“Just like you,” I said. She elbowed me in the ribs, hard. “Ouch!
‘Skeletally speaking,’ that was all I meant. Under the age of twenty-five. Aren’t you?” I knew she was, but only by a few months. I didn’t have many students who would challenge me or tease me, and none who would throw the occasional elbow. Miranda felt free to spar with me, and I liked the confidence and ease that reflected. She’d long since become immune to the lesbian and prostitute jokes about her last name, Lovelady, and she’d turned down countless cops who’d asked her to handcuff and “Mirandize” them. She was smart, strong, tough, and funny, and she didn’t take herself too seriously. But she was young enough to be my daughter, and she was my student, to boot. I cranked up the water pressure a bit. As the adipocere and intercostal cartilage dropped away, the rib cage emerged like some ancient shipwreck being scoured from a sandy seabed. Rib by rib I began dismantling the wreckage, wriggling each bone free of the sternum and free of the vertebra that it joined in the back. As I extracted the bones I handed them to Miranda, who laid them on the table beneath the skull in their proper anatomical position. As the adipocere-clad body departed the gurney piecemeal, a skeleton slowly took shape on the nearby countertop.
When I’d worked my way down the first seven pairs of ribs, I handed Miranda the sternum. She gasped, and I looked up. “What is it?”
“Look at that.” She pointed to a neat round hole, dead center in the lower end of the bone. “Was she shot, too?”
I studied the hole. “Well, it sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” When I said it, she glanced sharply at me, sensing a trick of some sort.
She studied the sternum more closely, first on the front side of the bone, then from the back. I could see her searching her data banks, trying to match what she saw with something she’d read or seen in my osteology handbook, my bible of bone science. It was in there, all right—a drawing at the top of page 117—but I wasn’t giving her any clues. “Well, it’s about the right size for a small-caliber bullet—maybe a twenty-two,” she murmured, but she sounded dubious. She glared at the bone accusingly, as if it were guilty of something. “But there are some things that don’t fit with that.”
“Such as?”
“For one thing, it seems too big a coincidence for a gunshot wound to line up exactly with the midline.” I kept my mouth shut. “For another, the hole looks beveled on the front and the back sides, and bullet wounds widen only in the direction of the bullet’s travel.”
“Right,” I said. “As the bullet smashes through the bone, the shock wave propagates in the shape of a cone, producing a larger hole at the exit. Like those funnel-shaped holes BB guns make in plate-glass windows—tiny on the outside, big on the inside.”
“Spoken like a boy who had a BB gun,” she said.
“Hey, a guy hears stories,” I said. “Now quit stalling. What else do you notice about this hole, which might or might not have been left by a gunshot?”
“Okay, what looks like beveling on both sides of the bone isn’t, really—it’s a smooth, undamaged surface. The beveling made by a bullet is rougher, and there are usually fracture lines radiating from the hole.”
“Excellent,” I said. “So this is…?”
She furrowed her brow. “A foramen?”
“Exactly. A natural opening in the bone. Rare in the female sternum, by the way—ten percent of men have them, but only about four percent of women. That’s why you’ve never seen one before.” She grinned, excited by the new nugget of firsthand knowledge. This, too—like the thrill of finding forensic clues—I found addictive. “Okay, let’s keep moving. Are you ready for what comes next?” Her grin vanished, and she took a deep breath. “This could be disturbing,” I added. She nodded. “If you have any trouble, just take a break and step outside. No shame in that.” She nodded again, eyes wide. I took up the sprayer again, but not before turning down the pressure by half. As the adipocere melted away from the center of the woman’s body, I felt a sense of amazement I’d experienced only a few other times in my life. A thicket of tiny, nested bones began to appear, suspended in a paler lump of adipocere—
a lump that had once been amniotic fluid and fetal tissue. Our young woman had been pregnant—was pregnant still, in a way—with a baby whose birth, at my hands now, was years overdue. It was a grim, sad delivery I was about to perform.
“We’re going to need a two-millimeter screen over the drain please, Miranda.”