Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [69]
What had gotten Miranda excited enough to ignore her throbbing arm was a region about midway along the shaft of the rib. A ring of thicker material, maybe half an inch wide and an eighth-inch thick at its midline, encircled the rib. Several other ribs in the tray had similar features. “Recently broken,” she said proudly. “But already healing. Definitely not perimortem.”
She was right; it couldn’t have been broken at the time of death. “Got a guess on how long before death?”
She swung the lamp with the built-in magnifier down over the bone and switched on the doughnut-shaped light. “Well, the hematoma at the break would have turned into this healing callus within a week to ten days, so I’d say the fracture occurred at least a couple of weeks prior to death. But the callus is still more cartilaginous than bony, so it’s got a ways to go yet. Just a guess—I’d need to search the literature to pin it down—but I’d say this break was two or three weeks antemortem.”
“Would you say it’s consistent with injuries sustained in a barroom brawl eighteen days before death?”
She swiveled her head to look at me. “Well, yeah. Would you say our friend participated in a barroom brawl eighteen days before he died?”
“Got the shit kicked out of him, according to the defendant, who also came out a little the worse for wear. Happened in one of those windowless cinder-block beer joints in Morgan County that practically shout, ‘Enter and die!’ Couple other locals corroborate the story. Apparently Mr. Ledbetter here got stomped by some bad hombres wearing combat boots.”
She laid down the first rib and picked up another. “Here’s the really interesting one. See the callus? Not a nice, neat ring around the bone. I’ve never seen one shaped like this.” Neither had I. The patch of new bone was long and irregular; instead of encircling a cross-section of rib, it extended for several inches in a lumpy, wavy path. “Weird, huh?” I nodded. “Must be a comminuted fracture, with multiple fragments,” she went on. “But that’s not all. Look at the distal end of the break. Something’s missing.”
I leaned closer to the lens. Sure enough, extending beyond one end of the healing callus was a gouged-out groove in the underlying bone. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Looks like a piece splintered off.”
Miranda nodded excitedly. “So where’s the missing piece?”
“Maybe somewhere in the right lung,” I said.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” she grinned. “Let’s go see.”
“No. I’ll go see,” I said. “You’ll go get your arm fixed.”
She made a face, then brightened. “This is a great case!”
“Yeah. I’m mighty glad to have your help. Good work, Miranda. Thanks.” I caught and held her eyes. They glistened and filled—damn, was she going to cry again?—and then she smiled and nodded briskly. Thank you, God, I thought, and nodded back.
I let her out at the service entrance to the health service. We were regulars there, what with our frequent trips for quick X-rays when we didn’t want to drive clear across the river to the morgue. Miranda hipped the door of the truck shut and waved me on with her good arm.
I crossed the river—our own River Styx, one of my colleagues had once joked, but that made me death’s boatman, and I wasn’t sure I liked the label—then threaded behind the hospital and angled in beside the morgue’s loading bay. Punching the combination code for the adjoining door, I hurried inside. My first stop was the X-ray room. I found Ledbetter’s file and clipped his films to a light box. His ribs were a mess: six ribs on the right side were fractured, three of them in two or more places. The seventh rib—the last of the “true ribs,” so-called because they joined the breastbone, while the “false ribs” below them did not—had one of the worst comminuted fractures I’d ever seen; it looked like one end had been fed through a KitchenAid garbage disposal before being