Bones: Buried Deep

  Bones: Buried Deep

  Max Allan Collins

  Dr. Temperance Brennan, a highly skilled forensic anthropologist who works at the Jeffersonian Institution and writes novels as a sideline, has an uncanny ability to read clues left behind in a victim's bones. Law enforcement calls upon her to assist with murder investigations when the standard methods of identifying a body are useless. Brennan often finds herself partnered with special investigator Seely Booth of the FBI's Homicide Investigation Unit. Booth, a former Army sniper who mistrusts science and scientists, believes the key to solving crimes lies in discovering the truth from good old-fashioned detective work. Brennan's equally brilliant colleagues at the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Lab include: earthy and bawdy Angela Montenegro, who's created a unique way to render an original crime scene in a 3-D computer image; Brennan's assistant, Zack Addy, a young prodigy whose genius IQ actually gets in the way of finishing any of the several doctorates he's begun; "the bug guy" Dr. Jack Hodgins, who's an expert on insects, spores and minerals, but conspiracy is his hobby; and Brennan's boss, the imposing lab director Dr. Daniel Goodman. "We hope my readers will realize that it's another manifestation of Tempe, and that they are in on this inside joke" says the real Reichs.

  Max Allan Collins

  Bones: Buried Deep

  For Dr. Greg Haines and Missy Jones — who reassembled the skeleton

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to acknowledge forensics researcher/co-plotter Matthew V. Clemens.

  Further acknowledgments appear at the conclusion of this novel.

  Epigraph

  “As those who study them have come

  to learn, bones make good

  witnesses — although they speak

  softly, they never lie and they never

  forget.”

  — Dr. Clyde Collins Snow,

  forensics anthropologist

  “The more outré and grotesque an

  incident is the more carefully it

  deserves to be examined, and the

  very point which appears to

  complicate a case is, when duly

  considered and scientifically

  handled, the one which is mostly

  likely to elucidate it.”

  — Sherlock Holmes,

  The Hound of the Baskervilles,

  by Arthur Conan Doyle

  Prologue

  1944

  On a moonless June night, Al Capone’s sleek teak motorboat skimmed like a child’s tossed stone across the surface of Lake Michigan.

  The craft had been a gift from someone who owed the crime boss a favor; Capone had climbed aboard once, promptly gotten seasick, and vowed never to return.

  But from time to time — even now, years after Snorky’s postprison retirement to Florida — the mob boss’s former business associates found use for the craft. Not big enough to make runs to Canada for whiskey back in Prohibition days, the craft would be used by Capone’s men to speed out onto the lake in the middle of the night, to meet the bigger boats and bring back small shipments.

  Post-Prohibition, other kinds of contraband had been smuggled by the speedboat, but tonight neither booze nor narcotics were aboard — though passenger Anthony Gianelli wished he had a flask or even a reefer about now, to ward off the chill.

  No, tonight was a much different sort of run.

  Behind the wheel, Johnny Battaglia squinted into the darkness. Wanting to avoid prying eyes, the pilot — a rather generous appellation, Gianelli thought — ran the boat without lights and had to struggle to see where they were going.

  Neither the smartest nor most keen-eyed of the mob’s loyal soldiers, Battaglia did have his strengths — tough as a nickel steak, brave as a bull, and loyal as an English bulldog, which he happened to closely resemble.

  Like Gianelli, Battaglia was a made man, though they both knew that Gianelli was the brains of the operation — unlike his burly counterpart, Gianelli had management potential and was headed toward bigger and better things.

  Taller, thinner, and more nattily attired than Battaglia, Gianelli was not an underboss yet, but he kept his eyes open and his mouth shut, and knew that tonight’s assignment was the next rung on his personal ladder.

  All they had to do was get through this run unscathed.

  Gianelli did not want to be out here on the water, and he found vaguely unsettling the lights of Chicago fading into the darkness, barely a glimmer on the horizon; but this was his job, and he would do it.

