Entombed (9 page)

Mercer entered
Manhattan through the Midtown Tunnel. "Let me out on First Avenue. I'll
catch up with Mike and Andy Dorfman at the morgue."

I knew the nurses
would not allow all of us into Annika's tiny room, and that it was more
important for Mercer to be present at the parents' reunion with their
child, in case there was any further conversation about the facts of
the attack. For me, it would be less stressful, less emotional, to
watch the processing of the skeletal remains. Without flesh and blood,
the bones seemed too far removed from anyone with whom I could identify.

I had never been in
Andy's cubicle in the basement of the medical examiner's office.

The familiar odor of
formalin wafted through the dim hallways, and empty steel gurneys lined
the walls, waiting for their lifeless loads.

No need to look for
room numbers. I could hear Alex Trebek's voice as I passed an open
door. Andy was hunched over the left femur of the skeleton, while Mike
sat in a chair with his feet on the desk, noshing on a bag of pretzels
and looking at the small portable television set on a bookshelf across
the room.

"European Literature.
You're just in time."

Our usual bet was
twenty dollars. "Double or nothing," I said. This was one of my few
areas of strength against Mike's concentration on military history and
general trivia.

"Not a prayer. Twenty
is max. Don't get too cocky, kid. You in, Andy?"

"Nope," he said,
dipping a toothbrush in a bowl of cloudy water and gently scrubbing
against the bones.

"He hasn't stopped
working since we left him last night," Mike said. "A little toothpaste,
a little soap-our girl will be cleaned up in no time."

"Writer who lost an
arm at the Battle of Lepanto," Trebek read aloud from the answer board
to the three finalists, each of whom looked as pained as I did by the
question.

"That category's a
mischaracterization," I said. "You just got lucky. It's war in the
guise of literature."

Mike lifted a Polaroid
of the skull from the top of a pile in front of him and scribbled
something on the back. "You first, Coop."

"Who was…? Give me a
hint, will you?" I knew Lepanto was in Greece, but couldn't begin to
figure whether the battle was an ancient or modern one.

"No, I'm sorry,"
Trebek said to the three-time champion, a waiter from Oregon who was
trailing the other two players. "It was not Alexandre Dumas."

"Time's up," Mike
said, tapping the photo on which he'd written the question on the
tabletop while he twirled Andy's calipers in the other hand.

"Who was Sophocles?"

"Very lame. Bad
answer."

"He was a playwright
and a general, wasn't he?"

"Yeah, but he never
lost a body part," Mike said. None of the contestants answered the
question correctly. "Who is Miguel Cervantes? You didn't know he was
called El Manco, the one-armed man? Lepanto was the first defeat of the
Ottomans by the Christians- Spanish and Venetian mostly. Fifteen
seventy-one. Jane Austen and those brooding Englishmen you like to read
never left the sheep farm, Coop. I would have won the bundle tonight."

He held out his hand
for the twenty.

"I'll buy dinner. Put
it towards that."

"No can do, Miss
Lonelyhearts. Valerie leaves for California tomorrow. Family ski trip
for her parents' fortieth anniversary. Going to her place for a
home-cooked meal. You know what that is, home cooking?"

"I have a vague
childhood recollection." I had grown up in a close-knit family. My
grandmother, who emigrated from Finland as an adolescent, lived with us
for many years. Both she and my mother were superb cooks who prepared
complicated meals every day of the week and made it seem effortless.
We'd spend less than an hour at the dinner table when my father
returned home from his surgical rounds, and then the women had to deal
with the mounds of plates and pots that had been used in the process.
Somehow I never inherited the love for standing over a hot stove that
had run through my maternal line.

"Andy's making great
progress," Mike said. "Scotty and I got up here at five. He's already
running with it."

"With what?" I asked,
glancing around the shelves that were lined with fragments of bone and
assorted animal skeletons- snakes, an armadillo, and an elegantly
horned antelope head among them.

"Basic 'scrip. Enough
for Scotty to start looking at old police records and calling other
agencies. Explain it to her."

