Beverly Hillstrom’s lab was located at the rear of the University of Vermont’s Medical Center Hospital, off Colchester Avenue, in an inconspicuous corner not far from the loading docks. I had a little difficulty finding it, even knowing which entrance to use-autopsy areas don’t tend to advertise, especially within hospitals-and the first person I saw when I finally did walk through the metal double doors looked at me as if I’d lost my way. Only my badge and my using Dr. Hillstrom’s name changed his mind.
I was ushered into a small white lab room lined with cabinets, mounted light boxes for X-rays, and several freestanding bulletin boards covered with the photographs Hillstrom had taken the day before. Hillstrom herself was deep in conversation with a small dark-haired woman with half glasses, periodically referring to the mottled dark brown pelvis of the skeleton on which I was pinning so much hope. He-or she-was stretched out on a porcelain table in the middle of the room, looking like a rejected medical-school model that needed reassembling.
Hillstrom looked away from her companion and gave me a wide grin-the most expansive greeting she’d ever bestowed on me. “Lieutenant, good to see you. You must have left at the crack of dawn. I’d like you to meet Dr. Nora Gold, forensic anthropologist. She’s not only agreed to help us out with this case-she’s kept us at it through most of the night.”
Nora Gold and I shook hands. Her warm brown eyes were surrounded by clusters of radiating laugh lines, and she had an engaging, almost mischievous smile. I guessed her to be somewhere in her fifties.
I nodded toward the bones. “Has he confessed yet?”
Dr. Gold chuckled. “To some things, he has.”
I looked at her for a moment, hoping for some good news at last. “How much can he tell us?”
“Have you ever dealt with forensic anthropology before, or someone practicing its particular form of witchcraft?”
“No, but I’ve read or heard about some of the things you can do.”
“Well, one of the things that lots of people find frustrating is the amount we have to equivocate. They think the Ph.D. and the lab coat make us purveyors of the truth. We aren’t. Forensic anthropology is more an interpretive art than it is an exact science. It depends almost entirely on statistical analysis and probability-number crunching, to put it simply. For example, when I say this fellow is a male, I actually mean I’m eighty percent sure of it. There’s an outside chance it’s a female.”
I pushed out my lower lip and sighed gently. The Ph.D. and lab coat had certainly gotten me to expect more.
Nora Gold patted my arm and looked up at me, still smiling. I noticed then that Hillstrom was looking amused, as well. “Lieutenant, that was the limited-warranty speech. I actually do think we can help you out here, but I didn’t want you taking everything you hear from me as gospel. Okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed tentatively.
She gave my arm one last squeeze and then rubbed her hands together, turning toward the photographs and the X-rays covering the wall-mounted light boxes. “Here we go, then. There are six things we can evaluate when we have a specimen as complete as this one: sex, age, height, weight, race, and handedness. Some of those we can nail down pretty well; others are almost flights of fancy. Sex,” she added pointedly, “is pretty solid.
“Now, I won’t give you a postgraduate lecture, but I think you ought to know that the validity of some of these conclusions is based on a massive amount of previous data. A few people over the past hundred years have measured thousands of skeletons they already knew a good deal about. The point of the exercise was that if they could find a set of common physical denominators in skeletons they knew were female, or black, or left-handed, or forty-five years old, or whatever, then later they could apply those denominators to skeletons they knew nothing about.” She turned to the neat pile of bones on the table. “Like our friend here.”
It was nice to hear. “So he’s a male, according to your guidelines.”
She smiled and rested the tips of her fingers on the darkened skeleton, as if feeling for a telltale pulse. “Yes. What Bev and I were doing half the night was measuring almost every square inch of this poor man, taking X-rays and tissue samples, even slicing him here and there to look at him under the microscope. What I can tell you with as much certainty as possible is that he was also Caucasian, almost exactly six feet tall, left-handed, and in his late twenties.”
I understood the amount of effort both these people had put into this case. Not only was their homework decorating the walls all around us, but I could see it in their tired faces. They had brought both their professional and personal interest to bear. And yet, despite that, I was disappointed. The description they’d furnished me could have fit a sizable percentage of the population.
I did my best to keep my ambivalence to myself. “Interesting. What makes you think he’s left-handed?”
“The long bones. Actually, you hit on one of the lesser strengths of this science. A lot of the study skeletons I mentioned came from military conflicts, in which official records supplied the comparative data. Unfortunately, handedness is not recorded as a relevant vital statistic, so we’ve had to establish a standard through other means, mostly by comparing the number of living right- and left-handers to a similar mathematical discrepancy among skeletons. What we found was that living left-handers make up the same percentage of the overall population as the percentage of skeletons with elongated, more torsioned left humerus bones, who also have a distinct beveling of the dorsal margin of the glenoid cavity in their left clavicles.
“Translated into English, it means that if you spend your life throwing balls with one arm instead of the other, the bones and the shoulder blade of that arm show the effects.”
I nodded without comment, causing Dr. Gold to suggest, with the friendliest of smiles, “You expected much more, didn’t you?”
“No, no. I mean, I had nothing before-” She interrupted me. “Well, there is more. I wouldn’t say that in a courtroom, but Bev’s spent half the night singing your praises, so I think I can trust you.”
I laughed and shook my head, realizing I was being thoroughly manipulated. On the other hand, if they did have more to offer, having it fed to me in bits and pieces was a small price to pay for their satisfaction.
“In addition to the six categories of physical appearance I described to you, there are also two other factors that leave their marks on a person’s anatomy-environmental influences and historical landmarks. Examples of each would be a man who worked in a granite quarry all his life, and whose teeth were therefore evenly worn by the stone dust he’d been unconsciously grinding, or a person whose case of childhood rickets left him with a pair of permanently curved legs.”
She moved to the end of the table and picked up a femur. “What we found trespasses into both those areas, although I’d weight it more as historical in origin.” She pointed to a rough rippling at the bottom end of the femur. “See this? It’s where the gastrocnemius-the calf muscle-attaches to the distal head of the femur, or thigh bone, just above the knee joint. That muscle, as you know, tightens up when you stand on your toes. In fact, its major function is to help us pushing off, as you would at the start of a sprint. Of course, all the other muscles of the upper and lower leg play a part, too, but that tiptoe gesture draws most heavily on the calf. Well, over the years, we’ve discovered that a certain repetitive muscular movement sometimes irritates the proximal end of the gastrocnemius, to where it finally scars the bone at the point of attachment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, a little lost, “Bouncing around on…” I paused and smiled. “A ballet dancer?”
She laughed at my amazement but cautioned me with a hand gesture. “Maybe. I can show you the evidence, and I can tell you how we’ve linked it to a certain activity in the past, but it’s up to you to draw the conclusions.”