by Kathy Reichs
Much to Slidell’s annoyance.
As appeasement, I agreed to drop by the MCME at the butt crack of dawn. Skinny’s wording, not mine.
I spent an hour sampling from the chicken and the goat head, and double-checking the bugs I’d collected from the cellar. Fortunately, I’d taken time on-site to separate and label them.
Insects packaged and shipped to an entomologist in Hawaii, I rushed to campus to teach my morning seminar. In the afternoon I advised students. Legions of them, all concerned about upcoming midterms. Dusk was nothing but a memory when I finally slipped away.
Wednesday, I was again up with the sun. Rising at daybreak is not my style. I wasn’t enjoying it.
The Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner is located at Tenth and College, on the cusp of uptown, in a building that started life as a Sears Garden Center. Which is exactly what it resembles, sans the pansies and philodendra. Squat and featureless, the one-story brick bunker is also home to several Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD satellite offices.
In tune with the original mall theme, landscaping consists of an acre of concrete. Bad news if you’re hoping for a shot at Southern Homes and Gardens. Good news if you’re trying to park your car.
Which I was, at 7:35 A.M.
Card-swiping myself through double glass doors, I entered an empty reception area. A purring silence told me I was first to arrive.
Weekdays, Eunice Flowers screens visitors through a plate-glass window above her desk, granting entrance to some, turning others away. She does scheduling, types and enters reports, and maintains hard-copy documents in gray metal cabinets lining the walls of her domain.
Regardless of the weather, Mrs. Flowers’s clothes remain pressed, her hair fixed with balanced precision. Though kind and generous, the woman inevitably makes me feel messy.
And her work space totally confounds me. No matter the chaos throughout the rest of the lab, her desktop is perpetually clean and clutter-free. All papers stay militarily squared, all bulletin board Post-its aligned and equi-spaced. I am incapable of such tidiness, and suspicious of those who are.
I knew the gatekeeper would arrive in fifteen minutes. Precisely. Mrs. Flowers had clocked in at 7:50 for more than two decades, would continue to do so until she retired. Or her toes pointed north.
Turning right, I walked past a row of death investigator cubicles to a large whiteboard on the back wall. While penning that day’s date in the square beside my name, I checked those beside the names of the three pathologists.
Dr. Germaine Hartigan was away for a week of vacation. Dr. Ken Siu had blocked off three days for court testimony.
Bummer for Larabee. He was on his own this week.
I looked at the intake log. Overnight, two cases had been entered in black Magic Marker.
A burned body had been found in a Dumpster behind a Winn-Dixie supermarket. MCME 522-08.
A jawless human skull had been found in a cellar. MCME 523-08.
My office is in back, near those of the pathologists. The square footage is such that the room probably qualifies by code as a closet.
Unlocking the door, I slid behind my desk and placed my purse in a drawer. Then I pulled a form from plastic mini-shelving topping a filing cabinet at my back, filled in the case number, and wrote a brief description of the remains and the circumstances surrounding their discovery. Worksheet ready, I hurried to the locker room.
The MCME facility has a pair of autopsy suites, each with a single table. The smaller of the two has special ventilation for combating odor.
The stinky room. For decomps and floaters. My kinds of cases.
After laying out cameras, calipers, a screen, picks, and a small trowel, I crossed to the morgue. The stainless steel door whooshed open, enveloping me in the smell of refrigerated flesh. I flicked on the light.
And said a prayer of thanks to Joe Hawkins. Metaphorically.
On Tuesday, I’d been too grumpy because of the butt-crack hour to notice. The dilemma struck me as I was changing into scrubs. If the cauldrons were on the floor, how would I move them?
No problem. Hawkins had left both on the gurney he’d employed to transport them from Greenleaf. Gathering the cardboard box containing the skulls and the chicken, I toed the brake release, turned, and rump-pushed the door. It flew open.
Hands caught me as I sailed into a full-out pratfall. Recovering, I turned.
