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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Temperance Brennan, L.P.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: First bones / Kathy Reichs.

  Names: Reichs, Kathy, author.

  Description: Simon & Schuster Canada edition | Previously published in print as part of The bone collection.

  Identifiers: Canadiana 20200204890 | ISBN 9781982157937 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS3568 E49 F57 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  ISBN 978-1-9821-5793-7 (ebook)

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  An origin story. That sounded like fun.

  As I began to write about Tempe’s start in the lab, it made me think of my own beginnings in forensics. In the early 1980s, I was on faculty at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, focusing on bioarchaeology. The ancient dead. One day, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD detective asked me to examine bones discovered beneath a house. I was teaching courses on human evolution and skeletal biology, but had never worked with law enforcement. It sounded intriguing. I agreed to do the evaluation.

  The remains were those of a dog. Case closed. The police brought me other skeletal material from time to time and I told them what they had. Then I got a call that would change my life. The detective spoke of a missing five-year-old girl. He wanted me to visit the scene. To determine if the small bones could be human. If they could be those of the child.

  They were. Her murder hit me hard. She’d been the same age as one of my daughters. I wanted justice. Didn’t get it. The prime suspect, an eighth-grade dropout, was never charged. He later died while serving a life sentence for eight counts of child molestation and the murder of a ten-year-old girl who’d lived one block from my victim.

  The lack of closure was frustrating. I resolved to contribute what skills I had toward the resolution of such crimes. After retraining and earning certification by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, I began consulting for law enforcement, coroners, and medical examiners. ID. Manner of death. Postmortem interval. Anything to provide answers for families and to help nail the guilty.

  People in towns that have suffered crimes against children remember the names of those victims for years. Charlotte, North Carolina; Soham, England; Praia da Luz, Portugal. All have been scarred by violence against the helpless. The innocent.

  A sad but true fact is that, unlike in fiction, not every killer is caught. In my early case, the child’s remains were identified, but her aggressor was not charged. I carry the names of several such children in my memory, and I am burdened by the knowledge that there will always be new murders, not all of which will be solved.

  While this little girl’s murder helped propel me into forensics, the majority of deaths I investigate are not those of children. The victims in First Bones are adult males. Their murders take place in the 1980s, a time when the country was facing a different type of killer. The AIDS/HIV epidemic. For those of us working with the dead, AIDS and HIV posed a new and real danger.

  The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and related acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) were little understood in the early 1980s. The disease was initially thought to affect only gay men. Few preventive public health measures were in force. The medical community was slow to appreciate the widespread danger and did little to guard against it. But as evidence about the deadly nature of AIDS accumulated, drastic changes in procedure were introduced.

  Medical examiners, forensic anthropologists, and laboratory technicians donned special masks and aprons and goggles and gloves. We avoided unsafe contact with the bodily fluids of corpses. We followed strict new guidelines for the handling and disposal of blades and needles. The threat was real and we were taking it seriously.

  Improved medical methodology has slowed the spread of the disease. Education of at-risk populations. Better pharmaceuticals—drugs a long time coming.

  Though much progress has been made, we still haven’t “removed the pump handle,” as Tempe says to Pete in First Bones. In 2019, for the first time in decades, a new strain of HIV was identified. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2017, 38,739 people received an HIV diagnosis in the United States. That same year, Health Canada reported 2,402 cases. Statistics from the World Health Organization suggest 36.7 million people are affected worldwide.

  In 1985, a small group of people conceived a project to commemorate those who had died of AIDS. Known as the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the blanket is a patchwork of three-by-six-foot panels, each recording the name of a decedent.

  I first saw the quilt in the early 1990s, during a visit to Washington, D.C., to see my daughter. It stretched from the Capitol Building to the Washington Monument, inviting us to sit down and learn about the disease.

  When I saw it again in 1996, rectangles representing over seventy thousand people covered the entire Washington Mall. Today the quilt has more than fifty thousand panels containing names from all fifty U.S. states and forty-three countries. If laid end to end, they would stretch for miles.

  It is the storm of illness-related emotions that drives First Bones. The daily anxiety of those with HIV. Their fear that the condition will progress to AIDS. Their worry that they may have transmitted the sickness to others. Their struggle with the duty to disclose. Far worse is the agony of those diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Their heartbreaking knowledge that the virus will kill them. That the death will not be pretty. In my story, these feelings grow strong enough to result in murder.

  I sometimes think of my own “quilt.” The bones to which I could not put names. The victims of violence whose perpetrators remain unknown. Or unpunished. I try to keep my work separate from my personal life. Try to leave the stories at the morgue. Still, in unguarded moments, the unsolved cases break into my thoughts.

  I take satisfaction in knowing that most Jane and John Does go home to their families. That most killers are caught. I believe in the power of science. To battle disease. To solve crime. I will continue to apply my expertise in forensic anthropology toward the pursuit of justice.

