Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel - Страница 5

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But if her pelvis said “woman,” her mouth whispered a different, sadder word to me: “child.” If she had lived to be my age, the ripe old age of thirty-seven, her maxillary sutures — the seams in the roof of her mouth — would have begun smoothing out and filling in, eventually becoming nearly invisible. But the maxillary sutures in the skull I cradled upside down in my hand were rough and bumpy, the bones barely beginning to fuse. In fact, if I hadn’t known from years of study that the bones were slowly joining, I might have concluded that something had struck the hard palate at its center, creating a cruciform pattern of cracks. But it was her life, not her palate, that had shattered.

Tyler studied my face as I studied the dead girl’s skull. “How old you think she is?”

“Not old enough,” I said. “Fourteen; fifteen, tops. But maybe only twelve or thirteen.”

He frowned and shook his head — not in disagreement, but in dismay. “That’s what I figured, too, but I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

“Any skeletal trauma?”

“A couple healed fractures in the arms,” he said. “One in the left humerus, the other in the right radius, about three inches above the wrist. And two ribs. But nothing perimortem. Nothing I could see, anyhow. Maybe you’ll spot something I’ve missed.”

I pored over every bone twice — with my eyes and with my fingertips — in search of a fresh, unhealed fracture, or the ragged nick of a knife blade, or a telltale smear of lead from a passing bullet — but there was nothing to be found. Finally, circling back to the skull once more, I shone a flashlight through the foramen magnum and peered inside the cranial vault, in case there was a fracture on the inner surface that might have ruptured one of the meningeal arteries, the arteries carrying blood to the brain. “I’m not seeing anything, either,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t killed. Just means that any injuries she had were soft-tissue trauma.” I took a final look into the cranial vault. “Oh, hey, did you find a wasp nest in here?”

He reached up and plucked a small gray object from the narrow shelf above the counter, then dropped it into my palm. A dozen or so hollow, hexagonal cells made of dry, papery pulp, it weighed almost nothing. “It’s a little crunched on the sides, from the forceps,” he said. “Getting it out through the foramen magnum was like trying to pull a ship out of a bottle.”

“Any more wasps on board?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I think ol’ Bubba Ray Peckerwood done got ’em all.”

“Careful,” I cautioned. “If you slip up and call him Peckerwood to his face, Special Agent Meffert might just feel obliged to open up a can of whup-ass on you.”

“Ha — let him try,” said Tyler. “I’ll lay some yoga on him. He’ll never even know what hit him.”

“What,” I scoffed, “you’re gonna meditate him into submission?” Tyler was a recent and enthusiastic convert to yoga, for reasons I didn’t fully grasp. “Weren’t you an athlete — a real athlete — once upon a time? Weight lifting or shot putting or some such? One of those manly sports dominated by hulking women from East Germany?”

“Hammer throw,” he said. “The ultimate test of strength and coordination. But by the way, there is no East Germany. The wall came down three years ago, in ’89, remember? ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall?’ Ronald Reagan’s finest moment. You’re showing your age, Dr. B.”

Summoning up my reediest old-man voice, I piped, “Back when I was a boy…”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Save it for the undergrads, Gramps.”

Was he just kidding, or was there a slight edge in his voice? Worse, was there a kernel of truth in his jab? Was I fossilizing even before I turned forty?

Time was much on my mind these days. Time since death was foremost in my thoughts. But time before death — my time; my sense of urgency about creating a research program to fill the gaps in my knowledge — that, too, was tugging at the sleeve of my mind.

* * *

“Hang on a second, Doc, I’m fixin’ to put you on speakerphone,” drawled Sheriff Cotterell. I had swum back across the sweltering sea of asphalt to the stadium just in time to catch the call. “Bubba Hardknot’s a-settin’ right here with me, and I know he’ll want to hear whatever you got to say.”

I heard a click, then a hollow, echoing sound, as if the phone had been lowered down a well. “Hey, Doc,” Meffert’s voice boomed, from deep in the depths. “Whatcha got for us?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “I’ll send you both a written report in the next couple days, but here’s the bottom line. No skeletal trauma, so the bones can’t tell us how she died. All they can tell us is a little about who she was. White female; stature between five foot one and five foot three; age thirteen to fifteen. I estimated the age by looking at the pelvis, the teeth, the epiphyses of the long bones and clavicles, the—”

“Excuse me, Doc,” Meffert interrupted, “the what-ih-sees?”

