Bones on Ice: A Novella (7 page)

“You think some con did in Hallis?”

“No. Crap, I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine mustering the energy to kill anyone up there. Just wait and the mountain will do it for you. A blizzard, a rockslide, a crevasse, an avalanche. That bastard’s the perfect crime scene. Sorry.”

“Maybe the abominable snowman did it.” Slidell snapped his notebook, pocket-jammed it, and got to his feet. I stood.

“The Yeti is a peaceful creature.” Gass, craning up at us.

“Yeah, well, leave him to the Russians for now.” Slidell’s parting words. “Stick around town.”

Gass, voice solemn, eyes unreadable behind the tilted lenses. “Bright was my friend. She could be tough, but I loved her. The others, not so much. I want to help if I can.”

Slidell flipped some bills onto the table and I followed him outside. We rode without talking until he dropped me at my car. I knew the reason for his silence. Though squirrelly, Gass seemed believable. So we hadn’t a single viable suspect. If not Sasquatch, then who?

At the annex, I got straight behind the wheel. Eager to examine the bones, I gunned the engine and fired toward the lab.

Where the body would deliver its second bombshell.

As it turned out, I got back to the lab much later than I’d planned. Mama phoned. Which required a series of calls back and forth with my sister, Harry. Which meant I had to go inside. Then I discovered that I was out of cat food. A trip to Petco. Back home. By then I was hungry and decided to stop for a quick taco.

When I finally arrived at the lab, Hawkins had left. But he’d followed my instructions with his usual precision.

In autopsy room five, Brighton Hallis’s face and scalp floated in a large glass jar, flattened, lidless eyes staring through the murky fluid in which they were submerged. A hunk of white silicone rubber sat on a tray on one counter. A collection of bones and cranial fragments lay on another, drying on towels. Beside the bones was a stack of three-by-five color prints. Beside the prints, a fingerprint card.

In the cooler, ME215-15 was chilling on her gurney, prone, covered in blue plastic sheeting, which I flipped open. The skull was angled up, forehead tight to a rubber headrest, stripped of flesh to the level of the neck. The bone looked pale yellow, the suture lines squiggly dark in the artificial light. On the neck, a deep gouge and tiny white flecks marked the spot where Hawkins had painted his casting material.

I wheeled Brighton Hallis out of refrigeration. Then I turned on the fans. All of them.

After gloving, I examined the area of damage in the neck region. A shallow track angled downward from the skull base toward the gash overlying the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. I considered its form and depth. Studied the photos Hawkins had taken. Then I walked over and picked up the cast.

The thing looked like the beak of a petrel seabird. I closed my eyes, willing an idea to form in my mind. An image. A link.

Nothing.

I laid the thing down and returned to the body.

The second area of trauma was on the skull, with impact blows to both the front and back. This one was easier. Or maybe it was because this injury involved bone. My turf.

I started with the back. On the ectocranial surface of the right parietal, three inches superior to the lambdoid suture, was a classic example of a depressed fracture. Concave center, radiating cracks, the full Monty. But something was off.

Puzzled, I found a hand lens and brought my eyes close. With the damage magnified, I could see what was actually going on. What I’d mistaken for a single depressed fracture actually showed two points of impact. Fractures radiating from the second impact ran up
to, but didn’t cross, fractures radiating from the first. That meant two separate blows to the back of the head.

I thought about that. About the size and shape of the concavity. A brick? A paddle of some sort?

I circled the gurney and, using two hands, rotated the skull so that I could see the face. What was left of the face. The damage to the nasal-maxillary region was extensive. The bones were shattered in the region below the nose, the teeth virtually obliterated.

I returned the skull to its original position. Thought about two blows to the back of the head. About the anatomical location of the anterior and posterior injuries. The picture was not one that I’d expect from a fall. Unless Hallis lost her balance and cracked headfirst onto a rock. Then backward. Twice. Or a giant bird dropped two boulders onto her skull.

But she wore a helmet. Unless she removed it.

Or someone did.

Holy crap!

A bird!

Neuron-fired recollection. A quick fumble through a cardboard carton. Faded clothing. A headlamp. An ice axe. Bright blue rope.

I dropped the lens and shot back to the counter. Picked up and angled the cast this way and that.

Holy flying crap!

I raced to my office, grabbed the box I’d collected from Blythe Hallis, rummaged wildly, finally yanked out the object I sought. Pulse going double time, I pumped back to autopsy room five and positioned my prize side by side with Hawkins’s cast.

The resemblance hit me like a punch. The Grivel Quantum Tech ice axe was a perfect match for the beaklike shape of the silicone rubber. For the wound in Hallis’s neck. And the handle could easily have created the damage to the skull.

