Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(30)

“Please,” I said.

“It’s instant.”

“That’s fine,” I told her. “I’m not fussy.”

“How do you take it?”

“Black.” I answered.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Through the glass walls of her office, I watched Harriet’s progress through the lab, turning on lights as she went. Eventually she paused in an area that appeared to be a tiny kitchenette where she put her dirty dishes in a sink and switched on an electric kettle. At the far end of the lab, she stopped in front of another door where she had to punch a code into an electronic keypad to unlock it. She disappeared inside, letting the door close behind her,

Several long minutes passed before she emerged once more. She did so carrying a banker’s box. The contents couldn’t have been very heavy, because small as she was, she appeared to carry the weight with little or no effort. She deposited the box on the lab table closest to her office door and then beckoned for me to come join her, which I did. As I approached, I caught a glimpse of the label on the end of the box, which read “Geoffrey. 4/25/2008.”

“Bones?” I asked.

Harriet nodded. “Not just bones,” she replied with a smile, “my personal specialty—unidentified bones. A lot of the time when skeletal human remains are located in wilderness areas, they turn out to be Alaska Natives, indigenous people who succumbed to natural causes decades earlier. Often we locate remains of people like hunters, hikers, or skiers who wander out into the woods and end up dying due to misadventure such as accidental falls or drownings. Occasionally we find the remains of homicide victims, and that’s apparently the case with this one,” she added, giving the lid of the box what appeared to be an almost affectionate pat.

“In the spring of 2008, just before the breakup—”

“Breakup?” I interrupted, thinking the topic of conversation had somehow veered into some kind of marital discord. “Whose breakup?”

Harriet sighed. “That’s what people in Alaska call that time of year when the ice breaks up—usually in the late spring. One of the bear-tagging teams working near Eklutna Lake some distance north of here went into the den of a hibernating black bear and noticed something that appeared to be a partial human skull. In the old days, some nitwit most likely would have straightaway gassed both the mama bear and her cubs to death without ever allowing them out of the den. And chances are the bear in this particular den had nothing at all to do with the bones in question, since they looked to have been there for some length of time.

“In any event, since we’re now living in more enlightened times, the tagging team simply notified us about the existence of the remains and sent along the coordinates of the den so we’d be able to locate it later. You’ll be happy to know that we waited until the den was abandoned before sending out a team of graduate students to do the actual work.”

“Graduate students instead of CSIs?” I asked.

“We’re a bit on the underfunded side here,” she said. “We can’t afford CSIs.”

With that, Harriet carefully lifted the lid off the box. I could see there was only one item inside—a partial human skull with jagged holes showing here and there. It resembled a nightmare jigsaw puzzle with several missing pieces. From the multitude of cracks spread across what remained, I could tell that the skull had once been smashed to pieces and then painstakingly glued back together. A few of the teeth were there, but most were missing. There was a deep indentation in the back of the skull.

“Would a blow like that have been fatal?” I asked.

“This is all speculation, of course, but I believe so. If the skin was broken, the wound would have bled profusely, but the real damage would have been from a subdural hematoma.”

“A brain bleed, then?”

Professor Raines nodded. “The angle of the blow suggests that the victim was most likely in either a kneeling or a sitting position when he was struck from behind. At the time of death, I believe the skull was still intact. I suspect a hungry bear cracked it open later in order to devour whatever remained inside.”

“So the victim was dead long before the bear came along.”

“Correct.”

“And the weapon?” I asked.

“Most likely a round metal object approximately three or so inches in circumference,” Harriet replied. “Had the instrument of death been a tree branch, for example, we would have found tiny wooden splinters still embedded in the bone. However, there weren’t any of those.”

“How do you know the guy’s name was Geoffrey?” I asked.

“I don’t,” Harriet answered. “That’s the name I assigned to him when he first came into the lab. At first, with nothing more than the shattered skull to examine, I didn’t know if the victim was male or female, but I allocate names to victims the same way meteorologists dub hurricanes—alphabetically, according to the year, alternating male names with female ones. Since 2008 was quite busy, by late April I was already up to the G’s, and by then it was time for a male name.”

“So you give each set of bones an individual name?”

“It humanizes them for me in a way that calling them Jane or John Doe doesn’t. It helps me keep in mind that these were once real people who walked, talked, breathed, and lived before being reduced to this.”