Swamp Bones (2 page)

I leaned closer for a better view. “I don’t see any feathers on this one.”

“Birds have two types of feathers—vaned, which form the outer layer, and down, which lie underneath the vaned. For this recovery I’ll use magnification to view the downy parts. They carry distinct species characteristics. Mites, the amount and distribution of pigment, the node shapes. Differences in feather microstructure set bird groups apart. It’ll take a little work, but I’ll nail this baby.”

“I have no doubt.”

Lisa glanced at the wall clock. “I’ll need ten minutes to finish up here. Then I’ll take a
break and get you on your way.” She hooked a thumb at the fume hood. “I save the easy cases for last. Those over there aren’t so tidy but they’ve got more to work with. Literally. Meat, feathers, bones. Have a look.”

While Lisa resumed prying apart the goodies on the gurney, I crossed to the fume hood. The smell of putrefying flesh was much stronger up close. Five specimens lay arranged in chronological order. Each was labeled with a field number and site name, and with GPS coordinates indicating the location of its recovery.

These masses were more oozy and less homogenous than the lumps on the table. In some I could make out individual vaned feathers and small bones. In one, a furry ringed tail. I picked up a probe and teased a bone out of a packet labeled #1032-27 B
IG
C
YPRESS
. Yep. Raccoon. Next one was fox. I was feeling smug.

“I’ll introduce you to Aaron while you’re here.” Lisa’s words came out muffled by her mask. “He’s quite a character.”

“The only introduction I want is to a big cheeseburger.” I hadn’t eaten since leaving home for the Charlotte airport, five hours ago. It was early for lunch but I was starving.

I shifted to #1976-32 B
OGGY
K
EY
. Saw one fragment of bone. Recognized it as bird.

The fourth carcass was that of a decent-size doe. Mother of God. That was one ambitious snake.

The final set of remains showed more advanced decomp and smelled far more rank. I breathed through my mouth as I bent over #4715-59 H
ARDWOOD
H
AMMOCK
. Black feathers. Raptor beak. I was going with vulture.

As I straightened, a tiny segment of bone caught my eye. The shaft was wrong for bird, the outer tube too thick in proportion to the hollow interior.

Definitely not avian. I peered closer. Noted the patterning on the bone’s outer surface.

My heart tossed in a few extra beats.

What?

Tightening my grasp on the probe, I poked deeper into the putrefied thing that had once been a bird. Into its stomach. Saw undigested skeletal elements. Apprehension climbing, I extracted several.

“Almost done!” Lisa sang.

Grabbing a long pair of tweezers, I pulled bones until I had a small pile.

Breath suspended, I rolled each this way and that, noting anatomical details.

And felt a rush of adrenaline shoot through my body.

So began the vacation that never was. I told myself I’d soon be snorkeling in Biscayne Bay. But on hearing what I’d found, Lisa had extracted a promise that I stick around until she handed this off to the authorities.

I looked like an oversize scarecrow in Lisa’s tiny borrowed lab coat. The thing hit me mid-thigh and mid-forearm. The gurney had been cleared of everything but #4715-59 H
ARDWOOD
H
AMMOCK
. The bird carcass lay to one end, my grisly discovery to the other.

Once again, Lisa and I were positioned on opposite sides of our subject, handing off bones to the correct expert. Taking shape in front of me was a small human foot. Eight phalanges, three metatarsals, a fragment of calcaneus, and one partial cuneiform. I estimated we’d recovered roughly one third.

“Here’s the last.” Lisa handed me another item teased from the turkey vulture’s gullet. “It’s remarkable how much a human metatarsal resembles a
Cathartes aura
tarsometatarsus.”

“And how these bad boys possess the appetite of Hannibal Lecter,” I said.

“And the smell of a teenage boy’s sneakers.”

I passed on the obvious foul fowl joke. Hunger headache was joining my list of discomforts. Unfair, but I blamed all my woes on the Everglades.

I was tightening the alignment of the foot bones when the door opened and three men strode into the room. The reinforcements we’d called for had arrived. The waft of male sweat gave the putrefaction a run for its money.

The largest of the trio wore a brown uniform bearing a Miami-Dade Police Department logo. A plaque on his shirt gave his name as T. Yellen. A gold sheriff’s department badge declared Yellen’s rank to be that of sergeant or higher. A bad mustache evoked the seventies. A substantial belly suggested a love of fast food.