Tim Larabee resembles a wrangler who’s spent far too much time in the desert. A marathon junkie, daily training has grizzled his body, fried his skin, and hollowed his already lean cheeks.
Larabee’s eyes were apologetic. Eyes set way too deep. “Sorry. I didn’t know anyone else was here.”
“My fault. I was leading with my ass.”
“Let me help you.”
As we maneuvered the gurney out of the cooler and into the autopsy room, I told him about the cellar.
“Voodoo?”
I shrugged. Who knows?
“Guess you won’t be X-raying the fill.” Larabee slapped one iron cauldron.
“Flying blind,” I agreed, pulling on gloves. “But I’ll have Joe shoot the skulls as soon as he gets here.”
Larabee indicated the box. “Quick look-see?”
I opened the flaps. Each skull was as I’d left it, encased in a labeled ziplock. No need to check the bag. The stench told me it still contained the chicken.
While the ME gloved, I removed the human skull and centered it on a cork ring balancer on the autopsy table.
“Mandible?”
I shook my head no.
Larabee ran a fingertip over the forehead and crown. “Looks like wax,” he said.
I nodded in agreement.
Larabee touched the stain haloing the borders of the overlying goo. “Blood?”
“That’s my guess.”
“Human?”
“I’ll take a sample for testing.”
Larabee gestured with an upturned palm. I knew what he wanted.
“This is only preliminary,” I warned.
“Understood.”
I took the cranium in my hands, palate and foramen magnum pointing up.
“I’ll wait for the X-rays, of course, but it looks like the third molars were just erupting, and there’s minimal wear on the others. The basilar suture has recently fused.” I referred to the junction between the sphenoid and occipital bones at the skull base. “That configuration suggests an age in the mid to late teens.”
I rotated the skull.
“The back of the head is smooth, with no bump for the attachment of neck muscles.” I pointed to a triangular lump projecting downward below the right ear opening. “The mastoids are small. And see how this raised ridge dies out at the end of the cheekbone?”
“Doesn’t continue backward above the auditory meatus.”
I nodded. “Those features all suggest female.”
“The brow ridges aren’t much to write home about.”
“No. But at this age that’s not definitive.”
“What about race?”
“Tough one. The nasal opening isn’t all that wide, but the nasal bones meet low on the bridge, like a Quonset hut. The inferior nasal border and spine are damaged, so it’s hard to evaluate shape in that region.” I turned the skull sideways. “The lower face projects forward.” I looked down onto the crown. “Cranial shape is long but not excessively narrow.”
I replaced the skull on its ring.
“I’ll run measurements through Fordisc 3.0, but my gut feeling is Negroid.”
“African-American.”
“Or African. Caribbean. South American. Central—”
“A black teenaged girl.”
“That’s only preliminary.”
“Yeah, yeah. PMI?”
“That’ll take some work.”
“A hundred years? Fifty? Ten? One?”
“Yes,” I said. “I FedEx’ed the bugs yesterday.”
“I didn’t know you were here.”
“It wa
s in and out early,” I said.
“Now what?” Larabee asked.
“Now I sift through two cauldrons of dirt.”
The door opened and Joe Hawkins stuck his head through the gap.
“You see what I left in the coffee room yesterday?”
Larabee and I shook our heads no.
“I was at the university all day,” I said.
“I was in Chapel Hill,” Larabee said.
“Just as well. You ain’t gonna like it.”
5
WE FOLLOWED HAWKINS DOWN A SHORT CORRIDOR TO A SMALL staff lounge. The left side was a mini-kitchen, with cabinets, sink, stove, and refrigerator. A phone and a small TV sat at one end of the counter. A coffeemaker and a basket holding sugar and dried cream packets sat at the other. A round table and four chairs took up most of the right side of the room.
Joe Hawkins has been hauling stiffs since the Eisenhower years, and is living proof that we’re molded by what we do. Cadaver thin, with dark-circled eyes, bushy brows, and dyed black hair slicked back from his face, he is the archetypical B-movie death investigator.
