“The house is at 119 Amherst Drive. If he’s not there, you might see if he’s shown up at his job. He
works at the Walmart out on the bypass.”
“And if we need to reach you, is this the best number?”
“Probably,” said Angie. “But let me give you my office number, too.” She rattled it off. “That’s the crime lab at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. ”
“I’ll send a unit to check on him, ma’am, and we’ll contact you as soon as we know anything.”
“Okay, thanks very much,” Angie said. She hung up, then phoned her husband. “Listen to this,” she said, and told him what had just transpired.
* * *
Half an hour later, as she and I were beginning to excavate the seventh and final grave, her phone rang. She glanced at the display and drew a deep breath. “Angie St. Claire.”
The volume was cranked up high, and I could hear the sheriff’s voice clearly, even though her cell wasn’t on speakerphone. “Ms. St. Claire, this is Sheriff Etheridge, up in Cheatham County, Georgia. I’m calling to ask if you could come up and see me today, please.”
“Have you talked to Don? Did he confess?”
“I need to speak with you in person, ma’am.”
“Sheriff, I’m working a big crime scene right now, the murders at the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory. I’ll be glad to come up there if there’s a good reason, but I’d appreciate knowing what’s going on. Has Don Nicely confessed to killing my sister?”
There was a long silence on the other end. Finally the sheriff said, “Ms. St. Claire, your brother-in-law is dead, and I need a statement from you. How soon could you come in and do that?”
“I’m out in Miccosukee County, Sheriff, about an hour west of Tallahassee. I can probably be there in about ninety minutes.” She hesitated, then asked, “Can you tell me how he died?”
“No, ma’am. We’re not releasing any details until we’ve done a thorough investigation.”
“Of course. I understand. I’ll be at your office in the courthouse as soon as I can.”
She hung up, stared at the phone awhile, and took a series of deep breaths. “He’s dead,” she said. “The man who murdered my sister is dead. Thank God. There is some semblance of justice in this world after all.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. She shook her head, then looked at me. “A thorough investigation. Why is it that the locals spent all of sixty seconds on Kate’s death, but they’re ready to pull out all the stops to investigate that son of a bitch Don’s?”
I shrugged. “He was a man — a white man. That might be part of it.” I hesitated, but decided it would be foolish not to say what was hanging in the air, unspoken between us. “Might also be that they figure somebody had a pretty good reason to kill him.”
“Somebody sure did,” she said. “Mainly his own sorry self.” She called up the text message she’d received. “Look here. He said it himself. ‘I’m sorry.’ That’s for damn sure. As sorry as they come.”
I shifted my gaze from the screen to her exhausted face. “Angie? Is there any chance the sheriff might find anything that could implicate you?”
“No,” she said. She shook her head and then I thought I saw a hint of a smile, so brief and slight and enigmatic I instantly doubted whether I’d seen it. “Not a chance.”
That enigmatic smile scared the hell out of me.
Chapter 27
Angie was back at the scene by late afternoon, looking wrung out. Don Nicely had died from a shotgun blast to the head — a blast virtually identical to the one that had killed Kate. The Cheatham County sheriff had questioned Angie for two hours, she said, and would expect her to come back for another interview soon. The sheriff had also questioned her husband, Ned. Ned had confirmed that she’d been with him all night, at the movies and then at home, but the sheriff seemed unconvinced.
She related this to me as she swept a metal detector over a grave — the outermost of the graves we’d discovered. It was the seventh and last of the graves to be excavated; it was also, I suspected, the last of the graves to have been dug, lying as it did on the outermost margin of the Bone Yard.
The skull, which I’d excavated first, was that of another young white male. Judging by the presence of the twelve-year molars and the partial fusion of the sutures in the palate, his age was probably somewhere between twelve and fifteen. Although I couldn’t be sure, because of the dirt and remnants of tissue on the bone, I didn’t see any skull fractures. The absence of trauma gave me some small hope — foolish, perhaps — that his death had been less brutal than the other boys’ deaths appeared to have been.
The bones were slight of stature, and still not fully developed; the ends of the long bones were not yet fused to the shafts, I saw as I began working inward from the margins, so he — like the others — had still been growing at the time of his death. My guess, which I’d be able to confirm or correct when I examined the teeth and bones more closely, was that he’d been in his early teens — older than the prepubescent child whose skull had been Jasper’s first find, but certainly younger than the robust lad whose skull had been Jasper’s second find.
