LC 02 - Questionable Remains Read online

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  REMAINS

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  REMAINS

  A LINDSEY CHAMBERLAIN NOVEL

  BEVERLY 01J"OR

  To my mother, Edna Phillips Heth

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Diane Trap, Jean Stiles, and all the members of the Harriette Austin Writer's Group for their critiques and support. Thanks to my husband and my mother for their support. My gratitude to David Hally, who taught me to love archaeology.

  Chapter 1

  DR. CHAMBERLAIN." GERALD Dalton, Denny Ferguson's defense attorney, lay a hand on the mahogany witness box. "Dr. Chamberlain." He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, taking in the entire jury, who sat fanning themselves with their notebooks and gazing at Lindsay through skeptical eyes. "You ask these twelve men and women to believe that you can positively identify my client as being the man who shot Ahyoung Kim, even though the perpetrator wore a ski mask ... and you only got a glimpse in his mouth as he was yelling at you to hand over your purse?" Dalton removed his glasses and pretended to clean them with his handkerchief, shaking his head as he focused his gaze on his task. "My client could go to the electric chair," he said, replacing his glasses on his nose. "Are you willing to have that on your conscience? Weren't you scared? This fellow, whoever he was, had just shot Mr. Kim and now he fixed his attention on you. You must've been terrified."

  "Your Honor." The prosecutor, Max Gilbert, rose to his feet. "Is Mr. Dalton going to cross-examine Dr. Chamberlain, or is he going to testify himself?"

  "Get on with it, Mr. Dalton," said the judge.

  "Dr. Chamberlain, don't most bone experts like yourself use dental records to identify people, or are you able to Zen your identifications?" Dalton gave Lindsay a broad, sarcastic, toothy grin.

  "Your client has very distinctive overlapping teeth," Lindsay replied, "as I have described in detail. I saw them clearly and noticed them in spite of my fear, because observation is automatic for me. It's my job."

  "It's your job," Dalton repeated. "Haven't you told your students on many occasions that you need much more evidence to make a positive identification than to rule out a person?"

  "Yes," she answered. The heating system in the old, small-town courthouse was on high, and Lindsay could feel the prickly sensation of perspiration forming on her forehead. I must look guilty, she thought ruefully. She saw Mrs. Kim and her son Albert out in the spectator seats. Mrs. Kim understood little English, but she could read faces; her own was filled with worry. Albert, who had dropped out of the university to help his mother, looked angry. The defendant, Denny Ferguson, sat staring down at his hands; occasionally he would look up at Lindsay with a half smile on his face.

  Dalton's cocounsel sat tapping a pencil silently on her pad of paper. She watched the jury for a moment, then shifted her attention back to Lindsay.

  "Well, then," Dalton continued with exaggerated sarcasm, "forgive me if I don't quite understand. It seems to me that all you can say about my client-after your brief look in the perpetrator's mouth-is that you can't rule him out. This is a far cry from saying that Denny Ferguson is positively the man you saw."

  "The man who shot Mr. Kim was your client." Lindsay realized she sounded more stubborn than professional.

  "Dr. Chamberlain, you require more supporting evidence when you identify skeletal remains. Why are you requiring so little for a man's life?"

  "I have described your client's dentition in great detail. I am sure of my identification."

  The jury wasn't convinced. Lindsay could see that. Too much rested on her testimony, and they didn't believe she could identify Ferguson by having seen only his teeth. They would not have noticed his teeth in that detail, and they didn't really believe she would either. Denny Ferguson would go free, even though Lindsay knew he was the one who shot and killed Mr. Kim, the neighborhood grocersimply because Mr. Kim did not have enough money in the cash drawer to satisfy him.

  "You like the Kim family, don't you?" The defense attorney's voice was quiet, almost gentle.

  "Yes."

  "You want to see the murderer caught. We understand your sadness and sympathy for the Kim family." Again he gestured with a sweep of his arm, including the jury as if they were on his side. He shook his head and raised his voice, drawing out his words. "But, just how can you convince me, and these twelve very sensible people that you can say for sure it was my client who shot Mr. Kim and not someone else with bad teeth?"

