CHAPTER 1

TUESDAY, JUNE 18

As Detective Marti MacAlister and her partner, Matthew “Vik” Jessenovik, walked across the wide expanse of grass toward the man who had found the skeletal remains, they could here his voice rising with hysteria.

“… looking at me … he was looking at me … he … he … he was…”

“He didn’t have any eyes,” the uniform interrupted.

“And grinning … he was…”

“They all look like they’re grinning.”

Marti could see that the man was wearing a long overcoat despite the seventy-five-degree weather. Limp brown hair fell across his forehead and hung to his shoulders. He was clutching a fraying nylon duffel bag.

“What if I was sleeping on him? What if…”

“You probably were.”

The man dropped the bag and began rubbing his arms through his coat sleeves.

“I just wanted a place to sleep.” He sounded as if he was about to cry.

Close up, the man looked to be in his teens. Marti could smell him, just dirt and perspiration, not the sickening odor of rotting garbage or the sweet, acrid smell of marijuana.

The uniform looked at her and Vik with raised eyebrows. He shrugged.

“Okay, Brandon, here are the detectives who are going to investigate this.” He introduced them, then took a few steps back while they showed Brandon their badges.

“What happened?” Marti asked.

“Went to sleep and woke up with this head staring at me and grinning.”

“A skull,” the uniform said. “Just a skull.”

“Just hell. Wasn’t more than six inches from my face.”

“What did you do?”

“Do? What do you think? Grabbed my stuff. Ran like hell. Woke up those people in that house.” He pointed toward a large Georgian in the center of the lawn. “Sleeping on a dead body. Damn.” He shook his head. “Middle of June and I still can’t find a safe place to sleep.”

“Nothing’s safe when you’re on the street,” the uniform said.

Marti turned to him. He needed something to do. “Where did he find it?” she asked.

“Down in there.” He pointed to a ridge of trees midway between the top of the bluff and the little-used four-lane roadway at the base of the bluff. From where they stood, Marti could not see the lake at all.

“Did you disturb anything?” she asked.

“No. Flashed my light in, saw the skull, called it in.”

“Good. Go watch for the coroner’s van and the evidence tech. Direct them down there.”

She turned to Brandon. “Did you see anything else?”

He shook his head.

“Sleep here before?”

“Couple of times.”

“Ever see anyone here?”

“No. If I wanted to see people I’d go someplace else.”

She gave Vik a small nod. It was his turn.

“How old are you, son?”

“Nineteen.”

At six-two, Vik towered over him. Vik’s face was craggy, with a beaklike nose that was skewed to one side by a break. Wiry salt-and-pepper eyebrows almost met in a ferocious scowl. He seldom smiled. Now he struck what Marti called his vulture pose. Most adults were intimidated by this, kids weren’t fazed at all. Brandon didn’t seem to be afraid either.

“Where are you from?”

“Around.”

“Around where?”

Brandon shrugged. “Wherever.”

“Where are you headed?”

“No place in particular.”

“Well, in that case, you won’t mind if we detain you for twenty-four hours, make sure there aren’t any warrants out on you.”

Another shrug. “Think you could make it the hospital? Psych ward? Food’s better.”

Vik shook his head. “Sorry.”

“Vagrants,” Vik said as they walked away. “Strange way to live. Somebody will probably find his body someday. Or his bones.”

*   *   *

Vik whistled as he led the way through the woods where the remains had been found. It was a tuneless whistle, not a song, something he did so seldom that Marti had to think for a minute before she realized that Brandon’s age bothered him. As she followed him, she wondered what would bring anyone, especially a homeless teenager, to this place. Low bushes snagged her slacks. Tree branches scratched her arms. There was no path. The dirt was hard-packed and the undergrowth spiky and sharp. As they headed about thirty feet down to the base of the bluff, they pushed scrub and low tree branches aside, heard the scurrying of small animals, and flushed the occasional bird.

This was all that remained of the ancient bluffs that once descended to sandy beaches and the then unpolluted, fish-filled waters of Lake Michigan. For several hundred years the Potawatomi Indians had foraged here. According to Marti’s eleven-year-old son Theo, they called themselves the Neshnabek, which meant The People. Then the French and the English brought civilization, or uncivilization, as Theo would say—and ultimately, relocation.

