Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 9

The phone rang just as I was contemplating the structure of the female pelvis, and I jumped, then hissed a curse before putting on my telephone manners.

“Hello, this is Dr. Brockton.”

“It’s Sheriff Kitchings.”

“Hey, Sheriff, I’ve spent some time going over these remains, and I’ve got some mighty interesting things to tell you. First of all—”

He cut me off. “Hang on, Doc. I’m not sure we should discuss this on the phone. This could turn out to be a pretty sensitive case.”

This was a first. I always wrote up my findings in a formal report, but I’d never yet encountered a lawman who didn’t want to know what I’d found out as soon as possible. “Well, shall I just write up what I found and mail it to you?”

“No, sir, I believe we should move a little faster than that. Could I send Williams to get you again? And could you bring the, uh, the material with you? The material you’ve got there in Knoxville?”

I sighed but decided to play along. “Well, it’s possible for me to come see you, if you think it’s urgent, but I can’t bring the, uh, material just yet. I need to simmer on that for another day or two, if you catch my drift.” After a moment, he allowed as how he caught my drift. “Look,” I suggested, “I’ve got a class to teach in a few minutes, but I’ll be through at noon if you want to send your deputy sometime after that.”

“Any chance you could skip that class? Maybe get somebody to fill in for you?”

“Sorry, Sheriff. I don’t cut my own class. Besides, it’s at least an hour’s drive down here.”

“Thing is, Williams is already in Knoxville.” They must think I had nothing to do but wait to be summoned to Cooke County.

“Well, I can find something to keep him busy for an hour or so,” I said. “We’ve got a few skeletons that need digging up, if he wants to lend us a hand out at the Body Farm. He knows how to find it now.”

The sheriff laughed mirthlessly. “I expect he’d just as soon pass on that, but thanks anyhow. I’ll holler at him and tell him to get you at noon.”

I told him how to find my private office. It was tucked deep beneath the east stands of the stadium, down near the level of the football field. Pretty close to the east end zone, in fact, but separated by layers of concrete and steel and spectators. I’d lost count of the times I’d looked up from a skull or femur to feel the entire structure shaking — another UT touchdown, I knew. Visiting teams didn’t score very often at Neyland Stadium, and when they did, there weren’t enough fans to rattle the girders. Ten, twenty thousand people couldn’t cause much vibration. Ninety thousand hometown fans at a grudge match against Georgia or Florida or ’Bama, though, could set off seismographs clear over in Nashville.

I hung up, pushed back from my battered desk, and walked through a doorway into an adjoining room filled with cardboard boxes, each measuring one foot square by three feet long. Each box contained a cleaned, disarticulated human skeleton.

There was only one way into our skeletal collection, and that was through my office. I didn’t want just anyone to have access to the skeletons — it was easy to envision drunken fraternity pranks, macabre Halloween decorations, and countless other student hijinks if word got out that there were hundreds of boxes of bones just lying around for the taking. So while we made no bones, so to speak, about having the collection — took great pride in it, in fact, since it was the world’s largest collection of modern skeletons whose age, race, and sex were known — I was careful to keep the collection room locked and to issue keys only to the forensic faculty and graduate assistants.

Threading my way among the gray metal shelves stacked with oblong boxes, I felt like a bookworm browsing in the Library of Congress. There were hundreds of stories recorded in these skeletons — tales of childhood bicycle wrecks, skull-bashing barroom brawls, years of secret domestic violence, decades of gradual decline. To hear a particular story, all I had to do was slide the cardboard box off the shelf, take it to a table, flip open the top, and lift out the bones. Some tales were written in the lurid detail of fractured limbs, cut ribs, and bludgeoned or bullet-shattered skulls. Others were understated, like the sturdy bones of the nineteenth-century black man whose arms and legs and massive muscle attachment points bespoke a life of heavy labor.

I pulled two boxes from the shelves — old friends, in a way, who had helped me teach thousands of students over the years — and removed a few of their bones. Their broad surfaces were smooth as ivory from the touch of countless hands; as I grasped them, they felt familiar and comforting, these pieces of the dead.

Unlatching the battered briefcase I kept in the collection room, I laid the bones on the gray foam padding inside and closed the lid. Then I ducked down the back stairs, emerging beside the tunnel that led to the end zone. Threading my way up a maze of concrete ramps and stairs, I emerged near the rear of McClung Museum, a blocky 1960s building that housed the university’s modest assortment of Native American artifacts.

Two hundred seventy faces turned my way when I strode through the door at one side of the lecture hall in McClung. My introductory class — Anthropology 101: Human Origins — was the only course in the department’s curriculum not taught in the warren of rooms beneath Neyland Stadium; there simply wasn’t room for it anywhere beneath the stands. The museum, whose handful of offices had housed the entire department back when there were only three anthropology professors, now held only the museum’s staff. McClung was quiet most of the time, attracting only a smattering of visitors, but three mornings a week, it bustled with the chatter and laughter of freshman and sophomore undergraduates.

Most intro courses were taught by junior faculty or even teaching assistants; in fact, I was the only department chairman I knew who still taught a 101 course. I told colleagues that I thought it was important for an administrator not to lose sight of day-to-day teaching, and that was true. Also true, though, was the fact that I loved being around students as they began falling in love with a new subject. With my subject. And — maybe, by extension, just a bit — with me.

