The Bone Yard (Body Farm 6)

“Angie and I were just taking a look at the skull,” I said. “Angie, you want to tell him what we know so far about the sex, race, and age?”

“Me?”

“You. It’s a pop quiz, to see if you were paying attention.” She took the skull from my hand and drew a deep breath, then succinctly recapped everything I’d said about the cranial sutures, the muscle markings, the maxillary sutures, and the ambiguous gender. “Good job,” I commended. “You made a hundred.” She smiled slightly and flushed a faint shade of pink.

Vickery removed the cigar, studying the damp, bitten end as if it might contain some guidance. “So we’ve got a Johnny or a Janie Doe, teenager or less. What more can you tell from the skull? Any idea how this kid died?”

“We were just about to get to that,” I said. I took the skull back from Angie and pointed to the left cheek. “You can see that the zygomatic arch, which connects the cheekbone to the temporal bone, has been gnawed off. There are fresh chew marks at both ends of the arch.” Angie and Vickery both leaned in to peer at the damage. “Now look at the right cheek. What do you see?”

“The arch is missing there, too,” said Vickery. “But it doesn’t look like Fido’s to blame for that.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The right zygomatic arch wasn’t chewed. It was snapped.”

“And it’s darker than the chew marks,” Angie observed.

“And what do you suppose that means?”

“It happened a while back?” I nodded but kept quiet, to encourage her to finish the thought. “At the time of death?”

“Yes. Probably. More or less,” I said. “It’s stained the same color as the rest of the skull. That means the bone was already broken when the soft tissue began decomposing. But see how the edges of this break are a little less jagged than the edges of the other zygomatic arch, the one the dog snapped? It’s possible that this break was already beginning to heal before the kid died.”

Vickery frowned, causing his cigar to twitch in his mouth. “What does that tell you about the timing of the injury? Can you be any more specific?”

“Not much more specific,” I answered. “Antemortem or perimortem — before death, or right around the time of death.”

Vickery nibbled on his cigar. “Couldn’t it have happened sometime afterward? Like, when the body was buried or dumped out of a car or whatever?”

“Never say never,” I answered. “But I’m pretty sure this fracture occurred days or even weeks before death. And I’m pretty sure the other fracture was the fatal one.”

Angie and Vickery both looked down at the skull, then up at me. Angie spoke first. “What other fracture?”

“This one,” I said, tracing a thin line that angled up the skull from just above the left ear, up through the temporal bone and into the parietal, which formed the top of the cranial vault. I’d rubbed a thumbnail over the line; the break in the surface was so subtle I could barely feel it, but it was there, and it showed no signs of healing, so I knew that it had occurred at or near the time of death.

Vickery spoke through cigar-clamping teeth. “So it’s likely, or at least possible, that this kid was murdered?” I nodded. “May I?”

“Sure.” Before I had a chance to add “but you might want gloves,” he took the skull from me and raised it close to his face, his eyes ranging up and down the fine, dark crack. He rotated it, scrutinizing the crack from all angles; he tried peering through the eye orbits to see the inner surface of the cranial vault, but the openings were too small.

He handed the skull back to me, and took his cigar out of his mouth. “Eww,” said Angie. Vickery gave her a puzzled look, then followed her gaze down to the cigar he now held between contaminated fingers.

“Eww,” he echoed. “I hate it when I do that.” He tossed the cigar into a trash can, then washed his hands with sanitizer from a pump dispenser mounted on the wall beside the door. “No offense, Doc,” he began, pointing at the fracture, “but this doesn’t look all that bad to me. I mean, it’s not like the skull’s bashed in. You certain this would be enough to kill him?”

I shrugged. “Certain, no; confident, yes. A defense lawyer could probably hire another anthropologist or a pathologist to disagree in court. But on the inside of the skull, right about here”—with my pinky, I traced a line that crossed the fracture at its midpoint—“runs the middle meningeal artery. The fracture could have ruptured that artery, causing a cerebral hemorrhage. Obviously something killed this kid, and my money’s on this fracture.”

Vickery fished a tan leather case from an inside coat pocket and extracted a fresh cigar. “Okay, I’ll buy it. For now. Until we find bullet-riddled bones or a knife in the ribs.” He unwrapped the cigar, tossed the cellophane in the trash, and began gnawing on the end of the replacement.

“Mind if I ask you something, Agent Vickery?”

“I do if you call me ‘Agent Vickery.’ I don’t if you call me ‘Stu.’ ”

“Okay, Stu. Do you ever light ’em? The cigars?”

“Never. And it’s not just because every place has banned smoking. Truth is, I hate the smell of cigar smoke. But I like the smell of cured tobacco. Like the flavor, too, in small doses.” He gave the cigar an appreciative chomp. “But chewing tobacco — doing dip — that is one nasty habit.”

“You’ll get no argument from me about that,” I said, thinking back to my close Copenhagen encounter of the nausea-inducing kind. I chose not to point out that Stu had a thin line of brownish drool trickling from the corner of his mouth.

It’s possible he noticed me looking at it, or maybe he simply felt a tickle on his chin; in any event, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed. “So,” he said to Angie, “did you ask him yet?”

Angie turned red. Silence hung like a soap bubble in the air, so I popped it. “Ask me what?”

“Um…” She hesitated. “Ask if you’d consult with us on this case.”

“Which case? This case?” I raised the skull into the center of the triangular space defined by the three of us. Angie nodded. “Do you mean in a bigger way? More than a take-a-quick-look sort of way?” She nodded again. “Don’t you have forensic anthropologists in Florida who can help you with this?”

She looked sheepish. “We’re a little shorthanded right now.”

“What about Tony Falsetti,” I said, “over in Gainesville? Doesn’t he do a lot of work for FDLE?” Tony, who was a Knoxville native and a fine forensic anthropologist, had been hired some years ago to teach at the University of Florida. My impression was that his lab at UF worked with Florida investigators in the same way my own lab consulted with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and other agencies.

“He’s gone,” she said. “To Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia. I sent him an e-mail, and he wrote me back from Sarajevo. He’s working on a huge project to identify people killed in the Balkan civil war. They’re searching for his replacement, but they haven’t filled the position yet.”