LIEUTENANT STUTZMAN MADE A LEFT OFF PALMER STREET AND parked the Suburban in front of the Montana State Crime Lab. It had been an eight-hour drive across the state from Wolf Point to Missoula, broken up over the span of two days. Last night he’d stayed at a Days Inn in Great Falls. From the window of his hotel room, he’d been able to see the Missouri River, the same body of water that passed through Wolf Point and along the southern boundary of David Reece’s property. Seeing the river so far from home had given him a sense of disorientation, as if he’d been driving for half the day and had wound up right back where he started. There was some truth to that, he supposed. This was a case twenty years in the making. He’d read through the reports by the officers who’d investigated the disappearances back then—typed and handwritten notes on paper yellowed with age that he’d found in cardboard boxes in an off-site storage shed. The place had smelled of mildew and neglect. The bottom of one of the boxes—damp and weakened by decay—had given way when he lifted it, the papers spilling out onto the concrete floor. Jeff had gotten down on his knees to collect them, gathering the files and loose papers in his hands as if they were the mortal remains of the victims themselves.
Oh, but you have those, too, he thought. One of them’s been riding with you all the way from Wolf Point.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, as if it might be sitting up and staring at him from the back seat, the remnants of the skeleton they’d discovered in the rectangular wooden box buried on David Reece’s property.
Jeff took a shuddering breath and ran his hand across a three-day growth of stubble on the side of his face. He hadn’t shaved since Pitsinger’s crew had unearthed the box on Wednesday.
“It’s not Kenny,” he said to himself. “Whoever these bones belong to, it’s not your brother. We buried him in a plot at Wolf Point Cemetery. Remember?”
Yeah, he thought. I remember. I wore a black suit and tie and stood there with Dad, Aunt Amy, and Uncle Clayton. Mom was there, too, drugged up on Valium and staring at the coffin.
“You take care of this thing,” he told himself. “You take care of this one thing and maybe it’ll be better.”
Jeff unfastened his seat belt, climbed out of the truck, and stood there beside the open door. The Montana State Crime Lab was a one-story structure that shared a parking lot with several other buildings. Behind it were a medical clinic and the Missoula County Detention Center, with its chain-link fence and coils of barbed wire that stood out against the light blue backdrop of the morning sky. The parking lot was mostly empty. He’d arranged to meet the medical examiner here this morning with the remains of the second body. The autopsy of the first set of bones had already been completed, but Jeff wanted to see it for himself, to take some photos of the things the pathologist had discovered.
Jeff closed the driver’s-side door, opened the rear hatchback, and pulled out a large black duffel. He locked the truck and walked to the front door of the building, ringing the bell when he found it locked.
A minute later, a thin man with short dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses came to the door and unlocked it from the inside. He was dressed in tan khakis and a button-down shirt. Jeff recognized him from a newspaper photo he’d viewed online the night before. The doctor looked to be in his mid-thirties, younger than Jeff had expected for a man in his position.
“Dr. Lester?” Jeff asked as the man swung the door open to let him inside.
“Yes. Call me Owen,” he said, and extended a hand.
“Jeff Stutzman,” the lieutenant said. “We spoke on the phone.”
“Yes, we did. You made a long drive to meet me here on a Saturday. I appreciate that.” He glanced at his watch. “You arrived a bit earlier than I expected.”
“I got on the road early this morning,” Jeff told him. “It was hard to sleep with this thing in the room with me.” They looked down at the duffel bag Jeff was holding in his left hand. “I put everything in a plastic body bag that I sealed myself. I have photos of the way we found it.”
“Excellent. We’ll log what you have into evidence first.”
There was a welcome desk in the front lobby, and the pathologist walked around to the other side of it. “We keep a physical and an electronic log of all the evidence that comes through here. You took a photo of the seal?”
“Yes.” Jeff unzipped the duffel bag’s side pouch, reached inside, and pulled out a series of Polaroids. He handed the first one across the desk, and the doctor took it, making note of the number on the seal.
“Fill out as much as you can,” he said, placing the logbook on the counter. When Jeff had finished, Owen initialed it and placed the open logbook where the intake clerk would see it when she arrived on Monday. “Please bring the bag with you,” he said, and he led Jeff down a hallway and into the west wing of the building.
“Been working here long, Doctor?”
“About six years,” he said. “I grew up in western Montana but did my residency in Seattle and worked at a hospital there for a year before returning home.” He looked back at Jeff and gave him a smile that subtracted another couple of years from his face. “Sooner or later, we all return to our starting point.”
Owen held his ID badge in front of an electronic reader on the wall next to a door marked PATHOLOGY. The pad beeped and he opened the door, holding it for Jeff as he stepped inside.
The lab was smaller than Jeff had imagined. A single stainless-steel table occupied the center of the room. To their right was a metal counter and sink. A scale hung from a hook in the ceiling, and a microscope sat in the corner of the room. To their left was an office, a small room with an internal window between the office wall and the lab. Owen stepped inside, retrieved a file from his desk, and walked to the counter on which the microscope was sitting. “This is the forensic report from the first set of remains,” he said, and motioned for Jeff to join him at the counter.
