Diane picked up the skull and examined the bullet wound. It apparently hit dead center in the left infra-orbital foramen-a hole under the left orbit for nerves and vessels-and exited through the right side on the lambdoidal suture where the parietal and occipital meet. The bullet’s exit took huge fragments of skull with it.
Diane took off her glove and touched a femur with her fingers.
“This ain’t right, is it?” said Grover.
“Grover, you know your bones, don’t you?” said Diane. She remembered when he cleaned the bones of a murder victim for her how he had packaged the bones with all the correct sides together, even the ribs.
“What?” asked Pilgrim. “What is it that you are seeing?”
“For one thing,” said Diane, “look at the photograph. Look how the bones are arranged.”
“He looks to have been in a super flexed position when he died,” said David. “You think he was tied up and executed?”
“No,” said Diane. She smiled at Grover. “What do you notice about the bones, Grover?”
“They’re mighty brown, Dr. Fallon. Mighty brown.”
“Um huh,” murmured Diane. She picked up several bones and studied each. She examined the skull again and the teeth and surfaces inside the skull.
“The bones are awfully clean,” said Jin.
“Aren’t they, though?” said Diane.
“A dental chart isn’t going to help much on him,” said Rankin. “He has no fillings, and the poor fellow had more than a few bad dental caries in his molars. That one in his incisor looks like it might have been ready to abscess.”
“How old is he-or she?” asked Jin.
“He. The pelvis is clearly male. He was probably in his early twenties.” She showed them the rugged surface of his pubis symphysis-where the two hip bones come together in front. “The older you get, the more worn down it is-among other things. And he’s just getting in his third molars.”
“So, Grover,” said Lynn Webber, “what’s with the brown bones?”
“I believe he’s worn down to his bones in a coffin. Don’t you, Dr. Fallon?” he said.
“I do indeed,” said Diane.
“In a coffin?” said David. “What are you saying?”
“Bones in a coffin often get that very brown color to them. Look,” she handed David back the photograph. “This fellow is far too flexed to have been put that way while he was still fleshed out-even if he were bound tight. Look at how the long bones are all parallel and the smaller bones are all in a pile. I believe the skeleton was in a box under one of the students’ bed. I’ll have to run some tests, but these bones are very old, perhaps a hundred years or more.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Rankin. “I guess his killer’s beyond the likes of us now. But that begs the question, just where did a student get the skeleton of a person who appears to have had a proper burial when he died?”
“Good question. If any of the house’s residents are among the survivors, we can ask if they know,” said Diane. “In the meantime, pack this fellow back up. I’ll take him to the osteology lab and work on him later.”
“All that’s real interesting,” said Archie. He was standing behind Jin, looking over his shoulder. “Never knew you could tell so much from just bones.”
“Oh, she can tell you more than that when she gets to really analyzing him,” said Jin.
“You trying to butter me up, Jin?” asked Diane.
“Every chance I get, Boss.” He grinned at her.
Grover began repacking the bones in his careful way-as if the deceased could feel what was happening to them and he wanted to make sure they were comfortable throughout their journey to the afterlife. Everyone else gravitated back to their respective workstations, except Lynn Webber. She hung back. Jin went with David back to the burned-out house site.
“OK, Grover,” Lynn asked her diener, “how did you know about the bones turning brown in a coffin?”
“Like Raymond was always saying,” he replied, referring to his cousin who had been Lynn’s assistant before him, “there are some questions it’s just best not to ask.” He gave her a rare smile, and Lynn laughed out loud.
Diane got the idea that this was the first joke Grover had ever made.
Diane packaged and labeled the bones, which she had tentatively identified as those of Donald Wallace, pending DNA confirmation. How awful for the parents to have raised a son or daughter to adulthood with all their hopes and dreams for that child, and in just one moment of disaster to have nothing left but a few bones-no face to look upon, nothing to see or hold. She did not envy the people whose job it was to inform the parents that their child’s remains had been identified.
By the end of the day all the bodies had been autopsied, and all but eight were identified. Of those remaining eight, the forensics team felt they would be able to ID most of them when everyone had been reported missing. It was, after all, still soon after the tragedy and it might be a week or more before some people were confirmed missing and forensic evidence could be collected for comparison.
Diane had yet to determine how many individuals the disarticulated bones represented. Those would be the hardest to identify. Now that the recovered bodies had been processed, she was going to take the remaining bones back to her lab, which was a more efficient operation than this tent city and had much less distraction.
Toward the end of the day when one of the last bodies was being wheeled in by Pilgrim’s diener, a reporter managed to get inside the tent by waiting until one of the rear entrances was unguarded. He crept in with his camera before anyone noticed him but froze when he saw a charred body in the characteristic pugilistic pose roll past him on a gurney. When the stronger flexor muscles shrink and contract from the fire, the arms and hands strike the pose of a boxer. It is a disturbing sight. The burned flesh is bad enough, but the posed appearance of the cadaver looks all the more horrifying. The reporter stared transfixed with his camera in his hand until one of the policemen led him away.
Diane guessed him to be new to this type of story-apparently he’d never seen firsthand a fiery accident or the aftermath of a house fire. She felt sorry for him. These were images no one wants in their head.
“I guess he’ll never do that again,” said Rankin, the ME the body was headed for.
“But his description of what we’re doing in here is going to be worse,” said Lynn.
“How could he possibly describe anything worse than this has been,” said Brewster Pilgrim.
“You have me there,” said Lynn. She took off her lab coat and gloves. “I’m going to sit down by Archie here and do some paperwork, go home, and soak in a hot bath for several days,” she announced. “Or until we get some more dental charts and x-rays to look at.”
“You know what we haven’t seen?” said Rankin.
“What’s that?” asked Pilgrim.
“Meth mouth. Even if most of the students at the party didn’t know what was going on in the basement, which I think may be true, and were not methamphetamine users, what about the cooks in the basement or some of the residents? Or surely there were some buyers at the party. I haven’t seen anybody with the diseased mouth of a serious crystal meth addict.”
“Neither did I,” agreed Pilgrim.
Lynn looked up from her paperwork. “What are you saying that means, exactly?” she asked.
Rankin shrugged his thin shoulders. “I guess maybe if this was just someone cooking for themselves and a few addicted friends, I’d expect to find some of those friends at the party. All I’ve seen is some pretty good dentition. The worst teeth I’ve seen are in our hundred-year-old fellow. If it was a large-scale operation and the meth was going to a distributor, then there might not be many addicts at the party. That’s all. I’m just thinking out loud.”