Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 26

The skull rocked gently back and forth with each step I took. I had cradled the occipital on a doughnut-shaped cushion and lined the sides of the box with bubble wrap, so I wasn’t worrying about damage, merely noticing the movement. I found myself counting the slight, rhythmic bumps, like the clicks of some macabre pedometer. Now there’s a moneymaking idea, I thought, the Brockton SkullDometer — the perfect gift for the forensic anthropologist who has everything. Other ludicrous marketing slogans began popping into my head: “Two heads are better than one.” “Give the gift that keeps on giving — throughout the extended postmortem interval.” “Don’t stop — I’m gaining on you!”

Normally I don’t take skeletal material from open forensic cases to class, but today — fresh from the cave that had entombed Leena, and had nearly swallowed me — I was completely preoccupied with the Cooke County woman. As I counted the bumps within the box, I hoped that going over the case in class might spark some new insight.

The lecture hall was nearly filled by the time I entered, even though it was still several minutes before class time. One student who was not in her customary seat this morning, though, was Sarah Carmichael. My heart sank. I had hoped that we’d be able to pretend nothing had happened in my office that recent night. Actually, what I really hoped was that I had dreamt it all, but I knew that wasn’t so. Still, I had told myself, if we could just ignore the whole thing, maybe it would fade into a dreamlike memory. No such luck, the empty front-row seat told me.

I set the box on the desk at the front of the auditorium and carefully removed the bones, balancing the skull on the cushion and laying the hyoid and sternum in front of the mandible. “I have good news and bad news today,” I announced. “The good news is, you get to play forensic detective. This skull belongs to a recently discovered homicide victim, case number 05–23, and we’re looking for the killer right now.” There was a general stirring and murmuring throughout the room. I had their attention.

A wary voice drifted down from the back. “What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is, our murder victim here is the subject of a pop quiz. Go ahead and put your name on a piece of paper.” The murmurs gave way to scattered groans and a few whispered curses. “Don’t get excited,” I added, “it’s only three questions, and they’re purely for extra credit. You get one point added to your midterm average if you can tell me both the race and the sex of this individual; you get another point if you can tell me the manner of death — in other words, how was this person killed? If you’ve read the chapter on the cranium and didn’t miss class last week, these should be easy for you.” Judging by the expressions on the sea of faces in front of me, some of them had done the reading and stayed awake during the lecture, while others suddenly wished they had. Several students leaned forward and began scrutinizing the skull from afar. Others flipped open their texts and began scanning pages. At the back of the room, I thought I saw the door open just a crack.

“I expect a lot in this class,” I went on, “and it’s not because I like to trip you up, or keep you too busy to party. It’s because mastering this material could be a matter of life and death someday. Our dead friend here, for instance: I don’t know who committed the crime, or why, or exactly when. And until we can figure those things out, somebody’s getting away with murder.”

The mood in the classroom had turned dead serious. “I can’t pass this around, and I can’t let you touch it,” I said. “It’s forensic evidence, so it has to be protected from damage or contamination. But if you’ll line up and file past, you’ll see everything you need to see to answer those three questions. Jot your answers down quickly. For question number one, just put ‘M’ for ‘male’ or ‘F’ for ‘female. For question two, put ‘C’ or ‘N’ or ‘M,’ depending on whether you think it’s Caucasoid or Negroid or Mongoloid, and for three, just put one word that describes what you think caused the death. Hand me your paper as you head back to your seat.”

A boy at one side of the room — a quadrant from which I’d heard snores on more than one occasion — raised his hand. “Did you say Mongoloid?” I nodded. “Man, that’s harsh. Why would somebody kill a retard?”

The room erupted in groans. I checked the seating chart. “Do your reading, Mr. Murdoch!” I thundered. “In physical anthropology, ‘Mongoloid’ refers to peoples of Mongolian descent — Asians and Native Americans.” He slumped in his seat.

