Lovely in Her Bones Read Online Free

asked Elizabeth.
    “No. He said he’d let me know. He didn’t even have his lab set up at that point; most of the equipment hadn’t even been ordered.”
    “So when did he hire you?”
    “The next day. Now shut up and let me tell you how it happened.” Milo leaned back against the seat and tucked his hands behind his head. “Okay. Dr. Lerche had already met the district medical examiner because the two of them would be working together on cases. You know forensic anthropologists consult for the state, right?”
    They nodded.
    “Well, that same day I talked to him, they had a case come in. It was a found body in a pretty bad state of decomposition, and—”
    “Wait a minute,” Elizabeth interrupted. “Is this story going to get gross?”
    Milo thought about it. “Not really,” he told her. “I won’t get any more graphic than I have to.”
    “Okay,” said Elizabeth grudgingly. “Go ahead.”
    “All right, the medical examiner brought Dr. Lerche this body and wanted a report on it right away. That meant that he had to get down to the bones quickly so he could go to work.” He glanced over at Elizabeth to see if his explanation had been delicate enough.
    “Don’t pay any attention to her,” said Bill. “Go ahead. How did he do that?”
    “Well, the method he uses is to boil the body until the flesh comes off—”
    “Aargh!” Elizabeth made a face.
    “But he didn’t have any place to do it. See, his equipment hadn’t arrived, and he didn’t want to do it in his apartment—”
    “Thank God!” said Bill, grateful that precedent had been established.
    “All right,” sighed Elizabeth. “What did he do?”
    “He called the animal science people and asked if they had any facilities that he could use over in their building.”
    “That seems reasonable,” said Elizabeth cautiously. She had been dreading a mention of the cafeteria or some other bizarre site.
    “Sure, it was,” Milo agreed. “They offered him their lab facilities right away. The only problem was that the only thing they had for boiling things in was an autoclave.”
    “That thing you sterilize instruments in?”
    “Yeah. And you know how small it is. No way you could get a whole body in one of those things.”
    Elizabeth sighed. “I know I’m going to hate myself for asking this, but—”
    “Well, he just put it into the autoclave a piece at a time, right, Milo?” asked Bill.
    “Of course. What else could he do? The process was going to take at least twelve hours to do anyway. He started at six o’clock, as soon as the animal science people had gone home for the day. And he just stayed there that night, tending his autoclave and stacking up the clean bones.”
    “What does this have to do with you?” asked Elizabeth.
    Milo grinned. “There he is, by himself, dressed in ragged cutoffs and an old T-shirt because it’s … uh … inelegant work,” he finished lamely with a glance at Elizabeth. She nodded solemnly, and he continued. “It’s three o’clock in the morning, not another soul in the building, when suddenly the door to the lab bursts open and in walk three campus cops, guns drawn.”
    He waited for a moment so that Bill and Elizabeth could grasp the situation. Elizabeth nodded slowly, “So-they think-”
    “Oh, sure! They think they’ve caught Jack the Ripper’s grandson! And he doesn’t have any identificationon him. It’s in his good clothes, which he left in his office. At three o’clock in the morning, who’s he going to call? Remember he’d just gotten here and didn’t know many people.”
    “Did they arrest him?” asked Bill.
    “Yep. He tried to explain what was going on, and they allowed him to go without handcuffs on the strength of that, but they were going to take him down and put him in a cell until they got things straightened out.”
    “He went to jail?”
    “No.” said Milo. “That’s where I come in. Three a.m. was my break time, when I walked across campus to Burger