After an hour's careful unfolding and matching, I managed to reassemble a pair of trousers, a suit jacket, and a long-sleeved shirt. As I looked at his clothes, I began to imagine the man who had worn them had been a large, heavyset man. Fat? Or perhaps he'd just been big-boned and well-muscled. So far, all we knew was that he'd worn big clothes. A simple measuring tape told us that his jacket measured 58 inches around the chest, while it had taken a 48-inch waistband to circle his waist. His arms and his legs were long, and his neck was big too, almost 18 inches in circumference.
Although the threads connecting these panels were gone, I could still see the seams and darts, and it appeared as if the suit had been hand-tailored to a custom fit. Evidently, he'd been stylishly dressed, but for what era? After we'd finished recovering all these things yesterday, I would have guessed that they'd lain in their secret grave for at least ten years. But I associated this type of tailored polyester suit with the mid-1960s. (Lambers, of course, had never seen one at all!)
“This guy dresses like a Cold-War Russian,” I found myself saying, and then asked myself what had brought that image to mind. Something in the cut of his suit recalled for me TV footage of foreign dignitaries meeting with President John F. Kennedy, something old-fashioned and European…
I pulled out a pencil and a couple of sheets of paper and tapped into my rusty medical-illustration skills. As Lambers called out the measurements of each garment, I sketched out labeled diagrams of the suit jacket, the trousers, and the shirt, complete with notes about the placement and size of buttons, pockets, pleats, even the epaulets on the shoulders of the shirt, and not forgetting the type and manufacturer of the zipper. As Lambers watched in fascination, I went online to search vintage clothing sites.
I showed him a few images. “What do you think?” I asked him. “1960s? 1970s? We're getting back there, anyway.”
Lambers shook his head. “If he was killed way back then, we'll never find out who did it.”
I sighed. “Right now I'm more concerned with figuring out who he was.”
“That won't be easy either.”
He was right, of course. It was hard enough identifying a pile of bones that had lain in the woods for a year or more. If this man had been there for two or three decades…
“Anyway, the clothes give us somewhere to start,” I said. I shot off a few e-mails to the names I'd seen on the vintage clothing sites we'd just browsed. An expert opinion might at least pinpoint the year these clothes had been in fashion. That wouldn't be definitive-the victim might have stolen the clothes, or borrowed them, or bought them from a thrift shop. He might even be the kind of guy who wore the same suit for decades. But, as I'd told Lambers, it was a place to start.
We moved on to the gold pen and pencil set. When I gently scraped away the dirt from the pen's clip, I began to make out a faint logo: C-R-O-S-S.
“It's a Cross pen,” I said to Lambers. I could tell by his blank look that the name meant nothing. “Cross,” I repeated. “It's a kind of upscale brand. For people who care about that kind of thing, it's maybe the Rolls-Royce of pens. Each one of them is individually made, and all by hand. A friend of mine wanted to get one for her nephew's graduation, and she only spent about a hundred dollars, but she told me that some models cost more than five hundred.”
Lambers's eyes widened. “For a pen?”
I pointed to the next evidence bag. “And a pencil. Solid gold, matching set…” I made a mental note to contact the Cross company. Maybe they could tell me when this particular style had been on the market.
I was eager to get on to the keys and the coin, but it would take hours to clean off the corrosion that had been building up over the years, and I was even more eager to look at the bones. By now, my examining room was crammed full of gurneys stacked with evidence, notepaper, and cameras, so I set to clearing some space while Lambers finished with his notes and pictures. Once again my hands went on autopilot while my mind roamed free. I could almost see our victim now: a wealthy man, well dressed in a business suit, leather gloves, and knee socks with garters. He had a faintly European air, and he carried himself like a man who was used to the best: a monogrammed money clip, a gold Cross pen and pencil set. For some reason, he'd gone or been taken down to an isolated spot on the banks of the Ohio. And there was something else: Someone had held a gun to his skull and pulled the trigger.
By now I'd moved all the other evidence onto the counters lining the periphery of the lab, and I was ready to start with the bones. As I took each one out of its evidence bag, I laid it out on the gurney, so that a disarticulated skeleton gradually emerged. I finally added the skull and mandible. Our guy's face and jaws were still covered in debris from the grave, but I knew from yesterday's quick field exam that he'd had several gold crowns and fillings in his mouth. The x-rays that Mark had taken yesterday had revealed more fillings, bright white spots on the film that were the same density as the bullet.
Now, as I carefully brushed away the sand, mud, and traces of lime, I was treated to another welcome surprise. These teeth had not only been crowned and filled with gold, they'd been extremely clean and well cared for, with no evidence of active decay at the time of death.
“This was no derelict,” I told Lambers. “He had money right up until he died.” So far, we might have been dealing with someone who'd once been wealthy but who had gone on to face hard times. I'd seen many such cases before: a man who becomes destitute after years of comfortable living; the daughter of wealthy parents who pay for her expensive composite fillings only while she lives at home. You see signs of expensive dental care, yes, but you can also read the hard times that came later: the cavities, the buildup of tartar and calculus, the gum disease. You might even notice a missing tooth or two.
Not with this guy. Although decades of chewing had ground down the surfaces of his teeth a little, he had maintained a nice smile until the day he died-a nice, expensive smile.
I looked more closely at the man's skull, trying to imagine his face. His head was large and well rounded, with a square jaw that fit well into the temporomandibular joint, the place where the mandible attaches to the skull. That joint showed no signs of arthritis, so he'd had no trouble chewing with those well-kept teeth. The bridge of his nose was formed by exceptionally large, prominent nasal bones. I pictured a big protruding nose, and then a huge forehead, the flesh jutting out to cover the heavy brow ridge. He'd have had a rugged, masculine face, with well-proportioned features and a sparkling smile. Judging by the clothes he'd worn, he'd had a significant amount of flesh covering these big bones. I noticed the well-defined muscle insertions, which usually indicate big, strong muscles. He was probably a hefty guy, but not fat. More meaty, like a wrestler. Or maybe a football player?
Lambers was getting restless. After all, we already knew that this man was a large White male. What else could the bones tell us? I decided to go back to my thinking-out-loud method, so Lambers could share in my search.
“So far, I haven't seen any old fractures, but the ends of the long bones and the lower spine had started to show some wear. Those teeth of his had worn down a little too, so I think we could bump his age up into the forty-to-fifty-five range.” I wanted to narrow that down, but it'd have to do for the moment. “Now, let's see how tall this guy was.” I opened a cabinet and pulled out a giant set of sliding calipers.
In spite of himself, Lambers was intrigued. “What are you going to do, Doc? Connect all these bones and measure from top to bottom?”
“Luckily, I don't have to. I'm just going to measure his thigh bone and then ask the computer here to figure out the rest.” Anthropologists before my time made great progress in estimating stature by using mathematical formulas and statistical analyses. These formulas have recently been computerized and bolstered by data from modern forensic cases, so now all I had to do was type in the femur measurement. A computer program called FORDISC 2.0 would do the rest.