It took only a short while to photograph the remains in situ, then carefully remove the bones, reconstructing their original open-air arrangement on a blue-black tarp spread over the nearest nearly level bit of floor. One by one the stained, fire-blackened bones emerged into the light.
Little else was found. Whatever clothes the unknown victim might have been wearing had decayed or dissolved or otherwise deteriorated to little more than patches of muck along the bottom of the case. There was a belt buckle, unadorned and functional. A watch face but no band-perhaps the band had been leather, since a small buckle lay beneath the corroded watch. Some indefinable sludge that must have been shoes, since it still covered portions of the feet.
“No idea what would have cause this kind of damage,” one of the investigators ventured. “Usually, even after decades, more would survive. Leather. Synthetics. It looks almost as if some kind of acid or something had been poured over everything. But there’s no trace of any damage from corrosives on the bones themselves. Other than having not a trace of flesh on them, they are almost pristine.” He shook his head. “No idea at all.”
Finally, at the bottom of the concrete tomb, they located a single clue. Two bits of metal, thin and rectangular, that looked like a set of dog-tags, or a pair of medic-alert pendants.
It took some cleaning and a strong magnifying glass to read anything through the accumulated layers of grime, sludge, and almost rock-hard sediment.
Medic-alert tags.
The name on one of them was still legible, although any mention of medical disorders had been totally eradicated.
“Bryan Sidney.”
“I know that name from somewhere,” Edgar Sai said. “Give me a minute.” He placed a call on his cell phone, stepped away from the small group for several minutes, then returned.
His face was pale, and he looked shaken.
“Bryan Sidney. Disappeared November, 1989. Police figure he’d skipped town. He and a partner built this original subdivision, then got caught cutting to many corners. Talk was they were both in deep shit, probably were going to be arrested, maybe serve some time in jail.
“Then Sidney disappeared. No trace. The talk settled down for a while.
“The it re-surfaced a two years later, stronger. More evidence, I guess, or something. Indictment actually came down.
“The night before he would have been arrested, Sidney’s partner, Andrew McCall was found murdered.”
Sai stared around at the wreckage from the fire, the gutted rooms, the shattered foundation slab, the black pit lying open and revealed just a few feet away.
“He was found murdered,” he continued, “in this house.”