Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 (7 page)

“Right,” I said. “As the bullet smashes through the bone, the shock wave propagates in the shape of a cone, producing a larger hole at the exit. Like those funnel-shaped holes BB guns make in plate-glass windows—tiny on the outside, big on the inside.”

“Spoken like a boy who had a BB gun,” she said.

“Hey, a guy hears stories,” I said. “Now quit stalling. What else do you notice about this hole, which might or might not have been left by a gunshot?”

“Okay, what looks like beveling on both sides of the bone isn’t, really—it’s a smooth, undamaged surface. The beveling made by a bullet is rougher, and there are usually fracture lines radiating from the hole.”

“Excellent,” I said. “So this is…?”

She furrowed her brow. “A foramen?”

“Exactly. A natural opening in the bone. Rare in the female sternum, by the way—ten percent of men have them, but only about four percent of women. That’s why you’ve never seen one before.” She grinned, excited by the new nugget of firsthand knowledge. This, too—like the thrill of finding forensic clues—I found addictive. “Okay, let’s keep moving. Are you ready for what comes next?” Her grin vanished, and she took a deep breath. “This could be disturbing,” I added. She nodded. “If you have any trouble, just take a break and step outside. No shame in that.” She nodded again, eyes wide. I took up the sprayer again, but not before turning down the pressure by half. As the adipocere melted away from the center of the woman’s body, I felt a sense of amazement I’d experienced only a few other times in my life. A thicket of tiny, nested bones began to appear, suspended in a paler lump of adipocere—

a lump that had once been amniotic fluid and fetal tissue. Our young woman had been pregnant—was pregnant still, in a way—with a baby whose birth, at my hands now, was years overdue. It was a grim, sad delivery I was about to perform.

“We’re going to need a two-millimeter screen over the drain please, Miranda.”

She scurried over to a cabinet and pulled out a disk of wire mesh, which she fitted into the round neck of the drain. I hoped it was fine enough to catch everything.

The tiny vertebrae were like little seed pearls on a string; the body, or centrum, of each vertebra was no bigger than a lentil. On either side of each vertebral body floated the two halves of the neural arch, which would have fused to one another in the first few years of life, then fused to the centrum sometime around preschool or kindergarten age. At the base of the spine nestled the minute beginnings of the hip bones, about the size and shape of baby lima beans. Folded up alongside the spine were the legs: the femur was about the size of the middle bone of my index finger; the tibia was more like a pinky bone. The bones of the feet were so small, they’d have to be screened out with a sieve. Arching at right angles to the axis of the spine and legs were ribs—thin, curving slivers so light and frail they might have come from a quail or a trout. The bones of the skull, which was the lowermost point of the fetal skeleton, were also birdsized; the occipital, which formed the base of the skull, was no bigger than a quarter.

“Hard to believe we all start out this small and fragile,” I said. “Looks like she was just about midway through her pregnancy.”

“How can you tell? Who’s researched this? Who could
bear
to?”

“A couple of pathologists in Budapest back in the 1970s. They studied and measured one hundred and fifty fetal skeletons, from every stage of development. I don’t know why they started, but I guess they bore it the same way we’re bearing this right now: bone by bone, for the sake of something more important.” We fell silent, and I found myself thinking back to the other fetal skeletons I’d examined.

I’d seen skeletons in the womb only three times before. Two were in Arikira Indian graves in South Dakota. Their village, I knew, had been decimated by smallpox, which was deliberately spread by white fur traders—an early case of biological warfare. In the third case, a pregnant woman’s remains were found in some brush beside a rural stretch of Kentucky interstate; the woman, as best the police and I could determine, had been hitchhiking and climbed into the wrong vehicle. In those cases, though, both the mother and the fetus had already skeletonized by the time they were found. Here, the baby’s remains were hidden away inside an intact corpse—until I burrowed in to expose them. I felt a brief flush of shame at my intrusion, and then a pang at the reminder of just what a risky venture life can be: a race in which some people never even make it out of the starting gate.

I glanced up at Miranda. Tears were running down her cheeks and soaking her mask. I touched her arm. “Maybe you should take a break,” I suggested. She jerked away, shaking her head, and I saw rage flashing through the tears. It was not anger at me, I realized, but at whoever had snuffed out these two lives.

