“I know,” she agreed grimly. “Everywhere.”
“But if,” I went on, “for some reason I decided to lie down instead, I think I’d probably prop my head up on the arm of the sofa. But see how vertical the hole is?” She nodded. “That means her head was lying flat on the sofa, and the gun was straight up and down. That’s a lot of weight to hold at an odd angle. Seems strange. Wrong.”
She nodded grimly. “Everything about it seems strange and wrong.”
But apart from the nagging sense that the angle of the shot was unusual, what did we have, really? Nothing, I was forced to admit as we reboxed the sofa cushions and sections of mattress, refolded the bed frame, and set the sofa aside so we could pack the ravaged layers of flooring once again. With the sofa removed, the circle of blue tarp showed through the hole in the carpet and pad and waferboard. The plastic was bright and clean, cheerful and mocking. I stared at it in frustration, and then with curiosity and the glimmer of an idea. “So your sister’s house,” I said, looking at the splintered edges of the subflooring, “it must not have been on a concrete slab.”
“No. Crawl space.”
I turned to Joe. “Did y’all by any chance do any cleaning under the house?”
“Sure,” he said. “If you leave contaminated dirt in the crawl space, it smells like somebody died under there. Makes the whole house stink, and that just traumatizes the family all over again.” Suddenly he smacked himself in the forehead. “Duh, I’m sorry — I got so interested in watching you work, I forgot to bring you the dirt. There’s two boxes of it in the other trailer; I’ll bring ’em right over.”
I asked him to bring me a clean, empty box, too, and I stretched the wire screen across the top of this one, then folded the edges of the screen over the edges of the box and stapled them to hold the screen taut. As Angie slowly dumped dirt onto it, I jiggled the box and brushed the dirt across and through the mesh, sifting the soil, prospecting for nuggets of bone. There was nothing in the first box except screws, nails, bottle caps, and old fragments of broken bottles. I was nearly through screening the second box of dirt when two small objects danced into view on the shimmying mesh. The first, about an inch long and half an inch in diameter, was the lead slug from a shotgun shell. I was glad we’d found it, because if we hadn’t, I’d worry that we’d failed to search thoroughly, but I wasn’t sure the slug would shed all that much light on things: there was no question that Kate had been shot, nor any question about what gun had fired the shot; the only question was who had pulled the trigger, and I knew the slug couldn’t answer that for us.
The second object was a piece of bone about the size and shape of a pencil eraser. “Now, that’s interesting,” I said to Angie.
“What is it?”
I plucked it from the dirt with my gloved fingers. “It’s the dens epistrophei.”
“Um… refresh my memory?”
“The dens epistrophei is a little peg of bone that sticks up from the top of the second cervical vertebra, the vertebra called the axis. This peg fits into a notch on the atlas, the first cervical vertebra, to form a pivot point.” I rotated my head to the right, to the left. “When I do that, my atlas is pivoting on the axis, rotating around the dens epistrophei.”
“And what does finding it tell us?”
“I think it tells us more about the angle of the gun. Hang on a second.” I sifted the last of the dirt, and sure enough, I found a second shard, one whose concave surface nested perfectly with the convex curve of the dens. “This is the back of the atlas. It’s not as hard as the dens epistrophei, but it was shielded by it.” I showed Angie and Joe how the pieces fit together. “Normally a shotgun suicide blows off the parietal and occipital bones — the top and the back of the head,” I explained. “I’ve never seen one where the neck got blasted, too.” I squinted at the bones. “Hard to say for sure, but it looks like there might be a wipe of lead on the dens. See that dark streak?”
Walsh leaned in to take a look and asked, “And would that tell you something important?”
“Maybe,” I answered. “It would tell us that the neck was destroyed by the projectile itself, not by the shock wave around it. It helps you figure out the angle of the gun, and whether the angle is consistent with a self-inflicted wound. If we were doing this at the Regional Forensic Center in Knoxville, I’d X-ray these bone fragments to see if that streak really is lead. But anyhow, I suppose we should turn this over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as is, and let them do the test for lead.”
