Kathy Reichs - Cross bones

“I’ll take these to Esther Getz this afternoon,” he said.

Jake studied the shroud a full minute, then straightened.

“Getz is a textile expert at the Rockefeller Museum. Did you examine the bones?”

I shook my head. “There’s not much to examine.”

Jake set down the lens, stepped back, and made a sweeping gesture with one long arm. Ryan gave a trumpet flourish with his lips.

I moved to the counter, and gently poured the contents of each tub onto its lid.

“Do you have gloves?”

Jake started toward the back bedroom.

“And tweezers,” I said to his retreating back. “And a probe or dental pick.”

He got all three. As Jake and Ryan watched, I sorted, naming each fragment.

“Phalanx. Calcaneus.” Those were the easy ones. No other shard was larger than my earlobe. “Ulna, femur, pelvis, skull.”

“So what do you think?” Jake asked when I’d finished.

“I think there’s not much to examine.”

“Male or female?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Damn it, Tempe. This is serious.”

I inspected a chunk of occipital bone. The nuchal crest was prominent, but it wasn’t a record-setter. Ditto for the linea aspera on some splinters of femoral shaft. The only thing left of the pelvis was the thick, chunky part that had formed a joint with the sacrum. No gender-specific feature remained.

“The muscle attachments are robust. I’d give it a qualified ‘male,’ and that’s probably the best I’ll be able to do. Nothing’s complete enough for measurement.”

I picked up and rotated the heel bone. A small, circular defect caught my eye. Jake noticed my interest.

“What?”

I pointed at the tiny tunnel on the outer side of the bone. “That’s not natural.”

“What do you mean, not natural?” Jake asked.

“It’s not supposed to be there.”

Jake repeated his come-on gesture, more impatient than before.

“It’s not a foramen for a vessel or nerve. The bone’s badly abraded, but, from what I can see, the hole’s edges are sharp, not smooth.”

I lay down the calcaneus and handed Jake the glass. He bent and brought the midpart of the bone into focus.

“What do you think it is?” Ryan asked.

Before I could answer, Jake shot into the map room. Drawers opened and slammed, then he reappeared, flipping through stapled pages.

Slapping the pages onto the counter, Jake jabbed a finger at one.

I looked down.

Jake was pointing at an article titled “Anthropological Observations on the Skeletal Remains from Giv’at ha-Mivtar.” His finger was on a page of photographs. Much detail had been lost in the photocopy process, but the subject was obvious.

Four shots depicted fragments of a calcaneus and other foot bones, some before and some after separation and reconstruction. Though coated with a thick, calcareous crust, an iron nail could be seen traversing the calcaneus from side to side. A wooden plaque peeked from below the nail head.

A fifth photo showed a modern heel bone for comparison. On it was a circular lesion positioned precisely as the defect on our shroud calcaneus.

I looked a question at Jake.

“Back in sixty-eight, fifteen limestone ossuaries were found in three burial caves. Thirteen were packed with skeletal remains, and preservation was first-rate. Bunches of wildflowers. Spikes of wheat. Things like that. Trauma on the bones indicated that a number of individuals had died from violence. An arrow wound. Blunt-force trauma.”

Jake tapped the photos.

“This poor bastard was crucified.”

Jake positioned a second article beside the first and flipped to a sketch showing a body on a cross. The victim’s arms were spread-eagle on the crosspiece, but contrary to modern images, the wrists were tied, not nailed. The legs were spread wide, with the feet nailed to the sides, not the front of the upright.

“We know from Josephus that wood was scarce in Jerusalem, so the Romans would have left the upright in place, and only the crossbar would have been carried. Both parts would have been used repeatedly.”

“So the arms were tied, not nailed,” said Ryan.

“Yes. Crucifixion originated in Egypt. In Egypt they tied. Remember, death wasn’t caused by nailing. Hanging from a cross weakens the two sets of breathing muscles, the intercostals and the diaphragm, leading to death by asphyxiation.

“The victim would have been positioned with the legs straddling the upright and each foot nailed laterally. The calcaneus is the largest bone in the foot. That’s why the nail was driven through the calcaneus, from outside to inside.”

The Jesus family tomb. A crucified man in a shroud.

Realizing where Jake was going, I flapped a hand at the heel bone lying on his counter.

“There’s no way to know if this is due to trauma. The defect could be the result of a disease process. It could be postmortem damage. A worm or snail hole.”

“It could have been made by a nail?”

Jake’s eyes burned with excitement.

“It’s possible.” My voice carried little conviction.

Crucifixion? Of whom? We’d already excluded one candidate. Max was too old at the time of his death, if you believed traditional scripture. Or too young, if you believed the Joyce theory based on Grosset’s scroll. Was Jake suggestingthese were the bones of Jesus of Nazareth?

As with Max, a tiny part of my brain wanted to believe. A larger part didn’t.

“You said you recovered other bones from the Kidron tomb?” I asked.

“Yeah. Looters don’t give a rat’s ass about skeletal remains. They just dumped the bones on the tomb floor when they carted off the intact ossuaries. We got those. We also got bones that were adhered to the insides of the boxes they smashed and left behind.”

“I hope those remains were in better condition than these.” I pointed at the contents of the Tupperware.

Jake shook his head. “Everything was fragmentary, and preservation wasn’t great. But the dumped bones were still in discrete piles with ossuary fragments mixed in. That helped in sorting out the floor individuals.”

“Did someone analyze the material?”

“A physical anthropologist with the Science and Antiquity Group at Hebrew University. He was able to identify three adult females and four adult males. Said that’s all the information he could get out of the assemblage. There was nothing measurable, so he couldn’t calculate statures or run population comparisons of any kind. He found no indicators of specific ages, no unique individual characteristics.”

“Did he spot any lesions similar to this one?”

“He mentioned osteoporosis and arthritis. That was it as far as trauma or disease.”

“Were any of the other bones found in loculi, like our guy here?” I asked.

Jake shook his head. “They wanted boxes, not bones. Thank God the bastards didn’t go knocking out walls. I still can’t believe you found a hidden loculus. And a shroud. Oh my God! Two thousand years. Do you know how many people have been in and out of that tomb? And you found an undisturbed burial. Oh my God!”

Behind Jake, Ryan lip-syncedOh my god.

“Where are the other bones now?” I asked

“Back in”-Jake did the E.T. shimmy thing with his fingers-“holy ground. And the Hevrat Kadisha won’t say where. But I’ve got the anthropology report.”

Ryan imitated the shimmy thing.

A grin crawled Jake’s face. “Most of them, anyway.”

“Oh?” I floated one brow.

“A few little scraps might have gotten misplaced.”

“Misplaced?”

“Remember our phone conversation about DNA testing on the Masada skeleton?”

I nodded.

“Nice folks at that lab.”

“The IAA agreed to send samples?”