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She laughed. “So to speak.”
“You’ll do fine,” I assured her, as she set the skull on a cushion to one side of her table. “Just give him whatever nose the rest of his face wants to have.” The last thing I saw, before I turned to go, was a scowling Joanna taking an X-acto knife to the face of the dead African American woman and, in the place where a nose had been only a few moments before, carving a two-inch question mark.
She’ll do fine, I assured myself. Really.
CHAPTER 28
I THRASHED, AWAKE AND ANXIOUS, FOR MOST OF THE night—the new normal, apparently—then finally drifted off shortly before dawn. I woke up at eight, weary and bleary and astonishingly late for me, and called the bone lab. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” answered my assistant, sounding far chirpier than I felt.
“Good morning,” I said. “Sort of.”
“Dr. B? Did you just wake up? I mean, you? Just now?”
“Ten minutes ago,” I said. “I finally fell asleep at six, so I’m running behind on everything today. How would you feel about teaching today’s nine o’clock forensic class?”
“Me? Sure. But . . .”
“But what? You can say if you don’t want to.”
“No. I mean, no, I don’t want to say no. I’d love to teach it. Today is blunt-force trauma, right?”
“Right.”
“But . . . you love teaching that class. Are you sure you can bear to let go of the reins for an hour?”
“Are you implying I have control issues?”
“No, I’m not implying it. I’m saying it, straight up. You have a teeny-tiny control issue, roughly the size of Texas, when it comes to teaching class.”
“You just watch me,” I said. “I’ll sit in the back of the room and I won’t say a word.”
“Wait—I’ll be up there teaching, and you’ll just be sitting there?”
“In the back of the room,” I repeated. “I won’t say a word.”
“Right. Sure, boss. And then hell will freeze over. And our elected leaders will all work together for the common good.”
“Not a word, I tell you. Not so much as a syllable.”
BY THE TIME I GOT TO CAMPUS, I HAD RALLIED A BIT, and I had mixed feelings about enlisting Miranda to teach. Unfortunately, I had painted myself into a corner, with a thick coat of paint in the unmistakable shade of Stubborn Pride. I had left myself no choice but to let her teach.
I suspected she hadn’t headed to class yet, so I stopped off at the bone lab to check. At the very least, I could accompany her and offer constructive feedback. Perhaps she’d even offer the reins of class back to me.
The lab’s door of the bone lab gave a particularly loud rasp as I pushed it open, setting my teeth thoroughly on edge. “How do you stand that noise?” I asked Miranda, whose desk was only three feet from the source of the sound.
“Hmm? What noise?” She looked up. “Oh, the door? It’s like anything annoying—you hear it enough times, you learn to tune it out.” She smiled at me with an arch, enigmatic smile.
Across the room, I saw the familiar blond hair of Joanna Hughes, her bent head and tense shoulders a study in concentration. “You working on our Middle Eastern guy?” I called. She didn’t answer, so I ambled over to take a look. Peering over her shoulder, I was stunned. Three days before, I had handed her a bare skull. Now, a pair of warm brown eyes stared back at me from a remarkably lifelike face. “Joanna, you’re amazing,” I said. “How on earth did you finish this so fast?”
“He’s not actually finished,” she said. “I haven’t done anything with the hair yet, and I’m not sure about the nose. But he’s getting close, I think.” She took a deep breath and released it, hunching her shoulders up to her ears, then letting them drop. “You can get a lot done if you don’t sleep. This guy got under my skin. Miranda told me how he died—how he was killed—and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. So I figured I might as well just go flat out.”
“It’s remarkable,” I said, studying the details: the chiseled cheekbones, the prominent eyebrows, the strong, straight nose. “This is so much better than that grainy video footage. Once the TV stations and the newspapers put this out there, somebody’s sure to recognize him.”
Miranda sidled up behind me. “Notice anything interesting about Joanna’s reconstructions?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, eyeing the half-dozen heads on her table. “I notice they’re terrific. What are you noticing?”
“They’re all the same color,” Miranda said. “The African American woman, the European man, the Hispanic kid from the Arizona desert, the Middle Eastern guy. All the same shade of gray.” I was on the verge of pointing out that of course they were, because they were all made of clay, but I realized she was making a bigger point. “It’s boring, but it’s safe,” she went on. “Our guy, 16–17. Maybe killed just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the wrong clothes or the wrong skin.”
“Maybe so.”
“Isn’t it a shame,” she said, “that what makes some people different—what makes them less boring—makes other people hate them?”
She looped a scarf around her neck—the morning felt more like midwinter than late fall—and said, “I need to head to class.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said. Miranda shot me a suspicious glance. “Hey, I’m only helping carry the skulls. I won’t meddle in class. Promise.”
MIRANDA CLICKED TO THE NEXT SLIDE, A CLOSE-UP of a bashed-in skull, shown from behind. Thirty student faces leaned forward, captivated by the image from a forensic case we had worked a year before. “So from this blow,” she said, using a laser pointer to highlight the crater at the back of the skull, “the fracture patterns radiate outward about the same distance in all directions.” She traced several of the lines, each of them a foot long on the three-foot image of the skull. “Compare that to the other blow.” She clicked to the next slide, showing the skull’s shattered temporal bone. “Notice this fracture,” she said, highlighting a crack that zigzagged from the temple toward the back of the head. “See how it starts out nice and strong, like the others? It’s cracking, cracking, cracking, but then—bam—it stops all of a sudden, at this point where it intersects the one from the back of the head.”
Looking out at the students—junior and senior undergraduates taking Introduction to Forensic A
nthropology—she posed a question. “What does that tell you about the order in which the blows to the head were delivered? And therefore, what inferences can you draw about the defendant’s statement to the police?”
The class was silent, possibly because they hadn’t read the background materials on the case. Finally, a young woman in the front row—Mona, noteworthy for her quiet intelligence, flowing tunics, and ever-present hijab covering her hair—raised her hand. “He’s lying,” she said. “It wasn’t self-defense.”
I smiled, then—unable to stay in my seat any longer—I stood and took the reins of the class back from Miranda, along with the laser pointer. “Explain,” I prompted Mona.
“The defendant said he hit the victim in the side of the head first, to avoid being stabbed, then hit him again as he fell. But the blow to the temple was the second blow, not the first one.”
“Go on,” I encouraged. Beside me, I heard Miranda sigh, just loudly enough to be sure I heard it, as she stepped aside. “How can you tell?”
“The way the cracks propagated.”
I knew what “propagated” meant, but I suspected some of her classmates didn’t. “Mona, pretend you’re on the witness stand, in court,” I told her. “Dr. Mona Faruz, forensic anthropologist for the prosecution. Explain your terminology and your reasoning.”
“Sorry,” she said, her olive skin flushing slightly. “Fractures in brittle materials propagate—they grow and spread—in a consistent way, whether the material is a ceramic cup or a steel pipeline or a human skull.” Mona was an engineering major, so I suspected she knew more than anyone else in the room about fracture mechanics. “When an impact is severe enough to cause cracking, the crack, or cracks, will spread from the point of impact until their energy is dissipated, or weakened.”
