Bones Never Lie

CHAPTER 11

I LOGGED ON to my computer and pulled up the file. Scanned the contents. As I feared, case number ME107-10 fit the pattern.

The skull had been found by hikers off South New Hope Road, near the town of Belmont, just west of Charlotte and just north of the South Carolina border. It lay in a gulley across from the entrance to the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden.

The facial bones and mandible had been missing, and the calvarium gnawed and weathered. Remnants of brain matter had adhered to the endocranial surface, suggesting a PMI of less than a year.

I’d led a recovery team. For a full day we’d worked a grid shoulder to shoulder, poking under rocks and fallen trees, sifting through vines, leaves, and brushy undergrowth. Though we found a fair number of bones, much of the skeleton had been lost to scavenging animals.

I was able to determine that the remains were those of a twelve- to fourteen-year-old child. What was left of the cranium suggested European ancestry.

Gender determination based on skeletal indicators is unreliable prior to puberty. But articles of clothing found in association with several bone clusters suggested the victim was female.

A search of MP files turned up no match in North or South Carolina. Ditto when we ran the profile through NamUS and the Doe Network, national and international data banks for missing and unidentified persons.

So the child remained nameless, ME107-10. The bones were archived on a shelf down the hall.

I pushed from my desk and walked to the storage room, boot heels echoing in the quiet of the empty building.

After locating the correct label, I pulled the box and carried it to autopsy room one. Larabee’s closed office door told me he’d already left. The autopsy table was empty. Its small occupant had been stitched, zipped into her body bag, and rolled to the cooler.

I thought of the heartrending conversation Slidell was having with Shelly Leal’s grieving parents. Receiving autopsy results is never easy. Nor is delivering them. I felt empathy for all three.

Deep breath. Only a faint trace of odor lingered in the air.

After gloving, I lifted the lid.

The skeleton was as I remembered, stained tea brown by contact with the vegetation in which it had lain. And woefully incomplete.

Still psyched about finding the lip print, I spread paper sheeting on the table and placed all the bones and bone fragments on it.

The skull’s outer surface was scored by tooth marks, and the orbital ridges and mastoids were chewed. Most of the vertebrae and ribs were crushed. The one pelvic half had several canine punctures. Each of the five long bones was truncated and cracked at both ends.

I examined everything first with a magnifying lens, then with the ALS. Spotted no hairs or fibers snagged on or embedded in the bones. Detected not the faintest suggestion of a glimmer.

I was repacking the skeleton when my eyes fell on a bag tucked into one corner of the box. Odd. Had the clothing never left the MCME? Had it gone to the CMPD lab and come back? I’d noted no report in the electronic file.

I opened the bag, withdrew the contents, and placed everything on the sheet.

One lavender sandal, size marking abraded by wear.

One pair of purple polyester shorts, girls’ size twelve.

One T-shirt saying 100% Princess, size medium.

One pink polyester bra, size 32AA.

One elastic band from a pair of girls’ panties, label faded and unreadable.

I repeated the process with the lens and the ALS.

Except for a few short black hairs, obviously animal, I got the same disappointing result.

Discouraged, I reshelved the box, then returned to my office. Thinking perhaps an error had occurred and a report hadn’t been entered, I pulled my own file on ME107-10. I still keep hard copy. Old habits die hard.

Data entry omission. The clothing had been submitted, examined, and, for some strange reason, returned to us. The lab had gotten zilch.

I was dialing Slidell when my iPhone rang. He and Ryan were going to the Penguin. The junkie inside me rolled over and opened an eye.

What the hell. I was done here.

I cleaned up and headed out.

Larabee’s car was gone from the lot. But two vans sat outside the security fence. One had WSOC written on the side panel, the other News 14 Carolina.

Crap.

As I crossed to my Mazda, each van’s doors thunked open and a two-person crew leaped out. One member of each pair held a mike, the other a shoulder-propped camera.

I hurried to my car, jumped in, and palmed down the locks. Gunning through the gate, I lowered a window and waved a message that needed no clarification.

I knew the media had picked up on transmissions concerning the discovery of Leal’s body, and that the reporters sitting vigil at the morgue were just doing their jobs. I also knew that dozens more were swarming elsewhere—the underpass, the convenience store, the Leal home—salivating for an inside line to pipe to their editors.