Andy kept rubbing the
surface of the leg bones with his toothbrush. "We've got a woman-and
I'd say a young one, in her early twenties."

"How can you tell
that?"

"Get used to it, Andy.
Coop's gonna keep interrupting. All she knows how to do is
cross-examine."

"First thing is
getting the bones clean, laying her out in a proper anatomical
position. That was easy here. Usually when we find them so many years
later, the skeletal pieces are scattered around the scene, or they've
been moved by animals. This one had nowhere to go in that brick coffin."

"But age, how can you
tell that?"

"Bones stop growing
basically by the time we're twenty-five years old. Up until then they
keep changing and fusing together. After that, you begin to see
deterioration, which helps us make estimates. They sort of break down,
with everything from signs of arthritis to osteoporosis."

"And here?"

"She's in her early
twenties, most probably. It's the pelvis again, and the ribs. She's got
good height. How tall are you, Alex?"

"Five-ten."

"I'd say she was
somewhere between five-six and five-eight."

"I was this big by the
time I was sixteen. Could she have been a teenager?"

Andy's attention
shifted to the skull, and he pointed the tooth-brush at the woman's
mouth. "The teeth are interesting. Can you see?"

I stepped closer to
the table.

"Some pretty expensive
dental work went into this girl. Quality dentistry, including a pricey
porcelain crown in one of the back molars."

I could see the neat
and well-crafted denture in the lower part of the jaw.

"Now look up here,"
Andy said. "These teeth evidence some pretty severe rotting."

"That's an odd
combination, isn't it?"

"What it suggests is a
kid from a family of means, parents who would pay for first-class
dental work throughout her youth and at some stage of young adulthood.
The multiple sites of decay are consistent with some other kind of
dysfunction going on in her life. Most often it's a slip into addiction
or alcoholism. Her mouth exhibits classic signs of someone who has
stopped taking care of herself, someone who didn't get medical or
dental attention because the substance abuse would be discovered once
she was in the hands of a health care professional."

It was astounding to
me how this empty shell of a being was revealing herself to Andy
Dorfman. "Can you tell anything else about her?"

"Give me the calipers,
Mike," he said, reaching across the table. "We try to figure out race
from the facial characteristics, using tools like this. The
distinctions are pretty subtle for the most part- the set of the
cheekbones, how far apart the eyes are, the shape and width of the
nose. You need the skull to do it, so we're fortunate she was
intact-without that, I couldn't even make an educated guess."

"And here?"

"Caucasian. I'm sure
of it. I've put my calculations into FORDISC-"

"What's that?" I asked.

"University of
Tennessee keeps a database of cranial measurements, a few thousand of
them going back a century. Forensic Discriminant Functions, it's
called. Sometimes the facial mask is more obtuse than this one. No
question in my mind about this one."

"So we got a white
female in her early twenties," Mike said. "Possibly a drug addict or
alcoholic. If the ring is hers, her initials are A.T."

"Anything that tells
you how she died?"

Andy ran his eyes up
and down the length of the silent specimen on the table. "Nope. I
thought for sure once we turned her over today I'd find a fracture on
the back of her skull. I really wanted to."

"Why?"

He looked up at me.
"Because the alternative is pretty frightening."

"Nothing worse that I
can think of," I said, recalling the undersides of the broken
fingernails, caked with a layer of cement.

"It's one thing to
find that she died-say of an overdose-or was killed, even, and then
bricked up inside this wall. But if she was alive, and gagged, and then
watched herself being entombed-well, can you think of a more miserable
death?"

"Twenty-five years
ago, huh?" Mike said. "I just hope the guy who did this to her is still
breathing so I can be there when Scotty slaps the cuffs on."

"Are you still looking
for something else?" I asked.

"The pathologists
reviewed it with me-both the X-rays and the bones. They agree there's
no other gross cause of trauma. There won't be any kind of death
certificate for months down the road, Alex. Whatever fancy medical term
they come up with, we're talking buried alive here."

