Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

  "Okay."

  "And I have to be honest with you. One, I'm not a criminal investigator, I don't know anything about police work, I'm not going to be any good to you. I can't, and I won't, it's just not something I can do. Okay? Two, I'm not buying your theory one hundred percent. About your e-mails connecting to these old cases. About the cases being linked or the animal attacks being homicides. I'm sorry, but that's how I see it."

  He nodded and stood up. "Good. Fine. Hey, I'd like nothing more than being proved wrong, believe me. Now we gotta go or we're both gonna be late."

  He seemed more relaxed as he locked the door and escorted her to the stairs outside, as if coming clean had let some pressure out. When they got to the edge of the light cast by his motion-detector spot, Cree couldn't see a thing; beyond the top step, the stairs were just an abyss of darkness. But he took her arm in a solid grip, and she measured her steps by his.

  "Takes a while to get used to it," he said. "Could break your neck. Me, by now I could do it blindfolded."

  They descended into the night, into the foliage that rose thick around the stairway. In places, she was completely night-blind, but she felt Bert's bulk next to her, his firm careful hold on her arm and his steady tread. Uncle Bert, from back when.

  "I saw you dancing," she confessed. "When I was coming up the stairs. I remember when I was a kid, you dancing in our kitchen."

  Face invisible, Bert snorted softly. They moved on down.

  "You looked . . . you looked good. Like a guy who knows what he's doing. Who's still got the stuff."

  "Yeah," he said wearily, more to himself than to Cree. "A regular Fred Astaire."

  12

  THE CAMPUS SIDEWALKS were mostly deserted. The lights, regularly spaced along streets and walks, lit the open spaces and the facades of buildings but put impenetrable shadows under the trees. Cree presented herself at the security office to register and pick up an electronic key, then drove to the parking lot behind the Life Sciences Building and walked the leaf-shadowed paths around to the front door. The foyer and main corridor were empty except for an old man buffing the marble with an electric floor polisher. She took the elevator to the basement level, where it was much cooler, and so quiet her heels echoed. No light showed under any of the doors she passed.

  She knocked at the lab door, waited, then tried the knob and found that it opened. The windows were dark, but the ceiling fluorescents were on and humming, bathing the big room in blue-white light. The counters were spotless, the computer screens dark, the various clay heads standing there looking at nothing. The smell of rot was stronger now. No sign of Skobold.

  He wasn't in his office, either, though his desk light was on. Probably gone to the bathroom, she thought.

  Killing time, she studied the partially completed craniofacial reconstructions. Karen Chang must have been busy today, because the head she'd been working on was no longer just plaster and spacers. Half the face was clothed in straps of brown clay of varying widths and thicknesses, and ropes of clay wrapped the post that served as a neck. It looked like a drawing from a nineteenth-century anatomy textbook: on one side, angular white bone with the long grin of teeth; on the other, the beginnings of the muscles and fat that gave a face its humanity and its individuality. Karen had put glass eyes into both sockets, round unblinking baby blues, unsettling in such an incomplete face. Cree lightly touched the clay, found it soft and yielding, like flesh.

  The buzz of fluorescents was the only sound. She wondered what was taking Skobold so long, then thought maybe he was already working on the wolfman. But the door to the back room was shut and its window was dark.

  Running late, then. She went to another reconstruction, this one further along. She looked it over and opened the textbook on the counter next to it to find drawings and photos of cadaver dissections, with statistical tables next to them. One series of head shots showed a dissection in reverse order, starting with white bone, then working layer by red layer up, muscle by muscle. She found it disturbing but fascinating: the complexity of the face, the body, the way all the parts worked together. How all that engineering ended up smoothed over with skin, detailed with brows and lashes, with characteristics people could think of as beautiful or handsome, when there was all that organic machinery underneath. She wished she hadn't looked at the photos in Bert's case files, which kept spoiling what really should be unalloyed awe and appreciation.

