“Pleading for his life,” said Miranda.
We had not unearthed any artifacts besides the watch in the process of pedastaling the skeleton. Now, though, as we removed and bagged the bones, I came across seven small objects embedded in the soil. Six were metal buttons—one in the region of the chest, where a left shirt pocket would have been; three along the midline of the body, spaced between the chest and the pelvis; and one at each ankle. The seventh object, at the waist, was a rectangular plastic buckle, olive green, with a rotting bit of canvas webbing still threaded through it. As I handed each object to Arpad, as carefully as if it were a precious gem recovered from a pharaoh’s tomb, the law enforcement officers crowded around to inspect them. At the sight of the buckle, Emert voiced what I’d been thinking. “This guy was wearing army coveralls,” he said. “I’ve still got my dad’s in a chest in the attic.” There were no coins or keys in the grave, which led me to believe that the pockets had been emptied. I was therefore not surprised, though I was disappointed, that the grave contained no dog tags.
“So we’ve got a dead G.I. from World War II here,” said Emert. “Swell. There were only, what, ten thousand of those here in Oak Ridge?”
I thought we were finished—through the bones, down to the dirt—when the tip of my trowel snagged on a clump of clay. But it wasn’t clay. A chunk of it broke off, and when it did, it revealed odd striations within the soil. Looking closer, I began to discern a lump, a shape, about a foot long and slightly narrower, somewhat paler than the rest of the red clay lining the grave. I probed gently at the edge I had exposed. The striations were quite thin—paper-thin, I realized, as the proportions of the rectangle registered in my brain. “I don’t know what this guy was doing when he died,” I said, “but it seems to have involved a mighty thick stack of papers.”
CHAPTER 29
I HOPED THE BONES MIGHT TELL US MORE THAN THE papers did about the dead soldier. Officially he was case 09-02, the second forensic case of 2009, but a number was a poor substitute for a name.
One of my UT colleagues in the College of Agriculture—a scientist in the Forest Products Laboratory—had confirmed that the rectangular lump we dug from the grave was indeed a stack of paper. From the thickness, he estimated it to be somewhere between 400 and 500 pages, and he said it appeared to be a low grade of typing paper—long on wood pulp, short on linen fibers. Because it was cheap and pulpy, it tended to crumble into chunks, rather than peeling apart into individual sheets. “I managed to pry apart a few fragments,” he told me, “but I’m afraid there’s not much there. Ink smears and mold. Whatever’s written on those pages, it hasn’t stood the test of time.”
The bones, on the other hand, had held up well. After a day of simmering in hot water, Biz, and Downy fabric softener, followed by some gentle scrubbing with a toothbrush, Miranda had laid the clean, caramel-colored bones of G.I. Doe—that’s what she‘d dubbed 09-02—in anatomical order on a table in the osteology lab. She had also taken skeletal measurements with a 3D digitizing probe. After entering the measurements in the Forensic Data Bank, she plugged them into ForDisc, the software developed by one of my computer-savvy colleagues at UT. According to ForDisc’s analysis of the data—the size of the skull, spacing of the eye orbits, width of the nasal opening, and the length and diameter of various bones, among others—G.I. Doe was a white male of about 180 centimeters, or five feet eleven inches, in stature. None of that surprised me; after all, ForDisc had been programmed to make, quickly and automatically, the kinds of calculations and analyses physical anthropologists had spent years learning how to make with calipers, and slide rules and calculators.