Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 7

An hour after the walnut-paneled door of the Knox County Criminal Court closed behind me, the stainless-steel door of the cooler at the Regional Forensic Center opened before me. The room was as familiar to me as my own kitchen, and I felt just as much at home here. No: I felt more at home here, I realized, remembering the hours of pacing I’d done last night, trying to escape the painful loss of Kathleen. Here, at least, I was in control; here, death was always close at hand but never close to home; here, only anonymous strangers stared at me with lifeless eyes.

I extricated the gurney that held the body of my cavewoman, as I’d begun to think of her, and wheeled it down the hall to the decomp room. Parallel-parking it against the wall, I butted one end against the side of a big stainless-steel sink and latched the cart into place with a pair of large metal hooks that clipped onto brackets on the face of the sink.

At that moment Miranda — fetching in a fresh set of scrubs — walked in with a tray of instruments: scalpels, probes, scissors, tweezers, and, although I doubted we’d need it, a Stryker saw. The Stryker autopsy saw is a truly ingenious power tool: its fine-toothed oscillating blade can lop off the top of a skull in a minute flat, but if it grazes your fingertip by mistake, it delivers nothing worse than a tickle, without so much as nicking the skin. I’ve used one hundreds of times, and every time, the first thing I do is press the chittering blade to the heel of my hand, just to appreciate anew the ingenuity of the design.

“Playing with your favorite toy, I see,” said Miranda.

“Simple pleasures for simple minds. You ever notice how similar this blade’s motion is to an electric toothbrush?”

“Ouch, man,” she said. “Quick way to lose some teeth.”

“I know, you wouldn’t want to get the two confused. But I wonder which came first, the toothbrush or the saw?”

“I think the egg came first,” she said. “Then the chicken. Then the autopsy toothbrush.”

“Okay, I get it, you’re over it,” I said. “You got the X-rays?”

“Across the hall in the lab. Be right back.”

Ratcheting the zipper of the body bag down, I marveled once more at how thoroughly the flesh had been transformed into the waxen features of a mummy. In some cultures, a corpse in this condition would have been considered an “incorruptible”—a holy relic or saint, perhaps capable of working miracles. A shrine might be established, to which the sick and the maimed would flock by the thousands in hopes of being made whole again. And all because of a trick of fat, moisture, and temperature. But then again, who was I to dismiss it as a trick? Maybe it was more than that. After all, here she was, almost perfectly preserved, just waiting to be found. Waiting to be identified. Waiting patiently to tell her story and ask for justice. If it was a trick of chemistry, it was a mighty slick one.

Normally the first step would be to remove the clothing from the body, but the garments had decayed to rotted shards enmeshed in adipocere. As the adipocere came off, so would the bits of fabric. I would start at the head and work my way down.

My eyes drifted to the neck, and something just below it caught my gaze — a slight bulge at the top of the chest. Just then Miranda brought in the X-rays. “Look,” I said, “I think she’s wearing something around her neck.” She leaned in and we both studied what appeared to be a flat, oblong pendant hidden beneath a veneer of adipocere. Whatever chain or cord it had once hung from had long since crumbled to a greenish-white line of oxide encircling the waxy neck.

“Oh, that,” she said. “I saw that on the X-rays.” There was an odd note in her voice. On the surface, she sounded nonchalant — practically bored — but underneath, she was almost quivering with excitement. I waited. After a tantalizing pause, she added, “That’s not all I saw on the X-rays.” She switched on a light box on the wall by the door and slipped one of the films into place. Her head blocked my view.

She turned toward me, still blocking my view, then, with her eyes locked on mine, leaned sideways to reveal the image. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” I breathed.

“Well, that’s probably not how you should word it in the report, but it is worth noting.”

“Let’s get to it.”

We turned back to the gurney and the waiting corpse. The hair mat had slid backward on the skull, shifting the hairline back to the top of the head. Despite being matted with adipocere and discolored by mold, the hair still showed traces of its original fineness and straw-blond color. The ears were mostly gone — with no bone to support them, they had gradually collapsed and merged with the waxy tissue of the scalp. The face looked almost masklike: the adipocere had separated slightly from the underlying bone, creating an eerie effect, as if a skeleton were masquerading as a mummy for some bizarre costume party of the dead. Although the lips were parted in an eternal scream, the teeth were tightly clenched. The eye orbits were filled with lumpy disks of wax, which stared blindly up at me, at Miranda, and at the harsh fluorescent lights that had taken the place of the cave’s velvety blackness.

