Read Dead Past for Free Online Page B

tell us,” Diane said, attempting a smile.
    “That he has no future.”
    Jin responded so quickly that Diane looked over at him and raised an eyebrow. She was joking, but the authority in Jin’s voice surprised her.
    “The future is in the right palm, his past in the left.”
    “Oh?” Diane stared at him.
    “I used to date a girl who was into reading palms. That’s what she said.” He grinned broadly.
    She measured the hand and photographed it front and back, took samples from under the nails, swabbed the skin, and printed the fingers. Jin took a sample of tissue for DNA comparison. He handed her more remains.
    The squeaking sound of a cart brought her head up. Grover, Lynn Webber’s morgue assistant, was wheeling a body back from the portable x-ray set up in the trailer. He maneuvered between the light table and a frame hanging with x-rays he and Pilgrim’s assistant had taken so far. He bumped the light table where Allen Rankin was examining dental x-rays and muttered an apology. Diane wasn’t sure if he was talking to Rankin or the body. He referred to the charred and mutilated bodies as babies.
    “All them poor babies,” he had said on his first glance of the scene. “Them poor, poor babies.”
    Grover was probably in his forties, but it was hard to tell. His dark skin was unlined and his hair had no gray. He was a big guy with big hands and a face so solemn that he looked perpetually melancholy. He had absolute respect for human remains and a good knowledge of anatomy.
    “We have a match,” Rankin said from his seat at his field desk.
    The first match. The first “this is someone. Not just human features roughly carved in charcoal.” Not a John or Jane Doe. No longer anonymous.
    Rankin rose to give his report to the officer in charge of the records, a heavyset policeman with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a bloodhound face, and a body that looked both sturdy and agile—Archie Donahue, Diane believed his name was. As she recalled, he had been on the Rosewood police force for a long time and worked in the evidence locker. Well suited for this work, filing and cataloging the artifacts of lives that loved ones hoped would identify them in death.
    Archie sat at the long evidence table and looked up from the stack of antemortem records he’d just accepted from the intake desk in the coffee tent. He was about to enter them into the computer program that kept track of all the incoming details of missing students—anything that would help identify them. Archie seemed to hesitate reaching for Rankin’s report. Probably dreaded the thought that one of the dead would be a child or grandchild of someone he knew. Rosewood wasn’t that big a town. And if it were true that there are only six degrees of separation between everyone in the world, then in the town of Rosewood the number of degrees was probably one or two. Many local children stayed to attend the local university. Everyone in Rosewood would know someone touched by this.
    Diane saw his hands shake as he looked at the report.
    “Bobby Coleman . . . I know his daddy,” he whispered in a cigarette-and-whisky voice. “We go to the same church.”
    They all stopped, Pilgrim, Webber, Diane, even the assistants—a spontaneous moment of silence for his grief—for Bobby’s family’s grief.
    Brewster Pilgrim broke the silence. “I need your opinion here, Diane,” he said.
    Pilgrim was the coroner of the county to the north of Rosewood. He was inclined toward being heavy, and looked like everyone’s ideal grandfather with his white hair and white brush moustache.
    “I can’t tell the sex,” he said. “Looks too close to call to me.”
    Diane changed gloves, walked over to Brewster’s work area, and looked down in the open cavity of the charred cadaver.
    “We should have given this to you,” he said. “Hardly any flesh left. Must have been in the hottest part of the fire. And look at this. I believe a beam or something fell on him. Look at the crushed