"Mr. Carsman was a hunter. A bird hunter. Talked about not liking to kill. Talked about no one understanding hunting except other hunters. Said he liked to listen to the wind blow, the rain fall. "The rain?" I asked. "Is that why you're here?" He said no, it was on account of his dog. His dog? I verified that, then he lifted this paper bag, this grocery bag, the top of which was choked down tight so it looks like an old man's neck. He'd been sitting there holding it between his knees. I'm starting to think this guy is over the top and I'm part of his plan somehow. I'm starting to wish I carry some kind of revolver in my desk. I'm about to come out of my chair when he hoists this bag onto my desk. Thump, it goes. That thump worried me because I knew that sound: bone. I'm thinking it's a head maybe. He says he wasn't sure what to do with something like this. He said Stu Coleman's a neighbor of his. I know Stu from the state lab. Stu's all right. Stu told him to bring it to me. I asked him if I could see the bone. That threw him, but like I said: I knew that sound. There's no mistaking the sound of a bone on your desk." "Whatever you say," Boldt said.
His palms were moist. He wanted to order his dinner. He wanted Dixie to stop with his storytelling and get to the point, but Dixie spent a lot of hours with the dead, and he appreciated someone alive to talk to when he got the chance. "He was hunting in a very remote location, timberland northeast of the city. He shoots a bird-a blue grouse, I think it was-and he sends his dog after it. Dog disappears a long time. When he comes back-the dog, that is-he has ..." Dixie leaned over with some effort. Boldt heard the sound of a zipper. The bag. Dixie righted himself saying " ... this in his mouth."
Dixon let the large bone down gently onto the table. To him, it was perfectly normal to show someone a bone-a human femur. Big and unmistakable. To the people passing by their table, it proved a source of great curiosity-and for some, disgust.
Boldt studied it, turning it over repeatedly, and said, "You could have waited until I ordered my dinner."
"After a little bit of searching the stream, he found this as well," Dixon informed him, placing another, much smaller bone on the table. "This is the one that interests you-it's a rib."
"What if I was planning on ordering barbecue?"
"I thought Liz had you eating vegetarian."
"Who told you that?"
"Word gets around."
"Well ... What if I am?"
"Then you're not ordering barbecue," Dixon said.
The second Scotch arrived. This was followed by a dinner waiter whose attention kept drifting to the two bones. Boldt ordered the Greek salad. Dixon just to be spiteful-ordered a rich pasta with smoked turkey and prosciutto.
When the waiter left, Boldt handled the rib. "I'm supposed to be interested in this?"
"Yes, you are, It's human. just like the femur. Just like you." Dixie stared him down. "I took a personal interest in locating the rest of the corpse. Human bones discovered in such an isolated area suggest a buried body and buried bodies seem to be epidemic these days. The discovery of any human remains has to be investigated if for no other reason than that it is illegal to bury a corpse in the watershed area where Carsman's dog discovered the bone. Maybe you remember Monty, my assistant, Lewis Montgomery? He's our forensic anthropologist-and he's very good. Monty coordinated a search team using Boy Scout troops because at the time Search and Rescue wouldn't touch it."
Boldt interrupted, "Boy Scouts?" Dixie ignored him. "Nothing turned up and the case was filed under Unsolveds. I haven't spoken to Monty about the bones since. He and I ran some tests on them back when Carsman turned them over to us. Measurement and calcification tests indicated this femur had once belonged to a woman between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. The pelvis, if it can be found, will not only confirm this but will also tell us whether or not this woman had children." --Dixon continued "To formally identify a person from his or her bones, one needs more bones than this, and a lot of luck. A young woman in her mid-twenties, buried fifty miles from nowhere suggests the obvious to me - - ."
"Homicide," Boldt finished for him.
He toyed with the partial bone on the table. "Look at the rib, would you?" Boldt studied the rib more closely, taking it into his hands and spinning it around. The waiter arrived with their meals. Boldt moved his arms to accommodate the man, who remained fascinated by the bones. He bumped a water glass, nearly spilling it. The waiter offered ground pepper, which both men declined, and he left, backing away, still fascinated.
Boldt ran his index finger along the square end of the bone.
"Some kind of surgical technique?"
"Interesting, isn't it?"
Boldt waited him out. "We use gardening shears. They work the best."
"We?" Boldt asked. "My office," Dixon replied. "For the autopsies," he clarified. "You've seen me use them; you just don't remember."
"But this was no autopsy," Boldt said. "I have some serious hunches about that rib, about this skeleton, and the young woman it once danced inside. Once slept inside.
The woman inside whom it grew and developed. My office closed the case' Another department could reopen it." He stabbed some of the salad. "You're the investigator."
"Boy Scouts. What did you expect?"
"We had some good people leading them.
Nothing wrong with young eyes, young legs. That's rough country out there."
Boldt asked, "Did they look up river for the rest of her?"
"Of course. And found nothing. But there must be some way to find her."
"You want my advice?"
"I want more than your advice. I want your participation. How would you go about it?"
"I'd talk to the experts. Water Resources or Army Corps of Engineers. Someone responsible for flood predictions, for the way water would move a bone like that. We had some heavy rains last fall. Was that six months ago? I think it was. Those rains let up right after Miles was born. That's how I measure the world now, you know? In terms of when my boy was born." Dixie said, "People bury bodies along rivers for two reasons.
The wet soil speeds decay-7Boldt interrupted, "And it's easier to dig in."
"Matthews showed you the autopsy files on those three runaways. I've put in a request for the tissue samples from those cases. But this ... I had forgotten all about this case." He touched the long femur that remained between them on the table just as a young man in his twenties passed, noticed the bone and nudged his girlfriend.
"Oh, look. They have leg-o-man tonight." She giggled.
Boldt did not laugh. He was staring intently at Dixon.
"Patterns, my friend. We're in the patterns business-cops and interior decorators. This bone," he said, shifting his attention to the rib, "never healed. Never had time to heal. See the different color here? That means it was buried within a few days of the operation. Oh, yes: operation. This woman was cut open, either to heal her or to steal from her. But not at a hospital, not as part of the system. Quite possibly it killed her, if she wasn't dead already. Cut open by a surgeon-someone who has done enough rib work to use snippers instead of the medical school tools we're told to use. Snippers work better. Those runaways, the files I gave Matthews-Walker-, Sherman, Blumenthal-they were also cut open by a surgeon. The same guy? The same reason? He wasn't after a kidney, I can tell you that. Lung or liver, those are your choices, the way he cut that rib. Are all these the work of the same doctor? Patterns. We both know that it's patterns that hang these guys. We're all-every one of us-victims of our own inescapable patterns."
inescapable patterns Boldt thought. He examined the bones once again. "An organ harvest?"
"It's a strong possibility. We have a lot of questions to answer: How long ago was she buried? Who was she? What procedure was done? We need the rest of her, Lou, or a good portion thereof - Why did he bury this one and not the others? She's been in the ground a long time. Those bones are picked clean. What sets her apart?" only Boldt sensed something in the man, a friends can. "You're jumping ahead of yourself. You're linking her to the others with only supposition. Or are you? You wouldn't get this excited over hunches," Boldt realized, thinking aloud. "There's something else in that bag of yours, isn't there? Something even more convincing?"