“Epiphyses,” I repeated. “The ends of the bones. In subadults — children and adolescents — the ends of the long bones haven’t yet fused to the shafts; they’re connected by cartilage, at what’s called the growth plates. That’s how the arms and legs can grow so much when kids hit puberty. Toward the end of puberty, the epiphyses fuse, and the long bones don’t get any longer; you don’t get any taller. This girl’s epiphyses weren’t fully fused yet, so she hadn’t quite finished growing. She had her second molars — her twelve-year molars — so she was probably at least that old. And her pelvic structure had started getting wider, so we know she’d entered puberty. But her hips were still getting wider, so she wasn’t out of it yet.”

“How can you tell that?” asked Cotterell.

“Good question, Sheriff. There’s actually an epiphysis on the outer edge of each hip bone, too — it’s called the iliac crest, and all through puberty, the iliac crest is connected to the ilium — the wide bone of the hip — by cartilage. It’s another growth plate. Somewhere around age sixteen or eighteen, the iliac crest fuses. After that, the hips don’t get any wider.”

I heard a rumbling growl, which even over the speakerphone I recognized as Sheriff Cotterell’s laugh. “Doc,” he chuckled, “you ain’t never seen my wife.”

“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “After that, the bones of the hips don’t get any wider.”

“What else you got?” said Meffert. “You hear back from your buddy in Forestry?”

“I did. That little black locust seedling was two years old. So she’s been dead at least that long.”

“And no more’n how long?” asked the sheriff.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Nothing in the bones to tell us. When did that wildcat mine shut down?”

“Twenty-two years ago,” said Meffert. “In 1970.”

“Then she died somewhere between two years ago and twenty-two years ago,” I said.

“Twenty years? That’s as close as we can nail it?” The frustration in the sheriff’s voice was crystal clear, even though he was forty miles away.

“I’m afraid so, Sheriff. I wish I had more for you, but I don’t. We need better tools and techniques for determining time since death.”

“Got that right,” he said. I was glad he and Meffert weren’t there to see my face redden once more.

CHAPTER 4

Satterfield

He picked up the sheaf of pages and tamped their bottom edges on the kitchen table to align them, then turned the stack sideways and repeated the maneuver to even up the sides. Once the sheets were in perfect alignment, he inserted them into the three-hole punch and swung the lever down slowly. Closing his eyes to concentrate, he savored the slight variations in resistance as the steel posts punched through the five single-spaced pages, sheet by sheet by sheet.

A loose-leaf binder, already half filled, lay open on the table in front of Satterfield. Popping open the gleaming chrome rings, he threaded the freshly punched pages onto the stack, then clicked the rings shut and began rereading the text, twirling a pink Hi-Liter with the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his left hand as he read. When he came to the description of the cut marks, he uncapped the marker and highlighted the passage: “The bones were severed with a curved tool of unknown type, the cutting edge having a curved shape approximated by the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.”

A yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil lay beside the binder. Setting down the marker, Satterfield picked up the pencil and drew a curved line on the pad, then — doubting the accuracy of the drawing — he pushed back from the table and went to one of the kitchen drawers. Rummaging in the drawer, he found a metal tape measure and extended the tape to 3.5 inches. Next he opened the cabinet containing glassware and held the tape across the mouths of various vessels until he found one — a coffee mug — whose diameter fit the description in the forensic report. Setting the mug on the legal pad, he ran the mechanical pencil one-third of the way around the base, then set the mug aside and inspected the neat arc he had traced. The shape puzzled him. Trying to imagine the head of an ax or a hatchet behind the curve he’d traced, he frowned; the arc was too steep to fit either of those tools. Besides, he suspected that both of those implements — certainly a hatchet — lacked the weight required to cut cleanly through bone in a single stroke. Rereading the highlighted passage, he concluded that he’d interpreted the text correctly and had drawn the curve accurately. That meant he simply needed to do more research. Tearing the perforated page from the yellow pad, he folded and tucked it into his pocket. Then, closing the binder, he returned it to its hiding place — the cold-air return of the ventilation ductwork — along with the box of stolen files, the mother lode of material he’d begun to build his plans around. Fitting the slotted grille neatly over the mouth of the duct, he flipped the latches to lock it into place.