  Bert's theory bothered her. It was awful to think of a murderer on the loose, somebody who had gotten away with it but who didn't want to let go, wanting to rub Bert's nose in his failure. Somebody who, having gotten away with it before, might think to try it again. Or do something more extreme to Bert than sending e-mails.

  But just as troublesome was Bert himself. True, she hadn't studied the cases and didn't have the forensic experience he did, but it looked to her like he was trying to connect dots that didn't connect. Even if he could prove there was something wrong with earlier determinations on each case, it would be quite a stretch to assume there was a common perpetrator. And he was too intense about it, too convinced, on too little evidence. As if he had too much emotional investment. As if Bert was showing some mental fatigue at the end of his thirty-five-year shift.

  A sound brought her out of her thoughts. It was a low rumble followed by a dull blump! from the inside wall. Somebody doing something in the next room over, whatever that was. As she listened, the sound came again, that heavy rolling rumble followed by a muffled concussion that shook the counter slightly. A janitorial crew, she figured, cleaning and moving furniture.

  She closed the anatomy book, starting to be bothered by the cadaver photos. She checked her watch, wondering if everything was all right with Skobold or if she should be concerned. A moment later a sharp rattle came from close by, and she jumped, hands suddenly tingling.

  It was Horace, backing through the hallway door with an armload of papers and folders. "Sorry I'm late," he called. "I hope you haven't been waiting too long?"

  "Not at all. I've been admiring your work." She flexed her hands, trying to shed the wired, caffeinated feeling, hoping he wouldn't notice.

  "I was just finishing off some chores next door," Skobold explained after he'd deposited his papers on his desk.

  "What's next door?"

  "Oh. The rest of the lab. The meat suite."

  " 'Meat suite'?"

  He owled her with his eyes and frowned disapprovingly. "The students' unfortunate attempt to be facetious. They call this side the 'bone zone.' You don't assume all our subjects arrive as clean as the wolfman, do you? Most have to be processed next door before they come in here. I'll show you."

  She followed him out of the lab and down the hall to another door she'd passed on the way in. Skobold unlocked it, groped inside, and snapped on the overhead lights. They went into what looked like a typical pathology suite: two steel tables, scales, surgical power tools, big steel sinks, rolling chrome tables for medical instruments, a bank of a dozen brushed-steel morgue drawers, a big walk-in cooler door.

  The smell was strong in here, reminding her of when Mom used to boil chicken carcasses for soup—steamy, murky like that, only this meat had gone very bad.

  "By the time we receive remains, the medical examiner's lab has given up on trying to determine cause of death or identity," Skolold explained. "This is often because the soft tissue remains are in such bad shape—badly decayed or burned, in states of liquefaction or mummification or what have you. Mainly what we do here is get down to the bones again and work outward from there."

  "Uh-huh."

  He peered at her with concern. "Is it the odor?"

  "I'll manage."

  Skobold pointed out the industrial-size stove against one wall, where a couple of large, lidded pots were simmering. A venting hood covered the whole thing, and a fan hummed as it sucked the steam away.

  "When we get remains that include a significant amount of flesh, we macerate them for several days—that's essentially just
soaking. Do you see those vats near the sinks? We pour the water off, rinse the remains, and refill the vats every day. When the tissues have softened up, we simmer the remains and then scrub off any lingering bits." Skobold chuckled and shook his head. "It used to get us in awful trouble with the other departments, but with our fume hood and new ventilation system it's vastly improved. You never get rid of every last whiff, though."

  "Right."

  He walked her around the suite, discussing the challenges of working with various kinds of corpses. He referred to people burned beyond recognition as "crispy critters." Crispy critters required special techniques for removing the remaining burnt flesh and preparing the charred, very fragile bones. Sometimes they encountered a mudman, someone who had been buried in soil that had absorbed the fluids of decomposition and then dried to form a cement-hard capsule around the body; this demanded painstaking removal of mineral and tissue, using dental picks and toothbrushes. Then there were corpses that had been left in sealed containers of one kind or another and had largely liquefied, another set of challenges.

