My pulse started to race. “First name Freddie-Fred or Frederick, maybe? White male, forty-five, give or take a few years?”
She hesitated. ”I don’t suppose you have a HIPAA release from him, do you?”
“I don’t,” I said, “and I’m afraid he’s too dead to sign one for me. Would you need a subpoena to let me look at his X-rays?”
“Hang on one more minute, Doc.”
I hung on. My cell phone’s low-battery indicator started to beep-draining the battery all the faster.
Finally she came back on the line. “This is such a coincidence, Dr. B.,” she said. “Dr. Shepherd was just saying that he needs to consult with you about that very case.”
I laughed. “Theresa, you’re the best. Can I come over in about ten minutes?”
“I’ve already pulled the file,” she said. “I’ll tell Dr. Shepherd you’re coming to speak with him.”
Fifteen minutes later Ben Shepherd switched on a light box and clipped a cranial X-ray onto the glass. Dr. Sherpherd and I had worked together on several cases, and it was Ben who’d gotten me a portable X-ray machine to use down at the loading dock, so that when decomposing bodies needed to be X-rayed, we didn’t have to haul them inside and stink up his department. I gave a slide lecture every year for the Radiology staff and residents, showing shattered skulls and dismembered bodies. “I like a good gunshot wound,” he’d said to me once. “The beveling of the entry and exit wounds. The lead wipe around the edges. The lead spatter inside the cranium. It’s so much more interesting than a skateboarder’s broken arm.”
Ben studied Parnell’s cranial X-ray. “Hmmm,” he said. “Not much to see. His chart says he had a mild concussion, but of course that doesn’t show up in an X-ray.”
I studied the ghostly image. The teeth weren’t the reason for the X-ray, so the image wasn’t oriented to capture much dental detail. And the skull showed no sign of healed fractures we could try to match to the burned cranium. But there was one hope, I realized, studying the frontal view of the cranium. Just above the brow ridge, in the center of the forehead, a wavy boundary between dark and light traced a delicate scalloped pattern, almost like the lobes of a ginkgo leaf, within the skull. That scalloped line was the upper edge of the frontal sinus, a cavity in the middle of the skull’s three layers of bone. Every person’s frontal sinus was unique, and was therefore a possible means of positive identification-in theory, at least, although the theory hadn’t been applied or tested nearly as exhaustively as identification through fingerprints, dentition, or DNA. I pointed to Parnell’s frontal sinus and traced the edge with the tip of a pen. “If we get lucky piecing this skull back together,” I said, “we might be able to match that, or exclude a match.”
“Whenever you get enough to compare,” he said, “bring it over and we’ll shoot an X-ray.”
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t think we even need to shoot an X-ray. When the cranium burned, the inner layer of bone peeled loose, so the frontal sinus is actually exposed. If we had a copy of the X-ray, we could compare the bone directly with the image.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “I think I just got paged. I’ll be gone a few minutes. If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll figure Theresa’s come in and reshelved that chart.” He gave me a wink, shook my hand, and wished me good luck.
CHAPTER 30
I TUGGED OPEN THE DOOR OF THE OSTEOLOGY LAB and walked in waving the manila envelope of X-rays as if it were the winning ticket in the $50 million Powerball game.
Miranda sat with her back to the door, bent over one of the lab tables, peering through a magnifying lamp. She looked almost like a statue, and in fact I couldn’t remember seeing her in any other position but this-staring through the lens, tweezers in one hand, a chip of cranium in the other-in the eight days since the Cooke County fire. It was as if she’d always been sitting here and always would be, forever reassembling the fragments of what we hoped was the skull of Garland Hamilton.
Miranda heard the crinkling of paper and X-ray film and glanced around. I waited expectantly. She raised her eyebrows. I jiggled the envelope.
Finally she said dryly, “Okay, the suspense is killing me. What’s in the envelope?”
“I could tell you were dying to know,” I said. “Cranial X-rays of a homeless guy.”
“And you have those because…?”
