‘‘If anyone can wheedle things away from people, it’s Kendel,’’ said Jonas. ‘‘I don’t know if you’ve no ticed, but after you’ve talked to her awhile, you really want to please her.’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ said Korey. ‘‘Underneath that soft femi nine exterior, she’s tough. You kind of get the idea she can be ruthless if she needs to be.’’
‘‘I’m glad you two approve of my choice,’’ said Diane.
‘‘She can sure get the job done,’’ said Korey. ‘‘She’s got a set of lungs on her too.’’
Jonas raised one of his white bushy eyebrows. ‘‘Lungs?’’
‘‘You were here when she found the museum snake in her desk drawer,’’ said Korey. ‘‘Her voice carried all the way up here.’’
‘‘Well, it was a shock,’’ said Jonas. ‘‘And speaking of getting the job done, I’m in the process of translat ing the case our mummy friend came in. I’m working with an Egyptologist friend from the University of Chicago.’’
‘‘Is there any way we can date the case?’’ said Diane.
‘‘I took the liberty of taking a few scrapings from the inside to send off for analysis. The translation will also tell us something. I’ve sent photographs to my friend.’’
Diane looked from Jonas to Korey. ‘‘It looks like all of you have all this well in hand. I’ll be in the lab if you need me to sign something.’’
Before Diane went back to the other bones in her lab, she asked Korey to send the X-rays to her office so she could study the complete set on her light table that evening. She was getting as excited about the mummy as the others. It felt good. She would like to have explained to the people who didn’t want a crime lab next to the museum that for the people working in the lab, the museum was a welcome oasis.
Jin looked through the glass into the jar and back at Diane, his face somewhere between amazement and laughter. ‘‘Nice piece of glass he’s in,’’ said Jin.
‘‘I need a blood sample. My people in the museum tell me that this is the best place to get it.’’
Jin nodded. ‘‘All that vascular tissue it has is needed to—’’ He grinned. ‘‘Well, you know.’’
‘‘Indeed. Will you take care of it?’’
‘‘You came to the right place. Did you break it off?’’
‘‘No. He came to us in that condition.’’
‘‘Want me to let you know if it was whacked off or broken?’’
‘‘Please.’’
‘‘I knew there would be perks in working here,’’ said Jin, taking the Victorian pickle jar to his work station.
Diane started back to her lab, but abruptly turned and went to Jin’s desk—a large work space with mi croscopes, glassware and chemicals. It could have been the space of a mad scientist.
‘‘Jin, did you leave anything in my car?’’ ‘‘Leave anything? Like what?’’
‘‘Like anything.’’
‘‘No. Was I supposed to?’’
‘‘No. Just asking.’’
Diane didn’t really believe that Jin would have sent her flowers, but you never know.
She laid out the bones of Green Doe in order, head to toes, on the shiny metal table. As with Blue, she started with the pelvis, measuring, recording and ob serving. The pattern of Green Doe’s pubic symphysis, the front articulation of the two sides of the hips, was similar to Blue’s—rough and unworn. He hadn’t lived the years it takes to smooth out the ridges and in crease beveling along the margins. Green was around the same age as Blue Doe. Young—late teens or early twenties. There were no markings on his pelvis, nor were the muscle attachments overly prominent. He hadn’t been a particularly muscular fellow.
She went to Green’s skull, which had strikingly in teresting facial features. Her mind flashed to the clay models that Neva had presented to them. The fact that she was an artist wasn’t on her vitae—it wasn’t something that Neva thought employers would find important. But it was important to Diane. She picked up the house phone and rang the lab. David answered.
‘‘Jin showed me the mummy’s crown jewels. Inter esting,’’ David said.
‘‘I imagine it will generate all manner of conversa tion among my staff.’’
‘‘How could it help but?’’
‘‘Is Neva there? Would you send her to the bone lab?’’
‘‘Sure thing.’’
‘‘Oh, and David. You didn’t happen to leave any thing in my car, did you?’’
‘‘No. What did you find there?’’
