Time of Departure (6 page)

 

6

Two days later, I set my alarm for five, got up, and drove to the UF campus for a morning run in the open air. The Lake Alice loop was only three and a half miles—shorter than my usual five-mile treadmill run—but at least the time and place had the advantage of being randomly chosen. I'd spent the last thirty-six hours brooding over the events outside Sam Grayson's building. I didn't like the feeling that I was being watched, even if it was by a man who had helpfully broken cover to save me from being maimed or killed.

More than that, I didn't like the idea that the man seemed to know what I was going to do before I knew it myself.

The parking lot at the Baughman Center on Museum Road was deserted. I drove through the lot and parked in an unpaved area under some trees. I went through my usual stretching routine, set my watch, and headed off. The run was flat and easy, but it still felt good. Somewhere in the final mile, I passed another runner—a big guy, built like a linebacker, wearing heavy boots, moving slowly and wheezing like a steam train. Despite my precautions, I half expected to see Marc Hastings leaning against my car when I loped off the Ficke Gardens path and back into the parking area.

But the lot was still empty and I was still alone.

I was walking in circles, cooling down, when I heard the faint sound of my phone ringing. I quickly unlocked my car and retrieved the phone from under the seat. I checked the call display.

Sam Grayson

I answered. “Sam?”

I was still breathing hard and Sam must have picked up on it. “Is this a bad time?”

“No. I just finished the Alice Lake loop. Just catching my breath.”

“You just finished a run?”

“Yeah.”

“Girl, it's six thirty in the morning! I don't know where you get the juice!”

“Yeah … well, along the same lines, I could ask what's so important that you're calling me at this hour.”

“I called to tell you not to come to the office.”

“What?”

“I want you to go to the morgue. Speak to Terry Snead.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure we've ever talked about this … it's a cold case … happened back in the '70s. There was this string of missing women. They were all from around here, all young, in their twenties—”

My breath stopped in my throat.

“—but there were never any bodies.”

The sweat from my run went cold on my body. I heard myself ask a question. My voice seemed unconnected and far away. “What's at the morgue?”

“Damnedest thing, Claire! You know the road-widening project they're doing down near Bronson? It's part of that bypass the DOT's planning.”

I was vaguely aware of it. “Yeah.”

“Some workmen on the site uncovered a grave. Two bodies. Snead thinks they're from that case!”

I felt faint. I closed my eyes. “Can't be…”

“Well, let's find out! I've got meetings all morning. Go see what Terry's got. You can brief me this afternoon.”

I was struggling for words. A few seconds passed.

“Claire?”

“I'm here. I'll go.” My mind was in turmoil.

“Great. See you later.” He disconnected.

I slid behind the wheel of my car. I was feeling light-headed. I sat there for a minute, taking deep breaths. Finally, I started the engine.

I took exaggerated care on the drive home, the way people do when they've had too much to drink.

 

7

“Claire Talbot! Always a pleasure!”

Associate Chief Medical Examiner Terry Snead didn't climb to his feet when I entered his small office in the basement of the UF Pathology Department. Instead, he rolled his chair back from his desk and relaxed into a half recline so he could look me up and down. I knew Terry had a crush on me, and I'll admit to exploiting his feelings occasionally over the years when I'd needed to squeeze an extra bit of investigative work out of him.

Terry didn't really know how to flirt creatively. Twenty years of adult life might have pruned away most of the awkward mannerisms of the congenital nerd, but behavioral artifacts remained. It was still possible to detect the brilliant but guilelessly uncool college kid of an earlier time. For me, one of the main indicators was the gape of undisguised admiration that I was being greeted with at that very instant.

“You know,” Terry said, “you should come around here more often.”

“Yeah, I know.” I finished the tired joke for him. “The place is dead—needs livening up.”

“Hey, I heard a new one! A mortician and a blonde walk into a bar—”

“Terry!” After the events of the past week, I was in no mood for this.

“Okay, okay! It's great to see you.”

