novelxo Half Moon Bay: Chapter 4
The anthropologist said, “Showboating prick.”
Monday afternoon, I’d arrived early at the bureau to attend the autopsy.
“Where does he get off?” Professor Ralph Szabla taught at Chico State, consulting for our office as needed. Suspenders held up drab baggy pants; beneath a stained white short-sleeved polo shirt he wore a second polo, maroon and long-sleeved. For several minutes he’d been holding forth about his distaste for Kai MacLeod, whom he’d met, once, at a symposium.
Rumors had MacLeod flying to Los Angeles to meet with a TV development company about creating his own reality show. The working title was Can You Dig It?!
“He’s not even tenured,” Szabla said. “He’s a goddamn assistant.”
Atop the slab, the recovered bones lay arranged in standard anatomical position, flattened, like the victim of a Looney Tunes steamroller. The blanket and glass eye had been sent out for analysis.
The pathologist, Judy Bronson, straightened a vertebra and said, “We can’t all be purists like you, Ralph.”
“Fuck that,” Szabla said. The suspenders had a pattern of llamas wearing sunglasses. “I just feel bad for my friend here who has to put up with him.”
He nudged me. “You all right there, Deputy? You look a little green.”
“How’s the baby?” Dr. Bronson asked. “Getting any sleep?”
“Hey now,” Szabla said. “You had a kid? Boy or girl?”
“Girl. Fourteen weeks.”
Szabla guffawed. “ ‘Fourteen weeks.’ You realize nobody talks like that except new parents. ‘Fourteen weeks…’ How many milliseconds? Well, no shit. Congratulations. I take a sabbatical and next thing you know, bang, there’s more people.”
“We’re trying to decide whether to sleep-train her,” I said. “Or—Amy is. I’m for it.”
“You gotta let em cry,” Szabla said. “It’s the only way.”
“That’s what you did?”
“Fuck no. Six years my wife didn’t sleep. That’s why she left me.”
Judy reached up for the spotlight, panning it slowly over the table while she and Szabla pointed out features. The skeleton of a human infant contains around two hundred seventy bones, more than an adult’s because sections fuse together and the count drops. What we’d pulled from the ground included most of the major structures, including three teeth. Missing were the miniature puzzle pieces: hands, feet, ear bones.
The decedent was human.
There was one individual represented.
As to the third question—how long ago did death occur?—I figured Szabla’s rotten mood came in part from having to concede to Kai MacLeod: The skeleton was modern in origin. We all regarded as far-fetched the idea that someone would dig up ancient remains, wrap them in a twentieth-century material, and rebury them. More tellingly, the bones lacked the characteristic reddish tinge that comes from prolonged exposure to soil.
Even so, the window for date of death remained wide.
“When was the stage built?” Szabla asked. “Gotta be before then.”
“I spoke to a guy at Berkeley parks department,” I said. “They replaced all the wood in ’98, but apparently they didn’t disturb the earth. The original structure went in sometime in the early seventies. He was a little hazy on the exact date.”
“Early seventies, bet your ass he’s hazy.”
Based on the extent of cranial suture fusion, ossification, and dentition, Szabla estimated the age at death to be between six and eighteen months. More than that he hesitated to say.
“At this stage of development, you can’t determine sex from skeletal morphology,” he said. “Changes to the pelvis don’t kick in till puberty. Same goes for ancestry: big-ass can of theoretical worms. I’m not going to tell you there’s no such thing as race, but given the degree of variability in kids, I’d be bullshitting you if I got specific. ‘Hey, this here sucker’s eleven percent Lithuanian.’ ”
The right clavicle had been snapped in half. The sternum and ribs showed stress fractures. I wondered about child abuse, but Szabla and Judy agreed that the damage was more consistent with the trauma of disinterment. Infant bones are delicate, and an excavator shovel is not a precision instrument. The same bundling that had kept the bones together would have also caused them to bash into one another.
There were no previously healed fractures. No unambiguous blade marks. No crushed hyoid to suggest throttling; no hyoid, period. The structure starts out as three pieces of cartilage, and complete ossification can take until puberty. Along with all the other soft tissue, it had melted away.
Common methods of infanticide such as smothering leave no skeletal trace.
While the presumption of foul play felt reasonable—why bury a body in a public place, other than to hide it?—none of us was ready to come out and say homicide.
Imagine a mother who hasn’t slept in weeks, tripping on the rug and losing her grip.
A father, nerves frayed, rocking his child at four in the morning, praying please go to sleep, rocking harder, please, harder, just go to sleep already, harder, too hard; then looking down and realizing, with sudden wakefulness, what hell his impatience has bought him.
