Kathy Reichs - Bare Bones

Good. The passenger had also seen a dentist.

I gloved, spread a sheet across the table, and emptied container two. It took several minutes to locate and remove the two loose dental restorations. After sealing those items in a vial, I picked out all jaw and tooth fragments, placed them on a tray, and set it aside.

Then I turned to the skull.

There would be no reconstruction for this guy. The fire damage was too severe.

Teasing off charred flesh and flaky black gunk, I began working my way through the jigsaw puzzle of cranial architecture.

A segment of frontal bone rolled down into a pair of prominent brow ridges. Occipital pieces showed bulbous mastoids and the largest neck muscle attachment I’d ever seen. The back of the guy’s head must have bulged like a golf ball.

The rear-seat passenger had definitely been male. Not that useful. Larabee would nail that during his post.

On to age.

Taking two steps to the right, I studied the tray of dental fragments.

Like plants, teeth send roots into their sockets long after the crowns have sprouted through the gums. By twenty-five, the garden is in full bloom, and the third molars, or wisdom teeth, are complete to their tips. That’s a wrap, dentally speaking. From that point on, it’s dental breakdown.

Though the passenger’s enamel was either missing or too crumbly to evaluate, every viewable root was complete. I’d need X rays to observe those hidden in the sockets.

I returned to the cranial wreckage.

As with dentition, skulls come with some assembly required. At birth, the twenty-two bones are in place, but unglued. They meet along squiggly lines called sutures. In adulthood, the squiggles fill in, until the vault forms a rigid sphere.

Generally, the more birthday candles, the smoother the squiggles.

By stripping blackened scalp from the cranial fragments, I was able to view portions of suture from the crown, back, and base of the head.

The basilar squiggle was fused. Most others were open. Only the sagittal, which runs from front to back across the top of the head, showed any bony bridging.

Though vault closure is notoriously variable, this pattern suggested a young adult.

On to ancestry.

Race is a tough call at any time. With a shattered skull it’s a bitch.

The upper third of one nasal bone remained in place on the large frontal fragment. Its slope downward from the midline was acute, giving the nasal bridge a high, angled shape, like a church steeple.

I swapped the piece of forehead for a chunk of midface.

The nasal opening was narrow, with a rolled lower edge and a tiny spike at the midway point. The bone between the bottom of the nose and the upper-tooth row dropped straight down when viewed from the side. The cheekbones ballooned out in wide, sweeping arcs.

The steepled nasal bridge, sharp inferior nasal border, and nonprojecting lower face suggested European ancestry.

The flaring zygomatics, or cheekbones, suggested Asian or Native American ancestry.

Great.

Back to the dentition.

Only one front tooth retained a partial crown. I turned it over. The back was slightly ridged at the point where the enamel met the gum line.

I was staring at the incisor when Joe Hawkins poked his head through the door.

“You look stumped.”

I held out my hand.

“I’m not sure it’s shoveled, but there’s something weird there.”

Joe looked at the tooth.

“If you say so, Doc.”

Shoveling refers to a U-shaped rimming on the tongue side of the center four teeth. Shoveled incisors are usually indicative of Asian or Native American ancestry.

I returned the tooth to the tray and requested X rays of the jaw fragments.

I checked the time. One-forty.

No wonder I was starving.

Stripping off gloves and mask, I washed with antibacterial soap and threw a lab coat over my scrubs. Then I went to my office and washed down a granola bar with a can of Diet Coke.

As I ate, I scanned my phone messages.

A journalist from the Charlotte Observer.

Skinny Slidell. Something about the Banks baby case.

Sheila Jansen. She’d called early. The NTSB works hard.

The fourth pink slip caught my attention.

Geneva Banks.

I tried the Bankses’ number. No answer.

I tried Jansen.

Her voice mail invited a message.

I left one.

I stopped back into the main autopsy room. The passenger lay where the pilot had been, and Larabee had just made his second Y incision of the day.

I walked over and looked at the body. Though gender was clear, age and race were not. Those aspects would have to be determined skeletally.

I explained the discrepancy in racial features. Larabee said he’d spotted nothing useful in the body.

I asked for the pubic symphyses, the portions of the pelvis where the two halves meet in front, and the sternal ends of the third through fifth ribs to tighten my age estimate. Larabee said he’d send them over.

Larabee told me he’d talked with Jansen. The NTSB investigator would be dropping by in the late afternoon. Neither Geneva Banks nor Skinny Slidell had phoned him.

When I returned to the stinky room, Hawkins had popped the dental X rays onto the light boxes.

The roots of the left canine and second molar, and of both wisdom teeth, were visible in various jaw fragments. While the canine and M-2 were complete to their tips, the M-3s were not quite over the plate.

Dentally, the passenger looked eighteen to twenty-five.

Race was still a crapshoot.

Back to the zygomatic arch.

Yep. Mongoloid-looking cheeks.

Back to the maxilla and frontal.

Yep. Caucasoid-looking nose.

As I was staring at the frontal bone, an irregularity on the nasal caught my eye. I carried the fragment to the scope and adjusted focus.

Under magnification the irregularity looked circular and more porous than the surrounding bone. The edges of the circle were clearly defined.

A puzzling lesion, unlike usual findings in nasal bones. I had no idea what it meant.

I spent the next hour mining fragments, stripping flesh, and recording observations. Though I found no other signs of disease, I decided to request X rays of the rest of the skeleton. The nasal lesion looked active, suggesting a chronic condition of some sort.

At three-thirty, Hawkins delivered the ribs and pubes. He promised to take a full set of films when Larabee finished with the passenger’s body.

I was placing the pubes and ribs in a solution of hot water and Spic and Span when Larabee entered, followed by Sheila Jansen. Today the NTSB investigator wore black jeans and a sleeveless red shirt.

Hours of exposure had numbed me to the smell of the passenger’s unrefrigerated head, now decomposing on my table. My greasy, soot-stained gloves and scrubs undoubtedly added to the room’s bouquet.

Jansen’s lips and nostrils tightened. Her expression went opaque as she attempted to regain control of her face.

“Time to swap stories?” I asked, peeling off mask and gloves and tossing them into a biohazard container.

Jansen nodded.

“Why don’t I meet you two in the conference room?”

“Good idea,” Larabee said.

When I joined them, the ME was going over his findings.

“—multiple traumatic injuries.”

“Soot in the airways?” Jansen asked.

“No.”

“That makes sense,” Jansen said. “When the plane slammed the cliff face, the fuel tanks ruptured. There was immediate ignition and fireball. I figure both victims died on impact.”

“External burning was severe, but I didn’t find a lot of deep-tissue destruction.” Larabee.

“After impact gravity took over and the fuel cascaded down the cliff face,” Jansen explained.