The Skeleton Crew Read Online Free Page A

the Dunes” generated websites populated with small cities of dead people who, like her, had never been identified. They are unsettling, these sites: a Facebook for the dead. Some warn viewers that the photos within are disturbing and graphic. But nothing prepares you for the seemingly endless collection of heads: artists’ reconstructions, vivid color portraits that capture an inquisitive look in the eyes or a stubborn set to the mouth, crude pencil sketches, cartoon-like illustrations, and distorted clay dummies sporting wigs, like something out of a beautician’s academy for the hopeless. Then there are the postmortem photos: waxen faces with unseeing eyes, some individuals sporting grievous, barely disguised injuries.
    I scrolled past image after image. It was like walking into a morgue, pulling out drawers, and yanking the sheets off body after body. What if you logged onto a site like this and came across the face of someone that you knew?
    Who, I wondered, would go out of their way to create or peruse an Internet morgue?
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    James Todd Matthews’s cause of choice is dumped, unclaimed, unidentified, and otherwise abandoned dead people.
    Identifying the unidentified dead is not a celebrated cause like saving the whales. As one cold case investigator put it, unidentified corpses are the bottom of the food chain, and citizens like Todd taking up these cases only serves to exacerbate the already uneasy relationship between cops and civilians. Even the word “civilians,” which the police commonly use to refer to citizens, smacks of the military and emphasizes the divide between those among us who wear uniforms and carry guns and everybody else.
    The police occupy a lonely rung of society where they band together for self-preservation. Their tough exterior projects distrust: “Cynicism, clannishness, secrecy, insulating themselves from others—the so-called bluecurtain,” write criminologists Larry J. Siegel and John L. Worrall. Many cops believe—understandably—that lawyers, academics, politicians, and the public have little concept of what it means to be a police officer. So it’s not surprising that when self-proclaimed web sleuths started seeking information about cold cases around 1999—when the Internet came of age—their phone calls and e-mails weren’t universally welcomed by law enforcement.
    Working my way through the names of administrators listed on the Doe Network, a site that logged thousands of details on hundreds of missing and unidentified people, I connected with Todd Matthews and soon arranged to meet him in Virginia Beach, home to beachside motels, honky-tonk bars, and pizza joints, at a conference for cops and forensics personnel who routinely confronted bodies: the newly dead, the decomposed, the dismembered.
    In contrast to Todd’s childhood in a bucolic region of Tennessee, I’d grown up in a gritty neighborhood in a borough of New York City. With as many as two thousand murders a year—one every four hours—crime was a fact of life in the 1970s. This was the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD era; the age of the sensational headline, of over-inked black type on gray pulp newsprint unrelieved by color. There was, of course, The New York Times , but on the subways and buses everyone’s head was buried in the tabloids—the New York Post and my family’s favorite, the New York Daily News . I’d get home from school to thirty-point type screaming terrifying gems like HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, about a robber shooting and decapitating the owner of a Brooklyn strip joint.
    A few years later, serial killer Son of Sam gave New York City a collective nervous breakdown, generating a run on locks and Mace. David Berkowitz started a yearlong killing spree the summer I graduated from high school, picking off his victims—among them young women with long hair, the way I wore mine at the time—with a .44 double-action