Skull Duggery

ELEVEN

Every forensic anthropologist will tell you, and every homicide cop too, that after a while you become hardened to looking at the remains of murder victims; you can divorce yourself from them as once-living human beings and view them simply as cases, clues, evidence. When you go home at night, you put your thoughts of them aside and relax or get on with other things.

With one exception. No one ever gets used to looking at murdered children. No one manages to completely overcome the internal shudder of sadness and horror-of despair at the wickedness of people-when dealing with the remains of a murdered child. There is always a desire for vengeance mixed in with it too-for justice, certainly, but mostly, if you are being honest, for vengeance. You want to do every possible thing you can to put the bastard away. Forever. And if he should resist arrest and get the bejesus beat out of him by somebody his own size, well, gee, wouldn’t that be a shame?

These were very much Gideon’s feelings as he stood looking down at the contents of the one-by-three-foot fiberboard carton containing Caso Numero 08-Teo dV 1-1, now tenderly laid out by him on two sheets of newsprint atop the desk in one of the unoccupied cubicles at police headquarters, a few yards down the corridor from Marmolejo’s office. The carton had been waiting for him when he arrived, and when he removed the lid, a single glance had convinced him that Orihuela had been right in classifying the remains as those of a teenager; the bones were small and gracile, and at least some of the epiphyseal unions were incomplete. Not as unsettling as a baby would have been-a baby, so utterly trusting and defenseless, was the worst-but plenty bad enough; a fresh young life, innocent and unworldly, barely started and bursting with promise, cut off before it could be lived.

In this frame of mind he thought it best to put off opening the neatly folded brown paper sack labeled craneo, in which the patent evidence of murder would be found. In merely lifting it out of the carton, he had been made aware of the fragile, shattered pieces inside, crackling like so many broken eggshells. Better to work his way slowly up to that.

He pulled up the stool that had been provided at his request, had a sip of Marmolejo’s excellent espresso that had likewise been provided, put the sack to one side and settled down for a closer look at the rest of the skeleton. Score another one for Dr. Orihuela: he could tell the difference between a right and left clavicle and even between a right and left fibula. One might think any physician, especially a forensic pathologist, would be able to do that, but one would be wrong. Yes, an orthopedic surgeon, say, had better be familiar with every muscle insertion point, every foramen, every fossa, on the human tibia. But as for differentiating between a right one and a left one, they had available to them a foolproof, sublimely simple method for doing it: the right one was the one in the right leg, and the left one was the one in the left leg. Medical doctors simply aren’t trained in working with bones that don’t happen to be enclosed in bodies and at least roughly in their appointed place, and why should they be? When would a doctor have to deal with an isolated, bodyless bone? Never. That was what anthropologists did.

But this particular doctor had gotten it right. There were, as he had reported, a left clavicle, a right innominate (the right half of the pelvis); the long bones of the left leg-femur, tibia, and fibula; and, in another paper sack, twenty-two of the twenty-six bones of the left foot. (Orihuela had prudently described them as hand or foot bones, and hadn’t specified the side, but this was understandable; it had been a long time before Gideon himself could reliably distinguish between many of those almost identical little bones without an atlas at hand.)

Why this particular assemblage of bones? Why the right hip and the right collar bone, but the left leg and foot? Why the top and bottom of the body but nothing, other than a single clavicle, a collar bone, in between-no ribs or vertebrae, no scapulas, no arm bones? Why no sacrum, why no sternum? Who knew? Gideon could speculate, but after all the time these remains had lain in the mine it wouldn’t be much better than guesswork. The elements, the bugs, the animals had all had their chance at mucking up things over the years.

The years they had lain in the mine. Here, Gideon thought, was one place he might question Orihuela’s judgment. Yes, the bones showed the kind of pitting and superficial flaking that he too might associate with five or so years of exposure in the semiarid climate of inland southern Mexico. (Or two, or twenty; bone weathering was one of the many wildly variable after-death phenomena.) But how much “exposure” was involved in lying at the bottom of a mine shaft? There might or might not be rain, depending on exactly where the body was situated, but there would be no sun to broil the bones, no wind to abrade them, no big temperature or humidity swings to swell and shrink and crack them. So if the remains had really been in the mine all that time (not that there was any guarantee of that), the weathering process would have been greatly slowed. These bones might be considerably older than five years. Sergeant Nava had said they had tried to identify the girl, if it was a girl, from missing-persons records that went as far back as eight years. Gideon would be suggesting to Marmolejo that they might do well to take that back a decade or so. He jotted a note to himself on the breast-pocket pad he’d brought with him.

