She pointed to one of the skeleton’s heels. “There’s something else. Notice how this small bony ledge extends forward from the calcaneus, the heel bone? That’s a spur. He has one on each heel. They don’t look serious, so it’s very possible he never knew he had them, but they are suggestive of another kind of chronic activity.”
“But not ballet?”
“No-remember, the stress there occurs when the dancer’s on his toes. This comes about more often from pounding the heel repetitively.”
“Jogging?”
She straightened with a pleased expression on her face. “Excellent, although the ‘buyer beware’ warning still applies. Other things can cause the same spur to develop.”
“But you’ve connected this thing to jogging more than to anything else,” I persisted.
“I have, and so have others. There definitely is a pattern.”
“Okay. You mentioned you could establish how much he weighed.”
There was no longer any need to control the tone of my voice. Even with her repeated caveats, Nora Gold had done a good deal to rekindle my spirits. As ghostly as his identity still was, the man on the table was beginning to fill out in my mind.
Beverly Hillstrom, who had been sitting on a stool throughout our conversation, wagged a finger at her friend. “I told you he’d hold you to that.”
“All right, all right,” Gold conceded. “You picked the weakest of my magic tricks. I can mutter about probabilities and sliding scales and margins of error on all the rest of this, but I can’t call my estimate of his weight anything other than a pure guess.” She then gave me a theatrically imperious look. “A highly educated guess, of course. It boils down to this: How many fat ballet dancers do you know? None, right? Here was a man in his late twenties, with two historic landmarks indicating strenuous physical activity. I have a tough time imagining him as anything other than fit and muscular, which, if true, would then put him in the 180- to 200-pound category, more or less. That’s the full extent of the science on that one.”
“Reasonable enough, though,” I murmured.
“See?” Gold turned to her friend, “I told you he’d buy it. I have to admit, though, there was another factor that led me to guess that weight, but it has only to do with ego-his, not mine.”
She picked up the skull without the jawbone and held it out to me upside down, so that I was looking at the upper row of perfectly aligned, even teeth. “Look at the right incisor, from the inside.”
I did so and noticed a faint diagonal line separating the crown of the tooth from its base.
“It’s been broken, mostly from the back of the tooth, and replaced with a sort of dental modeling epoxy-a plastic resin that can be molded right on the break, and shaped and colored to look just like the real McCoy. From the front, it’s a perfect match, but dentists usually don’t put the same effort into fixing the posterior side, for obvious reasons.”
“I thought they capped broken teeth.”
“They often do, but this tooth wasn’t so much broken as seriously chipped. It wasn’t dead, and the chip hadn’t exposed its roots to decay. In fact, he might have wandered around with a chipped tooth for years before getting it fixed. The point I’m getting at is that the dentistry is purely cosmetic, and that it was done to an otherwise perfect set of teeth-there’s not a single filling here. That’s both very rare and a natural source of pride in a perfection-driven society.”
I looked at her quizzically, never having given teeth much social significance before, unless they were moss-covered and stinking of rot.
“Remember who we have here: an athlete, who runs enough to cause bone spurs; a dancer, who, despite a recurring muscle tenderness, persists in his art; and a man with perfect teeth, who goes to the trouble of fixing a chipped tooth. I think our friend here kept one eye on the mirror. That’s the other reason I think he was slim and muscular-his ego demanded it of him.”
“What about the metal knee?” I asked finally. “He couldn’t have been a ballet dancer with that.”
“That’s true. I think he was dead before he had a chance to get the knee back to full operational order.”
That sent a tingle down my back. “He died right after surgery?”
“Within a couple of months of it. Bone is dynamic tissue, remodeling itself over the years. That’s how we can gauge things like age-cranial sutures continue to close until we’re eighty years old. That’s what explains how we can recover from a broken leg or arm: The bone reunites, growing back together sometimes to form a bond that’s stronger than before. When a surgeon puts in an artificial knee, he removes the ends of the bones to each side of the joint with a saw, exposing the marrow-filled hollow shaft that he partially fills with bone cement-like pre-drilling screw holes in wood before mounting a door hinge.”
“With a door, though, nothing happens where the metal hinge touches the wood. The metal might rust a bit, and the wood might swell in the dampness, but they remain two separate entities, as does the sawdust, unless you or a breeze removes it. With bone, it’s different; over time, it begins to heal over, removing the rough edges of the cut, along with any residual blood, and also reabsorbing the minute shards of bone dust that were created by the surgeon’s saw blade.”
“Here, however, there was very little healing. The line where the bone ends and the metal begins is only a couple of months old at the most. The residual blood has been reabsorbed, which takes a few weeks, but microscopic remnants of bone dust remain. Also, I could still see the striations left behind by the surgeon’s saw-not fresh, but again, not very old.”
I shook my head, amazed at my luck. “There’s no way you could know why the knee was replaced?”
She smiled regretfully. “’Fraid not, Lieutenant. Could have been any number of things. There was one additional aspect I thought was odd, though.”
I looked at her carefully. “What was that?”
For the first time, she seemed slightly hesitant. “Well, it’s trespassing into an area I really know nothing about, so there’s probably a perfectly mundane explanation for it, but one last indicator that this surgery took place slightly before his death is the amount of leachate surrounding the bone cement. Normally, after an operation like this, the cement, as it sets, leaches out somewhat over the next few months. The leachate is carried away and cleansed by the circulatory system.”
“And here you found some leachate still hanging around?”
I could tell by her tone that there was a little more to it. “Yes, that’s true, and it helped corroborate my time estimate based on the bone fragments, but it was the leachate itself that caught my eye. It looked different from what I’m used to. Now, I admit, it’s not every day that I have a skeleton with a prosthesis implanted, so I’m hardly an expert in the field, but still, it made me wonder. So I did a scraping and had the cement analyzed. The results came back just before you got here. It turns out the cement was a slurry of sorts, heavily impregnated with antibiotics.”
“And that’s not normal?” I asked.
She gave me a rueful smile and shrugged. “That’s just it. I don’t know, and I haven’t had time to check around. Bev’s the only physician I had immediately available, but she didn’t know, either.”
I immediately thought of Michael Brook, Ellen’s old doctor, and the man who had hoped to operate on Abraham Fuller. He was both old enough to have been practicing back in the sixties and experienced enough to at least get me started in the right direction. “Were there any markings on the knee? Something I could use to trace it?”
She pulled a piece of paper out of her lab coat and gave it to me. “Two separate numbers. I have to admit, though, I’m not sure how useful they’ll be. I don’t know if they’re serial numbers or not.”
I glanced at them, one with four digits, a dash, and two more, the other starting with a letter, followed by three digits. I shoved the paper into my pocket; that would make another question to ask Brook. “How about the way he looked? Can’t you reconstruct a face from the skull?”