The emptiness at the distal ends of the lower legs was striking—even more striking now than when I’d seen her lying on the ground, legs splayed around the sapling. The absence there was almost palpable, in the same way that a sudden, unexpected silence seems loud. But it wasn’t the missing feet, or even the cut marks at the ends of the legs, that had brought me hurrying back. What had brought me hurrying back was the neck; specifically, the hyoid, the thin, U-shaped bone from the throat.
By the time we’d found the body in the woods, the soft tissues of the neck had already decomposed extensively—far more than other regions, except for the ankles, where the feet had been severed. The differential decomposition told me that there’d been trauma to her neck. Unlike the thirteenth-century Chinese villager killed by a sickle, this woman had not had her throat cut; I knew that from the photograph I’d gotten in the mail, which showed no sharp trauma to the neck. That meant her neck had sustained a more subtle injury, yet one serious enough to scrape or bruise the skin there—and therefore to make it especially attractive to blowflies. The day we’d recovered the remains from Cahaba Lane, I’d told Tyler to look closely at the hyoid when he cleaned the material. “I bet you anything that bone is fractured,” I’d said. “I bet she was strangled.”
I’d been right about the fracture; I’d confirmed it a few hours before, when I’d taken my first look at the processed skeleton. But I’d barely begun my examination—in fact, I had just picked up the hyoid and taken a cursory glance at it—when Peggy had transferred Kathleen’s call to me. Seconds later, I’d dashed out of the lab, the dead woman forgotten in my urgency. But as I’d paced the hall outside the conference room where Kittredge was interviewing Kathleen, my mind had strayed back to the bone lab. Back to the dead woman. Back to the fragile, broken bone from her throat.
In life, the hyoid—a support for the muscles and ligaments of the tongue and larynx—had helped give this woman a voice, had helped her speak. Now, in death, I prayed that the hyoid could tell me not only how she’d died, but also who had killed her.
THE HYOID WAS GONE.
I stared at the skeleton—at the cervical spine, where the bone should have been; where the bone had been, only a few hours before. It was gone.
I felt myself break into a sweat. Had he been here—the killer? Had he forced the bone lab’s lock, recognized the mutilated skeleton somehow, and made off with the hyoid—the evidence that he’d strangled her? The scenario seemed far-fetched, but what other explanation could there be? I picked up the phone from the desk and dialed the departmental office two flights above me. “Peggy,” I said without preamble, “do you know if Tyler’s been back to the bone lab since this morning?”
“Tyler? Not that I’ve seen. Why? Do you need me to track him down?”
“I do,” I said. “I need to know if he came back and took the hyoid from this skeleton.”
“What’s the hyoid?”
“A bone from the neck. Thin. Arched. Shaped like a short, wide version of the letter U.”
“You mean that little bone you had in your hand when your wife called?”
“Exactly,” I said. “That bone’s gone missing, and I’ve got to find it. It’s . . .” I paused, suddenly confused and spooked. “How did you know I had it in my hand when she called?”
“Right after I transferred the call, I saw you go tearing up the steps. You had something in your hand. Check your pockets.”
“What?”
“Check your pockets,” she repeated. “I bet you put it in one of them.”
“That’s absurd,” I said, reaching my right hand to my shirt pocket, then—more to myself than to Peggy—“I’ll be damned.” I’d had it with me all along.
“You’re welcome,” I heard her saying as I hung up the phone.
Plucking the bone gingerly from my pocket, I took it to one of the magnifying lamps and switched on the light. The fluorescent ring flickered on, and I held the bone beneath the lens, my hand looming, large and momentous, through the glass.
The thicker, central body of the bone—its ends defined by a pair of toothlike processes, the “lesser horns”—was intact. The damage was confined to the junction where the body met the thinner, more fragile ends of the arch—the “greater horns,” the ends were called. But only one of them was damaged: the left one, folded inward, almost at a 90-degree angle to its normal position, the ligamentous joint splintered. My right hand trembling slightly, I walked back to the skeleton and held the bone in position above the neck. Then, with my left hand, I reached down and closed my fingers partway, encircling the neck without quite touching it. If I had tightened my grip, my left thumb would have pressed on the greater horn, folding it inward, creating exactly this fracture.
A wave of dread and panic crashed over me. I’d seen a woman’s hyoid broken exactly this way once before: three years earlier, in 1989. That woman had died in California, and this one had died in Knoxville. But though two thousand miles separated them, I felt sure the two women had died by the same hand.
The words of Brubaker, the FBI profiler, came shrieking into my mind. At the time he’d spoken them, I’d shrugged them off; now, they cut me to the bone. “You’re the key,” Brubaker had said. “It’s personal between you and him.”