I motioned to the first row, and they formed a line to one side of my desk. As the students scrutinized the bones — student by student, row by row — their faces were alive with curiosity, wonder, sometimes sadness and even reverence. I was so intent on watching their reactions that I stopped keeping tabs on the line, so I was surprised when the last student filed past. I was doubly surprised to see that it was Sarah. She must have slipped in the back door after the line had formed.

She didn’t meet my eyes as she approached; I wasn’t sure whether to be worried or relieved by that. The fact is, none of the other students had met my eyes, either: they were all focusing exclusively on the skull. The only difference was, I hadn’t shared a passionate and inappropriate kiss with any of them since the last class.

Sarah lingered over her paper, scrawling considerably more than the letters “F” and “C” and a one-word description of a murder. When she handed me her paper, I saw it bore several lines of script, but I was afraid to risk reading it while standing in front of 270 students. The last thing I wanted to do was fall apart in front of them again.

“Okay, how many of you said this was a male?” A few hands shot up, Mr. Murdoch’s among them. He looked around furtively.

“Small features, sharp upper edge to the eye orbit, no external occipital protuberance at the base of the skull: class, what does that tell us?” The rest of the students called “female” in unison. “The mouth structure is vertical, rather than having teeth and jaws that jut forward,” I said. “What’s the race?” The chorus of “Caucasoid” was less robust, and I thought I heard a “Negroid” or two. “Caucasoid,” I said. “Remember the pencil test: if a pencil or a ruler can touch both the base of the nasal opening and the chin, it’s Caucasoid; if the teeth slant forward too much to allow that, it’s probably Negroid. Mongoloid peoples have flatter cheekbones and shovel-shaped incisors, Mr. Murdoch.” He wasn’t the only student looking chagrined, though.

“Now, the hard one: manner of death.” I held up the sternum, pointing to the small, round foramen. “How many said gunshot?” Nearly everyone in the room raised a hand proudly. I wagged a finger and shook my head, smiling. “That was a trick question. One of my best graduate students almost got fooled by that hole in the sternum.” I explained how to tell the difference between a foramen and a gunshot wound, and then I pointed out the fractures in the hyoid. “Did anyone guess strangulation?”

One hand went up in the back row. It was Sarah’s. “Well done, Miss Carmichael,” I said. “You’ve got the makings of a good forensic anthropologist. I hope you’ll stick with it.” She reddened and ducked her head, but she nodded. When class ended, though, she was out the back like a scalded cat.

Walking back to class, the box tucked under one arm, I unfolded Sarah’s quiz paper. Beneath her answers to the three quiz questions, she’d written two things. I stopped at the top of the department’s exterior staircase to read them. “P.S.,” read the first one, “She has no lateral upper incisors. Genetic?” Golly, she was sharp! I went on to the second addition. “P.P.S. I was deeply moved by your story and your sorrow,” it said. “I’m embarrassed by what happened next, but I’m not actually sorry.”

I laughed out loud. “Okay, then neither am I,” I said. Two passing students gave me a sidelong glance, then looked quickly away. The nutty professor, I could feel them thinking. I didn’t care. I practically danced down the maze of ramps and stairs leading to the base of the stadium, then took the steps to my office two at a time. When I saw my door, though, my euphoric bubble burst.

The steel frame bowed outward into the curving hallway, while the metal door itself bent inward. Just above and below the knob, the pea-green paint hung in slivers from two spots where a wrecking bar had pried open the door to my office.

Heartsick, I stepped inside. The filing cabinet hung open, its locked drawers also mangled by the pry bar. Forensic case folders lay strewn across the floor, examination reports and field notes and newspaper clippings commingled like some mass grave of moribund murder investigations. Sorting and refilling the mess would take hours, if not days. A single folder lay atop the cabinet. I knew without looking which report it would be: 05–23. Leena Bonds.