Next, also putting aside the sack of foot bones, he went over the innominate, clavicle, and leg bones for signs of injury, old or new, and of disease or abnormality or anything else that might individuate them and thus help the police in identifying them. As Orihuela had said: there was nothing.

That left ancestry (formerly known as “race”), sex, and age, preferably to be determined in that order because girls’ and boys’ skeletons matured at slightly different rates. (Girls’ skeletons matured earlier.) So it was helpful to know the sex before trying to determine the age; and since sexual characteristics differed somewhat between racial groups, it was helpful to ascertain the race before trying to determine the sex. Ancestry, sex, age.

Ancestry he already knew he had little chance of determining. Not on this assemblage of subadult bones. It might be that when he opened the sack with the skull and the mandible, he might find that the incisors were “shovel shaped,” which in this part of the world would suggest, but hardly prove, Native American ancestry. In any case he wasn’t yet ready to face that particular dismal litter of human debris. Besides, he didn’t need the race to determine the sex. He already knew the sex.

Once again, Orihuela had been on the mark. Subadult or not, the sexual characteristics of these remains were unmistakable, and they were those of a female.

The “too much chewed” right innominate bone-the right half of the pelvis-made that absolutely clear. The bones of the pelvis, for obvious reasons, offer more differentiating criteria between the sexes than any other skeletal element in the body. Indeed, the pelvis is the one skeletal element from which the sex can be determined with 100 percent reliability. Women are built to be capable of having babies. Men aren’t, and the distinctions are hard to miss or to get wrong once you know what to look for. There is the shape of the greater sciatic notch, of the obturator foramen, of the auricular surface of the ilium, of the ilium as a whole. All these things were observable despite the heavy gnawing around all the edges, and they all yelled “female” at Gideon, as they would have at anyone else who knew what he was doing.

That the skeleton of a teenage girl-thirteen to fifteen, if Orihuela was correct-should show the sexual differentiation of a woman of twenty was, as Gideon had told Marmolejo, unusual; something you didn’t expect to run into every day, or every month, and its un-commonness bothered him. Generally speaking, skeletal maturation and sexual differentiation progressed in concert. You wouldn’t expect one to outstrip the other by five years, or even three. Like any scientist, Gideon was more comfortable when his data performed the way they were supposed to, when they fit the prevailing model; and these remains definitely didn’t. However, he understood well enough that while something like this was anything but common, it wasn’t unique either, or even “abnormal.”

Human variability wandered all over the map, and, like most kinds of variability, the results were almost always in the ubiquitous form of the bell-shaped curve. Whatever characteristic you were measuring, the great majority of people could be counted on to cluster near the center, in the great, humped body of the bell. But there were always those who didn’t fit-bigger, smaller, fatter, thinner, more developed, less developed-the people with the traits that constituted the “tails” on either side of the bell, tapering down to nothing as they became more and more extreme and infrequent. What he had in front of him now was apparently an example of someone out near one of those extreme ends of the bell-shaped curve of subadult sexual differentiation. If something has, say, a one-in-a-hundred probability of occurring, then it was reasonable to expect to encounter it every hundred times or so. And he had looked at hundreds, maybe thousands, of skeletons. He was probably long past due to come across one like this.

So why worry?

But worry he did; the more extraordinary your findings, the more you had to wonder if there might be something you were misinterpreting, something more or less than met the eye, something that would easily explain away apparent discrepancies or inconsistencies. something, even, about which you were flat-out mistaken. Well, he wasn’t mistaken about the sex, of that he was sure. So that left the other end of the equation, the age. She was a subadult, all right; Gideon had already seen that for himself with a glance, but where in that category did she fit? If she were at the eighteen-year-old end, then the sexual differentiation wouldn’t be so extraordinary, no more than a year or so premature; not much to trouble oneself about. But if she were, as Orihuela had estimated, at the other end, the thirteen-year-old end…

With good reason, forensic anthropologists aren’t supposed to prefer any particular outcome of their investigations, but forensic anthropologists are as human as anybody else, and Gideon knew that the younger she was, the more his findings on sex differentiation and skeletal maturation would be at odds with each other. Bell-shaped curves notwithstanding, thirteen-year-old girls weren’t supposed to have pelvises like twenty-year-olds. There wasn’t much he could do about it except to warn himself in no uncertain terms that he was not to let what he preferred or didn’t prefer affect his analysis.

