Kathy Reichs: Bones to Ashes

Age and sex consistent. Orthopedic implant serial number a match. Known resident at the address. Known bed smoker. Good enough for me. Now it was up to the coroner. By three I’d completed my report and delivered it to the secretarial office for typing.

It isn’t protocol to notify me of a skeleton’s arrival. Normally, a case goes to one of the lab’s five pathologists, and via him or her, to me. But I’d asked for a heads-up on the bones Bradette was sending from Rimouski. On the chance they’d forgotten, I checked with morgue intake.

Nothing.

Geneviève Doucet’s were the third set of remains that had simmered overnight. Using long-handled tongs, I fished out her skull, pelvis, and several long bones, then spent an hour teasing off flesh. The stuff was resilient as gator hide, so I accomplished very little.

I was lowering Geneviève’s basket back into its compartment when my lab door opened. I turned.

Of course. Ryan has a knack for showing up when I’m looking bad. I waited for a crack about steam-lank hair and eau de poached flesh. He made none.

“Sorry I didn’t bring Charlie last night.”

“No problem.” I settled the stainless steel cover over the well and checked the temperature gage.

“Lily,” Ryan sort of explained.

“Nothing serious, I hope.” Backhanding hair from my face with a lab coat sleeve.

“I’ll come by tonight.” Ryan jabbed a thumb at the skeleton laid out behind me. “That my floater?”

“Yes.” I stepped to the table, holding wet, greasy gloves away from my body. “She’s young. Fifteen to eighteen. Mixed racial background.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Except for the front teeth, I’d have said she was white. Nasal opening is narrow and spiked at the bottom, nasal bridge is high, cheekbones aren’t especially flaring. But all eight incisors are shoveled.”

“Meaning?”

“There’s a high probability she’s part Asian or Native American.”

“First Nations?”

“Or Japanese, Chinese, Korean. You know, Asian?”

Ryan ignored the dig. “Show me.”

I rotated the woman’s skull so her upper dentition was visible. “Each of the four flat teeth in front has a raised border around its outer perimeter on the tongue surface.” Picking up the jaw, I indicated a similar raised ridge. “Same with the lowers.”

I set down the jaw.

“I took cranial measurements and ran them through Fordisc 3.0. Metrically she falls in the overlap region for Caucasoid and Mongoloid.”

“White and Indian.”

“Or Asian.” A teacher correcting a dull pupil. “Any interest in age indicators?”

“Hit me with the high points.”

I indicated a roughened area on the base of the skull. “The basilar suture is fused.”

“The wisdom teeth aren’t fully out,” Ryan observed.

“Correct. The third molars have emerged but aren’t yet in alignment with the tooth row.”

Moving farther down the table, I ran my finger over an irregular line curving below the upper edge of the right pelvic blade. “The iliac crests are partially fused.” I picked up a collarbone and pointed to a similar irregularity on the throat end. “Same for the medial clavicular epiphyses.” I waved my hand over the arm and leg bones. “Growth caps on the long bones are in various states of fusion.”

“Anything else?”

“She stood about five foot three.”

“That’s it?”

I nodded. “No abnormalities or anomalies. No new or healed fractures.”

“LaManche thought the hyoid was intact.”

Ryan referred to a tiny U-shaped throat bone often damaged during manual strangulation.

I gathered a small ovoid disc and two slender spurs in the palm of one glove. “At her age the hyoid wings and body aren’t yet ossified. That means there’s elasticity, so the bone can undergo considerable compression without breaking.”

“So she could still have been strangled.”

“Strangled, smothered, poisoned, gut-stabbed. I can only tell you what the bones tell me.” I replaced the hyoid.

“Which is?”

“She wasn’t shot or bludgeoned. I found no bullet entrance or exit wounds, no fractures, no cuts or slash marks anywhere on the skeleton.”

“And the autopsy revealed zip.”

LaManche and I had discussed his findings at lunch. There hadn’t been much to discuss.

“The lungs were too far gone to know if she was breathing when she went into the water. Marine scavengers took care of her eyes, so there’s no way to check for petechiae.”

Petechiae are red pinpoint hemorrhages caused by leaky capillaries under increased venous pressure. Since sustained compression of the neck causes the backup of blood returning to the heart, the presence of petechiae on the skin of the face, and particularly around the eyes, is strongly suggestive of strangulation.

“So she could have been dead when she went into the water.”

“I could try playing around with diatoms.”

“I know you’re going to tell me what those are.”

“Unicellular algae found in aquatic and damp terrestrial habitats. Some pathologists believe the inhalation of water causes penetration of diatoms into the alveolar system and bloodstream, with subsequent deposition in the brain, kidneys, and other organs, including the bone marrow. They see the presence of diatoms as indicative of drowning.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I’m not convinced diatoms can’t make their way into any submerged body, drowned or not. Neither is LaManche. But there is another application. Many diatom species are habitat specific, so assemblages found in or on bodies can be compared with assemblages found in control samples taken from different locations. Sometimes specific microhabitats can be identified.”

“Use diatoms to narrow where the body’s been. Salt water. River bottom. Swamp. Estuary.”

“That’s the general idea. But it’s a long shot.”

“Sounds good.”

“Before boiling I removed bone samples for DNA testing. I could have a marine biologist check the marrow in those. Also the sock.”

Ryan spread both hands, palms up. “Case practically solved.”

I raised questioning brows.

“The girl died near the river or someplace else. She was alive or dead when she entered the water. If alive, she fell, jumped, or was pushed, so manner of death is suicide, homicide, or accidental.”

“Unless she had a stroke or heart attack,” I said, knowing the only categories left were “natural” and “undetermined.”

“Unless that. But this is a teenager.”

“It happens.”

Ryan did show up that night. I’d showered and blow-dried my hair. And, yes, I confess, applied mascara and lip gloss and a spritz of Alfred Sung behind each ear.

The buzzer warbled around nine. I was reading about FTIR spectroscopy in the Journal of Forensic Sciences . Birdie was performing his evening toilette on the far end of the couch. Losing interest in intertoe spaces, he padded along to the foyer.

The security screen showed Ryan in the vestibule, birdcage at his feet. I buzzed them in, welcomed both warmly. After greeting and ear scratching the cat, Ryan accepted my offer of a beer.

While I poured Moosehead and Diet Coke, Ryan settled Charlie on the dining room table. Birdie assumed his sphinx pose on one of the chairs, head up, paws in-curled, every sense fixed on the cage and its occupant.

Charlie was in top form, perch hopping, seed spewing, head cocking right then left to eyeball the cat. Every now and then he’d fire off a line from his repertoire noir .

Ryan took Birdie’s end of the couch. I took mine, feet tucked under my bum. Again, we established that our daughters were good. Lily was waiting tables at Café Cherrier on Rue Saint-Denis. Katy was doing a summer Spanish course in Santiago, Chile.