  "Mr. Dalton," said Lindsay, raising her hands to grip the top of the witness box and leaning forward slightly. "You had orthodontic work as an adult. You had four teeth pulled. Two upper second premolars and two lower first premolars. You wore your braces quite a long time, and the constant soreness caused you to develop the bad habit of grinding and clinching your teeth at night."

  Gerald Dalton gawked at Lindsay, surprise evident on his face; his mouth dropped open, speechless for a moment. It was that moment of surprised hesitation that swayed the jury. Lindsay could see them shift their gazes to one another the way people do when they simultaneously see and understand a truth. In that moment she saw Albert nod his head and turn to whisper something to his mother; she saw the prosecutor smile and the defendant look around as if someone told a joke he did not understand.

  "Okay, how'd you do it?" Gilbert asked Lindsay, handing her a cup of coffee from the cappuccino machine in the corner of his office. He grinned broadly. "Your timing was perfect."

  "My timing was from desperation."

  Gilbert sat down and propped his feet on his dark oak desk. "But tell me how you did it."

  "It wasn't that hard. His theatrics made it possible. The way he tried to intimidate me, leaning over me, drawing out his words with that big voice of his, gave me a good look into his mouth. I saw that he had premolars missing. When he looked down to clean his glasses, I caught a glimpse of a permanent retainer behind his lower incisors. A retainer is used to prevent shifting of teeth."

  "And grinding his teeth?"

  "His lower incisors were beveled where they ground against his upper incisors."

  Gilbert gave a satisfied laugh. "I'll bet there's going to be a great gnashing of teeth in his office when the verdict comes in. With circumstantial evidence and a witness who only saw in the perp's mouth, of Dalton thought this was going to be an easy one."

  "You think they will find Ferguson guilty, then?" asked Lindsay. She couldn't quite share in Gilbert's confidence.

  "I think so. Of course, I've been surprised and even shocked by juries before, but I feel good about this. You're a good witness."

  Lindsay took a sip of her coffee. "I can't stay for the verdict. I have to give an exam. Call me when you know something." She set down her cup and rose, offering Gilbert her hand.

  He stood up quickly and shook her hand with a firm grip. "Sure. Glad to work with you, Lindsay. We don't usually have this kind of thing going on in our little town. I hate to see this kind of crime come in."

  "Me, too," said Lindsay. "I'm going to miss Mr. Kim."

  Sally, Lindsay's graduate assistant, was setting up the classroom for the honors course final exam when Lindsay returned to Baldwin Hall, home of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology. Sally's dark blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail, one wayward strand falling into her face. She had on a pair of well-worn jeans and a black T-shirt showing a white skeleton of a rat on the front along with the words: Rattus Rattus.

  "I like your shirt," said Lindsay.

  Sally looked down at the picture on her chest. "Yeah, I do, too. We're selling them to raise money for the anthropology club." She paused a moment before she asked, "Is it over?"

  "It's with the jur
y."

  "I'm sorry about Mr. Kim, Lindsay."

  "So am I." Lindsay tried to fight off the depressing mood in which the trial had left her. "Did you get students from the advanced osteology class to help you with the exam?"

  "They'll be here in a few minutes."

  The graduate students came in, followed by six honors students from Lindsay's class. There were the usual moans, groans, and the predictable question, "Is it hard?"

  "I don't think so," said Lindsay, smiling. She gave each of them a long strip of black fabric.

  "What's this?" asked one of the students.

  "A blindfold," she answered.

  "I knew it," said another. "A firing squad. She's going to shoot us if we fail."

  "We have to get our bones somewhere," offered Sally.

  Lindsay smiled at the group of four male and two female undergraduate students as they dropped their backpacks on the floor and sat down. "Okay, everyone listen up. As you have probably guessed, your test will be to identify some selected bones by touch alone. After you've named each bone, the graduate student assigned to you will write your answer down for you. You can get extra credit if you can identify the correct side-left or right. Don't try to listen to what the other students are saying because I've put different bones in each of the boxes on the tables. Now, pick a box and begin."

