Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

  To make conversation, she picked up a photo of Skobold standing next to a plump, cheery-looking woman about his own age. "Your wife?"

  Skobold looked mildly alarmed. "Sister," he said through his food.

  Another photo showed Skobold with his arm around the shoulders of a handsome, dark-haired young man, much younger, in a graduation robe. Cree took it from the shelf and admired it briefly. "Is this your son? He's very handsome!"

  This time he looked positively stricken. "My partner, Ms. Black," he said gravely.

  Cree's mouth opened and shut of its own accord. "I'm on a real roll here, aren't I."

  Skobold stared at her as he nibbled a trailing tag of lettuce, then turned businesslike: "I'm happy to meet with you briefly now, but as I said, I can only spare fifteen minutes. And I haven't had time to do anything more with the wolfman."

  "I'm hoping the questions I have are general enough for you to have an opinion after even your limited examination to date."

  He gestured with his sandwich for her to continue.

  "You mentioned that the crime scene people retrieved various artifacts with the bones. What sort of artifacts?"

  "Broken china, splintered furniture . . . um, a galvanized tin bucket, that sort of thing. Bertie will have an inventory."

  "Any clothing?"

  "Just rags—shreds, really. The fluids of decomposition hasten cloth decay—they provide a growth medium for molds, bacteria, and insects. Really, only the hard parts survived—the buttons, some rivets. No zippers back then."

  "So . . . when you find a body like this, can you tell what happened? From the position of the bones? I mean, what happened before death or at death as opposed to after death?"

  "Aha. An excellent point. One of the subdisciplines of the field is called taphonomy. It's the science of determining what happened to remains after death—the process of decomposition, damage or distribution by natural forces or by human action. For example, you find a human skeleton distributed over several of acres of woodland. Does that mean somebody murdered the deceased, dismembered him, and scattered the parts? Or were they dragged by animals, washed by flood waters, or moved inadvertently during logging operations? Understanding taphonic factors can be crucial to determining time, cause, and manner of death."

  Skobold paused until she nodded to show she understood. "I wasn't present at the retrieval, but from looking at Bertie's photos of him in situ I can safely say he died where he was found. From the position of the bones, I suspect he was standing at the time of the earthquake."

  "Standing in the basement? Or standing outside and caught up in an avalanche of stuff?"

  "I don't know. It's an interesting point."

  She waited quietly as Skobold ripped off several more bites. At last he patted his mouth with a napkin, stood, and came around the desk. As Cree stood to follow him out, Skobold paused to tap the photo she'd commented on earlier, a grin suppressed at the corners of his mouth.

  "Yes, very handsome," he said. "I'll relay your compliments to him."

  He led her through the lab, explaining quietly that he had moved 3024 to the back room to keep him out of view of the graduate students who were now7 working with Karen Chang. He unlocked a door on the far wall, ushered her through, and shut it behind them. When the overhead fluorescents fluttered alight, Cree saw a small, windowless chamber lined with shelves full of boxes, bottles, and equipment. Skobold went to the wolfman's pallet and drew the fabric carefully down to the skeleton's knees. They both contemplated that shocking bony face as Cree unfolded the page on which she'd jotted her most pressing questions.

  "Can you tell much about his condition at time of death? His health history?"

  "Not too much on this individual yet, but in general—most definitely yes. An early physical anthropologist once said that bones provide every person with an epitaph. But now the science has improved to the point where we can more accurately describe bones as our posthumous autobiographies. Your bones are a diary that you've kept and added to every day of your life."

  "That's a beautiful concept!"

  "My favorite challenges are the osteo-archeological ones, where ancient remains are found and I am asked to decipher the social and physical environment from the bones. What did this woman do for a living? What diseases did this man have in childhood? Was this person rich or poor, a slave or a king? Was this child killed as part of a religious rite, or for the sheer nutritional value of his flesh? With current techniques and technologies, we can reliably answer many such questions."

