But Not Fortuitous Page 7

  “Well,” she said, “this looks like a bag of puzzle pieces.”

  I shifted my feet. “Yeah, we had a bit of an accident while trying to get him out of the ground.”

  “Understandable.” She glanced in our direction. “That was one hell of a storm that blew through here last night. Most people would’ve left the body there and gone back for it later.”

  She put the next film on the viewer and immediately pointed to four bright spots on the left side of the jaw. “He got his jaw broken at some point,” she explained. “They had to insert pins for support.”

  “That can help with the identification, right?” I asked, feeling hopeful.

  “Absolutely, but we need a name first,” she explained. “Without a name, we wouldn’t even know where to begin looking. There’s no database we can access that lists everyone who had pins inserted in their jaws—but wouldn’t that be cool?”

  I nodded, thinking it was not impossible to think it could happen in the future. After all, merely forty years ago no one would’ve thought we’d have an international database of DNA profiles.

  Dr. Wong suddenly leaned close to study a spot on the X-ray. She squinted. It appeared that something had caught her attention. Without saying a word, she pulled on some gloves and hurried to the table. Her assistant had cleaned off the bones that were protruding from the clothes, and she titled the skull away from her.

  When she moved the skull, I heard something rattle inside the skull. Amy and I glanced at each other and joined Dr. Wong.

  “What’d you find?” I asked.

  “It appears there’s a bullet hole in the right side of the parietal bone, and something is rattling around inside his skull.” She grabbed a set of long alligator forceps and carefully guided it through an opening in the skull. When she withdrew the forceps from the hole, it held a small object. It appeared to be a lead projectile and the striations from the bore of the weapon that fired it were still present at the base of the bullet. “Eureka! This man was shot in the head, and this is the bullet that killed him.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I indicated the empty holster and said to Dr. Wong, “There was a loaded revolver in that holster, and four bullets had been fired.”

  She nodded, considering what it might mean while she secured the bullet in a small evidence collection container. She then handed it to her assistant, so he could write the recovery date and time on the attached label.

  “What do you think happened?” she asked. “One bullet in the head, four fired rounds, and the gun ends up in his holster? Pretty strange.”

  “Yeah, it is strange.” I shrugged. “I guess it’s possible someone put the revolver back in the holster when they buried him, but I’ve got no clue what happened before he was buried. It’s anyone’s guess, really.”

  Dr. Wong leaned close to the skull and examined the hole. “The wound is nice and circular, so it wasn’t a contact wound. As you already know, this suggests it wasn’t self-inflicted.”

  I glanced where she pointed and nodded my agreement when I saw the clean hole. I also marveled at the condition of the skull. It looked a lot different than it had last night, when mud was clumped into the eye sockets and smeared across the entire surface. Even the clothes looked different, now that the mud had been rinsed off of it. The shirt appeared to be a khaki shirt, although it had seen much better days, and the pants were dark-colored, maybe navy blue at one time.

  We watched intently as the assistant carefully removed the clothes. The fabric had dried out in the ground over the years and the fabric was brittle. When he had cut off the pants and spread them out on an examination table, I noticed that the right seat of the pants was hanging loose. I tapped my chest.

  “That was me,” I explained. “I was trying to slide him onto a spinal board and the pants ripped.”

  “Is there anything in the pocket?” Amy asked.

  The assistant checked the dangling pocket, shook his head. He checked the other back pocket, and it was also empty. He then reached his slender hand into the front pockets. I held my breath as he withdrew his hand. It was empty.

  I glanced at Amy as the assistant checked the last pocket. She shrugged and, like me, I knew she wasn’t expecting much. We were right.

  “Thirty-seven cents.” The assistant rinsed off the coins and then held them up in his palm. “One quarter, one dime, and two pennies. That’s it—nothing else.”

  “He must’ve definitely been a cop,” Amy mumbled. “He was broke when he died, just like I’ll be.”

  I nodded my agreement as I studied the coins in the palm of the assistant’s hand. They had been pretty well preserved, and the quarter appeared shiny new. I was about to move away from the examination table when a thought occurred to me. “Hey, how old are those coins?”

  The assistant pulled them close and examined them one at a time, water still dripping from his hands. “The quarter is from thirty-three years ago, one of the pennies is from thirty-eight years ago, the other penny is from forty-two years ago, and the dime is from thirty-five years ago.”

  “So, the most recent coin was from thirty-three years ago,” I mused allowed. “If these coins were dated the years they were produced, then we know he could’ve been in the ground for up to thirty-three years, but not longer.”

  “What about the shirt pockets?” Amy asked the assistant. “Anything in them?”

  He checked the shirt pockets, but shook his head.

  Next, he laid the gun belt and holster out on a table, where Amy and I could visually examine it. I was hoping for a name or some other type of identifier stamped into the back of the weathered leather, but we had no such luck. Every loop was filled.

  “What kind of gun was it?” Dr. Wong asked as she busied herself working on the skeletal remains.

  “A Ruger GP-100, which first came into production about thirty-four years ago,” I explained, still checking the leather. “The timeframe is consistent with the coins. I’ll be able to narrow it down further by checking the serial number on the gun.”

