Page 71 of Fire and Bones
“Blessed day,” and Colt disconnected.
Doyle and I looked at each other.
“Doesn’t help much, does it?” she asked.
“I know the subcellar vic died after 1940. At a time when the house belonged either to Unique Swallow or to W-C Commerce.”
“Now you’re getting somewhere.”
Teasing. But the dig struck a nerve.
“You could just let it go.” Doyle reached for her mug. Grimaced at the contents and set it back down.
“You’re right. I could.” Hearing the lack of conviction in my own voice. “The Foggy Bottom vics aren’t my problem.”
“True. Thacker will deal with the four DOAs from the fire. If it was arson, as Burgos claims, those deaths are homicides. Deery will investigate that.”
Doyle glanced at her watch.
“Yikes! Gotta go!”
Shooting to her feet, she added,
“Thacker constantly struggles with budgetary issues. Will she really give a rat’s ass about a woman dead maybe eighty years?”
I had no answer to that.
“DC’s homicide rate has increased by more than twenty-five percent over the last few years. Deery’s caseload is undoubtedly mammoth. Will he?”
I had to agree. It was unlikely resources would be spent on such an old case.
“I know you want to head home. But think about hanging long enough to check out these articles.” Doyle indicated the satchel holding her three hundred printouts. “Or you’re welcome to make your own copies. I’m not doing that again.”
After Doyle left, I sat a moment, thinking about her question. Questions.
Would Thacker care about the lady in the sack? Would Deery?
Was her death even a murder?
Why not let it go?
An hour later, I wasn’t loading my rollaboard into my car. I wasn’t motoring south imagining the Virginia of days gone by.
I was in an autopsy room at the Consolidated Forensic Lab, standing over a body bag containing the nameless subcellar vic. Her shriveled flesh looked almost colorless under the harsh fluorescents, her bones the pallid gray of molted snakeskin.
The burlap sack lay folded to the left of the corpse. The long, skinny braid was coiled inside a plastic container, dark and murky like a creature seen through frosted glass.
I stared at the cranial and mandibular trauma, searching for any detail I might have missed, one bleak scenario after another looping through my brain. A crash? An accident? An argument? A push?
Why the makeshift burlap shroud?
I imagined a man looming over the tiny woman. Raising an object, maybe a fist, in anger. The bone-shattering blows. The woman falling to her knees. The killer maneuvering her lifeless body into the sack. Dragging the sack downstairs to the basement, then to the subcellar, her battered head thumping against each riser.
I wondered what the woman’s life had been like. The clothing in which she’d died suggested one different from that of Unique Swallow or her ladies of the night.
Was she married to a kind man with a friendly small-town face? To a tool who overdrank and mistreated her?
Did she have kids? Want kids?