Page 5 of X-Ray in the Xanth (Lovely Lethal Gardens Rewind #3)

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D oreen dropped off Nan and came home, and with the captain’s permission, spent all afternoon poring through the online database of missing persons among the cold cases, looking to see if she could connect any to this poor man reduced to a few bones and one very old X-ray.

Of course not all the cold cases had been digitized.

When she couldn’t find anything, she was more than a little stumped.

She figured she could get the captain to authorize her to go through the paper files.

Yet she groaned at the thought. After all, she had heard rumors about them no longer being in any particular order—alphabetical, chronological, even segregated by crimes.

Doreen shook her head at the thought of going through those physical records manually.

When Mack called her a little later, she asked, “Did you get any ID on the man?”

“Nope, not yet.”

She groaned. “How can anybody not miss someone like that?”

“Because he could have come from anywhere across the country. He could have come up from the States, or he could have come down from Alaska, for all we know. Remember that, just because they end up here, it doesn’t mean they started here.”

“Right, I wasn’t really thinking that he wouldn’t be a local.” She frowned. “I guess I should be thinking broader.”

“Something like this,… that’s been here this long, where nobody is tracking it, you have to think everywhere,” he murmured.

“It is unnerving to see how quickly an entire body, especially somebody huge like that,” she explained, “literally somebody your size, is reduced down to a few bones.”

“It wasn’t a short time frame though,” he pointed out. “That body has been there a lot of years. We did check, and some excavation work was done in that area about twenty years ago, looking at developing out there.”

“And yet it wasn’t found then? How is that a thing?”

“It wasn’t found because they didn’t go deep enough.”

“Right, of course not,” she mumbled. “That’s frustrating though.”

“You can’t let it get to you,” he pointed out.

“I know,” she grumbled, “but it needs to get to me a certain degree. Otherwise I won’t maintain any sanity doing this stuff.”

“That is one of the things I worry about with you,” he shared. “We want to know that you’re okay doing this. You aren’t trained, and you don’t have the experience to handle this constant barrage of the dark reality of humanity.”

“I understand,” she murmured, “and sometimes I do worry about that. Then something else happens, and I just love the puzzles and the chase.… After we find the killer, they pay for their crime. Then we also have closure for somebody else.” She nodded. “And I realize how much it’s all worth it.”

“And it is worth it,” he agreed. “I just need to know that you won’t wind up distraught over it all. I can’t have it on my conscience if it all gets to you, and you can’t find any separation from it. That just can’t happen on my watch, Doreen. It can’t.”

“Right, and I’m fine,” she said, and she was.

“I get that. I just took a break, had a cup of tea, trying to get some perspective. Plus, I can always call you to remind me that I get too close to these victims at times. Yet, sure, it’s upsetting to think that this poor man has been here all this time, but, more than that, it’s also important to remember that we are here now, and we can help him,” she explained.

“That’s a good way to look at it. However, I don’t have any answers for you, or even any ideas at the moment. It’ll take a bit of a time for Elizabeth to go over the bones, and, if she’s not confident with her ability to handle them,… then we’ll call in a specialist.”

“She seems pretty capable though.”

“Capable, yes, but we also need a solid determination on the time frame as to the man’s death,” he noted.

“Not really,” she noted. “Even if we get a solid determination on time of death, we’ll still be within what? A five-year range?”

“Possibly,” he conceded. “If nothing indicates an exact time frame, then, yeah, that could be what we’re looking at.”

“There’s the X-ray,” she pointed out.

“What about it?”

“The X-ray should give us some idea of time.”

“Maybe,” he conceded.

“Plus, somebody made an attempt to preserve it,” she pointed out, “so…”

“But the X-ray didn’t have any identifying marks on them back then.”

“Oh.… I was hoping a company name and a date or something showed where and when the X-ray was taken, or at least by whom. Then we could track it down or have some idea if they could carbon-date it or something.”

“Carbon-date it?” he repeated, with a chuckle. “So, you seem to be diving deep on this one.”

“There’s a certain manner of handling an X-ray, right?… I mean, you can’t just recycle those,” she pointed out. “They have silver or whatever other stuff on them, and they have to be treated differently. I would presume recycled by a company who specializes in that.”

“That’s interesting,” Mack noted, “so that would be a place to start, to see if they can identify when this image may have been taken.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“I’m at the hospital in the X-ray department right now.”

“But I don’t imagine they would be recycling them,” she pointed out. “They would ship them out to somebody else, I would think.”

“Probably so.” With that said, they soon ended the call.

Doreen spent the rest of the afternoon contemplating what it would take for somebody to kill someone and then to hide a body like that.

It’s not as if she wasn’t used to the idea by now with other cold cases solved, but something about seeing that man discarded in such a huge grave and somebody knowing about it for all these years really bothered her.

