Page 52 of Fire and Bones
No one restated the obvious concerning unproven assumptions.
Jamar continued.
“Case number 25-02105, Jawaad el-Aman, male, age twenty-one, foreign national, Syria. Body recovered from the third floor, west bedroom.”
“We’ll have to be extra careful with him,” Thacker said. “The kid was an ambassador’s son.”
“What was an ambassador’s son doing in a rented room in a cheap Airbnb?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But I don’t want the State Department getting its nuts in a knot.”
“Assuming the DOA is el-Aman.” I matched Thacker’s admonishment word for word.
“Assuming that.” Raising her mask to her face, Thacker added, “Let’s start with el-Aman.” Turning to me. “The body presumed to be el-Aman.”
Her eyes suggested a grin behind the blue polypropylene covering her mouth.
Crossing to the closest autopsy table, Jamar clicked on and adjusted the pull-down surgical lamp. The bright LED lit the black body bag like a spot on a darkened film set.
Thacker nodded.
The zipper rent the silence with a loud whrrrp.
The remains were as I recalled.
The man had died wearing a baseball cap. A quick google revealed the emblem on it was a Syrian flag.
The facial features were gone, the skull cracked, its contents reduced to a shriveled dark mass. The torso was blackened, the forearms history, the limbs curled into the pugilistic pose.
Jamar shot pics. Thacker and I tweezed debris off the charred flesh, setting each item aside for future analysis. A zipper and studs from jeans. A belt buckle in the shape of a star. Fragmented teeth. Amorphous globs that had probably been dental restorations. A melted and warped metal comb.
Then, with much maneuvering, the three of us managed to roll the corpse to its back.
I stood aside while Thacker dictated what comments were possible. She noted the remnants of a penis and scrotum, the genitalia protected from the flames by the well-muscled lower torso and thighs. The eyes, stomach, and other organs were too damaged to yield any info. Inking prints was impossible.
Using a scalpel, Thacker verified the presence of smoke in the victim’s mouth, lungs, and trachea. The kid had been breathing at the time of the fire.
When Thacker finished, Jamar wheeled the body off for radiography.
After a quick coffee break, Thacker and I viewed the projected images together. As she recorded facts about soft tissue, I focused on the skeleton.
Based on the state of epiphyseal union in the clavicles and long bones, I estimated that the victim had died in his late teens to early twenties. Using measurements taken directly on the handy-dandy Smartboard, I calculated that he’d stood sixty-eight to seventy inches tall.
Neither of us spotted anything suggestive of factors other than death by fire.
The bio-profile was consistent with that of Jawaad el-Aman. As was the cap bearing the flag of his homeland.
Beyond that, all we could do was collect samples for DNA testing.
Another short pause for lunch, then we moved on to the hippo bag. To the commingled bodies found on the second floor, presumably Danny Green and Johnnie Lamar Star.
As with the vic presumed to be el-Awan, the body parts having little or no flesh exhibited the most damage—the fingers and hands, the toes and feet. The few surviving digits had been reduced to blackened twigs.
While at the scene, I’d counted six limbs, each a scorched and shriveled spindle. That tally held true. The lower torsos and thighs, composed of solid, heavy bones encased in thick muscle masses, had congealed into one shapeless glob.
Neither man’s head had survived intact. Cranial and dental fragments coated the macabre black mass like sprinkles on a cake. Others had been collected and sealed in a small Tupperware tub. From the accompanying debris we retrieved parts of four melted sneakers, two scorched zippers, and fourteen more teeth.
By eight-forty-five Thacker and I had completed our analyses of #25-02103 and #25-02104, using the same protocol we’d followed for #25-02105. Brennan bones. Thacker organs and soft tissue. Jamar, brawn.