Dead Past

harm. The policeman guarding the son arrested her.”
    “Why did she attack you?” asked Jin, who seemed to find it funny, judging from the grin on his face.
    “They’re saying their son is the innocent victim and for some unknown reason, I’m trying to frame him or something. Anyway, their story is that I’m the culprit and they are going to have me fired and sue the police department.”
    “I think they are going to have to adopt another attitude,” said Brewster Pilgrim. “People aren’t in the mood right now for that kind of nonsense.”
    “Amen,” said Archie.
    Diane wanted to get off the topic of her misadventure, so she tried to make light of it. “It was a minor event. I’m sure when their lawyers see the evidence they’ll recommend abject contrition.”
    After seeing Blake Stanton’s parents, she felt oddly sorry for him; then she looked at the blackened bones in front of her and her sympathy evaporated. If he had anything at all to do with this . . . , she thought.
    She went back to work examining and measuring. There were several wrist bones found together, suggesting that they were from the same wrist. All were from the right side. She put the bones together like a three-dimensional puzzle and found that they fit as though they belonged, and they had complementary wear patterns in the articulated surfaces. She noted a healed fracture on the hook part of the hamate.
    “The size of the bones falls within the male range,” she said to Jin as she recorded the information on the form. “That doesn’t exclude larger boned females, of course. I think he—or she—might have been a baseball, racquetball or tennis player.”
    “Why is that?” asked Jin.
    She showed him the healed fracture. “This kind of fracture is not uncommon among athletes in sports that involve the swinging of a club.”
    “Really?” said Jin. “You can take a handful of wrist bones and say this is a male baseball player? That’s so cool.”
    “I didn’t say that. I said it could be. It’s suggestive. And I don’t know what kind of club was swung. Could’ve been an ax and he cut firewood for a living.”
    “Anyway, it’s really neat what you do with bones.”
    Archie shuffled through one of the boxes. He brought her a large envelope. He was limping slightly; she recalled a policeman getting shot last year and she wondered if it was Archie.
    “I remember this,” he said, “because Marjie, the policewoman who brought this batch in, said he’s a neighbor, and the son of a Rosewood policeman. He’s on the university’s racquetball team. She told me this is an x-ray of his hand.”
    “You have a good memory. Thank you, Archie,” said Diane. “This is a big help.”
    “Any little thing I can do.” He went back to his seat just as Marjie brought him more packages containing information on more missing children.
    Diane took the x-ray from the envelope and put it on the light box. There it was, a small fracture line like the healed one in the bones in front of her. She took each of the wrist bones in turn and compared it to the x-ray. There were no more fractures, but the relative sizes and wear patterns matched. She was satisfied that these were the bones of—she looked at the name on the x-ray—Donald Wallace. Now, if she could just find the rest of him.
    Wallace? She looked back at the name. Then picked up the envelope and read the label. Just as she feared. His father was Izzy Wallace, a policeman, as Archie had said—and a friend of Frank’s. Damn.
    Diane dreaded telling Frank. He was so overjoyed at finding Star. Now his friend will have this dreadful news. Izzy Wallace wasn’t one of her favorite people and she certainly wasn’t one of his, but she would wish this on no one. She looked forlornly at the other bones in the trays and set about seeing if she could match them up.
    It looked as if most of the bones found along the adjacent grid squares belonged with these wrist bones. But Jin would have to take DNA samples anyway to confirm.
    As if reading her mind, Jin spoke. “We’ll have to use mitochondrial DNA on most of these remains. The nuclear DNA will have been too degraded by the fire.”
    Diane nodded. “I think for most we’ll have dental records and x-rays to go along with the DNA. There’ll just be a few that we’ll need to rely only on DNA.”
    “You know, boss,” began Jin.
    “I know, Jin. If we had our own DNA lab, you could have all these done tonight and we’d have