The Skeleton Crew Read Online Free PDF Page B

identify thousands of victims of the World Trade Center attacks helped advance DNA as a forensic tool. Some of the pieces for a new approach to UIDs had started to fall into place.
----
    At the Virginia Beach conference, I met Betty Dalton Brown, an amateur sleuth living in North Carolina who spoke to Todd Matthews almost daily but had never met him in person. “I think he’s around sixty, very distinguished, gray hair, goes to the opera,” she said. “He’s the one with the mullet,” a Pennsylvania man informed her. (Todd insisted later that he was going for long-haired country boy, not a mullet.)
    I recognized Betty as one of the scheduled speakers who, just before the conference, had grimly taken in the sea of seats in the empty auditorium and muttered, “Anybody have any Scotch?” Betty, petite, with shoulder-­length dirty-blond hair, looked tough and feminine that day in black Western boots, black jeans, and a frilly checked blouse. Despite her attack of nerves, she pulled off her first-ever public talk about her search for a missing half brother, and I learned later that Betty has an uncanny knack for finding almost anything and anyone on the Internet. She’d blow away in a strong wind and she can be prickly, to put it mildly, but I decided that, in a showdown, I’d want Betty Brown on my side.
    After the official program in Virginia Beach ended, a small group that included Betty, Todd, and me reconvened in a Holiday Inn lounge. I gazed at Todd’s Hawaiian shirt, baseball cap, flip-flops, and ebullient hair. Knowing Todd only a matter of hours, I was a little worried that any minute he was going to confess that he believed the unidentified dead had been abducted by aliens or would be resurrected as vampires, and then I was going to have to stop myself from saying what I was thinking, which was something along the lines of What a weirdo hillbilly fanatic . I didn’t tell him it wasn’t considered normal in most circles to keep human skulls in your basement, as he mentioned he did, or to wear a soul patch.
    I didn’t have to say those things. Todd seemed resigned to the disdain with which some Yankees viewed him, and viewed the South as a setting for surreal fantasies and historical romances, Disney movies, and gothic nightmares of descents into madness. Hans Christian Andersen meets William Faulkner.
    Sitting over blue drinks that night with the web sleuths and a jovial forensic expert from a Texas university, listening to stories laced with details of decomposition as we ate rare burgers, I was wondering what kind of hideously ghoulish subculture I had gotten myself mixed up with. But as the night wore on, the waves crashed along the far side of the Virginia Beach boardwalk, the gory anecdotes became funnier, the blue drinks kept coming, and my companions were turning out to be excellent company.
----
    In the wake of Todd Matthews’s successful identification of Tent Girl in 1998, many civilian sleuths took to the Internet to search out potential matches between the unidentified and the missing. By 2001, the same unidentified corpses that were once almost universally ignored had evolved into tantalizing clues in a massive, global version of Concentration played around the clock by a hodgepodge of self-styled amateur sleuths, a dedicated skeleton crew that shared a desire to match faces to names—and names to dead bodies. Anybody with an idealistic bent, a lot of time, and a strong stomach could sign on: a stay-at-home mom in New York, a chain store cashier in Mississippi, a nurse in Nebraska, a retired cop and his exotic-­dancer girlfriend in Houston.
    Venturing into the web sleuths’ demimonde of aliases and screen names and pseudonyms, I came across SheWhoMustNotBeNamed and Yoda and abcman and Texaskowgirl. They were an underground society whose members wouldn’t recognize one another if they passed on the street; their real-world personas