So: fourteen, perhaps. His hip bones, though, could have come from an arthritic seventy-year-old.
Viewed from the front, human hip bones show more than a passing resemblance to a big, bony pair of ears — the ears of an African bull elephant, to be specific, spread wide as he’s about to charge. The top of the hip bone, the iliac crest, looks a bit like the ear’s thick upper edge, sculpted in bone. During childhood, the iliac crest is attached to the ear-shaped ilium by cartilage that eventually ossifies, turns to bone, once the hips have finished growing; during adulthood, the sutures fade, just as the sutures in the skull gradually fill in and disappear over the decades of adult life. In this boy’s pelvis, the iliac crest had not yet fully fused, because his growth spurt was just winding down, and the suture was more like a fissure, a valley, than a plain. I’d expected that.
What I hadn’t expected, and what I’d never seen before in any adolescent pelvis, was the arthritic appearance of the hips in the region of the iliac crest. Instead of being smooth and graceful, the bone along the suture line — the bone that had most recently been deposited along the growth plate — was thick, uneven, and lumpy, especially on the right side, though somewhat on the left as well.
As I studied the deformity, the realization of what had caused it dawned on me with chilling horror. When soft tissue or bone is damaged, inflammation occurs. Inflammation is painful, but it’s crucial to healing, especially in broken bones: blood flows to the site of the break, bringing with it an abundant supply of cells that clot into a thick, collagen-rich splice called a “healing callus.” Over the course of six or eight weeks, the collagen matrix in the callus fills in with calcium and becomes new bone. In this boy’s case, I realized, trauma to the hip bones — trauma at the vulnerable growth plate — caused inflammation, creating a callus that calcified into the thick, lumpy contours I was now seeing. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the likely cause of the trauma to the hip bones was a five-foot leather strap, slamming again and again into the buttocks and hips of a growing boy. A boy who lived long enough to heal, in a slightly misshapen way, before being killed.
But what had killed him, months after he survived a beating — perhaps even multiple beatings — that had been forceful enough to deform his hip bones? I hoped the grave would contain the answer.
During Angie’s absence, Rodriguez had done an initial scan with the metal detector before I’d begun excavating, just as we’d done with the six prior graves. Alerted by the detector’s staticky squawk, I’d been watching for metal as I’d troweled down through the shredded plastic and sandy earth, working my way from the edges of the grave inward to the bones. I hadn’t gotten far — only as far as the boy’s right thigh — when I found a piece of metal embedded in the back of the bone. It was a bullet, lodged in the bone in much the same way as the flint arrowhead I’d once found in an Arikara Indian thigh. But the Arikara warrior had been an adult, a warrior, shot in battle; this was a boy, shot
from behind, probably as he ran.
From the legs, I’d worked my way up the pelvis, up the spine, until I reached the third lumbar vertebra, the one centered in the small of the back. That vertebra’s spinous process — the knob jutting from the body of the bone, to give muscles a place to attach — was snapped off, and the vertebral foramen — the channel through which the spinal cord ran — was collapsed. Some powerful blow, possibly from the edge of the heavy leather strap, or more likely from something heavier, like a baseball bat or a metal pipe, had shattered the bone and doubtless crushed the spinal cord. The fracture lines here remained sharp, with no signs of healing. This injury, unlike the trauma to the hip bones, had occurred at or around the time of death.
The damage to the spinal cord would almost surely have paralyzed the boy’s legs. But would it have killed him? Not directly, though if he’d spiraled down into shock, he could have died within hours or even minutes. That theory seemed plausible, but then, as I continued to probe the grave, I found a small bone that forced a new and terrible realization on me. It was the hyoid — the fragile, U-shaped bone from the front of the throat — and it was snapped, the way a chicken’s wishbone would snap if you squeezed its ends together instead of pulling them apart.
I could think of only one sequence of events that fit all the pieces of this skeletal puzzle together: long after the boy’s initial beating or beatings — perhaps he still walked with a limp; perhaps, having been damaged already, he was an easy target for continuing abuse — he’d tried to escape. He’d been shot, then beaten again, so brutally that a vertebra shattered, rendering his legs useless. At that point, realizing things had gone much too far, someone had wrapped a strong, pitiless hand around the boy’s throat and strangled him.