Skin Deep

79

James Bowers was a forensic anthropologist who worked at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. He was a tall man with a long, thin, tanned face and salt-and-pepper hair. Dressed in jeans and a polo shirt he looked more like someone who was going to spend his day on a golf course than in trays of bones. Steve found him in a lab with benches and rows of chemical containers. Two complete human skeletons hung from stands, and students were working, some examining specimens through microscopes. The back wall had green chalkboards with notes and diagrams on them.

“You said you’d been hired to reconstruct the remains of the Essex River case.”

“Yeah, about ten years ago. She’d been found off of Hogg Island.” Bowers led Steve to the rear of the lab, passing a student at a table reconstructing a face with modeling clay. There were pegs looking like baby fingertips sticking out of the base at various lengths.

Bowers explained that reconstruction began with a plaster copy of the skull to which a couple of dozen pegs were attached at key points and cut to various thicknesses to aid the sculptor’s filling in of the clay for the flesh, guided by charts on thickness samples. “The hardest are the eyes, which are almost entirely tissue. The same with the ears, nose, and lips, because their size and shape is impossible to determine.”

“So, all you can really recapture is the general facial structure.”

“Exactly. The rest is guesswork.”

“But you guys sometimes are dead-on in identifying people.”

“Only because the guesswork was dead-on. It’s as much luck as science.”

They sat at a free bench. On it sat two skulls and some line illustrations of facial types drawn according to three generic face templates: ectomorph, ectomesomorph, and endomorph. Steve picked one up and held it to his face. “What do you think?”

Bowers smiled and pretended to study Steve’s facial proportions for a moment.

“My wife would say Neanderthal.”

Bowers laughed. “Close.” He glanced at the different charts and held up one then another. “You have more of a triangular than rectangular face with wide cheekbones and a narrow slightly pointed chin. I’d say you are the classic ectomorph.”

“Is that good?”

“You’ll be happy to know that it’s one of the most idealized male face types—the kind you almost always see in pencil drawings in men’s fashion ads and on mannequins. Also found on most movie and music idols.”

“I can’t wait to tell her,” he said. “Okay, the Essex case…”

“Yes, that was particularly difficult since skeletal remains in salt water tend to disintegrate. They were found by sport divers, but when police divers were called, they retrieved more bones, including part of the rib cage and vertebrae. A woman’s stocking was found enmeshed with the remains, which had settled in an underwater gulley. Fortunately, most of the skull was intact, so that we could determine the gender, race, and approximate age.”

“How do you do that?”

“Well, males usually have a more prominent browridge, eye sockets, and jaw.”

“What about race?”

He held up a skull. “We can pretty much determine racial group by the size and shape of the nose holes. This is a Caucasian, which you can see is triangular. African-Americans or, technically, the Negroid’s is square, and Mongoloids’ are diamond-shaped.

“As for age, we look at the teeth, bones, and joints. The smoother the skull, the older the individual. In this case, the victim was between thirty-five and forty.”

“How were you able to determine how she died?”

“Well, that was a stroke of luck. The skull told us how she hadn’t died. There were no signs of trauma—bullet holes or marks from a knife blade or axe or such. In a mass of debris surrounding her skull and jawbone, we found the hyoid bone from her throat, which was fractured, leading us to conclude that she’d been strangled.”

“That must be a small bone.”

“It is, and luckily it had gotten enmeshed with enough tissue and biomass to be preserved.”

“The report also says that the ligature was preserved also.”

“Yes. After the skull was found, divers found a length of a nylon-Lycra compound attached to the vertebrae. Because of the synthetics, it didn’t decompose and was identified as a woman’s black stocking that had been knotted into a small noose a third smaller than the circumference of the average neck size of a woman. The suspicion was that she had been dumped into the water after being strangled. No other article of clothing was found, so investigators theorized that she was possibly naked when she was murdered.”

“She’s still not been identified, but we’re reopening the case.”

“Glad to hear that. I’m sure her loved ones still anguish over her disappearance.”

“No doubt. The case file had photographs of the skeletal remains and various police reports. What seems to be missing is a digital reconstruction, which I understand you made.”

“Yes. Probably just a clerical error.”

“Do you still have one someplace?”

“I’m sure.”

He led Steve to the small office in the rear of the lab. The space was small and shelves were stacked with papers, books, and journals. Boxes of more papers were stacked on the floor.

“Please forgive the mess. We’re in the process of moving to a new location.” Bowers moved to a computer behind the desk. “It’s been some years, so give me a moment.”

Steve stood and watched as Bowers ran his fingers across the keyboard. A minute later he muttered, “Ah-ha.” He clicked and tapped keys. “Here we are.” He swiveled his monitor toward Steve. “In case you’re interested, she was an ectomesomorph—the so-called heart-shaped face, wide at the cheeks and an angled jaw that might be delicately pointed or slightly rounded at the base. There’s no way of telling exactly, given the limitations, but this is what we came up with.”

Steve felt as if he had stuck his finger into an electric light socket. On the screen was a three-dimensional head of Dana.