Burning Time

10

“Well, what can you tell me?” Newt Regis leaned back in his chair feeling a little nervous, because Dr. Milt Ferris had bothered to come to his office instead of calling him on the phone with the information Newt had asked for. When Newt wanted a prelim, Milt usually gave him a call with the TOD and COD.

Milton Ferris had been Medical Examiner for a while in the City of San Diego, and had taught pathology for years at the medical school. When he decided he wanted to get away from it all and came out here to write his memoirs, the job of Coroner happened to be open. Milt was persuaded to take it as a stopgap until they could find someone else. So far they were lucky. Four years had passed, nobody ever bothered to look for a replacement, and he hadn’t complained about the work yet.

Milt had changed a few things in Potoway Village.

Before Milt came, Newt was called Newton, which was his real name. Establishing Time of Death was just that, and nothing else. But Milton was a crossword puzzle maniac, and now everything was letters and codes. His idea of a good time was making up a crossword puzzle with just law enforcement and forensic terms in it.

Sometimes Newt complained that Milt had turned him into a salamander and Cause of Death into a fish, but Milt pointed out the KGB, CIA, FBI, and all the other police agencies around the world were the ones that started it, not him. Hey, the FBI now had branches with names like VICAP and IMNAT, absolute necessities for any crossword on the subject.

Milt was smooth all over, bald as an egg, pale, round, not over five foot five. At sixty, his face was still unlined except around the eyes, where there was always something of a smile going on. If he had had some hair, he might have looked a lot like a small Santa Claus. But even without hair, he didn’t look like someone who had spent his life cutting up dead bodies, and then studying the gruesome bits.

He sat heavily, opposite Newt, not smiling now.

“Well?” Newt demanded.

Out there where they found her, Newt and Ray and Jesse had gone over as much ground as they could, looking for some clue as to what happened. A track in the dirt, a scrap of cloth, a weapon, anything. But the girl had no clothes on, and there did not appear to be any disturbance of anything in the area around her. In some other part of the world, they might call in a botanist to examine the plant life under the body to determine, by the changes in the plants, how long the body had been there. But here there was no plant life under her. Milt had initially speculated that whatever happened to her happened somewhere else.

“It looks like she had some injuries, but she didn’t die of them,” he said now.

“What do you mean?” Newt frowned.

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what happened antemortem, and what might be postmortem injuries,” Milt said.

“Yeah?” Newt said. He knew that.

“She could have died, and then two ribs and an arm were broken when somebody moved her. You know that sometimes happens when ambulance drivers aren’t careful. It can mess up an autopsy report.” Milt shook his bald head.

“But you don’t think that’s what happened?”

“No.”

There was a long pause.

“So, what did she die of?” Newt said impatiently.

“Exposure,” Milt said.

“No kidding.”

“The color and condition of her skin—looks like she was thoroughly burned by the sun. Not just her front, but her back, too. That means she could have been walked around out there. Low temperatures at night. Looks like she starved, fried, and froze.”

“Raped?” Newt asked soberly.

Milt shook his head. “After twenty-four hours with really first-rate samples from a living person, intercourse would be pretty hard to establish, unless there were injuries. Postmortem,” he shook his head again, “not a chance. I do think she was tortured, though.”

“The wounds in her groin?”

“No, that’s postmortem change. That’s what happens in mummification. The skin shrinks. The resulting split sometimes looks like an antemortem knife wound.”

“Mummification?” Newt played with a pencil on his desk. It said Pell’s Apothecary on the side. “Then she must have been there for a while.”

“Nuh-uh.” Milt shook his head again.

“Why so sure?”

“The birds just started. The coyotes hadn’t even gotten there yet. A few days, and there’d only be bones left. In a way we’re lucky.”

“Oh, yeah?” Newt said. “How so?”

“We might still be able to get some prints.”

Milt had finished and didn’t make any going motions.

“What’s bothering you? In particular, I mean?”

“You know that blackened part on her chest?”

“Postmortem artifact?” Newt was proud he knew the word. When he was a rookie years ago, he had seen the blackened patterns on the chest of a person who had died several days before, and thought some madman had murdered him and put them there. It didn’t take long to learn the horrible truth. Humans don’t fare as well as animals in the looks department after death. All kinds of colors and patterns and wounds appear on dead bodies as they go through their many postmortem changes. Sometimes, in three days if the conditions are just right, a human can swell to three times its normal size with gases and putrefaction.

“No, a man-made burn.”

Milt was silent for a long time.

Newt twirled the pencil in his fingers. So, she might have been tortured and left out there. He had a mental picture of her hair, already shrinking away from her scalp, and her nails. The hair was silky and looked like it had been expertly colored; the nails were painted a delicate pink. This was no biker’s girl with crudely bleached hair, roots an inch thick, and black nail polish.

“The thing is,” Milt went on. “You know how ME’s are when we get together. We talk about unusual cases. I have a friend down in Twentynine Palms. A few months ago he had a similar case, a girl burned in the chest with something like a brand and left in the desert. Nobody took too much notice. It was a Mexican.”

“Christ.” Newt groaned.

“I know he photographed the burn for the pattern. In case another one came up. I’ll have to get his report. Now I’m not saying two burns make a trend, but it looks like another one may have come up—” His voice trailed off.

Slowly he got to his feet.

“When can you have the data for me?” Newt asked. He wanted to get the data into the surrounding jurisdictions as soon as possible. They had to identify her before they could start investigating what happened to her.

“Soon,” Milt promised. “They’re working on the X rays and dentals now.”

“Good.” Newt was so distressed by the thought of his California desert getting littered with the bodies of tortured young women that he followed Milt out of the building and watched him drive away.