“I’m glad y’all are looking into this,” he said. “Those women didn’t have much, but their girlfriends missed ’em bad. It’s not fair, you know?”
Cassie nodded without speaking, and I understood intellectually how a more emotional person might get lost in this case. But for me, it was just numbers and facts. Victim’s ages with no patterns. The same with occupation and social class.
My phone pinged with a text from Richie, and I stepped away. Walked halfway back to the car.
Davitt has a solid pix on one skull. Q wants to go out to media.
Qhad to be shorthand for Quinones. I turned back to Cassie and the sketch artist. Thanked him and told her we had to go.
Twenty minutes later, we were back in the Shilo PD lobby. I flashed my ID at the front desk. “We’re headed to the basement,” I said. “Do we need an escort?”
The woman at the desk was heavyset with enormous fake eyelashes. “You, honey”—she pointed with a long fingernail—“are hard to forget.” She buzzed me in and motioned at the elevator. “Go on, handsome.”
As we walked over and got inside, Cassie grinned.
“It’s floor B, handsome,” she said, motioning at the panel.
I ignored her and hit the button.
Getting off at the basement level, we saw Shooter at the far end of the room. She wore a head-to-toe suit made of white Tyvek material and had positioned two lights over the far end of a particular skeleton.
We came closer, examining the bones of the woman. The skull was missing, presumably with our facial reconstruction artist, whom I did not see on the floor.
“Until we have an ID, we’re using numbers,” Shooter said without looking up. She held a magnifying glass, which she’d trained on the woman’s right femur. “Say hello to number four.”
A sharp tool lay beside the skeleton’s femur. Next to it was a pile of wax shavings.
“Be polite now,” Shooter chided.
“Hello, number four,” Cassie and I said simultaneously, knowing Jo would not relent until we did.
I turned to Shooter. “Where’s Richie?”
“Third floor. Patsy Davitt wanted natural light.”
Davitt was the facial reconstruction artist we’d brought in to help us identify the skulls of the six women. I looked at Cassie, who nodded.
“On it,” she said and headed back to the elevator.
I glanced at the pile of shaved wax beside the femur. In humid environments like the South, a buried body can undergo a process known as saponification. The fatty tissues break down after burial and turn into a yellow material that gets whiter and more rigid over time, sometimes even preserving the bones.
“You’ve scraped off an adipocere formation,” I said.
Shooter glanced at the pile of wax. “Four and I have spent a couple hours together,” she said. “I noticed what looked to be a fracture along her femur.”
“Did the ME concur?” I asked.
“She did,” Shooter said. “But she also told me not to worry about it. That it’s healed. Thing is… the bone just looks wrong, you know?”
I stared at it. I didn’t know. But Jo Harris had the persistence of a bull terrier. She’d also studied kinetics and was once an Olympic athlete, so she knew the human body better than most.
“What are you seeing?” I asked.
“The wax,” Shooter said, her head down again. “It’s harder to see now that I’ve shaved it, but it was building up in a strange pattern. Right in this one area.”
I moved around to the opposite side of the table, getting close to the scratch marks where Shooter had scraped off the adipocere.
“Or I should say,” she corrected herself, “itwasn’tbuilding up in one area, Gardner. Almost in a straight line.”
