The following Wednesday, Goos called me from the crime lab. Several results were now available, which, he suggested, would be easier to absorb if I came out there.
“Am I going to have to look at bones?” I asked.
“’Fraid so.”
I grumbled, largely for show.
In the milder weather, I’d started using Lew Logan’s old bike to get to work, and by now I was up to the forty-minute ride to the outlying neighborhood of Ypenburg. I’d grown accustomed to the eye-rolling and pointing of the local kids when they saw my helmet. Nothing seemed more quintessentially Dutch to me than their scoffing at protective headgear while remaining the world’s leaders in training neurosurgeons.
I had no problem finding the immense Netherlands Forensic Institute, a black square of glass built into a grassy hillside that somehow reminded me of Darth Vader’s headpiece. It was a vast enterprise with nearly six hundred professionals on staff. Once inside, I experienced the place as a world of white, with lab coats and microscope lenses and confounding machines visible through the laboratory windows as Goos strolled me down the corridors.
I asked where we were headed.
“Little hard to do this in order,” Goos said. “But we have results in five different labs—DNA, Path, Microinvasive, Ballistics, and Fingerprints.”
“What’s Microinvasive?”
“You’ll see. But they have a special microscope here. Developed to look for trace fractures in the engine block of race cars.” Goos shook his head about the priorities. “We’ll start with your favorite.” He gave it an Aussie pronunciation, so that the last syllable came out ‘right.’
In the chill Forensic Pathology lab, we donned shower cap–like head coverings and surgical gowns. Goos steered me over to a stainless steel table on which the pieces of three largely complete skeletons had been laid out, the remains of Boldo and his son and brother, if Ferko were to be believed. There were special tungsten bulbs in here that gave the lab an optic clarity that seemed to exceed daylight.
“Okay,” said Goos, “so let us remind ourselves of what we are trying to accomplish.”
“I’d hope, one, to corroborate Ferko’s testimony and two, to find out as much as I can about who killed these people.”
From the slow pace at which Goos nodded, I didn’t think I’d get much better than a C on the quiz. I’d missed some of the sub-issues, specifically the age of these bones and the causes of death.
“Now how much pathology you familiar with, Boom? Don’t want to yabber on, if there’s no need.”
“Yabber your heart out, Goos. I’ve been a white-collar guy my whole career. Crimes of greed, not violence. I haven’t spent much time in places like this.” My one trip to the path lab, while a prosecutor, had come when the Black Saints Disciples had killed a young man who’d agreed to testify for the government. The agents on the case wanted me to see what had been done to our guy, which wasn’t pretty.
Goos withdrew a laser pointer from under his gown and showed me various points on the pelvis used to discern both the gender and age of the decedents. In the lab, Goos was expansive and wonky about the scientific refinements in his field since his time as a grad student. DNA had established that these remains were those of three males, while statistical analyses of the changes that occurred over time in the pelvis, legs, and teeth of a broad population (including, per Goos, “the density of blood vessel canalations”) allowed for near certainty in determining the men’s ages. For all the forensic advances, the result was close to Goos’s original estimate by naked eye. Two men were in their forties—forty and forty-five roughly—and the third was an adolescent of about fifteen.
Goos had snapped on plastic gloves as he handled the skeletons. The bones held a soft sheen now, the product of a layer of protective plastic Goos had applied to prevent further degradation. He tilted the top of one skull at me.
“Notice anything about this fella?” There was a hole, almost perfectly round, through the center of his forehead, as well as a network of fine fractures beside it. At the rear, a far larger hole had been blown away.
“Bullet?”
“Yay, counselor, it would be my expert opinion that this poor devil got shot in the head. And at fairly close range.” He pushed his pointer into the eye socket so I could see the light through the front bullet hole. “We’ve a punched-in surface, small pieces of bone missing, and beveling in the outer table.
“Now, we have a larger hole here.” He was indicating two ribs on the same skeleton. “So pretty sure he got shot first at longer range. Bullet wobbles more the further it travels, makes a bigger hole.”
He highlighted the examinations of the other two skeletons. The ‘youngster,’ as Goos put it, had been shot first in the hand and then through the chest, where the small entrance wound suggested the bullet had shattered. The third set of bones—apparently those of the brother who’d bled out—showed no bullet holes, which would be consistent with entry wounds through the softer tissues and organs.
“Last thing that’s relevant”—Goos tilted open the jawbone on the middle skeleton—“I see some missing teeth on all three, even this young fella. So I’d say these folks had very little dental care.”
“Meaning they were poor?”
