“Her YouTube clip’s been watched fifty or sixty million times. She became this overnight megacelebrity. Of course, that was a year or so ago. She’s old news by now.” Miranda studied the newswoman’s face, reaching down to shoo away a cloud of blowflies. It was absurd, of course, since the whole point of putting Gershwin out here was to allow nature to have its way with her, but the fly shooing was a reflexive gesture of respect, so I kept my mouth shut. “What do you plan to do with all these pictures of The Face of Channel 10?”
“Couple things, probably,” I said. “I need to do a funding proposal for the dean’s office—apparently they’ve got some deep-pocket donor they think might be interested in adopting us—and I could see using a few of these photos to illustrate our decomposition research. I’ll probably also do a slide presentation at the national forensic-science conference next February. ‘Decomposition Day by Day’ or some such. Thirty slides, thirty days, talk for a minute about each slide.”
Miranda closed her eyes and let her head slump forward, then feigned a loud snore. “A slide presentation? That’s lame, totally twentieth century,” she said. “How about a podcast—a real-time video camera, streaming continuous images to the Web? That would actually fit the spirit of our gal’s life and work and last request.”
“Broadcast this on the Web?” I shook my head. “No way. I don’t have nearly enough fingers and toes to count the ways that could get us in hot water.”
“Well, at least make a movie instead of slides for your presentation,” she said.
“But this is a still camera,” I pointed out. “Besides, neither one of us has the time to hang around and film a documentary.”
“Neither one of us needs to,” she said. “You’re setting the timer to take a picture, what, every few minutes or every few hours?”
I nodded.
“So once she’s through skeletonizing, in a month or two, string all the pictures together into a video and it’ll fast-forward through the entire decomp sequence in a couple of minutes. That would be cool.”
“You think that would work for the funding proposal, too?”
She cringed. “Why would seeing this woman’s face decay inspire some rich alumnus to fork over big bucks for body bags and bone boxes and the like?”
“Actually, I’m hoping to raise money for your assistantship,” I said. Miranda’s head whipped around, and I wished I hadn’t said it, even though there was some truth to it. “Sorry. Bad joke. You’re covered.”
She shot me a piercing look, hard enough to make me flinch. Miranda would make a terrific prosecutor or detective, I thought, if she ever got tired of forensic anthropology. “At least Ithink you’re covered.”
“You’re the chairman of the Anthropology Department,” she responded. “If anybody should know, it’s you.”
“I do know you’re not affected by the cuts I proposed,” I said. “But the dean has to approve the budget before it goes to the chancellor and the president. The football scholarships are safe and the coaching salaries are safe, but nothing else is guaranteed.” She didn’t say anything, but the worry in her eyes pained me. “By the way,” I added, “I’m giving a lecture at the Smithsonian on Saturday afternoon, and I’m having lunch with Ed Ulrich beforehand.” Ulrich had been one of my earliest and brightest Ph.D. students at UT; now he was head of the Smithsonian’s Division of Physical Anthropology. “I’m going to see if I can twist his arm for some research funding. Enough to support two graduate assistantships.”
“Tell Ed I said hi.” She was too young to have been a classmate of Ulrich’s, but she’d talked with him at conferences many times, and he’d made two or three trips to UT during the time she’d been my assistant.