A half-dozen rusting air conditioners jutted from the corrugated metal walls of the Annex, their compressors chugging full blast—full steam, I caught myself thinking ironically as I tugged open the balky steel door and stepped inside. The air conditioners did manage to lower the humidity a few notches, but they hadn’t made much headway against the heat, and none at all against the smell.
The Anthropology Department’s main quarters—built by bricking in the wedge of space beneath Neyland Stadium’s grandstands, decades before—weren’t exactly prime real estate; far from it. But Stadium Hall was palatial compared with the Annex. In winter the Annex was an icebox, rattling in the wind; in summer, it was a solar oven, its metal panels creaking and popping in the heat. And no matter the season, it stank inside, for the Annex was where we did the dirty work of processing human remains: simmering and scrubbing; separating flesh from bone; removing life’s lingering vestiges.
One corner of the processing room was taken up by an industrial-sized sink, which was flanked on one side by an immense steam-jacketed kettle—a cauldron big enough to simmer an entire skeleton—and on the other by a wide counter that ran the length of the wall. The counter was covered with blue surgical pads to absorb moisture from damp, freshly scrubbed bones, and when I entered, Tyler was laying out the last of the bones we’d brought back from the strip mine, neatly arranging them in anatomical order.
Normally I began my forensic examinations at the skull, but in this case—a case where the questions of age and sex seemed to converge, to entwine, in a pivotal way—I found my eyes drawn first to the pelvis, which confirmed what I’d thought in the field: female, beyond a doubt. The hip bones flared widely, giving them the distinctive shape that always reminded me of elephant ears; the sciatic notches—openings at the base of the sit bones where major nerves emerged from the lower spine—were broad, unlike the narrow notches of a male pelvis; and the pubic bone curved outward and down to create a concavity in her belly and birth canal, making room for babies that this particular female would never have.
But if her pelvis said “woman,” her mouth whispered a different, sadder word to me: “child.” If she had lived to be my age, the ripe old age of thirty-seven, her maxillary sutures—the seams in the roof of her mouth—would have begun smoothing out and filling in, eventually becoming nearly invisible. But the maxillary sutures in the skull I cradled upside down in my hand were rough and bumpy, the bones barely beginning to fuse. In fact, if I hadn’t known from years of study that the bones were slowly joining, I might have concluded that something had struck the hard palate at its center, creating a cruciform pattern of cracks. But it was her life, not her palate, that had shattered.
Tyler studied my face as I studied the dead girl’s skull. “How old you think she is?”
“Not old enough,” I said. “Fourteen; fifteen, tops. But maybe only twelve or thirteen.”
He frowned and shook his head—not in disagreement, but in dismay. “That’s what I figured, too, but I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”
“Any skeletal trauma?”
“A couple healed fractures in the arms,” he said. “One in the left humerus, the other in the right radius, about three inches above the wrist. And two ribs. But nothing perimortem. Nothing I could see, anyhow. Maybe you’ll spot something I’ve missed.”
I pored over every bone twice—with my eyes and with my fingertips—in search of a fresh, unhealed fracture, or the ragged nick of a knife blade, or a telltale smear of lead from a passing bullet—but there was nothing to be found. Finally, circling back to the skull once more, I shone a flashlight through the foramen magnum and peered inside the cranial vault, in case there was a fracture on the inner surface that might have ruptured one of the meningeal arteries, the arteries carrying blood to the brain. “I’m not seeing anything, either,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t killed. Just means that any injuries she had were soft-tissue trauma.” I took a final look into the cranial vault. “Oh, hey, did you find a wasp nest in here?”
He reached up and plucked a small gray object from the narrow shelf above the counter, then dropped it into my palm. A dozen or so hollow, hexagonal cells made of dry, papery pulp, it weighed almost nothing. “It’s a little crunched on the sides, from the forceps,” he said. “Getting it out through the foramen magnum was like trying to pull a ship out of a bottle.”
“Any more wasps on board?”
He shook his head. “Nah, I think ol’ Bubba Ray Peckerwood done got ’em all.”
“Careful,” I cautioned. “If you slip up and call him Peckerwood to his face, Special Agent Meffert might just feel obliged to open up a can of whup-ass on you.”
“Ha—let him try,” said Tyler. “I’ll lay some yoga on him. He’ll never even know what hit him.”