“Larabee’ll autopsy the pilot, but he’s asked me to deal with the passenger’s head.”
Boyd pawed my knee. When I didn’t respond he shifted to Ryan.
Over second, then third cups of coffee, Ryan and I discussed mutual friends, his family, things we would do when I returned to Montreal at the end of the summer. The conversation was light and frivolous, a million miles from decomposing bears and a shattered Cessna. I found myself grinning for no reason. I wanted to stay, make ham and mustard and pickle sandwiches, watch old movies, and meander wherever the day might take us.
But I couldn’t.
Reaching out, I pressed my palm to Ryan’s cheek.
“I really am glad you’re here,” I said, smiling a smile with giggles behind it.
“I’m glad I’m here, too,” said Ryan.
“I have a few animal bones to finish up, but that shouldn’t take any time at all. We can leave for the beach tomorrow.”
I finished my coffee, pictured the shards of skull I’d extricated from the charred fuselage. My cupcake smile drooped noticeably.
“Wednesday at the latest.”
Ryan gave Boyd the last strip of bacon.
“The ocean is everlasting,” he said.
So, it would turn out, was the parade of corpses.
RYAN COULDN’T DROP ME OFF. I HAD NO CAR.
I called Katy. She arrived within minutes to taxi us downtown, cheerful about the early-morning errand.
Yeah. Right.
The air was hot and humid, the NPR weatherman negative on the subject of a temperature break. Ryan looked overdressed in his jeans, socks, loafers, and chopped-sleeve sweatshirt.
At the MCME I handed Ryan my keys. Across College, a kid in an extra-large Carolina Panthers jersey and crotch-hangers headed in the direction of the county services building, bouncing a basketball to a rhythm he was hearing from his headphones.
Though my mood was gloomy, I couldn’t help but smile. In my youth jeans had to be tight enough to cause arteriosclerosis. This kid’s drawers would accommodate a party of three.
Watching Katy then Ryan drive off, my smile collapsed. I didn’t know where my daughter was going, or what plans Ryan shared with my estranged husband’s dog, but I wished I were heading out, too.
Anywhere but here.
A morgue is not a happy place. Visitors do not come for pleasant diversion.
I know that.
Every day greed, passion, carelessness, stupidity, personal self-loathing, encounters with evil, and plain bad luck send otherwise healthy people rolling in with their toes up. Every day those left behind are sucker punched by the suddenness of unexpected death.
Weekends produce a bumper crop, so Mondays are the worst.
I know that, too.
Still, Monday mornings bum me out.
When I came through the outer door, Mrs. Flowers waved a chubby hand and buzzed me from the lobby into the reception area.
Joe Hawkins was in his cubicle speaking to a woman who looked like she might have worked at a truck-stop counter. Her clothes and face were baggy. She could have been forty or sixty.
The woman listened, eyes glazed and distant, fingers working a wadded tissue. She wasn’t really hearing Hawkins. She was getting her first glimpse of life without the person whose corpse she’d just viewed.
I caught Hawkins’s eye, motioned him to stay at his task.
The board showed three cases logged since yesterday. Busy Sunday for Charlotte. The pilot and passenger had checked in as MCME 438–02 and 439–02.
Larabee already had the pilot on the main autopsy room table. When I peeked in he was examining the burned skin through a handheld magnifier.
“Any word on who we have here?” I asked.
“Nothing yet.”
“Prints or dentals?”
“Fingers are too far gone on this one. But most of the teeth are intact. Looks like he might have seen a dentist at some point in this millennium or the last. He definitely saw his tattoo artist. Check out the artwork.”
Larabee offered the lens.
The man’s lower back must have been protected from the flames by contact with the seat. Across it writhed the south end of a snake, taloned and winged. Red flames danced through the coils and around the edges of Mr. Serpent.
“Recognize the design?” I asked.
“No. But someone should.”
“Guy looks white.”