  Any trepidation he felt wasn’t fear of being caught, not exactly — but his wife had just arrived home with their new son, Raymond, and he wanted to be with his family in case he was needed.

  Granted, little remained for a father to do at this point — tending to the baby was, after all, woman’s work. But he still felt like he should be home.

  His job did allow a certain flexibility of hours, and thank God he wasn’t overseas, in Europe steamrolling the Nazis, or worse, the Pacific fighting the Nips; like Sinatra, he had a punctured eardrum, thank you God.

  Instead, here he was, bouncing along the water, part of a little navy in a different kind of war, wishing that he had brought his light overcoat. His suit jacket, an expensive gray pinstripe, was of little help against the wind cutting over the speedboat’s windscreen.

  Hell, it was June! But it was so damn cold out here on the water, in the middle of the night, might as well be March.

  Battaglia had his shoulders hunched against the wind as well. In the back, on the deck, police captain Ed Hill showed no signs of the cold getting to him — of course, Hill had already been dead for four hours, and was pretty cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather, a corpse wrapped inside a bedspread the size of one of those Caribbean banana republics.

  This thought brought Gianelli a slight smile — gallows humor to a mob guy, as to any soldier, was the norm.

  Hill was no ordinary copper. If he had been, anywhere here on the lake would have been good enough to drop him in.

  But Hill had been a small but significant piece in the feds’ case against Paul Ricca, the man who sat in the chair at the head of the Outfit table, from which Al Capone and then Frank Nitti had ruled Chicago. Ricca, “the Waiter,” had been convicted last December and gone to Atlanta earlier this year for a ten-year stretch, leaving the capable if unimaginative Tony Accardo to run things in his absence.

  Everybody knew Mr. Ricca was still in charge, but for now “Joe Batters” — a nickname given Accardo by Capone himself for the young thug’s skill with a baseball bat (and not on a diamond) — was running the business.

  Hill’s role in getting Ricca sent away had earned him an official commendation… and Tony Accardo’s wrath. Normally cops were off-limits; but this one had made the mistake of taking the Outfit’s cash, and then ratting them out, anyway.

  Tonight Gianelli and Battaglia had delivered a stern and terminal rebuke to Hill in his home. Mrs. Hill was out of town, visiting a sister in Milwaukee; had Gianelli not seen the woman board the train with his own eyes, he never would have whacked the cop in his own house.

  Business was business, but they weren’t savages.

  No women, no children, that was the rule. Usually no cops or reporters, unless they asked for it. If you didn’t have rules, you were just as bad as the animals.

  Gianelli peered down at the large lump in the bottom of the boat. He felt nothing — nothing — about this body on the deck: not anger, not hatred, not joy, not even indifference. Hill had crossed them and paid for it — this was the end result of a business transaction, nothing more.

  No one associated with the Outfit wanted Hill to turn up, no bobbing to the surface or washing up on the beach for this bastard with
a badge. Even without a body, there’d be heat….

  So they had other plans for Hill.

  “That must be U.S. Steel,” Battaglia yelled, working to be heard over wind and engine noise. He pointed at dim lights off to their right.

  Starboard, Gianelli thought… or was it port? He was almost sure it was starboard.

  “Yeah,” Gianelli agreed, feeling like a schmuck for yelling back, when there were only the two of them… not counting the cop. Who sure as hell wasn’t listening.

  The lights seemed distant, pinpoints only slightly larger than the few stars that dotted the sky. “We’re gettin’ there,” Gianelli said.

  Battaglia nodded.

  Another ten minutes and they would be well past the giant steel mill and approaching the barren sand dunes of the Indiana shore.

  Accardo had sent word and a car would meet them. They would get rid of Hill for good, then back home by morning. That was the plan, anyway.