My gesture was unfair. Definitely inelegant. But I refused to provide fodder for voyeurs wanting a peek into the heartbreak of others.

The Penguin drive-in is a clogged artery waiting to take you out. Featuring a menu with caloric levels very possibly illegal, the place has been a Charlotte institution since before I was born. I crave its burgers and fries like an addict craves dope.

The restaurant was close to the convenience store where Shelly Leal was last seen. Where she’d bought milk and candy and it had cost her life.

Pulling from Commonwealth into a spot by the entrance, I could see Ryan and Slidell through the double lens of my windshield and a tinted front window. The look on Skinny’s face almost made me regret my decision to come.

Though it was nearly two P.M., the place was crowded. And noisy with the hubbub of conversation emanating from fat-glutted brains.

The men looked up when I drew close. Ryan scooched left to make space for me in the booth.

Slidell was eating a sandwich that almost defied description. Blackened bologna on Texas toast with lettuce, tomato, and mayo. The Dr. Devil. One of the few offerings I’d never sampled. Ryan was working on a hot dog barely visible under a layer of queso and onion rings. Both were drinking sodas the size of oil drums. The iconic flightless bird grinned from each plastic cup.

I slid in and Ryan handed me a menu. No, thanks. I knew what I wanted.

The waitress appeared and queried my health in a syrupy drawl. I assured her I was swell and ordered the Penguin burger, a heart-stopper topped with pimento cheese and fried pickles.

While waiting for my food, I told Ryan and Slidell about the possible lip print.

“It could be Leal’s.” Ryan sounded skeptical.

“Yes,” I said. “Or it could have been left by her attacker. Maybe Leal fought and was pulled close, to pin her arms. Or maybe her body slipped while being carried to the underpass. There are lots of reasons her abductor’s face might have come in contact with the jacket.”

“You think DNA’s gonna last that long?” Slidell outdid Ryan at dubious.

“I’m hoping so.” I was. And that the match would send Pomerleau straight to hell.

My drink was delivered. Sugary tea, not the unsweetened I’d ordered. While sipping it, I shared my thoughts on the gap year, 2010. And described ME107-10.

The men listened, chewing and wiping grease from their chins. Though he hadn’t been involved, Slidell remembered the case.

I mentioned the media ambush at the MCME. Slidell delivered his usual rant. His suggestions for curtailing the power of the fifth estate did not involve amending the constitution.

By the time my food arrived, Slidell had finished his. He bunched and tossed his napkin and leaned back. “I’m convinced the parents are clear. Co-workers place the old man at the body shop when the kid went missing. Mother’s barely holding it together. Says she was home with the other two, waiting for the milk. It feels right to me.”

Ryan nodded agreement.

“How did they take the news?” I spoke through a mouthful of ground beef and pickle.

Shoulder shrug. You know.

I did. Though it wasn’t a frequent part of my job, I’d participated in the notification of next of kin. In that moment when lives changed forever. I’d seen people faint, lash out, cry, go catatonic. I’d heard them berate, accuse, beg for retraction, for reassurance that it was all a mistake. No matter how often I partook, the task was always heartbreaking.

“Mother wondered about a ring the kid always wore. Silver, shaped like a seashell. You got something like that?” Slidell asked.

“I didn’t see any jewelry in the autopsy room, but I’ll check,” I said. “Maybe Larabee bagged it before I arrived.” And separated it from the clothing? I doubted he’d do that. Didn’t say so.

“We did some poking into your other vics. Koseluk and Donovan are still missing. Both files are inactive, since no one’s been pressing.”

Ryan excused himself. I stood and watched him walk to the door. Knew he was going outside to smoke.

As I sat back down, Slidell freed a toothpick from its cellophane and began mining a molar. The action didn’t stop the flow of his narrative. “Lead on the Koseluk girl is a guy named Spero. Kannapolis PD. He’s okay. Worked with him once. Gangbanger got capped—”

“What’s his take?”

“He’s still liking the ex.”

“Al Menniti?”

Slidell nodded.

“Has he surfaced?”

“No.” Slidell withdrew the toothpick and inspected something on the tip. “Talked to the mother. She says the dumb fuck couldn’t hide his own ass, much less a kid. Says he didn’t give two shits about fatherhood. Her words.”

“Lyrical. What about Colleen Donovan?”