Unsmiling, Hawkins crossed to the table and jabbed a finger at an open copy of Tuesday’s Charlotte Observer.
“Yesterday’s paper.”
Larabee and I leaned in to read.
Local section. Page five. Three column inches. One photo.
Demons or Dump?
Police were baffled Monday night when a 911 call sent them to a house on Greenleaf. While renovating, a plumber had stumbled onto more than rusty pipes. Within hours, skulls, cauldrons, and an assortment of strange items were removed from the home’s basement and transported to the MCME morgue and the CMPD crime lab.
Directing the recovery operation were forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan and homicide detective Erskine Slidell. Though queried, police refused to comment on whether any remains were human.
The plumber, Arlo Welton, recounted knocking through a wall into a mysterious subterranean cellar. Welton described an altar and satanic paraphernalia that, in his opinion, clearly indicated demonic ritual.
Devil worship? Or underground Dumpster? The investigation is ongoing.
The photo was grainy, taken from too great a distance with too little light. It showed Slidell and me standing beside the crooked porch swing. My hair was cascading from a topknot. I was wearing the jumpsuit. Skinny was picking something from his ear. Neither of us looked ready to appear on The View. Photo credit was given to Allison Stallings.
“Sugar,” Larabee said.
“Shit,” I said.
“Nice ’do.”
My finger told Larabee what I thought of his humor.
As though on cue, the phone rang. While Hawkins picked up, I reread the article, feeling the usual irritation. While I’m an avid consumer of news, both print and electronic, I detest having journalists in my lab or at my field recoveries. In my view, cameras and mikes don’t go with corpses. In their opinion, neither the lab nor the crime scene are mine and the public has a right to know. We coexist in a state of forced accommodation, yielding only as necessary.
Allison Stallings. The name wasn’t familiar. Perhaps a new hire at the paper? I thought I knew everyone covering the police beat in town.
“Mrs. Flowers has been flooded with calls from the press.” Hawkins was holding the receiver to his chest. “Been saying ‘no comment.’ Now that you’re here, she wants direction.”
“Tell them to drop dead,” I said.
“‘No comment’ is good,” Larabee overruled.
Hawkins transmitted the message. Listened. Again, pressed the phone to his shirtfront.
“She says they’re insistent.”
“Mysterious? Satanic?” My voice oozed disdain. “They’re probably hoping for a boiled baby for the five o’clock news.”
“No comment,” Larabee repeated.
I spent the rest of the day with the Greenleaf materials.
After photographing the human skull, I began a detailed analysis, starting with the teeth.
Unfortunately, only ten of the original sixteen uppers remained. Nothing sinister. Dentition fronting the arcade is single-rooted. When the gums adios, the incisors and canines aren’t far behind.
Dental Aging 101. Choppers don’t arrive fait accompli. No scoop there. Everyone knows mammal teeth come in two sets, baby and adult. And that each set makes its entrance as a specialty troupe. Incisors, premolars, canines, molars. But dental development is more complex than simply a play in two acts. And much of the action takes place offstage.
Here’s the script. First, a crown bud appears deep in the jaw. Enamel is laid onto that bud as a root begins growing downward or upward into the socket. The crown emerges. The root elongates, eventually forming a tip. In other words, following eruption, formation continues until the root is complete. Simultaneously, other teeth play out their scenes according to their own entrance cues.
Cranial X-rays showed partial eruption of the third maxillary molars, and partial completion of the second molar roots. That combination, along with recent basilar suture closure, suggested an age of fourteen to seventeen. My gut instinct favored the upper end of that range.
A reassessment of cranial traits did not change my initial impressions of gender and ancestry. Nevertheless, as a cross-check, I took measurements and entered them into my laptop.
Fordisc 3.0 is an anthropometric program that employs a statistical procedure called discriminant function analysis, or DFA. DFA’s rely on comparison to reference groups composed of known membership, in this case skulls of individuals whose race and sex have been documented, and whose measurements have been entered into the database. “Unknowns,” such as the Greenleaf skull, are compared to the “knowns” in the reference groups, and evaluated as to similarity and difference.