Diane told him about the flowers and the card. ‘‘I didn’t think you or Jin sent them, but so far, no one I know has.’’
‘‘That’s really odd. I take it Frank didn’t send them, or Mike?’’
‘‘No, they didn’t.’’
‘‘Maybe you should get one of us, or museum secu rity, to walk you to your car for a few days.’’
‘‘It’s odd, but I don’t think it’s ominous.’’
‘‘Nevertheless . . . it doesn’t hurt to be careful. I’ll send Neva over.’’
Diane met Neva at the entrance to her lab and let her in. Neva stopped at the entrance and gazed around the lab and over at the table where Green Doe was laid out.
‘‘I haven’t seen this lab. It’s big,’’ she said. ‘‘You didn’t put it on the chief’s tour.’’
‘‘No, I didn’t. Technically, it’s part of the museum.’’
Neva looked uncomfortable . . . a little embarrassed. ‘‘I want to thank you for sending me to process the car by myself.’’
‘‘I had confidence you could do it. And now—why I asked you in here. You’re about to discover that there are hazards in letting your employer know you have a talent.’’
Chapter 17
Neva’s frown deepened as Diane said the word haz ard, as if bracing herself for a dressing-down, but by the time Diane reached the end of the sentence, Neva simply looked puzzled.
Diane smiled. ‘‘Let me show you another room that wasn’t on the tour.’’
She picked up the skull of Green Doe and led Neva into the vault. Neva’s gaze moved over the room, resting on each piece of equipment, then on Diane.
‘‘What is this room?’’
‘‘This is where I keep my special toys.’’
Diane turned on the computer and equipment and set Green Doe on a platform in front of a machine.
‘‘This is a laser scanner. The laser reads the topogra phy of the skull as it rotates on the pedestal and gen erates a matrix of points. It looks like a wire frame on the computer screen. Other software uses a skindepth database to reconstruct and display a textur ized face.’’
Diane turned on the computer and called up an image. ‘‘This is a reconstruction I’ve already done of Ethel—Fred and Ethel are the skeletons in the corner of the lab.’’
She showed Neva the sequence of images for Ethel from the wire frame to the reconstruction of a thirty-year-old woman with dark hair and eyes, a small nose, thin lips and high cheekbones. The face had the masklike, lifeless look of a computergenerated face, but it was a remarkably detailed face.
‘‘Wow. This is some incredible software.’’
‘‘It is. It’s the absolute state of the art.’’
‘‘You want me to run it?’’
‘‘I’m assuming that if you can do the detailed sculp tures that you do, you can also draw.’’
Neva nodded. ‘‘I wanted to take art, but my parents discouraged it. They said you can’t make a living with art.’’
‘‘Well, you are about to. There are several prob lems with facial reconstructions. One is characteris tics that the bones don’t show—the shape of the eyes, lips and tip of the nose. And these are the things that trigger recognition. People recognize the tip of Karl Malden’s nose without seeing any other feature.’’
‘‘Who’s Karl Malden?’’
‘‘Someone whose nose you would recognize if you were my age. I don’t suppose you know who Jimmy Durant
e is either.’’
Neva held up a hand as if she held a hat, quivered, and sang ‘‘Hot-cha-cha-cha-cha!’’ in so perfect an im pression of Jimmy Durante that Diane almost fell off her chair laughing.
‘‘I used to entertain my relatives as a kid with that. Amazing what you can get by with as a kid.’’ ‘‘Your talents are apparently endless.’’
Diane shook her head and returned her attention to the computer-generated photograph of Ethel.
‘‘We could show this to Ethel’s mother and there is a good chance she wouldn’t recognize her. Her mother knew her as an animated person, with mannerisms, facial expressions, and gestures. She knew all the de tails of her daughter’s face, and this just doesn’t have all those fine details that make up the person she knew as her daughter.
‘‘However, if we were to show this to a store clerk who bagged Ethel’s groceries, he might recognize her. He may not remember what the tip of her nose looked like, but he remembers the general look of her. What we need is pictures that both a mother and an ac quaintance can recognize. What I would like you to do is take an image like this and draw a more realis tic picture.’’
