The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

  And even though the desk clerk hadn’t been able to put me in a citrus room, I felt energized.

  It must have been the cheeseburger my waitress had brought me—thick and juicy, topped with crisp, smoky bacon—that restored my flagging energy.

  The bedside phone rang early the next morning. It was 7:18, according to the clock on the nightstand; normally I’d have been up for a couple of hours by this time, but despite the peaceful neutrals adorning my room, I’d had trouble falling asleep. I’d channel-surfed until midnight, then gotten caught up in a PBS documentary about the “lost boys of Sudan,” the many thousands of boys whose families were killed and whose lives were destroyed by a genocidal civil war in Darfur. As I watched, I tried to imagine my young grandsons, Walker and Tyler, in similar circumstances. What if my son and his wife were hacked to death by machetes in front of their sons? What if the boys were taken captive and forced to fight—forced, at ages eight and ten, mind you, to murder other children’s families—in the service of the very men who’d killed their own parents?

  In bleary-eyed hindsight, it hadn’t been wise to watch such a disturbing show so late at night. But I wasn’t sorry I’d seen it. It was easy, all too easy, to ignore the inhumane treatment inflicted on millions of vulnerable people around the world. The United States and the United Nations had stood by while nearly a million people were massacred in Rwanda, and had dragged their feet while tens of thousands were raped and murdered in the Balkans. After watching the Sudan documentary, I still didn’t know what to do, but I decided I wanted to do something to make a difference, however small, for people who didn’t have the rights and freedoms I’d enjoyed all my life. During the night, as I’d tossed and turned, I’d resolved to donate regularly to Human Rights Watch.

  Now, still groggy from troubled sleep and violent dreams, I took a while to answer the phone. It was Angie; no surprise there, since she and her husband were the only people who knew where I was staying. “Good morning,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Uh, great,” I mumbled.

  “You don’t sound great. You sound comatose.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I insisted. “That’s just the serenity talking. Any news?”

  “Only that there’s no news.” She sighed. “My lawyer says he might not hear anything till late in the day. Maybe your devilish buddy Grease will get faster results. Meanwhile, I was calling to see if you might want to take a look around the crime lab while we’re waiting. Scope out the competition, long as you’re here.” She hesitated. “Oh, and if you’d be game to look at something that’s just come in—a skull that a guy’s dog dragged in from the woods . . .”

  In fifteen minutes I was showered and shaved and dressed, waiting for Angie down in the lobby, beneath the fragile, illusory canopy of glowing glass bubbles.

  The Florida Department of Law Enforcement occupied three square buildings, three stories apiece, a couple of miles east of downtown Tallahassee. Actually, although it looked like three buildings, it was technically only one building, composed of three identical squares, joined—just barely—at diagonally opposite corners of the middle square. I’d Googled “FDLE” while I was waiting in the Duval’s lobby for Angie to pick me up, and one of the hits took me to a satellite photo. Zooming in on the complex from low orbit, I’d gotten the feeling I was gazing down on three diagonal tic-tac-toe squares, each of them measuring two hundred feet across. In the middle of each square, the satellite photo showed a large garden courtyard, whose grass and trees looked inviting even from hundreds of miles overhead.

  Angie turned off a winding, tree-lined street into a parking lot that fronted the complex. Even though I’d seen the satellite photo, I was unprepared for how big it looked at ground level. FDLE had nearly two thousand employees, and the headquarters complex looked large enough to hold most of them. “This is quite a place you’ve got here. I’m envious.”

  “Envious? Isn’t your ivory tower fancier than this?”

  I snorted. “Obviously you didn’t visit the Anthropology Department when you were in Knoxville.” She shook her head. “We’re housed in the bowels of the football stadium, underneath the stands.” She looked at me skeptically, as if she thought I was pulling her leg. “I’m serious. They bricked in the space under the stands. In the 1940s and ’50s, Stadium Hall was the football players’ dormitory. When it got too run-down for the jocks, UT built a new athletic dorm and put nonathletes in the stadium. When it got too dilapidated for the regular students, the university gave it to the anthropologists. But hey, I’m not bitter.”