“Maybe. If they’re willing.” Angie sighed. “Thing is, the evidentiary chain is all shot to hell already. I mean, you know and I know that nobody’s messed with this stuff since it got hauled away from the scene. But legally, in terms of admissible evidence, that wouldn’t count for jack.”
“We sealed those boxes right there at the house,” Walsh protested, “and they’ve been locked in the trailer ever since.”
“But in court,” she pointed out, “that wouldn’t carry any real weight, would it?” I shrugged, but she had a valid point. “For instance, what would your devilish lawyer pal — Grease? — what would he do about this, if he were defending Kate’s husband?”
“He’d rip you and me and Joe here to shreds,” I conceded. “In fact, by the time he was done, he’d probably have the jury believing that the three of us had killed your sister, so we could frame your saintly brother-in-law.” I hesitated before asking the question that had suddenly reared its ugly, demoralizing head. “But if what we’re doing isn’t going to be admissible anyhow, why are we doing it?”
“Well, at the risk of contradicting myself, I think that even if it’s not admissible, it might be persuasive,” she argued. “Might persuade the judge to sign an exhumation order. Might persuade the GBI to investigate, and maybe they’d find evidence that would be admissible. So that’s one reason we’re doing it. The other reason is, I need to know what happened to Kate. If I’m wrong in thinking Don killed her, I need to let go of that idea and face the fact that she shot herself. But if I’m right — and I’m pretty sure I’m right — I want to know for damn sure.”
“It might never be possible to know for damn sure,” I pointed out.
“Maybe not. But I’m not ready to give up on that possibility yet. Not ready to give up on Kate yet.”
I admired her loyalty and bravery. “Me neither. Let’s see if this is enough to get us an exhumation order, and maybe a nibble of interest from the GBI. Now let’s get out of these bunny suits and get me to the airport.”
Chapter 4
“Holy shit.” The Tallahassee airport security screener looked like he’d seen a ghost when my bag went through the X-ray machine. I’d tried to warn him—“You’re going to see a human skull in that bag,” I’d said — but instead of taking in my meaning, he’d simply looked annoyed and told me to please step through the metal detector. By the time I stepped through, he was frantically summoning his supervisor. The pair huddled briefly over the screen, then the supervisor radioed for his boss. While awaiting the arrival of higher authority, he motioned me forward with his left hand — and laid his right hand on his weapon.
“Sir, we’ll need to open your bag,” he said. I was amused by the contrast between his mundane words and his panicky tone, but I figured it would be unwise to laugh at a man who had one hand on a gun.
“Be my guest,” I said, in what I hoped was a soothing, I’m-not-a-serial-killer voice. “I’m a forensic anthropologist — a bone detective — and I’m a consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. That skull is from an FDLE case I’m working on.” I paused to see if the wind had shifted any; he still looked suspicious, but no longer openly hostile. “There’s a TBI badge and an FDLE evidence receipt in the side pocket of my bag. I’m taking the skull up to Tennessee to get some help identifying it.” At the rate this was going, though, I wasn’t feeling confident about making my flight and getting to Knoxville, at least not on the
flight that was scheduled to leave in forty minutes.
The supervisor eyed me with continuing suspicion, but his hand moved away from his gun. “I’ll still need to open the bag.”
“Of course. The skull is old and fragile, so if you unwrap it, please be really careful. You might want gloves, too.” They looked back and forth from the bag to my face. Behind him, I noticed another uniformed TSA official hustling toward us. It didn’t take a lot of brainpower to deduce that this guy was in charge. “I think your boss is here,” I said, nodding toward the fast-approaching newcomer. The two supervisors conferred briefly in hushed voices, then the higher-level manager gestured toward my bag. His underling tugged the zipper hesitantly, as if the bag might contain a live snake, and gingerly removed the cardboard box from inside and raised the lid. Within the box, the skull was swaddled in a layer of bubble wrap and surrounded by foam packing peanuts. They leaned down and peered in, shooing peanuts aside with gloved fingers. “It’s very fragile,” I pleaded. “Please be careful. If it gets broken, it’ll be harder to identify the victim and catch the killer.”
