Buried on Avenue B by Peter de Jonge

“When I got here,” says Bradley, “there was talk of finally getting a state-of-the-art machine. As you might guess, that conversation didn’t go anywhere.”
    Bradley works his way down the length of the body bag, the previous image developing while the next is being taken. When he’s done, the four overlapping shots, laid out on the counter, yield a composite view of the full skeleton. For the next couple hours, Bradley separates clothing and remains. He unbuttons the dress shirt and finds a black T-shirt, “The Germs” written across it in red letters. From the armholes of both shirts, Bradley pulls out the delicate bones of the fingers, hands, and arms. From the bottom and top he slides the spine, ribs, chest, and shoulders. Then he performs the same drill with the lower half, removing the bones of the feet, legs, and pelvis from the victim’s sneakers and the legs and waist of his jeans, a process made slightly simpler by the fact that the victim is not wearing underwear. When he’s done, the clothes are lying on one high-bordered metal tray, the bones on another beside it. To make sure the bones are all accounted for, Bradley reassembles them like a jigsaw in proper anatomical order. “An adult has fewer bones than a child,” says Bradley, “because over time, bones fuse, particularly in the hands.” When he’s finished, the skeleton lies naked on the table, as it lay clothed in the grave.
    Bradley will return to the skeleton later, but now directs his attention to the clothes. Hovering over them, he takes them in as a group. Then, although the evidence department will perform the same task in greater detail, he moves from one garment to the next, examining it inside and out; assessing its condition; looking for signs of blood, hair, or remains; and checking the contents of the pockets. In a back pocket of the jeans he finds a sodden clump of paper so stuck together that he decides to leave it where it is for evidence to tease apart, and caught in the laces of the sneakers he finds several strands of light blond, nearly white hair. “A towhead,” says Bradley, showing a strand to O’Hara before sealing the hair in a separate plastic bag.
    Finally he gathers each article of clothing, holds it about a foot over the table, turns it over, opens it up, and gingerly shakes it to see if anything has been caught in the fabric. When he shakes out the black tee, the early morning silence is punctured by a metallic ping, as startling as when his trowel hit the lighter. A quick search and Bradley holds a small copper bullet between his latex-covered thumb and forefinger.
    â€œTwenty-two-caliber,” he says, “the kind my grandfather and I used to shoot beer cans and bottles, as well as various critters who made the mistake of treating themselves to his vegetables. Twenty-twos aren’t much good for killing anything much bigger than a rabbit, and this is a lot smaller than the urban ammo that gets pulled out of bodies here. You got to be pretty unlucky to be killed by a twenty-two, but I guess we’ve already established that this kid wasn’t lucky.”
    Having found the bullet, Bradley takes a second, more focused look at the two shirts. He searches for holes and blood, but he finds neither. Then he walks to the counter where the X-rays are lined up. And after scanning the ghostly images for several minutes, points out a dark spot in the left shoulder blade or scapula. “Until the last of the flesh decomposed, the bullet was lodged in here. Eventually, it fell out into the shirt.”
    Bradley slips the bullet casing into a plastic bag and sets it aside for ballistics. On the counter is the Tupperware container holding the various items dug up with the victim, which will soon be delivered to the evidence lab or, in the case of the pot, to narcotics. As Bradley packs and labels the clothes, slipping each into a separate bag, O’Hara