“So who's behind the complaint?”
“I don't know, but I sure as hell intend to find out.”
“It's not your problem, Ryan.”
“No.”
“Any developments in the investigation?” I switched the subject.
I heard a match flare, then a deep inhalation.
“Simington is starting to look like a good choice.”
“The guy with the heavily insured wife?”
“It's better than that. The new widower owns a company that does highway construction.”
“So?”
“Easy access to plastic X.”
“Plastic X?”
“Plastic explosive. The stuff was used in Vietnam, but now it's sold to private industry for construction, mining, demolition. Hell, farmers can get it to blast out tree stumps.”
“Aren't explosives tightly controlled?”
“Yes and no. The regs for transport are tighter than those for storage and use. If a highway is under construction, for example, you need a special truck with escorts and a prescribed route bypassing congested areas. But once the stuff is on-site it's usually stored in a mobile vault in the middle of a field with the word explosive written on it in large letters.
“The company hires some old geezer as guard and pays him minimum wage, mainly to meet insurance requirements. Vaults can be burgled, misplaced, or simply disappear.”
Ryan drew on his cigarette, exhaled.
“The military is supposed to account for every ounce of plastic explosive, but construction crews don't have to ledger up that precisely. Say a blaster gets ten sticks, uses three quarters of each, and pockets the rest. No one's the wiser. All the guy needs is a detonator and he's in business. Or he can sell the stuff black market. Explosives are always in demand.”
“Assuming Simington filched explosives, could he have gotten them on board?”
“Apparently it's not all that hard. Terrorists used to take plastique, flatten it to the thickness of a wad of bills, and put it in their wallets. How many security guards check the bills in your wallet? And you can get an electrical detonator the size of a watchcase these days. The Libyan terrorists that blew up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie slipped the stuff on in a cassette case. Simington could have found a way.”
“Jesus.”
“I've also had news from la belle province. Earlier this week a group of homeowners got suspicious about a Ferrari parked on their street. It seems sports cars costing over a hundred thousand dollars don't commonly overnight in that part of Montreal. Turned out to be a good call. Police found the owner, one Alain ‘the Fox’ Barboli, stuffed in the trunk with two bullets in his head. Barboli was a member of the Rock Machine and had ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Carcajou's got it.”
Opération Carcajou was a multiagency task force devoted to the investigation of outlaw bikers in Quebec province. I'd worked with them on a number of murders.
“Does Carcajou think Barboli was revenge for Petricelli?”
“Or Barboli was involved in the Petricelli hit and the big boys are sanitizing the witness list. If there was a hit.”
“If Simington could get his hands on explosives, the Hells Angels would have no problem.”
“Like buying Cheez Whiz at the 7-Eleven. Look, why don't you get back up here and tell this Tyrell—”
“I want to check some bone samples to make sure I'm right on my age estimate. If that foot didn't come from the plane, the tampering charges will be irrelevant.”
“I mentioned your suspicions about the foot to Tyrell.”
“And?”
“And nothing. He brushed it off.”
Again I felt the flush of anger.
“Have you turned up any unlisted passengers?”
“Nope. Hanover swears deadheading is strictly regulated. No paper, no ride. The Air TransSouth employees we've interviewed confirm their CEO's claim.”
“Anyone who might have been transporting body parts?”
“No anatomists, anthropologists, podiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, or corrective footwear salesmen. And Jeffrey Dahmer isn't flying these days.”
“You're a scream, Ryan.”
I hesitated.
“Has Jean been identified?”
“He and Petricelli remain among the missing.”
“They'll find him.”
“Yeah.”
“You all right?”
“Tough as nails. How 'bout you? Feeling lonely all by yourself?”
“I'm fine,” I said, staring at the bed I'd just vacated.
North Carolina has a centralized medical examiner system, with headquarters in Chapel Hill and regional offices in Winston-Salem, Greenville, and Charlotte. Due to geography, and to its physical layout, the Charlotte branch, dubbed the Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner, was chosen for the processing of specimens collected at the incident morgue in Bryson City. A technician had been loaned from Chapel Hill, and a temporary histology unit had been set up.
The Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner is part of the Harold R. “Hal” Marshall County Services Center, which takes up both sides of College Street between Ninth and Tenth, just on the edge of uptown. The facility's home was once a Sears Garden Center. Though an architectural orphan, it is modern and efficient.
But Hal's tenure may be threatened. Shunned for years, the land on which the center sits, with its views of condos, shops, and bistros, has caught the interest of developers as more fitting for mixed-use commercial expansion than for use as county offices, parking lots, and a morgue. American Express gold cards, cappuccino makers, and Hornets and Panthers club seats may soon flourish where scalpels, gurneys, and autopsy tables used to hold sway.
Twenty minutes after finally donning the panties, I pulled into the MCME lot. Across College, the homeless were being served hot dogs and lemonade from folding tables. Blankets covered the moss strip between sidewalk and curb, displaying shoes, shirts, and socks for the taking. A score of indigents milled about, nowhere to go, in no hurry to get there.
Locking the car, I walked to the low-rise redbrick structure and was buzzed through the glass doors. After greeting the ladies up front, I checked in with Tim Larabee, the Mecklenburg County ME. He led me to a computer that had been set aside for crash victim processing and pulled up case number 387. It was probably violating the terms of my banishment, but I had to take the chance.
DNA testing was being done at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg crime laboratory, and those results were not yet available. But the histology was ready. The samples I'd cut from the ankle and foot bones had been shaved into slivers less than one hundred microns thick, processed, stained, and placed on slides. I got them and settled at a microscope.
Bone is a miniature universe in which birth and death occur constantly. The basic unit is the osteon, composed of concentric loops of bone, a canal, osteocytes, vessels, and nerves. In living tissue osteons are born, nourished, and eventually replaced by newer units.
When magnified and viewed under polarized light, osteons resemble tiny volcanoes, ovoid cones with central craters and flanks that spread out to flatlands of primary bone. The number of volcanoes increases with age, as does the count of abandoned calderas. By determining the density of these features one arrives at an age estimate.
First I looked for signs of abnormality. In the cross-section of a long bone, thinning of the shaft, scalloping of its inner or outer edges, or abnormal deposition of woven bone can indicate problems, including fracture healing or unusually rapid remodeling. I saw no such anomalies.
Satisfied that a realistic age estimate was possible, I increased the magnification to one hundred and inserted a ruled ocular micrometer into the eyepiece. The grid contained one hundred squares, with each side measuring one millimeter at the level of the section. Moving from slide to slide, I studied the miniature landscapes, carefully counting and recording the features within each grid. When I'd finished and plugged my totals into the proper formulae, I had my answer.