Page 29 of The Bone Code
“Execution-style.”
Flash tableau of the woman and child in Montreal. I forced it aside.
“Looks that way. I found no evidence of violence elsewhere in either skeleton, other than postmortem.”
“After they’d been shot.”
“Yes.” The phone went silent. “Both victims had their teeth knocked out or pulled and their fingers cut off just above the knuckles.”
“Cut with what?”
“An implement with a non-serrated blade. My guess would be pruning shears. Unfortunately, that’s all I can say.”
“What else?”
“That’s it.”
“How long do you think they were in that container?”
“Hard to be exact. One to five years?”
“What about all that barnacle business?”
“That will take time. And different expertise.”
“Who do I contact?”
“That’s on you.”
“The plastic?”
“Ordinary polyethylene sheeting. Ditto the wire. Common eighteen-gauge electrical available in any hardware department.”
Vislosky tossed her pen onto the desktop, leaned back, and stretched out her legs. They went a very long way. A beat of silence, then, “You got all this from the bones?”
“Except for the intel on the availability of the wire.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Vislosky picked up and waggled the pen back and forth in her fingers. They were very long fingers. Then she reached her free hand across the desk and smiled ever so slightly.
“I maybe was abrupt at the morgue yesterday.” No apology, just laying it out there. “First name’s Tonia.”
“Temperance Brennan. Tempe.” We shook, my hand disappearing inside hers. “Tonia is unusual.”
“My mama heard it somewhere, probably wrote it down wrong. What the hell. She wanted me to be a doctor. I wanted to be a cop.”
“You persisted.”
“It’s what I do.” Vislosky pistol-pointed one ET finger at me, picked up and opened a sky-blue folder.
“After leaving the autopsy yesterday, I started hunting through MP reports. Went back five years looking for kids fitting your profiles. Got nada.”
“How wide did you go?”
“No hits in the Charleston area, in South Carolina, North Carolina, or Georgia. Now I can refine my search. The medical info’s gold. I’ll contact hospitals, have them check their records back five years for any kid presenting with a”—her eyes rolled to her notes—“lateral condylar fracture.”
“They’ll love that.”