Larabee sponged upward on the tattoo. More snake emerged from the soot, like a message on a Burger King scratch-and-win. The skin between the scales was pasty white.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “but check this out.”
Snugging a hand under the pilot’s shoulder, Larabee eased the man up. I leaned in.
Black patches clung to the man’s chest like tiny charred leeches.
“That’s the same stuff that’s all over the passenger,” I said.
Larabee let the pilot’s shoulder drop to the table.
“Yep.”
“Any idea what it is?” I asked.
“Not a clue.”
I told Larabee I’d be working in the other room.
“Joe’s got the X rays up on the box,” he said.
I opened a case file, changed to scrubs, got a small cart, and walked to the cooler. When I pulled the handle on the stainless-steel door, a malodorous whoosh of charred and refrigerated flesh blasted my nostrils.
The gurneys were parked in two neat rows. Seven empty. Four occupied.
I checked the tags on the body bag zippers.
MCME 437–02. Ursus and company.
MCME 415–02. Unknown black male. We called him Billy in recognition of the site of his discovery, off the Billy Graham Parkway. Billy was a toothless old man who’d died under a blanket of newspapers, alone and unwanted. In three weeks no one had come forward to claim him. Larabee was giving Billy until the end of the month.
MCME 440–02. Earl Darnell Boggs. DOB 12/14/48. I assumed the unfortunate Mr. Boggs went with the lady in Joe Hawkins’s cubicle.
MCME 439–02. Unknown. The passenger.
I unzipped the pouch.
The body was as I remembered, headless, charred, upper limbs curled into the pugilist pose. The hands were shriveled claws. There would be no prints on this one either.
Hawkins had centered my plastic tubs in a clump above the passenger’s shoulders, as though trying to simulate the shattered head. Transferring the tubs, I rezipped the bag and wheeled the cart to the small autopsy room.
The X rays glowed black and white like the test patterns in the olden days of television. The second film showed two metallic objects mingled with teeth and chunks of jaw. One object looked like a fleur-de-lis, the other like Oklahoma.
Good. The passenger had also seen a dentist.
I gloved, spread a sheet across the table, and emptied container two. It took several minutes to locate and remove the two loose dental restorations. After sealing those items in a vial, I picked out all jaw and tooth fragments, placed them on a tray, and set it aside.
Then I turned to the skull.
There would be no reconstruction for this guy. The fire damage was too severe.
Teasing off charred flesh and flaky black gunk, I began working my way through the jigsaw puzzle of cranial architecture.
A segment of frontal bone rolled down into a pair of prominent brow ridges. Occipital pieces showed bulbous mastoids and the largest neck muscle attachment I’d ever seen. The back of the guy’s head must have bulged like a golf ball.
The rear-seat passenger had definitely been male. Not that useful. Larabee would nail that during his post.
On to age.
Taking two steps to the right, I studied the tray of dental fragments.
Like plants, teeth send roots into their sockets long after the crowns have sprouted through the gums. By twenty-five, the garden is in full bloom, and the third molars, or wisdom teeth, are complete to their tips. That’s a wrap, dentally speaking. From that point o
n, it’s dental breakdown.
Though the passenger’s enamel was either missing or too crumbly to evaluate, every viewable root was complete. I’d need X rays to observe those hidden in the sockets.
I returned to the cranial wreckage.
As with dentition, skulls come with some assembly required. At birth, the twenty-two bones are in place, but unglued. They meet along squiggly lines called sutures. In adulthood, the squiggles fill in, until the vault forms a rigid sphere.
Generally, the more birthday candles, the smoother the squiggles.
By stripping blackened scalp from the cranial fragments, I was able to view portions of suture from the crown, back, and base of the head.
The basilar squiggle was fused. Most others were open. Only the sagittal, which runs from front to back across the top of the head, showed any bony bridging.
Though vault closure is notoriously variable, this pattern suggested a young adult.
On to ancestry.
Race is a tough call at any time. With a shattered skull it’s a bitch.
