“Yabber your heart out, Goos. I’ve been a white-collar guy my whole career. Crimes of greed, not violence. I haven’t spent much time in places like this.” My one trip to the path lab, while a prosecutor, had come when the Black Saints Disciples had killed a young man who’d agreed to testify for the government. The agents on the case wanted me to see what had been done to our guy, which wasn’t pretty.
Goos withdrew a laser pointer from under his gown and showed me various points on the pelvis used to discern both the gender and age of the decedents. In the lab, Goos was expansive and wonky about the scientific refinements in his field since his time as a grad student. DNA had established that these remains were those of three males, while statistical analyses of the changes that occurred over time in the pelvis, legs, and teeth of a broad population (including, per Goos, “the density of blood vessel canalations”) allowed for near certainty in determining the men’s ages. For all the forensic advances, the result was close to Goos’s original estimate by naked eye. Two men were in their forties—forty and forty-five roughly—and the third was an adolescent of about fifteen.
Goos had snapped on plastic gloves as he handled the skeletons. The bones held a soft sheen now, the product of a layer of protective plastic Goos had applied to prevent further degradation. He tilted the top of one skull at me.
“Notice anything about this fella?” There was a hole, almost perfectly round, through the center of his forehead, as well as a network of fine fractures beside it. At the rear, a far larger hole had been blown away.
“Bullet?”
“Yay, counselor, it would be my expert opinion that this poor devil got shot in the head. And at fairly close range.” He pushed his pointer into the eye socket so I could see the light through the front bullet hole. “We’ve a punched-in surface, small pieces of bone missing, and beveling in the outer table.
“Now, we have a larger hole here.” He was indicating two ribs on the same skeleton. “So pretty sure he got shot first at longer range. Bullet wobbles more the further it travels, makes a bigger hole.”
He highlighted the examinations of the other two skeletons. The ‘youngster,’ as Goos put it, had been shot first in the hand and then through the chest, where the small entrance wound suggested the bullet had shattered. The third set of bones—apparently those of the brother who’d bled out—showed no bullet holes, which would be consistent with entry wounds through the softer tissues and organs.
“Last thing that’s relevant”—Goos tilted open the jawbone on the middle skeleton—“I see some missing teeth on all three, even this young fella. So I’d say these folks had very little dental care.”
“Meaning they were poor?”
“Or didn’t like the dentist. But let’s say poor.”
“Like the people in Barupra?”
“Or most of the people on earth, but Barupra, too.”
He plunked the skull back on the table so it made a dull knock.
“Done here now,” he said and removed his cap.
We walked down the hall to a stairwell. As he passed, Goos greeted several people in lab coats. I suspected a PhD got a lot more respect in these precincts than the usual humble cop. On the second floor, we entered a door labeled TOOLMARKS AND MICRO-ANALYSIS INVASIVE TRAUMA LAB.
“This is the place with the special microscope?”
“Infinite Focus Microscope it’s called.” Inside, the first thing I saw was a vast light table for the display of X-rays and other slides. Overhead vents hung down, inverted bells of clear plastic used to whisk away unwanted vapors. A piece of one of the long bones, whose absence I’d noticed from the first skeleton, was vised below the hot-shit microscope.
“Now this here is my domaine royal.” Goos turned with his long hands raised somewhat grandly. “Taphonomy, basically the study of bodily degradation. Without embalming, a body is skeletonized in about six weeks. So trying to figure if the bones have been in the earth five years or five hundred requires looking to other factors. Bones decompose more slowly than the flesh, but they do decompose. Tricky thing in this case is, as you know, there’s lots of salt in the earth thereabouts near Tuzla. That’ll degrade the bone surface more quickly, meaning you might think the remains are older than they are. Which is where our friendly microscope comes in. The interior of the bones, once we’ve sawed them open, shows decomposition unrelated to contact with the earth. All told, I’d say these were in the ground ten years give or take, and Dr. Gerber here at NFI, dog’s bollocks in this field, he agrees.”
I took a second to reflect on what Goos had shown me thus far.
“Overall, I’d say Ferko’s doing pretty well.” The Monday after we’d returned from Tuzla, I’d told Goos about Ferko’s sudden recall of Kajevic’s threats. Goos had reacted largely as I had. It was not a huge problem in itself, but it meant we had to probe Ferko’s story with even greater caution. It was heartening, therefore, that the lab results seemed to corroborate him.
“So far,” said Goos. “But it’s about to get a little thick. Let’s talk about the DNA analysis, because that’s where our first troubles appear. I can call up the report from this computer.” He batted at a keyboard.
I was better versed in DNA than pathology, because that science had proved revealing throughout the entire universe of crimes. You could extract DNA, for example, from a smudged fingerprint on a cashier’s check, as had happened to an unfortunate client of mine who’d bribed a county zoning officer by paying a college tuition bill.
“Now, DNA with buried bones is tricky. That’s because there’s always little critters in the soil who nibble on these bones and leave their own DNA behind.” He got a little deep for me in describing the extraction methods that had been developed to reduce soil contamination, but I followed well enough. A comparison between samples from the bone’s interior versus its surface helped isolate microbial effects.
“We performed Y-STR and mitochondrial DNA analysis,” Goos said.
“Mitochondrial is mother’s side and less subject to contamination?” I asked.
“Right you are, Boom. Mother’s side shows more than seventy percent of the genome in each man is consistent with Indo-Aryan origins.”
“That’s what you’d expect if they were Roma, right?”
“That’s what the experts here say. Now, the Y-STR, that was a lot more complicated. The good news is that all three exhibit a common Y chromosome, which you’d expect if they were truly father, son, and uncle. But even getting that result was quite the bitzer because of our contamination issues.” The classic contamination problem, even in a lab setting, arose from the fact that there was no way to tell the origins of the DNA you were examining. It could be blood or bone or skin from the subject, or a dandruff flake that had scaled off one of the investigators.
“Here, Boom, even when we isolated the microbial effects, the bone crystal cells from the surface showed much more human contamination than the bone crystals from the inside. And if these bones were in the earth for ten years, there’s no way that should be the case, unless my blokes and I were a lot less careful with the exhumation than I thought.
“So that result goes hand in hand with what I told you in Barupra, that I was detecting topsoil down in the grave? Madame Professor Tchitchikov, our geologist, has confirmed that. So the boil-over, Boom, is that some other person was digging in that site fairly recently. And probably handling these bones.”
“Meaning what?”
“Let me get you to the end of this.”