Spider Bones

“Nice try,” I mouthed, pointing at the phone.

“What?”

“Hadley Perry,” I mouthed again, rolling my eyes.

Da

“Please hold a second.” I pressed the handset to my chest. “Gosh, there’s a woman on the line claiming to be Hadley Perry.”

“Must be Hadley Perry.”

“It’s not going to work.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Payback for showing that slide at AAFS.” I’d Photoshopped Da

“I will get you. Take that to the bank. But adequate revenge will require time and intricate pla

“Come on, Da

“What bombed?”

“Your little farce.”

“What farce?”

“Having a caller pretend to be the chief ME.”

“Wrong guy.” Da

I felt a tiny flame spark in my gut.

“Are you serious?”

“Totally.”

Uh-oh.

“Are you still there, Dr. Perry?”

“Yes.” Terse.

“We have a terrible co

She provided the number.

I clicked off and dialed.

“Aloha. Honolulu medical examiner.”

“Dr. Bre

“Hold, please.”

Perry picked up right away.

“I’m sorry. What I was hearing didn’t make sense. Lord knows what was coming through on your end.” Nervous laugh. “This phone jumbles sound when the signal gets weak.” Dear God, I was rambling. “How can I help you?”

Perry repeated what she’d said earlier. Homicide, body parts, young male, help.

“Can’t someone local assist you?”

“No.”

I waited. She didn’t elaborate.

“There are board-certified anthropologists at the CIL.” I glanced at Da

“And they often help me out, Dr. Bre

“I’m in Honolulu for only a very short time.”

“I know that.”

Oh? I leaned back in my chair.

“Dr. Perry, I’m committed to resolving a situation at the CIL.”

“That’s military. They quit early. You can work with me after hours.”

Choosing a long bone, Da

“Why me?”

“You’re the best. You said so yourself.”

“I was joking.”

“I’m asking this as a personal favor.”

Far down the line I heard a barely audible voice, like a ghost speaking in some parallel dimension.

Or a nameless victim crying out for justice.

I glanced at Da

“I’ll come by at five thirty,” I said. “But only for an hour.”

After disco

“You overheard?”

“Enough.”

“I assume the two of you don’t get along.”

“Let’s just say Hadley Perry won’t be dining at my house real soon. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help her.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I don’t like her, it’s mutual, we’ll leave it at that.”

Da

For a moment we both stared at the half-cleaned skeleton.

“What did you want to show me?” Da

“It may be nothing.” I scooped up the occipital fragment. “Look at the suture.” I pointed to the squiggly line.

“Complex, with lots of accessories.” Da

I passed him the chunk of maxilla that had produced the mushroom-duck thing.

“Broad palate. Straight transverse suture, not bulging up over the midline.” He viewed the bone face-on. “The zygomaxillary suture is angled, not S-shaped.” He rotated it so the missing nose would have pointed skyward. “Cheekbones probably had some flare.”

Da

“You’re thinking this guy might be Vietnamese?”

I shook my head. “You’re right those traits say Mongoloid ancestry. But others suggest Caucasoid. The high nasal bridge, the narrow nasal aperture, the moderately shaped skull, neither long and narrow nor short and broad.”

“So, mixed race?”

“European-Asian or European–Native American.”

“We had troops who would fit that bill. American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Filipinos. Not many, but they were over there fighting for us.”

“What about the missing crew member? Did you learn if the fourth body was ever found?”

“Not yet.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“I’m still waiting for a response to my inquiry.”

For the rest of that day we teased charred tissue and moldy fabric from bone.

By five a fully cleaned skeleton lay on the table.

The exposed bone produced no breakthrough moment.

Honolulu’s medical examiner operates out of a curvilinear white structure on Iwilei Road just a short walk from Chinatown. Next door is the largest Salvation Army facility I have ever seen.

At precisely five thirty I pulled under an arch and into a small lot beside the building. Hadley Perry answered my buzz in person. The pictures I’d seen in the Honolulu Advertiser hardly prepared me.

Perry was a slim woman with disproportionately large breasts and a penchant for what Katy called “haute hooker” makeup. Her short black hair was gelled into spikes, several of which were fire engine red.

“Hadley Perry.” She shot out a hand.

I offered mine.

Perry’s grip could have molded forged steel.

“Thanks so much for coming.”

“I’m not sure I can help.” Wiggling my fingers to check for fractures.

“But you’ll give it the old one-two, eh?” Perry launched a punch to my biceps that really hurt. “Let’s have at it.”

Good Lord. Who was this woman?

I followed Perry through double doors down a polished tile corridor, resisting the urge to massage my throbbing muscle. Bypassing a large, five-table autopsy room, we entered a small chamber not unlike salle 4 at the LSJML. Glass-fronted cabinets, side counter, dissecting scope, hanging scale.

The stainless steel gurney held a plastic-covered mound. Small and lumpy, the shape looked wrong for a human being.

Wordlessly, we both do

Like a waiter presenting the table d’hôte, Perry whipped off the sheeting.

I SWALLOWED HARD.

The remains consisted of five amorphous lumps and an eighteen-inch segment of human lower limb. The skin was puckered and celery green, the underlying tissue gray and textured like pot roast.

Stepping to the table, I bent for a closer look.

The severed leg was sparsely populated with short, dark hairs. Bones were visible deep in the flesh, a partial femur up, a partial tibia and fibula below. All three shafts terminated in jagged spikes. Bones, skin, and muscle were scored by gouges, cuts, and parallel slashes.

“It’s a knee, right?” Perry asked.

“Left. This came from the ocean?”

“Yeah. Check out the X-rays.”

Perry crossed to a double-tiered illuminator, flipped two switches, and tapped a film lying on the box’s horizontal surface. I joined her.

An object glowed white within a segment of flesh. Bean-sized, it looked like a cartoon whitecap.

“Shark tooth,” I said.

“Yeah. There are others.” A blue-lacquered nail jabbed two more films.

“You’re thinking death by shark attack?”

Perry waggled a hand. Maybe yes, maybe no. “I see no hemorrhage in the tissue.”

Dead hearts don’t pump. Bleeding at a trauma site usually means the victim was alive when injured. No blood usually means the hit was taken postmortem.

“Could the absence of hemorrhage be explained by immersion in salt water?”

“Sure.”

“So the dismemberment could have resulted from postmortem scavenging.”