Having given himself a talking-to along these lines, he belatedly realized that his back needed a break. He got off the stool to stand up, work his shoulders, and massage the kinks out of his neck. He’d been crouched over the desk for over an hour now. Having borrowed one of the Hacienda’s vans, he had arrived at the Procuraduria a little before two, where he was received at the foot of the basement steps with full military honors-salute, clicked heels-by Donardo, the hulking cop who had been notably short on courtesies the day before. It was obvious that Marmolejo’s admonitions to Sergeant Nava had been promptly passed on down the line. Donardo had shown him to Marmolejo’s office for a cup of espresso and a leisurely chat before Gideon got down to work.

Now, wanting a breather for both body and mind, he walked down the hall to beg another coffee from Corporal Vela, Marmolejo’s adjutant, then returned with it to the bones. His aim was to come up with a probable age range of his own that would either confirm Orihuela’s estimate or refute it. The odds that he could do one or the other, and do it with confidence, were in his favor. The younger a person was, the more precisely his or her age could be determined from the skeleton. In a child under three it could often be narrowed down to a couple of months one way or the other. After thirty-five or forty, you’d have a hard time pinning it down to anything less than a ten-year range. But for a teenager, if you knew what you were doing and you had enough of the right bones in front of you (and Gideon thought he did in this case), you ought to be able to come up with a reliable-and defensible-age range of no more than three years, perhaps even two. That’s what he was shooting for.

The age of a person in her teens is established mostly by gauging the degree of growth in the long bones-the arms, legs, ribs, and collar bones. A bone grows, not simply by getting longer, but by having new bony material, epiphyses, deposited at both ends of the bone shaft. The epiphyses are made of cartilage to begin with, but with time they ossify and slowly fuse to the shaft. When the fusion is complete, the bone is done growing. And when the last epiphysis has fused to the last shaft, that’s it; you’re all “grown up.”

How long it takes from the time fusion begins until the time it’s complete and the segments are firmly, permanently attached varies from bone to bone, but for each individual bone the process moves forward through known, identifiable phases and is completed by a predictable age. Thus, by comparing the progress of fusion in the bones (there is a standard five-stage model that most anthropologists use), a fairly narrow age range can be determined with reasonable confidence-always assuming, of course, that one is working with a set of remains that aren’t too awfully far out along the tails of that bell-shaped curve. But all you can do about that is to knock on wood and hope for the best. And hedge your bets if you have any doubts. Whatever you do, however competent you are, you are going to get one wrong once in a while.

Gideon had four usable long bones to work with: the left collar bone (which might not seem to be one of the “long” bones, but is, physiologically speaking), the right femur, or thigh bone (the lower end only; the top had been chewed away), and the two bones of the lower leg: the thick, sturdy tibia and the slender fibula. Still, he thought that was enough to do the job.

He began with the clavicle, the collar bone, which he expected to give him an upper end of the age range. The clavicle is one of the last bones to fuse, the process typically not even beginning until about age eighteen. Thus, if the bone showed no evidence at all of fusion, as was indeed the case with this one, you were pretty safe in saying the individual was no older than eighteen. Okay then, as expected, she was no more than eighteen.

But he could do better than that. The leg bones develop on an earlier timetable than the clavicle does. In girls, while they vary from epiphysis to epiphysis, all of them are completely fused by the age of eighteen, when the clavicle is just getting started. But in examining the ones before him, Gideon found that, while all had begun the process of fusion, nothing was past the halfway point to completion. That meant, if the usual standards held (an appropriate place to pause for that knock on wood), that this young girl had never made it to eighteen at all, and very probably not past sixteen. So that lopped two years off the top end of the range.

