The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  It was one of the Lost Sheep volunteers, I realized, probably concerned for the man’s well-being. But it could just as easily have been Garland Hamilton waylaying him—offering money to a down-at-the-heels alcoholic, who might literally die for a drink.

  THE SURREAL scene beneath I-40 was still vivid in my mind the next morning as I studied skull fragments in the bone lab. When the phone rang, I ignored it, intent on the oval of pieced-together temporal bone cradled in one hand and the jagged shard clasped in a pair of tweezers. After half a dozen rings, the phone fell silent, then began clamoring again. Glancing at the display, I saw that it was Peggy, the one caller I couldn’t ignore. I sighed, laying the larger segment in the sand of the cake pan and the single piece back in the tray with countless other bits.

  “Hello, Peggy,” I grumbled.

  “Are we a tad grumpy this morning?”

  “We are,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “There’s a Lisa Wells on line one for you,” said Peggy.

  “Wells?” That name didn’t ring any bells. “Could you take a message? I’ve got my hands full at the moment.”

  A moment later the phone jangled again; Peggy again. I cursed under my breath as I reached for it. “Now what?”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. B., but Ms. Wells says it’s important. She says she might know a homeless man you’re looking for.”

  “Oh, put her on,” I said. A moment later the quiet background sounds of Peggy’s office were replaced by a cacophony of street noise in my left ear—cars whizzing past, wheels thumping into potholes, a jackhammer off in the telephonic distance somewhere. “Hello,” I said, “is this Lisa with the dimples?”

  “Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure whether she was taken aback or simply hadn’t heard me over the noise.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said, a bit louder and more formally. “It sounds busy there at the dayroom.”

  “I stepped outside to call,” she said. “There’s not a lot of privacy inside. Dr. Brockton, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you asked me yesterday.”

  “Thinking is good,” I said.

  “I’m in an awkward position,” she said. “I have to protect the confidentiality of our clients, but you’ve got me worried about one. A regular, a man named Freddie. He’s been here nearly every day for the past six months, but I haven’t seen him in over a week now.” She hesitated. “He does drink, but he’d been doing better lately. When he stopped showing up, I worried he’d gone on a binge. Now I’m afraid it’s something worse.”

  “Can you describe Freddie for me—white, black, short, tall, young, old?”

  “White,” she said. “Middle-aged—forty-five going on sixty. Homeless people tend to age fast—life on the street takes a toll. Probably about five-ten, fairly thin. A hundred fifty pounds, maybe.”

  “Remember anything about his teeth?”

  “You mean, did he have some?”

  I laughed. “Well, that would be a start.”

  She laughed, too. “Some of them don’t,” she said. “Beyond that, no, I don’t remember anything about his teeth.”

  “Then I don’t suppose you’d know where we might get hold of his dental records?”

  “Dental records? No,” she said. “The people we work with are barely hanging on, Dr. Brockton. We’ve got a dentist who volunteers one day a month, to provide very basic care, but dental records? Not on the radar screen of our clients.”

  “That’s what I figured,” I said, “but I had to ask. It’d be a lot easier to identify this burned skeleton if we had dental X-rays.”

  “X-rays?” Even over the street noise, I heard something in her voice shift. “Do they have to be dental?”

  “Dental’s usually best. An arm or leg X-ray might work, if it showed something we could compare to—a healed fracture or an orthopedic plate or some such.”

  “How about a head?”

  “A head?”

  “An X-ray of the head. The skull?”

  I heard something in my own voice shift. “Do you have an X-ray of Freddie’s skull?”

  “I don’t, but UT Hospital might. Not long after he started coming around here, he slipped in the lunchroom and hit his head hard—knocked him out cold. We called an ambulance, and they took him to the ER at UT.”

  I got Freddie’s last name from Lisa, then phoned the Radiology Department.

