me a machete, gloves, and a garbage bag. “Makes you look like a pirate.”
“Damn, and here I was going for Hendrix.”
Cate laughed, picking up a set of clippers, and the pair of us headed off into the bushes.
Ninety minutes on, we’d filled ten bags and lined up a five-foot, single-file parade of worthless-looking objets-du-garbage alongside the central trail.
Cate topped up one more load, then spun the bag closed and retrieved a toothed plastic closure from her shorts pocket. I reached over to keep the bag’s neck shut with my fist so she didn’t have to cinch it one handed.
She hoisted the load over her shoulder, Santa-style. “Ready for a break?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
I gathered up our tools, slowly scoping out the hacked weeds underfoot as I walked back toward the trail edge. All I turned up was a root-beer bottle and a wad of disintegrating newsprint.
There was nothing obviously connected to a child—no little toys, no tiny sweaters with name tags sewn in, no laminated photo-ID cards reading,MY NAME IS————, AND SKWARECKI SHOULD ARREST————.
We hadn’t found a thing that required a second thought: bent cans and grimy bottles, the rusty blade of a garden trowel, a tangle of kite-string with silver Christmas tinsel inexplicably wound in—pointless, all of it.
I placed my latest finds at the back of the sad little line of crap and sighed, shaking my head.
Maybe the Quakers were having better luck, or maybe there hadn’t been anything to find in the first place.
I wiped my hands on the back of my shorts and started trudging up toward the chapel, only slightly cheered by the promise of ice water.
When I stepped inside the chapel I found Cate deep in discussion with Detective Skwarecki.
Cate was looking at the floor and nodding, cup of water in hand, while Skwarecki gesticulated with what looked like the remaining half of a Chips Ahoy.
I grabbed some water myself before walking over to join them.
Cate looked up at me. “We may have a bit of good news.”
“The Quakers got lucky?”
“We’ve turned up a missing-persons report that could be relevant,” said Skwarecki. “It was filed last April here in Queens, by the mother of a three-year-old boy.”
“So, right age,” I said.
“The pathologist thinks the child we found was African American,” added Cate. “Which fits.”
I looked at Skwarecki. “You can tell someone’s ethnicity from their bones?”
“Broadly speaking,” she said. “You get different features distinguishing Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Africanoid skulls, even in children.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“The shape of the nose holes, proportions of any nasal bones, whether the zygomatic bones—cheekbones—are curved or square. Even the chin’s angle means something. Our guy’s pretty confident that this child’s ancestry is African.”
“Is there any way to tell for sure whether the woman who filed the report is the mother?” I asked. “Some kind of test?”
Skwarecki shook her head. “Not with skeletal remains. With a blood sample we can at least establish the likelihood of two individuals being closely related.”
“Sure,” I said. “Blood typing.”
“Serology, or HLA,” she said, “but again, with these remains…”
“What about DNA?” I asked.
I’d read about it in the Times, but it was still pretty new.
Skwarecki shook her head. “That takes a big sample of blood or saliva or semen from both individuals. And there’s a lot of argument on whether the results really even stack up forensically.”
“I thought it was foolproof,” I said.
She shrugged. “This guy Castro almost got off last year, killed a pregnant woman and her daughter. They thought they had him on DNA—blood on his watch—but his lawyer convinced the judge it was a lab screwup, not a match. That’s got everybody’s panties in a knot over guidelines, chain of evidence.”
I slugged back the last of my water, discouraged.
Cate asked, “So, in a case like this, how do you establish someone’s identity? You said there probably wouldn’t be dental records.”
“It’s tough,” said Skwarecki. “Skeletal structure can’t even confirm gender, before puberty.”
I peered into my now-empty water cup for a moment, like I’d find some useful advice printed at the bottom.
Nope.
I raised my eyes to meet Skwarecki’s. “Did the missing boy have any dental records?”
“No,” she said. “I asked his mother this morning.”
I thought about “our” child’s smashed rib cage and all the other fractures the ME said had never been set so they could heal properly. If he was the missing boy, it didn’t sound like he’d ever been taken to a doctor, either. Skwarecki had to be thinking about all of that too.
“So how did this lady manage to lose her son?” I