The other two wore green park rangers’ uniforms. One was short, with Earl Grey eyes behind rectangular, silver-framed glasses, and a seriously lopsided haircut. I could see him cruising a farmers’ market in a tie-dye and Birkenstocks, an NPR tote over one arm. I guessed he was the wildlife biologist, Dr. Aaron Lundberg.

The other guy was too tanned and too groomed, and had a “stud legend in my own mind”
demeanor about him. Black hair. Blue eyes. A physique that filled his uniform nicely. On his chest was a Department of the Interior badge identifying him as Scott Pierce, Everglades National Park Law Enforcement.

Lundberg, the biologist, and Yellen, the sheriff, were arguing, and appeared to have been at it for some time.

“Pythons do not attack humans,” Lundberg said, frustrated, as though he’d repeated the statement again and again.

“Goddammit, Aaron. Your friend here says she’s got an eighteen-foot snake with human parts in its belly.” Yellen looked red-faced and grim. “I’ve been dreading this day since the damn things first started showing up.”

“Didn’t happen,” Lundberg insisted.

“I’ve seen these bastards down hundred-pound gators and deer. They can sure as hell handle one of us.” Yellen sounded equally fed up with the debate.

“The chance of that happening is less than your chance of being struck by lightning while winning the Powerball.” Lundberg finger-jammed his glasses upward. They immediately resumed their spot low on the bridge of his nose.

“The news loves to tell me about kids getting squeezed to death while they sleep,” Yellen argued.

Lundberg spoke slowly, a teacher addressing a dull student. “Those are cases of escaped domesticated snakes attacking the first small prey they encounter. In the wild, we’ve recorded only five or six unprovoked python-on-human attacks. Only one resulting in a bite. None resulting in an attempt to wrap.”

“One of these buggers tries wrapping me, its head is going straight up its ass.”

So far Pierce had said nothing. Like those of a spectator at a tennis match, his eyes swung between Lundberg and Yellen. He leaned against one wall, arms crossed, more arranged than relaxed.

Yellen flapped a hand at Lisa. “You, missy. You called this in. Did this python eat somebody?”

“The foot bones came from the vulture.”

Three sets of eyebrows shot up.

“The turkey vulture ate the human remains. The python ate the turkey vulture,” Lisa
expanded.

“A bird killed this guy?” The sheriff sounded a galaxy beyond dubious.

“Or girl,” I interjected. Everyone ignored me.

“Turkey vultures scavenge on carrion,” Lisa explained. “They rarely, if ever, kill prey themselves.”

“How’d a bird find a corpse in a million-mile swamp?”

“It stank.” Lisa stated the obvious.

Yellen’s response was to hip-plant his hands and scowl. “The bird eats the vic, the snake eats the bird. Where’s the bloody old lady who swallowed the fly?”

Perhaps she’ll die
winged into my mind. Not bad, Sheriff.

“Goddammit, this is a jurisdictional nightmare. There’s flying and slithering and who the hell knows where the whole mess started? Could be Dade, Collier, Broward, or Monroe.” Yellen pronounced the last
Mon
-roe, emphasizing the first syllable of the county’s name. “Could be the park boys.”

Pierce spoke for the first time. “The snake was caught near Hardwood Hammock. That’s outside the park, south of Broward, in Metro.” He used the slang for Miami–Dade County.

“So I’m the lucky asshat,” Yellen said.

“You’ve got jurisdiction, Tom, but considering it’s a mobile crime scene, NPS will cooperate fully.”

Yellen’s jaw tightened. “Who says we’ve got a crime at all? The damn foot could have come from a graveyard.”

“No,” Lisa said. “Turkey vultures prefer fresh corpses. Though they might wait for the skin to soften for easier consumption, they avoid putrefied meat. The victim wasn’t dead long before the vultures fed.”

Lundberg’s face paled slightly. He swallowed. “And the python couldn’t have eaten more than a day or two before it was captured. The vulture is barely digested.”

“Slow your roll.” Yellen raised two palms. “There’s still no reason to jump to violent crime. Could be a fall, a drowning, a heart attack. Folks die a million ways to Sunday out here.”

“It’s a crime,” I said firmly. “Homicide.”

This time every face swung toward me.

“And you would be?” Yellen looked me up and down, likely taking in the lank hair and
ill-fitting lab coat.

