The Ragman's memory

5

Gail took a bite of pizza and chewed thoughtfully for a minute. We were sitting at either end of the kitchen’s small serving island, late at night, enjoying the novelty of a shared meal, even if it was garnished, I noted wistfully, with vegetables only.

“What did you do then?”

“Asked to see Shawna’s room. There wasn’t anything useful-no letters or diaries-just posters and stuffed animals and what-have-you. But it was so dark and gloomy… And dirty. Tough way to live.”

“I thought maybe Wilma’s phone records might help-give us a clue to who Shawna was calling her last few weeks at home. ’Course, that was wishful thinking-I suppose I should’ve been happy she had a phone at all, much less a filing system. I’ve got Ron pestering the phone company for it instead. We should have something tomorrow. She did have a recent snapshot she let us have.”

I paused to eat a slice myself, watching Gail cross the kitchen to refill her glass with milk. It was during small moments like this that I was happiest we’d moved in together. Despite the crisis that had stimulated the decision, I found myself uncannily comfortable with the end result, wondering why we’d staved it off for so long.

“After that, we went to the local high school,” I continued. “Talked to teachers, advisors, administrators-basically anyone who’d known her-and finally we chased down a couple of her old friends. But we didn’t get much-she was a loner, a dreamer, someone easily influenced by a smile and a good line. Her grades were lousy, she had zero ambition, her social skills were inept. She was plain and insecure and dying to get away. They all said her relationship with her mother was the pits.”

“No ties to Brattleboro?”

I shook my head and spoke with a full mouth. “No ties anywhere except to her hometown. When we first came up with Shawna’s name, we did a complete computer search. Nothing came up. The joke would be if the bones aren’t hers at all.”

“You see today’s paper?” Gail asked after a brief pause. I gave her a dour look, feeling twinges of familiar dread. “No. What did they do?”

“Nothing bad. They screwed up a little on the details, saying the piece of jaw you found was from the mandible instead of the maxilla, and they pumped up what you found a bit, making it sound like you’d sent a small graveyard of bones to Waterbury, but it was basically okay. They toed the line on the possible cause of death, quoting you that there was no sign of foul play so far, and they kept the little girl’s name out of it. Still, it’s causing the expected ripple around town.”

Given her many political contacts in Brattleboro-she’d served on the board of selectmen for years, among other high-visibility organizations-I knew Gail wasn’t referring to local gossip. I also knew she hadn’t brought up the newspaper article to make idle conversation. “Who from?”

She shrugged vaguely. “Some of the church groups, the halfway house, a few mental health people-the last two worried their customers’ll be hassled by the PD for questioning. And the selectmen… I heard the town manager’s phone was ringing off the wall with all the official hand-wringing about more violence in our streets.”

She turned her attention back to her meal, but I’d caught her meaning. Any political heat was troublesome enough, even as a routine part of the process. The fact that it was building so fast, based on the discovery of a few small bone shards, was unusual. It gave me the queasy feeling there might be something stirring I knew nothing about.

The follow-up story on the “mystery bones” ran on the front page the next morning. I had called Christine Evans-Norah’s science teacher-the day before as promised, and she’d been more than happy to talk to Katz and his reporters. A photograph of her appeared beneath the headline, and she was heavily quoted throughout the article, expounding on the habits of scavengers and the aging of bones. I appreciated her keeping Norah’s name out of it, but my earlier affection for her was dampened by what I’d since discovered about Shawna Davis. That anyone should benefit from the remains of a girl so neglected in life was an irony I couldn’t appreciate.

Except that we still had only circumstantial evidence linking Shawna to our body-an ambiguity we needed to settle.

J.P. Tyler knocked on my open door as I was finishing the paper. “I got a fax from the lab early this morning and followed it up with a phone call.”

I waved him to the plastic guest chair by my desk.

He sat down gingerly, a sheaf of papers clutched in his hand. J.P. was not a “people person”-an inhibition that only worsened when he was faced with someone superior in rank, regardless of how accommodating they tried to be. Still, it made me extremely grateful that while our budget was as anemic as any other department’s in town, we could still afford to equip, train, and entertain Tyler enough to keep him with us.

“First off,” he began a little ponderously, “most of the bone tissue we sent them was human. What we thought came from animals, did. And the PCR DNA test they ran links the hair to the skull and the teeth. But that’s about as definitive as they want to get so far. They think the person was a young Caucasian female, but they stress that these are statistically-based findings and have a twenty percent or better chance of being wrong. It might’ve been better if we’d had more to give them, but even with the other skull fragments we excavated from under the doghouse, it wasn’t as much as they would’ve liked. They favor long bones and the pelvic girdle-that’s where most of the aging and sex studies they use for base data have concentrated.”

Despite the care and speed the lab had expended on our behalf, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of irritation. I’d put Shawna Davis’s face on this cast-off corpse hoping the lab would reward my faith. Now I not only didn’t know if I had a bona fide homicide on my hands, I didn’t even have a rock-solid identity for the victim.

“What else?” I asked.