  He offered to show her some examples. She briefly considered looking at a pre-Columbian mummy from Chile, but in the end declined.

  By comparison to Bert's photos and some of the subjects Skobold described, the wolfman was beautiful. Cree understood how you could get to like bones: clean, simple, innocent, elegant.

  Skobold gave her a lab smock to slip over her street clothes, and then they gloved up and got to work. He had taken scrapings earlier, in the eventuality that DNA or toxics work might prove necessary, so their job tonight was to clean the bones. They rolled the wolfman's pallet out of the back room and positioned it next to a pair of deep stainless-steel sinks with fine mesh over the drains. Skobold switched on a radio to some classical music, and then with the water running showed her how to gently brush and rinse away soil, bits of desiccated tissue, and mold stains. Cree took the adjacent sink and followed his lead.

  "Even a small amount of surface discoloration can obscure important clues," he explained. "My main concern will be to look very closely at the places where bone growth has occurred, which provide the best information about his age. His development was no doubt atypical, but between the fusion of the various epiphyses, his cranial sutures, his pubic symphysis, and other indicators, we should be able to pin his age down."

  Cree started with the toe bones, rolling each irregular knot under the stream, brushing gently, and offering it to Skobold for approval. When each was clean, she blotted it dry and set it back on the pallet. Two hundred and eleven bones, some of them in pieces, would take a while.

  The radio played a peppy Bach concerto, Skobold sometimes humming along contentedly. But with just the two of them, alone in the depths of the big empty building late at night, the rest of the world felt very far away. The windows on the outside wall were dead black, the busts on the counters seemed frozen in silent convocation. Cree's thoughts kept coming back to her discussion with Bert.

  "So," she said. "Uncle Bert. You call him Bertie—you guys must be pretty good friends?"

  Skobold held up a dripping rib, found something that displeased him, and returned it to the stream of water. "I have a great affection for him. I'd like to say we're friends, but I doubt our association quite warrants the term. We have a long-standing professional relationship and . . . certain things in common."

  "But you've known him for a long time."

  "Twenty-six years."

  She dried her toe bone and began washing the next, trying to think of a way to sneak up on the topic without making it obvious she was concerned: In Skobold's opinion, how was Bert doing? Was he handling his impending retirement okay? Anything different about him recently? Did he always drink so much? From there, maybe she could solicit his thoughts about Bert's theory.

  "He sure takes his John Does seriously. Like the wolfman here. I mean, I can understand your having a clinical interest, but I wouldn't think Bert would bother. Given that he's retiring."

  Skobold paused and looked at her with eyes that filled the entire lenses of his glasses, almost accusing. "Your family—you've been close to Bertram since your father's years in the Navy?"

  "Well. Actually, not so close. He and Pop supposedly had some legendary times together, if you can believe a word they said. I haven't seen him since Pop's funeral, and before that we'd fallen out of touch for many years. But we all have fond memories of him, and he calls my mom sometimes."

  Skobold finished his rib, blotted it, and took up the next. "I met Bertram during a difficult period for us both. I believe our mutual . . . hardships forged a bond."

  "Hardships?"

  "I had recently lost a son, Ms. Black. Yes, I was married once. My son was seven. He was hit by a car while riding his bicycle in front of our house."

  Cree looked up, shocked. Skobold was brushing the wolfman's rib tenderly, biting his lips so hard they were white.

  "Oh, I'm so sorry! God, Dr. Skobold, I didn't know! I hope I haven't sounded cynical or facetious, I mean when I'm talking about your subjects here or—" Suddenly she remembered her comment on the photo in the office, mistaking his lover for his son, and understood the real scope of that error. She felt her face flush.

  "It changes you, Ms. Black. You are never the same."

  "No. Never."

  "My point was, given that Bertie had also lost his daughter around the same time, we forged a sense of connection. A special . . . trust, if no real intimacy."

  "Wait, wait . . . I'm sorry—Bert had a daughter?"

  "I assumed you knew."

