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“Hey, now,” Waylon protested. “Don’t be talkin’ bad ’bout Vienna sausage. I had me some for lunch, and like as not I’ll have me some more for dinner.”
“Lucky you,” she said.
I ignored their culinary bickering. “The milk jugs might tell us something,” I went on. “The pull dates—‘sell by’—might help us pin down the time since death. Maybe even on how long he was out here.” A chilling thought hit me. “Or she.”
“OKAY, MIRANDA, YOU KNOW THE DRILL. TELL ME what you see.”
It was one of my favorite teaching techniques: putting my students on the spot and testing their knowledge, in the same way chief residents quiz medical students during hospital rounds. Miranda, of course, hardly counted as a student by now; she was more like a junior colleague, but this was a ritual we’d performed for years, and I suspected she had come to share my fondness for it.
After I had “shot my way in” to close-ups of the bones, we had switched gears, returning to the truck to fetch rakes, trash bags, trowels, gloves, and evidence bags. We hadn’t bothered with a body bag; there was no body—just a skeleton, and only a partial one, at that. No point wasting an eighty-dollar vinyl bag when a few fifty-cent paper bags would do the job just fine.
Miranda bent down, then dropped to one knee and studied the bones for a long moment. Drawing a deep breath, she began. “The remains are fully skeletonized, indicating a considerable time since death—perhaps several months, though almost certainly less than a year; in fact, probably less than six months.”
“Explain,” I said, trying not to show that I was pleased that she had reached the same conclusion I had.
“Given the elevation here in the mountains, and the declining average temperatures in September and October, there would almost certainly be soft tissue on the bones if the death had occurred in the fall, when the weather cools off and decay slows down. But if the death occurred no later than, say, mid-August—we’ll need to check the temperature records, of course—the corpse could have skeletonized fast, in just two or three weeks.”
“Excuse me,” said Sheriff O’Conner. “What makes you think it wasn’t more than six months or so ago?”
“The remains are on top of last fall’s leaf litter,” she said, gesturing at the ground. “True, there are some dead leaves on the bones”—she leaned forward and picked up a brown leaf that was lying on a long-bone shaft—“but these aren’t from last year.” She pointed upward, toward the crown of the dead tulip poplar. “These are from the tree the victim was chained to.” Good girl, Miranda, I thought, though of course Miranda—was she about to turn thirty?—was far from a girl now. “Also,” she went on, “there’s no vegetation growing up through the skeletal elements. That suggests the remains hadn’t yet skeletonized by spring or early summer, when seeds germinate.”
Her mention of seeds germinating reminded me of a case a few years ago—my God, I realized, twenty years ago—in the Cumberland Mountains, where I found a two-year-old black-locust seedling growing from the eye orbit of a dead girl’s skull. I had so many ghosts floating around in my head by now; every new case seemed to remind me of an old case, or two or three or five old cases. Concentrate, Brockton, I scolded myself. Be here now.
“Clearly there’s been a lot of carnivore activity and scatter,” Miranda was saying. “Possibly dogs; more likely, coyotes. As you can see, in addition to the skull, we’re missing the hands and feet, along with the ends of the long bones. In fact, we’re missing a lot of the elements of the axial skeleton.”
“The which of the what?” asked Waylon.
“The elements of the axial skeleton,” she repeated. “The bones below the skull—the ribs, sternum, lumbar vertebrae from the lower spine—most of them are gone. So it could have been a whole pack of coyotes.”
I would circle back to that shortly, but meanwhile, I wanted her to move on. “So what can you tell us about the victim?”
“Well, a lot less than I could if we had the skull,” she said. “From the narrow pelvis, we can see that the victim was male. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us anything about his geographic ancestry.”
“Excuse me, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Are you using ‘geographic ancestry’ the way we used to use ‘race,’ back in the age of dinosaurs, when I was in Dr. Brockton’s classes?”
“I am,” she said, her smile tolerant but tight. Then, looking at O’Conner and Waylon, she explained, “We used to categorize people into three ‘races’: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which meant Asian or Native American. Now, anthropologists—most of them, anyway”—she glanced at me as she said it, knowing that I had not fully swallowed this politically correct batch of culturally sensitive Kool-Aid—“recognize ‘race’ to be a self-defined cultural identity. A label people choose for themselves, not an objective physical feature.”
I kept silent, though inwardly I chafed a bit. If it looks like a Caucasoid and quacks like a Caucasoid, I thought, it is a Caucasoid. The three-race model had served forensic anthropologists extremely well, in my opinion, and it seemed a shame to discard it for the sake of what struck me as politically correct hairsplitting.
“Is ‘dead redneck’ a cultural identity, too?” asked Waylon. “’Cause no matter what you call it, I reckon that’s most likely what we’re lookin’ at right here.”
Miranda looked both appalled and puzzled. “Well,” she hedged after an awkward pause, during which I struggled to keep a straight face, “if you’re dead, it makes it hard to self-identify. But are you saying you don’t think the victim is African American?” Waylon nodded but didn’t elaborate, so Miranda pressed him. “Why not?”
“Not many to choose from up here,” he said. “Ain’t but a handful of black folks live in Cooke County. Seems like we’da heard about it if one of ’em went missing.”
Seeking a second opinion, she looked at the sheriff. “Really? They’re that scarce?”
O’Conner shrugged, looking slightly self-conscious. “As counties go, it’s fairly monochrome,” he conceded.
“How monochrome?” she persisted.
“Ninety-five percent white, as of the 2010 Census,” he said. I was surprised and impressed that he knew the number off the top of his head. “Two percent black. Two percent Hispanic, supposedly, but I’m pretty sure that number’s rising, judging by the increase in Latinos I saw at the cockfights, back before we shut that operation down.”
“Wowzer,” she said. “Double wowzer. Interesting method of demographic research, Sheriff. And int
eresting Census data. I didn’t know America still had such lily-white places.”
The professor in me couldn’t let that stand unchallenged. “Hey, Cooke County is a multicultural melting pot compared to Pickett County, up on the Kentucky border,” I said. “Last time I checked, their black population was two-tenths of a percent.” She looked dubious. “True fact,” I assured her. “Zero point two percent. One black person for every five hundred whites.”
“Must be a whole lotta fun for that one,” she observed dryly. “But we digress. So: The victim might or might not have been a white male. Let’s see if we can tell how old he was.”
She picked up a clavicle—luckily, there was one to pick up, though only one. “The clavicle, the collarbone, is a good indicator of age,” she said. “The ends of the bone, called the epiphyses, are connected to the shaft by cartilage before adulthood, but then they fuse, and growth stops. But luckily, the ends of the clavicle don’t fuse at the same time. The distal end, where it joins the shoulder, fuses first, at age nineteen or twenty.” She examined the bone. “And that appears to have happened, although . . .” She peered more closely. “Perhaps not 100 percent.” She studied the other end, which had once been attached to the sternum. “The medial epiphysis fuses later,” she went on, “usually during the twenties. Here, the fusion has just begun, so we know he’s younger than thirty.”
I didn’t say anything—I didn’t want to interrupt her—but inwardly I was cheering, Yes! You are going to be a terrific professor someday, Miranda!
She frowned at me, and for an absurd moment I wondered if she’d heard my thoughts and found them discomfiting, but then the reason for the frown became clear. “Too bad so many of the elements are missing,” she said finally. “The skull could help us narrow down the age further. The sutures—the seams—in the roof of the mouth fuse at different ages, too. But based on the clavicle, I’d estimate the age at right around twenty. No more than twenty-five. Maybe as young as nineteen.”
