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The blank face in the box wasn’t the only ambiguity accompanying me on the drive south. Several months before, I’d made love to a librarian who’d been helping me research the history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee — the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and the location of the recent murder of an atomic scientist. Just days after sleeping with the librarian — Isabella — I’d been stunned to learn that it was she who’d killed the scientist, in a bizarre act of vengeance for the suffering that the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, had caused her family. Some weeks after that, as the FBI tried to follow Isabella’s trail, I’d been even more stunned to learn that she might be pregnant. I’d received a cryptic message from her that seemed to confirm her pregnancy: from San Francisco, she’d mailed me an origami bird — a paper crane, symbol of peace — that contained, within its folds, a much smaller crane. Two months had passed since I’d received the origami message: two months in which I’d twisted in the wind, wondering where Isabella might be; wondering if she were indeed pregnant with my child; wondering whether she’d be caught; half hoping she would be; half hoping she wouldn’t. A psychologist I’d consulted, as I’d sorted through my conflicting feelings, had summed up my dilemma. “You’re at a crossroads,” he’d said, “a place of not-knowing. And you need to pitch your tent there for a while.”
So even as I steered my GMC pickup south on I-75 toward Atlanta and Tallahassee, I was pitched in my karmic tent, camped at an intersection from which fog-shrouded roads diverged toward unseen, unknowable futures. I was not an especially happy camper.
Chapter 6
Angie met me the next morning at the FDLE evidence- intake door. “Welcome back. How was your drive?”
“Not bad. Atlanta was slow, but that gave me a chance to check out the skyline. I came through right at dusk, when the buildings were starting to light up. Looks like the architects there are running a ‘Fanciest Roof’ contest — spires and arches and flying buttresses everywhere up there, glowing like Christmas.”
Vickery greeted me with a nod that included a slight additional wag of the cigar. Then he removed the cigar and used it to point at the box under my arm. “I see you brought along a friend. Glad you had some company.”
“Not much of a conversationalist,” I joked, then got serious. “So. A missing kid; maybe a murdered kid. How do you plan to get the pictures out to the public?” As soon as Joanna had finished the reconstruction, I’d e-mailed a batch of photographs of it, along with a draft of my forensic report on the skull. But Joanna’s work would pay off only if it were seen by someone who recognized the child’s face.
“We’ve posted the pictures and a summary of your report on CJNet,” she said. I must have looked blank, because she added, “Criminal Justice Network. Our statewide intelligence Web site for law enforcement.” I nodded. “Our public information officer already sent a press release to all the news outlets in the state,” Angie went on. “Here’s one for you.” She handed me a printed copy. Underneath the FDLE logo was a headline, contact information, and three thumbnail-size images of the reconstruction. I skimmed the copy.
FDLE SEEKS TO IDENTIFY CHILD’S SKULL FOUND IN APALACHEE COUNTY
On May 17, a citizen contacted the Apalachee County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) to report finding a skull on his property. After responding to the scene and determining that the skull appeared to be human, an ACSO deputy contacted the Apalachee County Medical Examiner, who in turn contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for forensic assistance.
A forensic examination at the central FDLE crime laboratory in Tallahassee confirmed that the skull was of human origin, and that the individual had been deceased for a substantial period of time — months or years, perhaps even many years. Further examination by a forensic anthropologist indicated that the skull was that of a white juvenile, approximately ten to twelve years of age, of unknown gender. A fracture in the skull indicates that the child died from blunt-force trauma to the left side of the head. FDLE and ACSO are investigating the case as a homicide.
Anyone with information on this case, including the identity of a missing boy or girl approximately ten to twelve years of age, is encouraged to call FDLE or the Apalachee County Sheriff’s Office.
The press release ended with contact phone numbers and e-mail addresses for FDLE and the sheriff’s office. Attached were three additional pages bearing eight-by-ten enlargements of frontal, profile, and half-profile photos of the reconstruction. “Looks good,” I said. “Any decent leads yet?”
“It’s a little early yet.” Vickery shrugged. “We’ve had a few calls, including one from a guy who says that he’s the missing child.”