When I repacked the skull, sternum, and hyoid in a small hatbox for the trip up to class, I had left the big box containing the rest of her skeleton sitting on my desk. That box, like the scores of others lining the shelves in the adjoining room, measured three feet long by a foot in cross-section. It would be hard to miss. And now, as I whirled to look, I saw that her box was missing. “Damn,” I muttered, setting down the student papers and the hatbox. “Damn.” Then a flood of relief washed over me as I realized that all was not lost. Leena’s skull and hyoid — the key to her identification and her manner of death — were safe in the hatbox. Whoever had come looking for them had gone away frustrated. He hadn’t left empty-handed — the theft of the rest of her skeleton was a bitter loss — but I still held the trump cards, if the case ever came to trial. Thank God I had taken her to class.

Using my handkerchief, I picked up the handset of my phone and dialed the campus police. “This is Dr. Brockton in Anthropology,” I told the dispatcher. “Someone’s just broken into my office and files. They’ve also stolen some skeletal material.” The dispatcher promised to send an officer right away. “Tell him to park at the east end zone access portal,” I told her. “There’s a stairway that leads from there straight up to my office.” She read the directions back to be sure she had them right. “The stolen material is part of a murder case,” I added. “I’ll need to call in some outside cavalry, too. Just so you know.” She promised to give the responding officer a heads-up.

My next call was a quick one to Art. I told him what I thought I should do, and he concurred, so I pressed the switchhook, pressed “8” again for another outside line, and dialed the number on the business card I fished from my wallet. “FBI,” snapped a no-nonsense male voice. I identified myself and asked for Agent Price. “One moment, I’ll see if she’s in,” he said, swiftly parking me on hold.

Ten seconds later, Angela Price picked up. “Dr. Brockton, how are you?” Price’s voice was crisp but cordial. “You’re not calling with a field report from another cockfight, I hope?”

“No, I’m calling from my office at UT. Somebody’s just broken in and stolen the postcranial skeleton from my Cooke County murder case.”

“Postcranial?”

“Everything below the skull, or nearly everything. Luckily, I had the cranium and the hyoid bone — the bone from her throat that shows she was strangled — in a classroom with me. So those are still safe, for the moment.”

“What would you like me to do, Dr. Brockton?”

“Well, you said to let you know if anything else cropped up, and this sure counts as cropping up in my book. Does this merit sending the Bureau’s crime scene wizards over to take a look? Just informally, of course. I’m also wondering if you folks could take temporary custody of the skull and hyoid for me, too? It’s easy to get into a professor’s office, but I can’t imagine somebody breaking into the FBI’s evidence vault.”

“Hang on a second.” She, too, was quick with the “Hold” button; must’ve been emphasized in the curriculum at Quantico. I hung in limbo for several minutes. Just as I was about to hang up and redial, she picked back up. “I’m not trying to dodge you, Dr. Brockton, but Steve Morgan, your former student? He already knows his way around that labyrinth over there. He’s on his way now, and some TBI evidence techs will be right behind him in a mobile crime lab.” She must have sensed some disappointment on my end of the line. “We just don’t have either the jurisdiction or the resources right now, and TBI does. Can you understand that?”

“I reckon I’ll have to.” I regretted the petulance of that as soon as I said it. “Sorry. Yes, of course.”

“Do you feel safe there?”

It hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about that. “Yes, I think so. Thanks for asking. A UT officer should be here any minute. In fact — yes, there’s his car now.”

“Good. Keep in touch. Don’t give up on us.” She rang off without another word, and I met the campus cop at the door. He looked young enough to be a student himself; his gun was drawn and his hand was shaking. When I explained that a TBI team was on the way, his big eyes got even bigger. Mercifully, he holstered the trembling weapon, then scurried back to his patrol car and returned with a roll of crime scene tape. With it, he fashioned a big X across the open doorway. When Steve Morgan arrived ten minutes later, he eyed the crime scene tape and sized up the eager young cop. “Anybody been in here besides Dr. Brockton?”

