Bare Bones Read online

  Skeletal.

  To be precise, a skull and mandible, three cervical vertebrae, and bones comprising the better part of a right and left hand.

  We’d screened and rescreened, but that’s all that turned up.

  Hawkins matched the number on the tag to the number on the form, then dropped the tag into the plastic container.

  I looked around. A human being had been killed in this place. The victim’s head and hands had been severed and thrown into the privy, the body dumped elsewhere.

  Or had the killing occurred at another location, the head and hands brought to the privy for disposal?

  Either case was a common pattern. Ditch the head, ditch the hands. No dentals. No fingerprints.

  But on a farm in rural Mecklenburg County?

  I closed my eyes and let rain fall on my face.

  Who was this victim?

  How long had the body parts been in the privy?

  Where was the rest of the corpse?

  Why had two of the hand bones been buried with bears? Was the slaughter of the animals related to the killing of the human?

  “Ready?”

  Ryan’s voice snapped me back.

  “What?”

  “Everything’s loaded.”

  When we circled to the front of the property, I could see that a white Taurus had joined the cars and vans on the shoulder. A large man was emerging from the driver’s side, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  A tall, lanky man was unfolding from the passenger seat, feet splayed, long, bony fingers braced against the door frame.

  Larabee exchanged a few words with the men as he and Hawkins passed them on the way to their vehicles.

  “Great,” I muttered under my breath.

  “What?” Ryan asked.

  “You’re about to meet Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

  “That’s not very charitable.”

  “Rinaldi’s OK Slidell wouldn’t make the cut for Jerry Springer.”

  Skinny Slidell exhaled a stream of smoke, flicked the butt, then he and his partner started toward us.

  While Slidell lumbered, Rinaldi seemed to move by fits and starts. Standing six-foot-four and carrying just a little over 160, the man looked like a stilt walker dressed by Hugo Boss.

  Skinny Slidell and Eddie Rinaldi had partnered for nineteen years. No one on the force could understand the attraction.

  Slidell was sloppy. Rinaldi was neat. Slidell mainlined cholesterol. Rinaldi ate tofu. Slidell was beach music and rock-and-roll oldies. Rinaldi was strictly opera. Slidell’s fashion sense ran toward the blue-light special. Rinaldi’s suits were custom-made.

  Go figure.

  “Hey, Doc,” said Slidell, yanking a wadded hanky from his back pocket.

  I returned the greeting.

  “Ain’t so much the heat as the humility, eh?” He ran the yellowed swatch across his brow, jammed it home with the backs of his fingers.

  “The rain should cool things down.”

  “Good Lord willin’.”

  The skin on Slidell’s face looked like it had been stretched forward hard then allowed to drop. It hung in crescents below his cheeks and eyes, and drooped from the border of his jaw.

  “Dr. Brennan.” Rinaldi’s hair was wiry thin on top, and stood out from his scalp like that of one of the characters in “Peanuts.” I could never remember. Was that Linus or Pigpen? Though Rinaldi’s jacket was off, his tie was meticulously knotted.

  I introduced Ryan. As the men shook, Boyd ambled over and sniffed Slidell’s crotch.

  “Boyd!” Grabbing his collar, I yanked the dog back.

  “Whoa, girl.” Slidell bent and roughed Boyd’s ears. The back of his shirt was soaked in the shape of a T.

  “His name’s Boyd,” I said.

  “No news on the Banks case,” Slidell said. “Little mama’s still AWOL.”

  Slidell straightened.

  “So you found yourself a stiff in the crapper.”

  Slidell’s face remained flaccid as I described the remains. At one point I thought I saw a flicker in Rinaldi’s eyes, but it came and went so quickly, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Let me get this straight.” Slidell sounded skeptical. “You think the bones you found in the grave come from one of the hands you found in the dumper.”

  “I see no reason to think otherwise. Everything is consistent and there are no duplications.”

  “How’d these bones get out of the dumper and in with the bears?”

  “That sounds like a question for a detective.”

  “Any clue when the vic was chucked in?” Slidell.

