Don’t Look Behind You

vertebra; #22, one vertebra, #27, one vertebra, three rib bones, and cloth; #32, a bone fragment; #40, some charred bones; #42, one vertebra and a collarbone; #42, bone fragment; #44, piece of black plastic bag.
    On the west side of the grid, they found more vertebrae and a scapula (shoulder blade). North of the grid on the east side of the backhoe, they located another cut femur and more shreds of the plastic bag. On the east side of the dirt pile they found a small piece of metal, its use undetermined.
    On top of the dirt pile, the sheriff’s searchers collected more rib bones, more vertebrae, clothing pieces, a leather belt, and some twine segments.
    Had any of the body parts been buried in lower ground that often became waterlogged, the searchers might have found what is colloquially known as “grave wax,” where the flesh literally turns to a kind of soap. This transmogrification can remain for decades after death. It is, however, more often found in corpses located in lakes and rivers. The proper term for grave wax is “adipocere,” but these bones were absolutely dry.
    All of the found body parts and debris were packed carefully and taken to the County-City Building evidence room in Tacoma for safekeeping.

Chapter Two
    By June 6 , 2007, Pierce County detective Lieutenant Brent Bomkamp assigned Detective Sergeant Ben Benson as the lead detective on the mysterious case of the unidentified bones. Benson would have to investigate the background of the nameless remains by himself; his usual partner—Denny Wood—was working on another puzzling homicide and had to stick with that.
    In his twenty-plus years in the sheriff’s office, Ben Benson had worked in almost every department there. I met him when he was working undercover, exposing narcotics rings. When Ben was a road deputy and I was a reporter, I once rode in the shotgun seat of his patrol car. We were going more miles an hour than I care to remember through a violent storm during Third Watch on a 911 call. This was long before he was assigned to homicide cases. Along with Ed Troyer—now the media liaison for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office—and some of the other young deputies, I was a frequent guest on a radio show that was designed to let the public know what their local law enforcement officers were doing to keep them safe.
    Benson, Troyer, and Brian Halquist, the radio show’s producer, even helped me move my furniture into the new house I bought back in 1989. If my neighbors had known that my movers were the narcotics squad helping me out in their off-duty hours, I’m not sure what they would have thought.
    But I never told them.
    Later, Ben Benson piloted fixed-wing planes for the sheriff’s office, photographing the ground below in all kinds of criminal probes. Ed Troyer, along with Benson and many other Pierce County detectives and volunteers, has participated in a number of charitable projects that Troyer organizes. A few years ago, they drove a convoy to Mexico to deliver refurbished ambulances and fire trucks to poverty-stricken areas. After the Japanese earthquake and tidal waves, Troyer collected a warehouse full of donated items to ship to Japan for the disaster victims. What he couldn’t ship to Japan, he personally delivered to Alabama tornado victims.
    Volunteering to help those in need is not, of course, exclusive to the Pierce County officers. Law enforcement personnel all over America are always among those first in line to aid in disasters.
    Ben Benson was the one who was assigned to investigate this case of the buried bones single-handedly.
    In that first week of June 2007, Benson knew within a few days after the unearthed bones surfaced that they were human. Now he learned that Dr. Katherine M. Taylor ofthe King County Medical Examiner’s Office—the only forensic anthropologist in Washington State—had determined that the dead person was a male. She was able to determine his sex by studying the pelvic morphology, noting that the narrow subpubic angle and the sciatic notch were those of a man and did not demonstrate the wider pelvis women have that enables them to deliver babies.
    In addition, Dr. Taylor saw that the heads of the thigh bones and other bony processes were “robust,” something seldom found in females.
    The few pieces of skull told her that the cranial sutures were firmly closed, and the vertebrae bore signs of a man who was almost certainly over forty.
    Dr. Taylor couldn’t really determine how