For sex determination there are a number of reference groups, each composed of known males and known females of specific racial or ethnic backgrounds. Since tight-fitting cheekbones and a relatively long skull ruled out Asian and Native American ancestry in this case, I ran comparisons using Caucasoids and Negroids.
No surprise. No matter black or white, the Greenleaf skull classified with the girls.
Evaluation of race is a bit more complicated. Just as they are for sex determination, the potential reference groups are composed of both sexes of known blacks, whites, American Indians, and Japanese, as well as Guatemalan, Hispanic, Chinese, and Vietnamese males. That’s what the Fordisc database holds.
I ran a two-way comparison between black and white females.
My unknown classified with the former. Barely.
I checked the interpretive stats.
A posterior probability, or PP, gives the probability of group membership for an unknown based on its relative proximity to all groups. Major assumptions are that variation is roughly the same within groups; that means and values differ between groups; and that the unknown actually belongs to one of the reference groups you’re using. That last isn’t necessarily true. A DFA will classify any set of measurements, even if your unknown is a chimp or hyena.
A typicality probability, or TP, is a better indicator of actual group membership. TP’s suggest the likelihood of an unknown belonging to a particular group based on the average variability of all the groups in the analysis. TP’s evaluate absolute distances, not relative distances, as with PP’s.
Think of it this way. If you have to fit your unknown into one of the program’s reference groups, a PP tells you which is the best choice. A TP tells you if that choice is realistic.
The PP on my screen said that for my unknown, black ancestry was a greater likelihood than white. The TP suggested her head wasn’t put together like those of the black ladies in the data bank.
I remeasured and recalculated.
Same result.
Numbers go one way, overall deductive judgment goes another? Not uncommon. I stick with experience. And, since genes pay no heed to stats, I knew there was the possibi
lity of mixed ancestry.
Flipping to the cover sheet, I filled in boxes on my case form.
Sex: Female.
Ancestry: Negroid. (Possible Caucasoid admixture.)
Age: Fourteen to seventeen years.
Sweet Jesus. Just a kid.
Staring into the empty orbits, I tried to visualize who this young woman had been. Felt sad at the loss. My mind could conjure up rough images of her appearance based on the black girls I saw around me. Katy’s friends. My students. The kids who hung out in the park across College Street. I could envision dark hair and eyes, chocolate skin. But what had she felt? Thought? What expression had molded her features as she fell asleep each night, woke each morning?
Fourteen to seventeen. Half woman, half child. Had she liked to read? Ride a bike? A Harley? Hang out at the mall? Did she have a steady boyfriend? Who was missing her?
Had malls existed in her world? When did she die? Where?
Do what you do, Brennan. Learn who she was. What happened to her.
Setting sentimental musing aside, I refocused on the science.
The next boxes on the form asked for PMI and MOD. Postmortem interval. Manner of death.
With dry bone, leached of flesh and organic components, time since death can be even tougher to nail than race.
Gently, I hefted the skull in one palm, testing its weight. The bone looked and felt solid, not porous or degraded like old cemetery remains or archaeological materials. All visible surfaces were stained a uniform tea brown.
I looked for cultural alterations, such as tooth filing, cranial binding, occipital flattening, or surgical boring. Zip.
I checked for indications of coffin burial. The skull retained no funerary artifacts such as morticians’ molding wax, trocars, or eye caps. No threads or fabric shreds. There was no embalmed tissue. No flaking of the cortical bone. No head or facial hair.
I shined a small flashlight through the foramen magnum, the large hole through which the spinal cord enters the brain. Except for adherent dirt, the vault interior was empty.
Using a dental pick, I scraped at the endocranial soil. A small cone formed on the gurney. Though slightly shinier, the soil looked similar to that in the cauldron. It yielded one pill bug, one puparial case, and no plant inclusions.
