False Mermaid

Buck Callaway, the former ME, had been a colleague at the university, and a good friend who’d seen her through some rough times. They had kept in touch. Since his retirement, Buck and his wife had set off traveling the world. Nora was never surprised to receive their postcards from far-flung locales—the Peruvian Andes, Greenland, or the steppes of Mongolia. Buck’s travel had a serious purpose; in his retirement, he was compiling an epidemiological library of the ancient world. It was Buck Callaway who’d first urged her to take up the study of ancient bog remains in Ireland. She had yet to meet his replacement.

“What’s the new guy like?” she asked Frank.

“Solomon’s good,” Cordova said. “Very enthusiastic. Although that pretty much goes without saying for you pathology types.”

They signed in at reception, and Cordova led the way down the hall and through the wide double doors leading into the autopsy room. Not much had changed since she’d last been here; the place still had the look of a combination laboratory and operating room, albeit with some rather unorthodox surgical instruments. Three of the five stainless-steel tables were occupied. At the first two, the mortuary technicians were washing a pair of pale corpses, preparing them for the next step. On the last table was an articulated skeleton belonging to the county’s latest Jane Doe.

Nora’s first thought was that she might be back in Dublin, looking at one of the National Museum’s ancient specimens. The skull had been reduced to bone, along with one side of the body, just as Frank had described. Moving closer, she saw that the right side was mostly intact, from the shoulder down to the slightly darkened toenails and the sole of the foot. Taken as a whole, the image was grisly and surreal: a grinning, gap-toothed skeleton half veiled in tattered flesh.

Cordova said: “Something else, isn’t it?”

Nora let her gaze travel slowly across the face—what was left of it. The nasal bones had all but disappeared, and the exposed frontal bone bore evidence of several shallow, dishlike compression fractures. The maxilla was badly broken and a handful of teeth lay loose on the table. Whoever this young woman was, her face had been destroyed, exactly as Tríona’s had been. Nora reached out to grasp the edge of the stainless-steel table and felt Frank Cordova move incrementally closer behind her. He was about to speak when a voice sounded behind them.

“Hey, Frank. I’ve got that report for you, and personal effects are here somewhere—”

Nora turned to see a stocky, bearded figure in blue scrubs. She had to concentrate on putting on a professional face as Frank introduced her.

“Steve Solomon,” the newcomer said, extending his hand. “Buck Callaway has mentioned your name. And he told me a little about your work—in Ireland, right?” He turned his attention to the body on the table. “I’m glad to have you here. To be honest, I haven’t really seen much of this sort of thing, so I’m happy to have an expert—”

“Not exactly an expert,” Nora demurred. “Just trying to understand bog preservation a little better.”

Solomon said: “I do have a little experience with wet burials—did my residency at Tulane, and my first job was with the Orleans Parish coroner. But I never encountered anything quite like this. So how does our Jane Doe compare to what you’ve seen?”

“Most of the bodies I’ve examined were much older—about two thousand years older, actually. But there was one case recently, a young man who’d been buried in peat for only about twenty-five years.” Danny Brazil, whispered the small voice in her head. His name was Danny Brazil and he kept bees. Aloud she said: “Even after that short exposure to the bog environment, the similarity to ancient remains was pretty amazing.”

Nora turned back to the body and studied the edges of the flesh where the right leg must have been submerged in water; the visible tendons and ligaments looked frayed, and she could see a layer of adipocere beneath the skin—ordinary body fat transformed into a yellowish, waxy material—a common feature of preserved remains. “The darkening of the skin is just a basic Maillard reaction. It starts quickly, but takes a long time to become really well established. There’s some recent research from Canada, studies of fetal pigs buried in peat for different intervals, and some of them showed a slight change in coloration after only a few years. Sometimes it depends on the age of the individual, and the quality of their skin—how receptive it was to the chemical changes. Frank said you thought she might have been in the ground three or four years at least. From the degree of coloration, I’d probably agree with that.”

Nora could feel Frank checking her expression, gauging her reaction to the body.

She asked: “No evidence that animals had disturbed the site?”

Solomon shook his head.