  “You can do that?” she asked.

  “Yep.” I checked the bullets that were shoved into the loops of the gun belt. They were heavily corroded, but I was able to copy the information on the headstamp, which confirmed they were all .357 caliber cartridges.

  “There’s nothing here, Clint,” Amy said with a sigh after we’d gone over the items carefully, photographing each as we inspected them.

  I turned away from the table and approached Dr. Wong. She was studying the skeletal remains closely. Some of the bones had broken loose from the torso during the spill, and she was now piecing the body back together like a full-size puzzle.

  I shifted my feet, feeling restless. “Hey, Doc, how long do you think this’ll take?”

  “Oh, I’ll be here a while.” She paused and looked at me through the face shield. “We’ve got to measure every bone, inspect them for evidence of old fractures or medical procedures, search for signs of injury, and on and on. It could easily take a few days to complete a thorough examination.”

  “What can your examination possibly reveal?”

  “We can determine the individual’s gender and approximate age, and Mary can reconstruct the face for a possible identification.”

  As I figured, nothing they discovered would be of immediate assistance in solving the case, and I mentioned as much.

  “You’re right,” Dr. Wong acknowledged. “Most of what we find will help to verify his identification and to tell a story about what happened to him, but your investigation will have to uncover some possible names for comparison purposes. If we have to wait for Mary to reconstruct his face so we can send a photo out to the media for identification, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a long time.”

  That was all I needed to hear. After collecting the gun belt and the projectile for evidence—I left the clothes behind to be examined by Dr. Mary Roach—I asked Dr. Wong to call if she needed anything, and then I waved for Amy to follow me.
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br />   “Where’re we going?” Amy asked once we were outside.

  I frowned when I saw the sheets of rain pouring down all around us. I wanted to go back to the burial site, but it would be impossible to inspect the hole in this rain. Had it not been raining, I could’ve pumped out the hole and started inspecting it further, but at this rate, the hole would be filling faster than any pump could drain it.

  “We need to divide and conquer,” I finally said to Amy. “One of us needs to bring the evidence to the crime lab and the other needs to canvass the neighborhoods surrounding North Project Road. I think it’ll be a waste of time, but it needs to be done just in case someone saw or heard something that might help to break this case wide open—because right now, we’ve got nothing. We need to get with the local papers and research articles from—say—twenty to thirty-three years ago to find out if a lawman ever went missing. We also need to go to the assessor’s office and find out the next of kin for that plat of land. They might’ve heard rumors about something taking place thirty-plus years ago on their land.”

  “I’ll take the crime lab and the assessor’s office,” she said without hesitation.

  I nodded and we jogged to our vehicles and headed back to the police department. Once we’d arrived, we met Susan and Regan in the break room. I grabbed a handful of paper towels to wipe the rain from my face and hair. I then started making a sandwich.

  “Regan rolls into town and suddenly the skies open up,” Amy said playfully from the other side of the room. “That girl’s always been trouble. I can tell y’all some stories.”

  Regan shot an evil look in Amy’s direction. “Keep it up and I’ll tell them about that one night in college.”

  Amy shook out her blonde hair and water dripped down her shoulders. She smiled. “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, but—”

  “You do regret not doing a few things,” Regan said, finishing Amy’s sentence. The two women laughed. Amy patted her hair dry with a towel from the kitchen drawer and then began making herself a sandwich.

  “Anything come out of the autopsy?” Susan asked, twisting around in her chair to see me.

  As I put the finishing touches on my triple-decker sandwich, I told her what we’d learned. “Basically, we’ve got a guy—possibly a cop—who was shot in the head and buried. Thanks to some coins in his pocket, we think he’s been dead for up to thirty-three years. His gun was still in his holster and might provide a more accurate timeframe. There was also a projectile rolling around in his head that might help identify the murder weapon—if we ever find one.”

  I took my plate and sat across from Susan and Regan while I continued. “On Monday night, decades after he was planted, someone decides to dig him up—for Lord knows why—but a young boy interrupts that process and ends up buried on top of the man. That about sums it up and it makes no sense whatsoever.”

  “Could it have been a suicide?” Susan wanted to know. “What if his family buried his body to hide the fact that he committed suicide? Suicide is taboo in some circles. Hell, they might’ve done it for the insurance money. After so many years of being missing, can’t the missing person be declared dead and the insurance company forced to pay up? Wait a minute”—her face scrunched up—“I was barely born thirty-three years ago. Did they even have life insurance back then?”

  I was chewing on a mouthful of food and almost choked from laughing. When I swallowed, I said, “It wasn’t a contact wound and, while it’s possible he held the gun away from his head and shot himself, I’m thinking it was a homicide. If you’re going to kill yourself, you want to make sure you do it right. Holding the gun away from his head would’ve increased the chances of a failed attempt.”

  Regan tucked a lock of long, black hair behind her ear and asked, “What if the bullet in his head was fired from the gun in his holster?”

