read the first one, “She has no lateral upper incisors. Genetic?” Golly, she was sharp! I went on to the second addition. “P.P.S. I was deeply moved by your story and your sorrow,” it said. “I’m embarrassed by what happened next, but I’m not actually sorry.”
I laughed out loud. “Okay, then neither am I,” I said. Two passing students gave me a sidelong glance, then looked quickly away. The nutty professor, I could feel them thinking. I didn’t care. I practically danced down the maze of ramps and stairs leading to the base of the stadium, then took the steps to my office two at a time. When I saw my door, though, my euphoric bubble burst. The steel frame bowed outward into the curving hallway, while the metal door itself bent inward. Just above and below the knob, the pea-green paint hung in slivers from two spots where a wrecking bar had pried open the door to my office.
Heartsick, I stepped inside. The filing cabinet hung open, its locked drawers also mangled by the pry bar. Forensic case folders lay strewn across the floor, examination reports and field notes and newspaper clippings commingled like some mass grave of moribund murder investigations. Sorting and refilling the mess would take hours, if not days. A single folder lay atop the cabinet. I knew without looking which report it would be: 05-23. Leena Bonds. When I repacked the skull, sternum, and hyoid in a small hatbox for the trip up to class, I had left the big box containing the rest of her skeleton sitting on my desk. That box, like the scores of others lining the shelves in the adjoining room, measured three feet long by a foot in cross-section. It would be hard to miss. And now, as I whirled to look, I saw that her box was missing. “Damn,” I muttered, setting down the student papers and the hatbox. “Damn.” Then a flood of relief washed over me as I realized that all was not lost. Leena’s skull and hyoid—the key to her identification and her manner of death—were safe in the hatbox. Whoever had come looking for them had gone away frustrated. He hadn’t left empty-handed—the theft of the rest of her skeleton was a bitter loss—but I still held the trump cards, if the case ever came to trial. Thank God I had taken her to class.
Using my handkerchief, I picked up the handset of my phone and dialed the campus police. “This is Dr. Brockton in Anthropology,” I told the dispatcher.
“Someone’s just broken into my office and files. They’ve also stolen some skeletal material.” The dispatcher promised to send an officer right away. “Tell him to park at the east end zone access portal,” I told her. “There’s a stairway that leads from there straight up to my office.” She read the directions back to be sure she had them right. “The stolen material is part of a murder case,” I added. “I’ll need to call in some outside cavalry, too. Just so you know.” She promised to give the responding officer a heads-up.
My next call was a quick one to Art. I told him what I thought I should do, and he concurred, so I pressed the switchhook, pressed “8” again for another outside line, and dialed the number on the business card I fished from my wallet. “FBI,”
snapped a no-nonsense male voice. I identified myself and asked for Agent Price. “One moment, I’ll see if she’s in,” he said, swiftly parking me on hold. Ten seconds later, Angela Price picked up. “Dr. Brockton, how are you?”
Price’s voice was crisp but cordial. “You’re not calling with a field report from another cockfight, I hope?”
“No, I’m calling from my office at UT. Somebody’s just broken in and stolen the postcranial skeleton from my Cooke County murder case.”
“Postcranial?”
“Everything below the skull, or nearly everything. Luckily, I had the cranium and the hyoid bone—the bone from her throat that shows she was strangled—in a classroom with me. So those are still safe, for the moment.”
“What would you like me to do, Dr. Brockton?”
“Well, you said to let you know if anything else cropped up, and this sure counts as cropping up in my book. Does this merit sending the Bureau’s crime scene wizards over to take a look? Just informally, of course. I’m also wondering if you folks could take temporary custody of the skull and hyoid for me, too? It’s easy to get into a professor’s office, but I can’t imagine somebody breaking into the FBI’s evidence vault.”
“Hang on a second.” She, too, was quick with the “Hold” button; must’ve been emphasized in the curriculum at Quantico. I hung in limbo for several minutes. Just as I was about to hang up and redial, she picked back up. “I’m not trying to dodge you, Dr. Brockton, but Steve Morgan, your former student? He already knows his way around that labyrinth over there. He’s on his way now, and some TBI evidence techs will be right behind him in a mobile crime lab.” She must have sensed some disappointment on my end of the line. “We just don’t have either the jurisdiction or the resources right now, and TBI does. Can you understand that?”
“I reckon I’ll have to.” I regretted the petulance of that as soon as I said it.
“Sorry. Yes, of course.”