Dead Past

said Pilgrim. He and his assistant were making noise moving a cadaver to his table. Diane strained to hear over the rustling of the body bag. At least the body bags had arrived. At first they didn’t have enough and they had covered the victims with a clear plastic. Even the dieners thought it was creepy.
    “It seems likely,” she said. “If he was only a victim, what was he doing with a gun?”
    “Exactly,” said Rankin. “Ironic thing is that he has the least injuries. All the other survivors have critical internal or brain injuries. He may be the only one who can shed light on this and I understand he’s lawyered up.”
    Diane heard several grunts of disapproval from people in the tent. It sounded like too many people. A constant parade of personnel came and went—bringing in bodies and evidence from the site, or delivering antemortem information from relatives, or paperwork from the police department. Diane hoped one of them was a gatekeeper. She didn’t like the idea of a reporter listening in on their conversations, or worse. She watched for a moment—all present were MEs, technicians or police, all people she recognized, all doing a job. And there were guards at the door.
    Diane focused her attention back on the hand lying on the table, palm up in a half-curled position. The thing she noticed first was that the nails were professionally manicured.
    “Has his nails done,” said Jin. “Not your average student.”
    “I wonder what the palm could tell us,” Diane said, attempting a smile.
    “That he has no future.”
    Jin responded so quickly that Diane looked over at him and raised an eyebrow. She was joking, but the authority in Jin’s voice surprised her.
    “The future is in the right palm, his past in the left.”
    “Oh?” Diane stared at him.
    “I used to date a girl who was into reading palms. That’s what she said.” He grinned broadly.
    She measured the hand and photographed it front and back, took samples from under the nails, swabbed the skin, and printed the fingers. Jin took a sample of tissue for DNA comparison. He handed her more remains.
    The squeaking sound of a cart brought her head up. Grover, Lynn Webber’s morgue assistant, was wheeling a body back from the portable x-ray set up in the trailer. He maneuvered between the light table and a frame hanging with x-rays he and Pilgrim’s assistant had taken so far. He bumped the light table where Allen Rankin was examining dental x-rays and muttered an apology. Diane wasn’t sure if he was talking to Rankin or the body. He referred to the charred and mutilated bodies as babies.
    “All them poor babies,” he had said on his first glance of the scene. “Them poor, poor babies.”
    Grover was probably in his forties, but it was hard to tell. His dark skin was unlined and his hair had no gray. He was a big guy with big hands and a face so solemn that he looked perpetually melancholy. He had absolute respect for human remains and a good knowledge of anatomy.
    “We have a match,” Rankin said from his seat at his field desk.
    The first match. The first “this is someone. Not just human features roughly carved in charcoal.” Not a John or Jane Doe. No longer anonymous.
    Rankin rose to give his report to the officer in charge of the records, a heavyset policeman with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a bloodhound face, and a body that looked both sturdy and agile—Archie Donahue, Diane believed his name was. As she recalled, he had been on the Rosewood police force for a long time and worked in the evidence locker. Well suited for this work, filing and cataloging the artifacts of lives that loved ones hoped would identify them in death.
    Archie sat at the long evidence table and looked up from the stack of antemortem records he’d just accepted from the intake desk in the coffee tent. He was about to enter them into the computer program that kept track of all the incoming details of missing students—anything that would help identify them. Archie seemed to hesitate reaching for Rankin’s report. Probably dreaded the thought that one of the dead would be a child or grandchild of someone he knew. Rosewood wasn’t that big a town. And if it were true that there are only six degrees of separation between everyone in the world, then in the town of Rosewood the number of degrees was probably one or two. Many local children stayed to attend the local university. Everyone in Rosewood would know someone touched by this.
    Diane saw his