My words finally seemed to sink in. The boss looked up. “You say you’ve got some sort of documentation about this?”
“I’ve got an evidence receipt from FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. I’ve also got my consultant’s badge from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” He pondered this, then unzipped the side pocket I was pointing toward. He fished out the papers and the leather wallet that held my TBI shield.
“So you’re Dr. William Brockton, PhD?” It was clear, from the incisive questioning, why this one was in charge.
“I am. I teach anthropology at the University of Tennessee. When I’m not causing trouble for the TSA.”
The joke seemed to cut some of the tension. “Tennessee,” mused the midlevel guy. “What kind of football team is Tennessee gonna have this year?”
“Probably pretty good. But probably not as good as Florida’s.”
“Probably not,” agreed the big boss. He gave me a smile that combined smugness, superiority, and pity. And in the pitying part of that smile, I saw that after enduring a few more barbs about football, the loser unlucky enough to live in Tennessee would make his flight after all.
* * *
The rusty venetian blinds in the windows of the bone lab were shut — at least, as shut as their fraying cords and tattered tapes allowed them to be — but the morning sun still poured through gaps where slats had been broken or bent during the past forty years. On hot mornings, even early in May, the stadium’s steel girders and masonry foundations worked together like an immense solar oven, collecting the sun’s heat and radiating it through the south-facing wall of windows in the bone lab. During pleasant months of the year, the bank of tables lining those windows offered plenty of daylight for studying bones, but during summer and winter, the extremes of heat and cold along the expanse of glass tended to drive students as far away from the windows as possible.
Miranda Lovelady was putting bones — the bones of the golf-club victim, I noticed — in a long cardboard box as I entered the lab. The box was three feet in length, with a one-foot-square cross section. We had thousands of such boxes stacked on shelves beneath the stands of the stadium. Each box contained the bones of a human skeleton, cleaned and neatly arranged. Several thousand of the skeletons were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Native American skeletons from the Great Plains, which I’d excavated decades before, early in my career. Another thousand were modern skeletons from bodies donated to the Body Farm over the past twenty years. And a few hundred contained the broken, burned, shot, or stabbed skeletal remains of murder victims.
A small, separate compartment at one end of each box held the skull — in the case of the box Miranda was repacking, the putter-punched skull — while the main compartment housed all other bones (and, in this box, the broken putter). The long bones of the legs and arms lay parallel, the ribs spooned up together, and the vertebrae clumped, strung together on cord like bony beads on a warrior’s necklace. As the door closed behind me, Miranda looked up and asked, “How was your weekend?” Then she looked down at the box in my hand and added, “Whatcha got?”
“Fine,” I answered. “And a skull from Florida.”
“Florida? Who sent you a skull from Florida?”
“Nobody. I went and got it.” Her eyebrows shot up in an interrogatory manner. “I made a quick trip to Tallahassee. Got there Thursday. Came back Friday night. Spent the weekend cleaning this.”
“Do tell.”
“Angie St. Claire — the forensic tech from the state crime lab — called Friday and asked me to help look into her sister’s death. That’s why Angie left here so suddenly on Wednesday.” Miranda nodded and opened her mouth to speak, but I didn’t give her a chance. “Anyhow, while I was down there for that, a sheriff’s deputy brought in this kid’s skull from one of the rural counties outside Tallahassee. I thought I’d ask Joanna to do a reconstruction.”
Miranda clearly wanted to ask more, but I excused myself to talk to Joanna, and Miranda left with the bone box, presumably to reshelve it in the collection room.
