The Skeleton Crew Read Online Free Page B

revolver. One of his victims was slain only a mile from my apartment building.
    More than two decades after I’d left daily newspaper reporting to write about academic research, I became acquainted with the existence of the Lady of the Dunes and jumped at the opportunity to reenter the gritty world outside the ivory tower. I’d come to learn that many whospend their days among the unidentified also end up reinventing themselves.
    Todd Matthews refers to himself, with only a hint of irony, as a hillbilly. Imagining himself some Southern version of Kojak, he’d set out as a teenager to crack Kentucky’s biggest unsolved mystery: the identity of a murder victim known as Tent Girl. Now in his forties, a minor celebrity of sorts who played an active role in early grassroots efforts such as the Doe Network, he shares podiums regularly with FBI agents and forensic experts. On the day of the Virginia Beach event, Todd walked into the linoleum-and-cinder-block lobby of an almost windowless police academy with his laptop under his arm. Our fellow attendees were, by definition, a pretty hardened bunch. Gentle, soft-spoken, almost effeminate, Todd stuck out in this crowd like a canary among raptors.
    He smiled at a Sofía Vergara look-alike detective behind the desk who, like almost everyone in the building, had a service revolver strapped to one hip. She checked our names on a list and pointed us toward an urn of black coffee, Styrofoam cups, and sticky, cinnamon-scented pastries. I watched Todd mill around, greeting people he recognized from the crime conference circuit.
    I thought Todd’s aquiline nose, thick chevron mustache, ragged soul patch, chestnut-brown eyes, and white teeth made him good-looking in an early-’80s sort of way. Around five-seven, his shaggy dark brown mane gained him a couple of inches. He exuded a Zen-like calm—until he started to speak. His middle Tennessee dialect—Tommy Lee Jones with a dash of Jed Clampett—was so rapid-fire, I had trouble recognizing it as English. “Dead” became “day-ud,” “well” was “way-eel.”
    Besides losing the flip-flops and baseball cap I would come to recognize as integral parts of his look, Todd hadn’t dressed for the part of speaker. In a short-sleeved golf shirt and jeans, he angled down the microphone; the previous presenter was a head taller. “I wore a suit in Vegas and everyone thought I was Tony Orlando,” he told a sea of unsmiling cops. “I don’t wear a mic because it wears down the chest hair.”
    After twenty minutes of leading the audience through the various ins and outs of using an online database to compare the details of the missing and the unidentified, Todd relinquished the podium to a forensic pathologist whose PowerPoint was a parade of gore: a corpse’s face and neck striped from sternum to forehead with perfectly even, vertical tire treads; skulls bashed in by hammers or riddled with bullet holes; severed limbs, bloodied and mangled or denuded of skin. No one in the audience blinked.
    Maybe Todd logged a couple of converts among law enforcement that day. He knew what he was up against. He’d spent years during his one-man investigation of Tent Girl trying to gain the confidence of cops who didn’t hide the fact that they considered him a time-sucking, death-obsessed wacko. He’d lost track of the number of times he’d been turned away, ridiculed, dismissed, hung up on.
    No one was actively investigating Tent Girl back then, almost no one was keeping track of the thousands of other unidentified bodies, and no one was effectively trying to match them to the tens of thousands of people still listed as missing. Incredibly, it would take thirty years from the time the issue was first raised for a universally accessible system dedicated to this purpose to materialize. One of the first people to advocate for such a thing was a dumpling-shaped woman