  Each student picked a spot next to one of the covered boxes on the laboratory tables and tied their blindfold across their eyes. Lindsay watched as they removed the lids from their boxes, reached in, took a bone, and felt for identifying characteristics. She smiled when their faces lit up as they felt a trochanter or a condyle or when they frowned as they searched with the tips of their fingers for a fossa or muscle attachment. Sometimes they would roll the shaft of a bone in their hands to determine the shape of the cross section. After a while she left the exam in Sally's supervision and went to her office.

  Lindsay's office had no windows. The walls beside and behind her desk were lined with bookshelves filled with books and journals. Her walnut desk had belonged to her grandfather, the only other archaeologist in the family. The brown, straight-grained wood surface was marred, and the left front leg still had her father's initials carved into it where he had tried out a new pocketknife on his ninth birthday. Her mother had wanted to have the desk refinished before they gave it to her, but her father had said no. Lindsay was glad because the marks left on artifacts reveal their history in a kind of code that she took pleasure in deciphering. The coffee cup rings told of her grandfather's long nights sipping coffee and working on articles. The cuts and scratches were evidence of the stone tools he laid out on the surface to examine and catalog.

  The desk faced the door to the archaeology lab. An oak filing cabinet inherited from the previous occupant stood behind the door. On the other side sat a single stuffed leather chair next to a brass floor lamp. Her grandfather's trowel rested on a bookshelf, and an old photograph hung on the wall behind the chair, showing her grandfather as a young man dressed in a tie and rolled up shirtsleeves, holding a shovel and standing in front of an Indian mound in Macon, Georgia.

  There were no artifacts or bones displayed in Lindsay's office. The only artifact she possessed was in an old cigar box inside her desk. It was a treasured possession: the first Indian artifact she had ever found. When Lindsay was five, her grandfather had taken her on the first of their many trips to do surface collecting. She had earnestly examined the freshly plowed ground as she walked beside her grandfather getting hot, tired, and restless. Then, there it was: the tip of a point partially covered by the moist earth. She had dug it out with her fingers and wiped off the dirt that clung to it. The point was beautiful, and it was huge, longer than her hand and almost as wide, made from black flint.

  "It's a Clovis point," her grandfather had told her. "The oldest point there is. It could have killed a woolly mammoth." Lindsay had held on to her find so tightly the edges had cut her hand, but that didn't matter because she had found something wonderful. Since that day she had found many things, but no discovery had ever made her feel as she did that time she found the Clovis with her grandfather. From that day on Lindsay knew she would be an archaeologist.

  Lindsay was reaching for a term paper to grade when a figure appeared in her doorway. She thought it was a student before she recognized Gerald Dalton's cocounsel. Lindsay hadn't gotten a good look at her in court. Now she saw that she was a small, fine-boned woman, not over five feet four inches tall. Lindsay guessed she wore a size two. She looked as if she had the hollow bones of a bird, she was so thin and delicate looking. Her short, glossy-black hair was cut in a pageboy, and her skin looked as though it would be translucent if her makeup were washed off. She stood stiffly in the doorway, still in the snug-fitting dark blue suit she wore to the trial.

  "Can I help you?" asked Lindsay.

  "Have you heard the verdict?" Her voice belied her small frame. It was low and husky.

  "No, I had to give an exam....

  "Yes. I saw your blindfolded students. I suppose that fits ... teaching them that they can make a positive identification without looking." The woman walked into Lindsay's office and stood, put her palms on the desk and leaned forward.

  "Is there a point to your visit?" asked Lindsay.

  "I wanted to be the one to tell you that the jury found Dennis Ferguson guilty. I hope that pleases you."

  Lindsay frowned. "Nothing about this event pleases me."

  "What really gets to me is that you don't have any misgivings about convicting a man on the flimsiest of evidence."

  "I was sure."

  "How can you possibly not have doubts? Are you that arrogant?" She stopped and looked at Lindsay for a moment, her green eyes clearly showing her anger. "God, you are, aren't you? You've set yourself up here as some great. . . bone ... guru, haven't you? And that performance today really topped it."