“Thanks, I need the help. Let’s put these in anatomical order beside the mother’s body, head down.” She nodded, then grimly set about reassembling the tiny skeleton as I handed her the bits of bone.

Six hours after we began, we finished. The waxy-looking mummy we’d brought in was now a skeleton, still slightly greasy and smelly, but merely a fading echo of a strong young woman. Beside her was something even fainter: the fading whisper of a baby who never drew breath.

Our knowledge, like the specimens on our counter, was skeletal: we knew this was a young white female of unusual height. We knew that she was pregnant, and that halfway through her pregnancy, possibly around the time she began to show, she’d been murdered—strangled, with no other signs of trauma, at least nothing visible so far. We still didn’t know her name, but the examination had told us other things that would help us seek her name. The echoes and whispers from these bones might help us understand why she’d been killed…and if we listened carefully enough, they might even suggest whose hands had encircled her throat and squeezed without mercy, leaving a record of violence for us to find.

I looked at Miranda. Her face was drawn; her eyes, which had danced and shone when she’d delivered the X-rays triumphantly, now looked drained and bleak.

“I know,” I said, “this one’s tough.”

She nodded.

“And Miranda?” I waited until her eyes met mine. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for a while.”

CHAPTER 8

ART BOHANAN WAS GLUED to his microscope. Literally, and unhappily. The fingerprint lab was in the basement of the Knoxville Police Department—a grim beige fortress in a grim black section of the city, surrounded by acres of asphalt and low-income housing projects. The uniformed officer on guard at the front had buzzed me into the elevator and pointed toward the floor. “He’s down there. Like always.”

The acrid scent of superglue bit my nostrils as I entered the lab in the basement. Art looked up as I walked in. “Hey, you wanna give me a hand here? Squirt some of that acetone on my fingers, would you?” His left thumb and index finger were fastened to the focus knob of a stereo microscope; his right hand gripped the light source. An open tube of superglue lay on the counter.

“So you’re really stuck?”

“Last ten times I checked. You wanna tug for yourself, or you gonna help?”

“Hold on—oh, wait, that’s what you’re doing already,” I teased. “When’s the last time you got pantsed? You got a camera somewhere?”

“Great, now I’m supposed to help you humiliate me even further? Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Come on, Bill, this light’s hot. Durn it, I’m not kidding.”

I picked up a small can of acetone and dribbled a bit over the edges of Art’s fingers, starting with the ones gripping the metal housing of the light source.

“So what’s the flash point of acetone? And what’s the temp of that light?” As the solvent soaked in, Art’s taut skin slowly peeled free. The fingers were an angry red. He rubbed them with a rag, then some hand lotion.

“Thanks a lot,” he said. “I owe you.” I wasn’t sure whether he was thanking me for setting him free or threatening me for dragging my feet about it. Both, knowing Art. I made a mental note to sniff my steering wheel in future before grabbing hold of it.

“Next time you really oughta read the label. That stuff sticks to your fingers.”

“Ha-ha. Very funny.”

If anybody knew about superglue and fingers, it was Art. Not only was he KPD’s senior criminalist, he was one of the nation’s leading fingerprint experts. In crime labs all over the country, technicians were using superglue-fuming gizmos to coat objects with sticky fumes that could pick up latent prints. And the gizmos they were using had been designed and patented by my buddy Art. Even the FBI had taken a shine to Art’s superglue gizmo, which in forensics is like Michael Jordan taking a shine to your basketball shoe. Spread on the counter beside the scope was a batch of photos. Most looked to be crime scene photos showing the interior of a car, a battered blue Impala. One, though, was a school portrait of a girl, maybe eight years old. Little girl, big smile. I recognized the photo: I’d seen it in the paper half a dozen times in the past two weeks, which is how long Stacy Beaman had been missing. She was last seen getting into a rusty blue car. The one in the photos belonged to a registered sex offender who’d been seen near the girl’s school three times in the days before her disappearance.