What about the bottom end? As he’d just noted, all of the epiphyses of the knee and ankle joints had started on their way to attachment. But those of the knee didn’t typically even begin to attach until fifteen or so. So, if “typically” held, this girl had to be at least fifteen and was probably no more than sixteen. Orihuela had missed on that score.

Fifteen to sixteen, a two-year range, and he didn’t see how he could narrow it any more than that without really going out on a limb. He would have felt better with a seventeen-to-eighteen range, but “And why,” Marmolejo’s interested voice asked from the entry to the cubicle, “would seventeen to eighteen be better than fifteen to sixteen?”

Gideon was surprised to find out that Marmolejo had been standing there, but not at all surprised to learn he himself had been talking out loud. It was an old, comfortable habit, conversing with the skeletons, and he had long ago given up trying to break it; not, to be truthful, that he had ever tried very hard.

“Better in the sense that the skeletal maturation and the secondary sexual development of the skeleton would have been in sync, instead of one being well behind the other,” Gideon explained. “It’d just be less unusual, that’s all. Less peculiar.”

“But you are satisfied that it is indeed a female?”

“Oh, no question. Orihuela was right about that.”

“And the age? Fifteen to sixteen? How confident are you of that?”

A moment’s hesitation this time, and a shrug. “Pretty confident.”

“Pretty confident,” Marmolejo repeated, head cocked in that thoughtful-monkey way he had. “Am I wrong, or is ‘pretty confident’ somewhat lower on the scale of certainty than ‘Oh, no question’?”

Gideon smiled. “You’re right, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it-at least until I look at the cranial remains. Oh, and there’s one other thing I can tell you that I’m ‘pretty confident’ about. I think Orihuela may have underestimated the time since death. In the mine, the bones were largely protected from the environment. The weathering process would have been very slow. He estimated five years. I’d say ten to twenty is more likely. So when you go looking for evidence of what might have happened, take that into consideration.”

Marmolejo nodded, not looking happy with this information. “Very good. Anything else?”

“Sorry, that’s it for now. Haven’t come up with anything that qualifies as a rabbit yet. Give me another hour or so, though; you never know. I’ll stop by your office when I’m finished.” He glanced at his watch. “Probably about four. Okay?”

By now Gideon felt ready to deal with the bag containing the mandible and skull, and as soon as Marmolejo had gone he unfolded and opened the sack. When he began lifting out the contents he found that the jawbone was almost whole, with only the right mandibular condyle, the ball-like process that forms the “hinge” of the jaw, snapped off and missing. On the cranium per se -the braincase-some of the sutures had pulled apart, giving it a warped look, but it was still essentially bowl-shaped and whole. But the facial skeleton-my God, it was as if it had exploded. It must have been in fifty pieces, not counting the dust-like sediment that had settled at the bottom of the bag.

After twenty minutes of work, with a little thought, a little trial and error, a little piecing of them together, he was able to identify thirty-one of the pieces; the rest were too small, mostly particles and fragments of the thin, curling, complex structures of the inner face-the ethmoid, the sphenoid, the lacrimal portion of the pterygoid. Some of them might even be rodent bones. Some parts of the facial skeleton were missing altogether, probably carried off by animals or eaten on the spot. He set the smallest pieces aside and concentrated on the recognizable chunks.

Much of the damage was postmortem, the “too much chewing by animales” of Dr. Orihuela’s report. Very few bony edges failed to show some signs of carnivore gnawing. But the perimortem damage, the destruction that had been inflicted at the time of death, was as bad as you were likely to find on a human face. The maxilla, the main bone of the face, running from the eyes to the palate, had suffered what was known as a Le Fort I fracture, broken roughly in half by a side-to-side fracture that ran through the base of the nasal aperture, so that the palate and the upper teeth were separate from the rest of the face, like some grotesque parody of an upper denture. Both zygomatic bones-the cheekbones-had been crushed into crumbs just under and inside the bony orbits of the eyes. The inner and outer rims of the orbits had also been splintered and broken, with pieces missing. The nasal bone no longer existed and the sinuses behind them, on both sides, had been fragmented as well. That, along with the knocking-out of upper front teeth and the shattering of their sockets, was the major damage. There was plenty of minor damage too, all of it adding up to a confirmation of Dr. Orihuela’s fuerza despuntada, although “blunt force” hardly conveyed the horrific extent of the destruction. Someone had smashed this kid in the face, judging from the damage probably right in the middle of the face, and more than once-probably more than twice-with something really heavy: a lead pipe, or a crowbar, or maybe a baseball bat.