  "I had no idea! It must have been the years when we were out of touch. No one ever mentioned it! Bert never once—"

  "No. He doesn't. Not anymore." Skobold looked suddenly tired, his face so gray it seemed chalky "She disappeared on her way home from school. She was six. Abducted a block from their house. Bertie was just a patrolman then, but he turned the city upside down, trying to find her. He turned himself inside out. He ruined his marriage, he did things that almost got him kicked off the force. She was never found."

  Cree Was speechless. She couldn't catch her breath. She thought back to how tough she'd been with Bert. Irrationally, she was suddenly very glad she'd complimented him on his dancing.

  "Only one of too many, I'm afraid," Skobold said. "Some show up here. Some never show up anywhere."

  He huffed a big sigh, and continued working. The lights buzzed and the radio played some chipper Mozart, utterly inappropriate. Cree went back to work on the longer foot bones. She'd had a bunch of questions to ask and now she couldn't even remember them.

  After a while Skobold was ready to talk some more. "Which explains his concern for John and Jane Does. For a long time, he would check in with me when I received remains that might possibly prove to be his daughter. He did the same with the MEs in half the state. After a few years, he'd stopped hoping to find her, it was just his . . . habit. Male, female, old, young, he wanted to give them that. Some tiny substitute for the care he couldn't give her, I suppose. I was happy to help him."

  A long silence. She couldn't speak.

  "Given that I understood," Skobold said quietly

  Cree was thinking about Bert's divorce and the difference between the laughing, flirting guy she remembered and the tired large rumpled man he was now, and about Skobold's handsome young lover and funeral home persona, and she couldn't say a word.

  They worked for another two hours, talking only when Skobold gave suggestions or showed her aspects of the bones he considered important. He washed the cranium and mandible himself, using extreme care, frowning to look closely at interesting features, retrieving small chips and loose teeth that accrued in the drain screen. When they were done, the stains were mostly gone and the skeleton looked brighter, more cheerfully savage.

  It was almost eleven o'clock when they peeled off their gloves. They removed their smocks and put them into a steel hamper, then covered the bones and wheeled the pallet into the back room.


  The next step, Horace told her, was to take cores from the femurs for the osteon count, another way to assess age and health. They'd measure the bones, label them, and varnish them; Skobold would degrease the skull in preparation for taking casts of it. He'd look closely at the X-rays, compare the wolfman's metrics to standard statistical tables, then would put together his best guesses as to facial musculature and appearance with any information she might find, such as period photos or medical records. Only then could they begin reconstruction.

  It would have to be done in his spare time, he reminded her, which meant they'd have to meet mainly after hours. Cree had other nighttime activities on her agenda, but figured it was manageable; she agreed readily.

  "Same time tomorrow night, then. Now, I have a little paperwork to do before I close up. Please take care walking to your car. There have been some incidents on campus lately."

  He opened the hall door for her, smiling wearily. But when she turned to say a last good-night, she found his face had changed again.

  "I adored my son. Adored him. I had to look at his broken body with an anatomist's knowledge of what it must be like inside him. Later, I wouldn't let them close the casket, they had to pull me away. At the burial, I thought I'd die. My marriage didn't last a year. I still visit his grave on the anniversary."

  Skobold's jaw was quivering slightly, and Cree felt it in him, the huge unfillable hollow, the enormity of that pain. She touched his cheek, afraid to offer more lest they both break down, and started to walk away.

  "But at least I knew, you see," he called after her. "Where he was. What had happened. When I thought of Bert's situation, I always knew I was the lucky one."

  13

  BERT WAITED UNTIL Cree had driven out of sight, then walked past the city-issue Crown Vic and got into his own vehicle. It was a Chevy Suburban, biggest thing on the road short of a Hummer, pretty intimidating with its dull gray paint and deeply tinted windows. He slammed the door, started it up, then bent to unlock the metal case bolted to the floor under the driver's seat. He brought out his little Tomcat .32 and tucked the clip holster into his waistband, then put the truck in gear.