“Yeah, but I bet the interior of my truck smells sweeter.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “Like beauty, sweetness is in the nose of the beholder, and on the way over here this morning I think my nose was beholding some not-so-sweet aroma from that body we hauled back from Nashville in your truck last week.” She was probably right; Miranda had a keener nose than I did, and the Nashville body—a floater fished from the Cumberland River—had been particularly ripe.
“Speaking of the truck,” I said, “would you go get the Stryker saw, the scissors, and the pliers while I open up the coffin?”
“I live to serve,” she said, and although it was a joke—one of her favorite ways of simultaneously acknowledging and mocking the professor-assistant disparity—she said it with genuine goodwill.
“So, the pliers,” DeVriess said. “I’m thinking those aren’t for opening the coffin.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m an anthropologist, but what I really want to do is postmortem dentistry. Enamel’s the hardest substance in the body, so the DNA in the pulp of the teeth has a decent chance of being undamaged. I’ll pull a couple of molars, but I’ll also cut cross sections from the long bones of the upper arm and the thigh.”
Burt nodded, and I thought I saw a flicker of impatience in his eyes. Was I droning on in too much detail?
Had I already explained, in last night’s phone call, why I needed to go to such lengths to get samples for a simple paternity test? Or had he done enough research on his own, before calling me, to know that DNA could be destroyed by the formalin in embalming fluid and that the teeth and long bones were the body’s most protective vaults for archiving genetic material?
“It looks like there’s not a lot of research data out there yet on DNA degradation,” he said, as if reading the question in my mind. “Nobody seems to have a good handle on how long our nuclear DNA hangs around after death and what factors affect the rate of decay.”
“Not much,” I agreed. “Forensic DNA analysis is still a brave new world. Remember, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that DNA testing became readily available.”
“I remember,” he said. “I was at the beach when the O. J. Simpson case began. I vividly recall sitting in the living room of that beach house watching him inch along the freeway in that white Ford Bronco, with dozens of cop cars trailing him like some huge police funeral procession. That, and the World Trade Center collapse, and the first moon landing, back when I was a ten-year-old kid—those are the three most powerful television events I can remember, the only three where I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when the story unfolded on the screen.”
“The moon landing, the O. J. circus, and 9/11,” said Miranda, back with us, tools in hand. “From the sublime to the ridiculous to the truly tragic.”
I knelt at the head of the coffin and groped the underside until I found what I was looking for, a hinged metal crank that I unfolded and began turning counterclockwise. Slowly, almost as if it were levitating of its own accord, the upper one-third of the lid swung upward, revealing the face of Trey Willoughby. The skin was ashen, with a slight mottling of dark gray mold—just as the coffin was tinged with rust—but otherwise the face in the coffin was a good likeness of the face I’d seen in an old photo I’d found on the Internet a few hours before. In life he’d been a handsome man—not the looker Maureen Gershwin had been, but attractive—and even now, even eight years postmortem, he was still looking pretty good.
“You don’t always get what you pay for,” I said, “but in this case the funeral home did a good job. Which one was it?”
“Ivy Mortuary,” said DeVriess. “Not in business anymore. The owner—Mr. Ivy—died in a car accident a few years back. No heirs.”