Pieces: Part 4

The big freezer at the county morgue is a wall of burnished steel file drawers. The Number 2 Parts drawer is in the lower left corner and, like the others, it pulls out to the length of a bed. Number 1 Parts is fairly full, but, for the moment, two smallish plastic bags are the only things in the Number 2 Parts drawer.

In the first bag is a greenish-gray bone shard. If you press the clear plastic flat, a single black tooth is visible, rooted in the bone. The jawbone's bag has its own typed tag with the date and location of its finding, and and a number code. If you type that code into the computer down the hall you learn the name of the fisherman who was digging for bait grubs last fall when he found the piece out near the river slough. The experts say it's not old enough to be a native burial.

The finger has its own bag, tag, and code. It was discovered by a woman who massaged her moods with walks on the wooded park trail. Her dachshunds, a mother-daughter pair, were fighting over it in the brush. There wasn't much flesh left, a few tatters at the joints, but it was fresh enough that she recognized it with that chilling of the chest that we all know. The cops spent a full day up there, sifting the leaf mold, quartering through the undergrowth, without finding anything more.

The morgue has a procedure for Parts Drawer cases. Photographs from different angles, samples taken, slides made, some basic lab analysis. Reports are filed and checked. It may be months or more, sometimes a few years, before the decision is made. It has to do with odds and intuition and how big a chunk is left to work with, and how crowded the Parts Drawers are. If no more is found, no connective element is recognized, if no clue surfaces, the part is sent to whichever crematorium is next in the county indigent rotation. The attendants wait until several parts can be sent at the same time. Until then the pieces wait, their movement through time stopped by the cold.

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