Title: Scar Tissue
Author: 8sword
Date: 2.9.10,
Revised: 2.22.10. A huge thank you to JadeEye, who re-edited these first three chapters to me. There were so many mistakes! How did you all bear it?
Summary: An unsettling new case and an even more unsettling new ANBU agent inject chaos into forensic anthropologist Haruno Sakura's methodical life.
Author's Notes: This story is heavily influenced on the TV show Bones. All forensic and terminology come from it or the forensic anthropology survey course I took a while back.
Disclaimer: Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.
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"Billowing on the innominate bone indicates an age between mid fifties and early sixties. Subject was definitely a male. Wear on the carpals and metacarpals indicates that he was left-handed, and the fillings in the back molars match the dental records for Senator Kaze."
Haruno Sakura snapped the file folder shut and looked up, her shoulders drawing back and spine straightening as she was accustomed to doing when speaking to higher-ranking officers – in this case, her boss.
However, unlike she was used to doing, she spoke to him with annoyance that she intended to be quite obvious. "Begging your pardon, sir, but I fail to see why this case demanded my attention. The car in which the remains were found belonged to Senator Kaze, the serial numbers on both of the victim's hip replacements match those on record for the senator, and the death was clearly caused by blunt-force trauma associated with a car accident. One of the grad assistants could easily have dealt with this, and I could have worked on that stabbing case."
Dr. Sarutobi sighed, rubbing his forehead with an age-spotted hand. "That case is in Sand Country, Dr. Haruno. Do I need to remind you that you are a forensic anthropologist employed by the Leaf government?"
"A forensic anthropologist employed by the Leaf government who could have improved Leaf Country's relationship with the Sand Country's medical examiner's office," said Sakura. "All they wanted was my help in identifying unusual striations in the kerf marks from a knife."
Sarutobi sighed again, but his eyes twinkled. "Would it help if I said I didn't send you to help Sand because I've just received another case for you to work on?"
"It would if the case involves someone who died at someone else's hands and not just some bastard who killed himself from drunken driving," said Sakura, giving a meaningful glance to the senator's remains on the examination table. "Sir."
Sarutobi gave her a stern look, but the cough he covered with his hand was indisputably a chuckle. "An ANBU agent will arrive with the remains some time this afternoon. Until then, why don't you go enjoy some lunch?"
"Yes, Dr. Haruno, why don't we enjoy some lunch?" The familiar soft voice came from behind Sakura.
She turned to see her colleague, Sai, standing on the steps to the autopsy platform.
He was smirking vaguely. "I promise a show."
Sarutobi groaned. "I don't want to know."
He headed quickly past Sai down the stairs.
Sakura waited until their supervisor was gone to return Sai's smile.
"What'd you do this time?" she asked, peeling off her latex gloves.
Sai inclined his head, twirling a pen in his fingers. He worked in facial reconstruction, as well as crime scene photography and sketching, and she couldn't remember ever seeing him without some sort of writing implement in hand, even when he had worked briefly under her as a graduate assistant several years ago.
"You know that Shino's giant cockroach apparently escaped from its container this morning?"
Sakura rolled her eyes. "How could I not have noticed?"
Their resident forensic entomologist, a man only five years older than herself and Sai but "much more dignified," according to Dr. Sarutobi, had nearly sent her into cardiac arrest earlier that morning. She had taken a step away from the examining table for another pair of gloves and seen Shino on his hands and knees underneath the tables' legs.
Sakura had nearly kicked him in the face with her high-heeled boots. If she hadn't known from working with him for a year that female fruit flies interested him more than any female Homo sapien, she would have proclaimed his robotically delivered explanation that he was checking under the autopsy table for his giant cockroach a giant load of bullshit and kicked him all the way to Water Country.
She saw no need to explain all this to Sai, however, so she just asked, as she came down the steps toward him, "What'd you do to it?"
Sai said nothing, merely let his smile curve a little higher. Then he opened the door to the lounge and stepped back to let her go through.
It was empty. Sakura opened the refrigerator to take out her bottle of iced tea and heard another set of footsteps following Sai's into the lounge.
She turned around and saw that the footsteps belonged to Shino. The dark-haired entomologist still had his safety goggles strapped on. He frequently forgot to take them off, and rarely was anyone brave enough to tell him he was still wearing them. Settling into a chair at the table and propping her foot on the legs of a chair across from her, Sakura watched as Shino took his customary bagged lunch from the fridge.
She glanced at Sai and saw him perfectly blank and smooth-faced, which, she knew, was much more indicative of impending calamity than any smile.
She returned her eyes to Shino just in time to see him open the plasticware containing his daily mustard-and-roast-beef sandwich.
He lifted it to his mouth with his usual slow, deliberate movements and bit down.
Sakura blanched.
Roast beef should definitely not have the two dark antenna she saw poking out from between Shino's lips.
With a movement as unhurried as before, Shino put his sandwich down. He opened his mouth and pulled out the bit of sandwich that he had bitten off. He peeled the top layer of bread from it.
The dark shape lying there twitched and exploded into motion.
Sakura shrieked and scrambled out of her chair as the cockroach zoomed angrily into the air like a fat, black bomber plane.