“Because he might be a missing person. Because I don’t trust Garland Hamilton, alive or dead. Because I worry that what you’re piecing together might not be Hamilton’s skull.”
“You think it might be this guy instead?”
“I hope not,” I said, “but it can’t hurt to compare. How much frontal sinus you pieced together so far?”
“This much,” she said, holding up a bony mosaic the size of a postage stamp. “Probably not enough to compare yet. But there’s a light box over there in that corner, if you want to plug it in.”
The light box was actually a slide sorter. Before I started using a digital camera, I shot 35-millimeter slides of every case I worked. By now I had tens of thousands of slides, so even though photography was fast going digital, I’d always need slide sorters and carousel trays. I’d taken a couple of stabs at converting my slides to digital images and plugging them into PowerPoint presentations, but the image files were so big they tended to crash the computer or fill up the hard drive. If I converted all my slides to digital images, I’d need a hard drive the size of Neyland Stadium to store them all.
I retrieved the slide sorter from the corner, set it on the desk, and knelt down to find a plug in the power strip. There wasn’t a vacant outlet, so I grabbed hold of a white plug. Just as I was pulling it free, I heard Miranda say, “Don’t unplug the white-” Then I heard her say, “Oooohhh…”
“What’s wrong?”
“That was the computer,” she said. “I had a file open I hadn’t saved yet. Oh, well-it was only my dissertation proposal. I’m sure I can reconstruct it in, say, three months.”
Knowing Miranda’s thoroughness, I felt sure she saved her work every three minutes.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing over,” I teased.
“Thanks,” she said. “One pearl of wisdom like that makes the long hours and the low pay seem worthwhile.”
Straightening up, I dusted my hands on my pants and switched on the light box. The fluorescent tubes flickered briefly, then glowed steadily through the milky glass. I laid down the X-ray of Freddie Parnell’s skull, centering the scallops of the frontal sinus over the brightest light.
“What do you think? Look familiar?”
“Sure thing,” she said. “That’s Billy Bob What’s-His-Name, well-known frontal sinus-about-town.”
“I just thought maybe since you’ve been spending so much time with those cranial fragments, some of those curves would register with you.”
“I’m trying to match fracture lines,” she said, “so I haven’t really been worrying about the sinus itself. Besides,” she added,
“I’m still missing a lot of the upper edge. I doubt that we’ve got enough yet for a match or an exclusion.”
She held out the postage-stamp-size mosaic, then plucked a second scrap of bone from the sandbox and aligned an edge with the bigger piece. The edges fit fairly well but not perfectly, and I knew that Miranda had spent days gauging such minutiae.
She flipped the pieces over so we could see where the inner layer of bone had peeled away, revealing the sinus cavity. Along one portion of each piece that she held, I saw a faint line where the sinus cavity ended.
“We’ve got some edge line here and here”-she pointed-“but there’s not much, and it’s not particularly distinctive. You want to flip the X-ray over, since we’re looking from the back side?”
I flipped it, and she shifted and rotated the pieces of bone above the X-ray, seeking some elusive alignment.
“Hard to say.” I frowned.
“Very hard,” she agreed. “How reliable did you say frontal-sinus c
omparison is?”
“Very,” I said. “No two are the same.”
“You’re sure?”
“I think I’m sure.”
“Who’s researched it?”
“Doug Ubelaker, up at the Smithsonian, did an article on this about ten years ago. He concluded it was a good basis for identification or exclusion.”
“How many sinuses did he look at? And how’d he quantify the match?”
“He looked at a few dozen,” I said. “I don’t know that he quantified it on any numerical scale. I think he drew on his experience and judgment to determine whether or not things matched.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Sounds like the way they compared fingerprints about a hundred years ago.”
“You got a better idea?” I was feeling a little defensive, though I wasn’t sure why.
“No,” she said, but then, after a pause, “Well, maybe. I mean, the edge of the sinus traces a curving line, right?”
“Right.”
“So if you can define those curves mathematically-the curve shown in Parnell’s X-ray here and the curve of Humpty Dumpty here, once we get him back together again-you should be able to graph how closely those equations match.”