“Parents both dead, lived with an aunt, Laura Lonergan, who spends her time frying her brains on meth. And there ain’t much to fry. That conversation was a treat.”

I gestured for Slidell to skip the character analysis. “Does Colleen have a jacket?”

Slidell nodded. “Juvie, so we’ll need a warrant to unseal it.” I raised my brows in question.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m writing something up.” Slidell paused, as though debating whether to make the next comment.

“What?” I urged.

“One weird thing. According to the file, Donovan was entered into a national database for missing kids.”

“By whom?”

“MP investigator name of Pat Tasat.”

“What’s weird about that?”

“I checked for the hell of it. Six months out, the kid was removed from the system.”

“Did Tasat say why?”

“No. And he won’t.” Tight. “Poor schmuck drowned in Lake Norman last Labor Day weekend.”

“I’m sorry. Did you know him?”

Slidell nodded. “Jimmy B and Jet Skis don’t mix.”

I thought a moment. “Isn’t it standard to enter a reason when removing a name from the database?”

“Yeah. That’s what’s weird. No reason was given.”

“Who removed her?”

“That wasn’t there, either.”

I gnawed on that, wondering what it could mean. If anything. “And Estrada?” I asked.

“Kid vanished in Salisbury—that’s Rowan County—turned up in Anson, so they caught the file. The investigation went nowhere, eventually landed with a ballbuster at the sheriff’s department name of Henrietta Hull. That’s who I talked to. Goes by Cock. You believe that?”

Hen. Cock. I was sure fellow cops had crafted the nickname. Doubted she went by it. “Was the problem lack of interjurisdictional sharing?” I asked.

“Partly that. Partly the Anson County Sheriff’s Office was busy mucking out its own barn.”

“Meaning?”

“Couple of their superstars got nailed for taking bribes.”

I remembered now. Both deputies had gone to jail.

“Partly it was timing. The initial lead retired some months into it. That’s when the case bounced to Hull. Mostly it was the fact that no one found dick. No physical evidence, no eyewitnesses, no cause of death.”

“Who did the post?”

“Some hack who didn’t bother to visit the scene.”

I wasn’t surprised. The Charlotte Observer had done more than one exposé on the failings of the North Carolina medical examiner system. A scathing series ran in 2013 after an elderly couple and an eleven-year-old boy died three months apart in the same motel room in Boone, and it turned out the culprit was carbon monoxide. The local ME had neither visited the motel nor filed a timely report after the first deaths. Another series shocked the public in 2014. Murders classified as accidental deaths, accidents as suicides, misidentified bodies delivered to the wrong funeral homes.

When interviewed, the state’s new chief ME attributed problems in the system to inadequate funding. No kidding. Except for Mecklenburg County, local medical examiners were paid a hundred dollars per case. And since the state didn’t require it, many had little or no training in forensic pathology. Some weren’t even physicians. The new boss was trying to bring about change, but without increased financial support, her chance of success was unlikely.

“No one kept pushing?” I asked.

“Estrada’s mother got deported to Mexico shortly after the kid vanished. There was no señor in the picture.”

I finished my burger and thought about Mama’s three girls, Koseluk, Estrada, and Donovan. One dead, two missing. Files ignored because no one was pushing.

Ryan rejoined us, carrying a hint of cigarette smoke into the booth.

“Tinker was at the scene last night?” I asked.

Slidell snorted loudly, then went back to working his gums.

“The SBI’s taking the position that the investigation will benefit from sharing information and resources at the state level.” Ryan’s first spoken contribution.

“There’s no way the SB-fucking-I will share piss-all.” Slidell jammed the toothpick into the remains of his slaw. “They think a clear on these cases is their ticket to a makeover. And that don’t include us.”

“What does Tinker think about these other three vics?” I asked.

“That asshat couldn’t think his way through a fart without coaching.” Slidell’s outburst caused several patrons to glance our way.

“He’s not convinced they’re related,” Ryan said.

“Leal?”

“That one he’s saying maybe.”

“What happens now?”

“I kicked what we got up the COC.” Slidell was using shorthand for “chain of command.” “Now we wait.”

We were returning to our cars when Slidell’s mobile sounded. He answered, and as he listened, his face grew red. Finally, “A couple extra whiteboards ain’t gonna clear this thing.”

Disconnecting with a furious one-finger jab, Slidell turned to us. “We’re screwed.”