Could have been used to knock out the teeth?

Hot damn! Though I knew my informal comparison would never hold up in court, I was certain I’d found the weapon that had killed Brighton Hallis.

I dialed Slidell. Got voicemail. Left a message.

Two calming breaths, then on to the vertebrae. Gross observation showed greenstick fracturing, uniform staining, and no remodeling, indicating that the stab wound to the neck was definitely a perimortem injury.

Next step, reassembly. Not the whole skull, but the relevant sections. Using good old Elmer’s and toothpicks, I started in. Yeah. Low tech. And tedious. Especially when the
head has not been removed from the body. But I had promised Blythe Hallis. No more mutilation than necessary.

By ten-thirty my back was screaming and my vision was blurring. I’d had it. But I’d reconstructed enough to get a pretty good picture. After snapping an autopsy diagram onto a clipboard, I began sketching in detail.

When finished, I knew what had happened to Brighton Hallis, if not the specific sequence. A stab wound to the neck. Repeated blows to the face and dentition. Two blows to the head. And the angling of the posterior damage suggested that the ice axe had penetrated at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. Given the size and shape of the weapon, and the victim’s height, if standing at the time of the attack, I estimated the assailant’s height at somewhere between sixty-five and seventy inches. Fantastic. Slidell would have a field day with that. Only Sasquatch could be crossed off the list.

I paused, visualizing the one fuzzy photo taken during recovery of Hallis’s body. Not crystal clear, but the slope appeared to have been moderate, with very few rocks.

I stepped back, considering. An ice axe to the neck. Multiple blows to the face and back of the head. I was unsure which injury killed her, but certain of one thing: Brighton Hallis’s death was not accidental.

I stripped off my gloves and dialed Slidell. This time he answered.

“A little payback, Doc?”

I had no inkling what that meant.

“I call you at dawn, you call me at night when I’m catching some hoops.”

While I’m busting my ass in an autopsy room. Without apologizing, I explained what I’d found.

Slidell made a noncommittal sound in his throat. In the background I could hear the frantic sound of play-by-play coverage.

“Ever think maybe the kid offed herself? Dove from a ledge?”

“Where the hell did that come from?”

“Your vic was in trouble up to her tits. I started digging into Bright Ascents, found a trail that led to Bert Malle over in Financial Crimes. You know him? He’s that asshat wears—”

“Why financial crime?”

“Your golden girl was engaged in some good old-fashioned embezzling. Fraud guys were about to pop her when she split for Everest.”

“But she was wealthy.” This didn’t make sense.

“
Eee-
lon was right. Her trust had a leash tighter than a—”

“Meaning?” Not up to a raunchy Slidellism.

“The kid was spending way beyond her means. Mostly on Everest.”

“How much went missing?”

“About a mil.”

“Roughly the amount Bright Ascents took in.”

“It was a small charity with a lot of dumb donors.”

“No one caught that the money wasn’t going where it was intended?”

“It wasn’t like contributors were hopping over to China to check on progress.”

“Nepal.” Jesus. Why did I bother? “What about Damon James?”

“Hard to say. Malle didn’t have a handle on James. Looks like Hallis kept her cards pretty close to her chest.”

“They’re sure it wasn’t mismanagement? Gass said Hallis had no head for business.”

“They claim their evidence is solid. Despite the Hallis name, the kid was facing prosecution. Question was when, not if.”

“Where’s the money now?”

“Hadn’t thought of poking down that hole.”

Dead air.

I slammed down the handset and rubbed my eyes. Which felt like someone had lit them on fire. Time to go.

As I packed away the photos, bones, and cast, my gaze fell on the detached face pasted to the inside of the jar.

Uh-oh, that tiny brain-corner voice whispered.

What? Was I missing something? Or was it just fatigue?

I viewed the flat, lifeless features through the liquid and glass. The boneless nose. The shriveled lips. The elongated ears.

The tiny voice drew in its breath.

The ears? I looked more closely.

Sweet God in heaven!

As before, I flew to my office. This time I pulled out an envelope and jiggled a photo out onto the blotter. A blond young woman smiled in the sunshine under an immaculate blue sky.

I grabbed a lens and brought her face into focus.

Son of a bitch!

Fingers trembling, I logged onto the Internet and googled for more images of Brighton Hallis. Page after page popped up. I clicked through them.

Son of a freaking bitch!

In every shot in which her ears were visible, Brighton Hallis wore earrings. Studs
mostly, but also loops and a few dangly numbers. It wasn’t her taste in jewelry that had my heart banging. It was the undeniable fact that Hallis had pierced ears.