  For more information on the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, visit aidsquilt.org/about/the-aids-memorial-quilt.

  1

  I sat with my chair drawn close to him, an icy heat hovering below my sternum. Fear.

  Through the sliding glass door came muted hospital sounds. An arriving elevator. A rattling gurney or cart. A paged code or name. In the room, only the soft rhythmic pinging of sensors monitoring vital signs.

  His face looked gaunt and greenish gray in the glow of machines tracking his pulse and respirations. Every now and then I glanced at a screen. Watching the lines jump their erratic zigzag patterns. Willing the pinging and jumping to continue.

  Surgical Trauma Intensive Care Unit. So cold. So sterile. Yet a human touch: a stain shaped like Mickey’s ears on one rail of the overcomplicated bed. Funny what you notice when under stress.

  A sheet covered him from the neck down, leaving only his arms exposed. A pronged tube delivered oxygen to his nostrils. A needle infused liquids into a vein in his right wrist. The arm with the IV lay tucked to his torso. The other rested on his chest, elbow flexed at an obtuse angle.

  I watched his sheet-clad chest rise and fall. Somehow his body looked smaller than normal. Shrunken. Or was it an illusion created by the fish-tank illumination?

  He didn’t move, didn’t blink. In the eerie light, his lids appeared translucent purple, like the thinly peeled skin of a Bermuda onion. His eyeballs had receded deep into their orbits.

  Hollywood’s dramatic death scenes are a scam. A slug to the body destroys roughly two ounces of tissue, no more. A bullet doesn’t necessarily drop a man on the spot. To kill instantly, you have to shoot into the brain or high up in the spinal cord, or cause hemorrhage by hitting a main vessel or the heart. None of those things had happened to him. He’d survived until a late-night dog walker stumbled upon him, unconscious and bleeding but still showing a pulse.

  The wee-hours call had roused me from a deep sleep. Adrenaline rush. Shaky clawing up of the phone. Then the heart-hammering drive across town. The argument to talk myself into the STICU. I hadn’t bothered with polite.

  Death by firearm depends on multiple factors: bullet penetration deep enough to reach vital organs, permanent cavity formation along the bullet’s path, temporary cavity formation
due to transfer of the bullet’s kinetic energy, bullet and bone fragmentation. All of those things had happened to him.

  The surgeons had done what they could. They’d spoken gently, voices calm through the fatigue, eyes soft with compassion. The internal damage was too severe. He was dying.

  How could that be? Men his age didn’t die. But they did. We all did. America was armed to the teeth and no one was safe.

  I felt a tremor in my chest. Fought it down.

  Uncaring death was about to punch a hole in my life. I didn’t want to consider the coming weeks. Months. We had done so much together. Fed off each other physically, emotionally. Despite the occasional aloofness, abruptness. The arguments. The unexplained retreats. The exchanges weren’t always pleasant, but they spurred the process, helped us accomplish more than either of us would have managed solo. Now the future looked bleak. Unbearable sadness wrapped me like a shroud.

  He’d been a good man. Capable. Devoted to his work. Always busy, but willing to listen, to provide feedback, sometimes outrageous, sometimes sage. Forever in motion.

  I thought of the hours we’d spent together. The shared challenges. The identification of issues and approaches toward solutions. The painstaking attention to detail that could knit together a comprehensible whole from fragments. The shared sense of accomplishment in uncovering answers to perplexing questions. The mutual frustration and disappointment when no solution emerged.

  I’d seen so much death. Corpses whole and partial, known and unknown. Lives ended in every conceivable manner. From the very old to the very young, male and female. At times cause was apparent, at others a puzzle requiring prolonged assessment and all my acuity. He was my greatest resource.

  Throughout my career I was often the bearer of heartbreaking news. The changer of lives, informing anxious next of kin that their loved ones were dead. He’d been there. Or listened to my telling. Death was a constant in my work, and now death would put an end to this cherished partnership.

  I looked again at the man in the bed. All was past. There would be no future.

  The door opened and a nurse entered, rubber soles noiseless on the immaculate tile. She was short and round with ebony skin that gleamed in the monitors’ reflected light. A badge on her scrubs said V. SULE.

  Nurse V. Sule smiled, a quick upward flick of her lips, then patted my hand.

  “He is having morphine.” Accented English. Rich, lilting. “He will sleep long. You go, hon. You have a coffee.”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  Another pat, then Nurse V. Sule began checking fluid levels and dials and tracings. I scooched my chair to the wall and sat back down. I’d been in it for hours. Ever since he was wheeled into that room.

  I watched Nurse V. Sule. Her movements were quick and efficient, but at the same time strangely graceful. I thanked her when she left.

