Buried on Avenue B by Peter de Jonge Page A

looks them over again and continues the effort she began in the garden to make sense of them. Several items are currency, or a form of it—the $20 bill, the pesos and yen, the old subway token, maybe even the marble and the fake pearl. The knife, the roach clip, and the titty lighter are, loosely speaking, tools, and the booze, weed, and CD are entertainment, the makings of a party. Maybe the movie stub falls into that multimedia group as well, or maybe it’s a bit of trash that just happened to end up in the vicinity. The tiny bag of weed bears the initials “GMS” in small, discreet script, like a monogram on the inside of a pricey wallet.
    The clothes packed and labeled, Bradley sits down for the first time that O’Hara can recall in a nearly twenty-four-hour day and reviews his notes and sketches from the site. “We’ll know more in a day or two,” he says, “after the dental X-rays and the DNA sample come back, but here are some broad strokes. The date of the movie ticket was 6/11/07, which means that the body could not have been buried in the garden before that. That’s a little over two months ago, and the level of decomposition is well beyond what you would expect from a body that had been buried for that amount of time. That suggests that the body spent a significant interval exposed aboveground before it was buried. But the most glaring thing,” says Bradley after a pause, “is the manner in which the corpse has been handled. I’m sure you noticed this as well, but this is not the case of a body being dumped in a hastily dug hole. On the contrary, the body was carefully and respectfully laid out. The body was placed flat on its back, arms at his side, and the grave was meticulously dug. The length and width are consistent to within a quarter-inch. Then there’s the condition of the shirts. Since there are no bullet holes or blood, and only slight evidence of remains, these can’t be the clothes the victim was wearing when he died. That means that the body was prepared and dressed for burial, and considering that at that time there would still have been decomposing flesh on the bones, that would have been a horrendous job. The stench alone would make you retch. The point I’m trying to make is that this boy—and based on his clothes, I’m assuming for now that it’s a male, approximately ten years old—was given a decent burial, or at least an attempt at one. A considerable effort was made to send him off with a sense of ceremony.”

 
    CHAPTER 13
    NO MATTER WHAT gets put in the ground or dug out of it, big picture, nothing changes. The rear of the ME’s office looks straight out at the FDR Drive, East River, and Queens. At 7:30 a.m., the sun, with its dumb-fuck optimism, has risen again, and people are going to work, because the FDR southbound is bumper-to-bumper. O’Hara walks around the building to First, buys a buttered roll from a sidewalk cart, and eats it as she leans against the hood of her car.
    Half an hour later, moments after it opened for business, O’Hara is back on her stool at Milano’s, and for a second it feels as if she never left. On her left and right, she is flanked by the same even more punctual regulars, and from the wall-mounted TV another vintage black-and-white seeps into the room. The only thing separating her from Groundhog Day is that the pretty brown-haired barkeep has changed classic metal allegiances, or at least her T-shirt. Instead of AC/DC, it’s Kiss.
    O’Hara’s NYPD notepad is in her bag, but for reasons of propriety and self-preservation, she leaves it there, and when the bartender delivers her grapefruit juice and vodka, O’Hara asks to borrow the yellow pad beside the dictionary. Standing between O’Hara and sleep is not only the lingering effect of half a dozen cups of bad coffee but the quantity of still-unprocessed evidence unearthed from the garden,