  She gazed down at the wolfman, catching a sense of the bones as Skobold saw the bones: bearers of encrypted stories, Rosetta stones of whole lives.

  Skobold pulled over a floor-standing lamp consisting of a circular light tube with a magnifying lens at the center. He adjusted the reflector, then picked up one of the leg bones and laid a finger near the knob at the upper end.

  "Before I can sculpt a face, I need to know everything I can about the individual I'm attempting to re-create. How old? How tall? What race? Fat or thin? Healthy, or a victim of chronic disease? Any determination I make will improve the degree of likeness I can achieve. To make those decisions, I'll look at the bones' appearance very closely, measure them, and compare their numbers to statistical baselines compiled from thousands of individuals."

  "But will the baselines really be helpful? Won't his deformities throw you off?"

  Skobold looked pleased with her. "An excellent point. No, we probably can't apply typical standards to, for example, his rate of growth. Or, if we see anomalies in his bone makeup, we have to ask if they're the result of environmental conditions—disease or poor diet, perhaps—or a coproduct of his deformity, perhaps caused by the way his genes triggered growth. With a subject like this, we'll have to put together data from a wide variety of indicators. And, of course, any historical information you can provide about him would be enormously helpful."

  "At this point, can you tell anything about his nutritional history? Did he eat well?"

  Skobold hefted the long bone as if he could gauge such things by feel. "The ridges and crests are pronounced, suggesting robust musculature and adequate nourishment. Again, I can't be certain without spending more time with him. However, I can tell you some other interesting facts."

  "Oh?"

  He hovered briefly, then selected a rib bone. He turned it on the table so that it arced into a little bridge, then wrestled the magnifying lamp into position above it. "Take a look."

  Through the lens, the ivory-brown bone looked huge; Skobold's chopstick appeared in the brightly lit circle and traced the length of rib's curve. "Here we see healthy bone—smooth, uniform in thickness, a nice sweep through its natural geometry But here . . . you see the thickening, the uneven surface?"

  "An injury?"

  "Exactly. You see, bones are ordinarily elegant. Each has grown to accomplish its function with maximum efficiency yet utmost economy, so they are generally smooth and graceful. But when a bone breaks, the body hurriedly sends materials of repair to the injury site, and growth then is more haphazard. An injured bone quickly adds a layer of what we call woven bone that functions like a miniature cast. It bridges and immobilizes the fracture as the bone ends knit. After a time the new bone smooths over, but there will always be a thickening, what we call a callus, at the point of fracture."

  Cree pondered the slight bulge. "So . . . what sort of injury caused this?"

  "Not a severe one. There's been no angulation or displacement. Just a small crack or compression . . . a bone bruise." In the viewer, the bone vanished and another rib appeared, again marked by a telltale swelling. "There are quite a few of these on this fellow's ribs. Most are on the posterior curve—his back. Also on the scapulae and the bones of the arms and hands."

  Cree picked up the longer rib and put her thumb and forefinger on either side. When she stroked the curve, the swelling was more obvious to her hands than to her eyes, a girdle of thickening about half an inch long. Tactil
e contact with the wolfman made him all the more real: Astonishingly, she was touching what had been the inside of someone's body, the bone just above what had once been a beating heart.

  "What do these callus formations imply?"

  "A rough life. Of course, we often see bone injuries and self-repair. Most are caused by accidents or result from repetitive use—for example, a stonemason's fingers will show indication they were repeatedly crushed, from being hit by the mallet or having stones dropped on them. But Wolfman's injuries were inflicted by others, I'm sorry to say. He was beaten with a stick or club. The location of the injuries suggests they occurred when he was on the ground, or bent over, perhaps trying to protect himself."

  "Defensive injuries."

  "In the technical sense, yes. But remember, the term can mean different things. He could certainly have gotten them while fending off blows from an attacker. He could also have gotten them from someone he was attacking, who was fighting back."

  Cree nodded, swarmed by questions. "How long before death? In a single beating or repeatedly over time?"

