Her Mother’s Grave

Chapter Eight

The next morning, Josie, Noah, and Gretchen stood around a sheet-covered metal examination table in the Denton City Morgue. The drab, windowless room was situated in the basement of Denton Memorial Hospital, an ancient brick building on top of a hill that overlooked most of the city. Josie could never get used to the smell—a putrid combination of chemicals and decay. Beside her, Noah looked pale, almost green, while Gretchen, completely unaffected, looked almost bored. Josie remembered that Gretchen had seen a lifetime of autopsies during her tenure as a homicide detective with the Philadelphia Police Department before coming to Denton.

Josie elbowed Noah lightly.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled from the side of his mouth.

Dr. Feist breezed in from the small office she shared with her assistant just off the main autopsy room. Her hair was tied back in a loose ponytail, and she now wore dark-blue scrubs. “I’ve already recorded my initial findings,” she told them with a smile. “So, I’ll allow questions.”

Carefully, she removed the sheet. The bones seemed small and insubstantial lined up in a perfect body shape across the examination table. The dirt had all been brushed away from the bones, which now looked off-white. The four of them stood around the table sharing a moment of silence for the stranger who had been murdered and forgotten for so long that only the thin, yellowing framework remained.

Josie knew before Dr. Feist even spoke that they were looking at the remains of a young woman; she had seen more than her share of female skeletons while concluding the case that had made her chief.

“I believe we are looking at female remains,” Dr. Feist announced. “I’d estimate the height to be about five foot two, five foot three.” She pointed to the mandible, which had been separated from the skull. “The chin is rounded, where men tend to have more squared-off chins.” She pointed to the forehead. “The frontal bone is smooth and vertical. The mastoid process,” Dr. Feist’s finger moved to a small, conical bone behind the jaw, where the girl’s ear would have been, “which is this bone here that kind of protrudes where certain neck muscles attach to it. As you can see, it’s small. In men, it is very pronounced.”

Gretchen scribbled on her notepad. Josie stepped forward and pointed to the pelvic bone. “The pelvis gives it away.”

Dr. Feist smiled, her eyes alight, looking at Josie as though she were a prized pupil. “Yes, it does. Why is that, Chief?”

Josie pointed to the pelvic girdle. “This opening here is broader and rounder—so women can give birth. Also, here, this angle—” she pointed to the bottom center of the pelvic bone.

“The pubic arch,” Dr. Feist put in.

“Right. This angle where the two sides meet is more obtuse in females. Greater than ninety degrees.”

Noah said, “For childbirth as well?”

Both Josie and the doctor nodded.

“How old was she?” Gretchen asked, pen poised over her notepad.

“Between sixteen and nineteen years old,” Dr. Feist replied.

“That’s quite specific,” Noah remarked.

“Well, the growth plates—or lack thereof—make it pretty easy to determine,” Dr. Feist said. “The long bones in the body have three parts: the diaphysis—that’s the shaft—the metaphysis, which is the part where it widens and flares at the end, and then the epiphysis, which is basically the end cap of the bone or the growth plate. In children, there is a gap between the epiphysis and the metaphysis.”

Gretchen, busy sketching on her notepad, said, “You mean there’s a space between the growth plate and the knobby end of the bone.”

Dr. Feist’s head bobbed from side to side. “Basically, yeah. As you get older, your growth plates and the ‘knobby end,’ as you call it, fuse together. The growth plates fuse at pretty predictable ages. For example, the epiphysis of the femur at the proximal end—that’s where the femur goes into the hip socket—fuses between ages fifteen and nineteen, give or take six months on each end.”

One of her gloved fingers ran up the length of the girl’s right femur, stopping at the hip socket and pointing to the very top where the bone inserted into the pelvis. “It’s fused, which means she could have been as young as fifteen, fifteen and a half, and as old as nineteen or nineteen and a half.”

“But you said sixteen,” Josie pointed out.

“I’m estimating, of course,” Dr. Feist responded. “But the distal radius fuses at around sixteen, and hers are fused.” Her gloved finger found the long bone of the arm on the thumb side of the girl’s right hand. Touching the flared part where the radius met the intricate bones of the hand, Dr. Feist said, “No space. The epiphysis has fused to the metaphysis.”

“When does the last growth plate fuse?” Gretchen asked.