Neva put her hands to her face and pressed the bridge of her nose. ‘‘Okay. I can do this.’’
‘‘It means you will have to learn the software.’’
‘‘I’m good with computers.’’
‘‘Good. Start by looking at computer-reconstruction files to with how it all works. Then we’ll do the three hanging victims. After we get a CT scan of the mummy, I’ll show you how to use the information from the scan to reconstruct his face.’’
Neva nodded.
‘‘You’ll also have to learn the bones of the skull and how the bones affect the look of the face,’’ said Diane. ‘‘And you’ll have to pay attention to other details too. Sometimes knowing things like the person walked with a pronounced limp might give you a hint Fred’s and Ethel’s familiarize yourself about how to portray a facial expression. Or if a toxi cological report on a decayed victim comes back show ing a certain kind of thyroid medication, you might guess that the victim has a bug-eyed look that is a side effect of some of those medications. A big part of this work is intuitive.’’
Diane watched her look at the skull sitting on the platform.
‘‘I’ve seen how they do those skin-depth points to make a sculpture of a face. But I’ve never understood how they know what the nose looks like.’’
‘‘You can’t know the shape of the tip. However . . .’’ Diane took the skull and sat down at a desk, mo tioning Neva to draw up a chair. ‘‘The width of the nose is indicated by the size of the nasal opening. The bridge of the nose and the nasal spine—this sharp projection at the bottom of the nasal passage— determine the length of the nose. A large nose needs a strut to hold it up. That’s what the anterior nasal spine does. If you draw a line coming off the end of the nasal bone and one coming from the nasal spine, where the lines meet gives you an idea how long the nose was. The angle of each line can suggest the tilt of the nose.’’
Neva nodded. ‘‘That makes sense.’’
‘‘Another effect of a long nasal spine is upward angling of the skin between the upper lip and the nose. Notice what happens when I pull on the lower part of my nose.’’ Diane pulled the bottom of her nose forward, stretching the skin above the lip. ‘‘In a shorter nose, that part of the face is parallel to the plane of the face, but in a long nose it angles forward.’’
‘‘So this guy would have that characteristic,’’ said Neva.
‘‘I believe so. Look how far the tip of the nasal spine is from his maxilla—where his upper teeth are.’’
Neva nodded and reached out and touched the skull with her fingertips, along the spine and down the max illa. She stopped abruptly and drew her hand away. ‘‘This is one of the hanging victims, isn’t it? How did his bones get so clean?’’
‘‘Yes, he is one of the victims. The diener at the morgue cleans the bones after we take all the samples we need from the flesh.’’
‘‘What a job—I’d hate to have to do that.’’
‘‘He seems to enjoy it. Having the proper equip ment helps.’’
Neva laughed nervously. ‘‘But it has to be a mess.’’
‘‘Not a lot messier than dealing with his clothes— and you had to do that.’’
‘‘That’s true. Thank God for latex gloves.’’
‘‘And Febreze,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Oh, God, yes. When we got out of the woods, I had to spray myself down good with Febreze to kill the odor. You’d think the woods would be well ventilated.’’
‘‘Another feature that is a consequence of a large nasal spine like this one is nostrils that appear arched. That shape exposes a larger-than-normal portion of the inside of the nose—the surface of the septum.’’
‘‘Yeah, I’ve seen that in people.’’
Diane touched a point on the bridge of the nose directly between the eyes. ‘‘This is the nasion. It’s a craniometric point. Here just below the opening of the nose is the nasospinale. For physical anthropologists, the length of the nose is measured between these two points. However, the relative position of the bones as they are situated in the face determines how we per ceive the length of the nose.’’
Neva furrowed her brows, looking hard at the skull as Diane continued.
‘‘See how the bridge of the nose stands away from the face, forming a straight line from the forehead to the nose? It’s different from, say, mine.’’ Diane rubbed her finger across the nasal bone of the skull and then touched her own.
