“What is this place?” Jake asked to whoever would care to answer.
“This house belongs to a physician friend of Mr. Sinclair’s,” Thorne explained. “He offered to let us use it for a while.”
“Where is he?”
Nick smiled knowingly at the question. Apparently, this ground had been covered once before.
“Away,” Thorne said. He spoke with an annoying, sanctimonious grin, as if responding to a joke that he alone had heard. Every move the man made seemed designed to keep people on edge. This was a man to be feared.
“What about contamination?” Jake asked.
Nick shook off the concern easily. “Don’t worry. We’ve got some Saranex suits and some respirators. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Not us,” Jake corrected. “The room. This is somebody’s kitchen, for crying out loud.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Thorne advised. “You need the room, you use the room. Our host won’t mind.”
Jake shared a look with Nick, but neither of them said anything.
“The stuff you said you needed is in the boxes over there.” Thorne pointed. “Do you need me for any of this crap, or can I go sit down?”
As Thorne departed, Nick knelt to open the boxes. “Looks like it’s all here.” He lifted two sets of white, hooded coveralls out of the largest box and handed one of them to Jake, leaving ten in the box. “God, there’s enough stuff here for an army.”
“Easier to borrow by the box, I suppose,” Jake mused. He rubbed the fabric of the coveralls between his fingers and shot a curious look. “What is this stuff?”
“Saranex,” Nick said. “See what happens when you drop out of the industry for a while? It’s basically a Tyvek garment with a Saran Wrap coating. Terrific stuff for low-level dust hazards.”
Jake examined it more closely. “Feels kinda like Pampers,” he said, drawing a chuckle. He flapped the garment with a loud snap, then thrust one leg into his coveralls. He had to push hard against the stiff folds. Suddenly, he stopped, realizing he’d forgotten something. “Thorne!”
It took a while, but in his own sweet time, Thorne reappeared at the kitchen door.
“See what you can find out about Carolyn and Travis, okay?”
The big man cocked his head and planted his fists on his hips. “And how do you want me to do that? Maybe I should just call the FBI and ask.” Shaking his head with disgust, he turned and disappeared again toward the front of the house.
“Prick,” Jake spat under his breath.
“He’s all personality, that one,” Nick concurred.
Dressing for this level of protection was a far less complex task-more like dressing for surgery, but with a full-face respirator instead of a surgical mask. The respirator resembled a pilot’s oxygen mask, with the addition of a clear Lexan facepiece, which formed an airtight seal around the entire face, from eyebrows to chin. In place of an artificial air supply, the respirators used two disc-shaped high-efficiency filters to knock any particulates out of the air before they could reach the user’s nose or mouth.
With the coveralls on, and their respirators in place, Jake and Nick lifted the hoods to cover their hair and donned two sets of gloves-latex under heavier rubber-and approached the butcher-block table. The bitter sacrilege of examining a child’s body on a surface designed for cooking was lost on neither man.
The orange body bag lay in a heap under a bank of fluorescent lights, not nearly as bright as Nick might have liked, but certainly adequate to the task at hand. It took a half minute or so to straighten the bag out enough to access the zipper. Like peeling a banana, the orange layer opened to reveal the green bag, which Jake lifted just enough to allow Nick to pull the outer shroud away and lay it on the tile floor.
“So tell me,” Jake said, his voice muffled by his respirator. “What’s the big mystery?”
“We’ll see in a minute,” Nick said.
Jake noted the lack of eye contact. “What is it?”
Nick ignored him as he fumbled with yet another rumpled bag in search of the zipper. Finally, he got it open. In the glare of the overhead light, they saw for the first time just how fine a dust they’d been exposed to: the consistency of talcum powder. Jake examined the fine coating on his gloved fingers and fought away a wave of despair. The body’s natural filters were useless against so fine a particle size. Whatever Travis had breathed was free to travel into the deepest recesses of the boy’s lungs; free to do its maximum damage. He closed his eyes and took a deep, purified breath.
Calm down, he told himself, fighting to find a ray of hope. You’re not a doctor. Quit trying to practice medicine. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.
The bones were all jumbled together in a heap in the bottom corner of the body bag. Nick reached in, up to his elbow, and pulled them out where he could see them. One at a time, he’d lift a piece to the light, turn it over in his gloved hands, then reach in for another one.
“What do you see?” Jake asked. It had been far too long since he’d taken anatomy and physiology.
Nick’s eyes never lifted from his work. “Everything’s pretty badly degraded from the heat of the fire,” he said. “This one appears to be part of a vertebral column. See the ridge here?” He traced it with his finger.
Jake saw it. “Okay, so what do we know?”
Again, Nick ignored his question as he reached in for another piece. “Okay,” he said. “This is the one I was looking for.” He turned it over in his fingers-sort of a long V with some unusual ridges along its edge. Nick’s shoulders sagged visibly as he dropped his hands to the table. When he looked up at Jake, his eyes had darkened, and even through the Lexan, Jake could see the creases in his brow.
“What is it?” Jake demanded, his heart suddenly racing. “What?”
Nick lifted the bone back into the light. “It’s a jawbone,” he said, his voice barely audible through the respirator.
Jake took the bone from him and held it up to his own face. “A jawbone! It doesn’t look like…” Then he saw it. He dropped the relic back into the bag and grabbed the side of the table for support.
“It’s a dog, Jake,” Nick said. “Or maybe a wolf or a fox. But it’s not human.”
Jake bit his lip and closed his eyes against the conclusion that tried to force its way through his brain. “A dog? Who’d do all of this just to cover the death of a dog?”
Nick looked away.
“Bullshit!” Jake shouted. “No! We missed it, then!”
“Jake…” Nick moved to join his friend on the other side of the table. “Listen…”
“We missed it. It’s got to be there!”
“But it’s not.” He put his hand on Jake’s shoulder.
Jake slapped it away. “Oh, God,” he wailed. A sound arose from his throat that was unlike anything Nick had heard from a human being: grief, unleashed in its rawest, most bitter form, rising as an agonized scream and reverberating off the tile walls, despite the muffling effects of his facepiece.
Jake pushed himself away from the table and stumbled toward the door. Suddenly, the huge kitchen seemed impossibly small. He needed to get out. Now.
He kicked open the door, bouncing a polished brass hurricane lamp off the wall and down onto the floor with a crash. Shards of glass skittered in every direction across the inlaid wood of the hallway. This couldn’t be happening. They’d missed something. They’d had to. This was it. This was the whole plan. That skeleton was the key piece of evidence that would lead to their acquittal; that would give them their lives back!
Now, he realized, he had nothing. He ripped the respirator off his head and heaved it across the room, where it pulverized a vase that had once been supported on an intricately carved ebony plant stand. “Fuck!”
Nick moved in behind him. “Jake, take it easy…”
Jake whirled on him, his eyes wild. “Fuck you, Nick! Fuck ‘take it easy’!” He ripped at his gloves and threw them one at a time against the wall. “Oh, God, no!” His grief lit a fire in his brain, and he pressed his hands against the top of his head as he sat heavily on the floor. “Oh, God, oh, God, no.”