The blows would have driven most of the skeleton of the face deep into the brain. He tried to visualize what they would have done to the fleshed, living head of a young girl. Then he tried not to visualize it. But certainly, the report’s probable cause of death could now be considered confirmed. Nobody could have lived through that.

Other than that, there wasn’t much these bone fragments could tell him beyond what he already knew. The unclosed cranial sutures were no help in aging, except to verify that she hadn’t reached her mid-twenties. The sex criteria were all either neutral or female.

The deciduous teeth had all been shed, and all of the permanent teeth (those that hadn’t been knocked out), except for the third molars, had come up. That was another nod in the direction of a minimum age of fifteen, because fifteen was generally accepted as the age at which the second molars were fully erupted. As for the state of development of the third molars, the upper jaw could tell him nothing because the back parts of it were gone. Not so in the mandible, however, and there he found that, while the third molars were not fully in place, they had broken through the bone and were a good third of the way up.

Predicting the age that wisdom teeth will erupt is risky business, since they are the most unpredictable of all the teeth, often not coming in at all. But a range of seventeen to twenty-one is a pretty safe bet. If these cranial fragments and teeth had been all that he’d had to work with, that would have been his guess: Seventeen to twenty-one-which would have fit nicely with the advanced sexual maturation. But in this case he also had the long bones, and they suggested fifteen to sixteen.

Taking everything together, which was what you did when you had data that didn’t fully match up (which is what you usually had), he was inclined to stick with his fifteen-to-sixteen estimate. The process of epiphyseal fusion was more reliable by far than the eruption of the wisdom teeth. As for the accelerated sexual maturation, that was just one of those things that you ran into from time to time, and, he supposed, maybe not all that that surprising if the girl was sixteen.

And that, he thought, hoisting himself off the stool for another stretching break, was probably all he was going to be able to… He hesitated, frowning. Wait a minute, wasn’t there something about…

He sat back down and picked up the mandible again, then the lower fragment of the maxilla, the one with the palate and the teeth. Of course. Four of the premolar teeth were missing. Normally, people have eight premolars or bicuspids, sets of two, left and right, upper and lower, between the canines and the molars. But this girl had only one in each place; none of her second premolars had come in. They hadn’t been knocked out or been lost on account of disease; they’d never developed in the first place.

Naturally, he’d noticed it earlier, but with his attention, emotional and intellectual, riveted on the horrible maiming of the face, he hadn’t really registered it until now. The condition was called hypodontia, and it was of forensic interest, both because it was rare-the incidence of one or more congenitally missing teeth ran at about 5 percent in most populations, but the probability of all four second molars being missing was-well, he didn’t know what the incidence was, but it was surely under 1 percent. And it was of interest because it was genetically linked; it ran in families. This, he thought with satisfaction, could well be the most important thing he’d turned up in terms of coming up with who the girl was. With some legwork and a little luck, she might yet end up with a better resting place than a cardboard box in a government warehouse in “Gideon-”

This time Marmolejo’s unexpected presence behind him made him jump. “Jeez! Javier, you have to stop sneaking up on me like that,” he said irritably. “Get some leather heels or cough or something.”

“You have my abject apology,” Marmolejo said unconvincingly. “I came to tell you that four o’clock won’t be possible. I’m on my way to a meeting in the office of the procurador general himself. The subject is the promotion of cooperation and teamwork between our various state and federal police agencies. This assures that it will be an extremely contentious meeting, and probably lengthy as well, so I may not be available for some time; perhaps as late as five. Or if that doesn’t work-”

“Five is fine. I’m running a little slow anyway.”

Marmolejo came a step closer and peered with interest at the bones. “Have you found anything more?”

“Actually, yes.”

He explained about the missing teeth. Marmolejo was gratifyingly impressed. “You see? I knew you would find something. Congenital hypodontia, that is new to me.”

