Wilmington, NC 05 - Murder On The ICW

Several students from the university had come along to assist her. Dr. McAllister did not look much older than her students and seemed much too young to have Ph.D. after her name. She had dark red hair tied up in a pony tail , a petite figure, and freckled milky skin. She could pass for sixteen. Bet she got carded everywhere she went.
    As she was introduced to us she gave Jon a lingering appraisal that was so obvious she could just as well have shouted: I am woman, you are man!
    Well, Jon is special. He's a real hunk with golden blonde hair, a ruddy complexion from working out of doors, and laughing brown eyes that shine with sincerity and truthfulness. He is tall and trim. Plus he's got this great personality: funny, a bit shy with women, a little naive. Every woman likes a man who makes her laugh and who isn't Mr. Smooth. Every woman that is except my sister Melanie who has a thing for the slick bad boys.
    Dr. McAllister and her team went to work and I was drawn back into the world of the macabre. She and her students gingerly scooped broken glass onto a tarp they had spread out near the entrance to the shed. With great care they removed the earth, using hand trowels and brushes.
    Standing, Dr. McAllister informed us that it appeared a complete skeleton had been buried in a very shallow grave. "The bones are just barely covered with dirt. Over the years the earth has settled. I'm going to need to examine those bottles. They'll provide valuable clues about the environment of this burial site. So I'm sorry," she said pointedly to Derek and Clyde, "but I'm going to have to ask you to take the bottles to my lab and leave them there for a few days."
    With arms crossed over his chest, Derek had been shifting from one foot to the other, clearly irritated and obviously feeling he was being denied his treasure.
    Diane exerted her authority. "One of her students can drive with you to the campus." As if to soften the force of her intent, she smiled at the bottle collectors. "They'll be returned to you when they are no longer needed."
    Jamie McAllister was quick to reassure them as well. "I won't need the bottles for very long. A week. Perhaps only a few days. I promise that we'll take good care of them and repack them just as you did. I'll call you when you can pick them up."
    She shook hands with both of them and gave them a big smile and the men seemed mollified. "Well, okay, sure, anything we can do to help," Derek the spokesperson said. He seemed charmed by the petite anthropologist.
    Diane recorded Derek's and Clyde's names and addresses before they left with one of Dr. McAllister's students. As the Durango bumped down the rutted lane, Diane also recorded their license plate number.
    From somewhere across the water, sirens screamed. Not the hooting of the siren when the drawbridge is being raised, but the wailing of emergency vehicles. A fire? I wondered. So many homes on Harbor Island were being renovated, and the danger of fire during renovation was always great.
    Dr. McAllister and her students set about separating bones from glass and earth. It would take them the rest of the day, she told us, and well into tomorrow. Items that related to the corpse itself -- clothing, fibers, artifacts -- had to be carefully exhumed as well.
    Diane's cell phone rang and after she listened intently, she hung up and declared, "Halloween was last week so what in the world is going on? Two homicides in one day! And this second corpse is fresh."
    Addressing me, she continued, "I'm leaving Officer Bentley here to secure the site. Please don't go near that shed until you get the say so from me." And with that she turned on her heel and marched off officiously to her next dead body.

    "Maybe they'll tear the shed down for us when they're through," I said to Jon as we trailed through tall grasses to the lodge and our vehicles.
    As we walked, Jon speculated about the corpse. "If the bottles are a hundred years old and were used during Prohibition, how long do you think they were in that shed? Seventy years? Eighty years?"
    "And as the corpse was under the bottles," I remarked, "surely it's been there for the same length of time. I wonder who he was. Or she? Maybe there will be a wallet or some form of ID."
    "It's possible he -- she -- died of natural causes and for some reason no one wanted to report the death," Jon speculated.
    "I've got copies of deeds and tax records back at my house. I'll go through them and see who was living here