Entombed

9

We both had our gold shields and identification badges in our hands, having been left by an angry immigration officer to cool our heels-and our tempers-while she fetched her supervisor.

"Put the hardware away," the supervisor said when he joined us in the glass cubicle. "Rules is rules and I don't break them for anybody."

I pointed across the corridor to the middle-aged couple, sitting stone-faced on folding wooden chairs like a pair of nineteenthcentury Ellis Island immigrants. "Their daughter is in the intensive care unit of New York Hospital, fighting for her life. We'll vouch for them, sign for them, deliver them back here in a week. What more-?"

"Welcome to America, post nine-eleven. I don't know who let them board without the papers they need, but this is as far as they get on my turf."

"The Swedish consulate arranged the whole thing. They were escorted onto the plane by an envoy from the American embassy, who gave them a letter that was hand-signed by the ambassador. He was promised by an NYPD captain that they'd be met on this end by a Port Authority official who would arrange everything from this point on."

"Maybe they can cut corners in Stockholm, lady, but I call the shots at this airport. The paperwork they got at the consulate is outdated."

Mercer was trying to restrain me, taking the reins with his unflappable demeanor. "We can do this your way, or we can do it the way the police commissioner just recommended to me. The mayor drives out here with the key to the city and a phalanx of reporters-and you continue to get in his way, or you just bend the regulations a bit and let us get these nice folks on the road."

We wrangled until after six o'clock, when the shifts changed and a new supervisor appeared. I had called the grand jury warden before the office closed to confirm the indictment had been voted. Within the hour we were on the Belt Parkway back to the city with our charges, who were more frightened than exhausted. The English they had not spoken since high school was basic enough for us to communicate, and I told them as much as I could about their daughter's experience and the news of her great recovery.

Mercer entered Manhattan through the Midtown Tunnel. "Let me out on First Avenue. I'll catch up with Mike and Andy Dorfman at the morgue."

I knew the nurses would not allow all of us into Annika's tiny room, and that it was more important for Mercer to be present at the parents' reunion with their child, in case there was any further conversation about the facts of the attack. For me, it would be less stressful, less emotional, to watch the processing of the skeletal remains. Without flesh and blood, the bones seemed too far removed from anyone with whom I could identify.

I had never been in Andy's cubicle in the basement of the medical examiner's office.

The familiar odor of formalin wafted through the dim hallways, and empty steel gurneys lined the walls, waiting for their lifeless loads.

No need to look for room numbers. I could hear Alex Trebek's voice as I passed an open door. Andy was hunched over the left femur of the skeleton, while Mike sat in a chair with his feet on the desk, noshing on a bag of pretzels and looking at the small portable television set on a bookshelf across the room.

"European Literature. You're just in time."

Our usual bet was twenty dollars. "Double or nothing," I said. This was one of my few areas of strength against Mike's concentration on military history and general trivia.

"Not a prayer. Twenty is max. Don't get too cocky, kid. You in, Andy?"

"Nope," he said, dipping a toothbrush in a bowl of cloudy water and gently scrubbing against the bones.

"He hasn't stopped working since we left him last night," Mike said. "A little toothpaste, a little soap-our girl will be cleaned up in no time."

"Writer who lost an arm at the Battle of Lepanto," Trebek read aloud from the answer board to the three finalists, each of whom looked as pained as I did by the question.

"That category's a mischaracterization," I said. "You just got lucky. It's war in the guise of literature."

Mike lifted a Polaroid of the skull from the top of a pile in front of him and scribbled something on the back. "You first, Coop."

"Who was…? Give me a hint, will you?" I knew Lepanto was in Greece, but couldn't begin to figure whether the battle was an ancient or modern one.

"No, I'm sorry," Trebek said to the three-time champion, a waiter from Oregon who was trailing the other two players. "It was not Alexandre Dumas."

"Time's up," Mike said, tapping the photo on which he'd written the question on the tabletop while he twirled Andy's calipers in the other hand.

"Who was Sophocles?"

"Very lame. Bad answer."

"He was a playwright and a general, wasn't he?"

"Yeah, but he never lost a body part," Mike said. None of the contestants answered the question correctly. "Who is Miguel Cervantes? You didn't know he was called El Manco, the one-armed man? Lepanto was the first defeat of the Ottomans by the Christians- Spanish and Venetian mostly. Fifteen seventy-one. Jane Austen and those brooding Englishmen you like to read never left the sheep farm, Coop. I would have won the bundle tonight."