Think like a parent driven mad with panic and grief.
Or think like a parkie. Say the baby had been conceived there. Could be the spot was chosen for its symbolism: a return to innocence. Crazy, yet kind of beautiful.
Berkeley.
For the last twenty-four hours, construction at People’s Park had been suspended. In that time, the protest had tripled in size, spilling through the sawhorses to occupy the entirety of Bowditch between Haste and Dwight. The counterprotesters had wisely abandoned ship. Our office had fielded calls from media outlets, the mayor of Berkeley, and the chief of Berkeley PD. The university chancellor had reached out from her hotel in Zurich. The sheriff himself had emailed to ask how things were moving along.
Whatever future you envisioned for the park, all could agree on one thing: It would really help to know who this person was.
The crime lab was quoting me a two-week turnaround for dental DNA. By law, I had less than a day left to rule on origin.
I said, “But we’re comfortable going with non-Native.”
Bronson nodded. “I think so.”
“Cheer up,” Szabla said. “You’re gonna make people happy with that answer. Piss off some others, too. Evens out in the end.”
“I’m not keeping score,” I said.
“Atta boy.”
—
OUR OFFICE PUT out a press release. Demolition at People’s Park had uncovered human remains of modern, non-Native origin. The decedent, a juvenile, had yet to be identified, and the cause of death remained undetermined. Anyone with information was encouraged to come forward. Effective Wednesday, work was cleared to resume.
Maybe I should’ve been keeping score.
On Wednesday morning I was at home, lying on the floor, doing tummy time with Charlotte, our noses touching as she bellowed her displeasure.
“Hands and knees,” I said, slapping the carpet. “You can do it. Head in the game.”
She spit up and face-planted in the puddle.
“Way to fight.” I wiped her down. Amy called from the car. “Hey,” I said.
“Is she there?”
“She is. You’re on speaker. Say hi to Mommy.”
“Hi honey,” Amy cooed.
Charlotte smiled.
“You never use that voice with me,” I said.
“I will if you want.”
“Don’t. It’s creepy. What’s up?”
“I just drove by campus. Is something going on? There’s cop cars everywhere.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Hang on.”
I carried the baby to the futon, jogging her in my lap as I switched on the early local news. Tail end of the Warriors recap. Then:
Back to our developing story in Berkeley, where a protest over the discovery of human remains in People’s Park has been growing since late yesterday afternoon. KRON-4’s Danika Shih reports. Danika?
Thanks, Susan. Yeah, as you can see behind me, people are climbing the fence, and if we come around you can get a look…They’ve formed human chains around the bulldozers. Now, the police have repeatedly warned the protesters to vacate, but they haven’t made any arrests, and so far nobody appears to be listening. Earlier I spoke with one woman who described herself as an activist. She compared the situation to Tiananmen Square.
The screen cut to a prerecorded interview. A gaunt young woman in an oversized sweater said It’s well documented that the area of the park overlaps with sacred Ohlone burial grounds.
The chyron identified her as Chloe Bellara, UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology. It did not mention that she was a graduate student, rather than faculty, or that Associate Professor Kai MacLeod regarded her as his star pupil, or that they might or might not be definitely fucking.
“Oh boy,” I said.
“Clay?” Amy said.
“One sec.”
Bellara was still talking. The university knows that if they admit that, they’ll be forced to give up their false claim to the territory.
What about the Coroner’s report that said the remains aren’t Native American?
I was there when the Coroner removed the bones. I interacted with them directly.
“You are so full of shit,” I said.
“Clay,” Amy said. “She’s going to learn that.”
So you’re saying the report is false? the reporter asked.
I’m saying a lot of powerful individuals stand to lose a lot of money. Everybody knows what happens then.
—
FOR EXECUTIVE VICE Chancellor George Greenwald and the university, the issue had been resolved. Whoever the child may have been, regardless of what his or her death meant, he or she did not currently constitute a legal impediment. Cue the wrecking crew.
My duty is to the decedent and the next of kin, and I was nowhere near resolution.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System had three open files for Alameda County children under the age of two. None fit the bill. The dates of last contact were 2008, 2005, and 2002, well after the construction of the Free Speech Stage.
I widened the search radius, one county at a time: Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Marin; up to Napa and Sonoma and out toward the Central Valley.
The case notes made me ineffably sad, far more than the bones had. When I sorted the results by age, children who’d gone missing younger than twelve months appeared as “0 years,” as though they’d never existed. Their physical characteristics were likewise jarring and full of heartbreak.
