My pulse started to race. “First name Freddie-Fred or Frederick, maybe? White male, forty-five, give or take a few years?”
She hesitated. ”I don’t suppose you have a HIPAA release from him, do you?”
“I don’t,” I said, “and I’m afraid he’s too dead to sign one for me. Would you need a subpoena to let me look at his X-rays?”
“Hang on one more minute, Doc.”
I hung on. My cell phone’s low-battery indicator started to beep-draining the battery all the faster.
Finally she came back on the line. “This is such a coincidence, Dr. B.,” she said. “Dr. Shepherd was just saying that he needs to consult with you about that very case.”
I laughed. “Theresa, you’re the best. Can I come over in about ten minutes?”
“I’ve already pulled the file,” she said. “I’ll tell Dr. Shepherd you’re coming to speak with him.”
Fifteen minutes later Ben Shepherd switched on a light box and clipped a cranial X-ray onto the glass. Dr. Sherpherd and I had worked together on several cases, and it was Ben who’d gotten me a portable X-ray machine to use down at the loading dock, so that when decomposing bodies needed to be X-rayed, we didn’t have to haul them inside and stink up his department. I gave a slide lecture every year for the Radiology staff and residents, showing shattered skulls and dismembered bodies. “I like a good gunshot wound,” he’d said to me once. “The beveling of the entry and exit wounds. The lead wipe around the edges. The lead spatter inside the cranium. It’s so much more interesting than a skateboarder’s broken arm.”
Ben studied Parnell’s cranial X-ray. “Hmmm,” he said. “Not much to see. His chart says he had a mild concussion, but of course that doesn’t show up in an X-ray.”
I studied the ghostly image. The teeth weren’t the reason for the X-ray, so the image wasn’t oriented to capture much dental detail. And the skull showed no sign of healed fractures we could try to match to the burned cranium. But there was one hope, I realized, studying the frontal view of the cranium. Just above the brow ridge, in the center of the forehead, a wavy boundary between dark and light traced a delicate scalloped pattern, almost like the lobes of a ginkgo leaf, within the skull. That scalloped line was the upper edge of the frontal sinus, a cavity in the middle of the skull’s three layers of bone. Every person’s frontal sinus was unique, and was therefore a possible means of positive identification-in theory, at least, although the theory hadn’t been applied or tested nearly as exhaustively as identification through fingerprints, dentition, or DNA. I pointed to Parnell’s frontal sinus and traced the edge with the tip of a pen. “If we get lucky piecing this skull back together,” I said, “we might be able to match that, or exclude a match.”
“Whenever you get enough to compare,” he said, “bring it over and we’ll shoot an X-ray.”
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t think we even need to shoot an X-ray. When the cranium burned, the inner layer of bone peeled loose, so the frontal sinus is actually exposed. If we had a copy of the X-ray, we could compare the bone directly with the image.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “I think I just got paged. I’ll be gone a few minutes. If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll figure Theresa’s come in and reshelved that chart.” He gave me a wink, shook my hand, and wished me good luck.
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 c
omparison is?”
“Very,” I said. “No two are the same.”
“You’re sure?”
“I think I’m sure.”
“Who’s researched it?”