The gurney had a lip of stainless steel running completely around its edge, as well as a screened drain near its foot. With the cart latched in place, the drain hung directly above the sink — a morbid but inspired design feature suggested by the person who’d cleaned more decomp spatters off walls and floors than anyone else in the world: me. A spray head, a twin to the one in my kitchen at home, hung from a bracket on the wall. I turned on the water, keeping the volume low but cranking the heat up almost to scalding. The adipocere’s texture was somewhere between wax and soap. Hot water would melt it like a cake of Ivory in a Jacuzzi.

Working gently, I played the water back and forth across the face. At first there was no effect — the adipocere was cold and almost rock-hard — but gradually it softened and sagged, then began to run, dripping greasily through the drain and down the sink. In the cave, and even when I had unzipped the body bag just moments earlier, I’d noticed almost no odor, but as the hot water began dissolving the adipocere, it unleashed the stench of decomp, mixed with acrid overtones of ammonia.

In less than a minute, the lump that had been the nose was gone, exposing the nasal openings in the skull. It didn’t take much longer for the zygomatic arches, the cheekbones, to emerge through the molten cheeks. The maxilla and mandible, the upper and lower jawbones, appeared next. As the connective tissues attaching the mandible to the skull gave way, I held the bone in place with my left hand until it was completely free, then gave it to Miranda, who turned and placed it on a counter lined with absorbent surgical pads. When I finished washing the adipocere off the bones, we’d do an initial examination of the entire skeleton to determine the race and estimate the stature and age. Then Miranda would simmer the bones in a vat of hot water (seasoned with a dash of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer and a bit of Biz laundry detergent to nudge the process along), followed by a gentle scrubbing with a toothbrush to remove any remaining tissue.

Having exposed the bones of the face, I directed the spray at the sides and top of the head, gradually peeling the hair mat off the skull, like some bizarre aquatic scalping. As the mat peeled free, I continued rinsing to remove the scalp residue. Miranda lifted the soggy tangle of hair, squeezed out most of the water, and set it on the pad to dry.

That’s odd, I thought as I studied the upper jaw. The woman didn’t have any upper lateral incisors; she was missing the two teeth that should have flanked her “two front teeth.” I didn’t see any extra space between the central incisors and the canines, nor any signs that the jawbone had filled in any gaps. So it wasn’t that she’d lost them; she’d never had them in the first place. Anomalous absence of teeth, as it’s called, is pretty rare, but it does happen. I kept quiet, waiting to see if Miranda would notice. If she did, she didn’t mention it.

With the mandible removed, the top of the spinal column was now visible. I directed the spray onto the first and second cervical vertebrae to expose them fully. The first vertebra is little more than a ring of bone — a spacer or washer, basically; it’s the second vertebra that actually bears the load of whatever weighty matter causes the human head to tip the scales at roughly ten pounds. “Okay, let’s remove the skull,” I said. Miranda nodded and moved into position at the end of the table.

Grasping the skull with both hands, she tilted it back slightly to widen the joints between the vertebrae. I took a scalpel from the instrument tray on the counter and eased it into the space between them, working it back and forth to sever the remaining bits of cartilage holding them together. The gap widened, then the skull pulled free in Miranda’s hands. She held it over the sink to drain for a moment, then took it to the counter and set it down. I shut off the water and followed.

We studied the skull in silence for a while. “Tell me what you see,” I said to her, as I had said to students hundreds of times before over the years. Miranda took up the skull and took up the challenge.

“Well,” she began in a careful, formal tone, “the skull is gracile, very smooth. The eye orbits are sharp-edged and the brow ridge is minimal”—here she paused, rotating the skull—“and so is the external occipital protuberance at the base of the skull. Clearly female, in my humble opinion.”

“Mine, too.” I smiled. We were almost mocking each other, and our skeletal Socratic dialogue, but not quite — certainly no more than we were mocking ourselves and our own tendency toward scientific stuffiness. “What about race?”

“The mouth structure is orthagnic — strongly vertical — so it doesn’t appear Negroid. No appreciable occlusal wear, so she didn’t have an edge-to-edge bite, and the incisors are definitely not shovel-shaped. That probably rules out Native American or Asian, though to be sure, we should put the skull measurements into ForDisc.” ForDisc — short for “Forensic Discrimination”—was a UT-developed computer program that used skeletal data to calculate, with great precision and accuracy, an unidentified person’s age, race, sex, and stature. Miranda took a final survey of the face and mouth. “Yup, she’s textbook Caucasoid, I’d say.”