As Marti and Vik descended through the woods and toward “civilization,” Marti could see the stacks of the “coker” plant, which still converted coal to electricity; the tops of concrete storage silos; gray mounds of gypsum waiting to be loaded onto ships; and the flat roofs of deserted buildings where fishing and boat-building industries once thrived. She couldn’t see the lake at all. When they reached the base of the bluff, clumps of dandelions and clusters of prairie grasses took over. There wasn’t much litter and not enough traffic to overcome the faint but unmistakable odor of a skunk.

“The Alzheimer’s Expressway,” Vik said.

“The Anstandt Expressway,” she reminded him. Tufts of the tough, enduring grass had sprung up in concrete cracks along the little-used road.

“Depends on your perspective, MacAlister. It begins nowhere, ends nowhere, and goes nowhere. About the only thing it’s good for is filming car chases and drag racing.”

Marti could understand Vik’s animosity. The roadway, two blocks long when it was built in the seventies and extended a few more blocks a couple of years ago, served no essential purpose that she could discern other than to divert some of the morning and evening commuter traffic. The Anstandt was supposed to go north, then west, and hook up with Route 173. It was also supposed to go south as far as Leebuck Road. Those links would have created a major bypass around the city. That never happened. There was a major manufacturing facility in the way, a cemetery with graves going back several hundred years, as well as churches and homes that had been built in the mid-to-late eighteen hundreds. For some reason none of that had initially been taken into consideration.

When Marti didn’t say anything, Vik said, “Alzheimer’s Expressway, like I said. This whole lakefront area should have been off-limits, just like they were smart enough to do in Chicago and Milwaukee.”

Marti knew that was Vik’s real complaint. “That would have been nice,” she agreed, thinking of trips to the lakefront when she lived in Chicago; the beaches, the parks, museums and marinas. Here there was industrial pollution, an EPA asbestos cleanup in progress, mercury in the water, and miles of train track that could not be taken up.

Marti stood at the verge where grass met gravel and that yielded to asphalt. She turned and looked at a place among the trees. The medical examiner and the evidence technicians had arrived. Strips of yellow plastic marked the spot where the skeletal remains had been found. It was a peaceful place, quiet, a place where few people came, and none for any good reason. Someone had been buried there, perhaps died there. It was a lonely place to die. Most places were.

*   *   *

It was after eleven the following morning when Marti parked at the coroner’s facility. Based on bits of clothing found with the remains, the medical examiner, Dr. Cyprian, estimated that the victim had been in a shallow grave for nine to twelve months. No ID had been found. Now somebody was going to read the bones. Marti wanted those bones to talk to her too, perhaps yield a few secrets that were less obvious than those a forensic anthropologist could have identified.

“Hurry up or we’ll be late,” Vik grouched. “Our expert from the big city has been here for half an hour.”

“So? She arrived early.”

Dr. Cyprian, a quiet-spoken East Indian, was waiting for them, along with Dr. Elaine Altenberg, who had driven up from Chicago. Marti and Vik had worked with her once before. Altenberg was good at what she did. She was a friendly, relaxed middle-aged woman who liked to talk. Marti had requested Meline Pickus, who had helped them when a mummy was found in the Geneva Theater, but Pickus was on vacation.

“Morning, Jessenovik,” Altenberg said. “MacAlister.”

The bones that had been recovered were arranged on a metal table in the autopsy room. The hands and feet were missing except for a few joints from the fingers.

“Animals,” Altenberg said.

Most of the remaining bones had been gnawed. It was obvious from the damage to the rib cage that the victim had been shot.

The autopsy room was all concrete and stainless steel. Tools were assembled on carts and tables. The floor slanted toward a central drain. Marti tried to ignore the odor of the dead, a smell that reminded her of uncooked pig’s feet at room temperature. The room was cold. She shivered and wished she had remembered to retrieve her jacket from the backseat of the car.

“I’m going to consult with Professor William Bass down in Knoxville to determine an approximate time of death,” Dr. Altenberg said. “We found some blowfly pupa cases near the body. Dr. Bass is the expert on seasonal dating based on the presence of fly pupae. We also have some soft tissue on the arms and legs and Dr. Bass is more familiar than I am with decay rates when the body is buried in a shallow grave.”