Height: 1´9˝ (21 inches)
Weight: 9 pounds
Hair: Unknown or completely bald
Most were alleged parental abductions. Most of the alleged abductors were fathers.
Sometimes there were older siblings, also missing.
Sometimes a mother’s body had been found, without her child.
Computerized age progressions showed the victims at ten years old, fifteen, twenty-six, forty-two. Every update applied a fresh coat of desperation. The subject was always depicted with a smile, as though he or she had carried on living happily, reaching milestones, maturing, thriving.
A parallel reality where nothing bad ever happened.
By week’s end, I’d winnowed the candidates down to five.
Elizabeth Turney. Citrus Heights, Sacramento County. Date of birth, June 11, 1961. Date of last contact, May 14, 1963. Her mother had left her outside a grocery store to buy a loaf of bread, coming back to find the stroller overturned on the sidewalk. At the time of her disappearance Elizabeth was wearing a yellow floral dress.
John David Ortega. Tahoe, Placer County. Date of birth, August 26, 1963. Date of last contact, July 4, 1965. The Ortega family had spent the holiday weekend camping by the lake. A thorough search of the water and surrounding woods failed to turn up any sign of the boy. He was barefoot, wearing dungarees and a red T-shirt. It was presumed he had wandered off or been abducted.
Michael Ewing. City of Merced, County of Merced. Date of birth, September 3, 1964. Date of last contact, April 19, 1966. His hair was black. No more information given.
Sybil Vine. Tracy, San Joaquin County. Date of birth, November 6, 1968. Date of last contact, August 8, 1970. Federal warrant issued for her father, Warren. The alleged abductor had family in Los Angeles and Las Vegas; possibly he had fled there. He had a scar on his forehead. The child’s height and weight were an approximation.
Olive Rheinholtz. Crows Landing, Stanislaus County. Date of birth, April 30, 1970. On January 7, 1972, baby Olive, along with her mother, Edith, and nine-year-old sister, Anne-Louise, were reported missing from the family farm. The next day their station wagon was located by the side of the road, five miles south down Highway 33, doors open, keys in the ignition. From an adjacent field police recovered a single girl’s shoe, brown leather, strap broken. The three had never been found.
Even as I compiled the list, I recognized its arbitrary nature. I’d chosen cutoff dates of 1/1/1960 and 12/31/1975, restricting the search to the northern half of the state. Not every missing persons case finds its way into the database. The older the file, the more likely it is to languish in a steel cabinet, crumbling, waiting for some retired cop or devoted amateur to take up the cause and drag it into the new millennium.
Geography alone made these five cases a stretch. The missing children came from relatively rural areas, far from People’s Park, communities with no connection to Berkeley or any of the values and stereotypes and behaviors that typified the Bay Area during the Age of Aquarius. I’d been to Merced. I could guess what it was like in 1966.
Would an abductor drive for hours, to a city with far greater population density, and start digging at random?
Unless that was the goal: Pin it on the hippies.
“Nikki left this for you.” Sergeant Brad Moffett stuck a Post-it to the back of my neck.
I peeled it off. There was a phone number with a San Francisco area code and a truncated note scribbled in Deputy Nikki Kennedy’s loopy hand. Basically a text in ink.
Peter Franchette
got ur name
wants 2 talk abt PPI
PPI stood for “People’s Park Infant”—our quasi-official shorthand.
I called Kennedy, catching her in the middle of rehearsal. “What’s this guy about?”
“Not sure,” she said. “He was pretty clear he’d only speak to you.”
In the background, the distorted screech of a detuned violin. Nikki Kennedy fronted a thrash-bluegrass Everly Brothers cover band called Die, Die Love.
I thanked her, then dialed the number on the Post-it.
“Hello?”
The voice was diffident, mildly suspicious.
“This is Deputy Edison at the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau. I’m looking for Peter Franchette.”
“Yes.” Eager, now. “Sorry, it came up as a blocked number. Clay Edison.”
“Do we know each other?”
“I know of you. Delilah Nwodo suggested I get in touch.”
Nwodo was an Oakland homicide cop. We’d collaborated on a case, and she’d sent congratulations after Charlotte’s birth, but otherwise we hadn’t been in regular contact for some time.
“How do you know Detective Nwodo?”
“She’s a family friend. Her father. But her, too.”
“What can I help you with?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure.”
“Your message mentioned an ongoing investigation.”
“Yes. The child. In People’s Park.”
“Did you have information to share?”
“I’m not sure,” Franchette said again. “I think it might be my sister.”