He held out his hand for the twenty.

"I'll buy dinner. Put it towards that."

"No can do, Miss Lonelyhearts. Valerie leaves for California tomorrow. Family ski trip for her parents' fortieth anniversary. Going to her place for a home-cooked meal. You know what that is, home cooking?"

"I have a vague childhood recollection." I had grown up in a close-knit family. My grandmother, who emigrated from Finland as an adolescent, lived with us for many years. Both she and my mother were superb cooks who prepared complicated meals every day of the week and made it seem effortless. We'd spend less than an hour at the dinner table when my father returned home from his surgical rounds, and then the women had to deal with the mounds of plates and pots that had been used in the process. Somehow I never inherited the love for standing over a hot stove that had run through my maternal line.

"Andy's making great progress," Mike said. "Scotty and I got up here at five. He's already running with it."

"With what?" I asked, glancing around the shelves that were lined with fragments of bone and assorted animal skeletons- snakes, an armadillo, and an elegantly horned antelope head among them.

"Basic 'scrip. Enough for Scotty to start looking at old police records and calling other agencies. Explain it to her."

Andy kept rubbing the surface of the leg bones with his toothbrush. "We've got a woman-and I'd say a young one, in her early twenties."

"How can you tell that?"

"Get used to it, Andy. Coop's gonna keep interrupting. All she knows how to do is cross-examine."

"First thing is getting the bones clean, laying her out in a proper anatomical position. That was easy here. Usually when we find them so many years later, the skeletal pieces are scattered around the scene, or they've been moved by animals. This one had nowhere to go in that brick coffin."

"But age, how can you tell that?"

"Bones stop growing basically by the time we're twenty-five years old. Up until then they keep changing and fusing together. After that, you begin to see deterioration, which helps us make estimates. They sort of break down, with everything from signs of arthritis to osteoporosis."

"And here?"

"She's in her early twenties, most probably. It's the pelvis again, and the ribs. She's got good height. How tall are you, Alex?"

"Five-ten."

"I'd say she was somewhere between five-six and five-eight."

"I was this big by the time I was sixteen. Could she have been a teenager?"

Andy's attention shifted to the skull, and he pointed the tooth-brush at the woman's mouth. "The teeth are interesting. Can you see?"

I stepped closer to the table.

"Some pretty expensive dental work went into this girl. Quality dentistry, including a pricey porcelain crown in one of the back molars."

I could see the neat and well-crafted denture in the lower part of the jaw.

"Now look up here," Andy said. "These teeth evidence some pretty severe rotting."

"That's an odd combination, isn't it?"

"What it suggests is a kid from a family of means, parents who would pay for first-class dental work throughout her youth and at some stage of young adulthood. The multiple sites of decay are consistent with some other kind of dysfunction going on in her life. Most often it's a slip into addiction or alcoholism. Her mouth exhibits classic signs of someone who has stopped taking care of herself, someone who didn't get medical or dental attention because the substance abuse would be discovered once she was in the hands of a health care professional."

It was astounding to me how this empty shell of a being was revealing herself to Andy Dorfman. "Can you tell anything else about her?"

"Give me the calipers, Mike," he said, reaching across the table. "We try to figure out race from the facial characteristics, using tools like this. The distinctions are pretty subtle for the most part- the set of the cheekbones, how far apart the eyes are, the shape and width of the nose. You need the skull to do it, so we're fortunate she was intact-without that, I couldn't even make an educated guess."

"And here?"

"Caucasian. I'm sure of it. I've put my calculations into FORDISC-"

"What's that?" I asked.

"University of Tennessee keeps a database of cranial measurements, a few thousand of them going back a century. Forensic Discriminant Functions, it's called. Sometimes the facial mask is more obtuse than this one. No question in my mind about this one."

"So we got a white female in her early twenties," Mike said. "Possibly a drug addict or alcoholic. If the ring is hers, her initials are A.T."

"Anything that tells you how she died?"

Andy ran his eyes up and down the length of the silent specimen on the table. "Nope. I thought for sure once we turned her over today I'd find a fracture on the back of her skull. I really wanted to."

"Why?"

He looked up at me. "Because the alternative is pretty frightening."