I was having trouble following her, but she seemed to be warming to the idea.
“Actually,” she said, “that might be a pretty nifty dissertation topic. I’m in the market, since you just erased my proposal.”
“I did not,” I said. “Besides, I have a draft of your proposal. You’re going to refine age estimates using the pubic symphysis.”
“I thought I was,” she said. “But the more I think about it, the less excited I get. The idea of squinting at four or five hundred pubic bones for a year seems like a very tedious project.”
“Gee, not like squinting at graphs and statistics for a year,” I said.
“But it would be original graphs and statistics,” she said.
“The pubic symphysis has already been studied up one side and down the other, so anything I did would be so derivative. This could be new territory. It could help us with exactly the problem we’ve got right here: Is this Freddie Parnell’s burned skull or isn’t it? We don’t have the mathematical tools to measure that right now. My experience and my judgment-that’s what I’m supposed to rely on, in the absence of statistical tools, right? — my experience and my judgment say this ain’t Freddie.” Her voice was rising, and I heard her frustration rising, too.
“But my experience and my judgment also say we don’t have near enough of this damn puzzle done yet to say that with any damn confidence.”
With that, she laid the two pieces of bone in the sand, stood up, and walked out of the bone lab.
As the door banged shut behind her, I realized that she’d been pushed-by me, by eight days of squinting at skull fragments, and by her terrifying assault-to the breaking point.
I also realized she was right about the frontal sinus. It would indeed be a good dissertation topic. And this particular scrap of reconstructed sinus wasn’t nearly enough to tell us whether Garland Hamilton was safely dead or dangerously alive.
CHAPTER 31
EVER SINCE BURT DEVRIESS HAD FILED HIS CLASS-ACTION lawsuit against Trinity Crematorium in Georgia, he’d been sending me a steady stream of cremains to analyze. I’d also been making frequent trips to Alcoa with my postage scale to weigh the cremains from Helen Taylor’s furnaces.
By now I was nearing thirty cases from Trinity, and they showed interesting similarities and fascinating differences. One consistent trend was the weight of the cremains: Those from Georgia tended to weigh three or four pounds, which was less than two-thirds the weight of those from Tennessee.
The cremains from Georgia usually contained a mixture of human bone and animal bone, as well as a bewildering array of extraneous contaminants: bits of charred wood, zippers, nails and screws, and heaping helpings of Quikrete concrete mix, which accounted for the powder, the sand, and the pebbles. Most puzzling of all, the Georgia cremains contained small, fluffy spheres of fabric-I took to calling them “fuzzballs”-whose only purpose, as best I could tell, was to puff up the cremains and keep them from looking so skimpy.
Early in Burt’s suit, I’d gone to Chattanooga to give a deposition. I was cross-examined by a legion of lawyers, representing not just Trinity but a consortium of funeral homes that were being sued by DeVriess for defrauding their customers. The lawyers made several scornful attempts to show that it was impossible to tell the difference between burned human bone and burned animal bone. I’d brought numerous slides, though, and the questioning gave me a chance to present a lecture on the distinctive differences between human bone and animal bone.
One thing working in my favor was the fact that the fragments of actual bone that came back from Georgia hadn’t been as finely ground as the cremated bones that came out of Helen Taylor’s processor. Either Trinity didn’t have a processor or, like the cremation furnace, it sat untouched and gathering dust. Trinity did, however, have a wood chipper parked behind one of the sheds-and right beside a commercial-size barbecue smoker. The two pieces of equipment, operating separately or in tandem, conjured up images that boggled the mind-and turned the stomach.
Burt had waged an aggressive campaign to keep the case before the media, and it had worked. More and more clients signed on, and the magnitude of his damages claim kept multiplying. Within three weeks, thirty plaintiffs had joined the class, and Burt was seeking a million dollars for each plaintiff. If every remaining wronged family signed on, it was possible the claim could grow to $900 million.