  "Can't say. But given the degree of healing, I'd hazard that none of these injuries occurred within, oh, the ten to fifteen years preceding his death."

  The wolfman lay in his many pieces. Knowing about the pain he must have suffered, Cree saw his bones, his unintentional autobiography, as looking sad and defeated.

  "You're feeling it, aren't you?" Skobold said softly. "You want to know who he was. You feel an unaccountable loyalty to him. A determination to find out who he was, to give him his due."

  "I always get that for the underdog. No pun intended." She realized he'd read her mind, and she cocked her head at him. "How'd you know?"

  "I share the sentiment." His fingers stroked the arm bone comfortingly. "They look so crushed down by time and gravity. But then I remind myself they're defiant, too. They say, We will persist. We will tell the story."

  "I like that."

  A thousand other questions occurred to Cree, but Skobold's assistant had appeared at the door. She knocked on the glass, made a throat-cutting gesture, and spun away.

  "Okay," Cree said quickly, "I know we're out of time. But one thing I should know . . . not to put pressure on you, but when do you think you can get to him? I mean, I'm down from Seattle and—"

  "I was planning to start tonight, after hours. I really shouldn't, but of course I can't resist. But it's going to have to be a spare time job for me, Ms. Black. Meaning it could take weeks to complete reconstruction. Unless," he finished with a prim smile, "you'd like to help me."

  "Are you kidding? I'd love it! I'm flattered you'd ask!"

  "It will go faster with extra hands. Just the routine processing will be time consuming, but what with the gossip factor, I can't let any of my students help. And our working together will allow us to compare notes on what we've found. But are you up for working in the evening?"

  Cree had to grin. "Absolutely! I'm . . . something of a night owl, actually."

  Skobold nodded thoughtfully. "Let's say eight tonight, then. I'll tell Security to expect you—you'll want to pick up a key from their office."

  9

  CREE GOT TO the house at three. Nobody answered the doorbell, and when she let herself in the racket of power tools explained why.

  In the dining room, a man was working with a floor sander that rasped and thundered and seemed to drag him after it; in the front parlor, a carpenter was using a table-mounted saw that he dropped to cut precision angles on a strip of decorative molding. A couple of men were bent over another table saw where they'd spread some papers. They looked up when she came in, and the older of them came toward her with an inquiring expression. He was dressed in a leather apron over brown work pants and shirt, and his air of authority told her he was head of this crew.

  "Mr. Hernandez," she said. "I'm Cree Black and I'm assisting Inspector Marchetti with the identification effort for the skeleton you found. If you can spare a few minutes, I have some questions for you."

  Hernandez shook her hand, feigning consternation. "I swear I didn't do it. I have an alibi for all of 1906."

  She shared a laugh with the men and clarified that it was regarding the house—its structure and renovation history. Hernandez gave his crew some instructions and went with her to the back parlor, where a short alcove extended to a doorway opening to the porch and terrace.

  "Okay," she began. "My questions have to do with the difference between what this house is now and what it was when it was first built."

  "Got it."

  "Originally, there was another house where the terrace is now." She showed him her photocopy of the Sanborn map. "You can see it's built very close to this house—what, five or six feet?"

  "Sounds about right. The gangway would have been just wide enough to walk through. On these steep hills the lots ran long and thin, you had to build close."

  "So all these windows, the protruding bays, the front porch—those would have been added after the other house came down?"

  "Oh, there'd have been windows. But you're right, not the bays or the porch, sticking out so far. With the other house gone, this side would have become a more important exposure, so they articulated this facade to make it look and function more like the 'front.' They'd have broken out walls and reframed to accommodate the additions. First, they'd've built foundation extensions for the bays and the porch."

  She tried to visualize the reconfiguration. "Can you see any sign of wall repair or renovation from what you've been doing?"

  "Nope. We haven't had to open up any walls on this side. Sorry."

  A fifth man arrived with a box of doughnuts and a cardboard tray loaded with Styrofoam coffee cups. The men shut down their tools and sat on the floor or leaned against the walls to stuff their faces. Cree declined Hernandez's offer of a doughnut.