“And on the age, move my ‘pretty confident’ up to ‘very confident. ’ ”

“But still short of ‘Oh, no question’?”

“If you mean, would I bet my life on it? No, but it’s the best you’re going to get out of me. The epiphyses don’t lie. She was fifteen or sixteen years old, or if you want to play it completely safe, make it fourteen to seventeen. I’ll see you at five.”

When Marmolejo left, Gideon stood up and stretched again, walked up and down the corridor a few times, turned down an offer of more coffee from Corporal Vela-it was getting to the time of day where a highball or a glass of wine would be more welcome-and returned to the cubicle to finish up.

There was nothing left but the bones of the feet, which he had not yet laid out properly. For whatever reason, in forensic analysis, these bones figure less than any of the others. There is less interest in them, less known about them, and less research done on them. Gideon wasn’t sure why, but he thought it might simply be that feet just aren’t that exciting, at least not to most people. Still, they had to be examined; as he had told Marmolejo, you never know what you’re going to find.

The tarsus, composed of the four largest ankle bones, was missing, but everything else in the foot was there: the three smaller cuneiforms, the five metatarsals, and the fourteen phalanges that made up the toes, even the four tiny ones at the ends. That was unusual, and he assumed that the foot, like the foot of the mummy, had been encased in a shoe.

Almost the moment he began to lay them out anatomically for a proper examination-no easy task; they are confoundingly similar-he ran into a shock. He found himself holding what he thought was a left first metatarsal in his right hand, and what he was sure was another left first metatarsal in his right hand. This was not as it should have been. The first metatarsal is the bone in the sole of the foot that leads to the first toe-the big toe-and like the toe itself, it is by far the strongest, bulkiest of its fellows, twice the thickness of any of the others, and therefore the easiest to recognize. Most important, we are entitled to only one apiece, not two. Two first metatarsals indicate two separate individuals just as surely as two jawbones do.

All alone in the cubicle, with no one to see him, Gideon Oliver blushed. He had just committed the simplest, most sophomoric error of omission that a forensic anthropologist can make. The very first thing to be established-how often had he drummed this into his students?-when faced with a pile of bones, is how many people one is dealing with. Well, strictly speaking, the first thing to be established is whether or not the remains are human, but figuring out whether you have one person or more than one is every bit as elementary. The fact that he’d been assured by the police that the carton contained a single individual was no excuse and he knew it. Cops weren’t anthropologists. Doctors weren’t anthropologists.

Everything he’d come up with, everything he’d told Marmolejo, was now in doubt. Were the legs and skull from one person or two (or more)? To which one did the clavicle belong? Or was that a third person? Why wouldn’t the skeletal maturation and the sexual differentiation be out of joint if he were dealing with two or more people? How could he have been so careless, so cavalier…?

In the midst of all this self-recrimination, he became aware that his own left thumb was trying to send him a message. Something didn’t feel right about the metatarsal. Why was its head so smooth? Why couldn’t he feel the grooves for the sesamoids? He took a closer look. The other end of the bone was peculiar too. Where was the prominence for the Peroneus longus tendon? What were those facets for the cuneiforms doing there? They should have been… they should have been…

It took him longer than he’d have liked to admit to realize what the problem was, or rather what it wasn’t. He’d made a mistake, all right, but not the inexcusable one he thought he’d made. The thing was, the bone he was holding in his left hand wasn’t another first metatarsal at all, it was the second, but greatly thickened, so that its bulk gave it the initial appearance of a first metatarsal.

Whew. One person, after all, and not two.

All the same, he finished laying out the foot bones now, as he should have done to begin with, just to be sure. And, happily, there they all were, with not a spare in the bunch. Other than the four missing ones from the tarsus, there were precisely enough to make one human foot; no more, no less.

One foot with a peculiar, grossly enlarged second metatarsal. Again, he picked it up, turned it round and round, fingered it, studied every ridge and fossa. Aside from its size, it was perfectly normal. The bulkiness wasn’t the result of disease or trauma; it had been caused by muscular stress… and he was fairly sure he understood exactly what kind of stress it had been, although he needed to check a few sources to be certain.

He was also fairly sure that the age estimate he’d given Marmolejo was going to suffer a significant revision.

He couldn’t help smiling. Marmolejo was going to love this.