‘‘His is kind of like those Roman statues.’’
‘‘Exactly. That would make the nose look longer. In this kind of nose there is a perception that the nose is longer than it actually is because your eye sees the nose as starting at the forehead, rather than where the nose actually starts.’’
‘‘Okay, I see. What about people with a bump on their nose, like the mummy? What would the bone look like?’’
‘‘The nose is supported by bone and cartilage. You see the bone here in Green Doe’s skull, but the carti lage was destroyed by the cleaning of the bones. When a body decomposes, the cartilage decomposes— though more slowly than flesh. The bump on the nose in the mummy resulted when the supporting cartilage decomposed and collapsed following death, and the nose drooped, revealing the end of the nasal bone— making it look like a bump. The mummy wrappings have pressed the nose down so that the nasal bone has a prominence that it wouldn’t have had while he was alive. Looking at all the pictures of Egyptian mummies in our reference books, it’s easy to think that Egyptian pharaohs all had nose bumps—making them all look alike.’’
‘‘That’s funny. I did think that all those pharaohs had bumps on their noses.’’
‘‘Bet you thought they were old and lean, too.’’ Neva grinned. ‘‘Yes, I did.’’
‘‘In more modern skeletal remains, you can tell from the upward angle of the lower part of the nasal bone that some noses probably had a bump. A person can appear to have a bump on their nose if they have damaged the cartilage supporting the tip of the nose, like from an accident or just getting hit hard in the nose.’’
‘‘And that would show up in the skull?
‘‘Not necessarily. You might see a break in the nasal bone, but you wouldn’t know how the break mani fested itself. Is that more than you wanted to know about how to determine the shape of the nose from the skull?’’
‘‘No. This is good. I’ve seen all those nose types in people. It never occurred to me that it had anything to do with their bones. How about the eyes and lips?’’
‘‘Those are more of a problem. You know how far apart the eyes were because you have the sockets. But you don’t get much help beyond that. Information about gender and race helps, along with knowledge of the geometry of the face—like where the corners of the lips are in relation to the other features. And age plays a big part. As you get older th
e eyelids sag, the lip line isn’t as distinct. As I said, much of this is intuitive. You do the best you can with the informa tion you have. But you go as far as you can with the bones.’’
The phone on Diane’s desk rang, lighting up the in house line. Diane reached and pressed the speaker button.
‘‘Fallon, here.’’
‘‘Dr. Fallon, it’s Andie. I’ve been going through your E-mail, and there’s one that’s kind of strange.’’ ‘‘Strange? How?’’
‘‘I’ll read it to you. It says: ‘Sometimes the dead are guilty.’ ’’ Neva and Diane exchanged glances.
‘‘The dead are guilty? What does that mean?’’ asked Neva.
‘‘I don’t know. I’m going downstairs. You stay here and work with the software.’’
Diane left her lab and headed for the elevators. Andie was sitting at her desk when she entered the private door to her office.
‘‘What do you think they’re talking about?’’ said Andie, giving up her seat at Diane’s computer.
Diane looked at the message. Sometimes the dead are guilty. That was all, no signature, no explanation. Diane looked at the sender. JMLndrmn23. It wasn’t anyone she recognized. But then, who did she know that would send her a message like this?
Sometimes the dead are guilty. A prank? An uneas iness began creeping up Diane’s spine to the back of her neck.
‘‘Are you going to respond?’’
Andie’s voice startled her. She’d forgotten she was still standing there by the desk.
‘‘I don’t know.’’ But she found herself clicking the REPLY button, and she wrote a simple note, What do you mean? and hit the SEND button.
‘‘What do you think it does mean?’’ asked Andie.
Diane shook her head. ‘‘Probably some selfrighteous person who doesn’t like the museum being connected to the crime lab.’’
She also was beginning to think that it wasn’t such a good idea. But Rosewood had her between a rock and a hard place on that one.
Odd, in any case. Something else she had recently described as odd. Oh, yes, the flowers. That was odd too.
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