Emert leaned in and squinted at the stained bones. “You’re sure it’s human,” he said, “not a bear? I saw the bones of a bear’s paw once, and I’d have sworn it was a hand or a foot.”
“Well, unless these Oak Ridge bears are smart enough to tell time, I’m pretty sure it’s human,” I said, “because it’s wearing a man’s wristwatch.” With the tip of my trowel, I pointed to a disk of corroded metal hidden beneath the wrist.
“Eureka indeed,” said Thornton.
Before I even had a chance to ask her, Miranda left the spot where she’d been working and came to kneel beside me. We’d done this so many times, our teamwork was seamless, wordless, and almost telepathic. I shifted to the upper arm and began excavating toward the shoulder and head; Miranda began working her way along the hand and then down the right leg.
As I troweled my way along the shoulder and toward the area of the head, the dirt began to drop away, revealing the rounded surface of a skull. Working with only the tip of the trowel, I started teasing the soil free. Occasionally I was forced to trade the trowel for small gardening shears, so I could snip away roots that clutched at the bones.
As the back of the skull came into view, I saw a prominent bump at its base. The bump — the external occipital protuberance — had once served as an attachment point for muscles at the back of the neck. The bump’s presence and prominence told me that the skeleton was definitely male, and a robust male, at that. I’d been fairly certain of the sex just from the size and muscle markings on the humerus, not to mention the wristwatch, but the external occipital protuberance confirmed it.
The head was rotated, so that instead of facing straight down, it was turned toward the left shoulder; it was tilted slightly backward at an odd angle as well. For a moment I wondered if the neck had been broken — hard to tell, with all the soft tissue gone — but I quickly rejected that theory in favor of another, simpler explanation: the body had simply been rolled down into the hole, and had come to rest slightly askew.
With three of us excavating, the work moved fairly quickly, but even so, it was midafternoon before we had worked our way around the entire skeleton. Rather than removing bones one at a time, we left the skeleton in place until we had exposed it completely, digging down on all sides so that the bones lay on a raised platform of earth — a technique called “pedestaling.” The soft tissue had decayed completely, as had all the clothing, except for thin, crumbling remnants of the leather soles of the shoes.
One by one, Miranda and I snipped the tulip poplar’s remaining roots, freeing the bones from their grasp. By the time the roots were cut and the stump pulled from above the torso, the stump itself looked skeletal and dismembered.
The torso posed a challenge. Normally a body in a shallow grave would gradually collapse, the vaulted rib cage flattening as the cartilage decayed and the ribs detached from the spine and sternum. In this case, though, a latticework of tree roots supported the ribs.
By this point I’d been on my hands and knees for the better part of four hours, so I groaned my way to my feet and clambered out of the hole we’d dug. Excusing myself from the group, I wandered into the woods, ducked behind a large tree, and took a much-needed bathroom break. Arpad and Miranda headed off in other directions to do likewise. In years past, I’d had female graduate students for whom the lack of bathroom facilities in the field posed problems, ranging from minor inconvenience to full-blown crisis, but Miranda had long since jettisoned most of her modesty about such matters. “Oh, good grief,” I’d once heard her chide a squirming female colleague, “we’re out here scooping up some dead guy’s rotten guts, and you’re too refined to tinkle in the bushes? Get over it already.” From the direction of a pine thicket about fifty yards away, I heard a yelp. “Jeepers,” Miranda shouted, “you guys have no idea how cold it is out here.”
“Next time I’ll bring a propane bun-warmer just for you,” called Arpad.
Once we regrouped, I photographed the skeleton from every angle, including wide shots and close-ups, and then prepared to remove the bones from the pedestaled grave. I asked Miranda to record the inventory of the skeletal elements — the listing of every bone — and Arpad to bag them in evidence bags.
I began with the skull. As I eased it from the ground, lifting and rotating it, I got my first glimpse of the right temporal bone, the oval bone just above the ear. A small, neat hole pierced the bone. The location coincided exactly with the dark circle on the head of the dead man in Leonard Novak’s photographs. “It’s you,” I said to the skull. “It really is you.”
The hole was about a quarter inch in diameter at the outer surface, but it flared wider as it bored through the bone. The beveling was the unmistakable signature of a bullet blasting its way through the skull. Any kid who’s ever shot a BB gun through a plate-glass window has seen the same physics, on a smaller and less lethal scale: as the BB enters the glass, it creates a shock wave that fans out like a cone, fracturing a steadily wider cross-section until it emerges on the other side of the window amid a shower of tiny shards.
The entry wound was about an inch above the opening for the right ear, and judging by its perfect roundness, the bullet had been fired directly toward the center of the cranial vault, since an angled trajectory would have caused an oval hole. There was no exit wound on the left side of the skull. I gave the skull a vigorous shake and was rewarded with a clattering inside. “I think we’ve still got the bullet,” I said. “Probably a.22. The entry wound’s small, and the bullet didn’t have enough oomph to punch out the other side.”
“Had enough oomph to do the job, though,” said one of the detectives.
“Funny thing about a.22,” I said. “Seems like a sissy gun, but the bullets tend to ricochet around inside the skull and really chew up the brain. Sometimes a.22 does more damage than a larger-caliber bullet that just blasts right through.”
“Reckon what he was doing,” said Emert, “when that bullet hit him?”
“Trying to steal atomic secrets,” said Thornton. “Or trying to keep them from being stolen.”
“Or making a pass at the wrong guy’s wife or girlfriend,” I said.
“Pleading for his life,” said Miranda.
We had not unearthed any artifacts besides the watch in the process of pedastaling the skeleton. Now, though, as we removed and bagged the bones, I came across seven small objects embedded in the soil. Six were metal buttons — one in the region of the chest, where a left shirt pocket would have been; three along the midline of the body, spaced between the chest and the pelvis; and one at each ankle. The seventh object, at the waist, was a rectangular plastic buckle, olive green, with a rotting bit of canvas webbing still threaded through it. As I handed each object to Arpad, as carefully as if it were a precious gem recovered from a pharaoh’s tomb, the law enforcement officers crowded around to inspect them. At the sight of the buckle, Emert voiced what I’d been thinking. “This guy was wearing army coveralls,” he said. “I’ve still got my dad’s in a chest in the attic.” There were no coins or keys in the grave, which led me to believe that the pockets had been emptied. I was therefore not surprised, though I was disappointed, that the grave contained no dog tags.
“So we’ve got a dead G.I. from World War II here,” said Emert. “Swell. There were only, what, ten thousand of those here in Oak Ridge?”
I thought we were finished — through the bones, down to the dirt — when the tip of my trowel snagged on a clump of clay. But it wasn’t clay. A chunk of it broke off, and when it did, it revealed odd striations within the soil. Looking closer, I began to discern a lump, a shape, about a foot long and slightly narrower, somewhat paler than the rest of the red clay lining the grave. I probed gently at the edge I had exposed. The striations were quite thin — paper-thin, I realized, as the proportions of the rectangle registered in my brain. “I don’t know what this guy was doing when he died,” I said, “but it seems to have involved a mighty thick stack of papers.”