Not romantically or sexually, of course. I’d never gotten involved with a student, though occasionally it had taken considerable willpower to resist the urge. During one unforgettable class, during a revival of the miniskirt, I had meandered over to the left side of the lecture hall to make some point or other about the structure of the pelvis. For the first time in my teaching career, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless on the topic. An attractive young coed in the front row, directly in front of me, chose that exact moment to uncross her legs and languidly drape one leg over the arm of her desk. As her skirt slid up her taut thighs and her flawless pelvic structure, it became clear that underneath, she was wearing nothing at all. Astonished, I looked up at her face; she cocked her head, raised an eyebrow, and smiled sweetly. Beating a hasty retreat to the other side of the auditorium, I struggled manfully to salvage my sentence, my lecture, and my composure. This same student appeared in my office a few days later — I’d just handed out midterm grades, and hers was an F. Her lower lip quivered as she leaned toward me across the desk in a low-cut blouse. “Oh, Dr. Brockton, I’ll do anything to pull up my grade,” she breathed.

“Then study,” I snapped. She dropped the class three days later, but not before turning in a quiz on the bones of the hand and arm, in which she defined humerus as “something that, like, makes you laugh.”

Today’s class — like the day of the migrating miniskirt — also happened to focus on pelvic structure. That seemed fitting, since I’d just been examining the pelvis of the body — the woman — found in the cave in Cooke County. As a teaching aid, I’d brought to class two sets of pelvic bones, one male and the other female, from the skeletal collection I’d been building over the years. Using red dental wax as a temporary adhesive, I reattached the pubic bones to the innominates, or hip bones, and then held them up, first the male, then the female. “Okay, I’ve noticed some of you carefully studying the pelvises of your classmates. So I’m sure you’ll have no trouble identifying the differences between the male and female.”

A laugh rippled across the room — a good beginning. “Which is the female, number one or number two?”

“Number two,” chorused a handful of voices.

“Very good. How can you tell?”

“It’s wider,” chirped one girl.

“Cuter, too,” added a boy.

“The bones in front come out farther,” said someone.

“That’s right, the pubic bones project more,” I said. “Why is that?”

“Pregnancy?”

“Right, to make room for the baby,” I said, “not just during pregnancy, but also — especially — during childbirth.” I rotated the pelvis backward by 90 degrees, giving them an obstetrician’s-eye view of the bones that frame the birth canal. “You see the size of that opening? That’s what a baby’s head has to fit through during childbirth. Now compare it to the male’s.” I held up the narrower pelvis in the same position. “Any of you fellows think you could pop a baby out through there? You better hope you never have to try!” I heard a few murmurs along the lines of “Ouch, man.”

Next I showed them the female’s sciatic notch — the notch just behind the hip joint where the sciatic nerve emerges from the spinal column and runs down the leg. “See any difference here?”

“Wider.” “Bigger.”

“Correct. That’s another result of the geometry of childbearing: as the female’s innominates flare out at puberty, this notch gets wider. Notice that I can easily fit two fingers into the base of this notch, but only one in the sciatic notch of the male? So ten years from now, when you’re working a forensic case, and a hunter or a police officer brings you nothing but a single innominate bone, you can tell immediately whether it came from a man or a woman.”

One of the girls near the front — Sarah Carmichael, according to the seating chart; she wore sensible clothes and asked sensible questions — said, “But if those changes don’t happen until puberty, how can you tell the sex of a child’s skeleton?”

“Good question, Miss Carmichael. The answer is, you can’t. Before puberty, there’s no reliable way to distinguish between the bones of males and those of females. All you can do is tell whether the bones you have are the right size for a boy or a girl of a given age.”

Most of them looked puzzled, so I trotted out an example. “When I looked at the child’s bones that were recovered in the Lindbergh kidnapping case”—a few heads nodded, but there were blank looks on a lot of faces—“I couldn’t say for certain whether they were the bones of a boy or a girl. All I could say was that they were consistent with the bones of a twenty-month-old male — which is how old Charles Lindbergh Junior was at the time he was kidnapped and killed. But the bones would also have been consistent with a twenty-four-month-old female.”

Sarah raised her hand again. “In that case, couldn’t you do a DNA test on the bones and compare it to the parents?” Sarah’s quickness and interest actually made her far more appealing than any temptress in a slithering skirt.

“You couldn’t back then, of course — the crime occurred about sixty years before DNA testing became common — but you could now,” I said. “The bones have been kept in glass vials; there’s even a little bit of soft tissue on some of them still, so there’s probably plenty of DNA for a test. But the authorities and the Lindbergh family seem confident of the identification: the clothing matched what the boy was wearing, and one of the feet had crossed toes, a genetic anomaly that was pretty distinctive. So there’s really no good reason to put the family through more anxiety this long after the case has been closed.” Sarah nodded thoughtfully.

“Let’s get back to the pelvis,” I said. “I’m going to pass these around. Be careful. I know most of you fellows have never handled a female pelvis before, so this is a good time to practice a gentle touch.” That was an old joke; it used to get laughs throughout the room, but something had shifted over the past few years, I’d noticed. The boys would still laugh, but the girls tended to frown now instead. I made a mental note to drop that line from the lecture next year.

As the pelvises made the rounds of the class, I explained how the face of the pubic symphysis — the joint where the two pubic bones meet at the midline of the abdomen — changes with age, and how those changes could reveal a person’s age at death. I passed around two additional pubic bones — one from an eighteen-year-old female, the other from a forty-four-year-old — so they could see for themselves the erosion that occurs during a quarter-century of wear and tear.

As the female pelvis reached Sarah, I noticed her rotating it, scrutinizing it from every angle. She furrowed her brow and chewed on her lower lip, concentrating intently. I walked toward her row. “Did you have another question?”

She looked up. “Can you tell just from the bones whether this female — whether any female — has given birth?”

It was a simple, logical, and innocent question, and it blindsided me completely. Visions of Kathleen — in the throes of labor, and then in the throes of death — writhed in my head, mingling with images of the strangled young woman and her sad little fetus. After what could have been either half a minute or half an hour, I became aware of the students’ stares.

“Yes,” I finally murmured. “Yes. You can.”

I stumbled toward the door.

“Class dismissed.”