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I felt sure that the skull had come from a twenty-something male whose skeleton appeared European, both to me and to ForDisc; a male whose DNA looked Middle Eastern, to Delia’s sequencing machines; and whose death, to any decent human being, had been horrific. “This was in Shiflett’s house? A trophy?”
“Kinda looks that way.”
The white-supremacist symbol on the forehead seemed not merely offensive but deeply ironic, for without the flesh, this skull—from a brown-skinned Middle Easterner—was indistinguishable from the skulls of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans that the Nazis and the neo-Nazis considered the “master race.” It had the same narrow nasal opening; the same sharp nasal sill beneath that opening; the same geometry in the cheekbones and eye orbits. Brothers under the skin, Delia had said when I’d given her the DNA sample a few days before. Trouble was, so many people had trouble seeing beneath the skin—beneath the surface differences—to the shared humanity at the core.
Steve nodded grimly. “That’s not all. There’s more in the bottom of the box.”
I set the skull down gently on the bubble wrap I had already removed from the box, then peered inside again, but I saw only more bubble wrap. I took that out and saw that what I had taken for the box’s bottom was actually a second box tucked inside, square but shallow. I slid my fingers down two sides of this box and lifted it out, then set it on the desk and removed a close-fitting lid. Inside, resting on a bed of odd, squiggly packing material, was a small leather-bound volume. Its dark green cover was embossed with ornate geometric designs in gold and red; the title was also stamped in gold—an exotic, swirling script I guessed to be Arabic.
The book’s cover had been mutilated—the entire book had been mutilated, in fact—by what appeared to be a large-caliber gunshot. The entry wound, as I would have termed it if it were in a corpse, was a neat half-inch hole in the center of the cover. The exit, out the back, was ragged and twice that size. Bizarrely, the “wound” appeared to be bloody, and I stared in puzzlement, riffling through the volume, whose pages were all stained around the edges of the hole. I turned to Steve. “What on earth?”
“I suspect it’s related to those,” he said, pointing at the packing material in the shallow box. “The book and the skull were both settin’ on those.”
“But what are they?” He didn’t answer, so I leaned down to examine the material. I had assumed they were made of cardboard, but looking closer, I saw they were furry, with longer tufts of hair at their ends. I reached in and plucked one from the box, holding it up to the light, my face a foot away. One end bore a tapered, inch-long tuft of hair; the other end was blunt—was cut—and bloody. “My God,” I said. “These are pig tails?”
“Looks like it to me,” he said, “but I’ll ask the lab to confirm it.”
I nodded in the direction of the other items. “So I’m guessing that’s pig blood on the skull and on the Quran?”
“Could be,” he said, “but it might be Shiflett’s—he might have wanted to mark his territory, like a dog pissing on a tree. The lab can test it with HemaTrace, tell us if it’s human or animal. Do you want to keep the skull?”
“I’d like to, yes. I want to get a facial reconstruction done. Put the likeness out there, see if anybody recognizes it. But I can scrape off some of the blood, so you can take that to the lab, too.”
He nodded, and I rummaged around in my desk drawer for a scalpel. I cleaned the blade with an antibacterial wet wipe—another staple the Anthropology Department purchased in bulk and consumed at a rapid rate—and began scraping flakes of dried blood from the forehead onto a clean sheet of paper. After I’d scraped off a tiny heap of flakes—if the material were salt, I’d call the quantity a pinch—Steve said, “That’s probably good.” He folded the paper, marked it as evidence, and sealed it in the envelope I offered him.
“What else did y’all find?” I asked. “Hard evidence tying Shiflett to the kid chained to the tree?”
“Looks like it, though we need the computer forensics people’s help.”
“With what?”
“His computer’s hard drive was erased.”
“Crap,” I said. “Although frankly, I’m kinda surprised this guy had a computer.”
“Why, Doc? He did communications work in the military. And you know from the snuff film that he was savvy with video editing and social media.”
“Good point,” I conceded. “But what can the computer forensics people find, if the hard drive’s been wiped clean?”
“Erased,” he said, “but probably not wiped. Most people think that deleting files is enough to cover their tracks, but it’s actually not.”
“How’s that?”