One scorching afternoon during the dog days of August, the UPS man brought me a flat cardboard envelope instead of the cremation containers I’d come to expect from him. Tucked into the cardboard was an envelope embossed with the name of Burt’s firm, and tucked inside the envelope was a check for fifty thousand dollars-drawn not on the firm’s account but on Burt’s personal one. I dialed his office and got Chloe.
“Hi, Chloe. Is the champion of the underdog in at the moment?”
“I’m not sure about the champion of the underdog,” she said,
“but Mr. DeVriess is in. Would you like to speak with him?”
“Sure, he’ll do in a pinch,” I said. I heard the click of the transfer.
“Hello, Doc,” said Burt.
“Hello, Burt,” I said, “I got your check. What’s the occasion? That’s about ten times what I invoiced you.”
“I’m returning the retainer you paid me last spring,” he said.
“Why? You earned it,” I said. “You helped clear my name and keep me out of prison. It was worth every penny, and I owe you a debt of gratitude for that. Always will.”
“I owe you one, too,” he said. “You found my Aunt Jean for me. You also landed me the case of my career.”
“So you’re feeling confident about it?”
“You might say that, Doc. I’ve just accepted a settlement offer for thirty million dollars.”
I whistled. “That’s great, Burt,” I said. “That’s over a million dollars a family. Even after you skim off your rapacious commission, that’s still seven hundred thousand a family.”
“Well, it won’t end up quite that good,” he said. “That thirty million has to cover every claim that comes forward during the next twelve months. It’ll dilute everybody’s share considerably if another fifty or a hundred people come forward. Still,” he said, “it should give every family at least several hundred thousand dollars.”
And it would give Burt a cool $9 million. I glanced again at the check in my hand, and suddenly $50,000 didn’t seem like quite so much anymore. Still, it was the most anybody had ever handed me.
CHAPTER 32
THE HEAT HAD BEEN BUILDING FOR DAYS: NINETY-FIVE degrees, ninety-seven, ninety-nine. Every morning the sun swam up through the haze like a blood orange, and it set the same way, ragged and shimmering. The cicadas buzzed angrily from midmorning till night, and the hotter it got, the louder
they buzzed. Or maybe it was the opposite: The louder they buzzed, the hotter it got, all that rubbing of legs or vibrating of membranes generating massive doses of heat. Looking up into one particularly noisy tree in my yard, I half expected to see hundreds of cicadas burst into flame.
The towers of downtown Knoxville were invisible from more than a mile or two away; driving upriver along Neyland toward the UT campus and downtown was like an act of creation, with buildings gradually materializing out of the murk, though they never seemed to make it all the way to crisp, sharp-edged solidity. Walking was like swimming through Jell-O.
Every patch of ground that wasn’t watered was cracking open from the heat and the drought. Cornstalks were withering in the fields; the pastures at the UT cattle farm, across the river from Sequoyah Hills, had gone from emerald green to desert brown. The Holsteins that normally dotted the hillside pasture seemed to have given up on the grass altogether, huddling miserably in the shallows on the inside of the river’s big bend.
A flock of Canada geese had given up migrating to take up permanent residence in a small, grass-ringed pond beside the UT Hospital’s parking garage; I passed them every day on my way to the Body Farm. The flock, which had doubtless congratulated itself on its wisdom and good fortune in laying claim to such a choice pond, had gradually taken on a look of despair and betrayal as the pond shriveled, shrinking to a puddle, then a mud flat, and finally a circular patch of red-clay desert-a mocking reversal of the oasis it had once been. I stopped one day on the shoulder of the road and got out to take a closer look. The cracked earth-saucer-size slabs of curling clay, divided by dark, deep fissures between-looked like a nightmarish, 3-D version of a flayed giraffe skin. Peering down into the fissures, I flashed back to a childhood fear that had haunted me one hot, dry summer half a century before: What if the devil managed to escape from hell and break free through the cracks in the ground? What if he emerged just as I happened by, my tender young soul ripe for the picking? Suddenly it hit me: It wasn’t just a childish fear. Garland Hamilton was roaming free on the face of the earth this hellish summer. I shivered in spite of the heat and fled to seek refuge and distraction amid the corpses at the research facility.
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