  “Hi, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said to Theresa, the Radiology receptionist. “A guy from one of the homeless missions might have come through the ER for a cranial X-ray about four months ago. Name was Freddie Darnell, D-A-R-N-E-L-L. We’re trying to ID a murder victim, and we think there’s a chance it’s Darnell. Would you be willing to check and see if you’ve got a record for him? We can get a court order if you need us to.”

  “Hang on just a second, Dr. Brockton,” she said. She put me on hold. A minute passed, then three, then five. I was watching the bars on my cell phone, which I’d forgotten to charge overnight. Now I was down to one battery bar, and I worried the phone might die before she came back.

  “I couldn’t find anything filed under Darnell,” she said. My heart sank. “But we did have a guy named Parnell, with a P,” she said. “Could that be it? Maybe somebody at the mission got it wrong—or maybe the ER intake clerk misunderstood.”

  My pulse started to race. “First name Freddie—Fred or Frederick, maybe? White male, forty-five, give or take a few years?”

  She hesitated. ”I don’t suppose you have a HIPAA release from him, do you?”

  “I don’t,” I said, “and I’m afraid he’s too dead to sign one for me. Would you need a subpoena to let me look at his X-rays?”

  “Hang on one more minute, Doc.”

  I hung on. My cell phone’s low-battery indicator started to beep—draining the battery all the faster.

  Finally she came back on the line. “This is such a coincidence, Dr. B.,” she said. “Dr. Shepherd was just saying that he needs to consult with you about that very case.”

  I laughed. “Theresa, you’re the best. Can I come over in about ten minutes?”

  “I’ve already pulled the file,” she said. “I’ll tell Dr. Shepherd you’re coming to speak with him.”

  Fifteen minutes later Ben Shepherd switched on a light box and clipped a cranial X-ray onto the glass. Dr. Sherpherd and I had worked together on several cases, and it was Ben who’d gotten me a portable X-ray machine to use down at the loading dock, so that when decomposing bodies needed to be X-rayed, we didn’t have to haul them inside and stink up his department. I gave a slide lecture every year for the Radiology staff and residents, showing shattered skulls and dismembered bodies. “I like a good gunshot wound,” he’d said to me once. “The beveling of the entry and exit wounds. The lead wipe around the edges. The lead spatter inside the cranium. It’s so much more interesting than a skateboarder’s broken arm.”

  Ben studied Parnell’s cranial X-ray. “Hmmm,” he said. “Not much to see. His chart says he had a mild concussion, but of course that doesn’t show up in an X-ray.”

  I studied the ghostly image. The teeth weren’t the reason for the X-ray, so the image wasn’t oriented to capture much dental detail. And the skull showed no sign of healed fractures we could try to match to the burned cranium. But there was one hope, I realized, studying the frontal view of the cranium. Just above the brow ridge, in the center of the forehead, a wavy boundary between dark and light traced a delicate scalloped pattern, almost like the lobes of a ginkgo leaf, within the skull. That scalloped line was the upper edge of the frontal sinus, a cavity in the middle of the skull’s three layers of bone. Every person’s frontal sinus was unique, and was therefore a possible means of positive identification—in theory, at least, although the theory hadn’t been applied or tested nearly as exhaustively as identification through fingerprints, dentition, or DNA. I pointed to Parnell’s frontal sinus and traced the edge with the tip of a pen. “If we get lucky piecing this skull back together,” I said, “we might be able to ma
tch that, or exclude a match.”

  “Whenever you get enough to compare,” he said, “bring it over and we’ll shoot an X-ray.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I don’t think we even need to shoot an X-ray. When the cranium burned, the inner layer of bone peeled loose, so the frontal sinus is actually exposed. If we had a copy of the X-ray, we could compare the bone directly with the image.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I think I just got paged. I’ll be gone a few minutes. If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll figure Theresa’s come in and reshelved that chart.” He gave me a wink, shook my hand, and wished me good luck.

  CHAPTER 30

  I TUGGED OPEN THE DOOR OF THE OSTEOLOGY LAB and walked in waving the manila envelope of X-rays as if it were the winning ticket in the $50 million Powerball game.

