Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

After twenty minutes of work, with a little thought, a little trial and error, a little piecing of them together, he was able to identify thirty-one of the pieces; the rest were too small, mostly particles and fragments of the thin, curling, complex structures of the inner face-the ethmoid, the sphenoid, the lacrimal portion of the pterygoid. Some of them might even be rodent bones. Some parts of the facial skeleton were missing altogether, probably carried off by animals or eaten on the spot. He set the smallest pieces aside and concentrated on the recognizable chunks.

Much of the damage was postmortem, the “too much chewing by animales” of Dr. Orihuela’s report. Very few bony edges failed to show some signs of carnivore gnawing. But the perimortem damage, the destruction that had been inflicted at the time of death, was as bad as you were likely to find on a human face. The maxilla, the main bone of the face, running from the eyes to the palate, had suffered what was known as a Le Fort I fracture, broken roughly in half by a side-to-side fracture that ran through the base of the nasal aperture, so that the palate and the upper teeth were separate from the rest of the face, like some grotesque parody of an upper denture. Both zygomatic bones-the cheekbones-had been crushed into crumbs just under and inside the bony orbits of the eyes. The inner and outer rims of the orbits had also been splintered and broken, with pieces missing. The nasal bone no longer existed and the sinuses behind them, on both sides, had been fragmented as well. That, along with the knocking-out of upper front teeth and the shattering of their sockets, was the major damage. There was plenty of minor damage too, all of it adding up to a confirmation of Dr. Orihuela’s fuerza despuntada, although “blunt force” hardly conveyed the horrific extent of the destruction. Someone had smashed this kid in the face, judging from the damage probably right in the middle of the face, and more than once-probably more than twice-with something really heavy: a lead pipe, or a crowbar, or maybe a baseball bat.

The blows would have driven most of the skeleton of the face deep into the brain. He tried to visualize what they would have done to the fleshed, living head of a young girl. Then he tried not to visualize it. But certainly, the report’s probable cause of death could now be considered confirmed. Nobody could have lived through that.

Other than that, there wasn’t much these bone fragments could tell him beyond what he already knew. The unclosed cranial sutures were no help in aging, except to verify that she hadn’t reached her mid-twenties. The sex criteria were all either neutral or female.

The deciduous teeth had all been shed, and all of the permanent teeth (those that hadn’t been knocked out), except for the third molars, had come up. That was another nod in the direction of a minimum age of fifteen, because fifteen was generally accepted as the age at which the second molars were fully erupted. As for the state of development of the third molars, the upper jaw could tell him nothing because the back parts of it were gone. Not so in the mandible, however, and there he found that, while the third molars were not fully in place, they had broken through the bone and were a good third of the way up.

Predicting the age that wisdom teeth will erupt is risky business, since they are the most unpredictable of all the teeth, often not coming in at all. But a range of seventeen to twenty-one is a pretty safe bet. If these cranial fragments and teeth had been all that he’d had to work with, that would have been his guess: Seventeen to twenty-one-which would have fit nicely with the advanced sexual maturation. But in this case he also had the long bones, and they suggested fifteen to sixteen.

Taking everything together, which was what you did when you had data that didn’t fully match up (which is what you usually had), he was inclined to stick with his fifteen-to-sixteen estimate. The process of epiphyseal fusion was more reliable by far than the eruption of the wisdom teeth. As for the accelerated sexual maturation, that was just one of those things that you ran into from time to time, and, he supposed, maybe not all that that surprising if the girl was sixteen.

And that, he thought, hoisting himself off the stool for another stretching break, was probably all he was going to be able to… He hesitated, frowning. Wait a minute, wasn’t there something about…

He sat back down and picked up the mandible again, then the lower fragment of the maxilla, the one with the palate and the teeth. Of course. Four of the premolar teeth were missing. Normally, people have eight premolars or bicuspids, sets of two, left and right, upper and lower, between the canines and the molars. But this girl had only one in each place; none of her second premolars had come in. They hadn’t been knocked out or been lost on account of disease; they’d never developed in the first place.

Naturally, he’d noticed it earlier, but with his attention, emotional and intellectual, riveted on the horrible maiming of the face, he hadn’t really registered it until now. The condition was called hypodontia, and it was of forensic interest, both because it was rare-the incidence of one or more congenitally missing teeth ran at about 5 percent in most populations, but the probability of all four second molars being missing was-well, he didn’t know what the incidence was, but it was surely under 1 percent. And it was of interest because it was genetically linked; it ran in families. This, he thought with satisfaction, could well be the most important thing he’d turned up in terms of coming up with who the girl was. With some legwork and a little luck, she might yet end up with a better resting place than a cardboard box in a government warehouse in “Gideon-”

This time Marmolejo’s unexpected presence behind him made him jump. “Jeez! Javier, you have to stop sneaking up on me like that,” he said irritably. “Get some leather heels or cough or something.”

“You have my abject apology,” Marmolejo said unconvincingly. “I came to tell you that four o’clock won’t be possible. I’m on my way to a meeting in the office of the procurador general himself. The subject is the promotion of cooperation and teamwork between our various state and federal police agencies. This assures that it will be an extremely contentious meeting, and probably lengthy as well, so I may not be available for some time; perhaps as late as five. Or if that doesn’t work-”

“Five is fine. I’m running a little slow anyway.”

Marmolejo came a step closer and peered with interest at the bones. “Have you found anything more?”

“Actually, yes.”

He explained about the missing teeth. Marmolejo was gratifyingly impressed. “You see? I knew you would find something. Congenital hypodontia, that is new to me.”

“And on the age, move my ‘pretty confident’ up to ‘very confident. ’ ”

“But still short of ‘Oh, no question’?”

“If you mean, would I bet my life on it? No, but it’s the best you’re going to get out of me. The epiphyses don’t lie. She was fifteen or sixteen years old, or if you want to play it completely safe, make it fourteen to seventeen. I’ll see you at five.”

When Marmolejo left, Gideon stood up and stretched again, walked up and down the corridor a few times, turned down an offer of more coffee from Corporal Vela-it was getting to the time of day where a highball or a glass of wine would be more welcome-and returned to the cubicle to finish up.

There was nothing left but the bones of the feet, which he had not yet laid out properly. For whatever reason, in forensic analysis, these bones figure less than any of the others. There is less interest in them, less known about them, and less research done on them. Gideon wasn’t sure why, but he thought it might simply be that feet just aren’t that exciting, at least not to most people. Still, they had to be examined; as he had told Marmolejo, you never know what you’re going to find.