Vacation over, she replied.
???? I repeated.
A minute passed with no response.
What the hell?
I called Katy's cell.
Got voice mail.
Terrific. She'd turned off or was ignoring her phone.
I was clipping the BlackBerry onto my belt when Danny returned, his expression troubled.
"Dimitriadus," he said. "Back in nineteen ninety-eight."
"Could Dimitriadus have missed seeing the tag?"
"It might have been jammed way up under the lip of the box. When the cardboard loosened with age, it could have slid into view." He didn't sound convinced.
Danny removed the tag from the sonicator and returned to the sink for another go with the brush.
Seconds passed. A full minute.
Scrub.
Glasses off.
Squint.
Glasses on.
Scrub.
Repeat.
Agitated by Katy's texting, I almost snatched the tag from his hand.
At last, the glasses came off and the myopic eyes narrowed.
"Holy shit."
Danny rarely used profanity.
"What?" I asked.
Danny read aloud.
"Let me see." I shot out a hand.
Danny yielded the tag.
He was right. The stamped info was easier to discern as an indentation.
I reversed the letters and digits in my mind.
John Charles Lowery477 38 5923A pos BaptDid Baptists commonly have A positive blood?
Inane, but that's the first question that formed in my mind.
"That's a Social Security number, right?"
Danny nodded. "The military made the switch from service numbers sometime in the sixties."
"This can't be our John Lowery." I knew as I said it that I was wrong. But what were the chances?
"Let's check."
We hurried to Danny's office.
Pulled Spider's file.
The SS number belonged to John Charles Lowery from Lumberton, North Carolina. Spider.
But Spider Lowery died in Quebec.
Forty years after crashing in Long Binh.
Sweet Mother Mary, could the situation possibly grow more confused?
"Shall we lay the guy out?" Danny's voice held little enthusiasm.
My eyes flicked to my watch.
Five fifty.
I was anxious to get home to Katy. And I wanted to learn whether Ryan had found an alternate source of DNA for Spider.
"Let's do it first thing tomorrow."
"It's a date."
"You're on, big guy." I mimicked Danny's earlier wink. "But we both keep our clothes on."
I called out, explored.
Katy was not in the house.
At the pool.
On the lanai.
I found no note explaining her whereabouts.
I strolled down to the beach.
No Katy.
I was changing to shorts when a door slammed.
The cadence of conversation drifted to my room. Voices, one male, one female, not my daughter.
Had Katy made friends?
"Katy?"
"She's gone for a bike ride," the male voice called out.
Boing!
Katy's texts now made sense.
Had I asked her opinion?
I was half asleep, had acted on impulse.
Bonehead move, Brennan.
Had I given her a heads-up?
I'd had none myself.
Lame.
Slipping on sandals, I hurried downstairs.
Ryan's shirt featured turquoise bananas and lavender palms. His board shorts were apricot and had Billabong scrawled across the bum. Add flip-flops, Maui Jims, a "Hang Loose" cap, and a two-day stubble. You get the picture. Miami Vice meets Hawaii Five-O.
Lily held a string-handled shopping bag in each hand. By joint effort, her miniskirt and tube top covered maybe twenty inches of her torso. Ninety-inch wedge sandals, Lolita shades, maraschino lips.
Oh, boy.
"Aloha, madame." Ryan crushed me with a bear hug. "Comment ça va?"
"I'm good." Freeing myself, I turned to Lily. "How was your flight?"
Lily shrugged one very bare shoulder.
"I hope it's OK that we just showed up," Ryan said.
"How did you find us?"
Ryan grinned and flashed his brows.
I knew his meaning. "You're a detective. You detect."
"Katy seemed a bit flustered at seeing us," Ryan said.
"I may have forgotten to mention your arrival."
Rolling mascara-laden eyes, Lily threw out one hip.
"Everything happened so last-minute, the judge granting permission, booking seats, racing to Dorval," Ryan said. "In all the rush, I forgot to charge my cell. Damned if it didn't die at the airport."
"They do that," Lily said.
"Did Katy get you settled?" I asked.
"She did. I'm down, Lily's in the spare bedroom up. This place is killer, by the way."
"Can I go?" Lily. Not whiny, but close.
Ryan looked an apology my way.
I glanced at my watch. Six thirty. "Katy should be back any minute." Please, God. "How about we meet at seven thirty and head out for dinner?"
"My treat," Ryan said.
"No way," I said.
"I insist," he said.
"Katy can hurt you," I said. "I think she checks the right-hand column, then orders the highest-priced item on the menu."
"That's why God gave us credit cards." Ryan smiled and tapped his back pocket.