  I shook my head.

  “Any impression on gender?” Rinaldi asked.

  I’d made a quick evaluation. Though the skull was large, all sex indicators were annoyingly intermediate. Nothing robust, nothing gracile.

  “No.”

  “Race?”

  “White. But I’ll have to verify that.”

  “How confident do you feel?”

  “Pretty confident. The nasal opening is narrow, the bridge steepled, the cheekbones tight to the face. The skull looks classically European.”

  “Age?”

  “Skeletal maturation is complete in the fingers, the teeth show little wear, the cranial sutures minimal closure.”

  Rinaldi pulled a leather-bound notepad from his shirt pocket.

  “Meaning?”

  “Adult.”

  Rinaldi jotted it down.

  “There is one other little thing.”

  Both men looked at me.

  “There are two bullet holes in the back of the head. Small caliber. Probably a twenty-two.”

  “Cute, saving that for last,” said Slidell. “Don’t suppose you found a smoking gun?”

  “Nope. No gun. No bullets. Nothing for ballistics.”

  “Why’s Larabee cutting free?” Slidell tipped his head toward the parked cars.

  “He’s giving a talk tonight.”

  Rinaldi underlined something in his notes and slid the pen into its slot.

  “Shall we go inside?” he asked.

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I stood, listening to rain tick the magnolia leaves overhead, unconsciously putting off the inevitable. Though the scientist in me wanted to know whom we’d pulled from the privy, another part of me wanted to turn away, to take no part in the dissection of another murder.

  Friends often ask, “How can you constantly deal with the remains of death? Doesn’t that debase life? Make brutal death commonplace?”

  I shrug off the queries with a stock response about media. Everyone knows about violent death, I say. The public reads about the stabbings, the shootings, the airline disasters. People hear the statistics, watch the footage, follow the trials on Court TV. The only difference? I see the carnage closer up.

  That’s what I say. But the truth is, I think a lot about death. I can be fairly philosophical about the hard cases who do each other in as part of doing business. But I can never avoid the sense of pity for the young and the weak who simply happened to get in the way of some psychopath listening to voices from another planet, or some druggie in need of fifty dollars for a fix, or for the genuinely innocent who through no fault of their own happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were subsumed by events of which they had no understanding.

  My friends interpret my reluctance to discuss my work as stoicism, or professional ethics, or even as a desire to spare their sensitivities. That’s not it. It’s more a concern for me than them. At the end of the day, I need to leave those cadavers cold and silent on their stainless steel. I need to not think about them. I need to read a book, or see a movie, or discuss politics or art. I need to reestablish perspective and remind myself that life offers much more than violence and mayhem.

  But with certain cases, the emotional fire wall is harder to maintain. With certain cases, my mind loops back to the pure horror of it, no matter what rationalizations I make.

>   As I watched Slidell and Rinaldi walk toward the house, a tiny voice sounded in my head.

  Be careful, it whispered. This may be one of the rough ones.

  The wind kicked up, agitating the dried magnolia leaves and blossoms at our feet and whipping the kudzu into undulating green waves.

  Boyd danced around my legs, looking from me to the house, then back again.

  “What?”

  The dog whined.

  “You wimp.”

  Boyd’ll take on a rottweiler without batting an eye, but storms scare him silly.

  “We going in?” Ryan asked.

  “We’re going in!” I replied in a Walter Mitty contralto.

  I bolted for the house. Ryan followed. Boyd overtook us.

  As I bounded onto the porch, the screen door opened and Slidell’s face appeared in the gap. He’d abandoned the cigarette and was now chewing on a wooden toothpick. Before speaking, he rolled the toothpick with his thumb and index finger.

  “You’re gonna shit your Calvin Klein’s when you see what’s in here.”

  THE TEMPERATURE IN THE HOUSE WAS WELL OVER A HUNDRED. The air was stale and moldy, with that no-one’s-lived-here-in-a-long-time smell.

  “Upstairs,” said Slidell. He and Rinaldi disappeared through a double doorway straight ahead, then I heard boots moving around overhead.

