Free Bones of the Barbary Coast by Daniel Hecht Page B

always the bones.
    Skobold looked up from his lunch, a submarine sandwich on a sheet of waxed paper. She was early, and from the way his eyebrows appeared over the rims of his glasses he was surprised by her sudden appearance. He was sitting behind his desk while a younger man half-sat on one corner of it, gesturing with a manila envelope. The other visitor turned part way toward her and gave her a smile.
    Skobold swallowed. "Ah. Ms. Black, meet Cameron Raymond. Ray, Cree Black."
    " 'Ray'?"
    "Because of the last name and because I'm a radiologist. It was inevitable." Ray's grin moved further up the side of his face.
    He wore jeans and a white shirt and had the rangy, trim build of a very fit man. A nice face, Cree thought, handsome yet strangely shy or self-effacing. He shook her hand with a short, firm squeeze.
    "Ray works at Temple Microimage, the lab that's doing the imaging work on our . . . um, newest guest. He's the man I turn to when I need the kind of advanced analysis we'll be doing in this case. He's just brought some new films, which I'm very much looking forward to seeing."
    "And I should be getting back," Ray said. "But give me a call, Horace; we'll talk when you've had a chance to look them over."
    As he turned toward the door, Cree was startled to see the scarring that distorted the left side of his face. A weal of swollen tissue like a braid stretched from the corner of his lip to just in front of his ear, pulling the skin of his face and tugging down the corner of his eye. She almost gasped from a mix of sympathy and shock, and from the way he averted his eyes as he left, he clearly noticed her reaction.
    Skobold stared after him with a mournful, troubled expression, then raised a forefinger to request patience as he returned to his lunch.
    Cree sat on a plastic chair and waited, feeling bad about the way she'd reacted to the radiologist's scarring. She considered asking Skobold about him, but decided it would seem rude. Through the door to the lab, she could see several people clustered around Karen Chang and her partially completed reconstruction. The pallet had been removed from the back of the room, and she thought about asking Skobold where the wolfman had gone, but then worried he'd see it as her rushing him.
    To make conversation, she picked up a photo of Skobold standing next to a plump, cheery-looking woman about his own age. "Your wife?"
    Skobold looked mildly alarmed. "Sister," he said through his food.
    Another photo showed Skobold with his arm around the shoulders of a handsome, dark-haired young man, much younger, in a graduation robe. Cree took it from the shelf and admired it briefly. "Is this your son? He's very handsome!"
    This time he looked positively stricken. "My partner, Ms. Black," he said gravely.
    Cree's mouth opened and shut of its own accord. "I'm on a real roll here, aren't I."
    Skobold stared at her as he nibbled a trailing tag of lettuce, then turned businesslike: "I'm happy to meet with you briefly now, but as I said, I can only spare fifteen minutes. And I haven't had time to do anything more with the wolfman."
    "I'm hoping the questions I have are general enough for you to have an opinion after even your limited examination to date."
    He gestured with his sandwich for her to continue.
    "You mentioned that the crime scene people retrieved various artifacts with the bones. What sort of artifacts?"
    "Broken china, splintered furniture . . . um, a galvanized tin bucket, that sort of thing. Bertie will have an inventory."
    "Any clothing?"
    "Just rags—shreds, really. The fluids of decomposition hasten cloth decay—they provide a growth medium for molds, bacteria, and insects. Really, only the hard parts survived—the buttons, some rivets. No zippers back then."
    "So . . . when you find a body like this, can you tell what happened? From the position of the bones? I mean, what happened before death or at death as opposed to after death?"
    "Aha. An excellent point. One of the