The office had a single guest chair. I sat. I was wearing a dress, so I didn't cross my legs, because I wanted Terry's full attention.

“I'm guessing you're here about that find down at Bronson.”

“Sam asked me to come. Is this for real? Two bodies from that old case?”

“As I told your boss, everything's just preliminary. We'll need a lot more to be certain, but one of them looks pretty promising. Since they were both found in a single grave.” He gave a little open palm gesture, as if to say,
ergo.

“Who found them?”

“The way I heard it, a work party was clearing brush and a survey crew was following behind, shooting in a line of stakes to guide the excavators. You've probably seen them yourself on road projects—those flagged stakes that are marked for ‘cut' or ‘fill.'”

I hadn't, but I nodded knowingly so he wouldn't launch into a mini-lecture on civil engineering. My tactic almost failed, because he stared off into space and muttered, “I wonder why they were doing it the old way.”

Here we go,
I thought. I decided to play along for a second. “What do you mean?”

“Shooting line and using a level to mark the stakes. Nowadays, they can use GPS for everything, even the
z
-value.” I held my tongue while he thought it through. Finally, he gave me a eureka look and said, “That must be it!”

I took the plunge. “What?”

“Poor communication with the satellites. Maybe a solar flare. I should check that.” He made a move toward his computer.

“Terry! Could you do that later?”

“Okay, sorry. So, at one point, the survey guys were skirting along the top edge of an embankment. One of the chainmen pounded in a stake, and the ground on the face of the embankment subsided a bit. The guy didn't pay much attention, but when his crew chief moved forward for the next setup, he spotted a foot sticking out of the dirt.”

“A foot?”

“Well, as in … the skeletal remains of. They stopped work and called it in. That was in the morning. We spent the rest of yesterday and most of last night doing the archaeology. Got the remains moved here about three hours ago. A couple of crime techs are still out there, working the excavation. There was some through-and-through root growth. They're taking photos and measurements, and taking samples. I've lined up one of our botany profs to identify the plants, examine the growth rings, whatever it is they do, to see if he can give us a time line. Not that you're going to need that evidence.”

“Because?”

“Because … well, first, we're bringing in a forensic anthropologist to give us something more definitive, but I can tell you right now they're both female—the subpubic angle of the pelvises pretty much gives it away, and the skull indicators are consistent. One was in her twenties and the other … late twenties, early thirties.”

“Okay. And, second?”

He pointed at a box of surgical gloves on his desk. I plucked out a pair and snapped them on while he rolled his chair to a small exhibit safe. He spun a combination, opened the door, and reached in. He brought out a pair of plastic cups. Each was covered with a paper lid like the ones provided by expensive hotels for their bathroom glasses. Each bore an exhibit sticker. He set the cups in front of him on his desk.

“I was too tired last night for logging and bagging.” He removed the lid from one of the cups. “Hold out your hand.”

I complied. He upended the cup, and a white gold ring rolled out onto my palm.

“The younger one was wearing that. So obviously robbery wasn't the motive.”

It was a woman's ring—a blue gemstone, accented with small diamonds, in a partial bezel setting. I actually recognized the shape of the stone. It was what jewelers referred to as a cushion cut.

“I think it's a topaz,” Terry said. “There's an inscription inside the band.”

I located the inscription.

BD TO AJ 12/25/77

I looked at Terry.

“‘Billie Decker to Amanda Jordan.' She was one of the missing girls. Decker was her fiancé.”

“You work fast.”

“Not me. The cops. Lipinski came out to the site. He and that detective who wears those cargo pants—”

“Geiger.”

“That's the one. They arrived just after we found the ring. They wrote down the inscription. Lipinski called me last night. He said the ring was mentioned in an old crime report. So I guess Lipinski gets the credit for working fast.”

“That's not exactly his reputation.”

He smirked. “Hear ya.”

I dropped the ring back in the cup. I was thoughtful. “Eight girls disappeared. Amanda Jordan was the last one.”

