Or maybe his stomach felt that way because he was still outside the medical examiner’s building. And now he was late.

He hustled across the parking lot and through the double doors. The girl at the front desk waved him in. “They were just asking if I’d seen you. They’re in op six!” she hollered after him as he strode down the hall.

“Sorry!”

Mason took off his hat and wiped at the sweat on his temples. The building was icy cool compared to the stiff heat outside. He wrinkled his nose as the smell entered his nostrils. There was no getting away from it. Tonight, he’d have to wash his pants and shirt and take a shower before going to bed. It didn’t matter if he was in the building for thirty minutes or three hours. The scent still clung. Dr. Campbell claimed the building had the best air filtration system available. And he didn’t doubt her. Clearly, nothing had been invented to eliminate the odor of decaying flesh.

He added a medical examiner’s perfect air filter system to his mental list of how to make a million bucks.

Mason paused outside of op six, took a deep breath through his mouth, and pushed the door open with his shoulder. Dr. Victoria Peres and Lacey Campbell were shoulder-to-shoulder, bent over a skull on one of the silver tables, as Dr. Peres pointed at the nasal opening. Dr. Campbell was nodding emphatically, her brows narrowed in concentration.

Scanning the room, Mason took in four other tables with full skeletons. Each arranged as if the person had simply lain down and his flesh had melted away.

How had they separated the skeletons?

The pit had been one giant hole. The bodies tossed in like trash, their bones and flesh commingling over the years.

“Mason. Over here.” Dr. Campbell gestured, her eyes lighting up at the sight of him.

Actually, he figured her eyes were already bright from her fascination with the case. It took a special breed of person to get excited over old bones. Dr. Campbell was one. Dr. Peres was another. They were so deep in bone heaven, they probably hadn’t noticed he was very late.

Dr. Peres nodded at him. “Detective.” She glanced at the clock on the wall.

Scratch that. The forensic anthropologist missed nothing.

He moved closer, his boots sounding too loud on the hard floor. “Morning, doctors.” He stopped next to Dr. Campbell and forced himself to take a good look at the remains. The bones were a muddy brown, not the ivory color he’d expected. He glanced at the other tables. The other skeletons were the same. “Why are they dirty?”

Dr. Peres bristled and Dr. Campbell smiled, putting a calming hand on the other woman’s arm. “They aren’t dirty. They absorbed the color of the dirt they were buried in for twenty years. It’s pretty common. And they’ve been cleaned. There was some tissue still attached in a few places.”

Mason grimaced. “Tissue? There was still flesh left?”

“A bit. A simple soaking in a few different solutions takes care of it.”

Mason knew she’d purposefully left out details. In the past, he’d stepped into the room when bones had been simmering to remove the flesh. It’d smelled like a restaurant. He swallowed hard.

“How’d you get them separated? How do you know you have the right bones grouped together?” he asked.

“Very carefully.” Dr. Peres spoke. “I’m glad I was there for the unearthing. That’s where the first mistakes are always made. Luckily, he’d buried them one at a time. There was a small layer of dirt between each skeleton, enough to help us keep each separate.”

“Layers of dirt? How long apart between each burial?”

Dr. Peres bit her lip, and Mason knew she was frustrated that she didn’t have a perfect answer for him.

“I can’t tell. We can have each dirt sample analyzed, but I’m comfortable saying all five were buried within a ten-year period.”

Mason nodded. Once they had identified the bodies, he had a hunch each one would have been reported missing around the same set of years. He needed to get them identified first.

“What else can you tell me?” He pulled out his notebook and pen.

Dr. Peres’s face shifted into lecture mode. “This is number three. He’s a Caucasian male, approximately eighteen to twenty-five. Six feet tall with a well-healed fracture of his tibia.” Dr. Peres pointed at a bone in the lower leg. Mason bent closer and saw the thickened, slightly lumpy area along the sleek bone. “It can take three to five years for a break to look this good. It’s an old one…compared to this one.” Dr. Peres moved to a different table and indicated the smaller lower arm bone.

The bone had a jagged break that ran across the bone. “This happened pretty close to death. And this particular break on the ulna usually indicates a defensive wound.” She lifted her arms and crossed them in front of her face as if protecting her head. “Imagine defending yourself against a swing from a baseball bat. Where is the impact going to be?”

Mason nodded. Her visual worked very well for him. “But how do you know it didn’t happen while transporting the bones? Old bones have got to be brittle. I wouldn’t think it’d take much to accidentally break one.”

Dr. Peres smiled and picked up the thin arm bone. “Every break tells me a story. See here?” She ran a gloved finger along the break. “See the darkness? It’s a stain from the bleeding because of the break. The broken ends would be a lighter color than the outer bone if it happened during the recovery or transport because there would be nothing to seep in and stain the break. And see how notched the broken surface is? When fresh bone breaks, the ends are jagged and angled. When a bone breaks long after death, the break is almost flat, because the bone is brittle…like a dry stick snapping. Ever try to break a green tree branch? It’s a jumbled mess. A fresh stick will never break cleanly. Same with bone.”