The Devil's Bones

CHAPTER 30

I TUGGED OPEN THE DOOR OF THE OSTEOLOGY LAB and walked in waving the manila envelope of X-rays as if it were the winning ticket in the $50 million Powerball game.

Miranda sat with her back to the door, bent over one of the lab tables, peering through a magnifying lamp. She looked almost like a statue, and in fact I couldn’t remember seeing her in any other position but this-staring through the lens, tweezers in one hand, a chip of cranium in the other-in the eight days since the Cooke County fire. It was as if she’d always been sitting here and always would be, forever reassembling the fragments of what we hoped was the skull of Garland Hamilton.

Miranda heard the crinkling of paper and X-ray film and glanced around. I waited expectantly. She raised her eyebrows. I jiggled the envelope.

Finally she said dryly, “Okay, the suspense is killing me. What’s in the envelope?”

“I could tell you were dying to know,” I said. “Cranial X-rays of a homeless guy.”

“And you have those because…?”

“Because he might be a missing person. Because I don’t trust Garland Hamilton, alive or dead. Because I worry that what you’re piecing together might not be Hamilton’s skull.”

“You think it might be this guy instead?”

“I hope not,” I said, “but it can’t hurt to compare. How much frontal sinus you pieced together so far?”

“This much,” she said, holding up a bony mosaic the size of a postage stamp. “Probably not enough to compare yet. But there’s a light box over there in that corner, if you want to plug it in.”

The light box was actually a slide sorter. Before I started using a digital camera, I shot 35-millimeter slides of every case I worked. By now I had tens of thousands of slides, so even though photography was fast going digital, I’d always need slide sorters and carousel trays. I’d taken a couple of stabs at converting my slides to digital images and plugging them into PowerPoint presentations, but the image files were so big they tended to crash the computer or fill up the hard drive. If I converted all my slides to digital images, I’d need a hard drive the size of Neyland Stadium to store them all.

I retrieved the slide sorter from the corner, set it on the desk, and knelt down to find a plug in the power strip. There wasn’t a vacant outlet, so I grabbed hold of a white plug. Just as I was pulling it free, I heard Miranda say, “Don’t unplug the white-” Then I heard her say, “Oooohhh…”

“What’s wrong?”

“That was the computer,” she said. “I had a file open I hadn’t saved yet. Oh, well-it was only my dissertation proposal. I’m sure I can reconstruct it in, say, three months.”

Knowing Miranda’s thoroughness, I felt sure she saved her work every three minutes.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing over,” I teased.

“Thanks,” she said. “One pearl of wisdom like that makes the long hours and the low pay seem worthwhile.”

Straightening up, I dusted my hands on my pants and switched on the light box. The fluorescent tubes flickered briefly, then glowed steadily through the milky glass. I laid down the X-ray of Freddie Parnell’s skull, centering the scallops of the frontal sinus over the brightest light.

“What do you think? Look familiar?”

“Sure thing,” she said. “That’s Billy Bob What’s-His-Name, well-known frontal sinus-about-town.”

“I just thought maybe since you’ve been spending so much time with those cranial fragments, some of those curves would register with you.”

“I’m trying to match fracture lines,” she said, “so I haven’t really been worrying about the sinus itself. Besides,” she added,

“I’m still missing a lot of the upper edge. I doubt that we’ve got enough yet for a match or an exclusion.”

She held out the postage-stamp-size mosaic, then plucked a second scrap of bone from the sandbox and aligned an edge with the bigger piece. The edges fit fairly well but not perfectly, and I knew that Miranda had spent days gauging such minutiae.

She flipped the pieces over so we could see where the inner layer of bone had peeled away, revealing the sinus cavity. Along one portion of each piece that she held, I saw a faint line where the sinus cavity ended.

“We’ve got some edge line here and here”-she pointed-“but there’s not much, and it’s not particularly distinctive. You want to flip the X-ray over, since we’re looking from the back side?”

I flipped it, and she shifted and rotated the pieces of bone above the X-ray, seeking some elusive alignment.

“Hard to say.” I frowned.

“Very hard,” she agreed. “How reliable did you say frontal-sinus comparison is?”

“Very,” I said. “No two are the same.”

“You’re sure?”

“I think I’m sure.”

“Who’s researched it?”

“Doug Ubelaker, up at the Smithsonian, did an article on this about ten years ago. He concluded it was a good basis for identification or exclusion.”

“How many sinuses did he look at? And how’d he quantify the match?”

“He looked at a few dozen,” I said. “I don’t know that he quantified it on any numerical scale. I think he drew on his experience and judgment to determine whether or not things matched.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Sounds like the way they compared fingerprints about a hundred years ago.”

“You got a better idea?” I was feeling a little defensive, though I wasn’t sure why.

“No,” she said, but then, after a pause, “Well, maybe. I mean, the edge of the sinus traces a curving line, right?”

“Right.”

“So if you can define those curves mathematically-the curve shown in Parnell’s X-ray here and the curve of Humpty Dumpty here, once we get him back together again-you should be able to graph how closely those equations match.”

I was having trouble following her, but she seemed to be warming to the idea.

“Actually,” she said, “that might be a pretty nifty dissertation topic. I’m in the market, since you just erased my proposal.”

“I did not,” I said. “Besides, I have a draft of your proposal. You’re going to refine age estimates using the pubic symphysis.”

“I thought I was,” she said. “But the more I think about it, the less excited I get. The idea of squinting at four or five hundred pubic bones for a year seems like a very tedious project.”

“Gee, not like squinting at graphs and statistics for a year,” I said.

“But it would be original graphs and statistics,” she said.

“The pubic symphysis has already been studied up one side and down the other, so anything I did would be so derivative. This could be new territory. It could help us with exactly the problem we’ve got right here: Is this Freddie Parnell’s burned skull or isn’t it? We don’t have the mathematical tools to measure that right now. My experience and my judgment-that’s what I’m supposed to rely on, in the absence of statistical tools, right? — my experience and my judgment say this ain’t Freddie.” Her voice was rising, and I heard her frustration rising, too.

“But my experience and my judgment also say we don’t have near enough of this damn puzzle done yet to say that with any damn confidence.”

With that, she laid the two pieces of bone in the sand, stood up, and walked out of the bone lab.

As the door banged shut behind her, I realized that she’d been pushed-by me, by eight days of squinting at skull fragments, and by her terrifying assault-to the breaking point.

I also realized she was right about the frontal sinus. It would indeed be a good dissertation topic. And this particular scrap of reconstructed sinus wasn’t nearly enough to tell us whether Garland Hamilton was safely dead or dangerously alive.