“Dr. Temperance Brennan.”

“Dr. Brennan is a forensic anthropologist from North Carolina,” Lisa added. “She spotted the human bones.”

“Tom Yellen.” Yellen proffered one beefy hand. “Sheriff out of Miami–Dade Hammocks district office.”

“I’m a colleague of Phil Evans.” I named the Miami-Dade County forensic anthropologist I knew through the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

“You used to be,” Yellen said. “Evans died last month. Heart attack.”

Jesus. There’s blunt, but this guy was off the chart. Not knowing what to say, and feeling bad about Evans, I said nothing.

Yellen looked at Lisa. “And you would be?”

“Dr. Lisa Robbin, Smithsonian ornithologist. I’m assisting Dr. Lundberg with his python research.”

“Uh-huh,” Yellen said. “Let’s get back to the foot. What makes you think we got a homicide?”

Using my probe, I singled out the calcaneus and cuneiform. “These are tarsals. When articulated, they lie close to the point where the foot bones and the lower leg bones meet.” Overly simplistic, but close enough for this crowd.

“The ankle?”

“You can think of it that way.” Using the probe’s tip, I pointed to a series of gouges and striation on the superior surface of each tarsal. “These marks were made by a chain saw.”

There was a long dead silence. Yellen broke it.

“You sayin’ this foot was sawed off?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“You’re sure?”

“That I can’t answer?”

“That it was sawed off!” Exasperated.

“I am.”

“Sweet lord on a bicycle. I’ve got a sawed-off foot that was eaten by a bird that was eaten by a snake, and no clue where the crime went down or who the vic is.”

“Was,” said Lisa.

Another silence followed. This time I jumped in.

“You can tell a lot from a foot.”

Yellen’s eyes rolled up to mine.

“While I can’t definitively establish gender without DNA, these bones are small and the muscle attachments aren’t overly robust, suggesting female. A smaller than average female, in fact.”

“Could it be a kid?” Pierce asked. Children eaten by snakes—bad for park publicity.

I picked up the third metatarsal. “This bone shows evidence of a stress fracture.”

“Not a kid,” Yellen said.

My opinion of the sheriff rose a hair.

“Correct. There are two main types of metatarsal fracture: acute, due to sudden loading, and stress, due to overuse. If muscles become strained, they’re no longer able to lessen the shock of repeated impacts. When this happens, the muscles transfer the stress to the bones. This can create small cracks or fractures.” Again an oversimplification, but sufficient in this context. “The most common stress fractures result from high-impact sports, like distance running. It’s rare to see them in children.”

“So how old are we talking?”

“I’m limited in making an estimate because I’ve got mostly phalanges to work with. Toe bones.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Yellen curled his fingers in an impatient “Go on” gesture.

“I’ll need an X-ray, but the bone quality looks good and the joints show no arthritis or remodeling. And I see no evidence of recent epiphyseal fusion.” I referred to the growth caps at the ends of each bone. “Together, these features suggest young adult.”

“That’s it?”

“I’d say somewhere in the range twenty to thirty. A small, active woman, maybe a runner.”

Something crossed Yellen’s face. Recognition? Before he could speak, his mobile rang. With a nod, he stepped out of the room to take the call.

“I’ve taken what measurements I could,” I said, peeling off and tossing my gloves into a biohazard bin. “Someone can enter them into the Fordisc program for assessment of gender and ancestry. But, given what I had to work with, the results will be virtually meaningless.”

Lundberg and Pierce stood mute.

“See you back at the house?” I asked Lisa.

Before she could reply, Yellen thundered back into the room. His face was grim. And he was looking at me.

I clung to my seat as the airboat jounced across the water, still unsure how I’d been talked into the excursion. On board with me with me were Yellen, Lundberg, and Pierce. A uniformed Miami-Dade officer was piloting the craft.

Yellen’s phone call had brought news of more human remains. I’d explained that I was in Florida on vacation. That I’d only stopped by Lisa’s lab to pick up a key. I’d practically yanked my bikini and Picoult novel from my suitcase as Exhibit A. Fruitless.

Yellen had waved off my objections. He had a dismembered human body. Evans, his forensic anthropologist, was on the wrong side of dirt and I was not. Before I knew what had happened, I’d been deputized.

While I was being driven to the dock, Lisa had headed out for lunch. My empty stomach did not appreciate the irony.