It swooped close to her face, and she shrieked again, angrily this time, ordering Shino to catch the damn thing as Sai's loud laughter filled the air.
Ducking, breathing hard, she yanked open the lounge room door and scrambled out, slamming the door behind her.
"Sai!" she bellowed through the door, through which she could hear Shino's monotoned threats to infest Sai's office with a sample of pubic lice he had from one of his investigations if he ever kidnapped his cockroach again. "FORGET SHINO'S THREATS, I'LL MAKE SURE YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING FOR THE PUBIC LICE TO INFEST!"
As her shout echoed down the sterile corridor, the humor of the situation hit her.
She began to laugh, tears running from her eyes, until her abdominal muscles ached. He'd put the roach in Shino's sandwich, for God's sake –
Footsteps raced down the hall. Then a voice shouted, "Stand down! AN – "
Sakura's eyes registered the handgun. Then they registered her leg spinning out to kick the gun from the hands which held it, and her hand seizing the arm to which the hands belonged and wrenching it in a Dragon Twist.
The gun clattered to the floor.
" – BU," finished a strained voice next to her ear.
Sakura registered two things simultaneously: a) the handgun on the floor was a .40 mm, a caliber most commonly issued to law enforcement. And b) AN + BU = ANBU.
"Oops," she heard herself say as her eyes flicked up and met two wincing blue eyes.
Wincing herself, she released the arm that she had been gripping and took a step back.
The man she had just released was wearing a standard issue black suit with white uniform shirt. But he didn't look like any of the other ANBU agents for whom she had worked cases. Those agents had all been nondescript, dark-haired and dark-eyed like her own colleagues.
This one had swapped his standard-issue dark tie for a bright orange one, and his hair was just as bright, a loud yellow that could barely even be called blond.
She was hardly one to talk about unnatural hair colors herself, but she felt her eyebrow lifting as she eyed the bright spiky hair and wondered if perhaps it was still dyed from an undercover mission or something. Her brow rose even further as she realized how young the agent appeared, the skin of his face fresh and smooth except some scar tissue above both zygomatic arches.
She took in all this in a few seconds, and then her visual inspection was interrupted by a shout.
"Agent Uzumaki!"
She recognized Dr. Sarutobi's voice even before the elderly man came hurrying around the corner of the hallway. He stopped short when he saw them. His eyes flicked first to Sakura, then to the ANBU agent, then to the handgun on the floor between their feet.
"Ah," he panted, managing to sound dry even then. "Well, I did ask you to wait for me, Agent Uzumaki."
"When people in my line of work hear screaming, we usually run first and ask questions later." Uzumaki's voice was as young as his face and had a playful tone that matched the smile that now curved his mouth. He stooped to pick up the gun and slide it back into the holster at his belt, then glanced up at Sakura with his blue eyes. "You were the one screaming, right?"
On her face, Sakura could feel both the weight of Sarutobi's eyes and the heat of intense embarrassment. Damn it, she would kill Sai later. To think that an ANBU agent had heard her shrieking like a schoolgirl over a stupid cockroach and now she would have to explain it –
The lounge door clicked open.
Sai stepped out, then stopped short at the tableau in front of him.
Shino brushed past him, gave the group of people a single disinterested glance from behind his goggles, and headed down the hallway.
Sakura glared after him.
"Why were you screaming, Sakura?" prompted Sarutobi.
"She saw a cockroach," said Sai without the slightest bit of perturbation. "Don't worry, Dr. Haruno," he said, coming up behind her and giving her a pat on the shoulder. "Shino caught it. You're safe now."
Sakura smiled sweetly and stepped backward, grinding her heel into his metatarsals. To Sai's credit, his gentle smile didn't waver.
But he did make a rather interesting sound.
"If the two of you are through," said Sarutobi. The expression on his face made it clear he saw through both of them even if the ANBU agent's forehead was creased with puzzlement. "Dr. Haruno, this is Agent Uzumaki."
Sakura was still feeling highly mortified, and when she felt mortified, she got bitchy.
"A pleasure, I'm sure," she said shortly, barely sparing him a glance. She looked at Sarutobi instead. "Where are the remains?"
-
The remains were waiting in a biohazard container the size of a garbage can in front of the steps to her autopsy platform. Two ANBU crime scene techs stood on either side of it like sentries and snapped to straight-spined attention when the group of Sakura, Sai, Sarutobi, and the ANBU agent approached.
"Sir," they said to Uzumaki, who grinned at them and waved at them to lower their hands from their salutes.
Sakura swiped her identification badge through the security reader mounted next to the steps and watched as the two techs, after a gesture from Uzumaki, hefted the container up the steps.
Rolling up the sleeves of her red lab coat, she directed them to the last of the three examination tables on the platform and plucked two pairs of latex gloves from the canister fastened to the railing that encircled the platform.
She pulled them on. "When were the remains found?"
"Yesterday." Uzumaki had followed her up the stairs and now stood with his hands in his pockets. "A kid in Konoha-cho found them while he was rooting around in a Dumpster for dinner."
Sai already had a digital camera ready in his hands. "Guess he won't be getting his meals from that Dumpster anymore."
