Dead Past

out—even if he were bound tight. Look at how the long bones are all parallel and the smaller bones are all in a pile. I believe the skeleton was in a box under one of the students’ bed. I’ll have to run some tests, but these bones are very old, perhaps a hundred years or more.”
    “I’ll be damned,” said Rankin. “I guess his killer’s beyond the likes of us now. But that begs the question, just where did a student get the skeleton of a person who appears to have had a proper burial when he died?”
    “Good question. If any of the house’s residents are among the survivors, we can ask if they know,” said Diane. “In the meantime, pack this fellow back up. I’ll take him to the osteology lab and work on him later.”
    “All that’s real interesting,” said Archie. He was standing behind Jin, looking over his shoulder. “Never knew you could tell so much from just bones.”
    “Oh, she can tell you more than that when she gets to really analyzing him,” said Jin.
    “You trying to butter me up, Jin?” asked Diane.
    “Every chance I get, Boss.” He grinned at her.
    Grover began repacking the bones in his careful way—as if the deceased could feel what was happening to them and he wanted to make sure they were comfortable throughout their journey to the afterlife. Everyone else gravitated back to their respective workstations, except Lynn Webber. She hung back. Jin went with David back to the burned-out house site.
    “OK, Grover,” Lynn asked her diener, “how did you know about the bones turning brown in a coffin?”
    “Like Raymond was always saying,” he replied, referring to his cousin who had been Lynn’s assistant before him, “there are some questions it’s just best not to ask.” He gave her a rare smile, and Lynn laughed out loud.
    Diane got the idea that this was the first joke Grover had ever made.
    Diane packaged and labeled the bones, which she had tentatively identified as those of Donald Wallace, pending DNA confirmation. How awful for the parents to have raised a son or daughter to adulthood with all their hopes and dreams for that child, and in just one moment of disaster to have nothing left but a few bones—no face to look upon, nothing to see or hold. She did not envy the people whose job it was to inform the parents that their child’s remains had been identified.

    By the end of the day all the bodies had been autopsied, and all but eight were identified. Of those remaining eight, the forensics team felt they would be able to ID most of them when everyone had been reported missing. It was, after all, still soon after the tragedy and it might be a week or more before some people were confirmed missing and forensic evidence could be collected for comparison.
    Diane had yet to determine how many individuals the disarticulated bones represented. Those would be the hardest to identify. Now that the recovered bodies had been processed, she was going to take the remaining bones back to her lab, which was a more efficient operation than this tent city and had much less distraction.
    Toward the end of the day when one of the last bodies was being wheeled in by Pilgrim’s diener, a reporter managed to get inside the tent by waiting until one of the rear entrances was unguarded. He crept in with his camera before anyone noticed him but froze when he saw a charred body in the characteristic pugilistic pose roll past him on a gurney. When the stronger flexor muscles shrink and contract from the fire, the arms and hands strike the pose of a boxer. It is a disturbing sight. The burned flesh is bad enough, but the posed appearance of the cadaver looks all the more horrifying. The reporter stared transfixed with his camera in his hand until one of the policemen led him away.
    Diane guessed him to be new to this type of story—apparently he’d never seen firsthand a fiery accident or the aftermath of a house fire. She felt sorry for him. These were images no one wants in their head.
    “I guess he’ll never do that again,” said Rankin, the ME the body was headed for.
    “But his description of what we’re doing in here is going to be worse,” said Lynn.
    “How could he possibly describe anything worse than this has been,” said Brewster Pilgrim.
    “You have me there,” said Lynn. She took off her lab coat and gloves. “I’m going to sit down by Archie here and do some paperwork, go home, and soak in a hot bath for several days,” she announced. “Or until we get