One of the original detectives felt the killer had confused the two addresses on his return. If this were true, then the killer couldn't have been a long-time resident of the neighborhood, like the girl's uncle, who had a record of burglaries, or the neighborhood dirty old man, or the pair of teens brought in for questioning. In fact, Yolanda's killer might be a total stranger to the area, and so not likely known in the area. Somebody would notice a stranger in a close-knit community, or someone new to the block, but how close-knit was this area in 1956? Was there a welcome wagon lady in the area who might know of anyone recently moved in, and if so, was she still alive for questioning? Not likely on both counts.
Lucas wondered about the possibility of a recently released sex offender taking up residence at a time when news of such releases was not divulged to the public. He thought of pursuing such a record, lost to time. What prison would he begin with, Huntsville? It was the nearest, but hardly the only one in the state.
An aged black man had been hauled in for questioning, a man who lived a few doors down. Sixty-two-year-old Jacob Perry, a man with a record for attempted molestation of a minor, was known for hanging about the schools and parks of Jacinto, always with an eye on the local children, but the detectives could not shake his alibi. He'd gone into the hospital that weekend for a hip replacement. Besides, reasoned Lucas from the standpoint of fifty years of police growth and hindsight, since the "dirty old man" was well versed in the terrain, he would have known the child's address and not confused it with a corresponding number a block away.
"Unless he was suffering from Alzheimer's," Lucas told himself now.
A pair of young thugs from the neighborhood were also questioned, Donnell Knight and Rory Billings, both of whom knew the neighborhood intimately. The detectives on the case reasoned the boys might have deliberately dumped the girl's sexually molested, tortured, and brutally beaten body on the wrong doorstep to throw suspicion away from themselves, but by the same token, police interrogators deemed the young men stupid and sloppy, seemingly contradicting their own findings. And it had been Lucas's experience that, despite popular novels and films glorifying the evil genius of killers such as Hannibal Lecter, ninety-nine percent of murderers were far too stupid to know how to divert attention away from themselves, and in practice, when they tried, it created a net thrown over themselves. In this case, the two boys' families alibied for them and they too were released.
Lucas read on. A year passed without any breaks in the case, and the thin little emaciated murder book traveled from upstairs to here, the dungeon of dead case files, and here it had remained all these years for Lucas to regard as one of thousands that deserved special heed. He didn't know why it deserved his care now, but it did. Maurice Remo had jumped in on it, when it arrived on his desk, the same desk Lucas sat at now, and the great Remo had not been able to crack the case either. In fact, Remo appeared to have given it short shrift, but he did write some marginal notes indicating that he, like Lucas, ruled out the girl's uncle, the old man, Perry, and the two boys as the killer based on the known evidence. Remo's signature on a routing sheet hinted at more information, perhaps a second volume to the investigation, but Lucas could find no additional tombstone in the paper cemetery he called home.
Maurice Remo was likely in a Florida retirement community by now, if not passed away Lucas pushed the file to a corner of his desk, as if the gesture would put an end to its nagging him; he firmly told himself that pursuing it would only be a waste of time.
In an effort to escape Yolanda Sims, he got on the phone and called upstairs to Chang's lab, anxious now to learn anything new about the god awful packages forwarded to Meredyth and him. When he located Leonard in his morgue, he asked, "Anything you can tell me about last night's findings at my and Meredyth's place?"
"Blood and serum tests show it's all from same body as I suspected. DNA typing is ongoing. Will take more time. Pretty sure now we have a young female, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-nine or thirty…healthy tissues, all of it."
"Then it's either from a murder victim or materials stolen from some medical facility, likely a morgue."
"So far as I can tell you, we here can account for all human tissues and organs, nothing missing or stolen."
"So far?"
"I have Dr. Lynn Nielsen doing the work, investigating two weeks of intake and output, paperwork to burial, and what's remaining in our freezer units. Of course, most of the bodies we process go either to one of the potter's fields or into the hands of family, and in turn into the care of a local mortician who preps 'em for funeral and burial services. Along that route, any number of people might have absconded off with body parts, especially if it's a close-lid affair."
"With missing eyes, I should hope so."
"News out of Florida has been full of unscrupulous morticians, but I don't know of any who's packaged up body parts and forwarded them to police personnel, do you?"
"No…no, that's a new wrinkle, Leonard."
"So far, Dr. Nielsen has found no discrepancies to indicate anyone stole anything from us," Chang reiterated. "They don't call me No Waste for nothing, Lucas."
"I always thought that referred to your slim waist. Doc."
"Both, I'm told. Of course, you know, Lucas, the parts could have come from another lab, morgue, or medical school."
"And you found no indication of cause of death, no toxins, no disease?" Lucas asked.
"No, nothing points to cause of death. Eyes show none of the microscopic hemorrhaging, no telltale signs of strangulation in the tissue. Nor do any of the tissue cuts show any sign of toxins or disease."
"A perfectly healthy woman without a name or a face." Lucas leaned back in his chair, his weight making it squeal. "What's our next step, Leonard?"
"Well, on the chance the human materials were stolen from someone's care, I took the liberty and contacted every hospital in the state with its own morgue where autopsies can be legally performed by trained pathologists. The number is considerably smaller than you might think. Only a few counties still allow hospital morgues to perform autopsies, and even these must be affiliated with a medical school or with the city or state Medical Examiner's Office."
"That's a good thing, isn't it?"
"Better reporting of suspicious and unknown cause of death, yes."
"I guess the number of funeral parlors in and around greater Houston is too astronomical to begin to contemplate. And I doubt anyone's going to phone in to tell us they've lost a pair of eyes, teeth, and four slices from a cadaver's abdominal organs."
As usual, Leonard did not always follow Lucas's sarcasm. He flatly replied, "Not all morgues have responded yet, but so far, none admit to having lost any human tissue whatsoever on the scale we are talking about here."
Lucas momentarily wondered if Chang meant to imply that there was an acceptable scale of medical waste and tissue loss in most hospitals, that this was chalked up to the cost of doing business. "Any way to get help from the teeth?" he asked.
"Absolutely, yes. DNA from the marrow is being matched to DNA from the organ parts. And if we find someone to match teeth to, then they will be of great benefit."