Don’t Look Behind You

scene close to eleven. The entire area was sealed off with crime scene tape, and deputies working the Third Watch were stationed around the large lot to protect it until the sun rose and they could work in daylight.
    Until they did, the mysterious bones would remain where they had probably rested for decades. Every single person who had entered the lot—both law enforcementand citizens—had been required to sign the sheriff’s log that began when the first responding deputy arrived.
    Pierce County detectives had virtually nothing to go on at this point. Whatever had happened, it had occurred a long time before and they would need to explore the tangled misadventures of those who had once lived or visited here. They might be seeking the identity of a vagrant who had only bedded down for a time. The deserted house would have been tempting for someone low on cash. It offered protection from the rain and wind. Probably no one asked for rent or even noticed that a so-far nameless man or woman had hidden behind the dark windows.
    Deputy Robert LaTour arrived at the Canyon Road property at a quarter to nine the next morning—Tuesday, June 5—and took over the security watch from Deputy Jim Junge, whose peers called him “Jungle Jim.” An hour later, a man who lived right next door to the bone site walked up.
    He said that he hadn’t talked to any of the investigators the day before, although the land was legally owned by his cousins. Still, he thought he might have something to add that might help.
    “My uncle passed away some years ago,” he explained, “and this property kind of went downhill. I moved in next door—right over there—in 1995. That was after my mother passed. I moved into her house.”
    “Any idea who the person we found might be?” LaTour asked.
    The neighbor shook his head. Unfortunately, he had little to add to the old property’s history
or
knowledge about who the tenants might have been over the years. By 1995 when he moved in next door, there didn’t seem to be any tenants—at least not any who stayed very long.
    Next, a woman approached Deputy LaTour. She was concerned because someone in her family had called her after seeing a TV news report the night before about the discovery of the unidentified remains.
    “She told me to get a ‘good criminal attorney,’” the woman said to LaTour. “And then she laughed because it was a joke.”
    But it wasn’t too funny, now that she thought about it. “We lived on the property for ten years—from 1985 to 1995,” the former tenant explained. “And we had a dog that used to dig up bones in the yard. The dog pen was right over there.”
    LaTour glanced at the area and realized that that was where the black plastic garbage bag of bones and some of the other bones were located. He asked the former tenant what she had done with the bones.
    “Oh,” she said. “I took them away from my dog and threw them in the garbage. I figured they were animal bones—but now that I think about it—they were kind of big.”
    Crime scene investigators (CSIs) Steve Wilkins and Adam Anderson, Clarence “Skip” Mason, and Steve Mell arrived at the bone site five minutes before eight the next morning, prepared to resume digging. With rebar posts and string, they marked off squares measuring two feetby two feet. This would enable them to accurately identify and revisit the location of whatever they might find.
    Ideally, they hoped to find a good portion of the body in a makeshift grave and learn what position it was in when it was buried. Sometimes that made the difference in determining if the person had died of suicide or homicide.
    They worked with trowels as well as shovels. If they found an actual grave, they would use brushes to carefully sweep dirt from bones. Now they began to dig and sift the earth they brought up.
    It was tedious work and the sun was baking hot. When each square had offered up whatever it held, they checked it off on the grid. Throughout the nine hours the investigators toiled, they found several more bones.
    But no real grave.
    They tallied up a grim list of what they discovered:
    1. One black plastic bag: containing two pelvic bones, a femur (thigh bone) that appeared to have been cut with some kind of tool, a tailbone (the sacrococcyx), several rib bones, some almost unidentifiable fabric, and several lengths of string.
    2. From the Grid Squares: #14, three ribs; #19, one vertebra; #20, three vertebrae; #21, two ribs and one