“No, sir,” said the young patrolman, all but saluting.

“Good work,” smiled Morgan. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks.”

The young man’s face fell. “You don’t need me here?” Morgan looked surprised by the question, maybe faintly amused. I felt bad for the UT officer, but he wasn’t ready to slink away just yet. “I, um, was sort of hoping to watch — to observe—how the TBI works a crime scene.”

Morgan smiled. It hadn’t been all that long since he was standing in my office apologizing for classroom hijinks. “Now that I think about it, Officer, if you’ve got time to stick around and control the perimeter here, the TBI would be much obliged.”

The lad practically trembled with excitement as he fished out his radio. “Unit Three to Dispatch,” he blurted. When the dispatcher responded, he snapped to attention, as if she could see him. “TBI is requesting officer assistance at the scene.”

“Copy that,” drawled the dispatcher, not nearly as impressed as he’d hoped. “Holler when you’re done. We’re starving, and we need somebody to make the deli run.”

It wasn’t long before two TBI techs arrived, light sources and evidence kits in hand, and began surveying the room methodically. Morgan and I stepped out into the hallway, but I leaned into the doorway to watch the techs at work. When they turned on the ultraviolet lights, purple prints showed up on every surface. Most of them were mine, I knew, and probably the rest belonged to graduate students. “Excuse me, sir,” said one of the techs, “can you tell me where this door leads?”

“Sure, it leads to the skeletal collection room.”

He wiggled the knob — it was locked, I knew from checking it myself — and inspected the frame for signs of forced entry. Finding none, he turned his attention back to my desktop.

Morgan cleared his throat to get my attention, then began a litany of questions — when had I left my office, how long was I gone, who knew my class schedule, how many different exits could the thief have taken, did I see anybody or anything suspicious, and so on, and so on. Finally, when he’d exhausted my factual knowledge, he asked the question that had been hanging in the air all along: “So who do you think might have done it?”

“Well, my first thought is the sheriff, of course. I still think he’s afraid of where the murder investigation is leading.”

“Has he ever been here before?”

“No, but it wouldn’t be hard to find out where it is.”

“Yeah, but that’s only half the battle,” said Morgan. “This office isn’t exactly easy to get to. You’re tucked away about as far from the rest of the Anthropology Department as you can get without burrowing clear under the AstroTurf.”

“Makes it easier to hole up and concentrate,” I said defensively.

“I’m not criticizing; just thinking out loud. Is there anybody who has been here before that might have an interest in stealing that skeleton?”

“Well, there’s the sheriff’s deputy, Leon Williams.”

“A deputy?” Morgan sounded dubious.

“You asked, and he’s been here before. He could have come to fetch it for the sheriff.” Suddenly I remembered Art’s Scenario E, the unknown possibility: “Or he could be working some angle we don’t even know about. Maybe he’s setting up the sheriff for a fall?” The more I thought about it, the surer I was that this was Williams’s handiwork.

“ ’Scuse us,” Morgan said to the UT policeman, taking my elbow and steering me into the stairwell. He checked the flight of stairs above and below the landing where we stood, then leaned close to me and spoke in a near whisper. “Listen, you didn’t hear this from me — if it got out that you did, I’d be in deep shit with Agent Price — but I guarantee you Williams was not the one who broke into your office and took those bones.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Yes I can,” he hissed.

“How?”

“Because he’s spent the last two hours in a roomful of FBI and TBI agents, that’s how.”

I had to admit, it was a pretty good alibi.

“Then it’s got to be the sheriff. Or maybe his brother. Orbin doesn’t seem the sort who would shrink from a little breaking and entering. Can’t you guys please get some sort of surveillance going on them?”

He checked the stairs again. “The paperwork’s in motion even as we speak,” he whispered. “Office, homes, vehicles. Should be in place within a week.” He gave my arm a sharp squeeze. “Remember, we did not have this conversation.”

I nodded, grateful that we hadn’t.