Free After the Storm by Linda Castillo Page A

the storm. Until I determine otherwise, this area will be treated as a crime scene.
    Mr. Hutchinson has rejoined his scouts, who are now munching on burgers and fries from the McDonald’s in Millersburg. They’ve dragged cut logs into a long row so that they have an unimpeded view of the coroner and me.
    “I think they’re enjoying this more than that LEGO movie,” the doc comments as he slips shoe covers onto his feet.
    “It beats picking up trash.” I pull on my shoe covers and, together, we enter the scene.
    The doc squats next to the skull. “It’s definitely human.”
    I motion toward the femur. “What about that? Is it part of the same skeleton?”
    “That’s a human femur.” He turns slightly, indicates the vertebrae scattered a few feet away. “Those are human as well.”
    “Any idea how long they’ve been here?” I ask.
    Grunting, he rises and goes to the black equipment bag he had set on the ground on the other side of the foundation. He removes two sets of blue gloves and hands a pair to me. “You know you’re going to have to get a forensic anthropologist down here to excavate and remove these bones, don’t you?”
    “Tomasetti recommended an FA who’s worked several cases for BCI.” I glance at my watch. “He should be here any time now.” I slip my hands into the gloves. “I thought maybe you could give me a ballpark.”
    “Let’s take a closer look.” He kneels next to the skull and picks it up. “There’s no trace of any soft tissue. Even the hair is gone from the scalp. I have no way of knowing if that’s due to time or elements or scavengers. That said, taking into consideration the condition of the bones and our climate here in northeastern Ohio … I’d say these bones have been here at least a decade.” He shrugs. “Depending on the PH of the soil, the bones themselves will eventually disintegrate or even fossilize. So, probably less than thirty years.”
    “Pretty large ballpark.”
    “You asked.” He frowns, but I see amusement behind his bifocals. “I really can’t get you any closer than that.”
    “Can you tell if the person was male or female?”
    “There’s no pelvis in sight, but …” Tilting his head back slightly, the doc lifts the skull, brushing away a bit of soil, and studies it through his bifocals. “This isn’t foolproof, Chief, but even with my proletarian eye, I can see that there’s a pronounced supraorbital ridge.” He runs a finger over the spot above the eye sockets, about where the brow would be. “I can’t tell you for certain, but I would venture to say this skull belonged to a male.”
    “Age?”
    He shakes his head. “No clue.”
    I look around. The dirt is smooth and hard-packed. There are several pea-size pebbles and other debris. A few bones scattered about, some partially buried. “There don’t seem to be enough bones here for a full skeleton,” I say.
    “You’re right; there’s not.”
    “Could be buried.”
    “Maybe.” He sets down the skull and looks around. “Or if animals had access to this area, the bones could have been carried off or even consumed over the years.”
    I indicate the small fragments of what looks like black plastic. “Those pieces,” I say, pointing. “Is it plastic? Fabric? Clothing, maybe?”
    His shoe covers crinkle as he crosses to one of the larger fragments and bends for a closer look. “Some kind of nonporous material. Quite deteriorated.”
    I squat beside him. “Doc, it looks like pieces of a garbage bag.”
    He tosses me a knowing look. “That doesn’t bode well for whatever happened to this individual.”
    Uneasy questions pry into my brain. Did this person suffer some kind of fall and die? Was he crawling around under the old barn and got stuck? Was he working down here and suffered a heart attack? Or did someone murder him, place his body in a garbage bag, and dump it?
    I think about the scarcity of bones, and something dark nudges at my brain. “If those fragments are