  “I’ll never complain again.”

  She swooped past the main entrance—a glassy lobby in the center building—and bore right, to the southeastern corner of the complex, in the direction of a sign that read EVIDENCE. Unlike the glassy main entrance, the evidence-intake door was inconspicuous, tucked in the corner of the southeastern square. Even with the help of the sign, I’d have had trouble locating this entrance.

  Angie signed me in and handed me a visitor badge, then unlocked a steel door that led to a glass-walled hallway, flanked on one side by the garden courtyard and on the other by a series of specialized labs: DNA. Firearms. Toxicology. Chemistry. Latent Prints. Photography. Documents. Computer Forensics. The chemistry lab had large windows along the hallway—“the aquarium,” Angie called it, and the chemist swimming behind the glass looked mildly annoyed by my presence. Then he saw I was with Angie, and his frown gave way to a smile and a nod.

  The crime lab occupied the entire second floor of the square. Halfway around, at the corner where the laboratory square joined the complex’s central square—administration and agents’ offices, according to Angie—was the facility’s main entrance, which opened into an area that was half lobby, half museum. The walls were lined with plaques and displays, including several glass cabinets highlighting the case of serial killer Ted Bundy, who was caught and eventually executed after a 1978 rampage in Tallahassee. In addition to photos of Bundy and the Florida State University sorority where he killed two young women and seriously injured two others, the display cases included plaster casts of Bundy’s teeth, which helped convict him of the FSU murders: during his assault on one of the victims, he bit her left buttock, and the distinctive bite mark was used as evidence at his trial. “Maybe it’s just because I know what he did,” I remarked to Angie, “but even his teeth look sinister. Almost vampirelike.”

  “I totally see that,” she agreed. “I guess it’s good he didn’t have braces as a kid. Might’ve been harder to get a conviction.”

  The display was a sobering reminder of the high stakes involved in forensic investigations. If Bundy had been caught and convicted after his first murder, dozens of young women—more than thirty by Bundy’s own admission, and as many as one hundred according to some estimates—would have escaped terrible fates. “Okay,” I said, “let’s hope the skull you want me to look at isn’t the work of a serial killer.”

  “Amen to that,” she agreed grimly. “Speaking of the skull . . .” She led me along one more stretch of hall, which closed the square and brought us back to where we’d begun, at the southeastern corner of the complex. “Hang on just a second.” She signed herself into the evidence room and emerged, moments later, holding a jawless skull in gloved hands. “I told the medical examiner you were going to be here, and he sent this over. I think he was glad to hand it off to a bone guy.” She nodded at a steel door just across from the evidence room. “You mind getting that for me?” I opened it, and she led me into a simply furnished room that was a combination office and lab; a computer workstation occupied the interior wall, a countertop lined the windowed wall, and a large table filled the center. The room was well lit and was even better cooled; the windows were dewy with condensation from the chill.

  “Wow, no danger of getting heatstroke in here.”

  “The lab is always cold. Other parts of the place are always too hot. Go figure.” She shrugged. “The thermostat’s in another building, do
wntown. Miles away.” She checked her watch. “The case agent assigned to this should have been here by now. Stu—Stuart Vickery. Great agent, but bad with a watch. If he offers to take you to the airport this evening, say no—you’ll miss your flight for sure. But we can go ahead and get started, and catch him up when he gets here.” She set the skull on the table, resting it on a beanbag cushion to protect and stabilize it. She pointed to a big box of blue gloves on the counter. “You want gloves?”

  I did want gloves. The skull had been given a cursory cleaning by time and, presumably, the M.E.’s office, but it remained slightly greasy, and despite the rapid whoosh of the cooling system, the aroma of decomposition was already noticeable.

