Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [83]
“Now, the hard one: manner of death.” I held up the sternum, pointing to the small, round foramen. “How many said gunshot?” Nearly everyone in the room raised a hand proudly. I wagged a finger and shook my head, smiling. “That was a trick question. One of my best graduate students almost got fooled by that hole in the sternum.” I explained how to tell the difference between a foramen and a gunshot wound, and then I pointed out the fractures in the hyoid. “Did anyone guess strangulation?”
One hand went up in the back row. It was Sarah’s. “Well done, Miss Carmichael,” I said. “You’ve got the makings of a good forensic anthropologist. I hope you’ll stick with it.” She reddened and ducked her head, but she nodded. When class ended, though, she was out the back like a scalded cat.
Walking back to class, the box tucked under one arm, I unfolded Sarah’s quiz paper. Beneath her answers to the three quiz questions, she’d written two things. I stopped at the top of the department’s exterior staircase to read them. “P.S.,” read the first one, “She has no lateral upper incisors. Genetic?” Golly, she was sharp! I went on to the second addition. “P.P.S. I was deeply moved by your story and your sorrow,” it said. “I’m embarrassed by what happened next, but I’m not actually sorry.”
I laughed out loud. “Okay, then neither am I,” I said. Two passing students gave me a sidelong glance, then looked quickly away. The nutty professor, I could feel them thinking. I didn’t care. I practically danced down the maze of ramps and stairs leading to the base of the stadium, then took the steps to my office two at a time. When I saw my door, though, my euphoric bubble burst.
The steel frame bowed outward into the curving hallway, while the metal door itself bent inward. Just above and below the knob, the pea-green paint hung in slivers from two spots where a wrecking bar had pried open the door to my office.
Heartsick, I stepped inside. The filing cabinet hung open, its locked drawers also mangled by the pry bar. Forensic case folders lay strewn across the floor, examination reports and field notes and newspaper clippings commingled like some mass grave of moribund murder investigations. Sorting and refilling the mess would take hours, if not days. A single folder lay atop the cabinet. I knew without looking which report it would be: 05-23. Leena Bonds.
When I repacked the skull, sternum, and hyoid in a small hatbox for the trip up to class, I had left the big box containing the rest of her skeleton sitting on my desk. That box, like the scores of others lining the shelves in the adjoining room, measured three feet long by a foot in cross-section. It would be hard to miss. And now, as I whirled to look, I saw that her box was missing. “Damn,” I muttered, setting down the student papers and the hatbox. “Damn.” Then a flood of relief washed over me as I realized that all was not lost. Leena’s skull and hyoid—the key to her identification and her manner of death—were safe in the hatbox. Whoever had come looking for them had gone away frustrated. He hadn’t left empty-handed—the theft of the rest of her skeleton was a bitter loss—but I still held the trump cards, if the case ever came to trial. Thank God I had taken her to class.
Using my handkerchief, I picked up the handset of my phone and dialed the campus police. “This is Dr. Brockton in Anthropology,” I told the dispatcher. “Someone’s just broken into my office and files. They’ve also stolen some skeletal material.” The dispatcher promised to send an officer right away. “Tell him to park at the east end zone access portal,” I told her. “There’s a stairway that leads from