Death Night

“All great things.”

Flattery. Straight to the plus column every time.

“He even told me how you like your coffee.” Lucy reached across the front seat of her Beetle, emerging with a giant thermos. “Black and strong, right?”

This was a tough one. Under any other circumstance, bringing coffee earned a place in the plus column. But Kat had practically a whole pot of java sloshing around in her stomach, and while the caffeine kept her mind alert, it wasn’t sitting well with the rest of her body. Still, it was the thought that counted. Another plus.

Lucy must have seen the uncertain look on her face because she said, “You just had some, didn’t you? Considering the hour, I should have known.”

“No, it’s fine,” Kat said. “I just should have had some food with it, I think.”

Lucy reached deep into the car again, this time returning with a flat box tied shut with some string. “Then it’s a good thing I also brought doughnuts.”

That was the moment Kat gave up trying to keep score. Lucy had passed with flying colors.

“So, these bones were found in the history museum?” she asked Kat once they entered the morgue.

“In a crawl space under the floorboards. They were in a trunk that a murder victim was found on top of.”

“Any indication that the victim knew they were there?”

“Not that I know of,” Kat said. “Our theory is that the body was put there by whoever killed her.”

“So these bones might not have anything to do with the murder.”

“Or they might be the key to solving it.”

Kat took the bag of bones to the morgue’s second autopsy suite, the first one being presently occupied by Wallace Noble and the body of Constance Bishop. Inside, she dumped the bones onto a stainless steel table in the center of the room.

Lucy grabbed a white lab coat and some latex gloves, putting them on before approaching the table. “Is this everything that was found in the trunk?”

“The whole shebang,” Kat said.

“Well, right off the bat, I can tell that these are some old bones.” Lucy started sliding them around the table, putting them in order from top to bottom. “I already see some bone rot.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to tell how old they are?”

“Possibly. Nothing exact, mind you. Maybe a ballpark figure.”

“That’s better than nothing.”

Kat retreated to a corner of the autopsy suite and grabbed a doughnut, munching on it while she watched Lucy work. For her part, Lucy was all business as she studied the bones. She arranged them slowly and methodically, occasionally pausing to give one a closer inspection.

“These are pretty well preserved,” she said, picking up a hand with fingers permanently splayed. She examined the back of the hand, then the palm, then the back again, swiveling it in a kind of morbid wave. “And while I can already tell this isn’t a complete skeleton, there’s a lot less scatter than I thought there’d be.”

“Scatter?”

“A body left out in the open never stays in one piece for very long. Animals usually come along quickly, taking bones with them. A corpse left in a forest could be scattered for miles within two weeks.”

Although she’d taken only two bites of her doughnut, Kat returned it to the box and closed the lid. Hearing about scattered bodies made her no longer hungry. “Since that didn’t happen in this case, then it means the body was buried.”

Lucy looked up from the table, a flash of approval in her blue eyes. “Nick told me you were a quick study.”

“Thanks, but I had help,” Kat said. “We found dirt with the bones.”

“How did it smell?”

“Pardon?”

“The dirt. Did it smell fresh?”

“A little bit. Not as overpowering as a freshly plowed field, but close enough.”

Holding the skull to her nose, Lucy sniffed deeply. “I see what you mean. That smell doesn’t come from the dirt itself. It comes from microbes that are in the dirt, which die off and fade away.”

“So this was all dug up very recently,” Kat said.

“Within a day or two.”

Kat couldn’t help but be impressed. It was clear that Lucy Meade was whip smart. Another mark in the already cluttered plus column.

“You’ve told me more in five minutes than I could have found out in five hours,” she said.

“Glad I could help,” Lucy replied. “Now, if we’re lucky, I’ll also be able to find out how old the person was when she died and what killed her.”

“She?” Kat emerged from the corner and edged close to the table. “How can you tell?”

Lucy pointed to a section of bones in the center of the table. They formed the shape of a wide heart, with a large hole in the center.

“The pelvis,” she said. “It’s bigger in women than in men, thanks to our childbearing capabilities. And if I was a betting woman, I’d go all-in on the fact that our Jane Doe here had at least one child of her own.”

By that point, Lucy had finished arranging the bones on the table so that they were in the same order as the human body—skull on top, broken-off toes at the bottom. She pulled an iPhone from the front pocket of her jeans and started circling the table, taking pictures of the bones.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to send these to a colleague of mine in Harrisburg. He knows more about identifying the age of bones than I do.”

“Would it be better if he saw one of them himself?” Kat asked.

“That would help.” Lucy shoved the phone back into a front pocket of her jeans. “You want me to head over there?”

“Seriously?”

“Sure,” Lucy said. “It’s not that far of a drive. And with the equipment he has, we might be able to tell you with some accuracy how old these bones really are.”

Kat didn’t know whether to hug Lucy, jump for joy, or both. Instead, she added a gigantic checkmark in her mental plus column.

“Take whatever bone you want,” she said. “Any information you can get will be more than we know now.”

Lucy’s hands hovered over the table as she decided which bone to choose. Furrowing her brow and biting her lower lip, she resembled a kid in a candy store who was told she could buy only one item. Much like what a kid would do, she settled on the biggest one—the femur.