Angie and Vickery both looked down at the skull, then up at me. Angie spoke first. “What other fracture?”
“This one,” I said, tracing a thin line that angled up the skull from just above the left ear, up through the temporal bone and into the parietal, which formed the top of the cranial vault. I’d rubbed a thumbnail over the line; the break in the surface was so subtle I could barely feel it, but it was there, and it showed no signs of healing, so I knew that it had occurred at or near the time of death.
Vickery spoke through cigar-clamping teeth. “So it’s likely, or at least possible, that this kid was murdered?” I nodded. “May I?”
“Sure.” Before I had a chance to add “but you might want gloves,” he took the skull from me and raised it close to his face, his eyes ranging up and down the fine, dark crack. He rotated it, scrutinizing the crack from all angles; he tried peering through the eye orbits to see the inner surface of the cranial vault, but the openings were too small.
He handed the skull back to me, and took his cigar out of his mouth. “Eww,” said Angie. Vickery gave her a puzzled look, then followed her gaze down to the cigar he now held between contaminated fingers.
“Eww,” he echoed. “I hate it when I do that.” He tossed the cigar into a trash can, then washed his hands with sanitizer from a pump dispenser mounted on the wall beside the door. “No offense, Doc,” he began, pointing at the fracture, “but this doesn’t look all that bad to me. I mean, it’s not like the skull’s bashed in. You certain this would be enough to kill him?”
I shrugged. “Certain, no; confident, yes. A defense lawyer could probably hire another anthropologist or a pathologist to disagree in court. But on the inside of the skull, right about here”—with my pinky, I traced a line that crossed the fracture at its midpoint—“runs the middle meningeal artery. The fracture could have ruptured that artery, causing a cerebral hemorrhage. Obviously something killed this kid, and my money’s on this fracture.”
Vickery fished a tan leather case from an inside coat pocket and extracted a fresh cigar. “Okay, I’ll buy it. For now. Until we find bullet-riddled bones or a knife in the ribs.” He unwrapped the cigar, tossed the cellophane in the trash, and began gnawing on the end of the replacement.
“Mind if I ask you something, Agent Vickery?”
“I do if you call me ‘Agent Vickery.’ I don’t if you call me ‘Stu.’ ”
“Okay, Stu. Do you ever light ’em? The cigars?”
“Never. And it’s not just because every place has banned smoking. Truth is, I hate the smell of cigar smoke. But I like the smell of cured tobacco. Like the flavor, too, in small doses.” He gave the cigar an appreciative chomp. “But chewing tobacco—doing dip—that is one nasty habit.”
“You’ll get no argument from me about that,” I said, thinking back to my close Copenhagen encounter of the nausea-inducing kind. I chose not to point out that Stu had a thin line of brownish drool trickling from the corner of his mouth.
It’s possible he noticed me looking at it, or maybe he simply felt a tickle on his chin; in any event, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed. “So,” he said to Angie, “did you ask him yet?”
Angie turned red. Silence hung like a soap bubble in the air, so I popped it. “Ask me what?”
“Um . . .” She hesitated. “Ask if you’d consult with us on this case.”
“Which case? This case?” I raised the skull into the center of the triangular space defined by the three of us. Angie nodded. “Do you mean in a bigger way? More than a take-a-quick-look sort of way?” She nodded again. “Don’t you have forensic anthropologists in Florida who can help you with this?”
She looked sheepish. “We’re a little shorthanded right now.”
“What about Tony Falsetti,” I said, “over in Gainesville? Doesn’t he do a lot of work for FDLE?” Tony, who was a Knoxville native and a fine forensic anthropologist, had been hired some years ago to teach at the University of Florida. My impression was that his lab at UF worked with Florida investigators in the same way my own lab consulted with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and other agencies.
“He’s gone,” she said. “To Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia. I sent him an e-mail, and he wrote me back from Sarajevo. He’s working on a huge project to identify people killed in the Balkan civil war. They’re searching for his replacement, but they haven’t filled the position yet.”
I named another former student, now teaching in Tampa, at the University of South Florida. “Did you try her? I think she consults on forensic cases.”
“She’s in Africa all month,” said Angie. “Teaching Nigerian medical students about skeletal trauma.”
“Nigeria? Well, good for her. Sounds like I need to keep better tabs on our graduates, though. Maybe I should put tracking collars on them.”