  Miranda sat with her back to the door, bent over one of the lab tables, peering through a magnifying lamp. She looked almost like a statue, and in fact I couldn’t remember seeing her in any other position but this—staring through the lens, tweezers in one hand, a chip of cranium in the other—in the eight days since the Cooke County fire. It was as if she’d always been sitting here and always would be, forever reassembling the fragments of what we hoped was the skull of Garland Hamilton.

  Miranda heard the crinkling of paper and X-ray film and glanced around. I waited expectantly. She raised her eyebrows. I jiggled the envelope.

  Finally she said dryly, “Okay, the suspense is killing me. What’s in the envelope?”

  “I could tell you were dying to know,” I said. “Cranial X-rays of a homeless guy.”

  “And you have those because…?”

  “Because he might be a missing person. Because I don’t trust Garland Hamilton, alive or dead. Because I worry that what you’re piecing together might not be Hamilton’s skull.”

  “You think it might be this guy instead?”

  “I hope not,” I said, “but it can’t hurt to compare. How much frontal sinus you pieced together so far?”

  “This much,” she said, holding up a bony mosaic the size of a postage stamp. “Probably not enough to compare yet. But there’s a light box over there in that corner, if you want to plug it in.”

  The light box was actually a slide sorter. Before I started using a digital camera, I shot 35-millimeter slides of every case I worked. By now I had tens of thousands of slides, so even though photography was fast going digital, I’d always need slide sorters and carousel trays. I’d taken a couple of stabs at converting my slides to digital images and plugging them into PowerPoint presentations, but the image files were so big they tended to crash the computer or fill up the hard drive. If I converted all my slides to digital images, I’d need a hard drive the size of Neyland Stadium to store them all.

  I retrieved the slide sorter from the corner, set it on the desk, and knelt down to find a plug in the power strip. There wasn’t a vacant outlet, so I grabbed hold of a white plug. Just as I was pulling it free, I heard Miranda say, “Don’t unplug the white—” Then I heard her say, “Oooohhh…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That was the computer,” she said. “I had a file open I hadn’t saved yet. Oh, well—it was only my dissertation proposal. I’m sure I can reconstruct it in, say, three months.”

  Knowing Miranda’s thoroughness, I felt sure she saved her work every three minutes.

  “Anything worth doing is worth doing over,” I teased.

  “Thanks,” she said. “One pearl of wisdom like that makes the long hours and the low pay seem worthwhile.”

  Straightening up, I dusted my hands on my pants and switched on the light box. The fluorescent tubes flickered briefly, then glowed steadily through the milky glass. I laid down the X-ray of Freddie Parnell’s skull, centering the scallops of the frontal sinus over the brightest light.

  “What do you think? Look familiar?”

  “Sure thing,” she said. “That’s Billy Bob What’s-His-Name, well-known frontal sinus–about–town.”

  “I just thought maybe since you’ve been spending so much time with those cranial fragments, some of those curves would register with you.”

  “I’m trying to match fracture lines,” she said, “so I haven’t really been worrying about the sinus itself. Besides,” she added,

  “I’m still missing a lot of the upper edge. I doubt that we’ve got enough yet for a match or an exclusion.”

  She held out the postage-stamp-size mosaic, then plucked a second scrap of bone from the sandbox and aligned an edge with the bigger piece. The edges fit fairly well but not perfectly, and I knew that Miranda had spent days gauging such minutiae.

  She flipped the pieces over so we could see where the inner layer of bone had peeled away, revealing the sinus cavity. Along one portion of each piece that she held, I saw a faint line where the sinus cavity ended.

  “We’ve got some edge line here and here”—she pointed—“but there’s not much, and it’s not particularly distinctive. You want to flip the X-ray over, since we’re looking from the back side?”

  I flipped it, and she shifted and rotated the pieces of bone above the X-ray, seeking some elusive alignment.

  “Hard to say.” I frowned.

  “Very hard,” she agreed. “How reliable did you say frontal-sinus comparison is?”

