I had found a copy of the Portland Press Herald in Barnes amp; Noble at Union Square, and while I ate, I scanned the pages for reports on Eagle Lake. There were two: one was a description of the ongoing difficulties in uncovering the remains, but the main piece announced the suspected identities of two of the dead. They were Billy Perrson and Vyrna Kellog, and they were both homicide victims. Billy Perrson had died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Vyrna Kellog's skull had been crushed, apparently with a rock.
Slowly, the truth about the fate of the Aroostook Baptists was being revealed. They had not dispersed, scattering themselves to the four winds and taking with them the seeds of new communities. Instead they had been murdered and consigned to a mass grave on a patch of undeveloped land; and there they had remained, trapped in a forgotten cavity of the honeycomb world, until spring daylight had found them.
Was that why Grace had died-because in breaking through the dead layers obscuring the past, she had found out something about the Aroostook Baptists that nobody was ever supposed to discover? More and more I wanted to return to Maine, to confront Jack Mercier and Carter Paragon. I felt that my pursuit of Mr. Pudd was drawing me away from the investigation into Grace's death, yet somehow Pudd and the Fellowship had a part to play in all that had occurred. He was linked to her passing in some way, of that I was certain, but he wasn't the weak link. Paragon was, and he would have to be confronted if I was to understand what had driven someone to end Grace's life.
But first, there was Mickey Shine. I had checked the Village Voice and found the exhibition listings. The Cloisters, which housed the Metropolitan Museum's medieval collection, was hosting a visiting exhibition on artistic responses to the Apocalypse of St. John. An image of Jack Mercier's bookshelf flashed before my eyes. It seemed that the Met and Mercier currently shared an interest in books and paintings about the end of the world.
I left Chumley's shortly after ten, patting the sleeping dogs one last time for luck as I went. The warm, damp smell of them was still on my hands as I walked beneath the shrouded sky, the noise of the city seeming to rebound back on itself from above. A shadow moved in a doorway to my right, but I paid it no heed and allowed it to move unchallenged behind me.
I passed through the streetlights, and my footsteps echoed hollowly on the ground beneath my feet.
Bone is porous; after years of burial, it will assume the same color as the soil in which it has been interred. The bones by St. Froid Lake were a rich brown, as if the Aroostook Baptists had become one with the natural world around them, an impression reinforced by the small plants that grew between the remains, fed by decay. Rib cages had become trellises for creeping roots, and the concavity of a skull acted as a nursery for small green shoots.
Their clothing had largely rotted away, since most of it had been made from natural fibers and could not survive decades of burial in the manner of synthetic materials. Water stains on the surrounding trees indicated that the land had flooded on occasion, adding extra layers of mud and rotting vegetation, compressing the bones of the dead farther and farther into the soil. The field recovery, the separation of bone from earth, human from animal, child from adult, would be a painstaking process. It would be completed on hands and knees, with aching backs and cold fingers, all supervised by the forensic anthropologist. State police, sheriff's deputies, wardens, even some anthropology students were drafted to assist with the dig. Since the ME's office had only one vehicle, a Dodge van, with which to transport remains, local undertakers and the National Guard were assisting in the removal of the bodies to nearby Presque Isle, from where Bill's Flying Service would take them down to Augusta.
At St. Froid Lake, orange aluminum arrows, the trademark of the deputy chief ME, had been used to create an archaeological square, enclosed and protected by lengths of string. An array of seemingly primitive but ultimately necessary equipment had been brought to bear on the scene: line levels to measure the depth of the remains below the surface; flat-bladed shovels and trowels with which to dig, aware always that the bones could be damaged by a careless movement; handheld screens for sifting small pieces of evidence-a quarter-inch mesh screen first, followed by a standard window screen; tapes; graph paper for drawing a site map depicting the area as seen from above, the position of the remains being added to the map as they were uncovered; plastic bags, bright blue heavy-duty body bags, and waterproof pens; metal detectors to search for guns or other metallic debris; and cameras, to photograph items and artifacts as they were revealed.
As each artifact was uncovered it was photographed, then marked and sealed, an adhesive label attached to the container detailing the case number, the date and time of discovery, a description of the item, its location, and the signature of the investigator who had recovered it. The item was then transported to a secure evidence storage facility, in this case the offices of the ME in Augusta.
Soil samples were taken from the carefully piled earth and bagged. Had the soil by the lake been only slightly more acidic, the remains might simply have vanished and the only sign that they had ever been there would have come from the flourishing plant life above, nourished by flesh and bone. As it was, animal predation, erosion, and scattering had resulted in missing and damaged limbs, but sufficient evidence remained to be examined by the specialists assembled by the ME's office. They included-in addition to the forensic anthropologist, the ME's own permanent staff, and the scientists at the state lab in Augusta-an anatomist, three dental teams to act as forensic odontologists, and the radiologist at the Maine General Medical Center in Augusta. Each would bring to bear his or her own specialist knowledge in a formal identification of the remains.
The remains had been identified as human by an examination of the intact bones, and the sex of the victims would be confirmed by further examinations of the skull, pelvis, femur, sternum, and teeth, where teeth could be found. Age estimates of those victims under the age of twenty-five, accurate to within one year or so, would be made from teeth, where teeth remained, and from the appearance and fusion of the ossification centers and epiphyses, the end parts of the long bones, which grow separately from the shaft in early life. In the case of older bones, radiological examinations of the trabecular pattern in the head of the humerus and femur, which remodels with age, would be used, in addition to changes in pubic symphysis.
Height would be calculated by measuring the femur, tibia, and fibula of the victims, arm bones being less reliable in such cases. Dental remains would be used to make a preliminary racial determination, dental characteristics associated predominantly with particular races enabling the likelihood of the victims being Caucasoid, Negroid, or Mongoloid to be assessed.
Finally, dental records, radiological examination of the remains for evidence of fractures, and comparative DNA tests would all be brought to bear in an effort to make positive identifications of the personal identities of the victims. In this case, facial reconstruction and photosuperimposition (the overlaying of a photograph of the suspected victim over a transparency of the skull, now largely done on-screen) might have assisted the investigation, since photographs existed of the suspected victims, but the state had made no budgetary provisions for photosuperimposition techniques, mainly because those with their hands on the purse strings didn't really understand what the process entailed. They didn't understand the mechanics of DNA testing either. They didn't have to; they just knew that it worked.