The upper third of one nasal bone remained in place on the large frontal fragment. Its slope downward from the midline was acute, giving the nasal bridge a high, angled shape, like a church steeple.
I swapped the piece of forehead for a chunk of midface.
The nasal opening was narrow, with a rolled lower edge and a tiny spike at the midway point. The bone between the bottom of the nose and the upper-tooth row dropped straight down when viewed from the side. The cheekbones ballooned out in wide, sweeping arcs.
The steepled nasal bridge, sharp inferior nasal border, and nonprojecting lower face suggested European ancestry.
The flaring zygomatics, or cheekbones, suggested Asian or Native American ancestry.
Great.
Back to the dentition.
Only one front tooth retained a partial crown. I turned it over. The back was slightly ridged at the point where the enamel met the gum line.
I was staring at the incisor when Joe Hawkins poked his head through the door.
“You look stumped.”
I held out my hand.
“I’m not sure it’s shoveled, but there’s something weird there.”
Joe looked at the tooth.
“If you say so, Doc.”
Shoveling refers to a U-shaped rimming on the tongue side of the center four teeth. Shoveled incisors are usually indicative of Asian or Native American ancestry.
I returned the tooth to the tray and requested X rays of the jaw fragments.
I checked the time. One-forty.
No wonder I was starving.
Stripping off gloves and mask, I washed with antibacterial soap and threw a lab coat over my scrubs. Then I went to my office and washed down a granola bar with a can of Diet Coke.
As I ate, I scanned my phone messages.
A journalist from the Charlotte Observer.
Skinny Slidell. Something about the Banks baby case.
Sheila Jansen. She’d called early. The NTSB works hard.
The fourth pink slip caught my attention.
Geneva Banks.
I tried the Bankses’ number. No answer.
I tried Jansen.
Her voice mail invited a message.
I left one.
I stopped back into the main autopsy room. The passenger lay where the pilot had been, and Larabee had just made his second Y incision of the day.
I walked over and looked at the body. Though gender was clear, age and race were not. Those aspects would have to be determined skeletally.
I explained the discrepancy in racial features. Larabee said he’d spotted nothing useful in the body.
I asked for the pubic symphyses, the portions of the pelvis where the two halves meet in front, and the sternal ends of the third through fifth ribs to tighten my age estimate. Larabee said he’d send them over.
Larabee told me he’d talked with Jansen. The NTSB investigator would be dropping by in the late afternoon. Neither Geneva Banks nor Skinny Slidell had phoned him.
When I returned to the stinky room, Hawkins had popped the dental X rays onto the light boxes.
The roots of the left canine and second molar, and of both wisdom teeth, were visible in various jaw fragments. While the canine and M-2 were complete to their tips, the M-3s were not quite over the plate.
Dentally, the passenger looked eighteen to twenty-five.
Race was still a crapshoot.
Back to the zygomatic arch.
Yep. Mongoloid-looking cheeks.
Back to the maxilla and frontal.
Yep. Caucasoid-looking nose.
As I was staring at the frontal bone, an irregularity on the nasal caught my eye. I carried the fragment to the scope and adjusted focus.
Under magnification the irregularity looked circular and more porous than the surrounding bone. The edges of the circle were clearly defined.
A puzzling lesion, unlike usual findings in nasal bones. I had no idea what it meant.
I spent the next hour mining fragments, stripping flesh, and recording observations. Though I found no other signs of disease, I decided to request X rays of the rest of the skeleton. The nasal lesion looked active, suggesting a chronic condition of some sort.
At three-thirty, Hawkins delivered the ribs and pubes. He promised to take a full set of films when Larabee finished with the passenger’s body.
I was placing the pubes and ribs in a solution of hot water and Spic and Span when Larabee entered, followed by Sheila Jansen. Today the NTSB investigator wore black jeans and a sleeveless red shirt.
Hours of exposure had numbed me to the smell of the passenger’s unrefrigerated head, now decomposing on my table. My greasy, soot-stained gloves and scrubs undoubtedly added to the room’s bouquet.