  The U.S. Steel plant pumped out sheet metal three shifts a day — steel that would soon be tanks, flame throwers, ships, and God only knew what else in the war effort. Farther past the mill now, waves breaking on the beach were audible even over the engine thrum.

  Battaglia angled the boat that way and cut the engine to a growl.

  “See anything?” Battaglia asked.

  Gianelli slowly scanned the shoreline — so dark was the night, he might have been staring down a gun barrel.

  “Can’t see a goddamn thing,” he admitted.

  Where was the car, and the son of a bitch who was supposed to meet them? Had there been some foul-up? Worse yet, a double cross?

  Gianelli strained to make out a shape that might be a car in the darkness. But all he saw was the rise and fall of the dunes. There was the occasional house out here, but not in this stretch — that’s why they’d picked it.

  Only thing out here should be their contact…

  “Where the hell is he?” Battaglia wondered.

  Running parallel to the beach, motor idling, sand on their right, Gianelli could make out only the sound of the tide rolling up to slap the shore, the motion of the water moving them slowly forward and slightly right.

  Starboard, Gianelli reminded himself.

  Ahead of them, up the beach, he saw a glimmer of light…

  … and then it was gone.

  Had he seen it or imagined it?

  “You catch that?” he asked.

  “Catch what?” Battaglia replied, his face turned farther astern.

  Maybe he had imagined it.

  Gianelli looked again, harder, if that was possible, and waited. And waited some more. And some more…

  There it was!

  A small dot of light maybe fifty yards farther up the beach — a flashlight, no doubt about it.

  “I see it,” Battaglia said, and guided the boat in that direction.

  As they neared the shore, Gianelli realized the guy was standing at the end of a short pier. Battaglia cut the engine so they could float in alongside the wooden structure, and the guy doused his light.

  Battaglia tossed a line to the guy, who pulled them up to the dock and tied it off on a cleat.

  As Battaglia and their host hefted the package out of the boat, Gianelli studied the beach, still unable to see the car in the moonless night.

  “Where’s your wheels?” he whispered, the nature of their activity calling for that tone more than any chance they’d be overheard.

  “Closer to the road,” the guy said.

  Gianelli pulled a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and shone it in the man’s face.

  Man?

  Hell, this guy was a kid, barely eighteen — curly black hair, wide brown eyes, and a face that looked like it never met a razor.

  “Closer to the road?” Gianelli asked, keeping his voice down, knowing it carried at night.

  “Yeah,” the kid said matter-of-factly.

  “Why the hell’s it over there?” Battaglia asked, just a little irritated.

  The kid let out a long breath as they rested the package on the dock.

  “Either we carry this load closer to the road,” he said, his baritone voice older than his face, “and toss it in the car, or I pull the car up here for us to stuff this guy in… and then explain to the cops why the car sank in the sand and we got stuck.”

  Battaglia still looked pissed, but Gianelli was nodding. “You got a brain or two, kid. What’s your handle, anyway?”

  “David Musetti,” the kid said, his voice as hushed as Gianelli’s.

  “Good thinkin’, Davey. Come on, Johnny, let’s get this dead weight up to the car.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the body was stowed in the trunk of a ’42 Chevy, while Battaglia was stuffed in the backseat, Gianelli sitting on the passenger side next to Musetti as the young man started the car.

  “Know where you’re goin’?” Battaglia asked.

  “Yeah,” Musetti said matter-of-factly — they might have been discussing what restaurant they were choosing. “Been there before.”

  They crossed the railroad tracks of the South Shore Line, a train that ran from the city to South Bend, Indiana. Gianelli and a couple of other mugs had even brought a body here in a trunk one time on the train.

  The Dunes Express, the boys used to call it.

  But lately it had been strictly delivery by car — the feds had infiltrated the railroad dicks, watching for wartime sabotage; so hauling corpses by rail was out.

  The Musetti kid turned the Chevy right onto Highway 12 and switched on the car’s headlights. They’d barely gone a mile when they passed an Indiana state trooper who had some poor bozo pulled over.