  "Performance?" asked Lindsay.

  "The way you pulled the rabbit out of the hat on the stand. It was the drama that convinced the jury, not the facts.... It was the damn show you put on. You are the most arrogant, manipulative woman I have ever met."

  Lindsay started to speak when the woman turned on her heel and left.

  Sally, who had been standing just outside the doorway, watched after the retreating figure before she came into Lindsay's office. "Well, who peed in her Wheaties?"

  "I suppose I did," replied Lindsay.

  Lindsay finished grading the papers and tests, turned in the final grade sheets to the department, and locked her office. Before going home she put on her running clothes and drove to Memorial Park where she jogged on the wooded trail that wound around the duck pond. It was a cold February day, and there weren't many people on the trail. She was glad for the solitude and content to empty her mind of everything but running. After twenty minutes of jogging she slowed to a walk and went back to her car.

  Driving through the town of Trowbridge, she passed Mr. Kim's grocery. It had been closed following Mr. Kim's murder. She saw Albert Kim walking down the sidewalk toward the store. She pulled her Land Rover into a parking place and got out.

  "Albert," she said. He turned from unlocking the door of the grocery store to greet her. "How's your mother?"

  Albert smiled and nodded. "She's better. Thanks to you and the jury, she's better."

  "Are you going to stay here and run the store or go back to school in Chicago?"

  Albert shook his head. "I don't know. I will have to stay here for a while anyway, you know . . ." He paused, not knowing what to say, and seemed filled with despair.

  "You could transfer to the university here. If you need a letter of recommendation, I would be glad to write you one," Lindsay offered.

  "Thank you. You're very kind. I may ask you..."

  They turned to look as a woman with shopping bag in hand crossed the street, waving at Albert. "It looks like you have a customer," Lindsay said. She took her leave and drove home.

  Home was in the middle o
f thirty-six acres of oak, hickory, walnut, and pine trees. Lindsay had moved a nineteenthcentury square-logged cabin onto her property and was in the process of restoring it. She had added the modern conveniences of electricity, plumbing, bathroom, and kitchen. The dark, oak-log cabin sat on the edge of a small pond where Lindsay often fished.

  Mandrake, Lindsay's horse, stood behind the white board fence, tossing his head as she drove up. The black Arabian stallion was a birthday gift from her mother. Lindsay loved the horse, but it was not the horse that to her was the best part of the gift. It was the fact that Ellen Chamberlain bred, raised, and trained the horse for her. It took seven years to bring Mandrake to the level of training that Ellen wanted for her daughter's horse. During that time Lindsay, of course, had seen Mandrake, but had had no idea he was to be hers. Seven years of patient training-that was what Lindsay found so remarkable about her mother's gift. She got out of her car and, hugging herself against the cold wind, walked over to Mandrake with an apple she had not eaten for lunch. He took it from her hand, and she stroked his soft nose as he ate. She made a mental note to call Susan Gitten to house-sit for her when she went on her summer vacation. Susan, a trainer herself, was one of the few people with whom Lindsay trusted her horse. She was a reliable woman a year younger than Lindsay's twentyseven years, honest, pleasant, and totally lacking in sense of humor. Seeing a friend or watching a horse do what she trained him to do would bring a smile to her face, but jokes were lost on her. Lindsay thought Susan must be completely bewildered by sitcoms and comedians.

  Lindsay was a minimalist when it came to furnishing her house, a trait she got from her mother. The living room had a couch and two rocking chairs facing the fireplace. The mission-style oak pieces had tan, leather-covered cushions and were draped with lap comforters. A painting of Mandrake, the only original painting she owned, commissioned from a local artist, hung over the fireplace. Her other paintings were copies. Lindsay could not hope to afford or acquire original Vermeers. The woman quietly pouring milk hung on a wall over the kitchen table; the woman reading a letter was over a desk in her bedroom; the woman looking over her shoulder hung opposite the front door, greeting guests as they entered her house. It was the quiet gentleness of the everyday lives of the women in the pictures that appealed to her, just as what she saw in many of the archaeological sites she excavated: people going about the commonplace tasks of living.