  I took a pair of gloves from the box and tugged them on. “I wear gloves a lot more often than I used to. Back in my younger days, I didn’t glove up if I was handling clean, dry bones. Now I’ve gotten a lot more careful. A couple months ago I had a case where a woman died from a contaminated bone transplant. She got toxic shock syndrome from a bacterium called Clostridium sordellii. It’s pretty common in soil, and generally harmless, but it got into her body and started multiplying like crazy. By the time they realized how sick she was, she was a goner.”

  “They tried antibiotics?”

  “Yeah, something powerful—like, the H-bomb of antibiotics. The antibiotics killed the bacteria, but by then the bacteria had produced lethal levels of toxins. Nasty stuff. A bad way to die.” I shuddered at the memory. “Hell, it’s made me kinda skittish about working in the yard. Get a cut or a scrape, a germ like that gets in, and if the conditions are just right—or just wrong—you’re done for.”

  “Life’s iffy,” she said drily. “It’s a wonder any of us make it out alive.” She was trying to joke—she was trying desperately to hang on to work and routines and normal ways of living life—but it came out sounding bitter. She must have heard the bitterness, because she apologized.

  “No need,” I assured her. “Sorry I got gloomy on you. Let’s see what we can figure out about this particular mortal.” I started by leaning over and simply looking. The skull wasn’t complete; the mandible was missing, so the upper teeth rested directly on the beanbag, creating the effect of a big, almost comical overbite. After a moment I picked it up from the cushion and turned it upside down, studying the teeth and the roof of the mouth.

  “First of all, can you tell if this person’s been dead for more than seventy-five years? If so, the skull goes to the state archaeologist.”

  “I’d say less. For one thing, it’s in pretty good shape—not a lot of erosion or crumbling—which suggests that it’s not too old.” I gave a sniff. “So does the fact that there’s still a little tissue on it.” I held it toward her so she could sniff it, and she made a face. “But that’s not all. See that filling? Twentieth century, for sure; hard to be a lot more precise than that, unless we do a radioisotope study to find out if the person died before or after the cold war heated up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People born after the bomb—after all those H-bomb tests spread fallout all over the planet—have higher levels of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, in their teeth and bones. It’s called bomb-spike carbon.”

  “That’s scary.”

  I agreed. After a closer look at the top of the cranial vault, I handed the skull back to Angie. “How about you tell me what you can figure out about this person.”

  She flushed. “Gee, I don’t know. I mean, you’re the expert.”

  “Best way to become an expert is to learn. Best way to learn is by testing your knowledge.” I gave her an encouraging smile. “Come on; I can’t exactly flunk you if you get a thing or two wrong.”

  “Okay.” She drew a deep breath. “It looks small, so I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s a woman. The nasal opening is narrow, so that would make her a white woman.” She turned it upside down. “No wisdom teeth, so maybe she’s still a teenager. But then again, my wisdom teeth still haven’t come in, and I’m thirty-four, so I know not to put much weight on that.” She flipped it again, studying the dark zigzag seams where the plates of the cranial vault knitted together. “The skull sutures are prominent, so she can’t be very old.” She rotated the skull slowly, scrutinizing it from all angles. “No bullet wound that I can see. Looks like the dog crunched on both cheekbones before his owner took it away from him.” She gave the skull a final inspection, then shrugged. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” She handed it back to me. “So, how’d I do? Pass or fail?”

  I smiled. “Pretty well. You’re right about the race. White. And the age—it’s a young person. You get points for noticing that the third molars hadn’t erupted, and more points for realizing that the skull sutures haven’t started to fill in yet. Those don’t fully fuse and start obliterating until the thirties and forties.”

  “Okay, so what’d I lose points for? Did I get the sex wrong?”

  “Maybe. So yes.”

  “Huh?”

  “It might be female, might be male. Can’t tell—it’s too young.”