  The cop was watching, smugly skeptical, as the drunk tried to walk a chalk line on the edge of the road.

  Gianelli admired the fact that the kid neither sped up nor slowed down when he drove past the scene.

  Gianelli said, “Kid, you’re a pretty cool customer.”

  Musetti shrugged, then glanced into the mirror before turning left without a signal, easing onto a dirt road that was little more than a cow path.

  The kid killed the lights.

  They rode back into the woods almost half a mile, cresting a hill and easing down the other side before Musetti turned off the car.

  They sat in silence for a moment before climbing out.

  “Let’s get to it,” Battaglia said.

  Funny how little emotion there was in it, Gianelli thought. He was a sucker for sad movies and had to work not to blubber at a funeral of a friend or family member (either family). And maybe even a bent flatfoot like Hill deserved better.

  But that was how it was in war — bodies didn’t get respect, just disposal, and the ones doing the disposing didn’t feel anything much other than an itch to get done and get back home.

  Gianelli grabbed the shovels while the other two lugged the body. The soil here was marshy and that would make the digging easy, but Gianelli wished he had thought to wear less expensive shoes.

  The body was buried deep in no time. Gianelli wondered how Captain Ed Hill would feel if he knew how many of the Mafiosi he had chased over the years were interred around him.

  “On Judgment Day,” Gianelli said, “when all these corpses come up outa the ground, this poor bastard’s gonna be way outnumbered.”

  Battaglia laughed.

  Musetti didn’t.

  Soon the taciturn kid was pulling the car onto the highway and retracing his route back to the dunes. As they ambled along, Gianelli reflected.

  The marsh was home to many mysteries, Gianelli knew; and nobody would come out here looking for bodies. The sandy earth would keep its secrets forever.

  Or till Judgment Day, anyway.

  And maybe not even then. Gianelli laughed to himself, and Battaglia looked over at him stupidly.

  What kind of angel would want to come out to these godforsaken boonies to resurrect anybody?

  1

  The Present

  Like a thick oil slick
spreading over lake Michigan, an oppressive wave of heat coated Chicago, as it had since early spring.

  The summer-long drought, coupled since late July with a garbage strike, made for long nights and longer days in a city where aromas were high and tempers were short. Piles of garbage accrued over the last seven weeks had become giant disease-bearing compost heaps.

  Op-ed writers for the newspapers were referring to Chicago as “Fecund City” and “The City of Big Smoulders,” but neither side budged in the strike negotiations, and Mother Nature seemed to have decided to simply parboil the city.

  In this town where smiles were rare about now, Special Agent Seeley Booth sat in a meeting room of the Everett M. Dirksen Federal Building barely able to contain his grin.

  He’d been working on the case against Chicago Mafia bosses Raymond and Vincent Gianelli for most of the last six months, and now — with the help of a Gianelli crony turned informant — Booth had father and son in his sights.

  Sitting on the prosecution side of the table, Booth exuded quiet confidence. Which was, after all, part of the profile for an FBI agent; but with his square jaw, close-cropped brown hair, and steel-blue eyes, his confidence today approached cockiness.

  Even though this wasn’t a court day, Booth had worn his “testifying” suit, the number every law enforcement professional kept bagged in the closet for those special days in court.

  Booth’s was a charcoal gray with a lighter pinstripe and had cost him just a little less than his first car; but today he wanted to look as good as he felt.

  Next to Booth, federal prosecutor Daniel McMichael scribbled on a yellow legal pad that lay next to a stack of papers. His black hair receding and parted on the left, McMichael wore a gray suit easily twice as expensive as Booth’s.

  The prosecutor had dark eyes that could be warm and friendly to those on his side, and icy and aloof to his enemies. A bulbous nose squatted between high, chubby cheeks and over a mouth that turned up a couple of degrees at the corners in what passed for a smile.