The choice of restaurant involved stimulating dialogue. Lily wanted steak. Katy was avoiding red meat. Katy craved fish. Lily was over her quota on mercury. Katy suggested Thai. Too spicy. Lily proposed Indian. Katy wasn't in the mood.
We compromised on Japanese.
During dinner, neither Katy nor Lily was overtly rude, but icicles could have formed on our table. Back at Lanikai, each went straight to her room.
Ryan and I shared a drink on the lanai, Perrier for me, Big Wave Golden Ale for him.
Ryan apologized for Lily's insolence. She'd resisted making the trip. He'd insisted, gotten no support from Lutetia. He suspected a love interest, perhaps a man from Lily's drug rehab group. Or, worse, from her past as a user.
I explained that Katy was still dejected over Coop's death, but that she seemed to be on the mend.
We agreed that our daughters were champs at the use of the sugar-coated dig. And that my sisterhood-bonding therapy did not look promising.
I brought Ryan up to speed on developments at the CIL. The Mongoloid craniofacial traits of 2010-37. Spider Lowery's Native American ancestry. Luis Alvarez, the maintenance specialist who went down with Spider in '68. 1968-979, the decomposed body found near Long Binh eight months after the crash. Spider Lowery's dog tag in 1968-979's box.
Ryan filled me in on developments in Montreal. And Lumberton. Turned out my suggestion about Beasley, though a good one, was nonproductive. The sheriff was cooperative but, to date, had offered nothing of value.
Listening to Ryan describe his exchange with the sheriff triggered a Ping! moment. A comment of Plato's during our scrapbook conversation.
"Ryan, listen. Spider's mother died of kidney failure five years ago. It's a long shot, but maybe the hospital where she was treated still has some samples on file, you know, a path slide or something. And Spider had a brother who was killed a couple years before that."
"A long shot is better than no shot at all. I'll call first thing tomorrow, ask Beasley to poke around."
Ryan proposed taking Katy and Lily to Pearl Harbor the following day. I wished him luck.
At eleven, we too retired to our separate rooms.
Through my wall, I heard Lily talking on her cell.
THE SUNSHINE SISTERS WERE STILL SLEEPING WHEN I ENTERED the kitchen at eight the following morning. Ryan was lacing on Nikes for a run on the beach. The plan was that he and our daughters would spend the day at Pearl Harbor, visiting the USS Arizona monument and touring the USS Missouri battleship and the USS Bowfin submarine. I wished him luck in dealing with the dim and murky realm of female resentment. Then I was off to the CIL. I thought of the dog tag the whole drive. It just made no sense.
Dimitriadus was on my bumper as I turned in at JPAC. We crossed the lot together. In silence. I wondered how an examiner of unidentified bones could miss a dog tag in a box. Ten feet from the building, he accelerated his pace and shot inside, letting the door slam in my face.
Last night, Lily's cold shoulder. This morning, Dimitriadus. I was beginning to feel like the class pariah.
Danny was in his office.
"Dimitriadus is acting like I killed his puppy."
"Come in." Danny's smile faded. "Close the door."
Puzzled, I did.
"We're cutting Dimitriadus loose."
"Jesus. The guy's been here, what, twelve years? Why?"
"A number of reasons. Most recently, he failed his ABFA exam again." Danny referred to the American Board of Forensic Anthropology examination for certification, a credential essential for qualification in the field.
"The dog tag?"
"The decision was made before that came up, so no."
"What will he do?"
Danny spread both hands. Who knows?
"That info is for your ears only. So far only Dimitriadus, Merkel, you, and I know."
I nodded.
A beat passed.
"Today's good news is that J-2 has Alvarez's IDPF."
J-2, the joint command records section, has access to information on deceased personnel going back to World War I.
"I was just about to walk over and pick it up. Jackson asked about you. Come along, make the man's day."
"Corporal Jackson? The guy who convinced everyone the phone lines were scheduled for cleaning by a steam blast, and that all handsets had to be sealed in plastic bags for an hour?"
"It's Sergeant Jackson now."
"He's been here a long time."
"He's just been reassigned back, actually."
"I no longer have clearance to J-2."
"Follow me, little squaw."
Little squaw?
Danny and I took the corridor past the general's staff offices to a door at the back of the building and entered a large room furnished with cubicles containing desks, most occupied by civilians I knew to be analysts and historians. At the far end, a second door led to a secure area filled with movable shelving similar to that used for bone storage in the CIL lab. Instead of bones, these shelves held hundreds of small gray filing boxes, each identified by a sequence of numbers. The REFNOs.