  "How about the floor boards?" she asked. "I'm particularly interested in the area directly over the room in the basement."

  "I can tell you about that," one of the men said helpfully. He was young, muscular, his copper skin covered in dust except where a mask had sat over his mouth and nose: the floor sander.

  "Why don't you show us, Ricky?" Hernandez suggested.

  In the front parlor, Ricky tugged back a tarp and used a push broom to clear sawdust from the floor nearest the terrace-side wall. He squatted and swiped the area with his hands until he found the right place.

  "The varnish is colored all the same, probably been sanded clean and revarnished a couple times since then, so it's all yellowed the same. The floor is white oak, right? No big difference in color. But you can see all these boards got a finer grain, more rays. Better wood, older trees like they had. The boards on this side, it's different. You see that? It goes back, oh, about to there." Ricky gestured in an arc that took in about a quarter of the room.

  It was subtle, but Cree could see what he meant. The floorboards nearest the outside wall had been replaced with lumber from a different lot. Like the ceiling boards in the basement, they had been interlaced with the older boards so that the difference was almost imperceptible. It seemed to confirm the theory that the masonry that had buried the wolfman had fallen through both the outer wall and the floor, requiring substantial repairs.

  Ricky stood up again, pleased with himself. "This like CSI, man! Looking for the clues? You gonna put my name in the newspaper?"

  The men in the other room laughed and berated him.

  They chatted as Hernandez took her on a quick tour of the house to show off the fine work his crew had done, then headed for the basement. In the back room, they turned on some lights and Hernandez brought another with them into the wolfman's burial chamber. The deep, subterranean smell was the same, but in the harsh light the room seemed far smaller than it had in darkness.

  "Mr. Hernandez," Cree said, "what I'm trying to figure out is, after the stuff fell and killed that poor guy, somebody did all this work, right? And they left him in there. If I can determine what they did and
how they did it, that might help me figure out why they did it. Did they not know about the dead guy? Or did they deliberately leave him there?"

  Hernandez nodded. "I see your point."

  "So, your crew opens this up, and it's knee deep in rubble, right?"

  "Deeper. In the middle, more like shoulder high."

  "What kind of rubble?"

  "Bricks, mortar, slabs of granite that were probably windowsills or lintels. Lots of broken boards, too, broken floor joists, clapboards, pieces of crown molding. We figured a chimney or part of a brick wall fell through the walls and floor upstairs. Makes sense it was from the other house, falling this way"

  "Can you tell if this room was here already, and the stuff just happened to fall into it, or did somebody build it around the rubble pile?"

  Hernandez inspected the wall, pondering that. "Hm. Well, we've got a four-wythe brick wall on three sides. Four wythe means four layers of brick, which is way overbuilt for a dividing wall. If it was built after the stuff fell in, I'd expect to see poor-quality mortar work, an extruded joint, on these inner surfaces. Somebody trying to work while standing on a pile of debris, or working from the outside, it would be hard to clean up the mortar that bulges out when the brick is set. But looking at the inner face, I'm seeing skillful workmanship, a smooth V bead. I'd hire this guy in a heartbeat! I'd definitely say this room was here before the quake."

  "But after the quake, somebody patched the ceiling—removed the damaged boards, carefully put new ones in. That would have to be done from this side, wouldn't it?"

  "No question. Had to be done from in here."

  "So . . . how does someone do all this from the inside and get themselves out?"

  Hernandez frowned as he looked around, shining his light on each of the walls in turn, then looked closely at the outer wall. He shrugged, at a loss. "Only thing I can think of is there was a filled-in door right where we happened to break through. We didn't look that close, we just determined it wasn't a bearing wall and started in with the sledges. If somebody had built that section from the outer side, working the bricks in skillfully, we wouldn't have noticed. And we'd've wrecked any indication of sloppy interior mortar joint as we knocked our way through."