  The porch overhang, kudzu, dirt-crusted screens and windows, and the impending storm limited the interior light to subterranean levels.

  I found it hard to breathe, hard to see. From nowhere, a cloud of foreboding engulfed me, and something menacing tapped at the back of my thoughts.

  I sucked in my breath.

  Ryan’s hand brushed my shoulder. I reached up, but already it was gone.

  Slowly, my eyes adjusted. I appraised my surroundings.

  We were in a living room.

  Red shag carpet with navy flecks. Faux-pine paneling. Early American couch and chair. Wooden arms and legs. Red-and-blue-plaid upholstery. Cushions littered with candy wrappers, cotton stuffing, mouse droppings.

  Above the sofa, a flea market print of Paris in springtime, Le Tour Eiffel all out of proportion to the street below. Carved wall shelf overflowing with glass animals. More figurines parading across a wooden cornice above the windows.

  Collapsible TV trays, the kind with plastic tops and metal legs. Soft drink and beer cans. More cans on the carpet. Cheetos and corn chip bags. A Pringles canister.

  I enlarged my scan.

  Dining room dead ahead through a double doorway. Round maple table with four captain’s chairs. Red-and-blue ruffled seat pads. Upended basket of plastic flowers. Junk food packaging. Empty cans and bottles. Stairs rising steeply off to the right.

  Beyond the dining room table was a swinging door identical to one that had separated my grandmother’s dining room from her kitchen. Beveled wood. Clear plastic panel at hand level.

  Adult hand level. Gran had spent hours wiping grape jelly, pudding, and little prints from the paint below.

  Again, my nerves buzzed with an ill-formed sense of apprehension.

  Through the swinging door came the sound of cabinets being opened and closed.

  Boyd put his forepaws on the couch and sniffed a Kit Kat wrapper. I pulled him back.

  Ryan spoke first.

  “I’d say the last decorating order was placed around the time that latrine was dug.”

  “But someone tried.” I gestured around the room. “The art. The glass animals. The red-and-blue motif.”

  “Nice.” Ryan nodded false appreciation. “Patriotic.”

  “The point is, someone cared about the place. Then it went to shit. Why?”

  Boyd oozed back to the couch, mouth open, tongue dangling.

  “I’m going to take the dog out where he’ll be cooler,” I said.

  Boyd offered only token objection.

  When I returned, Ryan had disappeared.

  Stepping gingerly, I crossed the dining room and pushed the swinging door with my elbow.

  The kitchen was typical of old farmhouses. Appliances and workspace spread for miles along the right-hand wall, the centerpiece a white porcelain sink below the room’s single window. Kelvinator at the far end. Coldspot at the near end. Formica countertop at waist level. Worn wooden cabinets above and below.

  To move from stove to sink or from sink to refrigerator required actual walking. The place was massive compared with my kitchen at the annex.

  Two doors opened from the left-hand wall. One onto a pantry. One onto a basement stairway.

  A chrome-and-Formica table occupied the middle of the room. Around it were six chrome chairs with red plastic seats.

  The table, chairs, and every surface in the room were coated with black fingerprint powder. The granny glasses–wearing tech was shooting close-ups of prints on the refrigerator door.

  “Think tank’s upstairs,” she said, without looking up from the camera.

  I returned to the dining room and climbed to the second floor.

  A quick survey revealed three bedrooms. The remaining footage was given over to the glorious modern WC. Like the first-floor motif, the bathroom fixtures looked circa 1954.

  Ryan, Slidell, Rinaldi, and the male CSU tech were in the northeast bedroom. All four were focused on something on the dresser. All four looked up when I appeared in the doorway.

  Slidell hitched his pants and switched the toothpick to the other corner of his mouth.

  “Nice, eh? Kinda Green Acres Gone Trailer Park.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Slidell swept a hand over the dresser, Vanna White displaying a game show prize.

  Entering the room was like walking into a moldy greenhouse. Violets, now brown with age, covered the wallpaper, the fabric on an overstuffed chair, the curtains hanging limp at each window.

