Spider Bones(17)

"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 donned aprons and gloves.
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."
"I've seen it before."
I scanned the films, each taken at a different angle. Like the knee, three other hunks of flesh contained portions of skeleton.
"That's the pubic bone and a bit of ischium." I indicated a plate showing part of the pelvic front.
"Good for sex?"
"Not tonight."
"Hardy fucking har."
I braced for an arm-punch. Didn't come.
"The V-shaped subpubic angle, blocky pubic body, and broad ischio-pubic ramus suggest male."
Perry nodded.
"That's a bit of iliac crest." I pointed to a section of the curving upper border of a left pelvic half. "It's only partially fused to the iliac blade. Assuming male gender, to be on the safe side, I'd say you're looking at an age of sixteen to twenty-four."
"Sonovafrigginbitch."
"That's a portion of proximal femoral shaft, from just below the head and neck. Left, like the knee and pelvis." I was pointing at a plate clipped to the light box's vertical surface. My finger moved to the one beside it. "And that's part of the left foot and ankle. Those are remnants of distal tibia, talus, and some smaller foot bones, I'd say the navicular and the third and second cuneiforms."
"Can you get height from them?"
I considered. "No. I could do a statistical regression off measurements taken from the partial leg bones, but the range would be almost uselessly broad."
"But you could say if the kid was very big or very small?"
"Yes. The muscle attachments suggest a robust build."
"What about race?"
"No way. The skin appears pale, but that could be the result of postmortem bleaching or skin sloughing due to immersion in salt water."
Human pigmentation is contained solely in the epidermis, the skin's outer layer. Lose the epidermis, we all look Scandinavian, a fact often misinterpreted by those unaccustomed to seeing bodies recovered from water.
Perry knew that. I knew that she knew that. The answer was strictly reflex. My attention was focused on the remains.
Returning to the table, I examined each mass in turn. Then, "Where was this found?" I waved a hand over the grisly assemblage.
"Come on, I'll loop you in."
Degloving, Perry led me back up the corridor. We encountered only one person, an elderly Hawaiian with a bucket and mop. The man dropped his eyes when we passed. Perry did not acknowledge his presence.
The chief ME's office looked like Danny Tandler's on uppers. Files and papers occupied every horizontal surface-desktop, coffee table, chair seats, windowsill, file cabinets, floor. Books, magazines, and reprints teetered in stacks. Open journals lay with spines cracking under the weight of overlying issues.
The window was covered with cheap metal blinds. The walls were hung with photos of an impressively large black dog, probably a Lab. Other decorative touches included a hanging skeleton, a pair of conch shells, now repositories for rubber bands and paper clips, several ashtrays from Vegas, a fake fern, and a collection of plastic action figures whose getups and weapons meant nothing to me.
Perry gestured to the single uncluttered chair.
I sat.
Circling the desk, my host dropped into one of those winged-meshy things designed for NASA missions to Mars.
"Nice pooch," I said. Actually, the dog looked scruffy and mean. But Southern ladies are bred to show interest in strangers. The mechanic, the receptionist, the dry-cleaning lady. Doesn't matter. Dixie daughters exude warmth to one and all.
Dr. Hadley Perry was not an exuder.
"Day before yesterday a couple of high schoolers were snorkeling in Halona Cove, between the Blowhole and Hanauma Bay. You know it?"
Setting for the famous Lancaster-Kerr kiss, Halona Cove was known to locals as From Here to Eternity Beach. The little inlet has soaring cliffs, killer waves, and very few tourists. Accessed only by a steep, rocky path, the spot is a favorite with local teens hoping to get more sand in their shorts than Deborah and Burt.
I nodded.
"Kids spotted something on the bottom, maybe twelve feet down, in one of the rock cuts. Brought it up, dimed nine-one-one when they realized their prize was a human knee.
"Cops called me. I ordered divers, went out there myself. The girl was still tossing chunks. The boyfriend was trying for macho, not pulling it off."
Perry worked a way too colorful nail on her blotter, brushed the flotsam with the back of one hand.
"Divers searched for over two hours. What you just saw is what they collected."
"Got any MPs fitting the profile?"
Perry lifted a printout and read.
"Anthony Simolini, date of birth December fourteenth, nineteen ninety-three. Haole."
"Meaning white."
"Sorry. Yeah. Brown hair, brown eyes, five-eleven, a hundred and eighty-five pounds. On February second of this year, at approximately ten p.m., Simolini left a Zippy's restaurant on the Kamehameha Highway in Pearl City. He was heading home but never showed. Kid's a high school senior, big-deal athlete. Friends and family say no way he's a runaway.
"Jason Black, date of birth August twenty-second, nineteen ninety-four. Blond hair, blue eyes, five-nine, a hundred and sixty pounds."
"Haole," I said.
"January twenty-seventh of this year, Black had a throw-down with his parents, stormed out of the home, vanished. Kid has a history of drug abuse, problems at school. Friends say he often talks about splitting for the mainland.
"Ethan Motohiro, date of birth May tenth, nineteen ninety-three. Asian, black hair, brown eyes, five-four, a hundred and twenty pounds. Last September Motohiro set off to circle the island by bike. A motorist saw him on the Kalanianaole Highway near the entrance to Makapu'u Point, probably on the seventh. That was the last sighting."
"Makapu'u Point is close to Halona Cove, right?"
"Yeah. Motohiro had a steady girlfriend, was an A student, planned on attending university."
"Not the pattern for a runaway. Also, he may be too small. I think this kid was pretty big."
Back to the printout.
"Isaac Kahunaaiole, date of birth July twenty-second, nineteen eighty-seven. Native Hawaiian, black hair, brown eyes, six-three, two hundred and seventy-five pounds. Worked night security at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, lived at home with his parents and four of six siblings. December twenty-second, two years back, Kahunaaiole boarded a bus for Ala Moana. Never showed up. Coworkers say he was cheerful, well liked, had a good work ethic."