Dead Past

hands shake as he looked at the report.
    “Bobby Coleman . . . I know his daddy,” he whispered in a cigarette-and-whisky voice. “We go to the same church.”
    They all stopped, Pilgrim, Webber, Diane, even the assistants—a spontaneous moment of silence for his grief—for Bobby’s family’s grief.
    Brewster Pilgrim broke the silence. “I need your opinion here, Diane,” he said.
    Pilgrim was the coroner of the county to the north of Rosewood. He was inclined toward being heavy, and looked like everyone’s ideal grandfather with his white hair and white brush moustache.
    “I can’t tell the sex,” he said. “Looks too close to call to me.”
    Diane changed gloves, walked over to Brewster’s work area, and looked down in the open cavity of the charred cadaver.
    “We should have given this to you,” he said. “Hardly any flesh left. Must have been in the hottest part of the fire. And look at this. I believe a beam or something fell on him. Look at the crushed pelvis here.”
    The cadaver was charred black down to the bone. There was flesh, but it had been so consumed by fire that the hard bone underneath the flesh was exposed over the entire body. The head was gone, probably exploded in the heat. Pieces of skull lay in a shallow box near the remains with blackened flesh still clinging to them. Obviously found nearby and probably from the same body.
    “I believe you’re right about the break.” She examined the broken right ilium and left pubis. It looked like something heavy had fallen across the pelvic region and crushed the bones. “It is a rather androgynous pelvis, isn’t it,” agreed Diane.
    She carved flesh away from the pelvis to look at the various markers for gender. What she saw was a wide subpubic angle, wide sciatic notch, and the presence of the preauricular sulcus.
    “Female,” she said.
    “Thanks,” said Pilgrim. “I’d have probably called it male. Looked like a male pelvis to me.”
    As he spoke, Diane teased a bit of bone away from the pubis with a pair of tweezers and put it in the palm of her hand.
    “What’s that?” asked Pilgrim, leaning over her shoulder to look at the delicate piece.
    “Fetal bone,” said Diane. “She was pregnant.”

Chapter 6

    Brewster Pilgrim looked for a long moment at the bone so tiny and fragile it could have come from a bird.
    “Them poor babies,” whispered Grover who stood behind them shaking his large head.
    Pilgrim snatched off his latex gloves, threw them in the trash. “I need a break,” he said, and headed out of the tent. “I don’t know why we can’t convince kids to keep out of drugs . . .” was the last thing Diane heard him say before he disappeared into the cold.
    Diane bagged and labeled the fetal bone and went back to her station. Lying before her on the table were assorted fragments of a skull that had burst from the heat of the fire that incinerated the body. She pulled up a stool, sat down, and began her next task—fitting together the pieces of the bone puzzle. Jin was helping Lynn Webber sample the marrow of a femur for DNA profiling.
    Rankin suddenly looked up from the charred and bloated remains of the corpse on his table. “We can’t stop kids from getting drugs because there is an army of dealers working against us,” he said. “And we’ll never stop them because it’s a trillion-dollar business. There’s just too much money—more money than any of us can wrap our brains around.” He paused for the briefest moment. “And no one can go up against that kind of money. Don’t kid yourselves that we can do anything but pick up the pieces from the carnage.” He stopped speaking just as suddenly as he had begun and continued his autopsy.
    They had all paused to watch Rankin as he ranted. Diane had a sick feeling that he was right. They couldn’t do anything. Her gaze met Lynn Webber’s briefly and she knew that Lynn had the same sick feeling. Grover was still shaking his head.
    Just a few more pieces of the skull puzzle and she too would go to the coffee tent and relax for fifteen minutes. It occurred to her that she wasn’t that far from her apartment. She could just go the short distance through the woods and sit down on her own sofa with a hot cup of her own coffee. The thought sounded heavenly. She placed two pieces of occipital together—the thick bone that made up the back of the head. From the prominent nuchal crest, the skull looked like a male.
    The morgue tent was void of