“Or didn’t like the dentist. But let’s say poor.”
“Like the people in Barupra?”
“Or most of the people on earth, but Barupra, too.”
He plunked the skull back on the table so it made a dull knock.
“Done here now,” he said and removed his cap.
We walked down the hall to a stairwell. As he passed, Goos greeted several people in lab coats. I suspected a PhD got a lot more respect in these precincts than the usual humble cop. On the second floor, we entered a door labeled TOOLMARKS AND MICRO-ANALYSIS INVASIVE TRAUMA LAB.
“This is the place with the special microscope?”
“Infinite Focus Microscope it’s called.” Inside, the first thing I saw was a vast light table for the display of X-rays and other slides. Overhead vents hung down, inverted bells of clear plastic used to whisk away unwanted vapors. A piece of one of the long bones, whose absence I’d noticed from the first skeleton, was vised below the hot-shit microscope.
“Now this here is my domaine royal.” Goos turned with his long hands raised somewhat grandly. “Taphonomy, basically the study of bodily degradation. Without embalming, a body is skeletonized in about six weeks. So trying to figure if the bones have been in the earth five years or five hundred requires looking to other factors. Bones decompose more slowly than the flesh, but they do decompose. Tricky thing in this case is, as you know, there’s lots of salt in the earth thereabouts near Tuzla. That’ll degrade the bone surface more quickly, meaning you might think the remains are older than they are. Which is where our friendly microscope comes in. The interior of the bones, once we’ve sawed them open, shows decomposition unrelated to contact with the earth. All told, I’d say these were in the ground ten years give or take, and Dr. Gerber here at NFI, dog’s bollocks in this field, he agrees.”
I took a second to reflect on what Goos had shown me thus far.
“Overall, I’d say Ferko’s doing pretty well.” The Monday after we’d returned from Tuzla, I’d told Goos about Ferko’s sudden recall of Kajevic’s threats. Goos had reacted largely as I had. It was not a huge problem in itself, but it meant we had to probe Ferko’s story with even greater caution. It was heartening, therefore, that the lab results seemed to corroborate him.
“So far,” said Goos. “But it’s about to get a little thick. Let’s talk about the DNA analysis, because that’s where our first troubles appear. I can call up the report from this computer.” He batted at a keyboard.
I was better versed in DNA than pathology, because that science had proved revealing throughout the entire universe of crimes. You could extract DNA, for example, from a smudged fingerprint on a cashier’s check, as had happened to an unfortunate client of mine who’d bribed a county zoning officer by paying a college tuition bill.
“Now, DNA with buried bones is tricky. That’s because there’s always little critters in the soil who nibble on these bones and leave their own DNA behind.” He got a little deep for me in describing the extraction methods that had been developed to reduce soil contamination, but I followed well enough. A comparison between samples from the bone’s interior versus its surface helped isolate microbial effects.
“We performed Y-STR and mitochondrial DNA analysis,” Goos said.
“Mitochondrial is mother’s side and less subject to contamination?” I asked.
“Right you are, Boom. Mother’s side shows more than seventy percent of the genome in each man is consistent with Indo-Aryan origins.”
“That’s what you’d expect if they were Roma, right?”
“That’s what the experts here say. Now, the Y-STR, that was a lot more complicated. The good news is that all three exhibit a common Y chromosome, which you’d expect if they were truly father, son, and uncle. But even getting that result was quite the bitzer because of our contamination issues.” The classic contamination problem, even in a lab setting, arose from the fact that there was no way to tell the origins of the DNA you were examining. It could be blood or bone or skin from the subject, or a dandruff flake that had scaled off one of the investigators.
“Here, Boom, even when we isolated the microbial effects, the bone crystal cells from the surface showed much more human contamination than the bone crystals from the inside. And if these bones were in the earth for ten years, there’s no way that should be the case, unless my blokes and I were a lot less careful with the exhumation than I thought.
“So that result goes hand in hand with what I told you in Barupra, that I was detecting topsoil down in the grave? Madame Professor Tchitchikov, our geologist, has confirmed that. So the boil-over, Boom, is that some other person was digging in that site fairly recently. And probably handling these bones.”
“Meaning what?”
“Let me get you to the end of this.”
He motioned and we traveled a few steps to the ballistics lab. Through a window at the back, I could see two guys in white hazmat suits getting ready to discharge shotguns at a car door. Goos, who’d gone to see a technician when we entered, now held an envelope out of which he spilled two objects, one an intact bullet about two inches long, the other a squashed-up fragment with a shining interior. The pretty glow, like polished jewelry, on an object that had been lethal to another human, reminded me of the odd beauty of a slide my mother’s oncologist showed me of her cancer cells.
