8
Lying on the bed of her room at the Cloud Nine Motel in Basalt, Colorado, Corrie made her decision. If those marks on the bones were what she thought they might be, her problems would be solved. There wouldn’t be any choice: the remains would have to be examined. Even Kermode couldn’t stop it. That would be her trump card.
But only if she could prove it.
And to do that, she needed access to the bones one more time. Five minutes, tops — just long enough to photograph them with the powerful macro lens on her camera.
But how?
Even before she asked herself the question, she knew the answer: she would have to break in.
All the arguments against such an action lined themselves up before her: that B&E was a felony; that it was ethically wrong; that if she got caught, her entire law enforcement career would be flushed down the toilet. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be all that difficult. During their visit two days before, the chief hadn’t turned off any alarm systems or other security devices; he’d simply unlocked a padlock on the door and they had walked in. The shed was isolated from the rest of the development, surrounded by a tall wooden fence and screened by trees. It was partly open to one of the ski slopes, but nobody would be skiing at night. The shed was marked on trail maps of the area, and they showed a service road leading to it from the equipment yard of the ski area itself, bypassing The Heights entirely.
As she weighed the pros and cons, she found herself asking the question: what would Pendergast do? He never let legal niceties stand in the way of truth and justice. Surely he would break in and get the information he needed. While it was too late to achieve justice for Emmett Bowdree, it was never too late for the truth.
The snow had stopped at midnight, leaving a brilliantly clear night sky with a three-quarter moon. It was extremely cold — according to the WeatherBug app on her iPad, it was five degrees. Outside, it felt a lot colder than that. The service road turned out to be snowmobile-only, covered with hard-packed snow but still walkable.
Leaving her car at the very base of the road, by a tall stand of trees and as inconspicuous as possible, Corrie labored uphill, her knapsack heavy with gear: the Canon with tripod and macro, a portable light and battery pack, loupes, flashlight, bolt cutter, ziplock bags, and her iPad loaded with textbooks and monographs on the subject of osteological trauma analysis. The thin mountain air left her gasping, the smoke of her condensing breath blossoming in the moonlight as she hiked, her feet squeaking in the layer of fluff atop the hard-packed snow. Below, the lights of the town spread out in a magical carpet; above, she could see the warehouse, illuminated by lights on poles and casting a yellow glow through the fir trees. It was two o’clock in the morning and all was quiet. The only activity was some headlights high on the mountain, where the grooming equipment was being operated.
Again and again, she had choreographed in her head the exact series of steps she’d need to take, rearranging and refining them to ensure that she would spend as little time in the shed as possible. Five minutes, ten at most — and she’d be gone.
Approaching the shed, she did a careful recon to assure herself that she was alone. Then she stepped up to the fence gate and peered over it. To the left was the side door that she and the chief had used, illuminated in a pool of light, the snow well beaten down before it. The door was securely padlocked. By habit, she carried a set of lock picks. In high school, she had practically memorized the underground manual known as the MIT Guide to Lockpicking, and she took great pride in her skills. The padlock was a ten-dollar, hardware-store variety — no problem there. But she would have to cross the lighted area in order to reach the door. And then she’d have to stand in the light while dealing with the lock. This was one of two elements of unavoidable danger in her plan.
She waited, listening, but all was quiet. The grooming machines were high up on the mountain and didn’t look like they’d be passing by anytime soon.
Taking a deep breath, she vaulted the fence and darted across the lighted area. She had her set of lock picks ready. The lock itself was freezing, and her fingers quickly grew stupid in the cold. Nevertheless it took only twenty seconds for the padlock to spring open. She pulled the door ajar, ducked inside, and gently closed it behind her.
Inside the shed it was very cold. Fumbling a small LED light out of her backpack, she flicked it on and quickly moved past the rows of snowmobiles and antique snowcats to the rear of the structure. The coffins, laid out in neat rows, gleamed dully in her light. It only took a moment to find Emmett Bowdree’s coffin. She removed the lid with care, trying to keep the noise to a minimum, then knelt, playing the light over the bones. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and her hands were shaking. Once again, a voice inside her pointed out that this was one of the dumbest things she’d ever done, and once again another voice responded that it was the only thing she could do.
Get a grip, she whispered to herself. Focus.
Following her mental script, Corrie pulled off her gloves again, laid her backpack on the ground, and unzipped it. She quickly inserted a loupe to her eye, tugged the gloves back on, pulled out the broken femur she’d noticed before, and peered at it under the light. The bone showed several long, parallel scrapes in the cortical surface. She examined them carefully for any sign of healing, bone remodeling or periosteal uplifting, but there was none. The longitudinal marks were clean, fresh, and showed no sign of an osseous reaction. That meant the scraping had occurred perimortem: at the time of death.
No bear could have made a mark like this. It had been done with a crude tool, perhaps the blade of a dull knife, and — clearly — it had been done to strip the flesh from the bones.
But could she be sure? Her field experience was so limited. Removing her gloves again, she fumbled out her iPad and called up one of her school e-textbooks, Trauma Analysis. She looked through the illustrations of antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem injuries, including some with scrapes similar to these, and compared the illustrations with the bone in her hand. They confirmed her initial impression. She tried to warm her frozen fingers by breathing on them, but that didn’t work and so she pulled her gloves back on and beat her hands together as quietly as she could. That brought back a little sensation.
Now she had to photograph the damaged bone. Once again the gloves had to come off. She hauled out the portable light, battery pack, and small tripod from her backpack. Next came her digital camera, with the massive macro lens attachment that had cost her a fortune. She screwed the camera into the mount and set it up. Placing the bone on the floor, she arranged things as best she could in the dark, then flicked on the light.
This was the second danger point — the light would be visible from outside. But it was absolutely indispensable. She had arranged things so that it would be on for the shortest possible amount of time, without a red flag of turning it off and on — and so that right afterward she could pack up and leave.
God, it was bright, casting a glow over everything. She quickly positioned the camera and focused. She took a dozen photos as quickly as she could, moving the bone a little bit each time and adjusting the light for a raking effect. As she did this, she noticed, under the strong glare, something else on the bone: apparent tooth marks. She stopped just a moment to examine them with the loupe. They were indeed tooth marks, but not those of a grizzly: they were far too feeble, too close together, and with too flat a crown. She photographed them from several angles.
She hurriedly put the bone back in the coffin, and moved on to the next anomalous mark she’d noticed on her first visit — the broken skull. The cranium showed massive trauma, the skull and face literally crushed. The biggest and, it seemed, first blow had occurred to the right of the parietal bone, shattering the skull in a star pattern and separating it along the sutures. These, too, were clearly perimortem injuries, for the simple reason that survival was impossible after such a violent blow. The green-bone nature of the fractures indicated they had occurred when the bone was still fresh.