She was often on the outskirts of these cases at this point. But now, by being more intimately involved from the start, seeing his remains, seeing the care Elizabeth took with them, made Doreen sad. Yet she wanted to do the best that she could for him.

It was just heartbreaking to think of this poor man lying there all these years, completely undetected, and yet somebody knew he was there.

Somebody was not at all worried about him, only worried about themselves, worried their crime would ultimately be discovered.

As the years passed, the murderer presumably got complacent over the whole thing, thinking they got off scot-free.

She was really hoping that wouldn’t be the case.

She just didn’t have any way to move forward yet, a fact that bothered her as well.

As she went through the online history of the park, it had been used as an old ball game field.

A favorite place for the local teams to go play.

Even before that it had been mostly owned by the Crown.

At one point, it had been opened up for a public sale, either part of the green space for this new development back then, or who knows?

Perhaps it would become something completely different.

It was really hard to tell from these old records.

However, with the body having now been found, it would bring everything on any pending development project to a grinding halt.

Yet she knew it wouldn’t be for long. These things tended to be dealt with relatively quickly, at least she hoped so for their sake.

There was nothing quite so irritating and frustrating as having to deal with all these delays.

Even if the residents had a better idea of what was going on, there still needed to be some level of transparency.

She wanted to bug Elizabeth for answers but knew that wouldn’t get Doreen very far and could potentially damage a burgeoning friendship and a great resource. Elizabeth would call her when she had anything to report. So, Doreen bided her time, even though it was hard to do.

When Nan called her later, Doreen muttered, “Sorry, I don’t have an update.”

“Of course not,” Nan noted, but a wealth of disappointment filled her tone too.

“This stuff takes time, Nan.” Doreen had to smile at herself because she was telling her grandmother exactly what she had been working at convincing herself of.

“I get that,” Nan admitted, “but really there should be something.”

“You already know what we found out at the scene.”

“Which wasn’t much,” she pointed out.

“No, it sure wasn’t,” she agreed, “and that’s a concern too, if this poor man was buried there all that time.”

“I know. It’s horrible,” Nan cried out.

“And you don’t know of anybody who went missing years ago? Not that we have a date range for the time of death yet.”

“I love how you make it sound as if I was even aware of all this,” Nan replied. “And, no, I have no idea.”

“But somebody must have known him, even if he was visiting here, right? Especially if he had been living here but was leaving town and going back to another location.”

“He was very tall, and that’s one thing we have going for us. That sets him apart,” Nan noted.

“There are still a lot of tall men here.”

“Not back in our youth there weren’t,” Nan declared, with a snort.

“I mean, generations are getting taller, but we don’t know how old this man was or how long he was there.

You guesstimated his age at roughly thirty-something to fifty-something.

Even if we take him at his youngest, thirty-something, tack on maybe fifty years ago he was buried there, then he could still come in somewhere around Richie’s age or so, I would suspect. ”

“Then we know who to talk to at least,” Doreen replied. “That would be a start.”

“But he’s still reeling from the last one,” Nan stated worriedly.

“That’s true. I was so hoping he would have some time to recover between cases.”

Nan chuckled. “Of course you were.”

“I would give him a little bit of time,” Doreen muttered. “I mean, obviously he’s had a rough go.”

“It’s not even that so much. I think it’s just that life has caused so many people to struggle, and yet we don’t quite realize what is happening in this town to other people. And that’s hard to hear about, especially after the fact, when we could have possibly helped them earlier.”

“Of course,” Doreen agreed. “Like Mack was just telling me, he doesn’t want me to get down and depressed by working all these cold cases. We don’t want that for you and Richie and the others in your special club at Rosemoor either. However, we don’t want anybody getting away with murder.”

“Apparently somebody did,” Nan muttered.

“I know, and the problem could be, at some point in some future cold case, we’ll find out that the people responsible for someone’s death are already dead and gone and don’t have to pay the price. Speaking of not having to pay, did you hear that Bernie Winters is in the hospital?”

“That’s karma for all the times his wife ended up there,” Nan grumbled, with a sigh.

“Yet she never reported him for beating her up all the time, and she never left him either. What a sorry excuse for a husband. Now she’s long dead, and he will never be put in prison, which is definitely where he belongs,” Nan muttered.

Doreen sighed. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“We’ve got to find this person who killed the body in the park now, before he gets away with everything too.”

“I’m working on it,” Doreen said. “With the captain’s permission, I’ve been going through missing persons’ files in BC, and, so far, I haven’t come up with anybody who fits the description.”

“And that initial physical description could be wrong. We’re still in the estimating phase,” Nan pointed out. “We wouldn’t want to make a mistake on that.”

“It’s not even about making a mistake at this point,” Doreen clarified, “because I don’t have much in the way of parameters.”

“I know, and that sucks.”

Doreen felt it too because that seemed to be the general consensus for the rest of the day.