  I stopped chewing and stared at her. She had porcelain skin, which would probably burn red in the Louisiana sun.

  “I wouldn’t like that one bit,” I finally said.

  “Why not?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it be good to have the murder weapon?”

  “I’d rather find the murder weapon in the hands of the killer, rather than in the holster of the victim.” I sighed. “If the murder weapon and the victim are found in the same hole, and if we can’t get DNA from the weapon, we’re dead in the water—literally.”

  CHAPTER 15

  After our late lunch, Amy headed for the crime lab with the evidence and the scientific analysis request sheet in her hand. We were asking for the revolver to be scrubbed for DNA and then tested against the projectile to hopefully exclude it from being the murder weapon. If our victim had been killed with his own weapon, then I’d have to seriously consider the fact that he might have taken his own life. While difficult to pull off, crazier things had happened.

  As for me, I’d asked Lindsey to run the Ruger revolver through the NCIC database to see if it had ever been reported stolen, but there was no record on file. Next, I sent out a request to the ATF for a weapon’s trace, and then I began researching the serial number to determine the production date.

  I started on Ruger’s website and found a chart that displayed a list of serial numbers in a column to the left, with the corresponding year of production in a column to the right. I checked my notes for the weapon’s serial number and slid my finger down the sheet to find where it fit. I smiled.

  “What’re you smiling about?” Susan asked from my doorway. “Did you break the case?”

  “Oh, hey there, Mountain Lion,” I said, leaning back in my chair and gingerly reaching for my shoulder where she had clawed me earlier in the morning during sex. “I didn’t see you standing there.”

  Her tanned face suddenly turned red and she shot a quick glance up and down the hall. “Don’t say that! Someone will hear you.”

  “I was able to pinpoint the outer edge of the burial time period,” I said, ignoring her admonition. “The weapon in our victim’s holster was produced thirty years ago, so he couldn’t have purchased it before then. This means he was buried within the last thirty years—no earlier.”

  “And this helps us how?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I jumped to my feet and pulled on my raincoat. I then grabbed my notebook. “I’m off to canvass Mechant Loup-North. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

  “Want some company?” she offered. “Regan’s riding around with Baylor and I’ve got some time.”

  I welcomed the help and we headed out together. We began at the Mechant Loup bridge, on the western side of the highway, and worked our way north through each neighborhood. She took one side of the street and I took the other. There were short breaks in the rain, but, for the most part, we were rained on most of the time. It was hard to keep the pages in our notebooks dry, but it didn’t really matter, because we learned nothing of substance.

  Once we’d knocked on every door on every street on the western side of the highway, we switched to the eastern side and began canvassing those neighborhoods. When we reached the end of North Boulevard, I leaned in close to Susan, allowing my hood to overlap hers so she could hear me over the driving rain.

  “Remember that house?” I pointed to a mansion at the end of the street. We had worked a heinous murder case in front of that house some time back, and it had made a lasting impression on most of us.

  She nodded. “How could I ever forget?”

  We walked up the long driveway together and rang the doorbell, but no one answered. Turning, we continued working our way to the north, and ended up completing the canvass an hour later.

  Before heading back to the office, I drove to the end of North Project Road, crossed the wooden bridge, and parked on the headland. I shut off my engine.

  “What’re you thinking?” Susan asked, looking from me to the rain pounding the windshield.

  “I want to check out the gravesite.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  We were already wearing our rubber boots, so we dumped ou
t of my Tahoe and lowered our heads against the driving rain. We started the long hike through the woods. Once we hit the trees, the umbrella of branches and leaves above us offered some reprieve from the relentless downpour, but it did nothing to help the saturated ground. The water was at least eight inches deep in most areas, but reached the top edges of our boots in some places.

  It was only five o’clock in the afternoon, but the dark clouds and trees made it appear closer to nine, so we were forced to pull out our flashlights.

  “If this rain doesn’t stop,” Susan hollered over the thunder that rumbled overhead, “we’ll never be able to retrieve the tent.”

  I nodded and paused to wipe water out of my eyes and check our surroundings. I didn’t recognize a single landmark and the ground had been reduced to a shallow pond. Susan nudged my arm and pointed to our right, where her flashlight illuminated an alligator that was lounging on a log. It looked to be a little more than seven feet long.

  “I bet they’re everywhere” she said, drawing her pistol. “I’m not getting eaten by an alligator today. I’m just not in the mood.”

  I had personally watched a man lose his arm and nearly his life to an alligator, so I wasn’t about to object to her level of apprehension. My eyes finally fixed on a tree to our left. I recognized it and headed in that direction. It was a lucky find. Once we reached it, I saw the yellow police tape flapping in the wind about a hundred yards away.

  “We’re almost there.” I pointed in that direction, where a giant oak tree stood guard over the crime scene. “There’s the gravesite.”

  Encouraged by the sighting, Susan pushed by me and high-stepped it to the area. Once we’d reached the crime scene tape, she scanned our surroundings until she found a downed tree that was sticking out of the water. Without hesitation, she grabbed onto a branch and pulled herself out of the water. She didn’t holster her pistol.