I laughed out loud. “Okay, then neither am I,” I said. Two passing students gave me a sidelong glance, then looked quickly away. The nutty professor, I could feel them thinking. I didn’t care. I practically danced down the maze of ramps and stairs leading to the base of the stadium, then took the steps to my office two at a time. When I saw my door, though, my euphoric bubble burst.
The steel frame bowed outward into the curving hallway, while the metal door itself bent inward. Just above and below the knob, the pea-green paint hung in slivers from two spots where a wrecking bar had pried open the door to my office.
Heartsick, I stepped inside. The filing cabinet hung open, its locked drawers also mangled by the pry bar. Forensic case folders lay strewn across the floor, examination reports and field notes and newspaper clippings commingled like some mass grave of moribund murder investigations. Sorting and refilling the mess would take hours, if not days. A single folder lay atop the cabinet. I knew without looking which report it would be: 05–23. Leena Bonds.
When I repacked the skull, sternum, and hyoid in a small hatbox for the trip up to class, I had left the big box containing the rest of her skeleton sitting on my desk. That box, like the scores of others lining the shelves in the adjoining room, measured three feet long by a foot in cross-section. It would be hard to miss. And now, as I whirled to look, I saw that her box was missing. “Damn,” I muttered, setting down the student papers and the hatbox. “Damn.” Then a flood of relief washed over me as I realized that all was not lost. Leena’s skull and hyoid — the key to her identification and her manner of death — were safe in the hatbox. Whoever had come looking for them had gone away frustrated. He hadn’t left empty-handed — the theft of the rest of her skeleton was a bitter loss — but I still held the trump cards, if the case ever came to trial. Thank God I had taken her to class.
Using my handkerchief, I picked up the handset of my phone and dialed the campus police. “This is Dr. Brockton in Anthropology,” I told the dispatcher. “Someone’s just broken into my office and files. They’ve also stolen some skeletal material.” The dispatcher promised to send an officer right away. “Tell him to park at the east end zone access portal,” I told her. “There’s a stairway that leads from there straight up to my office.” She read the directions back to be sure she had them right. “The stolen material is part of a murder case,” I added. “I’ll need to call in some outside cavalry, too. Just so you know.” She promised to give the responding officer a heads-up.
My next call was a quick one to Art. I told him what I thought I should do, and he concurred, so I pressed the switchhook, pressed “8” again for another outside line, and dialed the number on the business card I fished from my wallet. “FBI,” snapped a no-nonsense male voice. I identified myself and asked for Agent Price. “One moment, I’ll see if she’s in,” he said, swiftly parking me on hold.
Ten seconds later, Angela Price picked up. “Dr. Brockton, how are you?” Price’s voice was crisp but cordial. “You’re not calling with a field report from another cockfight, I hope?”
“No, I’m calling from my office at UT. Somebody’s just broken in and stolen the postcranial skeleton from my Cooke County murder case.”
“Postcranial?”
“Everything below the skull, or nearly everything. Luckily, I had the cranium and the hyoid bone — the bone from her throat that shows she was strangled — in a classroom with me. So those are still safe, for the moment.”
“What would you like me to do, Dr. Brockton?”
“Well, you said to let you know if anything else cropped up, and this sure counts as cropping up in my book. Does this merit sending the Bureau’s crime scene wizards over to take a look? Just informally, of course. I’m also wondering if you folks could take temporary custody of the skull and hyoid for me, too? It’s easy to get into a professor’s office, but I can’t imagine somebody breaking into the FBI’s evidence vault.”
“Hang on a second.” She, too, was quick with the “Hold” button; must’ve been emphasized in the curriculum at Quantico. I hung in limbo for several minutes. Just as I was about to hang up and redial, she picked back up. “I’m not trying to dodge you, Dr. Brockton, but Steve Morgan, your former student? He already knows his way around that labyrinth over there. He’s on his way now, and some TBI evidence techs will be right behind him in a mobile crime lab.” She must have sensed some disappointment on my end of the line. “We just don’t have either the jurisdiction or the resources right now, and TBI does. Can you understand that?”
“I reckon I’ll have to.” I regretted the petulance of that as soon as I said it. “Sorry. Yes, of course.”
“Do you feel safe there?”
It hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about that. “Yes, I think so. Thanks for asking. A UT officer should be here any minute. In fact — yes, there’s his car now.”
“Good. Keep in touch. Don’t give up on us.” She rang off without another word, and I met the campus cop at the door. He looked young enough to be a student himself; his gun was drawn and his hand was shaking. When I explained that a TBI team was on the way, his big eyes got even bigger. Mercifully, he holstered the trembling weapon, then scurried back to his patrol car and returned with a roll of crime scene tape. With it, he fashioned a big X across the open doorway. When Steve Morgan arrived ten minutes later, he eyed the crime scene tape and sized up the eager young cop. “Anybody been in here besides Dr. Brockton?”
“No, sir,” said the young patrolman, all but saluting.
“Good work,” smiled Morgan. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks.”
The young man’s face fell. “You don’t need me here?” Morgan looked surprised by the question, maybe faintly amused. I felt bad for the UT officer, but he wasn’t ready to slink away just yet. “I, um, was sort of hoping to watch — to observe—how the TBI works a crime scene.”
Morgan smiled. It hadn’t been all that long since he was standing in my office apologizing for classroom hijinks. “Now that I think about it, Officer, if you’ve got time to stick around and control the perimeter here, the TBI would be much obliged.”
The lad practically trembled with excitement as he fished out his radio. “Unit Three to Dispatch,” he blurted. When the dispatcher responded, he snapped to attention, as if she could see him. “TBI is requesting officer assistance at the scene.”
“Copy that,” drawled the dispatcher, not nearly as impressed as he’d hoped. “Holler when you’re done. We’re starving, and we need somebody to make the deli run.”
It wasn’t long before two TBI techs arrived, light sources and evidence kits in hand, and began surveying the room methodically. Morgan and I stepped out into the hallway, but I leaned into the doorway to watch the techs at work. When they turned on the ultraviolet lights, purple prints showed up on every surface. Most of them were mine, I knew, and probably the rest belonged to graduate students. “Excuse me, sir,” said one of the techs, “can you tell me where this door leads?”
“Sure, it leads to the skeletal collection room.”
He wiggled the knob — it was locked, I knew from checking it myself — and inspected the frame for signs of forced entry. Finding none, he turned his attention back to my desktop.
Morgan cleared his throat to get my attention, then began a litany of questions — when had I left my office, how long was I gone, who knew my class schedule, how many different exits could the thief have taken, did I see anybody or anything suspicious, and so on, and so on. Finally, when he’d exhausted my factual knowledge, he asked the question that had been hanging in the air all along: “So who do you think might have done it?”