Carcass Trade Read Free Page A

on the window frame. Above me, two ragged ravens swept through the sky and came to rest in the branches of a Monterey pine a few dozen yards away.
    Believing the shape of the head would form itself once my eyes got used to the shades of blackness, I looked inside again, but nothing there resembled a skull. On the chest wall were two burned lumps that said the victim was a woman.
    Joe and a coroner’s investigator with an explosion of coppery hair backlit by the sun were approaching as I got down. Les moved aside for them.
    I said, “The head’s gone. Maybe it rolled under. I can’t see that well. We’re going to need lamps.”
    â€œIt’s not gone,” Joe said. “It’s just not in one piece.” He put his hands to his head like ear mufflers and said, “You’ve got a prison of bone here. High enough temperatures, it explodes.” Expanding gases, he explained, would send bony shrapnel jetting into the leaves and lumpy eucalyptus buttons we’d have to search through on the canyon floor. “Our job just got a little harder, is all.”
    Les moved to the ladder, went up, looked a long while, then climbed down. “Get it out. We’ll see what’s what.”
    Doug came along with the CCD and set it down by Joe. He handed over the car keys, and Joe took them, bounced them twice, and gave them back. “You’ll need the sifter, too,” he said. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,” Joe said, as Doug gamely headed back up the hill to Joe’s car.
    Joe told Les, “I need to get to the underside of the car, but I’ll wait till the body is cleared. I guess you know it’s registered to a woman in Beverly Hills.”
    Les nodded. “We’ll give her a call. If she’s callable.” His gaze went to the wreck.
    The polished silver pin in Joe’s lapel with the numbers 4–190 on it glinted in the sun. A lot of cops have pins and belt buckles designed with 187 on them, the penal code section for homicide, but Joe’s meant he was for 190, the section that allows a judge to impose the death sentence for murder in the first degree.
    Joe went back up the hill as I stood waiting for Doug to bring back the screened flat we use for sifting. The coroner’s investigator, dressed in street clothes and wearing flat shoes, climbed up the ladder and looked in. She came back down wordlessly, then glanced at us and said, “Whew. Get your pictures. I’ll call Transport.” I didn’t know her name and she didn’t offer it. As she turned to go up the slope, she folded her arms tightly around her waist. Sometimes it’s too early in the morning.
    When Doug came back to give me the sifter, he got up on the car and began taking shots as I laid line in a grid for our search of the surrounding area. In a while the transport team arrived in a plain-wrap station wagon, two young men in blue jumpsuits with “Coroner” in gold letters on the back. They came down the hill with a collapsible gurney and a body bag. I told them to walk a single line along the ledge and when they were in the car itself to keep an eye out for anything foreign and try not to disturb its position. Then I went back up to my car, removed my jacket, took out a pair of coveralls and stepped into them, also bringing along the Polaroid I keep as a standby. I couldn’t see that Les Fedders was doing anything but bullshitting with the woman fire fighter.
    Doug’s autowinder was still going as I began brushing aside debris in a corner grid with just my gloved fingers. In the next fifteen minutes I found and dropped into a paper bag what I thought were fragments of temporal, occipital, nasal, and maxillary bone, this after snapping shots of the surface of the gridded area. I also found a tooth.
    Pretty soon I heard Doug’s camera buzzing again off my left shoulder and saw him photographing something by the trunk of an oak. Next