Patch Gilbert lay on his back, arms spread, dirt still covering most of him, his mouth open wide and loam pooling between broken teeth. His face was ruined, beaten into pulp, a plane of graying hair askew on his scalp, little broken tiles of bone peeking through his forehead. Thuy Linh Tran lay atop one of Patch’s arms, as though he cradled her in a comforting hug. Dirt was scattered on her bloodshot irises. A bullet hole marred her forehead.
Whit slipped plastic bags over his shoes, carefully stepped down into the grave, touched Patch’s throat, then Thuy’s. He wrote down the time on his death scene form. For the record. Suddenly the promise of tears burned at the back of his eyes and he wanted to cry for this funny, good old man and this generous woman, but he didn’t want to lose it. Not in front of this crowd. He felt David’s stare against his back.
Whit stepped back out of the grave. He began his work of detailing the scene for the inquest report and the autopsy orders, keeping his eyes on the papers. It was easier that way.
David knelt down by Whit. ‘I think the man got hit with a shovel. Hard. Repeatedly. Probably even after he was dead. Wonder why the killer shot her, though. Maybe broke the shovel on him, couldn’t use it on her.’
‘Patch would have fought hard,’ Whit said.
‘He’s an old man,’ David said.
With about ten times the heart and guts you’ll ever have, Whit thought.
‘Makes me think of a case I read,’ David said. ‘Up in Oklahoma, ’65 or ’66, old couple got killed while out walking, buried right off a hiking trail…’
Whit tuned him out. David loved to recite old police cases from true crime collections as though they held all the beauty of love sonnets. All the details and none of the context. Whit bit his lip. When David paused for breath, Whit asked one of the techs to take extra photos of their faces, of their wounds. The techs did, and measured the depth of the bodies, carefully clearing more dirt back from the corpses when one of them gave a little cry of shock.
‘What is that?’ The tech stepped back from where Thuy’s feet still lay partly buried and Whit saw two curves of brownish skull exposed.
‘Look here,’ another tech said, clearing away dirt next to Patch’s knee. A crooked brown bone of finger, bent as if to beckon. ‘Old bone. Real old.’
‘Don’t touch it,’ Whit said. ‘stop the digging.’
‘Why?’ David asked.
‘There’s other remains buried with them. I got to call the guy in San Marcos. This closes down everything.’
‘We’re not stopping. This is a serious crime scene-’ David began.
‘They talked about site analysis in JP training. You have to stop the dig.’
David took a breath of infinite patience. ‘What guy in San Marcos?’
‘Forensic anthropologist. I don’t remember his name. But he’s got to check out the site. They must’ve gotten buried in old unmarked graves.’ Whit wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘You can’t move ’em until the FA’s here with his team.’
‘Judge Mosley’s right, David,’ one of the DPS techs said quietly. ‘He’s talking about Dr Parker. He can be here in forty minutes. DPS sticks him on a chopper and rushes him down here.’
‘Fine,’ David said. His lips went thin as wire. ‘Get this guy here, then, quick.’ He turned away from Whit to confer with the DPS team.
Whit took out the notepad he used at death scenes, jotted down descriptions of the bodies, talked in a low voice with the DPS photographer while she snapped footage, told her what angles would help him at inquest. He tried not to look at Patch and Thuy’s broken faces.
Instead, he kept glancing at the old, worn bones.
*
The forensic anthropologist – a banty rooster of a man named Parker, a fortyish fellow with a shaved bald head and sporting a Yankees cap – arrived by DPS chopper within an hour, accompanied by a team of graduate students armed with dental picks, brushes, trowels, string and stakes.
Whit left them to their work, spoke words of comfort to Lucy and her cousin Suzanne and the Tran family, all waiting up at Patch’s house. He came back down as the afternoon began to melt into night. The Port Leo fire department set up lights so the work could continue. Parker and David talked a lot, David losing patience and getting it back. The team sifted dirt from the site, carefully, and found more bone fragments, little pebbles of teeth. When Parker got up from his digging to gulp a cup of water, Whit cornered him at the jug on the back of a DPS truck.
‘So what is this looking like, Dr Parker?'
‘Off the record, Judge?'
‘Yeah.’
‘Because I don’t like to commit before all the data’s gathered.’
‘So don’t commit.’
‘We haven’t removed bones yet but there’s at least two skeletons in there, more likely three. They’re badly disarticulated – they’re not laid out as if they were buried and then not disturbed again.’
‘Why would the new bodies be on top of them?’
‘I think these old bones were dug up, dumped back in the dirt, and your murder victims dumped on top of them. The whole site’s a jumble. I mean, bones that look that old, you expect it. Ground settles over time, bodies sink. But these seem, well, shuffled.’
‘Anything other than the bones?’
‘Latches. Nails. Locks. A few slivers of wood.’
‘Locks?’
‘Locks.’
That was freaky, Whit thought. Why would you put a lock on a coffin? ‘You said wood. From a casket?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Wouldn’t a casket have kept the bones better organized?’
‘Apparently not these.’ Parker finished his water. ‘Don’t think they were buried in caskets. Coffins would have mostly rotted away by now, anyway.’
‘These bones… how old are they?’
‘The wetter the soil, the browner the bones get over time. These are pretty brown. We’ll assemble the skeletons as much as we can tonight and tomorrow. We’ll probably remove the bones in the next few hours, once we’ve cleaned away the dirt, gotten samples, sifted, photographed and mapped the site. If we can identify the make of the nails and latches, that can help us date the bones.’
‘The family of the murder victims are friends of mine,’ Whit said. ‘We’d like to get Mr Gilbert’s and Mrs Tran’s bodies out of there as soon as possible.’
‘We’ll hurry,’ Parker said, a softening in his tone for the first time. ‘You’ll need to transfer the old bones to my custody for examination, Judge.’ Whit nodded and Parker headed back to the dig, flush with light from the fire trucks.
The diggers worked tenderly, quietly around Patch and Thuy, as though the couple slept and the techs were gentle spirits, come to grant them sweet dreams. Finally they were done. The bodies were lifted out slowly, placed on clean sheets. Whit filled out an authorization for autopsy, had David countersign it. He watched the bodies taken away by the mortuary service for autopsy in nearby Nueces County. The service people carried the bodies carefully on their stretchers. The forensic anthropologists continued their work around the old bones, industrious and steady as ants.
By midnight, Wednesday fading into Thursday, the FA team had put an astonishing assortment of bones – including three human skulls, brown as walnuts – into paper bags. Whit signed over the bones to Parker and the FA team headed to Corpus Christi to sleep and finish their work. Lucy slept upstairs. Whit had showered and lain with her until she dozed off, then come down to Patch Gilbert’s empty den at two a.m., unable to sleep. He watched an old Perry Mason rerun. Perry’s was a perfect world for you, one where justice ticked along sure as clockwork.
Whit let the TV mumble along and sat in front of the bay window. He cracked open the window so he could hear the murmur of St Leo Bay. The night was dark, the moon shy behind clouds, the fireflies glowing and vanishing like candle wick embers, just snuffed out between wet finger and thumb. The fire truck lights still blazed over the now-canopied site, an officer standing watch.
The old house was full of the old man, his laughter, his teasing. On a side table there was a bottle of Glenfiddich that Whit had seen Patch open only last week. He found two shot glasses and picked up the bottle. He poured the shots of fine Scotch, one for him, one for Patch.