Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [44]
When he bought the paper, Harold was in his late forties and he understood his readers better. He cared about them more. It seemed to him they wanted life to go on in a calm and gentle way—for it to appear understandable and controllable. When you were trying to grow soybeans for a living, you didn’t necessarily want the paper to challenge your way of life.
And now he was faced with the second big story of his life and he was seriously thinking of handing it over to Sarah Briding. Maybe it would be her way out of town and he would see her byline in the New York Times in years to come. Everyone deserved a chance.
“Sarah, could you come in here please?”
The girl—woman, he supposed he should call her—appeared in his doorway. She reminded him a little of Bertha all those many years ago. Hair was a little darker blond, but she was equally full of life. It was all ahead of her.
“Yes, Harold.” After her first month of working at the paper, he had been able to persuade her to call him by his first name, but it still rolled uneasily off her tongue. “What can I do for you?”
“The park poisonings, the Schuler murders . . .” He pointed at a nearby chair, then paused. Where to start? “Come in here and let me tell you everything I know.”
“Human for sure?” Claire asked, holding the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear so she could take notes.
“Quite sure.” Sarah Morgan, the forensic anthropologist, cleared her throat, then added, “Although the small bones could be from a bear.”
“Really?”
“Well, I don’t think so, but bear bones are the ones that most closely resemble human and they resemble them especially when they’re young. And most of these bones are from younger humans.”
“How many people?”
“Hard to tell exactly. From their varying sizes, I’d say there’s a good chance that the bones are from four to six different people. One’s pretty small. Baby-sized.”
“Well, there was a baby involved. Can you tell what bones in the body they are?” Claire had told her nothing about the Schuler murders. She wanted to see if she would match it or not.
Sarah said, “All the bones are phalanges or digits.”
“Translate, please.”
“Fingers. Probably baby fingers.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. Can you tell me the sexes?”
“No, nor can I tell you anything about their ethnicity.”
“One last queston. Can you tell how long they’ve been dead—so to speak?”
“I can tell you they weren’t dismembered yesterday or even three months ago. But they could be a year old or they could be fifteen hundred years old. Until they get old enough to do carbon dating, I can’t tell you much more.”
“But they could be fifty years old?”
“Yes.”
Claire told Sarah she would be sending her another bone. Sarah said she’d fax her the full report when she had finished with the tool-mark analysis.
“What’s this about?”
“A family was murdered here about fifty years ago.”
“With a baby?”
“Yes, it was her first birthday.”
Two hours later, the sheriff called a meeting with everyone to go over all that was known about the poisonings. He reported that four of the poison victims had left the hospital. Andy Lowman was still in critical condition. He sent off a crew of deputies to go back to the park and scour it for anything they might have missed last night. He told Claire he wanted her to be on hand to take the forensic reports as they came in and to coordinate all activities from the office. Among all the deputies there was a sense of urgency and a more pronounced sense of not knowing how to protect themselves or the community from what was happening.
“We have to understand what has led to this,” Claire stated.
The sheriff nodded. “I want you to work on that.”
Since the meeting, Claire had been at her