Dead Past

only yesterday this person was alive—just yesterday.
    “They had a special on Court TV two nights ago about missing persons—double feature, two hours’ worth,” said Jin. “Great stuff. Turns out there are several missing persons who meet my criteria of interesting. A teenage girl and her family were leaving church when she went back in for her purse and was never seen again. Doesn’t that sound like Sherlock Holmes? And a whole family just fell off the face of the earth. No one knew they were gone; they just weren’t home anymore—but all their belongings were still in the house, their car in the driveway. And then there was the man who was last seen in the waiting room of his doctor’s office. The receptionist didn’t see him leave and no one knows what happened to him. All these people were normal people with no secret lives or anything—that anyone found out about,” he added. “I’d like to investigate them.”
    “No clues at all in any of the cases?” asked Lynn.
    Diane picked up a piece of nasal bone and turned it over in her hand. Even blackened as it was, a healed crack was evident. Something distinctive about this individual, she thought as she looked for surrounding pieces.
    “No clues,” said Jin. “But I tell you, my favorite is Colonel Percy Fawcett.”
    “Never heard of him,” said Lynn.
    “He’s the coolest missing person. He disappeared with his son and his son’s friend in the Amazon while looking for an ancient city inhabited by a mysterious tribe. His story is really strange, full of subterranean cities, alien tribes, psychics, with the lost city of Atlantis thrown in. Great stuff,” he repeated.
    “Do you ever try to solve any of the cases?” asked Diane. Jin turned to her, looking almost startled that she had been listening.
    “I’ve helped with a couple of cold cases that detective friends of mine were working on. I’m afraid I didn’t offer much in the way of a solution. Mostly I just read up on them and try to solve them—you know, like an armchair detective. I’ve gotten a few good hypotheses. You know, there’s been quite a few missing persons north of here in the Smoky Mountains. People disappear and nothing is ever found of them,” he said. “Nothing. I mean, like what’s in the Smokys?”
    “Wild pigs,” said Diane without looking up from the piece of skull she was gluing together. “They eat everything with blood on it—bones, sticks, you name it.”
    “Yes, pigs,” agreed Lynn. “Once you’re dead, the wild boars scarf you up.”
    Jin looked from Diane to Lynn. “Well, thanks for ruining a perfectly good mystery for me.”
    Lynn and Diane both laughed.
    Diane had finished gluing all the pieces of the skull she had and they sat drying in the sandbox. It looked like the pieced-together ancient skulls that she had in the museum—but this person was recently alive.
    “I’m going to take a break,” she said. “When I come back, I’ll see if we have any x-rays of faces with broken noses. I believe I can ID this skull.”
    “I think I’ll finish up this cadaver,” said Lynn. She sneaked a peek at the table where Brewster Pilgrim left his.
    Jin slipped off his gloves and put on a new pair, walked over to Pilgrim’s table, and began preparations to cut the femur and take a DNA sample. Back to business.
    Diane left the tent and gulped in the outside air. The cold bit her lungs. It felt good to be out of the morgue tent.

Chapter 7

    Sleet was falling again. The drops felt like cold pin-pricks on Diane’s face. The argon streetlights shining bright against the backdrop of the twilight sky flooded over the tent city and gave the place an eerie glow. There were searchlights and strange machines in one direction along the street, and a quiet crowd of people standing in the other. In a David Lynch movie it could have been the midway of some macabre traveling circus.
    Diane looked wistfully in the direction of her apartment but did not yield to the temptation to escape to its peace and solitude. She would take fifteen minutes of relief in the coffee tent. But first she stopped at the crime scene.
    The blackened rubble of the house was now crisscrossed by planks and grid strings and illuminated by a ring of large spotlights shining into it from all sides. Neva and David were stretched out on boards, sifting carefully through a grid square near the front of the site. A mobile crane parked to one side of the yard was lifting a basket of