Page 22 of Fire and Bones
Nearing the ME team, I raised an arm in greeting. The shorter of the two gestured back.
“Temperance Brennan.”
I proffered a hand to the tech who’d returned my wave, a small man with haphazard dreads and skin the color of week-old tea.
“Jamar Delson.” We shook, with Jamar doing some fancy finger thing at the end. “Dr. Thacker said you was coming.”
Cocking his chin up and left, he said, “My pale pal here is Ace Bagget. He’s a bit slow but listens real good.”
Ace rolled his eyes. Which were so velvety brown they made me think of Bambi’s mother. Badly scarred skin bore witness to acne that must have made his teen years difficult.
Both men appeared to be in their late twenties. While Jamar topped out at about five-five, I put Ace at six feet minimum.
“Dr. Thacker said you two were crackerjack with burn vics,” I said, exaggerating a tad.
“Snap!” Jamar shot a bony finger my way.
Ace said nothing.
“I assume you’ve worked a few fires?”
“Does a goose shit every ten minutes?”
Assuming the question was rhetorical, and clueless about the answer, I offered no response.
“People lost their lives here,” I said. “The authorities, friends, relatives, insurers, lawyers, you name it, will all want to know why. And who. So, a critical first step in this investigation will be victim ID. The more of each corpse we recover, the easier that will be.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Jamar over-nodded his agreement.
Ace started working a cuticle with his front teeth.
“This fire was a doozy,” I said. “I suspect the bodies will be in bad shape.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jamar repeated himself.
Ace said nothing. The cuticle was now red and raw.
“Captain Hickey has cleared us to enter the building. I’d like to begin by walking each room in a grid pattern.”
“We go in squarin’ and starin’,” Jamar said.
“Exactly. If you spot remains, stop and alert me.”
With that rather nebulous plan in mind, we donned the rest of our PPE, raised our N95 masks to our faces, and climbed to the front entrance, now sans door. Here and there, through the shattered cellar and first-floor windows, I saw gossamer wisps of smoke feathering up from the wreckage. And the occasional firefighter still probing it.
Picking our way through ash and chaotically piled rubble, carefully testing the placement of each booted foot, we took a quick tour. Confirmed that the building’s interior was as devastated as the damage to its exterior had suggested.
The roof’s eastern third had fallen in, taking with it significant portions of the inside walls on that side. As expected, sections of both upper floors had collapsed down onto each other. Much of that wreckage had then ended up in the basement.
On each level, metal fixtures, knobs, appliances, and hinged cabinet doors had warped and distorted. Porcelain sinks and commodes had cracked. Upholstery, carpeting, and drapes had been reduced to charcoal vestiges.
Every item in the house was darkened and covered with soot. The air coming through my mask reeked of the plastics, oils, chemicals, varnish, and paint recently consumed by the flames.
Having evaluated the situation, and sensing that these guys knew their way around a fire scene better than Thacker had let on, I suggested we split up. Jamar volunteered to search what remained of the upper floor. Ace took the second. I headed to the main level.
For more than an hour, the only sounds were the muted thudding of our footfalls, the soft tapping of our probes, the raspy crunching and scraping of displaced debris. Occasionally, one firefighter called out to another.
Then Jamar whistled.