‘And the glasses are inside this box.’ He put his hand on a wall-mounted cabinet holding Plexiglas safety glasses on a series of hooks, all illuminated by a soft ultraviolet glow.
‘I’m here to run the fluoroscope for you, capture whatever images you want, take photos, and move the material if necessary.’
‘Basically cater to our every need,’ joked Steelie.
‘Exactly.’
Jayne was glad Steelie had made the joke. She was beginning to feel tense about seeing the body parts out of the natural environment by the freeway where the leaves and detritus had masked the brutality of the cuts. The clinical setting would make the body parts look more like a dismembered body – one body in particular, one person in particular: Benni – no, don’t think of him, don’t even conjure up his name. Jayne felt Steelie nudge her and she took the mask Steelie was holding out, shaking her head in response to the question in her friend’s eyes.
She pulled up her hood and followed the others into the cool room, another windowless space whose chill was a shock. Most of the overhead lights were switched off but a panel illuminated the center of the room above the fluoroscope. The fluoroscope’s neck was cantilevered parallel to the floor, making the portable X-ray machine resemble an out-of-commission oil derrick. The body parts were in black body bags, each bag on its own gurney, and lined up next to the fluoroscope.
‘Sorry for the “CSI” effect with the lights,’ Tony said, only slightly muffled through his mask, ‘just trying to keep radiant heat to a minimum but let me know if you need more light.’
He pulled the nearest gurney towards the fluoroscope and unzipped the body bag. It held the severed leg.
The pale flesh was damp and had defrosted. Blood pooled darkly in the recesses of the body bag. Jayne was relieved that her first instinct was to move closer to get a better look. She and Steelie positioned themselves on either side of the gurney, while Tony stayed by the fluoroscope.
‘The cut goes through the femoral shaft,’ commented Steelie. ‘Looks like midway up the thigh.’
‘And the other cut’s just under the patella,’ Jayne murmured.
‘Trying to avoid sawing through bone again?’
‘Maybe. Can’t tell which cut he tried first.’
‘How much of the patella have we got?’
‘I don’t think he even nicked it. Take a look.’ Jayne moved to the right to examine the proximal cut, while Steelie bent down to look at the patella, its tip just visible amongst the ligaments and fat of the knee.
‘We don’t have much to go on for sex,’ said Steelie.
‘Not when we can’t expose the femur to do a mid-shaft circumference.’
‘Even that’s just an indication.’
There was silence as the anthropologists looked at the leg, tilting their heads this way and that.
Tony cleared his throat. ‘The thigh’s not shaved. Would that indicate male?’
‘Possible, but not reliable,’ replied Jayne, her eyes still on the leg. ‘Not all women shave their thighs and plenty of men do, like swimmers and cyclists. If you can take photos of each cut and from above, we can move on to the fluoro.’
‘No problem.’ He went into action, the recharge of the camera’s flash whining as he took two shots from each vantage point, the latter requiring a stepladder that he wheeled over from the corner. Before turning on the fluoroscope, Tony brought over three lead vests and they all slipped the heavy material over their heads, adjusting them by the shoulder sections until the vests could rest there without too much discomfort.
Tony turned two switches on the fluoroscope and began pushing and pulling the lens head over the severed leg on the gurney. An X-ray image of everything in the lens’ path beamed out of a monitor on an adjoining trolley.
Jayne asked, ‘Can you bring it in a slow sweep from one end to the other?’
The anthropologists’ eyes flicked between the partial leg and the fluoroscope screen, trying to orient the gradations of grey that represented bone and tissue.
They all noticed that the cut at the top of the femur didn’t reveal any shards of metal or metallic fragments, as might have been expected from forceful cutting action. Steelie asked Tony about the apparent absence of trace evidence.
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘There are indications that the perp washed the body parts after he’d done the cutting.’
As the fluoroscope traveled down the thigh, faint, lighter marks were visible at the distal end of the femur.
‘Hold it there, just above the knee,’ said Steelie. ‘Lines of fusion?’ She looked questioningly at Jayne, who was staring at the screen.
‘Looks like it. Move it down a fraction, Tony . . . and back up?’
He pushed the lens to where it had been a moment before.
Steelie said, ‘Lines of fusion.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ breathed Jayne.
‘Talk to me, Thirty-two One,’ said Tony, glancing back and forth at each woman.
Steelie pointed at the monitor. ‘See those lines at the top of the knee? That’s where the epiphysis, or growth plate, is in the process of fusing to the shaft of the femur. Fusion happens at standard ages across populations and sexes. So, because we can see that line, we know you’ve got a teenager or someone in their early twenties, regardless of sex.’
He made a low whistle.
‘Make a print of what you’ve got on the screen now,’ Jayne said. ‘Then can you flip the leg over so we can see the same region from the posterior?’
‘What label do you want?’
‘Distal left femoral epiphysis.’
‘Can you spell that?’
‘Left femur will be fine,’ Steelie clarified.
Jayne looked at the fluoroscope screen and felt a surge of excitement to see that pale jagged line. An identifying marker to narrow the search. A start.
Tony tapped buttons at a keyboard beneath the screen, then raised the fluoroscope’s neck to make space to turn over the leg.
He handled the leg carefully, supporting it at each end, barely raising it off of the gurney before laying it back down. He put it on a section of body bag that wasn’t bloody, then removed one of his two layers of gloves and returned to maneuver the fluoroscope towards the back side of the knee.
Similar pale lines were again visible on the fluoroscope screen, this time clearer without the patella in the foreground.
‘I think it’s either close to fully fused or it finished fusing not long before death, and that’s why we can still see the line,’ said Steelie. ‘Another shot, Tony.’
He worked with the machine, then asked, ‘Want to take it from the top again?’
‘Yep,’ said Steelie, ‘then let’s move on to the next bag.’
Nothing remarkable came up on this second pass. Tony re-bagged the leg and Steelie and Jayne watched him discard his dirty gloves and double-glove again with clean ones. Tony then switched that gurney for the next one. Jayne was no longer apprehensive about how the contents of the next body bag would affect her. She had moved on to thinking about the person who made the cuts and did the killing. She was thinking about bringing them down.
Scott and Eric barely talked until they were at the base of Jeffdale Avenue in Woodland Hills. The street didn’t extend far up the slope before making a sharp turn but the matching pastel split-level houses gave it a sense of suburban uniformity. 3180 Jeffdale was on the left side of the street. The double garage door was closed but there was an oil mark in the driveway concrete as though a vehicle that leaked fluids usually sat there.
‘OK,’ said Scott, his eyes on the oil stain. ‘It’s either in the garage or it’s on the road right now. Let’s get a look in the garage first.’
‘Then you’re on the front and I’m on back duty?’
Scott nodded and jutted his chin at the glove box in front of Eric. Eric unlocked it and removed two guns in their holsters and two pieces of small electronic equipment. They strapped the gear on to their waistbands. Before they got out of the car, they put on FBI-marked windbreakers that covered their waistlines.