“I’d say so, too. How old would you say she is?” This was a trick question, but Miranda didn’t hesitate more than a nanosecond.

“Approximately twenty years, ten months, five days, and seventeen-point-two minutes,” she rattled off. I stared at her, dumbstruck, and she laughed. “Gotcha. You know I can’t tell till we see the clavicles and pubic symphysis.” She studied the zigzag seams in the skull. “The cranial sutures aren’t obliterating yet, so she’s young. Third molars haven’t erupted, but that doesn’t mean much — she might be one of those highly evolved people whose bodies know that wisdom teeth are a waste of good calcium.” She tilted the skull backward to study the seams in the roof of the mouth. “The maxillary sutures are beginning to fuse, so she’s adult, not subadult. But I can’t say if she’s eighteen or twenty-eight until we deflesh the clavicles and the pelvis.” She paused, then added, “Not that you asked, but I can also tell you that the skull shows no obvious signs of trauma, blunt or sharp. She has three unfilled cavities, suggesting either low socioeconomic status or limited access to dental care. Probably both, if she grew up in Cooke County. And she has no lateral upper incisors, probably because of a genetic anomaly rather than tooth loss — the maxilla shows no resorption of bone, which we’d see if an empty socket had gradually filled in.” God, she was good! Miranda was going to make a spectacular forensic anthropologist, if she didn’t get lured away by some smart medical school first.

“Great start,” I said, “let’s move on.” Miranda set the skull down on the counter and we returned to the headless corpse. As I began cleaning the remaining cervical vertebrae, we both leaned in closer. Miranda saw it first. “There.” She pointed with a gloved finger. A small, curving bone, about the thickness of a wishbone from a chicken breast, nestled in front of the third cervical vertebrae. Reaching in with a six-inch pair of tweezers, she grasped it and held it steady while I flooded it with hot water.

“Don’t sneeze,” I said.

“Don’t make me laugh,” she retorted. “Oh, wait, I forgot — no risk of that. I’ve heard your jokes before.”

I worked the spray back and forth to extend the exposed region, and gradually the unmistakable U-shaped arch of the hyoid bone emerged from the goo. When it was completely free, Miranda bore it to the countertop as if it were a prize. Still holding it with the tweezers, she braced her elbows on the countertop as I swiveled an illuminated magnifying glass into position. She hunched in concentration, studying the bone from every angle. Finally, wordlessly, she pulled back so I could look.

Reaching in with both hands, I slid my fingers over hers onto the tweezers. “Okay, got it,” I said, and she let go and stepped back.

The hyoid is an arch measuring an inch to an inch and a half high, and about the same in width. Under the magnifying glass, it looked five times that size. Once upon a time this hyoid had supported the dead woman’s tongue and the other muscles she used to talk. Now I hoped the bone itself could tell us how she died.

Attached to the central arch, or “body,” of the hyoid are two thinner arches, called the “horns.” Normally, the arch’s height is roughly the same as its span, or the distance between the tips of the horns. In this case, though, the horns were much closer together. It was easy to see why: where the horns joined the central body, the cartilage looked ripped from the bone, and the body itself was cracked at the midline. I had seen dozens of damaged hyoids in my time, but none so mangled as the one I held now. This young woman had been strangled with crushing force. The story of her death was written in bone.

I straightened and looked at Miranda. She raised her eyebrows, and I gave her a grim smile. “Well, now we know she didn’t just crawl in that cave and die on her own,” I said. We had just reached a crucial milestone. Before, I had suspected that a murder had occurred; now I knew it. The small, fragile bone I held in my hand not only proved that a murder had been committed, it also told us how it happened. A rush of excitement surged through me. I liked to think of it as the wholesome satisfaction of a fruitful scientific inquiry. The truth was, though, it was more like a drug. Other people were hooked on cocaine or cigarettes or runner’s high; I was addicted to forensic discovery.

“We’ll want lots of photographs of this,” I said. “Thirty-five millimeter; use the closeup lens and get in as tight as you can. Take it over to the engineering lab, too, and use their scanning-electron microscope. Besides these visible fractures, the SEM will probably show lots of microscopic avulsion fractures, too, where the cartilage has torn from the bone. We’ll need good evidence photos if this ever comes to trial.” Miranda nodded. “Okay, let’s pry off that pendant and then see what the clavicles tell us.”