Joanna Hughes was working at a small table—“her” table — on the opposite side of the room. Joanna’s table was unlike any other in the lab. Most of them were covered with trays of bones or skeletal fragments: bits of skull on one, for instance; gnawed ribs on another; a jumble of vertebrae on a third. Joanna’s table, by contrast, held beautiful human heads or, more precisely, beautiful clay sculptures of heads. Joanna was an artist who restored faces to the skulls of the unknown dead.
As I crossed the lab, Joanna leaned back from her current project, frowned, and then grabbed the nose and twisted it completely off the face.
“Ouch,” I said. “That’s gotta hurt.”
Joanna turned and smiled, waving at me with the wad of clay she’d just amputated. “He was getting too nosy for his own good,” she cracked.
Unlike the handful of other people in the lab, Joanna wasn’t a student; she had an undergraduate degree in forensic art — a degree program she’d created herself, through persistent and articulate pleas to the Art and Anthropology departments. She’d taken courses in anatomy, anthropology, and art, with one goal in mind: to restore faces to the dead. Somehow she’d known, even as a child, that this was the work she felt called to do. Joanna’s reconstructions were a last-ditch effort to identify someone once all other avenues had been exhausted. If her combination of art and skill allowed her to re-create the face of someone who’d gone missing or been killed years before, there was a chance — a slim chance, but better than none at all — that someone might see a picture of her work, in a newspaper or on television, and call the police to say, “Hey, I know who that was.” So far, she’d done twelve reconstructions, and five of those had led to identifications. In some fields that success rate would seem dismally low, but in the real world of cold-case investigations, it was remarkably high. She was batting over .400, and the work was a lot more meaningful than swatting a ball over a center-field fence. The woman was good. Very, very good.
I wished the department could put Joanna on salary, because her work was important and her skills were rare. The sad reality, though, was that we just didn’t have the money. So she worked for peanuts, charging law enforcement agencies a pittance for the time it took to do their reconstructions. Tight as law enforcement budgets were, I suspected that Joanna occasionally did reconstructions for free, if the investigator — or the skull itself — told her a particularly moving tale.
Joanna had made a believer out of me two years earlier. I’d been contacted by a family whose matriarch had gone missing twenty-five years before. The woman had disappeared one fall, and when a female skeleton was found the following spring, it seemed logical for investigators to think that the skeleton was hers. The medical examiner had concluded that the bones were indeed hers, and she’d been buried in the family plot. The identification wasn’t conclusive, though,
because the case happened before the advent of DNA testing. So, a quarter of a century later — after the O. J. Simpson trial and the show CSI had made DNA a household word — the family had asked to have the bones exhumed and DNA samples taken. After examining the bones — which showed me nothing that contradicted the medical examiner’s identification — I pulled a couple teeth and cut two cross sections of bone, which the family planned to send to a DNA lab, along with cheek swabs from one of the woman’s daughters and one of her granddaughters. After taking the samples, I put the bones back in the coffin and — within hours after it was unearthed — it was reburied. Several months later, startling news arrived: the DNA lab said that the skeletal woman in the coffin was not, in fact, the woman the M.E. and the headstone proclaimed her to be. The daughters and granddaughters of the missing woman were not, the lab reported, genetically related to the woman buried in the family cemetery. The district attorney reopened the case of the missing woman, as well as a second case: the case of the mysterious, unidentified woman in the coffin.
That’s when Joanna had entered the picture. We exhumed the coffin a second time, and this time I brought the mystery woman’s skull back to UT. Joanna studied its shape, then spent two weeks sculpting the face she thought had once resided on the skull. When I walked into the lab and saw her finished handiwork, I was stunned. Guided by nothing more than the shape of the skull and the information that it was a middle-aged white female, Joanna had sculpted a face that bore an astonishing resemblance to one of the missing woman’s daughters. Could the resemblance really be purely coincidental? Or was it possible the DNA lab had erred? Eventually — many months and many complications later — we learned that the DNA lab had botched the analysis… and that the M.E. and the headstone had been right all along. If not for Joanna’s remarkable reconstruction, though, the investigation would surely have continued down the wrong path, and we’d never have learned the truth.