Bones of the Lost

near Optimist Park on North Davidson, elderly male driver DOA at Carolinas MedicalCenter. A sixteen-year-old female with a gunshot wound to the head, found beside a Dumpster on Shamrock Drive. The Peruvian mummified remains awaiting my assessment. And the teenage hit-and-run victim from Old Pineville Road.
    Slidell’s Jane Doe.
    I beelined for the ladies’ and did what I could with my hair and dirt-crusted face, then shifted to the locker room to change into scrubs. Last stop, my office for Band-Aids, antiseptic, and the spare Nikes I keep under the coat tree. Ten minutes after arriving, I was ready to roll.
    When I pushed open the door of the large autopsy room, Tim Larabee was standing beside one of the two stainless steel tables. He wasn’t cutting or weighing, not dictating, not even looking down at the remains.
    Shielding her from me? From Slidell? From the many who would probe and photograph and analyze and dissect her?
    Odd thought. But true. The cold process had begun. And I would take part.
    X-rays glowed from light boxes mounted along one wall. Cranials. A full-body series.
    A pair of boots sat on one counter. Tan vinyl, with high heels and red and blue flowers running up the sides. Soles caked with mud. Cheap.
    And small. Maybe size five. Tiny feet striding in very big-girl boots.
    Clothing hung from a drying rack. A red blouse. A denim miniskirt. A white cotton bra. White cotton panties with pale blue dots.
    Slidell stood by the rack, feet spread, hands clasped and V-ing down over his genitals. He wasn’t assessing the clothes or the body. He didn’t acknowledge my entrance.
    I felt a new wave of irritation, squelched it as I kicked into scientist mode. First rule: block mind-set. Don’t suspect, don’t fear, don’t hope for any outcome. Observe, weigh, measure, and record.
    Second rule: block emotion. Leave sorrow, pity, and outrage for later. Anger or grief can lead to error and misjudgment. Mistakes do your victim no good.
    Nevertheless.
    I looked at the bruised and distorted young face, and for a moment pictured the girl alive, slinging her pink kitty purse onto her shoulder. The strap slipping because the meager contents provided no ballast.
    A dark stretch of road.
    A hammering heart.
    Headlights.
    White cotton panties with pale blue dots. The kind Katy favored throughout middle school.
    “Slidell give you a rundown?”
    Larabee’s question snapped me back.
    “Hit and run. Not yet identified.”
    “Take a look.” Larabee crossed to the X-rays. His face looked drawn and gaunt, even for him, an obsessive long-distance runner with no body fat and hollows in his cheeks the depth of ocean trenches.
    I joined him. He slipped a ballpoint out of the breast pocket of his scrubs and pointed at a defect located approximately mid-shaft in the left clavicle.
    At the third and fourth ribs inferior to it.
    Stepping to the next film, he ran the pen down the arm, over the humerus, the radius, the ulna. The hand.
    “Yes,” I said to his unspoken question.
    I followed as he moved on, to a posterior angle of the pelvis. He didn’t have to point.
    “Yes,” I repeated.
    To an anterior-posterior view of the skull. A lateral view.
    A cold fist started closing on my gut.
    Wordlessly, I returned to the body.
    The girl lay on her back. Larabee hadn’t yet made his Y-incision, and, except for the bruises, abrasions, and distortion due to fractures, she might have been sleeping. The hair haloing her head was long and blond, one clump held high with a plastic barrette shaped like a cat. Pink. The kind little girls love.
    Focus
.
    I gloved and examined the ravaged flesh, ghostly pale and cold to the touch. I palpated the arm, the shoulder, the hand, the abdomen, felt the underlying damage evident on the X-rays in glowing black-and-white.
    “Can we turn her over, please?” My voice broke the stillness.
    Larabee stepped to my side. Together we tucked the slender arms tight to the body and rolled it by the shoulders and hips.
    My eyes traveled the delicate spine and small buttocks. Took in the tread marks imprinted on the flesh of the painfully thin thighs.
    The fist tightened.
    “What’s this?” I ran one finger over a discoloration on the girl’s right shoulder. Maybe five inches long, the bruise appeared as a series of dashes.
    “Hematoma,” Larabee said.
    “It’s a patterned injury,” I said. “Any idea what made it?”
    Larabee shook his head.
    I looked at Slidell. He looked back but said