  A framed picture lay against one baseboard, a cropped magazine shot of a nosegay of violets. The picture’s glass was cracked, its corners off their ninety-degree angle.

  Crossing to the bureau, I glanced at the focus of everyone’s attention.

  And felt the buzz electrify in my chest.

  I raised my eyes, not comprehending.

  “What’s up is your baby killer,” said Slidell. “Take another gander.”

  I didn’t need a second look. I recognized the object. What I didn’t understand was its meaning. How had it come to be in this dreadful room with its terrible flowers?

  My eyes dropped back to the white plastic rectangle.

  Tamela Banks stared from the lower left corner, curly black hair outlined by a red square. Across the top of the card a blue banner declared State of North Carolina. Beside the banner, red letters on white stated DMV.

  I looked up.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “Under the bed,” said the CSU tech.

  “With enough crud to make a bioterrorist pee his shorts.” Slidell.

  “Why would Tamela Banks’s driver’s license be in this house?”

  “She must have come here with that hump, Tyree.”

  “Why?” I repeated myself. This wasn’t making sense.

  The CSU tech excused himself, returned to processing the next room.

  Slidell pointed his toothpick at Rinaldi.

  “Gosh, what do you think, Detective? Think it could have something to do with the two kilos of blow we found in the basement?”

  I looked at Rinaldi.

  He nodded.

  “Maybe Tamela lost the license,” I groped. “Maybe it was stolen.”

  Slidell pooched out his lips and rolled the toothpick. Looking for gonadal camaraderie, he turned to Ryan.

  “What do you think, Lieutenant? Either of those theories ring true to you?”

  Ryan shrugged. “If the queen invited Camilla to that Golden Jubilee concert, anything’s possible.”

  Slidell’s left eye twitched as a drop of sweat rolled into it.

  “Did you run a history on this place?” I asked.
r />   Another toothpick repositioning, then Slidell pulled a notebook from his back pocket.

  “Until recently, the property didn’t change hands that much.”

  Slidell read his notes. We all waited.

  “Place belonged to Sander Foote from 1956 until 1986. Sander got it from his daddy, Romulus, who got it from his daddy, Romulus, blah, blah, blah.” Slidell rotated a hand. “String of Romulus Sanderses on the tax records prior to fifty-six. Not really relevant to current events.”

  “No,” I agreed impatiently.

  “When Foote died in eighty-six, the farm went to his widow, Dorothy Jessica Harrelson Oxidine Pounder Foote.” Slidell looked up. “Lady was the marrying kind.”

  Back to his notes.

  “Dorothy was the third Mrs. F. She and Foote married late, had no kids. He was seventy-two, she was forty-nine. But here’s where the story gets interesting.”

  I wanted to shake Slidell to make him go faster.

  “The widow didn’t really inherit the farm. Foote’s will allowed Dorothy, and her son by a previous marriage, to live on the place until her death. After that, the kid could stay until he was thirty years old.”

  Slidell shook his head. “This Foote must have been some kind of fruit bat.”

  “Because he wanted his wife’s son to have a home until the boy was established?” I kept my voice calm.

  The wind picked up. Leaves thrashed the window screen.

  “After that?” Ryan asked.

  “After that, the place goes to Foote’s daughter by his first marriage.”

  Something rolled across the lawn with a hollow, thunking sound.

  “Dorothy Foote is dead?” I asked.

  “Five years ago.” Slidell closed the notebook and returned it to his pocket.

  “Has her son turned thirty?”

  “No.”

  “Does he live here?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “Technically?”

  “The little sleaze rents the place out to turn a few bucks.”

  “Can he do that under the terms of the will?”

  “Couple years back Foote’s daughter hired a lawyer to look into that. Guy couldn’t find any way to get the kid tossed. Kid does everything under the table, so there’s no record of money changing hands. Daughter lives in Boston, never comes to God’s little acre here. Place isn’t worth that much. Kid’s twenty-seven.” Slidell shrugged. “Guess she decided to wait it out.”