“The medial aspect of the clavicle fuses by age thirty at the latest,” Dr. Feist answered. “However, we don’t see epiphyseal fusion of either the medial or lateral aspect of the clavicle until age nineteen, and this young lady doesn’t have it.”

Josie leaned in and peered at the girl’s collarbones.

Noah ran a hand through his thick brown hair. “I’m trying to remember my college anatomy class.”

“The lateral is the part that goes into the shoulder,” Gretchen said. “The medial attaches to the sternum.”

“Show-off,” Noah muttered.

Gretchen kept her head down, her pen sketching the skeleton at a furious pace.

“That’s correct,” Dr. Feist said. “More or less.” She pointed to the gap between the epiphysis and the metaphysis on each end of the collarbones. “If she were nineteen or older, these growth plates would be fused.”

“So, this is a teenage girl,” Josie said, acid in her stomach fizzing.

“Yes,” Dr. Feist agreed. “It’s possible to estimate a year on either side of the range—perhaps fifteen to twenty—but I believe you’re looking at a sixteen- to nineteen-year-old female. Oh, and this teenage girl gave birth at least once.”

Josie could see by Dr. Feist’s raised brow and amused smile that she enjoyed tossing out that little surprise. Hands on her hips, Josie matched the doctor’s expression and said, “Just how can you tell that this girl gave birth?”

Dr. Feist beckoned them all closer to the table. They gathered round, and she pointed to one of the flat planes of pelvic bone, where Josie could make out a smattering of small holes roughly the size of shotgun pellets. “It’s called parturition scarring, or pitting,” Dr. Feist said.

“Par-nutrition?” Noah said.

“Parturition,” Dr. Feist corrected slowly. “Childbirth. When a woman gives birth, her pubic bones separate to allow the baby to fit through, and sometimes the ligaments attached to the bones tear and leave these small scars. It’s not always one hundred percent accurate, but in a girl this young, I’d say these are from her having given birth.”

Josie frowned. “No way to tell how old she was when she had her baby—or anything about the baby?”

“I’m sorry, Chief, but no. All I can tell you is that she had a baby before she died.”

“Maybe someone killed her and took her baby,” Gretchen suggested.

Dr. Feist shrugged. “I can’t speculate on why she was murdered or what happened to her child—but she was definitely murdered. You can see the fracture better now that she’s cleaned up.”

She moved around to the head of the table and reached up, adjusting the large, circular lamp that hung from the ceiling so that its beams shone directly onto the girl’s skull. Josie shuffled closer to Dr. Feist, and Noah and Gretchen followed, craning their necks to see the top of the skull. “See these,” Dr. Feist said, pointing to faint squiggly lines running down the center of the skull from front to back and then across the front from temple to temple. “These are called sutures. They’re openings where the skull plates fit together. These are normal, and you can see they’re still partially open, which is also normal for a teenager. Most of the skull’s sutures close well into adulthood.” She pointed out other sutures in the back of the skull and above where the ears would be. Then she pointed to a large depression on the top of the skull, on what would have been the girl’s left side, about midway from the front of her head to the back. Jagged cracks extended from where the bone had caved slightly. “This is not normal,” Dr. Feist said.

Noah gave a low whistle. “What could have caused that?” he asked.

Dr. Feist shrugged. She used her thumb and index finger to frame the size of the fracture. “A hammer maybe? The blunt side, not the sharp edge. It’s big enough that whatever she was hit with would have been blunt, but we’re still talking about something relatively small.”

“A baseball bat?” Gretchen asked.

Dr. Feist frowned. “Maybe, but it’s more likely something smaller and heavier.”

“Tire iron?” Josie offered.

The doctor nodded. “That’s more likely. Whoever hit her used a great deal of force. It’s hard to say from just bones, but I’m not sure the struggle—if there was one—lasted long. She doesn’t have any other fractures. Of course, she may have sustained bruising or lacerations, but we’ll never know that now.”

“How about the angle?” Josie asked. “What would you say? Someone taller than her? Shorter? Same height?”