We returned to the remains on the gurney, and I slid a long, thin spatula beneath the rectangular lump near the top of the sternum. It pried loose with a spackling sound, like cold bacon grease letting go. I gave it an exploratory feel; it was thin and hard, with well-defined edges beneath the irregular layer of goo. Miranda held open a small ziplock bag; after I’d slipped the object inside, she sealed it, then labeled it with the case number, the date, and the words “necklace/pendant.” As she wrote, I unleashed a spray of hot water across the dead woman’s collarbones.

They came free with almost no effort. Their lateral ends, where they met the upper arms and shoulder blades to form the shoulders, merged seamlessly with the shafts. Their sternal ends, though — where they joined the breastbone at the top of the rib cage — hung raggedly. The epiphyses — the ends of the bones — were connected to the shafts by a narrow zone of tissue that had not yet fully matured from cartilage into bone.

“So she’s still maturing skeletally,” said Miranda. “She’s not a kid anymore, but she’s not fully a woman, either.”

“Just like you,” I said. She elbowed me in the ribs, hard. “Ouch!

‘Skeletally speaking,’ that was all I meant. Under the age of twenty-five. Aren’t you?” I knew she was, but only by a few months. I didn’t have many students who would challenge me or tease me, and none who would throw the occasional elbow. Miranda felt free to spar with me, and I liked the confidence and ease that reflected. She’d long since become immune to the lesbian and prostitute jokes about her last name, Lovelady, and she’d turned down countless cops who’d asked her to handcuff and “Mirandize” them. She was smart, strong, tough, and funny, and she didn’t take herself too seriously. But she was young enough to be my daughter, and she was my student, to boot.

I cranked up the water pressure a bit. As the adipocere and intercostal cartilage dropped away, the rib cage emerged like some ancient shipwreck being scoured from a sandy seabed. Rib by rib I began dismantling the wreckage, wriggling each bone free of the sternum and free of the vertebra that it joined in the back. As I extracted the bones I handed them to Miranda, who laid them on the table beneath the skull in their proper anatomical position. As the adipocere-clad body departed the gurney piecemeal, a skeleton slowly took shape on the nearby countertop.

When I’d worked my way down the first seven pairs of ribs, I handed Miranda the sternum. She gasped, and I looked up. “What is it?”

“Look at that.” She pointed to a neat round hole, dead center in the lower end of the bone. “Was she shot, too?”

I studied the hole. “Well, it sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” When I said it, she glanced sharply at me, sensing a trick of some sort.

She studied the sternum more closely, first on the front side of the bone, then from the back. I could see her searching her data banks, trying to match what she saw with something she’d read or seen in my osteology handbook, my bible of bone science. It was in there, all right — a drawing at the top of page 117—but I wasn’t giving her any clues. “Well, it’s about the right size for a small-caliber bullet — maybe a twenty-two,” she murmured, but she sounded dubious. She glared at the bone accusingly, as if it were guilty of something. “But there are some things that don’t fit with that.”

“Such as?”

“For one thing, it seems too big a coincidence for a gunshot wound to line up exactly with the midline.” I kept my mouth shut. “For another, the hole looks beveled on the front and the back sides, and bullet wounds widen only in the direction of the bullet’s travel.”

“Right,” I said. “As the bullet smashes through the bone, the shock wave propagates in the shape of a cone, producing a larger hole at the exit. Like those funnel-shaped holes BB guns make in plate-glass windows — tiny on the outside, big on the inside.”

“Spoken like a boy who had a BB gun,” she said.

“Hey, a guy hears stories,” I said. “Now quit stalling. What else do you notice about this hole, which might or might not have been left by a gunshot?”

“Okay, what looks like beveling on both sides of the bone isn’t, really — it’s a smooth, undamaged surface. The beveling made by a bullet is rougher, and there are usually fracture lines radiating from the hole.”

“Excellent,” I said. “So this is…?”

She furrowed her brow. “A foramen?”

“Exactly. A natural opening in the bone. Rare in the female sternum, by the way — ten percent of men have them, but only about four percent of women. That’s why you’ve never seen one before.” She grinned, excited by the new nugget of firsthand knowledge. This, too — like the thrill of finding forensic clues — I found addictive. “Okay, let’s keep moving. Are you ready for what comes next?” Her grin vanished, and she took a deep breath. “This could be disturbing,” I added. She nodded. “If you have any trouble, just take a break and step outside. No shame in that.” She nodded again, eyes wide. I took up the sprayer again, but not before turning down the pressure by half.

