She shrugged. “You can. Some of the same people who spent their lives measuring bones also took fresh cadavers and stuck pins into their faces, trying to determine if there were any common denominators between peoples’ skin thicknesses. There are reams of figures for chins and foreheads and cheekbones and upper and lower lips. The cadavers must have been wonderful to look at afterward. Needless to say, this was done in the good old days, and not to the aristocracy, either.”
She grabbed a stool at this point and sat, giving a small shrug. “In answer to your question, I can’t really answer. I don’t think much of the technique myself, but others have had success with it. Clyde Snow, one of the giants in the business, once tested how accurate reconstructions could be. He had one done of a male skull, took a photograph of it, and then placed that photo on a poster with seven other head shots, one of which was actually the real guy. People were asked to match the clay reconstruction to the original. Of two hundred guesses, one hundred and thirty-five were right. Pretty good numbers.”
“So why don’t you like the system?”
“How often have you seen two faces that really look the same? Like twins? It’s pretty rare. But can you say the same about two skulls? Even to us, they look pretty similar-we have to work hard just to tell the girls from the boys. I don’t know how you can slap some clay on a bone and make it look like the original; there’re just too many variables, from scars to fat to facial hair. I’ve always felt that reconstructions are expensive and time-consuming shots in the dark.”
I smiled at her conviction. “I guess I won’t ask you to recommend a sculptor.”
She chuckled then. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind. It’s just that you can get so much solid information from remains like these, and still people jump up and down for the Hollywood special effects.”
I waved my hands in protest. “Not me. I’m quite content. I do have to ask the big question, though. What killed him?”
“At last,” Hillstrom exclaimed, throwing up her hands.
Nora Gold began to laugh.
I stared at both of them, nonplussed.
“Nora promised me that if you asked for the cause of death,” Hillstrom explained, “I, as medical examiner, could have the honors. Otherwise, I’d never get to say anything.”
I looked at them both quizzically.
“You’ll have to excuse us. We are old, old friends…”
“And very, very tired,” Gold added.
Over the years, I had become genuinely fond of Beverly Hillstrom, despite a professional coolness that I took merely as her style but that others often misinterpreted as barely veiled hostility. Seeing her cutting up with her small dynamo of a friend reinforced my appreciation of her and marked, I thought, a small turning point in our friendship. I doubted she would have let many people see her so relaxed.
Hillstrom moved to the skeleton’s chest, putting her finger on a neat hole slightly below the center of the sternum. “In my opinion, Lieutenant, a single bullet killed him, or at least could have. This hole fits the bullet we recovered to a tee, and the breakout pattern on the inside is entirely consistent with a bullet wound. Also, bone growth stopped at the time trauma was inflicted; none of the remodeling Nora mentioned earlier happened here. However, since we don’t actually have any soft tissue to consult, I can’t swear that the bullet hit his heart in a lethal fashion. But that’s what I think happened.”
I pointed to several broken ribs. “What about these?”
She pursed her lips. “Those are from last night’s ambush. We didn’t find a single indication of any old trauma beyond the one bullet hole, which encourages me to think the cardiac wound was the culprit. But who can tell? He could have had half his midsection removed by a simultaneous shotgun blast without a scratch left on his skeleton.”
“But you’re not saying he might have died of pneumonia or scarlet fever or something nonhomicidal, are you?”
“My opinion is homicide, and that’s what’s going on the certificate. But anything’s possible when you have this little to work on.”
I turned to Dr. Gold. “How long would you guess he’d been underground?”
She made a face at that. “That’s a tough one-it depends so much on the burial site. Quite a few years, certainly.”
“Closer to five, or twenty-five?”
“Longer rather than shorter. Fifteen to twenty years wouldn’t be out of line-possibly more.”
There was a long pause as we all found ourselves staring at the remains of our now certified murder victim, the stillness of his tarnished bones in violent contradiction to the manner of his death.
Dr. Gold laid her hand on my arm gently. “We’ve told you everything we can. We’ll be giving you the photos and the X-rays and whatever else you need and you’ll be on your own; so I was wondering if I could ask you a favor.”
“Sure-anything…”
“Tell me what happened-tell me who he was.”
I squeezed her hand and looked back at the skeleton, realizing for the first time the bonds she established with each of her “patients” in order to do her work well. It was a startling glimpse at the humanity that underlay professions like hers and Beverly Hillstrom’s-occupations that were at best regarded with ghoulish curiosity.
“If I ever find out, I will.”
14
I drove straight from Burlington to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, not bothering to check in at the office. What Nora Gold and Beverly Hillstrom had given me was the breakthrough I’d been hungering for-tangible evidence linking the skeleton, and therefore Abraham Fuller, to a concrete historical event. If I was lucky, the metal knee would not only lead to the surgeon who’d implanted it but to the identity of the skeleton, and possibly that of last night’s sniper, whose desperate attempt to destroy the knee had given my hopes a boost.
I found Michael Brook where his nurse said I would, in the hospital cafeteria-a small, pleasant, sunlit room with one window looking out on the parking lot and another overseeing the front lobby. It was one of the town’s best-kept secrets: a low-priced, high-quality, friendly place to eat that was rarely crowded.
Mike was sitting by the outside window, his artificial leg stuck straight under the chair opposite him, finishing up a chicken-salad sandwich. It was well beyond the lunch hour, and there were only two other people in the place, sitting together in a far corner.
“Joe,” he called out, “you’ve been grabbing headlines again.”
He pulled a rolled up newspaper from his lab coat pocket and slapped it on the table. CARS RIDDLED BY SNIPER ON I-91, the headline screamed. There were pictures of the burial scene, a shot of the hearse on the interstate, and one of Red, our tracker dog, sitting on his butt, looking bored.
Mike hoisted his leg out of the way and I sat across the small table from him. “You got a couple of minutes?”
“Sure. This is my afternoon off. I was about to get rid of some paperwork. This about Fuller again?”
I shook my head and tapped the picture of the burial scene. “This.”
His eyes widened. “The skeleton? Who was it?”
“I’ve just spent the morning with Hillstrom and a forensic anthropologist friend of hers, trying to find out. I got an amazing amount of information from them, but a couple of things came up I was hoping you could help me with.”
He finished off his Coke and sat back. “Shoot.”
“The skeleton was outfitted with an artificial knee.”
An interested grin appeared between the mustache and the beard. “So I read.”
“Well, the anthropologist figures the guy died within a few months of getting that knee…”
“Of an infection?”
“No, no. He was shot; as far as I know, the operation went fine. But Nora Gold, the anthropologist, thought the leachate from the bone cement looked a little odd, so she had it analyzed. Turns out it was heavily laced with antibiotics.”