She gathered up the pieces of the broken teacup with a wet cloth, shrugged into her still-damp coat, and went home.
FOURTEEN
A cheerful, softly whistling Gideon Oliver arranged the bones into as near a proper anatomical relationship as the remains would allow. What with Robb’s delivery of the final two sacks yesterday, there was quite a lot of material now, more than he’d realized. The skull and pelvis were lacking, yes, but he guessed he had something close to forty percent of the skeleton laid out on the table in front of him. Plenty to work with.
Because it was nine o’clock and the police department was open to the public for its daily hour, Robb and Clapper were busy with island police matters (a report of a lost cat, a complaint about a neighbor’s wind chimes), and he was on his own, which suited him. Not that he really minded their being around, but this way he could mumble, exclaim, and go “Hm” to his heart’s content without having to explain what he was doing. Things would go faster. He could get right down to business.
And he did. As a serious scientist, a well-regarded expert, a board-certified diplomate in forensic anthropology, the last thing he wanted to do was to examine these remains with the express purpose of determining whether or not they matched the fragmentary description of Pete Williams that he’d heard from Joey last night: age, about thirty; height, about five-ten; build, average.
But of course he was also very much a human being, so naturally it was the first thing he addressed. He started with build, the least specific, least useful, and most unmeasurable of the three characteristics, but also the easiest one on which to reach some conclusion. Inasmuch as bones, especially at muscle-insertion points, reflected muscular development-the bigger and stronger the muscles, the more robust and rugged the bones they attached to-their general ruggedness was an indicator of the muscularity of the living person. And it took but a few moments’ study for him to conclude that this once-living person had been neither especially powerfully built nor particularly puny. In other words: average. Like Williams. Also like almost everybody else. Conclusion: It might indeed be Williams. Or it might not.
Of course “build” comprised more than muscularity. There was also weight. Had the owner of these bones been obese? Skinny? Medium (“average”)? Unfortunately, there was no way to tell. Fat people’s bones looked like thin people’s bones. So no useful decision on that score either.
That left age and height. Stature, as finicky anthropologists (including Gideon) insisted on calling it, was most certainly something you could determine from skeletal remains. You could make an astonishingly good estimate of stature from any of the long bones, including partial ones, or, with a bit less certainty, even from the metacarpals, the finger bones, or the vertebrae. The more of these bones you had, the more accurate the estimate, and Gideon had a lot of them sitting right in front of him. That was the good news. The bad news was that he didn’t carry around in his head or on his person the tables, formulas, and regression equations required to make the calculations. He did carry around-one never knew what one might run into-a copy of ForDisc, a CD containing a sophisticated forensic anthropology computer program from the University of Tennessee that took all the grunt work out of it. You just measured the bones, clicked in the results, grabbed a quick sip of coffee while the computer plugged them into the proper regression formulas, and up popped your stature-range estimates, down to the millimeter. The only problem was, ForDisc was useful only on complete long bones, of which he had nary a one.
There were, however, published formulas for estimating stature from partial long bones; less reliable, naturally enough, but better than pure guesswork. Last night, realizing that he would need them, he had called the departmental secretary and asked her to overnight-mail a couple of textbooks that contained the necessary Steele and McKern formulas. He now also made a mental note to call the museum and ask Madeleine for the sliding and spreading calipers she’d mentioned. An osteometric measuring board was probably out of the question, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask. In any case the formulas wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, or possibly even the next day, so for the moment there was nothing he could do other than eyeball the bones, which didn’t tell him much. The guy had not been a giant, and he hadn’t been a dwarf-that was about it. Five-ten was very much in the ballpark, but it was a big ballpark. More than that he couldn’t say at this point.
Ageing an adult (and Gideon had already determined these were mature bones, reflecting an age at least in the mid-thirties) was a different matter. No calipers, no formulas, no regression equations, no discriminant function analyses; you just looked carefully at certain skeletal structures, and if you were familiar enough with the changes they typically underwent in adult life, as Gideon was, you could make a respectable guess as to how old the person was when death struck. Not all bones showed these changes with equal clarity. The pubic symphysis-that is, the area where the two halves of the pelvis came together-exhibited them most clearly and predictably (why, exactly, nobody knew), and was therefore the most useful of the skeletal age-indicators, but Gideon didn’t have a pelvis to work with. He did, however, have quite a few ribs-eight, to be exact-and ribs, although not quite as trustworthy as the pelvis, could give you a pretty fair idea of age.
It worked like this: The upper seven ribs did not directly join the sternum-the breastbone-but were connected by struts of cartilage. Without these flexible struts, inflating and deflating the lungs (otherwise known as breathing) would be a far more painful and difficult job than it was. (The next three lower ribs were each connected to the one above, and the lowest two to nothing at all in front.) As one got older, however, this “sternocostal cartilage” began to build up calcium salts and to very slowly ossify, particularly at the end that attached to the rib. As this lifelong process continued, the rib-ends reflected the new stresses placed on them with certain predictable changes. Generally speaking, in going from young to old, they went from billowy-smooth to granular and jagged, from round-rimmed to painfully sharp-rimmed, from flat and wavy to deeply concave. As one of Gideon’s students had put it, “Anybody can tell. They just plain get older- and uglier-looking. Like people.”
So they did, but with some understanding of these characteristics one could do better; one could arrange them into stages and use them for a reasonably reliable estimate of age, within a ten-year range at any rate.
And the estimate that Gideon came up with was fifty, give or take five years; certainly not the thirty he’d been anticipating. He went to pour himself a first cup of coffee from the pot that Robb had made a few minutes earlier (fresh, it wasn’t exactly Starbucks, but it wasn’t sludge either), spooned in some powdered creamer, and talked this over with himself. Could Joey’s guess at Pete Williams’s age have been fifteen or twenty years off? Possible, but very, very unlikely. Or were the rib-ends he’d just looked at atypical and therefore misleading? The standard ranges were, after all, merely averages, not hard-and-fast parameters, and human beings, as everyone who studied them knew, loved to violate averages. Neither Gideon nor any other anthropologist would stake his reputation on an age determination based strictly on his reading of rib-ends or, for that matter, any other single criterion.
But there were other criteria as well, and another ten minutes’ perusal of the bones convinced him that his age estimate had been on target. Aside from the generally “older and uglier” look of the long bones, there were signs of compression and lipping of the lower thoracic vertebrae. (He didn’t have the lumbar vertebrae, in which he’d expect these signs to be even more advanced.) Equally telling, there was some lipping of the glenoid fossa of the scapula-the ovoid depression in which the ball of the humerus nestled, forming the shoulder joint. That was part of the general, unavoidable wear and tear that went along with getting older. And on the body of the scapula-he held it up to the light-yes, there were translucent patches developing; almost like looking through eggshell in places. That went along with getting older, too. Bone demineralized with age, and the scapula, one of the thinnest, flattest bones in the body to begin with, showed it especially clearly.