As the adipocere melted away from the center of the woman’s body, I felt a sense of amazement I’d experienced only a few other times in my life. A thicket of tiny, nested bones began to appear, suspended in a paler lump of adipocere — a lump that had once been amniotic fluid and fetal tissue. Our young woman had been pregnant — was pregnant still, in a way — with a baby whose birth, at my hands now, was years overdue. It was a grim, sad delivery I was about to perform.

“We’re going to need a two-millimeter screen over the drain please, Miranda.” She scurried over to a cabinet and pulled out a disk of wire mesh, which she fitted into the round neck of the drain. I hoped it was fine enough to catch everything.

The tiny vertebrae were like little seed pearls on a string; the body, or centrum, of each vertebra was no bigger than a lentil. On either side of each vertebral body floated the two halves of the neural arch, which would have fused to one another in the first few years of life, then fused to the centrum sometime around preschool or kindergarten age. At the base of the spine nestled the minute beginnings of the hip bones, about the size and shape of baby lima beans. Folded up alongside the spine were the legs: the femur was about the size of the middle bone of my index finger; the tibia was more like a pinky bone. The bones of the feet were so small, they’d have to be screened out with a sieve. Arching at right angles to the axis of the spine and legs were ribs — thin, curving slivers so light and frail they might have come from a quail or a trout. The bones of the skull, which was the lowermost point of the fetal skeleton, were also bird-sized; the occipital, which formed the base of the skull, was no bigger than a quarter.

“Hard to believe we all start out this small and fragile,” I said. “Looks like she was just about midway through her pregnancy.”

“How can you tell? Who’s researched this? Who could bear to?”

“A couple of pathologists in Budapest back in the 1970s. They studied and measured one hundred and fifty fetal skeletons, from every stage of development. I don’t know why they started, but I guess they bore it the same way we’re bearing this right now: bone by bone, for the sake of something more important.” We fell silent, and I found myself thinking back to the other fetal skeletons I’d examined.

I’d seen skeletons in the womb only three times before. Two were in Arikira Indian graves in South Dakota. Their village, I knew, had been decimated by smallpox, which was deliberately spread by white fur traders — an early case of biological warfare. In the third case, a pregnant woman’s remains were found in some brush beside a rural stretch of Kentucky interstate; the woman, as best the police and I could determine, had been hitchhiking and climbed into the wrong vehicle. In those cases, though, both the mother and the fetus had already skeletonized by the time they were found. Here, the baby’s remains were hidden away inside an intact corpse — until I burrowed in to expose them. I felt a brief flush of shame at my intrusion, and then a pang at the reminder of just what a risky venture life can be: a race in which some people never even make it out of the starting gate.

I glanced up at Miranda. Tears were running down her cheeks and soaking her mask. I touched her arm. “Maybe you should take a break,” I suggested. She jerked away, shaking her head, and I saw rage flashing through the tears. It was not anger at me, I realized, but at whoever had snuffed out these two lives. “Thanks, I need the help. Let’s put these in anatomical order beside the mother’s body, head down.” She nodded, then grimly set about reassembling the tiny skeleton as I handed her the bits of bone.

Six hours after we began, we finished. The waxy-looking mummy we’d brought in was now a skeleton, still slightly greasy and smelly, but merely a fading echo of a strong young woman. Beside her was something even fainter: the fading whisper of a baby who never drew breath.

Our knowledge, like the specimens on our counter, was skeletal: we knew this was a young white female of unusual height. We knew that she was pregnant, and that halfway through her pregnancy, possibly around the time she began to show, she’d been murdered — strangled, with no other signs of trauma, at least nothing visible so far. We still didn’t know her name, but the examination had told us other things that would help us seek her name. The echoes and whispers from these bones might help us understand why she’d been killed…and if we listened carefully enough, they might even suggest whose hands had encircled her throat and squeezed without mercy, leaving a record of violence for us to find.

I looked at Miranda. Her face was drawn; her eyes, which had danced and shone when she’d delivered the X-rays triumphantly, now looked drained and bleak.

“I know,” I said, “this one’s tough.”

She nodded.

“And Miranda?” I waited until her eyes met mine. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for a while.”