Terry looked surprised. “You know about this old case?”

I thought of the eight missing person reports stored in my desk. “Not in great detail, but I've read a bit about it.”

“We can't be certain it's the Jordan girl. But the ring was still on her finger, so it's probably her. We'll confirm with a dental match or DNA.”

“Any ideas on the identity of the other body?”

“Not yet. But this was also found in the grave. It wasn't clear which body it belonged to.” He passed me the other cup.

Inside was an enamel locket on a gold chain. I poured it out into my hand. The locket's face had an exquisite white Tudor rose embossed on the rich cobalt blue enamel background. The enamel itself had an intricate repetitive pattern etched into it.

“This looks like something from an estate sale.”

“It's a Victorian mourning locket. That background pattern is what they call guilloche engraving. It's a French technique.”

“You seem to know a lot about jewelry, Terry.”

“My mother was a collector. That chain's more modern—what they call a spiga weave. Pretty common and probably harder to trace.”

“You didn't happen to find a nice mystery-solving portrait in the locket, did you?” I had already guessed the answer.

“No such luck. Just a seed.”

“A seed?”

“Yeah. Small and red with a black spot. At first I thought it was some kind of handicraft bead—you know, like you'd see on one of those Caribbean tourist necklaces—but I'm sure it's a seed. I'll get the botany guy to identify it.”

“Can I see it?”

“It's locked up in the botany lab upstairs. The prof's away at a conference. He'll be back tonight.”

I was quiet for a moment as I mulled over what I'd heard. Then I said, “I'd like to see the remains.”

“You'll have to gown up.”

 

8

The university's autopsy suite was state of the art, engineered to maintain negative pressure during examinations and equipped with three stainless steel pedestal-style downdraft autopsy tables with built-in sinks. The downdraft ventilation feature operated through perforated grid plates on the table's surface. It was designed to eliminate fumes and bone dust during examinations. Two of the tables were full sized, and they'd certainly seen their share of postmortem gore over the years, but it was the sight of the third table that always wrenched at my heart. It was a shortened version designed for the dissection of children.

A door in the far wall led to the cold unit, a long room lined along one side by those iconic storage drawers—Terry called them “cabins”—that I'd only seen in a few movies and on television crime shows until I joined the State Attorney's Office. Since then, I'd visited this facility several times, and even managed to keep down my lunch during the two autopsies—including the one involving the decapitated child—that I'd been dispatched to witness.

There was no compelling reason for a prosecutor to personally witness a postmortem, but soon after I joined the office, I learned that attendance was viewed as a rite of passage for junior prosecutors in the same way it was for rookie police officers. And, of course, sadistic throwbacks like Perry Standish and my now-deceased predecessor, Roy Wells, had happily anticipated hearing that I'd fainted at the sound of a Stryker saw biting through some departed soul's skull.

The bastards had been disappointed.

Gowned and gloved and wearing a surgical cap, I followed Terry Snead across the suite to a pair of cadaver lifts parked side by side near the door to the cold unit. Each lift was covered by a surgical drape. On the wall just above them was another exemplar of Terry's outré sense of humor—a sign that read
NO LOITERING
.

Terry pulled the drape off the lift on the left. “This one was wearing the ring. Until disproven, I'm calling her Amanda.”

Meticulously arranged on the lift tray was what appeared to be a complete set of human skeletal remains. The image that immediately came to my mind was that of an archaeological excavation I had visited in Nova Scotia. I'd been a college kid on a summer bicycle trip with two friends, and we were touring an old British colonial fort. A summer dig was under way near the fort's original sally port, and the archaeologists had just exposed the skeleton of an eighteenth-century soldier. What struck me at the time was the man's diminutive stature. He couldn't have been more than five feet tall, and his bones looked too fragile to have carried the musculature necessary for a fighting man. His skull was so delicate it made me think I was looking not at a soldier, but at a long-dead scullery maid.