Chapter Twelve
Present
Sergeant Wallis had an intimidating presence, even sitting down. He was a tall husk of a man, broad shouldered and big boned. He had a voice to match, low and deep and rumbling.
“You see this?” he asked, setting the morning paper down on his desk.
It was the front page of the San Luis Obispo Herald.
Detective Church didn’t have to look to know what it said.
He’d read it this morning, and not just in the Herald but in the Washington Post and USA Today and the National Enquirer, the headlines getting more and more brazen and salacious as the credibility of the paper declined: Cold Case Heats Up: Second Body Discovered in Saoirse Towers Case and Towers Case Becomes a Double Homicide: How Many More Skeletons Is the Senator Hiding?
And Church’s least favorite: S.L.O.(W) County Sheriff’s Office Misses Not Just One Body, But Two.
“I saw,” Church said.
The press conference the other day and the announcement that a second, unidentified body had been found on the Towers property had ignited even more public interest in the case and, consequently, more ire in the direction of the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office.
In Church’s opinion, the whole department looked like a bunch of Barney Fifes.
Not only had they misclassified Saoirse Towers as a missing person for over four decades, but her body had been found at the very location from which she had gone missing.
And now there wasn’t just one body that had been missed, but two.
Sergeant Wallis leaned back in his chair.
“Listen, I’m bringing Detective Leland in on this one,” he said.
For a moment, Church thought he had misheard him. “Leland?” Church said.
Sergeant Wallis nodded.
Church was used to—and very much preferred—working alone.
There were seven officers in the Major Crimes Unit, but the Cold Case Unit, where Church worked, was only him.
There was nothing Church enjoyed more than the solitude of his own desk and an afternoon spent sifting through an old, dusty case file.
“With all due respect, Sarge, Leland’s never worked a case this old,” Church said. “He won’t know what he’s doing. He’ll just get in the way.”
“Saoirse Towers is still your case,” Sergeant Wallis assured him. “But I’ve got two bodies now. I need two detectives. Detective Leland will be focused on ID’ing this Jane or John Doe. He’ll stay out of your hair.”
Church was silent a moment. “Tell me this isn’t because of the Riley case,” he said.
Sergeant Wallis shifted in his chair. “Listen, this is a big case,” Wallis said, and it wasn’t lost on Church how Wallis had sidestepped his question. “There are a lot of eyes on this. I want you to have a second set of hands. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to accept it.”
There was a knock on Sergeant Wallis’s office door, and the department secretary, Judy, ducked her head in.
“I have the DA on line two for you,” she said. “Looks like they’re moving up the court date for Dean Williams.”
Judy smiled at Detective Church when she saw him, mouthed a friendly hello, and Church gave her a nod.
“Put him through,” Wallis said.
“Will do,” Judy said, ducking back out.
Wallis fixed Church with a hard stare. “Do we understand each other?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Church said. “Understood.”
As Wallis reached for the handset on his desk, Church stood and headed for the door. He was halfway through it when Wallis called his name.
Church paused, turned back around. “Sir?”
“Take Leland with you to Santa Barbara,” Wallis said. “Whatever BFS has to say, Leland should be there too.”
The Bureau of Forensic Services was a state-run crime laboratory located in Goleta, about an hour and a half south of San Luis Obispo and just east of UC Santa Barbara.
Church had been there many times. The lab assisted local law enforcement agencies with forensic testing and analysis.
Their accreditations and state-of-the-art facilities far surpassed the small crime laboratory at the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office, which was better equipped to run blood samples in DUI cases than to conduct a forensic analysis of bones.
As Church and Leland waited in the lab, Leland eyed the two cups of coffee that Church held.
“One of those for me?” Leland asked.
“No,” Church said but offered no further explanation.
They had driven down separately. They could have driven down together, but Church had purposely scheduled an interview directly after with Teddy Mountbatten, Saoirse’s ex-boyfriend, who resided in Los Angeles now, so as to make carpooling impossible.
Church didn’t like the idea of being trapped side by side in a car with Detective Leland for a whole hour and a half, both ways.
In truth, he didn’t know Leland that well.