I laughed. “Did he say how he manages without his skull?”
“No,” Vickery deadpanned, “but I’m guessing the lack of a skull makes it a lot easier to go through life with his head up his ass.”
Any additional jokes were cut off by the whoop of a police siren, which turned out to be Vickery’s cell phone ringing. He scanned the number on the display and raised his eyebrows. “Vickery speaking” he said. “You must have radar or ESP, Deputy. I’m in the lab right now with the forensic anthropologist, who just brought the skull back with the clay facial reconstruction… What? Slow down, I can’t understand you… Hold on, I’m gonna put you on speaker.” He flipped open the phone. “You still there?”
“I’m here,” came an agitated male voice. The sound was distorted — loud but muffled, the way it might sound if the deputy was shouting into the phone. “I’m out here at the Pettis place. The damn dog’s done it again.”
“Done what?”
“Brought in another one.”
“Another bone? Well, that’s a start,” said Vickery. “Now, if he’ll just bring us another couple hundred — is that about right, Doc? Aren’t there two-hundred-something bones in the body?” I nodded. “If he’ll just bring us another couple hundred, we can put this kid back together.”
“Not another bone,” yelled the deputy. “Another kid. A different kid.”
“Deputy, this is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I interrupted. “I’m the forensic anthropologist. What makes you think it’s somebody different?”
“Because unless that first kid had two heads, it has to be somebody different. Pettis’s dog just dragged in another skull.”
Chapter 7
Highway 90 shimmered and melted in the afternoon heat. Just ahead, it was a straight, flat ribbon of asphalt that became a straight, rippling river in the middle distance, then seemed to flow directly into the sky as it neared the western horizon. I half expected the pavement to evaporate beneath our wheels, molten and miragey as it appeared, but somehow the margins between asphalt and liquid, between liquid and sky, skittered ahead of us at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, the same speed the Chevy Suburban was traveling.
Angie, Vickery, and I were in the crime lab’s Suburban, headed from Tallahassee to the boondocks of Apalachee County, an hour west and a world away from the hum of the state capital and the forensic labs of FDLE. The deputy who’d called in the skull had arranged to rendezvous with us in McNary, the county seat of Apalachee County, and caravan with us to the property where the dog, the owner, and a second skull awaited us.
Eventually a small town shimmered into view, as if it were being conjured out of the waves of heat; as if the buildings and cars and even people took a few minutes to coalesce. McNary, Florida — population “nary too many,” according to Vickery — solidified into a sleepy, pretty little town, its central square occupied by a century-old, cupola-capped courthouse that was surrounded by live oaks and flowering azaleas. The streets bordering the courthouse square were fronted by an array of small, local businesses: a three-chair barbershop, still sporting a spinning pole of spiraling red and blue stripes; the Stitch ’N Sew, whose display window proclaimed CHURCH HATS SOLD HERE and offered beribboned, bespangled evidence to back up the claim; Miss Lillian’s Diner, where a sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk listed the day’s specials as meat loaf
, mac and cheese, green beans, and four varieties of pie; the Casa de Adoración, a storefront Hispanic church whose members Vickery described as “a cross between Catholics and snake handlers”; two bail bonding companies, AAA Bail and Free As a Bird Bonds; a pawnshop offering DIAMONDS, GUNS, AND PAWN; and a hardware store whose sidewalk frontage abounded with lawn mowers, wheelbarrows, racks of gardening tools, and a handful of olive-drab hunting blinds perched on fifteen-foot stilts. As we passed the hunting blinds, I looked up, half expecting to see rifle barrels aimed at our passing vehicle.
A few blocks west of the courthouse, we passed a huge column of gray nylon fabric, a cylinder a hundred feet tall and thirty feet in diameter, glowing in the sun and rippling in the breeze. I pointed it out to Vickery. “What on earth?”
“Dunno. Looks like one of those weird artworks by that foreign guy — what’s his name? Crystal? Cristoff? The dude that wraps buildings and islands and small countries in fabric?”
“Christo,” said Angie. “But I don’t think this is art.”
