Dead Past

conversation for several minutes. Only the sounds of work—the clinking tools, shuffling of movement, creaking trolleys—filled the silent space where Rankin’s rant still hung in the air. Everyone was silent, thought Diane, because like her they realized that Rankin was right—there was nothing that any of them could do but pick up the pieces.
    Archie, the policeman in charge of evidence, stood and said to no one in particular that he was also going to take a break. Diane watched him leave with two other policemen. They must feel the weight of Rankin’s words most, she thought. They were like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the water with his finger in the hole in the dike. They were supposed to do something, but they too were powerless against so much money.
    Lynn finally broke the ensuing silence in what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
    “So, Jin,” she said, “what do you do in your spare time?”
    “I scuba dive,” he said. “Diane’s been teaching me caving. I’m getting pretty good, aren’t I, boss?”
    Both Jin and Webber’s voices were muffled by the nuisance masks they wore.
    “You’re a real natural,” said Diane.
    She looked among the fragments of skull scattered on her table for a triangular shaped piece that fit on the frontal just above the orbit. As she sorted through the remains, she noticed the absence of any part of the maxilla, the bone that holds the upper teeth. Identification would be easier if she had teeth to work with.
    “Diving and caving sound dangerous,” said Lynn. “You don’t do them at the same time, do you?”
    “I was advised not to do that,” said Jin, stealing a glance at Diane. “Too dangerous.”
    “Do you do anything relaxing?” asked Lynn.
    Diane wasn’t sure if she was really interested in Jin’s leisure activities, or just trying to fill empty airspace. Her voice sounded strained, even under the mask.
    “Diving’s relaxing,” he said, his eyes above his mask reflecting a broad grin. “And I’ve found some nice, quiet moments hanging on to a rock wall.”
    Lynn Webber gave a muffled laugh. “At least it gets you away from crime,” she said, watching him extract the sample of bone marrow.
    “I like to solve mysteries as a hobby,” said Jin.
    Diane looked up quickly from a broken zygomatic arch, expecting a joke, looking forward to a laugh, but it didn’t sound like the beginning of one of Jin’s jokes. He sounded serious. Solving mysteries as a hobby—she couldn’t wait to hear what this was about.
    “A hobby,” Lynn exclaimed. “I’d think you would have enough of death in the crime lab.”
    “Disappearances,” said Jin. “I’m kind of into strange disappearances.”
    “Strange disappearances?” asked Lynn. “Like how? Hoffa, Judge Crater? Aren’t all disappearances strange until someone finds out what happened?”
    Jin shrugged. “Some. Hoffa, that’s not strange, I mean not the kind of strange I like. It was probably just a mob thing. Same with Crater. Probably Tammany Hall stuff. What I find interesting are disappearances like the one that Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve—you know, like James Phillimore.”
    Jin took the pose of someone trying to remember a quote—chin up, hands suspended of movement. “ ‘Mr. James Phillimore who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.’ That’s the kind of missing person problem I like.”
    “That is more intriguing than Hoffa, I agree,” said Lynn. She stopped working on the cadaver in front of her and listened to Jin.
    Diane paused, too, sitting back on the stool. She had a large portion of the skull pieced together. The back, the side, the frontal down to the brow ridge, and one cheek. With the right x-ray she could probably identify the body. But it was a long shot that there would be the right x-ray.
    The partial skull sat in a small tub of sand looking as if it had just been revealed by a sandstorm. The sand held the blackened pieces of bone together while the glue dried. Jonas Briggs, the archaeologist at her museum, said that in his profession they reconstruct clay pots the same way. “Makes nice little Zen gardens—thousand-year-old potsherds standing in clean bronze sand,” he’d said. This Zen garden looked macabre.
    There was still an array of pieces to put together. She looked at them, mentally identifying the part of the skull each piece was from. Hard to believe that