Point of Origin

'All right, we need to pick up 395 and head over to Constitution,' I thought out loud as I watched signs and ignored urgent drivers riding my bumper and darting around me because going the speed limit wasn't fast enough. 'What we don't want to do is go too far and end up on Maine Avenue. I've done that before.'

I flicked on my right turn signal.

'On a Friday night when I was coming up to see Lucy.'

'A good way to get carjacked,' Marino said.

'Almost did.'

'No shit?' He looked over at me. 'What'd you do?'

'They started circling my car, so I floored it.'

'Run anybody over?'

'Almost.'

'Would you have kept on going, Doc? I mean, if you had run one of them over?'

'With at least a dozen of his buddies left, you bet your boots.'

'Well, I'll tell you one thing,' he said, looking down at his feet. 'They ain't worth much.'

Fifteen minutes later we were on Constitution, passing the Department of the Interior while the Washington Monument watched over the Mall, where tents had been set up to celebrate African American art, and venders sold Eastern Shore crabs and T-shirts from the backs of small trucks. The grass between kiosks was depressingly layered with yesterday's trash, and every other minute another ambulance screamed past. We had driven in circles several times, the Smithsonian coiled in the distance like a dark red dragon. There was not a parking place to be found and, typically, streets were one way or abruptly stopped in the middle of a block, while others were barricaded, and harried commuters did not yield even if it meant your running into the back of a parked bus.

'I tell you what I think we should do,' I said, turning on Virginia Avenue. 'We'll valet park at the Watergate and take a cab.'

'Who the hell would want to live in a city like this?' Marino griped.

'Unfortunately, a lot of people.'

'Talk about a place that's screwed up,' he went on. 'Welcome to America.'

The uniformed valet at the Watergate was very gracious and did not seem to think it odd when I gave him my car and asked him to hail a cab. My precious cargo was in the backseat, packed in a sturdy cardboard box filled with Styrofoam peanuts. Marino and I were let out at Twelfth and Constitution at not quite noon, and climbed the crowded steps of the National Museum of Natural History. Security had been intensified since the Oklahoma bombing, and the guard let us know that Dr Vessey would have to come down and escort us upstairs.

While we waited, we perused an exhibit called Jewels of the Sea, browsing Atlantic thorny oysters and Pacific lions' paws while the skull of a duckbill dinosaur watched us from a wall. There were eels and fish and crabs in jars, and tree snails and a mosasaur marine lizard found in a Kansas chalk bed. Marino was beginning to get bored when the bright brass elevator doors opened and Dr Alex Vessey stepped out. He had changed little since I had seen him last, still slight of build, with white hair and prepossessed eyes that, like those of so many geniuses, were perpetually focused somewhere else. His face was tan and perhaps more lined, and he still wore the same thick black-framed glasses.

'You're looking robust,' I said to him as we shook hands.

'I just got back from vacation. Charleston. I trust you've been there?' he said as the three of us boarded the elevator.

'Yes,' I replied. 'I know the chief there very well. You remember Captain Marino?'

'Of course.'

We rose three levels above the eight-ton African bush elephant in the rotunda, the voices of children floating up like wisps of smoke. The museum was, in truth, little more than a huge granite warehouse. Some thirty thousand human skeletons were stored in green wooden drawers stacked from floor to ceiling. It was a rare collection used to study people of the past, specifically Native Americans who of late had been determined to get their ancestors' bones back. Laws had been passed, and Vessey had been through hell on the Hill, his life's work halfway out the door and headed back to the not-so-wild west.

'We've got a repatriation staff that collects data to supply to this group and that,' he was saying as we accompanied him along a crowded, dim corridor. 'Respective tribes have to be informed as to what we've got, and it's really up to them to determine what's done. In another couple years, our American Indian material may be back in the earth again, only to be dug up again by archaeologists in the next century, my guess is.'

He talked on as he walked.

'Every group is so angry these days they don't realize how much they're hurting themselves. If we don't learn from the dead, who do we learn from?'

'Alex, you're singing to the choir,' I said.

'Yeah, well, if it was my great-grandfather in one of these drawers,' Marino retorted, 'I'm not so sure I'd feel too good about that.'

'But the point is we don't know who is in these drawers, and neither do any of the people who are upset,' said Vessey. 'What we do know is that these specimens have helped us know a lot more about the diseases of the American Indian population, which is clearly a benefit to those now feeling threatened. Oh well, don't get me started.'

Where Vessey worked was a series of small laboratory rooms that were a jumble of black counter space and sinks, and thousands of books and boxes of slides, and professional journals. Displayed here and there were the usual shrunken heads and shattered skulls and various animal bones mistaken as human. On a corkboard were large, painful photographs of the aftermath of Waco, where Vessey had spent weeks recovering and identifying the decomposing burned remains of Branch Davidians.

'Let's see what you've got for me,' Vessey said.

I set my package on a counter and he slit the tape with a pocket knife. Styrofoam rattled as I dug out the cranium, then the very fragile lower portion of the skull that included the bones of the face. I set these on a clean blue cloth and he turned on lamps and fetched a lens.

'Right here,' I directed him to the fine cut on bone. 'It corresponds with hemorrhage in the temporal area. But around it, the flesh was too burned for me to tell anything about what sort of injury we were dealing with. I didn't have a clue until I found this on the bone.'

'A very straight incision,' he said as he slowly turned the skull to look at it from different angles. 'And we're certain this wasn't perhaps accidentally done during autopsy, when, for example, the scalp was reflected back to remove the skull cap?'

'We're certain,' I said. 'And as you can see by putting the two together' - I fit the cranium back in place - 'the cut is about an inch and a half below where the skull was opened during autopsy. And it's an angle that would make no sense if one were reflecting back the scalp. See?'

My index finger was suddenly huge as I looked through the lens and pointed.

'This incision is vertical versus horizontal,' I made my case.

'You're right,' he said, and his face was vibrant with interest. 'As an artifact of autopsy, that would make no sense at all, unless your morgue assistant was drunk.'

'Could it be maybe some kind of defense injury?' Marino suggested. 'You know, if someone was coming at her with a knife. They struggle and her face gets cut?'

'Certainly that's possible,' Vessey said as he continued to process every millimeter of bone. 'But I find it curious that this incision is so fine and exact. And it appears to be the same depth from one end to the other, which would be unusual if one is swinging a knife at someone. Generally, the cut to bone would be deeper where the blade struck first, and then more shallow as the blade traveled down.'

He demonstrated, an imaginary knife cutting straight down through air.

'We also have to remember that a lot depends on the assailant's position in relation to the victim when she was cut,' I commented. 'Was the victim standing or lying down? Was the assailant in front or behind or to one side of her or on top of her?'