“Looks like art to me,” said Vickery. “Prettier than a lot of paintings I’ve seen.”
“Didn’t say it wasn’t pretty,” she said crossly. “But I think if we peeked behind that curtain, we’d find a water tower and a crew of guys with sandblasters or paint sprayers.”
On the outskirts of McNary — which were no more than a quarter mile from the inskirts of McNary — Angie pulled into a McDonald’s. An Apalachee County sheriff’s cruiser idled in the grass beneath the shade of a maple tree at the back corner of the parking lot. As she eased the Suburban to a stop at the edge of the pavement, a lanky deputy emerged from the cruiser, wiping his fingers with the tatters of a napkin. The three of us climbed out — it felt like stepping into a blast furnace — and swapped greasy, salty handshakes with the deputy, Will Sutton. “Sorry,” he said, “I should’ve gotten more napkins. Y’all want something to eat? Last chance for a while.” We declined, and in another minute we were headed westward again into the liquid shimmer of Highway 90.
Turning left off 90, we took a state highway south for a few miles, then turned west onto a county road for a few more. Then, at a sagging wooden gate that looked permanently open, we eased onto a small dirt road. The road, barely more than a pair of sandy tracks, wound through stands of pines and moss-draped live oaks; every now and then, small branches and beards of Spanish moss slapped and slid across the windshield. Where the ground was dry and the sand was loose, the Suburban spun and slewed in the slight curves; occasionally, we dropped into water-filled depressions that were axle-deep, flinging great sheets of sandy water high and wide, cascading over the already-spattered vegetation encroaching on the road. The Suburban seemed to need its four-wheel-drive and high ground clearance, yet fifty yards ahead of us, Deputy Sutton’s Ford sedan managed just fine, aside from a thick layer of mud and sand accumulating as it rooted through the wallows.
A mile back in the woods, the deputy’s cruiser turned out of the tracks and parked in a small clearing beneath towering pines. We pulled in beside him, and I noticed a tiny, tin-roofed cottage tucked at one edge of the clearing. The clapboard siding was painted forest green, and the structure looked like it had escaped from a gang of state park cabins fifty years before and had holed up in this remote hideout ever since. A battered Ford Escort station wagon sat rusting in the yard, its wheels up to the hubs in weeds.
Our arrival was heralded by the baying of a gangly black-and-white hound that bounded off the front porch and galloped toward us. As the Suburban stopped he reared up, putting his paws on Angie’s windowsill and thrusting a snuffling muzzle through the open window. “Nice doggie,” Angie said, her tone somewhere between sarcasm and hope. She held a tentative hand toward him, close enough to sniff but not close enough to bite. After a quick whiff, the dog gave the hand a sloppy lick with a long, deceptively swift tongue. “Nice.” She grimaced, reaching for a container of wipes in the console.
“At least he’s friendly.” I got out, and the dog loped around to my side of the car to check me out. After sniffing me briefly, he shifted his attention to the right front tire, which he marked with a liberal sprinkling of pee. “Well mannered, too.” Sutton got out of the cruiser, and the dog gave him a perfunctory sniff and marked one of his tires, too, though with only a few token drops. Clearly he’d sized up the group and found the FDLE contingent to be the alpha dogs.
The screen door of the cottage groaned open on a rusty spring. “Don’t mind Jasper,” called a stringy man who bore a vague resemblance to his dog. “He never did meet a stranger.” The screen whacked shut as the man descended the two porch steps and shambled toward us. He wore loose, faded jeans, cinched above bony hips with a belt of cracked black leather. On both thighs the denim was worn through to the layer of horizontal white threads; between gaps in the threads of one leg I glimpsed a scrawny thigh that was nearly as white — and nearly as thin — as the threads themselves. The man’s T-shirt looked as if it had been used for years as a painter’s drop cloth; I couldn’t tell if it was white under all the layers of color, or dark with numerous smears of white amid the other colors. Is a zebra white with black stripes, I found myself trying to remember, or black with white stripes?
Angie stretched out a hand for him to shake. “Good to see you again, Mr. Pettis. How you doing today?”
