‘I bet you were a fun kid,’ Kim said.
‘I absolutely was,’ Doctor A said, smiling. ‘I was what you would call a tommyboy. I liked jumping, fighting and playing with mud. My father was in the army, leaving me, my mother and my brother.’
‘Did you fight?’
Dr A’s expression said, of course.
‘Did you win?’
Her expression remained the same.
‘You really okay?’ Kim asked. Despite the woman’s animation, the smile remained below her nose. She looked tired, drained.
‘My glass is always half full, Inspector. But not right now. Marina is on her way with the last box.’ She shook her head. ‘We will not have all the bones.’
Kim understood. There was a sadness that the bodies would remain incomplete.
‘We will survey again tomorrow to be sure, but the grave is now empty.’
‘You been getting any sleep?’ Kim asked, noting the dark circles beneath her eyes.
‘Have you?’ she asked with a tired smile.
Kim opened her mouth to offer well-meaning advice but closed it again. She could only wonder at the woman’s mash-up of the pot and kettle analogy.
‘It is the why that is bothering me,’ Doctor A said suddenly. ‘What did these people do to deserve such disrespect? What was their crime?’
Kim thought about victim one, Jacob James. A hard-working, mild-mannered family man. There was nothing to suggest anything in his past deserving of such horrific treatment. All accounts noted him as a decent hard-working guy.
Doctor A’s phone vibrated on the table.
She checked it then stood. ‘Walk and talk, Marina just arrived.’
Kim knew herself to be a quick walker but there was little chance of keeping up with the tornado that was blazing a trail through visitors, hospital staff and internal post trolleys. Conversation had become impossible.
Kim just about managed to keep an eyeball on her until Doctor A took a left into the staircase that led down to the morgue.
‘Training for something, Doc?’ Kim said, as she just about caught the doctor at the entrance doors.
The woman she had seen earlier in the week at the gravesite offered her a nod as she removed the lid from the plastic box.
Kim glanced again at the collections of bones that grew less detailed as her eye cast across the row of gurneys. It sickened her that only one yet had a name.
From the corner of her eye Kim could see individual plastic evidence bags being removed carefully from the box.
Sadly, Kim knew there were not enough bones to complete the gaps in front of her.
She remembered a documentary on the identification of bodies following the attack on the World Trade Centre. Some families had buried nothing more than a tooth or a bone fragment.
‘Hey, Inspector,’ Doctor A said, turning a bag and holding it up to the bright, white light.
Kim turned.
‘Did you know that the human hand is eerily similar to that of a bear’s front paw?’
‘Problematic if I was looking for Yogi,’ she said.
Doctor A frowned. ‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ Kim said. Some things were just not worth the time.
‘Aha, I was hoping to see you,’ Doctor A exclaimed to the bone in her hand.
All signs of fatigue were gone as the woman began moving frantically around the room.
Kim understood it. Progress fuelled energy. She was exactly the same. Forward motion brought its own shot of adrenaline.
Doctor A moved to the side of body number two and placed the bag at the pelvis area. She nodded to no one in particular.
Kim already knew that the pelvis was the most reliable way to sex a body.
‘I suspected number two was male from the distinct ridges on the skull but this pelvis is a fit and it is definitely male.’
‘Age?’ Kim asked, hopefully.
‘The bone loses calcium and becomes less dense with age. If malnutrition and diseases like osteoporosis are not factors, I would age this male between thirty and forty at the time of death.’
Kim committed the information to memory. Penn could feed that into his database and try for a match.
Doctor A stood at the foot of the gurneys between Jacob James and victim two.
‘These two souls are almost complete so I am hopeful that the rest of the bones will help with our other soul at the end.’
Kim looked towards gurney three and silently applauded Doctor A’s optimism.
Doctor A followed her gaze.
‘Once we are complete with the bones, we shall begin extracting DNA.’
Kim nodded her understanding. The only problem was they would need someone to match it against. She sighed heavily. These victims were not giving up their secrets as quickly as she would have liked.
‘Well, Doc, I’ll…’ Kim stopped speaking and paused as she passed by the counter to the left of the door.
‘What’s that?’ she asked Marina, who was removing an evidence bag the size of a credit card.
Marina pushed it towards her. She held it up to the light.
It was a triangular piece of paper.
SIXTY-FOUR
Bryant waited until the three of them were seated before trying to catch Stacey’s eye. She hadn’t yet looked at him once.
He had expected her to still be pissed off but refusing to look in his direction meant she hadn’t simmered down one little bit. He’d considered flowers, even chocolates and yet he’d known that any grand gesture on his part would not be accepted in the manner it was intended.
There was only one way to resolve this.
‘Stace, I want to apologise for not giving you the respect you deserve as a police officer and a detective.’
Finally, she looked at him.
‘It won’t happen again,’ he continued. ‘But we really need your help on this case.’
She nodded her acceptance, and then looked to Dawson.
‘Ditto,’ he offered, distractedly.
Bryant shook his head but caught the wink he gave his colleague.
‘Okay, Woody has lined up an expert at Lloyd House for us to go and speak to. His name is Inspector Frederick Windsor bee ess see hons, it says here,’ Bryant offered, reading out the initials that came after his name.
‘Yay, let’s go see the middle-aged white guy and learn all about hate crimes,’ Dawson said, sarcastically.
Stacey chuckled and some of the tension fell from her face. But all too quickly, it was back again.
‘Stace, can you look into the backgrounds of all our victims? Either we have three separate random attacks that just coincidentally happened in the space of a week or there is some kind of link somewhere.’
She nodded.
‘Really dig around with ‘Bubba’ Brandon Jones. He liked to live loud. It might be interesting to see what kind of attention he was attracting on social media…’
‘Ahem,’ she offered.
‘And I’ll now stop telling you how to do your job,’ he said. ‘Once we’ve finished with our expert I want to go back to the families; start at the beginning and interview them all again.’ He handed her a piece of paper. ‘And just do some digging on this young lady.’