"Why months?" Mike
asked.

"I'm going over the
works once more to clean her up. I've got to check more thoroughly for
any individualizing characteristics to compare to old records."

"Like what?"

"Pathologies, like
fractures that had healed. I think we've got a hairline fracture of the
tibia here. We've x-rayed it and I'll document it with detail and
measurements."

"Will you attempt any
kind of facial reconstruction?"

"Sure, Alex, and that
slows down the process, too." First the computer would attempt several
forms, based on the shape of the skull and Andy's measurements. Then a
forensic sculptor would come in to add texture, to try to humanize the
portrait. "You'll be lucky to have that by April or May. It's a skill
very few artists have. The ball's in Mike's court."

"The NYPD's computer
system only has missing persons' reports online back through 1995.
Everything earlier has to be a hand-search," Mike said. "From there,
Scotty's got to notify every jurisdiction in the Northeast. No saying
where this chick got here from."

"And the feds, of
course." New York was a mecca to hundreds of thousands of young men and
women, coming to the big city from every corner of the country-to find
jobs or go to school, if their heads were on right-or to get caught up
in the alternative street life of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and
crime if they were unstable or unwise.

"So you go home and
get some beauty rest, Coop. Andy's given us a jump-start on the basics.
By the time we go public with the story, we'll have a pretty fair idea
of who we're looking for."

I walked along the
green-tiled hallway to the elevator that carried me upstairs to the
lobby and out the front door onto First Avenue, where I hailed a cab to
go home.

Despite the low
temperature, the sidewalks in the Fifties and Sixties were full of
pedestrians, making their way to and from the bistros and bars.
Friday-night burgers and shooters were staples of the end of the long
workweek for many young people looking to socialize before heading to
the bridges and tunnels.

How many of the women
hoping to hook up with guys tonight knew that a dangerous rapist had
this very neighborhood in his scope? I thought, as the cab cruised
under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge overpass. How many of them would
walk out alone after four or five drinks-intoxicated and oblivious to
their vulnerability- and make their way down the side streets in the
early hours of the morning?

I unlocked my door at
eight-thirty and dropped my files and pocketbook in the entryway. Next
to my bed, the answering machine flashed that there were three
messages, and I played them back as I undressed.

"Alex? You there? It's
Lesley. How about a movie and late supper? Give a shout." Girlfriends
were stepping in to try to fill the void left by my breakup with Jake.

That one was followed
by a call from Nina Baum, my college roommate and best friend, who
lives in Los Angeles. "No feeling sorry for yourself this weekend. If
you get lonely, I'm around all weekend. You did the right thing." Nina
had been the most out-spoken about how wrong Jake was for me and tried
to keep my spirits up after the split.

"It's Mercer,
Alexandra. We're on for tomorrow night. Greg Karras is coming in from
the coast. Let me know if you're riding with us." The geographic
profiler was ready to start the hunt for John Doe, and I was game to go.

I returned all three
calls-gave Mercer a yes, chatted with Nina about my week, and left
Lesley a message telling her I had gotten home too late to accept her
offer. I soaked in the bathtub with a stack of magazines beside me,
wrapped myself in a warm robe, and settled into the den with a Dewar's,
an English muffin, and a Faulkner novel that Jake had left behind.

When I awakened at 7
A.M.
I was relieved that I had slept
through the night without a call from anyone at Special Victims. My
Silk Stocking nemesis had taken another night off.

I opened the door to
pick up the newspapers. The
Times
had the latest on
Middle East peace talks and presidential gaffes. The tabloids were
beneath it and I bent to retrieve them. There on the front page of the
Post
was a photograph of
the doomed building on Third Street with a cartoonlike skeleton
dangling below a three-inch banner headline:
POE'S CRYPT?

10

"Did you see the damn
article on the cover of that rag this morning?" Paul Battaglia shouted
into the phone about five minutes later.

"Yes, boss. I haven't
had a chance to read it yet-"