“Gettin’ by, Miss Angie,” he said, shaking his head doubtfully. “Battery on my damn car’s gone dead, and I need to patch a couple holes in my damn roof, but I can’t complain.”
“There’s always something, isn’t there,” said Angie, who had a much bigger cause to complain, but who refrained. “You remember Special Agent Vickery and Officer Sutton,” she told him, and Pettis nodded. “And this is Dr. Brockton. He’s a forensic anthropologist — a bone detective — who’s helping us out on this case.”
“Bone detective,” he mused. “Like that gal on television? That one they call Bones?”
“Like her,” I said. “Except she’s got fancier equipment than I’ve got.”
“Fancier looks, too.” He grinned.
I laughed. “Yeah, and she’s probably a lot smarter than I am. I just do the best I can with what I’ve got to work with.”
“That’s all a man can do,” he said agreeably. “You want to see Jasper’s latest find?” I nodded. “It’s up here with the rest of the stuff he’s dragged in.” He led us up the steps and onto the screened-in porch. The screen was rusted, with several dog-sized rips in it; I suspected it did as good a job of keeping mosquitoes out as it did of keeping Jasper in. A wooden shelf, shoulder-high, ran nearly the width of the porch, mounted to the side of the house with triangular wooden braces. Perched on the shelf were a half-dozen skulls: three deer, an alligator, a cow, and a human, which — like the first one — lacked a mandible.
“That’s quite a collection,” I said. “I’ve seen anthropology departments with smaller collections than Jasper’s building here.” I donned a pair of gloves from my back pocket and lifted the human skull from the shelf. The light on the covered porch was dim, so I headed back into the daylight. Even in the dimness, though, I could tell that this skull had a grim story to recount.
The other four people gathered around as I studied the skull, turning it slowly to inspect it from all angles. Pettis leaned in close as I flipped it to inspect the mouth. “So what-all can you tell from this?”
“Quite a bit,” I said. “None of it very cheerful. Let’s start with the teeth, since we’re looking at them right now.” Two of them, the central incisors, had been snapped off at the gum line. “These were probably broken by a blow of some sort,” I said. “Maybe he just tripped and fell on the sidewalk, but more likely, somebody knocked them out. Maybe with a baseball bat or a piece of pipe. If we can find the lower jaw, I’ll bet the central incisors are missing from it, too.” I studied the remaining teeth. “One of his twelve-year molars is gone, and the jawbone’s already starting to resorb, to fill the empty socket. Four of the other
teeth have unfilled cavities.” I pointed with my pinky to one of the six-year molars. “This cavity goes deep enough to reach the root. That had to be painful. So this was a poor boy; he probably never even went to the dentist.”
“So it is a male,” said Angie. “I thought so; this skull’s a good bit bigger than the other.”
“He’s bigger, several years older,” I said. “Still a subadult, though.” I pointed to the roof of the mouth. “Remember how open the sutures in the palate looked in the other skull? These are nearly fused, but not quite. So this boy — young man, really — could be sixteen, seventeen. Judging by how that socket’s already filling in, he probably lost that missing molar not too long after he got it. I’d say he started out poor, and things went downhill from there.”
Vickery used his cigar to point to a jagged gap behind the left ear opening, at the base of the temporal bone. “Looks like a fair-sized chunk of bone is missing.”
I nodded. “The left mastoid process — the heavy piece that’s almost like a corner of the skull — has been knocked clean off. That’s a pretty stout piece of bone, so something hit him hard. Again, maybe something like a baseball bat. A two-by-four. A rifle butt.”
There was a sober pause while they took this in.
“What about time since death?” asked Angie. “Was this kid killed around the same time as the other?”
“Hard to say.” I shrugged. “There’s a little bit of tissue on this one, too, so they could be from the same time period. But the range of uncertainty’s big. They might’ve died the same day; they might have died years apart.”
“But we know we have two adolescents,” Vickery mused, “at least one of them male, maybe both of them male.” I nodded. “Both killed by blunt-force trauma, both found in the same general area. So we’re probably looking for a serial killer?” Angie drew a long, grim breath.