Jeff placed the duffel bag on the floor and crossed the room.
“The lighting is better in here than in my office,” Owen said. He opened the file and flipped through thirty or forty pages of catalogued descriptions of every bone and marking. Jeff caught glimpses of words he couldn’t pronounce and didn’t understand. There were pictures, too, color photos with notations beneath them. “Here,” the doctor said. “This is a summary of the findings.”
Jeff looked down at the page, a dense paragraph of tightly packed medical jargon. “Maybe,” he suggested, “you could summarize the summary.”
“Yes, of course,” he said, and adjusted his glasses. He was quiet for a moment before he began. “The initial set of skeletal remains was, in fact, human. A young male in his late teens or early twenties.”
“A male,” Jeff said. “You’re sure.”
“Well,” Owen said, “the thing about science is that you can never be absolutely sure of anything. Males and females can be differentiated based on the shape of their pelvic bones. Females have shorter and more rounded pelvic bones. The hips are wider and the shoulders are narrower than their male counterparts. There are other differences as well, but those are the big ones. There are always exceptions, but yes, I’m fairly certain that this was a male.”
“There weren’t that many males who went missing back then. It was mostly women and children.” Jeff looked down at the pages in front of him. “I was a kid myself. I remember what that was like. It can paralyze a community when one of its members goes missing, even if it’s just one. In our case there were—”
“Fourteen women and children,” Owen said, “plus the two men. Sixteen souls were lost over the span of three years.”
Jeff looked at him, surprised that he knew the numbers.
“I looked it up,” Owen said. “I was pretty young back then myself, but I remember hearing about the story from my parents. People know about Wolf Point—people in Montana anyway. It’s one of the reasons I prioritized your case.”
“We had a hard time of it,” Jeff said. “We’d like it to be over.”
“I can understand that. I’m here to help if I can.”
“I appreciate that,” Jeff said. “You mentioned that the first set of remains was from a person in their late teens or early twenties. You can tell that from the bone structure as well?”
“Yes,” he said. “We look at the surface of the teeth for wear and tear. Dental development is especially helpful in determining the age of children and adolescents, since different teeth come in at different ages. Three out of four of this specimen’s wisdom teeth had already erupted. That puts him between seventeen and twenty-five. Children’s bones also have growth plates that become fused in adulthood. The clavicle is typically the last bone to stop growing, and that happens at about twenty-five years of age. The growth plates of the clavicles from these remains were not yet fully closed.”
Jeff nodded. “So we know the gender and approximate age of the individual. Is it possible that he was buried long before the disappearances ever took place? What if he died a hundred years ago? Maybe we just happened upon him now.”
“That gets a bit trickier,” the pathologist said. “Traditional carbon dating helps archaeologists estimate the age of fossils buried between five hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Old stuff, in other words. Historically, it’s been of limited use in dating remains buried more recently.”
“Well, that’s a problem,” Jeff said. “I need to know if he was buried twenty years ago.”
“Exactly,” he said. “The difficulty with using radioactive carbon is that it decays very slowly. It doesn’t vary much over the span of a single century. Unless, of course, humanity does something to change that.”
“What do you mean?”
“The nuclear age,” he said. “During the 1950s and early 1960s, governments started testing nuclear weapons, and atmospheric radioactive carbon levels skyrocketed. Fortunately, we came to our senses. In 1963, the United States stopped aboveground testing of nuclear weapons, and radioactive carbon levels have been dropping back toward their natural levels ever since. As a result, we can date people who were born over the past six decades by the amount of radioactive carbon present in their tissues.”
Jeff frowned. “People who were born in the 1950s and 1960s tend to glow in the dark. Is that what you’re telling me?”
He smiled. “That’s one way of looking at it. And people born during the decades that followed glow less. Again, we can look at the teeth. Adult teeth are formed during certain ages, and the level of radioactive carbon can be measured in the enamel. If we match this up with the known levels during a given year, we can deduce the year of birth.”
“Radioactive teeth. You’re shitting me.”
“No,” he said, “I’m not. For teeth formed after 1965, the amount of radioactive carbon in the enamel can predict the year of birth to within one and a half years.”
“Jesus,” Jeff said, “that’s the scariest thing I’ve thought about all day.” He sighed. “And I’ve been driving around with a skeleton in my duffel bag.”
“It’s unsettling,” Owen agreed, “but it does give us an answer. Our office works closely with University of Montana’s anthropology department. Most of the forensic autopsies on human remains are actually performed there.”
“And? What did you find out?”
“Based on the samples we obtained, this man was born around 1979. If we estimate his age to be twenty at the time of his death, that means he died in 1999, plus or minus a couple of years.”
“The turn of the century,” Jeff said. “Twenty years ago.”
Owen nodded.
“There were two adult males who went missing back then,” Jeff said. “Curt Hastings and Abel Griffin. Curt was a thirty-five-year-old guy who got in an argument with his wife and went for a drive in his pickup. The Ford F-250 was found in a snowbank the next morning. The driver’s door was open and the diesel engine was still running. It was the same night that Rose Perry went missing. Two unrelated victims. Neither of them were ever seen again.”