  She frowned. “You’re saying it’s a dead kid?” I nodded. “Crap. Tell me what I should have looked for, to know it was a big kid rather than a little woman.”

  “Well, it’s not just the size, but the proportion. Ever seen a baby’s skull?” She nodded. “So you probably remember, the cranial vault looks huge compared to the rest of the face, almost like it’s been inflated like a balloon.” She nodded again. “This cranial vault isn’t that disproportionate, but it’s still large for the facial structure, relatively speaking.” She peered at the skull again, then at my head, and then, in a mirror on the wall, at her own. “Another thing.” I pointed at the supraorbital ridge, the shelf above the eyes. “If this were an adult woman, the edge of this ridge would be sharp. Here, take off a glove and feel the difference between mine and yours.” She hesitated. “Go ahead.” She peeled off her right glove and pressed the tips of her fingers to her eyebrows, then to mine.

  “Yours feel like a Neanderthal’s.”

  “Well, back in the days of cavemen, guys who could shrug off a whack in the head were more likely to survive and reproduce than guys who had skulls like eggshells,” I explained. “In females, thickheadedness wasn’t as crucial to survival as prettiness was. Women’s skulls evolved to be more delicate, with thinner brows and smaller muscle markings—‘gracile’ is the nerdy anthropologist’s word for it. Looks kinda like ‘graceful’ but rhymes with ‘hassle,’ which is what women’s lives are filled with.” She smiled. “Want me to tell you more about the age?”

  “Sure. How much can you narrow it down, and how do you do that?”

  I cradled the skull in the palm of my left hand. “Let me show you something in the upper jaw, the maxilla.” A prominent line ran along its midline, starting just behind the incisors. I traced the line with my right pinky finger. “See this seam?” She nodded. “This is the intermaxillary suture.” Running crosswise were two others. “This one, just behind the front teeth, is the incisive suture, and back here at the molars is the palatomaxillary suture.” She nodded again. “So, in the same way the cranial sutures fuse and fade over time—obliterate—so do the maxillary sutures. My maxillary sutures are fused solid by now, like they’ve been welded shut. Yours probably are, too. How would you describe these?”

  She bent down and took a close look. “It looks like the roof of the mouth is cracked.”

  “It looks cracked,” I agreed, “but it’s not; it just hasn’t finished growing together. That tells us we’re looking at a subadult. A teenager, maybe even preteen. That’s consistent with the smaller size of the skull, too. Be a big help if we can find the rest of the bones.”

  “From your lips to God’s ear,” said Angie. “We did a grid search across a pretty big area around the cabin. A quarter mile in every direction. That’s almost forty acres. Nothing so far.”

  Just then the door opened and a fiftysomething man walked in, nodding at Angie. His clothes were
rumpled, his white shirt bore a coffee stain, and he held an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. If he’d been wearing an old raincoat, I’d have taken him for Columbo, the bumblingly brilliant television detective from the 1970s. He took out the cigar, shifted it to his left hand, and held out his right. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Slow line at Starbucks. Stu Vickery. Good to meet you. Angie came back from Tennessee raving about the Body Farm.” He shook my hand, then shifted the cigar from his left hand to his right before clamping it back between his teeth. I wondered how many times in his life he’d repeated that sequence of movements: remove cigar with right hand, shift cigar to left hand, do something with right hand, shift cigar back from left hand, put cigar back into mouth. I wondered, too, how long an unlit cigar would last before it got totally soggy and crumbled in his mouth.

  “Angie and I were just taking a look at the skull,” I said. “Angie, you want to tell him what we know so far about the sex, race, and age?”

  “Me?”

  “You. It’s a pop quiz, to see if you were paying attention.” She took the skull from my hand and drew a deep breath, then succinctly recapped everything I’d said about the cranial sutures, the muscle markings, the maxillary sutures, and the ambiguous gender. “Good job,” I commended. “You made a hundred.” She smiled slightly and flushed a faint shade of pink.