"Nothing worse that I can think of," I said, recalling the undersides of the broken fingernails, caked with a layer of cement.

"It's one thing to find that she died-say of an overdose-or was killed, even, and then bricked up inside this wall. But if she was alive, and gagged, and then watched herself being entombed-well, can you think of a more miserable death?"

"Twenty-five years ago, huh?" Mike said. "I just hope the guy who did this to her is still breathing so I can be there when Scotty slaps the cuffs on."

"Are you still looking for something else?" I asked.

"The pathologists reviewed it with me-both the X-rays and the bones. They agree there's no other gross cause of trauma. There won't be any kind of death certificate for months down the road, Alex. Whatever fancy medical term they come up with, we're talking buried alive here."

"Why months?" Mike asked.

"I'm going over the works once more to clean her up. I've got to check more thoroughly for any individualizing characteristics to compare to old records."

"Like what?"

"Pathologies, like fractures that had healed. I think we've got a hairline fracture of the tibia here. We've x-rayed it and I'll document it with detail and measurements."

"Will you attempt any kind of facial reconstruction?"

"Sure, Alex, and that slows down the process, too." First the computer would attempt several forms, based on the shape of the skull and Andy's measurements. Then a forensic sculptor would come in to add texture, to try to humanize the portrait. "You'll be lucky to have that by April or May. It's a skill very few artists have. The ball's in Mike's court."

"The NYPD's computer system only has missing persons' reports online back through 1995. Everything earlier has to be a hand-search," Mike said. "From there, Scotty's got to notify every jurisdiction in the Northeast. No saying where this chick got here from."

"And the feds, of course." New York was a mecca to hundreds of thousands of young men and women, coming to the big city from every corner of the country-to find jobs or go to school, if their heads were on right-or to get caught up in the alternative street life of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and crime if they were unstable or unwise.

"So you go home and get some beauty rest, Coop. Andy's given us a jump-start on the basics. By the time we go public with the story, we'll have a pretty fair idea of who we're looking for."

I walked along the green-tiled hallway to the elevator that carried me upstairs to the lobby and out the front door onto First Avenue, where I hailed a cab to go home.

Despite the low temperature, the sidewalks in the Fifties and Sixties were full of pedestrians, making their way to and from the bistros and bars. Friday-night burgers and shooters were staples of the end of the long workweek for many young people looking to socialize before heading to the bridges and tunnels.

How many of the women hoping to hook up with guys tonight knew that a dangerous rapist had this very neighborhood in his scope? I thought, as the cab cruised under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge overpass. How many of them would walk out alone after four or five drinks-intoxicated and oblivious to their vulnerability- and make their way down the side streets in the early hours of the morning?

I unlocked my door at eight-thirty and dropped my files and pocketbook in the entryway. Next to my bed, the answering machine flashed that there were three messages, and I played them back as I undressed.

"Alex? You there? It's Lesley. How about a movie and late supper? Give a shout." Girlfriends were stepping in to try to fill the void left by my breakup with Jake.

That one was followed by a call from Nina Baum, my college roommate and best friend, who lives in Los Angeles. "No feeling sorry for yourself this weekend. If you get lonely, I'm around all weekend. You did the right thing." Nina had been the most out-spoken about how wrong Jake was for me and tried to keep my spirits up after the split.

"It's Mercer, Alexandra. We're on for tomorrow night. Greg Karras is coming in from the coast. Let me know if you're riding with us." The geographic profiler was ready to start the hunt for John Doe, and I was game to go.

I returned all three calls-gave Mercer a yes, chatted with Nina about my week, and left Lesley a message telling her I had gotten home too late to accept her offer. I soaked in the bathtub with a stack of magazines beside me, wrapped myself in a warm robe, and settled into the den with a Dewar's, an English muffin, and a Faulkner novel that Jake had left behind.

When I awakened at 7A.M. I was relieved that I had slept through the night without a call from anyone at Special Victims. My Silk Stocking nemesis had taken another night off.

I opened the door to pick up the newspapers. The Times had the latest on Middle East peace talks and presidential gaffes. The tabloids were beneath it and I bent to retrieve them. There on the front page of the Post was a photograph of the doomed building on Third Street with a cartoonlike skeleton dangling below a three-inch banner headline:POE'S CRYPT?