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Bones of the Lost

Bones of the Lost

Titel: Bones of the Lost Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Kathy Reichs
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near the Johnson C. Smith University campus. He was currently on parole, having served two of five years for hanging bad paper.
    The second semen donor was Ray Earl Majerick. Before I could read his list of priors, my e-mail pinged.
    A reply from Katy. Already?

Not guilty, but cute kids. Polaroids aren’t uncommon here, or it could be a Fotorama, a knock-off made by Fuji. Some missions are tasked with taking pics of the LNs to jolly them up. Instant cameras are used because they spit out a snapshot you can hand over right away. For personal use, troops use digitals or smartphones.

    I went back to the printout on Majerick. His arrest history told a different story from that of Creach. Armed robbery. Assault. False imprisonment. Forcible rape. The guy sounded like seriously bad news. No current tail, but Majerick’s last known address came from the state parole board. It was in Concord.
    I placed another call to Slidell. Voicemail. Didn’t people answer their phones anymore?
    Easy, Brennan. He may already be talking to Creach and Majerick.
    I turned my attention to the bone Larabee had found in Jane Doe’s scalp. As promised, it sat on the blotter, sealed inside a small plastic vial.
    After gloving, I removed the vial’s cap and slid the thing onto my palm. The fragment was off-white in color, triangular in shape, and measured approximately two centimeters long by a half centimeter across at the wider end. The narrow end tapered to a very sharp point.
    The color looked right. The weight was okay.
    I pressed the little triangle to my wrist. It felt cool against my skin. Good.
    Yet something was off.
    Uneasy, I dug a hand lens, matches, and a safety pin from my desk drawer.
    Under magnification, the outer surface of bone should appear to have tiny pores, sometimes black or brown due to soil and other contaminants. Larabee’s sliver looked strangely homogenous, like porcelain or china.
    Plastic? Resin?
    Placing the sliver on the blotter, I pulled out the business arm of the pin, lit a match, and heated the tip until it glowed red. Then I pressed the hot point to the sliver.
    Though a faintly organic smell tinged the air, the surface did not burn. The sliver was not plastic or resin. That left bone or ivory.
    But the material looked far too smooth and uniform for bone.
    Mind buzzing, I hurried to the stinky room and positioned the sliver under the dissecting scope, fractured edge up. Then I adjusted lighting and magnification.
    And there they were in the crosssection. Schreger lines. Tinyangled marks, like stacked chevrons. Their presence meant the material came from an elephant or mammoth tusk. The angle of the little Vs could indicate which, but my memory failed me on that.
    I stared, bewildered. How did ivory end up in the scalp of a hit-and-run victim?
    Suddenly I was in a froth to talk to Slidell. Hurrying back to my office, I returned the sliver to its vial and punched in his number.
    For the third time that day, I was rolled to voicemail.
    “Sonofabitch!”
    Agitated, and not wanting to scoop poop from a brainpan at that moment, I jabbed the message button on my phone, then, not so gently, entered my mailbox code.
    One by one, I worked through ten days of accumulated drivel.
    A question from the chief ME in Raleigh. Another from a colleague in Wisconsin. Those I saved. Two hang-ups. An interoffice appeal concerning abuse of the refrigerator in the staff lounge. Three queries from members of the media. All those I deleted.
    The final message froze the fingers I was drumming on the blotter.

THE CALLER WAS female, the words whispered in accented English. Background noise obliterated much of what she said.
    “… want to say, but … girl that … no accident …”
    The volume kept strengthening then fading, as though the woman had been repeatedly turning her head, sporadically distancing her lips from the receiver. Or maybe signal strength was erratic.
    Somehow the voice was familiar. Or maybe it was the tone, the urgency.
    Ping.
    Was it the same person who’d contacted me from the pay phone at Seneca Square?
    I held my breath, eager to catch every word, every nuance.
    “… Passion Fruit … place … go … not right …”
    I heard a shout in the background. Someone summoning the woman? Threatening her?
    Either way, the call ended with the click of an abrupt hang-up.
    I replayed the message again and again, pen poised over paper. I wrote almost nothing.
    I receive hundreds of calls, listen to scores of

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