“Will that take long?” Vik asked.

“No. A day or two at the most,” Dr. Altenberg said. “Now”—she pointed to the pelvic area—“there is no question that this is a male.”

Before she could continue, Marti said, “Confirmed by the pubic shape, sub-pubic angle and the ventral arc.” She had only seen one partial female skeleton, but she had seen three male skeletons and remembered that.

Altenberg paused, then picked up the skull and pointed to the ridge of bone above the eye sockets. “The suborbital crest is prominent, and…” She rotated the skull. “The nuchal crest at the back of the skull is more pronounced than a female’s would be. And, look at this.” She pointed to a small bump on the bone above where the ear would have been, and at two more small bumps above the eye socket. “Very unusual. Symptoms of something called Gardner’s Syndrome. It’s genetic, passed on by the male. And something else.” She turned the skull until it seemed to be grinning at them. “See how large the teeth are, and how the incisors have a shovel shape? Native American. Most unusual.”

Surprised, Marti took a closer look. “But … these are not old bones.”

“No, new bones, nothing ancient.”

“Potawatomi?”

“I can’t say yet. There are facial variations among the different tribes. Maybe we’ll get lucky and have so much difficulty finding out who he is that we’ll have to do a facial reconstruction.” She went on for at least ten minutes, describing how they used to do reconstructions; then said, “Of course, now we use computers,” and launched into an explanation of that.

“Smart woman,” Vik said as they walked to their car. “Knows her stuff. Just talks too much.”

“She was still going strong when we left,” Marti agreed. “At least Dr. Cyprian seemed interested.”

“Nice of her to tell us all the things that could have happened to the victim’s hair.”

“Kind of like listening to the migratory habits of the yellow-bellied sapsucker,” Marti agreed.

“Maybe we should take her over to the Alzheimer’s, let her find a few animal burrows and climb a few trees to check the birds’-nests. See if she could find some of his hair. Maybe that would get her out of our hair.”

“Having a bad day, Jessenovik?”

“I wasn’t,” Vik said. “Until now.”

“Interesting that it’s an American Indian.”

“Native American,” Vik said.

“Not according to Theo,” Marti told him. Theo, and her stepson Mike, who was also eleven, were working on a major Potawatomi project with their Boy Scout troop.

As soon as she got back to the office, Marti called the North American Indian Center in Chicago. The man she spoke with gave her some leads on whom to contact about missing Indians. He was not optimistic that she would identify the remains after this length of time unless there was an existing missing-persons report. She began scanning those as soon as she hung up.

By Thursday afternoon Dr. Altenberg had determined that the victim was five feet eight inches tall, weighed about one forty-five and was over twenty-one, but not older than twenty-five. None of that information matched up with the missing-persons reports they had targeted, but it did provide a minimal description. The odontologist Altenberg consulted had not made a tribal identification. As soon as he did, Altenberg would begin the computerized reconstruction.

On Friday, Marti scanned the forensic reports. “Nothing useful,” she concluded. “And nobody seems to be looking for him either.”

Dr. Altenberg called just before noon. “That was a lucky guess, MacAlister.”

“What was?”

“Potawatomi. Sorry it took so long to confirm that.”

Marti thanked her, hung up, and relayed the information to Vik. “We better start making inquiries about missing persons in Kansas, Wisconsin, and lower Michigan.” The Potawatomi had reservations there. “And I’ll put in another call to the Indian Center. They might be able to provide some additional leads now that we’ve identified the tribe.”

It appeared that the victim was not from this area. But if not, where did he come from? And why come here? Was he just another homeless man seeking a place to bed down for the night? Just passing through? Or, like his ancestors, who had once lived east of Lake Michigan, in what was now Indiana, had he come here seeking refuge? Marti decided that making abstract assumptions was not the best way to proceed. She had been listening to too many of Theo’s and Mike’s Potawatomi stories. She went back to her notes and went over the list of people and agencies she had identified. Those she had contacted were checked off. It was a short list and she had almost reached the end.