Without Mercy (4 page)

“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 interesting 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.”

“What a shame,” said O'Conner. “I mean, don't get me wrong, this would be awful at any age, but twenty's just a kid. Unbelievable.”

“It might be unbelievable,” I told him, “but I'm afraid it's all too true.”

I put the sheriff, the deputy, and the TBI agent to work, helping Miranda and me inventory and bag the bones. I'd brought a diagram of the skeleton, the bones drawn as outlines. As I picked up each bone and handed it off to the lawmen to bag, I called out its name, and Miranda filled in the bone's outline on the diagram. “Cervical vertebrae,” I said. “C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7.” That was the biggest collection of adjacent elements. Below the neck, the remaining bones were few, far between, and badly chewed—especially the long bones of the arms and legs. Given how many of the skeletal elements were missing, it didn't take long to collect them all. At the end, though, we got lucky: Two of the long bones—the right humerus and right femur—bore recently healed fractures. Comminuted fractures, in which the bones had been broken into several pieces. And those pieces had been fastened back together with metal plates and screws. “Look at this,” I said, holding up the two shafts. “This could help a lot with identification.”

Waylon gave a low whistle. “Them parts can be tracked, right, Doc? Like the serial number on a gun or a car?”

I shook my head. “I wish. But no. If we can find x-rays that match these, we'll have a positive I.D. But first we have to find a missing-person report that seems to fit, then see if we can get the medical records.”

“Huh,” Waylon grunted, clearly disappointed.

Once the bones were all charted and bagged, I put everyone else to work gathering up the bags, cans, and other debris. “I'll be back in a minute,” I told them. They probably assumed I needed to step behind a tree and pee. Instead I ambled away, wandering the site, alternating between scanning the ground
for anything that might happen to lie outside the circular path and, especially, examining the trunks of surrounding trees. After a while, I sensed that I was being watched.

“Dr. B?” I'd been so intent on my search that I hadn't heard Miranda come up behind me. “You look like you're looking for something. I mean, something specific.”

“I am,” I said, stepping closer to a medium-sized tulip poplar and running my fingers over the bark. “And I just found it. Y'all come take a look.”

The others laid down their trash bags and approached. Waylon was the first to spot what I was looking at. “God a'mighty,” he said. “I was afraid we was gonna find something like that.”

“Me, too,” said O'Conner, “though I didn't want to say so.”

“What?” demanded Miranda, looking from their faces to mine. “Somebody want to let me in on the secret?”

I reached up and tapped the tree trunk, slightly above my head. “Claw marks,” I said. “From a bear. A big one, judging by the height of the marks.”

Miranda blanched. “Are you thinking what I
think
you're thinking?”

I nodded. “You mentioned coyote scavenging, but I figured it for bear,” I told her.

“Why? You could tell from the tooth marks?”

I shook my head. “Hard to tell from the tooth marks themselves, though there
was
a mighty big puncture in a scapula. What tipped me off wasn't what was there, but what
wasn't
.” All three of them looked puzzled. “Canids—dogs and coyotes—tend to go for the extremities. A dog'll gnaw off a hand or a foot, or even an arm or a leg, and drag it off to a safe place. Bears, though, love the torso: the ribs, the sternum, even the spine. Stuff that's too tough for dogs and coyotes.
Remind me, when we get back to campus, to dig out an article for you. It was in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
a while back. Described some cases of bear scavenging in the mountains of New Mexico. The bears ate the ribs and the sternum every single time.”

“Beg pardon, Doc,” said Waylon. “I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but you reckon maybe the barbecue folks are missing out on a good bet?”

I blinked and stared at him. “You mean by not putting
humans
in the smoker?”

“Lord, no!” The big man blushed and grimaced. “I mean the sternum. From pigs, not people. Smoked sternum—might taste even better'n pulled pork shoulder or baby back ribs.”

“Waylon,” I said, “you are one of a kind.” He blushed again. “But I don't think it would work. The ribs have a fair amount of meat on them. Between them, actually. The intercostal muscles. But the sternum?” I poked around on my own chest, to underscore the point. “Lots of cartilage, to connect it to the ribs. But no real muscle to speak of. All you'd get is gristle and bone.”

Waylon gave his own mammoth chest a few exploratory prods, then nodded, looking mildly disappointed. “I reckon bears ain't as picky as us.”

“Maybe they don't have the luxury,” I pointed out. “They're mostly eating bugs and berries and acorns, right? Not often they get a feast like this.” I felt a stab of guilt when I heard myself refer to the victim that way. “I don't mean to sound callous. I just mean that if you're a big black bear in these mountains, it might be tough to find enough to eat, you know?”