“First thing I’d take note of,” said Goos, “is that there’s nothing about the presumed bullet wounds we were looking at in the path lab inconsistent with these projectiles. They are the remains of what is sometimes called Yugo M67 ammo, which is characteristically used in the Zastava, a full metal-jacketed, sharp-pointed round, 7.62 by 39 millimeters. This was one of Marshal Tito’s lasting contributions to humanity, creating a bullet for the Kalashnikov-style rifle that opens a bigger wound when it’s destabilized by the body.
“But here’s where our results start to go a little wobbly.” Goos went to a computer and pulled up a series of photographs of each of these pieces, magnified to about four times what the unaided eye could see. The photos showed the lands and grooves on the bullets, which were left by the raised surfaces in the gun barrel intended to impart spin. “First, they can tell from the rifling that these rounds were discharged by two different Zastavas. But it’s the intact bullet”—Goos held up the piece of lead—“that’s problematic. These boys and girls here can’t square any of the bullet wounds we saw on the remains in the path lab with a bullet of this caliber and power being left intact in a body. And it had to be in the body if we’ve recovered it from the grave. If this round struck bone, it would show some compression. And if it passed only through flesh, given where Ferko says the Chetniks were positioned, it had to have exited the bodies and thus wouldn’t be likely to be buried with the remains. Following?”
I was. But Goos and I both knew that every case had its anomalies, things that the experts found inscrutable and which were accounted for by a universal principle: Shit happened. The most famous example in the world of ballistics was the so-called ‘magic bullet’ theory of the JFK assassination, in which a single round seemed to have struck Governor Connally and then deflected to hit President Kennedy in a couple of places. I told Goos that, but he shook his head.
“There’s more, mate. Let’s go look at some fingerprints.”
Among the forensic sciences we’d been discussing, I knew prints the best. I was no expert, but I was conversant with the lingo of ridges and whorls and points of comparison. This lab was less dramatic-looking than some of the places we’d already been—just microscopes, and computers with giant monitors, hooded with black sheet metal to minimize glare. Nonetheless, Goos said, this was one of the most advanced fingerprint labs on the globe. By doing computer analysis of the hundreds of millions of digital prints that had been recorded around the world in the last twenty years, NFI had been able to attach statistical probabilities to ridge patterns, meaning they could say how often a given feature appeared in the human population, just as had long been done with DNA. Because of recent scientific disputes about whether fingerprints were actually unique to each person, the NFI technique seemed destined to become, with time, the new standard. But the old method, in which fumes of superglue were used to bring out print details, was good enough for present purposes.
“They found two good prints, one on each bullet. Troubling part is that it’s from the same digit.”
He waited for me to register the significance. Ballistics had already established that the recovered rounds had been fired by two different weapons. It seemed unlikely that the same person would have loaded both rifles. But that appeared to be the only innocent explanation.
“And here’s the print from the intact round.” After a minute of fiddling, Goos called up the image on the massive computer screen beside him. It was the standard negative image with fuming, but it was rendered in yellow against an indigo background. Goos zoomed the picture so that the place of the print on the bullet was clear. “Notice anything?”
I didn’t. It was a nice full print.
Goos used the back end of his laser pointer. “See here?”
I got it now. The print extended below the casing line. That meant the bullet had been handled after it was fired.
“Maybe kids playing around?”
“Don’t think that works, Boom. Fact is, this gravesite was tampered with. From the DNA contamination, we’re already saying somebody was handling those bones, and given the fingerprints on the bullets and the fact that the intact round doesn’t match the wounds we see in those remains, odds are that these bullets were planted—not just touched by some youngster mucking round. Somebody’s funning with us, Boom. Could be whoever done it took stuff out as well as dropped stuff in. But somebody’s been monkeying with our evidence, Boom. That’s the main point.”
This was not a welcome development.
“Were they trying to mislead us?” I asked.
“Can’t think of another reason to plant bullets, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
I took all this in silently.
“Next step,” said Goos, “involves Madame Professor Tchitchikov. I’m going to send her a piece of each of the skeletons so she can match the minerals that the bones have absorbed to the soil specimens from the graves. She needs to do the chemistry before she can finish up on-site in Bosnia.”
“What about looking at the Cave?”
“She’ll do that then, too.” Goos, stoical, with his usual watery eyes, stared at me a second. “Enough strange stuff here that you might want to plan to come along.”
I groaned. I hadn’t expected to go back to Bosnia so soon, especially not to get bad news.