-viewing public tended to regard DNA testing as far superior to any other method of identification, but I still considered dental records a powerful and often far faster means of identification. I’d chosen three cases to illustrate the point. The first involved a missing toddler, a two-year-old girl who disappeared one night while her uncle was babysitting. Eight months after she vanished, a pair of hunters found a small skull in a nearby stream beside a cow pasture. The skull was missing most of its teeth, but when I went to the scene and sifted the sands of the streambed, like a prospector panning for gold, I managed to find most of the teeth that had fallen from the skull. The missing two-year-old had never been to the dentist, so there were no dental records for comparison. There was, however, a photograph: a snapshot showing the girl grinning at the camera. And in her grin I glimpsed distinctive notches at the corners of her four upper incisors—unique, identifying notches that matched the teeth I’d found. The second case was the murder of a state police officer, gunned down in his driveway late one night after he finished his shift on duty. Investigators suspected he’d been shot by his brother-in-law, but the only evidence linking the suspect to the crime was a wooden cigar tip, found in the grass near the death scene. The tip bore deep indentations—bite marks—which meshed perfectly, it turned out, with the teeth of the suspect.
The third case gave me a pang as I reviewed it. The murder victim was a sixteen-year-old Japanese-American girl—a smart, pretty girl—who was abducted, raped, and bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. I identified her by comparing the teeth of the skeletonized remains with the dental records of the missing teenager. The first hint that the records would match the teeth came when I inspected an incisor found in the woods at the death scene. The tooth had the scooped-out, shovel-shaped cross section that typified Asian incisors, just as I imagined Isabella’s had. I was flashing through the slides of this third case when Miranda rapped on the open door and strode into my office, demanding, “What in the world are you doing?”
“I’m looking at the slides I’m about to show to my ten o’clock class,” I said, startled by her vehemence.
“I am not talking about those slides,” she snapped. “I’m talking about what happened to those ten bodies over the weekend.”
One thing I’d wrestled with on the drive back from Asheville was how I’d explain the ten mangled bodies and twenty stitched-up arms I’d parked in the cooler at the forensic center. “I told you I was doing a research project,” I began.
“Research? That’s not research. That’s butchery.Butchery. What the hell, Dr. B.?”
The likelihood of this very conversation had filled me with dread, but the dread had motivated me to prepare for it, as best I could. “We’ve never studied differential decay in dismemberment cases,” I said.
“If a killer cuts up a body, does that body decay at the same rate as an intact body? I don’t know. Nobody knows, because nobody’s done a controlled experiment to compare the decomp rates.”
“So now—on a whim—you’ve begun a large-scale study?” Her eyes bored into me. “If you’re doing a controlled experiment, where are the control subjects, the ten intact bodies?”
I had a halfway-plausible answer to this, too. “We’ve got years of decomp data from intact bodies,” I said. “We’ve got mathematical models that can calculate, at any range of temperatures, how long each stage lasts—fresh, bloat, decay, and dry. I’ve studied my ten control subjects, plus a whole lot more, over the past twenty years. The dismemberment study will be new data.”
She glared. “But just arms? Why not arms and legs?”
“One variable,” I responded. “Keep it simpler.”
“Then why the surgeries—all the incisions and sutures in those twenty arms? You’re studying differential decay in bodies that have been dismembered by murderous orthopedic surgeons? Is that it?”
I was angry—not with Miranda; angry with myself, and Ray Sinclair, and the FBI—but I vented the anger in her direction. “Miranda, it’s my research project, and it’s not your concern.”
“Not my concern?” She looked furious and deeply hurt. “I don’t know whether it’s what you’re saying or what you’renot saying that bothers me more, but I feel very concerned.”
“Drop it, Miranda. The subject’s closed.”
She stared at me, and then her expressive, angry, hurt face became a lifeless mask. “Yes, massa,” she said. She gave me a sarcastic version of a military salute, then left as suddenly as she’d appeared.
CHAPTER 34
IT WAS A PLAIN #10 ENVELOPE, ADDRESSED TO ME BYhand, in blocky letters, with no return address.
The envelope was distorted and lumpy. Most of it felt empty, but clearly its center containedsomething: something oddly shaped and perhaps a quarter inch thick. I wiggled a finger under one end of the flap and tore open the top of the envelope, then turned it upside down and shook it above my kitchen counter.
The envelope’s contents—an angular, spiky piece of red paper—tumbled out. The bright red shape seemed to blaze on the speckled black granite, like a flame against a starry night sky. The paper was folded into an origami crane, the Japanese symbol of peace. The wing tips were blunted, I noticed; looking closer, I saw why: A tiny bit of each one appeared charred.
I plucked the crane from the counter by the long, slender tail jutting up from the body. The bird had been pressed flat by its flight through the U.S. postal system—a flight that had begun in San Francisco, according to the postmark on the envelope. Taking care not to touch the scorched tips, I raised the wings partly to horizontal, then pulled them gently outward, slightly away from the body. As the wings spread and the bird took flight in my hands, a second snippet of paper fluttered from a fold in the bird’s body. It was a second crane—a tiny replica of the first, so small it might have required tweezers and a magnifying glass to create—made of delicate white rice paper.