Dr. Feist held up a finger. “I estimate her to be about five foot three. I would say she was killed by someone about the same height, but using an overhead strike.” She motioned to Gretchen, who was about her height. Gretchen moved closer, and Dr. Feist approached her from the side, slightly to her rear, both arms raised high over her head as though she was clutching something in them. She brought her invisible weapon down on Gretchen’s head, stopping before she made contact. “If it was someone taller than her, or if she had been kneeling, I would expect the fracture to be more depressed, because there would be more follow-through with the strike.”

“All right,” Gretchen said. “So we suspect she was struck over the head by someone close to her own height, and then she was buried in the woods.”

“And we suspect whoever killed her was a woman,” Josie said.

“How do you figure that?” asked Noah.

Josie said, “How many men do you know who are five foot three?”

“Not many, but they exist,” Noah countered.

“I’m aware,” Josie answered. “But if I had to make an educated guess in this instance, I would say we are more likely looking for a female assailant.” Josie turned back to the doctor. “No way to tell if she was killed there in the woods, or if she was killed elsewhere and then moved to the grave?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Noah turned his gaze to Dr. Feist. “No way to tell if she was sexually assaulted?”

Dr. Feist gave him a tight smile. “There’s no way to tell a lot of things. This poor girl has been buried for a long time.”

She walked over to a table along the wall and picked up a brown bag, which she emptied out onto the exam table near the skeleton’s feet. Dirty scraps of fabric came first, and then a larger garment. It was dirt-covered and faded, and some of it had disintegrated, but Josie could see that it was a windbreaker—dark blue with squares of what used to be bright yellow, teal, and pink on the shoulders and where the pockets were. There was only one sleeve left, and as Dr. Feist held the garment up, Josie could see several swaths of fabric missing from the back, the collar, and the waist—worn away by time and the earth’s erosion.

“This is what’s left of her clothing,” the doctor said.

Gretchen raised a brow. “No chance there are any identifying items in her jacket pockets?”

Dr. Feist laughed and placed the jacket carefully onto the countertop. “The insides of the pockets are gone. Decomposed. The rest,” she waved at the scrap pile, “is just buttons, a shoe sole, and what are probably scraps of leather.”

Josie stepped forward and looked down at the sad collection of items: a rusted zipper, a couple of blackened grommets from shoes requiring laces, a few small scraps of leather, the tiny folded nickel clasps of a bra, and a grimy rubber shoe sole deteriorating around the edges. Josie looked from the pile to the jacket and then pointed to the jacket. “What material is that made from?”

“My guess is nylon.”

“Looks like something from the 1980s,” Gretchen said. “Windbreakers were all the rage back then, especially the style with the blocks of bright colors.”

Josie nodded. “How long does nylon take to decompose in the ground?”

Noah pulled out his phone, his fingers working fast over the screen. A moment later, he said, “Thirty to forty years.”

“Seems about right,” Dr. Feist said. “The challenge in a case like this is figuring out how long the body has been in the ground. Usually the items we find along with the bones—if any—are the most helpful in trying to pin down a time frame. I was going to have a friend of mine from the college’s Archeology Department consult, but thirty to forty years would be a place to start.”

“That’s all fine and good,” Josie said. “But you know as well as I do that we don’t have any missing teenage girls in the entire county going back that far.”

Dr. Feist grinned and raised a finger in the air. “Oh, I may be able to narrow it down for you.”

Josie, Noah, and Gretchen stared at her. Gretchen’s busy pen finally stilled in anticipation.

“Wait till you see this,” Dr. Feist said as she returned to the head of the table and grasped the sides of the skull with both hands. She lifted it away from the lower jaw bone and held it under the overhead light so they could see inside what would have been the roof of the girl’s mouth. All three police officers leaned in.

“Holy shit,” Noah said. “Are those fangs?”

Behind the two front teeth were two additional, conical teeth that came to points.

“Supernumerary teeth,” Dr. Feist explained.

“Extra teeth?” Josie asked.

“Yeah, pretty much. The condition is called hyperdontia. It’s an inherited defect. Extremely rare. Something a dentist in a city this small would remember, especially given the fact that her supernumerary teeth actually looked like fangs. I did a little research. Supernumerary teeth can appear anywhere in the dental arch. Not all patients present with extra teeth that look so fanglike. Trust me, this girl would have been memorable to look at.”

Josie met Noah’s eyes, and then Gretchen’s. “Well,” she said. “Start tracking down dentists who were practicing in the city thirty to forty years ago.”