Jansen’s lips and nostrils tightened. Her expression went opaque as she attempted to regain control of her face.
“Time to swap stories?” I asked, peeling off mask and gloves and tossing them into a biohazard container.
Jansen nodded.
“Why don’t I meet you two in the conference room?”
“Good idea,” Larabee said.
When I joined them, the ME was going over his findings.
“—multiple traumatic injuries.”
“Soot in the airways?” Jansen asked.
“No.”
“That makes sense,” Jansen said. “When the plane slammed the cliff face, the fuel tanks ruptured. There was immediate ignition and fireball. I figure both victims died on impact.”
“External burning was severe, but I didn’t find a lot of deep-tissue destruction.” Larabee.
“After impact gravity took over and the fuel cascaded down the cliff face,” Jansen explained.
In my mind’s eye I saw the trail of burned vegetation.
“So the victims were exposed to the fireball effect of the explosion, but the burning wouldn’t have lasted very long.”
“That fits,” Larabee said.
“Both bodies show evidence of a black residue,” I said, settling into a chair. “Especially the passenger.”
“I found the same stuff all over the cockpit. I’ve sent a sample off for testing.”
“We’re screening for alcohol, amphetamines, methamphetamines, barbiturates, cannabinoids, opiates,” Larabee said. “If these guys were flying high, we’ll catch it.”
“You’re calling them guys.” Jansen.
“Pilot was a white male, probably in his thirties, five-eight to fiveten, lots of dental work, great tattoo.”
Jansen was nodding as she wrote it all down.
“Passenger was also male. Taller. With his head, that is.” He turned to me. “Tempe?”
“Probably early twenties,” I said.
“Racial background?” Jansen asked.
“Yes.”
She looked up.
“I’m working on it.”
“Any unique identifiers?”
“At least two fill
ings.” I pictured the nasal. “And he had something going on with his nose. I’ll let you know on that, too.”
“My turn.” Jansen flipped pages in her notebook. “The plane was registered to one Richard Donald Dorton. Ricky Don to his friends.”
“Age?” I asked.
“Fifty-two. But Dorton wasn’t flying yesterday. He’s riding out the heat wave at Grandfather Mountain. Claims he left the Cessna safe and sound at a private airstrip near Concord.”
“Did anyone see the plane take off?” I asked.
“No.”
“Flight plan?”
“No.”
“And no one spotted it in flight.”
“No.”
“Do you know why it crashed?”
“Pilot flew it into a rock face.”
We let that hang a moment.
“Who is Ricky Don Dorton?” I asked.
“Ricky Don Dorton owns two strip joints, the Club of Jacks and the Heart of Queens, both in Kannapolis. That’s a mill town just north of here, right?”
Nods all around.
“Ricky Don supplied sleaze for gentlemen of every lifestyle.”
“Man’s a poet.” Larabee.
“Man’s a lizard.” Jansen. “But a rich lizard. The Cessna-210’s just one of his many toys.”
“Are tits and ass that profitable?” I asked.
Jansen gave a beats-me shrug.
“Could it be that Ricky Don is also in the import business?” I asked.
“That thought has crossed the minds of local law enforcement. They’ve had Dorton under surveillance for some time.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Ricky Don doesn’t hang with the Baptist choir.”
Larabee clapped me on the shoulder. “She’s good, isn’t she?”
Jansen smiled. “One problem. The plane was clean.”
“No drugs?”
“Nothing so far.”
We all stood.
I asked one last question.
“Why would a grown man call himself Ricky Don?” It sounded like one of Harry’s Texas saloons.
“Perhaps he doesn’t want to appear pretentious.”
“I see,” I said.
I didn’t.
* * *
It was four-thirty by the time Jansen left. I wanted to go home, take another long shower, tap into the Victoria’s Secret knockoff reserve, and spend the evening with Ryan.
But I also wanted to split for the beach first thing in the morning.