Sakura did not laugh. She watched Uzumaki from beneath her bangs as she pretended to adjust her gloves.
He, she noticed, did not laugh either.
She dismissed the matter for the moment, put a mask over her nose and mouth so that she wouldn't exhale her DNA onto the canister's contents, and began to undo the latches that kept the canister shut and air-tight.
"Were pictures taken of the Dumpster?"
Uzumaki drew a compact disc out of the inside of his suit. "They're on this, with the kid's statement. We got picture of the alley, too, and it's still marked off in case we need to go back to it."
This was useless, Sakura knew. A bit of yellow ANBU tape didn't do anything in normal parts of the city to deter people from entering the marked-off area; in Little Konoha, it would be practically as though it didn't even exist.
She opened her mouth to tell him this. But, remembering how he had called the child from Konoha-chou, as it was less favorably known, a "kid" instead of a "cho-ho" the way most people did, she realized that he might be well enough acquainted with the area that informing him of this obvious piece of information would only make her look stupid. She shut her mouth.
It still rankled, though. The lab should have been called as soon as the body was found so that she, Sai, and Shino could have gone to examine the area themselves for evidence and make sure nothing was missed.
She'd had this argument with Sarutobi many times. He had told her that he, too, had had this argument with his ANBU liaison. But ANBU absolutely refused to let forensic specialists into their crime scenes.
Sakura had never had much respect for ANBU, with their holier-than-thou, top-secret behavior, acting as though they were so much higher than a normal soldier, who risked just as much, and the thought of it unconsciously made her brows dig into her eyes as she watched Uzumaki. Calling the Konoha-cho child a "kid" was probably nothing more than a fluke.
"I had the pictures e-mailed to Sarutobi, too, so they should be on your server," said the agent. He set the compact disc on the metal desk in the corner, where several computers sat.
Sakura realized, seeing her reflection in the monitor's dark screen-saver, that she was quite obviously glaring at him, and she forced her face blank again, looking down at the container.
With a final snap, Sakura pulled open its lid.
The stomach-wringing stench of cadaverine and putrescine hit her full in the face, as though her mask wasn't even there. A few flies buzzed up in its wake.
She clamped her lips shut even tighter, but the odor slicked itself along her tongue anyway.
The body inside was still fully articulated, placed upright. It might have been someone playing hide-and-go-seek in the canister if not for the fly eggs whitening the orifices of the face and the mottled green color of the flesh where it had not been torn by sharp-force trauma.
Over her shoulder, she heard the sound of Sai's camera shutter clicking as he took photographs. Without needing to be asked, Shino stepped forward and bottled a half dozen of the flies that had buzzed out of the container when Sakura opened it, then leaned past her to scrape several of the maggots and eggs from the skull into test tubes.
"Shizune should be dealing with this body," Sakura muttered, although she knew it was useless.
The body was still covered in flesh, and Sakura was a forensic anthropologist, which meant she specialized in recognizing trauma on bone. Shizune, the head forensic pathologist, dealt with flesh. But she had been lent out to Sand Country and would not be back for several days, if not longer.
Sakura motioned the ANBU techs forward. "I'm going to need one of you to help me lift this."
"Only one of us?" said the black-haired one, glancing at his partner.
"Only one," said Sakura shortly.
The one who had spoken stepped forward.
"Fresh gloves," Sakura ordered. He complied. "Okay, on three." She gently grasped under the corpse's shoulders, distributing the weight as evenly across her palms and fingers as she could so as to avoid inflicting postmortem trauma on the corpse and breaking it out of rigor mortis. "One, two, three – "
With twin grunts, she and the tech lifted the body out of the canister and onto the stainless steel surface.
Sakura had seen countless bodies fixed by rigor mortis into strange poses. But never one quite like this.
The body – she was fairly certain, based merely on the clothing and body structure, that it was male – lay on its back, its knees drawn up to its chest with its toes pointing inward in a textbook example of the fully flexed position. His head bowed forward with the black-hair, white insect eggs sprinkled throughout it, still hanging down and catching in the trauma-scored flesh of his shoulders. His arms hung to his side like a gorilla that moved by pressing its knuckles into the ground.
The stance was indicative of a limpness at the time of death, as though he had been unconscious, and the dark lividity across the knuckles indicated that he had been in a confined space – something like this container, perhaps, or an actual trash can, before ending up in the Dumpster.
Sai slowly circled the table, snapping shots from each angle. Sakura peeled off her first two layers of gloves, dropped them in the biohazards box, and grabbed a fresh file folder and set of autopsy forms. She began cataloguing the victim's clothing and personal artifacts so that she could move on to breaking the body out of rigor mortis to place it in anatomical position for X-rays and trauma analysis.
Behind her, she vaguely heard Sarutobi telling Uzumaki that the team would contact him as soon as they had a biological profile for the victim. But even that vague awareness melted away as she began to fall into the familiar rhythm of the autopsy.
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A/N: According to wikipedia, "cho" can be added to the end of a neighborhood's name to indicate it is a division of a larger city. So think of "Konoha-cho" as "Little Konoha," like "Little Tokyo."
Is the story worth continuing?