The mummy in the cooler did not.

Back to room five. To the lightboxes. To every X-ray I’d made into hard copy. I stared at the pickup-sticks jumble that contained within it the record of Brighton Hallis’s youthful calamities.

Or did it? I’d been so focused on cause of death, I’d neglected the question of ID. Taken it for granted. Violated my own first rule.

Time to fix that.

Pulling on fresh gloves, I picked up and studied ME215-15’s right ulna. Then I carried the bone to a magnifying scope, leaned into the eyepieces, and adjusted focus.

At sixteen, Brighton Hallis broke her arm while racing BMX. I searched the entire shaft, looking for gross evidence of an old healed fracture. Saw none. Only damage that was recent and postmortem.

My scalp tingled.

At eighteen, Brighton Hallis jumped into a quarry, hit bottom, and cracked her heel. I repeated my actions with the calcaneus.

No fracture line. No remodeling.

I checked the X-rays Hawkins had taken. Not a hint of old injury on the foot or arm bone.

I stood, eyes burning, the undeniable truth slamming home. The woman on the gurney in the cooler was not Brighton Hallis.

“What about DNA?” Slidell and I were back on the phone. The sports announcer was still sounding frenzied. Surprisingly, Skinny wasn’t taking off my head.

“I’ll phone in the morning, plead extraordinary circumstances. But I doubt that’ll do any good. Fingerprints are a better bet.”

“Call me when you have something.
Tomorrow
.” Slidell hung up.

I drummed agitated fingers on my desk, recalling my earlier statement to Slidell.
Five went up, four came down
.

Was it true? Was Brighton Hallis still on Everest? If so, who was the unnamed guest in our cooler?

One candidate popped to mind right away.

The mysterious solo climber of confusing South American origin. The woman last seen with Brighton Hallis? I checked my watch. Checked the Internet, source of all knowledge. Kathmandu was ten hours ahead of Charlotte. Morning. Business hours. I
picked up the landline, already hearing Larabee’s lecture about fiscal restraint.

Slidell was right about both the quantity of numbers and the switching required to reach a knowledgeable official in Nepal. I finally got one in Chitra Adhikari of the Nepal Ministry of Tourism, Mount Everest permit and statistics office.

Chitra’s English was limited, but eventually we do-si-doed into useful territory. In 2012, his agency issued thirty permits to expedition teams comprising 325 climbers. A veritable conga line up the mountain. They also issued nineteen unguided, or solo, permits.

“Can you fax me a list of those names?” I asked.

Chitra could. “Two thousand twelve, very bad year. Eleven people die on Everest.”

It took a lot of repetition and word searching, but in the end I learned that seventeen climbers were airlifted alive to Kathmandu that season. Only one on May 20, 2012. The day Brighton Hallis died.

“Viviana Fuentes.” The name sounded odd with Chitra’s lilting accent. “Solo climber. Very sick.”

“Did she survive?”

“Big puzzle. Woman disappear.”

“On the mountain?”

“No. After. Helicopter fly woman to Kathmandu Medical College Teaching Hospital. So sick, carried on stretcher. Doctor arrives, patient is gone.”

“She was dead?” Wanting to be clear.

“No. She walk out.”

“She could walk?”

“Maybe she not so sick at lower elevation. This happens. Maybe she confused. This also happens. No one knows.”

“Then, nothing?”

“Not quite nothing.” I could almost hear his smile. “Chitra, he a curious guy. I call a friend in Immigration. Learn someone using Viviana Fuentes’s passport fly from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Santiago, Chile.” I heard paper rustle. A lot of it. Then, “That happen on June 5, 2012.”

After thanking Chitra, I disconnected. Thought. Rubbed my temples. Thought some more. Then I hit the keyboard.

The images weren’t as numerous, but they were there. Praise the Lord for social media.

A woman smiled at a camera from the deck of what looked like an Alpine ski lodge. Her blond hair was a little shorter, her frame a smidge stockier. Otherwise, the
resemblance between Viviana Fuentes and Brighton Hallis was startling. I clicked more images. The two could have been twins.

I learned that Viviana Carmen Fuentes was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1987, a year before Brighton Hallis entered the world. She attended the University of Santiago and, after graduation, worked as an independent software consultant.

I learned that Viviana’s resemblance to Brighton Hallis went beyond the physical. An avid climber since her youth, she’d attained brief notoriety at age nine as the youngest person to summit Ojos del Salado in the Andes. Viviana was taught to climb by her father, Guillermo Fuentes, an accomplished mountaineer in his own right. Fuentes Sr. died in a storm on Denali when Viviana was fifteen.