  “Very,” I said. “No two are the same.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I think I’m sure.”

  “Who’s researched it?”

  “Doug Ubelaker, up at the Smithsonian, did an article on this about ten years ago. He concluded it was a good basis for identification or exclusion.”

  “How many sinuses did he look at? And how’d he quantify the match?”

  “He looked at a few dozen,” I said. “I don’t know that he quantified it on any numerical scale. I think he drew on his experience and judgment to determine whether or not things matched.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Sounds like the way they compared fingerprints about a hundred years ago.”

  “You got a better idea?” I was feeling a little defensive, though I wasn’t sure why.

  “No,” she said, but then, after a pause, “Well, maybe. I mean, the edge of the sinus traces a curving line, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So if you can define those curves mathematically—the curve shown in Parnell’s X-ray here and the curve of Humpty Dumpty here, once we get him back together again—you should be able to graph how closely those equations match.”

  I was having trouble following her, but she seemed to be warming to the idea.

  “Actually,” she said, “that might be a pretty nifty dissertation topic. I’m in the market, since you just erased my proposal.”

  “I did not,” I said. “Besides, I have a draft of your proposal. You’re going to refine age estimates using the pubic symphysis.”

  “I thought I was,” she said. “But the more I think about it, the less excited I get. The idea of squinting at four or five hundred pubic bones for a year seems like a very tedious project.”

  “Gee, not like squinting at graphs and statistics for a year,” I said.

  “But it would be original graphs and statistics,” she said.

  “The pubic symphysis has already been studied up one side and down the other, so anything I did would be so derivative. This could be new territory. It could help us with exactly the problem we’ve got right here: Is this Freddie Parnell’s burned skull or isn’t it? We don’t have the mathematical tools to measure that right now. My experience and my judgment—that’s what I’m supposed to rely on, in the absence of statistical tools, right?—my experience and my judgment say this ain’t Freddie.” Her voice was rising, and I heard her frustration rising, too.

  “But my experience and my judgment also say we don’t have near enough of this damn puzzle done yet to say that with any damn confidence.”

  With that, she laid the two pieces of bone in the sand, stood up, and walked out
of the bone lab.

  As the door banged shut behind her, I realized that she’d been pushed—by me, by eight days of squinting at skull fragments, and by her terrifying assault—to the breaking point.

  I also realized she was right about the frontal sinus. It would indeed be a good dissertation topic. And this particular scrap of reconstructed sinus wasn’t nearly enough to tell us whether Garland Hamilton was safely dead or dangerously alive.

  CHAPTER 31

  EVER SINCE BURT DEVRIESS HAD FILED HIS CLASS-ACTION lawsuit against Trinity Crematorium in Georgia, he’d been sending me a steady stream of cremains to analyze. I’d also been making frequent trips to Alcoa with my postage scale to weigh the cremains from Helen Taylor’s furnaces.

  By now I was nearing thirty cases from Trinity, and they showed interesting similarities and fascinating differences. One consistent trend was the weight of the cremains: Those from Georgia tended to weigh three or four pounds, which was less than two-thirds the weight of those from Tennessee.

  The cremains from Georgia usually contained a mixture of human bone and animal bone, as well as a bewildering array of extraneous contaminants: bits of charred wood, zippers, nails and screws, and heaping helpings of Quikrete concrete mix, which accounted for the powder, the sand, and the pebbles. Most puzzling of all, the Georgia cremains contained small, fluffy spheres of fabric—I took to calling them “fuzzballs”—whose only purpose, as best I could tell, was to puff up the cremains and keep them from looking so skimpy.

  Early in Burt’s suit, I’d gone to Chattanooga to give a deposition. I was cross-examined by a legion of lawyers, representing not just Trinity but a consortium of funeral homes that were being sued by DeVriess for defrauding their customers. The lawyers made several scornful attempts to show that it was impossible to tell the difference between burned human bone and burned animal bone. I’d brought numerous slides, though, and the questioning gave me a chance to present a lecture on the distinctive differences between human bone and animal bone.