He held out half the papers in his hand, all of them long computer-generated printouts with rows of lie-detector-style spikes on each one, accompanied by near-hieroglyphic annotations lining the margins. “These are toxicological analyses of the hair sample. None of them can tell sex or age either, but hair is a good indicator of other things. It grows at a little over a centimeter per month, and retains many of the chemicals ingested by the host.”

He leaned forward and began spreading out the sheets, pointing at the various spike patterns. “Some of these are legal drugs-like dextromethorphan-that’s found in a cough syrup called Robitussin DM, for example-so we can guess she either had a cold a couple of months before she died, or maybe she took it to get high. Anyhow, there’s also some marijuana-at multiple points-and finally,” he concluded, extracting a sheet from the bottom, “this: phenobarbital.”

“Sleeping pills?”

“Stronger-it’s a barbiturate. The longest-lasting available. The kicker is that it surfaces right at the root of the hair shaft, implying she was on it at the time of her death, although they tell us to allow a week’s margin for error with all this.”

“So she committed suicide?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The reading indicates a prolonged exposure-like a week or so. Taking a guess, I’d say she was sedated.”

My earlier irritation began to fade. “Can you tell if the amount was high enough for that? Maybe she just had a bad week getting to sleep.”

Tyler sat back. “I thought of that. Mass spec analyses aren’t as refined as urinalyses when it comes to specific amounts, but I checked the Physician’s Desk Reference for dosage recommendations, and it said that 120 milligrams of phenobarbital, three times a day, is the most you’d want to give an adult for sedative purposes. It’s true that different bodies metabolize chemicals at different rates and react to varying quantities, but this reading’s consistent with that dose-and there’re no other indicators along the hair shaft showing prior phenobarbital use. Had there been, it might have explained a growing tolerance for the stuff and a consequent need for more of it. The hair goes back almost twenty months, by the way.”

“But there’s no way to say the phenobarbital killed her?”

Tyler shook his head.

“You said earlier the hair had been dyed. You get anything back on that?”

He showed me another printout. “I gave the information to Sammie earlier. She’s checking on it now. The infrared analysis pegs the dye to only two manufacturers. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to eliminate the hairdressers that don’t use this color, and maybe a few others that don’t use these brands, and end up with somebody who remembers her.” He glanced hopefully at Shawna’s photograph I had taped to the wall before me. “One thing that might help is that the hair grew one and a half centimeters after the dye was applied, or about six weeks before she died.”

Through my open door, I saw Ron arrive at his desk. “Got the phone records,” he said when he saw me.

I beckoned to him, asking Tyler, “That it?”

Tyler nodded and rose. Ron noticed the printouts in his hand. “You get any DNA?”

Tyler looked at him curiously and then riffled through his collection. “Yeah-somewhere here.”

Ron explained his interest. “I was thinking that if we could get any DNA from the bones or teeth, we might be able to match it to Shawna’s PKU test on file in Massachusetts.”

I stared at him blankly.

But Tyler lit up. “Right. Every child born is supposed to have a PKU test. Stands for phenylketonuria-it’s done to check for mental retardation. And the blood sample is usually kept on record at the State Health Department. It’s just an identification card with a small dot on it, but it would be enough for us.” With rare exuberance, he patted Ron on the shoulder. “I’ll get right on it.”

Ron watched him leave, a small smile on his face.

“How’d you think of that?” I asked him.

The smile broadened. “I’m a new papa, remember? We just went through all that. Kind of stuck in my mind-all those vital records.”

Spoken like a true information nut, I thought gratefully, hopeful again that the identity issue could be settled. “You get a chance to look at those phone records?”

The smile slipped away. “Yeah-nothing to Brattleboro. For that matter, there weren’t many long-distance calls at all.”

“Okay. It was worth a shot. If you get any spare time, you might want to check the other numbers anyhow. Is Willy around?”

“I saw him talking to one of the patrol guys in the parking lot. Don’t know if he was coming or going.”

It turned out Willy was going, but I jogged outside and caught up with him just as he was starting his engine. He rolled down his window, scowling. “What?”

“You talk to any of your Satanist contacts?”

His look turned to disgust. “If I’d found anything, I would’ve said so. Besides, you only told me to think about it.”

“And then you went poking around.”

“Fuck you.” Willy didn’t like admitting defeat.

“What did you find out?”

“They’re all a bunch of thin-skinned assholes. What I got was a lot of holier-than-thou, alternate lifestyle bullshit. As far as I could tell, nobody’s contacted them to join up recently, and they haven’t been out recruiting. And it doesn’t look like they’ve been butchering virgins lately either. Can I go now?”

I stood back and let him slither out of the parking lot, his tires spinning on the hard-packed snow.

I didn’t share his obvious disappointment. Considering the little we had to work with, and the short time we’d been on the case, we were actually making pretty good headway. That satisfaction, however, was purely professional in nature. Emotionally, I was facing a darker picture. Tyler’s report, even with his scientific qualifiers, made it ever more likely that Shawna Davis’s death was a homicide.