  The chair was uncommonly comfortable as hospital furnishings go, armed, padded, willing to tilt slightly if I leaned back. I wondered if seating of this type was specially selected for rooms hosting those facing vigils of long duration. For visitors helping usher in death.

  I gazed at the rising and falling sheet. My vision blurred. The final breath would soon be drawn.

  Exhausted, and overwhelmed by sorrow, I stretched my legs, angled my head back, and closed my eyes.

  Just for a moment.

  2

  YEARS EARLIER. 8:07 A.M. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17.

  The knob rattles. I feel a subtle pull of air, note the time, and look up, curious. It’s winter break and the building is deserted. The entire campus is deserted. Who could be coming into my lab?

  The door wings back and two men stride in. Uninvited. Both are tall, maybe six feet. One is thin. The other is not thin. Both are in their mid-thirties.

  I’m annoyed at the interruption. I’ve been on the anthropology faculty at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte a single semester, my employment contingent upon having a PhD. The junior member of my doctoral committee has recently informed me that he won’t be signing off on my dissertation. Not only did the jackass refuse to read my opus during summer break, now that he has read it he’s demanding the inclusion of another trait in the statistical treatment.

  The borrowed collection I’m examining is due to be returned in three weeks. Spring term looms and course outlines, lectures, and exercises must be prepared. I’ve yet to hang tinsel or purchase a single gift. So, yes. I’m not in a ho-ho-ho mood.

  The heavy man has cop stamped on his forehead. Which, being greasy, matches his hair. Brown corduroy jacket, butt-shiny polyester pants, Kmart tie, kiss-my-ass swagger.

  The thin man looks like an antonym in more ways than weight. Designer suit, silk tie, custom shirt, Italian leather shoes gleaming like soup. His hair is artfully arranged to disguise its erosion from his scalp.

  I lower my mask but don’t rise. The men cross to my work table. Kiss My Ass takes the lead.

  “Where’s Doc Becknell?”

  “I’m Dr. Brennan.” Premature on the title, but soon enough. If I can shake this pair and get back to scoring foramina. “Can I help you?”

  “We need the doc.”

  “And you gentlemen would be?” Laying down my magnifier.

  Kiss My Ass yanks a badge from his belt and holds it out for inspection. The leather fob is so new it still smells of cow.

  “Congratulations on the promotion, Detective Slidell.”

  Slidell’s chin cocks up and his lower lids crimp.

  “Fresh off the press,” I respond to his unasked question, then turn to his partner.

  “Detective Eddie Rinaldi. We’re sorry for the intrusion, ma’am.”

  “Where’s Becknell?” Slidell demands.

  “Unavailable.”

  “How ’bout we get her on the horn and make her available.”

  “That would be difficult.”

  “We live in difficult times.”

  “Dr. Becknell is on sabbatical,” I say.

  “Meaning?”

  “She’s away.” I suspect this Slidell is oblivious to the ways of academia.

  “Away where?”

  “North Azraq, Jordan.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Excavating. The site is Epipaleolithic, early Kebaran down to Acheulean. Also some lower Levallois-Mousterian layers.” Half making it up, knowing the guy’s clueless. Bitchy. But Slidell’s arrogance isn’t playing well with me.

  “Dandy.”

  “Indeed.”

  Slidell’s eyes hold on mine, then drop to the table.

  “What’s that?”

  “Prehistoric cremains.”

  The eyes roll up, still irritated over my newbie crack. Maybe the archaeo-jargon.

  “Burned bone,” I explain.

  “Who’s the vic?”

  “A girl who died in her teens.”

  “How?”

  “Her heart stopped beating.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “I try.”

  “So you do the same bone-whispering mojo as Doc Becknell?”

  “What is it you want, Detective?” The clock is ticking. And I don’t like this man.

  “I’ve got a crisper needs a name.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Hearing the disgust in my tone, Rinaldi jumps in.

  “Let me explain, please. A physician named Keith Millikin vanished about a week ago. Dr. Millikin ran a street clinic off Wilkinson Boulevard, a one-man operation providing low-cost health services for indigents, the homeless, street kids—”

  “Junkies and deadbeats.”

  I ignore Slidell. So does Rinaldi.

  “When Dr. Millikin failed to open his office for five days running, one of his patients, a gentleman named Louis Grimm, filed a missing persons report.”

  I wait. Rinaldi doesn’t continue.

  “Go on.” Guarded. I suspect where this is headed.

  Slidell opens his mouth, but his partner hushes him gently with a raised palm. I notice that Rinaldi’s fingers are long and graceful, his nails buffed, his cuticles neatly trimmed.

  “Dr. Millikin lived in an Airstream off Highway 49, down near the South Carolina line. Yesterday, getting no response from the police, Mr. Grimm persuaded his brother to drive him to Dr. Millikin’s home. To make a long story short—”

  “Which you ain’t.”