Kathy Reichs: Bare Bones

The crime scene truck arrived at four. Joe Hawkins, the MCME death investigator on call that weekend, showed up a few minutes later. By then most of the McCranies’ guests had folded their blankets and chairs and departed.

So had Katy, Palmer, and Boyd.

Boyd’s discovery lay beyond the hedge dividing the McCranies’ property from the adjacent farm. According to Sarah’s father, no one occupied the neighboring house, which belonged to someone named Foote. A quick check drew no response, so we brought in our equipment through its driveway and yard.

I explained the situation to Hawkins as two crime scene techs unloaded cameras, shovels, screens, and other equipment we’d need for processing.

“It may be an animal carcass,” I said, feeling apprehensive about calling people out on a Saturday.

“Or it may be some guy’s wife with an ax in her head.” Hawkins pulled a body bag from his transport van. “Ain’t our job to second-guess.”

Joe Hawkins had been hauling stiffs since DiMaggio and Monroe married in ’54, and was about to hit mandatory retirement age. He could tell some stories. Autopsies were performed in the basement of the jail back then, in a room equipped with little more than a table and sink. When North Carolina overhauled its death investigation system in the eighties, and the Mecklenburg County ME facility was moved to its current location, Hawkins took only one memento: an autographed portrait of Joltin’ Joe. The picture still sat on the desk in his cubicle.

“But if we’ve got a bad one, you’ll make the call to Doc Larabee. Deal?”

“Deal,” I agreed.

Hawkins slammed the van’s double doors. I couldn’t help thinking how the job had molded the man’s physiognomy. Cadaver thin, with dark circles under puffy eyes, bushy brows, and dyed black hair combed straight back from his face, Hawkins looked like a death investigator from central casting.

“Think we’ll need lights?” asked one of the techs, a woman in her twenties with blotchy skin and granny glasses.

“Let’s see how it goes.”

“All set?”

I looked at Hawkins. He nodded.

“Let’s do her,” said granny glasses.

I led the team into the woods, and for the next two hours we photographed, cleared, bagged, and tagged according to ME protocol.

Not a leaf stirred. My hair bonded to my neck and forehead, and my clothes grew damp inside the Tyvek jumpsuit Hawkins had brought me. Despite liberal applications of Hawkins’s Deep Woods, mosquitoes feasted on every millimeter of exposed flesh.

By five we had a pretty good idea of what we were facing.

A large black trash bag had been placed in a shallow grave, then covered with a layer of soil and leaves. Close to the ground surface, wind and erosion had taken their toll, finally exposing one corner of the bag. Boyd had accomplished the rest.

Beneath the first bag, we discovered a second. Though we left both sealed, except for such tears and holes as they already had, the odor oozing from the sacks was unmistakable. It was the sweet, fetid stench of decomposing flesh.

The fact that the remains appeared to be limited to their packaging sped our processing time. By six we’d removed the sacks, sealed them in body bags, and placed the bags in the ME van. After receiving assurances that granny glasses and her partner and I would be fine, Hawkins set off for the morgue.

An hour of screening turned up nothing from the surrounding or underlying soil.

By seven-thirty we’d packed the truck and were rolling toward town.

By nine I was in my shower, exhausted, discouraged, and wishing I’d chosen another profession.

Just when I thought I was catching up, two fifty-gallon Heftys had entered my life.

Damn!

And a seventy-pound chow.

Damn!

I lathered my hair for the third time and thought about the day to come and my visitor. Could I get through the bags before meeting him at baggage claim?

I pictured a face, and my stomach did a mini-flip.

Oh, boy.

Was this little rendezvous such a good idea? I hadn’t seen the guy since we’d worked together in Guatemala. A vacation had seemed a good plan then. We’d both been under tremendous pressure. The place. The circumstances. The sadness of dealing with so much death.

I rinsed my hair.

The vacation that never was. The case was done. We were on our way. Before we’d reached La Aurora International, his pager had sounded. Off he’d gone, regretful, but obedient to the call of duty.

I pictured Katy’s face at the picnic today, later at the site of Boyd’s discovery. Was my daughter serious about the intensely captivating Palmer Cousins? Was she considering dropping out of school to be near him? For other reasons?

What was it about Palmer Cousins that bothered me? Was “the boy,” as Katy would call him, just too damn good-looking? Was I growing so narrow-minded that I was starting to judge character by appearance?

No matter about Cousins. Katy was an adult now. She would do what she would do. I had no control over her life.

I soaped myself with almond-peppermint bath gel and reverted to worrying about Boyd’s plastic sacks.

With a little luck, the contents would be animal bone. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if Joe Hawkins’s ax theory wasn’t a joke?

In a heartbeat the water went tepid, then cold. I leaped out of the shower, wrapped one towel around my torso, another around my hair, and headed for bed.

Things will be fine, I told myself.

Wrong.

Things were going to get worse before they got worse.

5

SUNDAY MORNING. TIME: SEVEN THIRTY-SEVEN. TEMPERATURE:seventy-four Fahrenheit. Humidity: eighty-one percent.

We were heading for a record. Seventeen straight days busting ninety degrees.

Entering the small vestibule of the MCME, I used my security card and passed Mrs. Flowers’s command post. Even her absence was imposing. All objects and Post-it notes were equally spaced. Paper stacks were squared at the edges. No pens. No paper clips. No clutter. One personal photo, a cocker spaniel.

Monday through Friday, Mrs. Flowers screened visitors through the plate-glass window above her desk, blessing some with a buzz through the inner door, turning others away. She also typed reports, organized documents, and kept track of every shred of paper stored in the black file cabinets lining one side of the room.

Turning right past the cubicles used by the death investigators, I checked the board on the back wall where cases were entered daily in black Magic Marker.

Boyd’s find was already there. MCME 437–02

The place was exactly as I’d expected, deserted and eerily quiet.

What I hadn’t expected was the fresh-brewed coffee on the kitchenette counter.

There is a merciful God, I thought, helping myself.

Or a merciful Joe Hawkins.

The DI appeared as I was unlocking my office.

“You’re a saint,” I said, raising my mug.

“Thought you might be here early.”

During the recovery operation, I’d told Hawkins of my plans for a Monday escape to the beach.

“You’ll be wanting yesterday’s booty?”

“Please. And the Polaroid and the Nikon.”

“X rays?”

“Yes.”

“Main or stinky?”

“I’d better work in back.”

The MCME facility has a pair of autopsy rooms, each with a single table. The smaller of the two has special ventilation for combating foul odors.

Decomps and floaters. My kind of cases.

Pulling a form from the mini-shelves behind my desk, I filled in a case number and wrote a brief description of the remains and the circumstances surrounding their arrival at the morgue. Then I went to the locker room, changed to surgical scrubs, and crossed to the stinky room.