I looked at Art’s scope. There was a car window crank clamped to the specimen stage. It didn’t take a forensic genius to figure out that the crank had come from the passenger door of that rusted Impala.

“You getting anything?”

“Hell, no. Not even a partial. Not from her, anyhow. His, they’re all over the place. Not surprising—it’s his car—but it’s killing me that we missed hers.”

“Missed ’em? Sounds like you think they’re in there somewhere.”

“
Were
in there; aren’t anymore. Hell,
she
was in there—three witnesses saw her. We just didn’t move fast enough. By the time we got the warrant and got the car, the prints were gone. Vanished into thin air.”

He wasn’t speaking figuratively. It was a phenomenon he had told me about before, one that had baffled investigators in child abductions for many years: why were children’s fingerprints so elusive, so fleeting? It had baffled Art, too, but the second or third time he found himself coming up empty-handed, he had vowed to figure it out. He’d enlisted the brain trust over at Oak Ridge National Lab—he pulled together a team of organic and analytical chemists—plus some parents and kids from a local elementary school. This cobbled-together team had done a research project to ferret out the differences between adult fingerprints and children’s prints. Once Art had gotten the ball rolling, it didn’t take the chemists long to figure out what was going on. Adult prints are oilbased, they found; kids’ prints, on the other hand—before puberty kicks in and activates all those acne-producing oil glands—are water-based. And water evaporates, taking the prints with it. The explanation was simple; the ramifications could be simply heartbreaking.

“How long did it take y’all to get the car?”

“Two days. Which was one day too many. Twenty-four hours sooner, her prints would’ve been there. Her prints
were
there.”

“Witnesses slow to come forward?”

“No. Lawyer quick to tie our hands. Claimed we were harassing his client.”

I had a bad feeling inside. I didn’t want to ask, but something in his face dared me to. “Who’s the lawyer?”

“Three guesses.”

I didn’t need three. “DeVriess.”

“Good ol’ Grease. Your new buddy.” He shot me a black look.

“Look, Art, I hate what he does, and I hate how he does it, as much as you do. Most of the time. If he’s helping a child predator, he’ll burn for that someday. But this stabbing case he’s got me working on, it’s different. The ME screwed it up, plain and simple, and the DA’s covering for him. And if you don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I think you are.” I glared at him, furious that he would tar me with the same brush as DeVriess.

He glared back, then looked away and sighed. “I know. You’re right. I understand what you’re doing. I respect it. I respect
you
—hell, you know that. It’s this little girl—it’s tearing me up. I want to kill the son of a bitch that snatched her, and I want to dismember the son of a bitch that kept us from dusting that car until the kid’s prints had evaporated.”

“I don’t blame you for that.”

“Sorry I jumped on you.”

“Forget it.”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, then blew it out loudly. As if from another life, the phrase “deep cleansing breath” popped into my head, unbidden and unwelcome. Art rubbed his raw fingertips. “So, aside from the pleasure of my cheery conversation, Bill, what brings you here?”

I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out a ziplock plastic bag and handed it to him. “This.”

“What’s the story?”

“It was around the neck of a corpse. Is it what I think it is?”

He squeezed the outline gently in every direction: the narrow side, the long side, and the thin edge. “Probably. Was he a veteran?”

“Not a he. A she. And no, I don’t think so.”

“What’s she doing wearing a military dog tag?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

“And whose is it?”

“That, too.”

“And you brought it to me because you can’t read?”

“Exactly. Also, I’m hoping there might be a print somewhere under that gack.”

“Gack—is that one of those technical anthropology terms you Ph.D.s throw around to impress and intimidate us common folks?” I nodded. Art fingered the tag, frowning. “A print. Sheesh—you don’t ask much, do you?”

“What’s the problem?”

“Well, for starters, we’ve got to figure out how to remove the gack without removing the print.
If
there’s even a print under there. Which I very much doubt.”

“How come?”

“The metal may have corroded or oxidized, though dog tags are supposed to be corrosionproof. If the metal did corrode, it’s undergone both chemical and physical changes that could destroy or distort the print. And if it didn’t corrode, the gack—adipocere, we lowly criminalists call it—will have either absorbed or smeared any prints that might have been there once upon a time.”