Leland was one of the newer detectives in the Major Crimes Unit, and Church never went out of his way to get to know anyone, preferring instead to keep to himself.
Leland was young, still—late twenties. As far as Church had been able to form an impression, Leland reminded him of a golden retriever—friendly, eager to please, and not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Church suspected Leland had been promoted to detective only because he was the sheriff’s nephew, and he had probably been assigned to this case for the very same reason.
“This is so much better than the morgue,” Leland said, looking around at the bones assembled neatly on stainless steel tables.
“How so?” Church asked.
“Dude, the smell,” Leland said, as if it should be obvious.
It’d been years since Church had had to attend an autopsy, but no matter how much time had passed, he could still conjure up the stench of rotting flesh—like rotten eggs and cabbage and days-old meat that had been left out to spoil in the sun.
“What do you think this thing does?” Leland asked, picking up a caliper from a tray on the table and turning it this way and that to examine it.
“Don’t touch anything,” Church said sharply.
Just then the door opened, and Dr. Nisha Laghiri entered.
She was in her mid-thirties, her dark hair pulled back at the nape of her neck in a low ponytail, secured with a black elastic band.
She wore a plain long-sleeve black shirt underneath her lab coat, cargo pants, and steel-toed work boots.
Nisha was always practical, and Church liked that about her.
They’d worked together for over five years now on cases where all that remained of the victim was skeletal, which, in Church’s line of work, was often.
Nisha approached life with the levelheaded certainty of a person who believed everything was an equation with an exact answer, if only you had the patience and reason to solve it.
“Good morning,” Nisha said with a smile. “Hello, Michael. Nice to see you again.”
Nisha was the only one besides his grandmother who ever called him that, and he had never corrected her. To everyone else, he was Mike or Detective Church. The formality of his full first name never seemed to fit him, but for some reason, he didn’t mind when she used it.
“Thought you might need reinforcements,” Church said, proffering the second cup of hot coffee, black. Nisha preferred her coffee like everything else: plain, without fuss or embellishments.
“Thank you,” Nisha said, taking it. “And who’s your friend?”
“This is Detective Leland,” Church said. “He’s looking into the identity of the second body.”
“Ah, tracking down our John Doe,” Nisha said.
“The victim’s male?” Leland asked.
Nisha nodded.
“And you can tell that from just, well, this?” he asked, gesturing dubiously at the bones assembled on the table nearest him.
Nisha smiled. “You can tell a lot about a person from their bones,” Nisha said.
“Not just sex, but height, relative age, weight. Here, I’ll show you.
” She took a sip of her coffee and then set it down, out of the way, and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves.
“May I?” she asked, pointing to the caliper Leland still held in his hand.
“Oh, yeah, of course,” he said sheepishly, handing it to her.
Nisha adjusted the caliper’s clamp over the left femur shaft.
“The femur shaft width, when taken in relation to the victim’s height and sex, can give us a relative approximation of their weight,” she said.
“Looks like two point thirty-four centimeters in diameter,” she said, reading from the caliper.
“Which, knowing the victim is male and roughly six feet tall, means he would have weighed around one hundred and ninety-six pounds.”
Nisha was the one who’d taught Church that bones were particular, that they told a story.
By measuring the length of the femur, the largest bone in the body, they could approximate a person’s height.
By examining the width of the hips and the anatomical differences in the frontal brow, eye orbits, and lower jaw, you could assign sex.
The epiphyses—the caps at the ends of the bones—could tell you whether a body had made it into adulthood.
“What about cause of death?” Leland asked.
“There was no evidence of perimortem trauma in our John Doe, unfortunately,” Nisha said.
“Perimortem?” Leland asked.
“It means no injuries that were caused at the time of death,” Church said. “At least, none that are visible on the skeletal remains.”
“But we’ll run a full tox report,” Nisha said. “It could identify trace amounts of drugs or poisons in the victim’s system.”
Leland’s eyebrows shot up. “Even this long after death?” he asked.
“It won’t be as definitive as what you’d get from blood or soft tissue,” Nisha said, “but yes, drugs and toxins can be absorbed into the bone tissue and detected long after death.”
Leland whistled appreciatively. “That’s impressive.”