“This isn’t Curt Hastings,” Owen said. “This guy was much younger than that.”
“Abel Griffin, then,” Jeff said. “He went missing in June of 1999, four years after the death of his brother Miles.”
The doctor frowned. “Two from the same family, spaced four years apart? But that makes three adult males, not two. Unless, of course, Miles was younger.”
“He was sixteen,” Jeff said, “and he didn’t go missing, not for long anyway. His body washed up on the banks of the Missouri River a few days after he disappeared. It was ruled an accidental death.”
“Accidental,” he said. “Did they do an autopsy?”
Jeff shook his head. “Not a formal one, no. The coroner back then was an elected official, not a physician. He had the body examined by one of the local doctors.”
“Were there any signs of trauma?”
“The report noted a broken neck and a bump to the back of his head. There’s a bridge that spans the river not too far from where the body was discovered. Kids play on it all the time. It was felt that the boy must’ve fallen from the bridge and struck his head on a girder on the way down.”
“How did they know he had a broken neck?”
“X-rays. I can get you a copy of the report. It’s pretty minimal.”
The pathologist nodded. “He could’ve been killed first and then thrown in the river. I’m sure you considered that.”
“Yes,” Jeff said, “but it doesn’t fit the pattern of the others.”
“Because he was found?”
“Exactly. None of the others were ever seen again. If someone did this to him, I don’t think it was the same person. They didn’t make any attempt to hide the body. It was in the river, yes, but there was nothing tied to it to weight it down.”
They were quiet for a moment, considering the possibilities.
Jeff touched the pages spread out on the counter between them. “How did this one die?” he asked.
Owen looked at him through the circles of his spectacles. “Head trauma,” he said. “The frontal bone was fractured. It was a long weapon, and slightly curved.” He sorted through the report, found the page he was looking for, and placed it on top of the others. It was a picture of a skull with a long diagonal crack through the forehead. “The fracture extends through the patient’s left orbit and cheekbone,” Owen said. “It appears to have been a single strike. There was a lot of force involved. A fist couldn’t have done this.”
“A long, slightly curved blade. Any ideas about the weapon?”
“Some sort of tool would be my guess.”
“And a big man,” Jeff said, “someone who could swing it hard.”
Owen shrugged. “A long handle multiplies the force of the blade during the arc of the swing. You don’t have to be strong. You just have to know how to swing the thing.”
“A farmer,” Jeff said, “someone who works with his hands.”
“I can tell a lot from human remains,” Owen said, “but I can’t tell you the occupation of the person who did this.”
“Okay,” Jeff said, “so where do we go from here? How do we identify the body?”
“Well,” he said, putting the pages back in order, “DNA testing would be the next step. Are there any living relatives?”
“Yes,” he said, “Abel’s mother, Connie. She runs the local movie theater in Wolf Point.”
“That’s good,” he said. “We can do kinship matching then. A buccal smear from the inside of her cheek should be sufficient. I’ll give you a kit to take with you.”
“Thank you,” Jeff said. He pointed to the black duffel bag resting on the floor. “Do you want to take a look at this?”
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.” He walked over, retrieved the plastic body bag from the duffel, donned some latex exam gloves, and opened it on the stainless-steel table. The doctor hummed to himself as he spread the bones out in front of him. The lower section of the spine was still attached to the pelvis.
Just another day at the office, Jeff thought to himself, and he had to look away for a moment as the pathologist lifted the spine and rotated it in his hands.
(“It’s about your brother. There’s been an accident.”)
“No,” Jeff muttered, and the doctor turned and looked back at him.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Sorry, I was . . . just thinking about something else.” He turned and put his hands on the counter.
“You okay?” Owen asked.
“Just tired,” he said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Understood. It’s a tough case to investigate.”
“Yeah. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
“I don’t know if you want to see this,” the pathologist said, “but this pelvis belonged to a female. On preliminary exam, I can tell you that there are some mild degenerative changes to the vertebrae. For most people, that starts to happen in their thirties and forties.”
“An adult,” Jeff said. “Definitely human?”
“Yes,” he said. “This is human.”
“Can you tell the cause of death?”
The doctor was quiet for a moment, and Jeff kept his eyes focused on the counter in front of him.
What’s wrong with you? It’s an adult female. You heard that, didn’t you? Turn around and take a look at what he has to show you.
“Nothing obvious,” Owen said. “I don’t see any fractures to the skull or long bones.” He put the skeletal remains back on the table. Jeff could hear the clunk of it from where he was standing.
Owen zipped up the bag. He removed his gloves and tossed them in the trash can. “I’ll need some time to make a thorough assessment,” he said. “I’m going to take this over to the university. We’ll see if we can get some carbon dating as we did on the other specimen. I’ll contact you in a week or two, as soon as I know something.”
“Thank you,” Jeff said. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead. He wiped them away with the sleeve of his shirt before turning around. “I can’t emphasize enough how helpful this is.”
The medical examiner nodded and walked with him to the parking lot. “It’s what we do here,” he said. “Sometimes the evidence talks to us.” He held out his hand and Jeff shook it. “But it’s a poor substitute for the living.”