He shrugged, as if to say that he didn’t fully understand it himself. “The way it was explained to me, deleting a file doesn’t actually delete the file. It makes that file’s space on the drive available, but the data doesn’t really get removed. It just gets overwritten, a little at a time, as new data gets added. So a lot of the old data is still there, especially if there hasn’t been a lot of new data. Sort of like deciding to paint your house a new color, but only painting for a few minutes every couple days. Gonna take a long time before that old paint’s out of sight.”
“Steve, you missed your calling,” I said. “You should’ve been a computer scientist. Who dabbles in home improvements.”
He laughed. “Point is, our computer nerds can probably recover a lot of the data.”
“Well, I hope you’re right.”
He grinned and held up an index finger. “But wait, there’s more. Much more. We found six video surveillance cameras, powered by a twelve-volt car battery. A video hard drive. DVDs with raw footage of the victim chained to the tree.”
I felt my excitement rising. “That’s great!” I winced at the way I’d said it, and he gave a shrug: absolution. He understood.
“Also a big assortment of hate literature. White supremacy publications. Neo-Nazi stuff. A bunch of antigovernment stuff, including The Turner Diaries, Tim McVeigh’s inspiration for Oklahoma City. Militia handbooks. DIY manuals on bomb making and sabotage.”
I was afraid to ask my next question, but I was even more afraid not to ask it. “Steve, did you find anything that ties Jimmy Ray Shiflett to Nick Satterfield?”
His brow furrowed. “Satterfield? The escaped killer?” I nodded. “No, nothing. Whatever makes you ask that?”
“Forget it,” I said. “Just jumpy, I guess. Hearing things go bump in the night.”
MOST TABLES IN THE BONE LAB WERE LITTERED WITH bare bones. Joanna Hughes’s table was occupied by human heads—some male, some female; some Anglo, some Latino; some smiling, some sad.
Despite the diversity, all the heads were the uniform gray of potter’s clay. Joanna was a facial reconstruction artist—the first and, as far as I knew, the only student at UT to major in forensic art. She had devised the major herself, combining classes in sculpture, drawing, anatomy, and osteology: a combination that gave her detailed knowledge of how bones, muscles, and tendons meshed to create the complex structures of the human face. Reconstructing a face wasn’t simply a matter of slathering clay onto a skull and mashing it around to create lips and noses and cheeks. No, reconstructing a face was a remarkably intricate process, requiring every muscle of the face to be created and applied, layered and interwoven, just as they had been in life, before the final covering of clay “skin,” whose thickness had to match precise scientific measurements of tissue depth at numerous landmarks on the face and head.
In my younger days I had tried my hand at clay facial reconstructions. The results were appalling: my reconstructed John Does tended to look like Neanderthals—and misshapen, stupid Neanderthals, at that. Perhaps, in hindsight, it was my failed attempts at facial reconstruction that had taught me to stick with things I could do well. And certainly my own failed attempts had made it easy for me to appreciate the remarkable blend of art and science manifested in every one of Joanna’s reconstructions. No
w, I was counting on that blend to show us what the killer’s grainy video had not: the face, in detail, of our Cooke County murder victim.
When I walked into the bone lab with the skull Steve Morgan had brought me, I arrived just in time to see Joanna grab the nose of an African American woman and twist it completely off the face. “Ouch,” I said. “Why’d you do that?”
“I didn’t like it,” she said. “It didn’t look right.” She frowned. “Noses are hard. There’s no foundation of bone to guide you. Nothing but a hole—the nasal opening.” She made a self-contradicting face. “Well, actually, there is a formula for estimating breadth and projection. But it still leaves a lot of margin—a lot of requirement—for artistic interpretation. So you just have to guess, from how massive or delicate the rest of the face is, what sort of nose that particular face is asking for. And this face”—she nodded at the one she had partially defaced—“wasn’t asking for the nose I gave her.” She pushed back from the wooden table and eyed the box under my arm. “So that’s him? The guy chained to the tree?” I nodded and handed her the box. She opened it and carefully removed the skull, studying it closely as she talked to me. “You said he’s in his twenties?”
“Early twenties, at most. Could be as young as nineteen. But definitely not, say, twenty-seven.”
“Wow, the bone structure is classic Caucasoid. But you said he’s Middle Eastern?”
“According to the DNA.”
“Crap,” she said.
“What?”
“The nose. Narrow? Wide? Straight? Hooked? Middle Eastern noses are all over the map.”
“So to speak,” I said.
