Even Frankie lowered her voice when she addressed Rob and Zeke. “I don’t need both of you here. Zeke, I want you to get back over to the office.”
Zeke instantly protested, “Why me? Why is Haskell always the one who gets all the perks?”
“Perks? You want to stay and watch Doc carve up John Doe, be my guest,” Rob said.
“You two knuckle-heads shut up,” Frankie growled. “There’s no carving up to be done. And I’m not asking for volunteers. I said—”
“This is a great learning experience,” Zeke kept on. “You’re always saying we need more training opportunities.”
Frankie began to splutter. She got control and said, “Keep your voice down! Mr. Eden has folks in the Arrangement Room right this minute.”
Zeke looked so horrified that Rob probably would have laughed—except he caught sight of the two FBI agents’ expressions. Clearly they thought they’d stepped into an episode of Police Squad! And no wonder. Instead, he muttered, “The bereaved, you dumbass.”
“Yes, the bereaved,” Frankie said impatiently. “Real live customers. What do you think I mean?”
Agent Darling, edging toward a white door with a placard that read Employees Only, said, “Sheriff, we’re just going to—”
They didn’t wait to hear Frankie’s answer, which was just as well. The door swung shut behind Darling and Gould as Frankie said to Zeke, “For cryin’ out loud, Zeke, if it means that much to you, you can stay.” She nodded at his shoulder mic. “But keep your radio on. Low.”
Zeke threw Rob a look of triumph, and Rob shook his head because there was no competition, whatever Zeke imagined. He would happily surrender his spot at the autopsy table to anyone who asked. He didn’t know why Frankie thought he needed to be there in the first place.
“But I don’t want to hear any complaints, if we get a call.”
“What kind of call are we going to get?” Zeke muttered. “Jack Elkins got stuck in the mud again? Ruby Lowe can’t find her dog?”
“You heard me.” Frankie bustled toward the door behind which the agents had vanished.
The doorway swung onto a short set of steps leading downstairs. They found the agents in the Preparation Room speaking with Doc Cooper.
Doc was tall and rangy with gold wire spectacles and a white, handlebar mustache. He was older than Frankie; had been ME long before Frankie had first taken office. He wore cowboy boots, and drove a vintage red mustang. And he had a surprisingly pleasant bedside manner, given that the bedsides he generally attended were slabs in the morgue.
The body—more accurately, the skeleton—had already been removed from the large stainless steel refrigerator in the back of the sterile white room, and arranged on the metal morgue table. The yellowed skull—gaping jaw and dark, empty eye sockets—grinned sightlessly up into the remorseless white light of the overhead lamps.
The left front tooth was chipped.
The air was artificially chill, and the room smelled of chemicals and something that raised the hair on the back of Rob’s neck.
It was not his first autopsy. Hell, this examination of old bones didn’t even qualify as an autopsy, but he felt a strange sort of regret. Not pity—because death and decay was what happened to everyone in the end—but something. Something he’d heard on late night TV came to him, a quote from one of those English murder mysteries where a cranky, roly-poly detective went around solving all those gruesome slayings in cute little cottages.
Any man’s death diminishes me.
Something like that. Anyway, no one else looked particularly moved—unless Agent Darling really had lost color and it wasn’t just a trick of the light. Between the chill air and the smell of chemicals, anyone might feel kind of off.
Zeke sucked in a breath. “Well, shit,” he said softly.
The FBI agents were still speaking quietly to Doc Cooper, but Darling glanced up at Zeke’s comment. His eyes met Rob’s.
This time when Rob felt that flash of awareness, he knew he wasn’t imagining it. He had to repress an inappropriate smile. Not like this was a social occasion.
“Well, let’s get started,” Doc said. He nodded to his white-clad assistant standing by the door, and the assistant flipped the switch. An instant and heavy gloom descended on the room. Only the spread of bones on the table remained illuminated in that fierce circle of light.
“As you can see, despite the fact we have a nearly intact skeleton, we don’t have a lot to work with,” Doc said. “No personal effects or identification of any kind, and the clothing, what’s left of it, is cheap, generic stuff. Boots, jeans, T-shirt, jacket.”
“How old?” Frankie asked.
“We’re looking at a male probably in his late teens or early twenties. You can see the collarbones aren’t completely fused. The skeleton is sixty-nine inches long so he would have been about five feet nine inches tall. Not a big fella. I’m not an anthropologist, but I believe our victim to be Caucasian. I can’t be completely sure.”
“How old is the forensic evidence?” Darling asked.
Doc sucked in his cheeks, thought it over, and finally announced, “About twenty years, I’d guess. A couple of decades at least. I believe the bones are contemporary, but like I said, this isn’t my area of expertise.”
Darling’s brows drew together. “You’re sure the recovered specimen is that old?”
Doc gave him an exasperated look. “I’m reasonably sure. What I can’t tell you yet is how he died. Aside from a chipped front tooth, there are no broken bones. No fractures. Nothing smashed, nothing crushed. No signs of skeletal trauma. Obviously we have no way of knowing what damage might have been done to his vital organs or soft tissue, but there is no immediately apparent cause of death.”
Gould said to Darling, “Right age and the right sex. But either way—”
Darling nodded.
“Twenty years,” Frankie said thoughtfully.
“I don’t remember any twenty-year-old missing person cases,” Rob said.
Frankie said to Doc, “Back in ’98…what was the name of that college kid who backpacked into the woods and disappeared?”
“Jordan something.”
“That’s right. Jordan Gaura.”
“You’re forgetting,” Doc said with grim satisfaction.
“What am I forgetting?”
“The whole reason everyone got worked up so fast. That kid’d had a hip replacement. I remember that very clearly because I thought at the time if his remains did ever show up, there wouldn’t be any doubt about who it was. Our John Doe is virtually intact. Ninety-five percent of the skeleton was recovered on site, so we can see that there were no broken bones either prior to or after death. Hell, he’s even got all his teeth.”
Frankie swore. “Then I can’t think of anybody else.”
“That’s good news,” Doc said. “He’s someone else’s problem.”
Doc and Frankie looked at Darling and Gould.
“But not ours,” Darling said. “The age of the victim is about right, but his location is all wrong.” He looked at Gould.
Gould concurred. “We haven’t identified the type of knife used by the Ripper yet, but we’re pretty sure it’s some kind of hunting knife with a serrated blade. Possibly homemade. That type of weapon leaves its mark. The ribcage, the sternum, there wouldn’t be any missing those grooves and depressions and striations.”
“I guess not,” Frankie said reluctantly.
Rob said, “He could have been carrying his ID in something else. A knapsack. A backpack.”
All eyes turned his way.
Rob answered his own thought. “Except there’s no knapsack. No backpack.”
Frankie said, “No.”
“No bike.” They had a lot of cyclists come through their patch, especially during the summer months.