A Merciful Silence (Mercy Kilpatrick #4)(98)

The cold faded away.

The skull was present, along with most of the ribs and the longer bones of the extremities. At the far end of the tent, two male techs in down jackets sifted buckets of dirt and rocks through a screen, painstakingly searching for smaller bones. A huge, gaping hole in the concrete wall of the crawl space under the building indicated where the remains had been discovered.

“Don’t step on anything,” said Dr. Peres.

Nice to see you too.

“Morning.” Lacey nodded in Dr. Peres’s general direction and tried to slow her racing heart. Her eyes studied the surreal scene. Bones, buckets, and bitch.

Dr. Victoria Peres, a forensic anthropologist, was known as a strict ball breaker in her field, and she didn’t take flak from anyone. At six feet tall, she was an Amazon incarnate. A recovery site was her kingdom, and no one dared step within breathing distance of her sites before she gave her assent. And don’t dream of touching anything without permission. Anything.

When she grew up, Lacey wanted to be Dr. Peres.

Lacey had worked with the demanding doctor on four recoveries before the doctor trusted her work. But that didn’t mean Dr. Peres liked Lacey; Dr. Peres didn’t like anyone.

Black-framed glasses with itty-bitty lenses balanced on the narrow ridge of the doctor’s nose. As usual, her long black hair was in a perfect knot at her neck. No stray hairs had escaped the knot, even though the doctor had been on-site for five hours.

“Nice you could make the party.” Dr. Peres glanced at her watch and raised one brow.

“I had to wait ’til my toenails dried.”

A sharp snort came from the woman and Lacey’s eyes narrowed. Wow. She’d actually made Dr. Peres laugh. Well, sort of. Still, it should give Lacey some bragging rights among the ME’s staff.

“What’d you find?” Lacey’s fingers yearned to start on the puzzle. This was the best part of her job. A mystery to decode.

“White female, age fifteen to twenty-five. We’re pulling her, piece by piece, out of the hole that leads into the building’s crawl space. Over there’s the guy who found her.” Dr. Peres pointed through a plastic tent window to a white-haired man speaking with two of the local police. The man clutched a wiener dog with a graying muzzle to his sunken chest. “He was taking his dog out to do its business and noticed several big chunks of concrete had broken out of the cracked wall. The dog crawled into the hole and when grandpa stuck his hand in to haul out the dog, he got a surprise.”

Dr. Peres gestured at the gaping hole. “I don’t think the body’s been here all that long, and it was skeletal when it was placed.”

“What do you mean?” Lacey’s curiosity rose to code orange. So much for her idea of someone getting stuck under the building.

“I think the hole was recently made and the skeleton shoved in. It was a pile of bones. An undisturbed, decomposing body doesn’t end up in a heap like that.” Dr. Peres’s brows came together in a black slash. “Bones scatter sometimes, depending on the scavengers in the area, but these look like they were dumped out of a sack and pushed into the hole.”

“One skeleton?” Lacey’s gaze darted back to the skull. What kind of freak dumps a skeleton? What kind of freak has a skeleton to dump?

Dr. Peres nodded. “And it looks pretty complete. We’re finding everything—phalanges, metatarsals, vertebrae. But what I don’t understand is why it wasn’t hidden better. They had to know we’d find it. They left the hole wide open and the big concrete chunks on the ground for anyone to trip over.”

“Maybe they were interrupted before they could finish. Cause of death?”

“Don’t know yet.” Dr. Peres’s tone was short. “No obvious blows to the skull and I haven’t found the hyoid, but both femurs are broken in the same spot. The breaks look similar to what you see in a car accident where someone hits a pedestrian with the front bumper.” She frowned. “A high bumper. Not a car. A truck, maybe.”

Lacey’s thighs ached. “Antemortem breaks?”

“Either postmortem or just prior to time of death. No signs of the slightest start of healing.” The doctor was curt, but bent to indicate several wedge-shaped fractures on the femurs.

Lacey’s gaze locked on the cracks as she crammed her mittens into her bag and knelt, automatically slipping her hands into a pair of purple vinyl gloves from a box by the skull. The thin gloves were second nature to her hands.

“Someone hit her with a vehicle and hid the body,” Lacey muttered, drawing a look of disgust from Dr. Peres. Too late, Lacey remembered the woman hated speculation on the cause of death before an exam was finished. Victoria Peres voiced only facts.

Mentally cringing, Lacey stood and self-consciously brushed at her knees. She’d stepped out of line. Not my job to figure out the who, what, where, when, why, or how of the death. She was here to focus on a minute aspect of the skeleton: teeth.

The dirt-sifting technician let out a whoop and added a patella to a growing pile of tiny bones. Dr. Peres picked it up, glanced at it briefly, spun it in her fingers, and assigned it to the left leg on the tarp.

“She seems small.” Too small. She looked like a child.

“She is small. She’ll be around five feet tall or so, but she’s a fully mature woman. Her hips and growth plates tell me that.” Dr. Peres lifted a black brow at Lacey. “Her teeth indicate that too. But that’s your department.”