“Sure. How much can you narrow it down, and how do you do that?”
I cradled the skull in the palm of my left hand. “Let me show you something in the upper jaw, the maxilla.” A prominent line ran along its midline, starting just behind the incisors. I traced the line with my right pinky finger. “See this seam?” She nodded. “This is the intermaxillary suture.” Running crosswise were two others. “This one, just behind the front teeth, is the incisive suture, and back here at the molars is the palatomaxillary suture.” She nodded again. “So, in the same way the cranial sutures fuse and fade over time—obliterate—so do the maxillary sutures. My maxillary sutures are fused solid by now, like they’ve been welded shut. Yours probably are, too. How would you describe these?”
She bent down and took a close look. “It looks like the roof of the mouth is cracked.”
“It looks cracked,” I agreed, “but it’s not; it just hasn’t finished growing together. That tells us we’re looking at a subadult. A teenager, maybe even preteen. That’s consistent with the smaller size of the skull, too. Be a big help if we can find the rest of the bones.”
“From your lips to God’s ear,” said Angie. “We did a grid search across a pretty big area around the cabin. A quarter mile in every direction. That’s almost forty acres. Nothing so far.”
Just then the door opened and a fiftysomething man walked in, nodding at Angie. His clothes were rumpled, his white shirt bore a coffee stain, and he held an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. If he’d been wearing an old raincoat, I’d have taken him for Columbo, the bumblingly brilliant television detective from the 1970s. He took out the cigar, shifted it to his left hand, and held out his right. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Slow line at Starbucks. Stu Vickery. Good to meet you. Angie came back from Tennessee raving about the Body Farm.” He shook my hand, then shifted the cigar from his left hand to his right before clamping it back between his teeth. I wondered how many times in his life he’d repeated that sequence of movements: remove cigar with right hand, shift cigar to left hand, do something with right hand, shift cigar back from left hand, put cigar back into mouth. I wondered, too, how long an unlit cigar would last before it got totally soggy and crumbled in his mouth.
“Angie and I were just taking a look at the skull,” I said. “Angie, you want to tell him what we know so far about the sex, race, and age?”
“Me?”
“You. It’s a pop quiz, to see if you were paying attention.” She took the skull from my hand and drew a deep breath, then succinctly recapped everything I’d said about the cranial sutures, the muscle markings, the maxillary sutures, and the ambiguous gender. “Good job,” I commended. “You made a hundred.” She smiled slightly and flushed a faint shade of pink.
Vickery removed the cigar, studying the damp, bitten end as if it might contain some guidance. “So we’ve got a Johnny or a Janie Doe, teenager or less. What more can you tell from the skull? Any idea how this kid died?”
“We were just about to get to that,” I said. I took the skull back from Angie and pointed to the left cheek. “You can see that the zygomatic arch, which connects the cheekbone to the temporal bone, has been gnawed off. There are fresh chew marks at both ends of the arch.” Angie and Vickery both leaned in to peer at the damage. “Now look at the right cheek. What do you see?”
“The arch is missing there, too,” said Vickery. “But it doesn’t look like Fido’s to blame for that.”
“Exactly,” I said. “The right zygomatic arch wasn’t chewed. It was snapped.”
“And it’s darker than the chew marks,” Angie observed.
“And what do you suppose that means?”
“It happened a while back?” I nodded but kept quiet, to encourage her to finish the thought. “At the time of death?”
“Yes. Probably. More or less,” I said. “It’s stained the same color as the rest of the skull. That means the bone was already broken when the soft tissue began decomposing. But see how the edges of this break are a little less jagged than the edges of the other zygomatic arch, the one the dog snapped? It’s possible that this break was already beginning to heal before the kid died.”
Vickery frowned, causing his cigar to twitch in his mouth. “What does that tell you about the timing of the injury? Can you be any more specific?”
“Not much more specific,” I answered. “Antemortem or perimortem—before death, or right around the time of death.”
Vickery nibbled on his cigar. “Couldn’t it have happened sometime afterward? Like, when the body was buried or dumped out of a car or whatever?”
“Never say never,” I answered. “But I’m pretty sure this fracture occurred days or even weeks before death. And I’m pretty sure the other fracture was the fatal one.”