“Sir, we’ll need to open your bag,” he said. I was amused by the contrast between his mundane words and his panicky tone, but I figured it would be unwise to laugh at a man who had one hand on a gun.
“Be my guest,” I said, in what I hoped was a soothing, I’m-not-a-serial-killer voice. “I’m a forensic anthropologist—a bone detective—and I’m a consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. That skull is from an FDLE case I’m working on.” I paused to see if the wind had shifted any; he still looked suspicious, but no longer openly hostile. “There’s a TBI badge and an FDLE evidence receipt in the side pocket of my bag. I’m taking the skull up to Tennessee to get some help identifying it.” At the rate this was going, though, I wasn’t feeling confident about making my flight and getting to Knoxville, at least not on the flight that was scheduled to leave in forty minutes.
The supervisor eyed me with continuing suspicion, but his hand moved away from his gun. “I’ll still need to open the bag.”
“Of course. The skull is old and fragile, so if you unwrap it, please be really careful. You might want gloves, too.” They looked back and forth from the bag to my face. Behind him, I noticed another uniformed TSA official hustling toward us. It didn’t take a lot of brainpower to deduce that this guy was in charge. “I think your boss is here,” I said, nodding toward the fast-approaching newcomer. The two supervisors conferred briefly in hushed voices, then the higher-level manager gestured toward my bag. His underling tugged the zipper hesitantly, as if the bag might contain a live snake, and gingerly removed the cardboard box from inside and raised the lid. Within the box, the skull was swaddled in a layer of bubble wrap and surrounded by foam packing peanuts. They leaned down and peered in, shooing peanuts aside with gloved fingers. “It’s very fragile,” I pleaded. “Please be careful. If it gets broken, it’ll be harder to identify the victim and catch the killer.”
My words finally seemed to sink in. The boss looked up. “You say you’ve got some sort of documentation about this?”
“I’ve got an evidence receipt from FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. I’ve also got my consultant’s badge from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” He pondered this, then unzipped the side pocket I was pointing toward. He fished out the papers and the leather wallet that held my TBI shield.
“So you’re Dr. William Brockton, PhD?” It was clear, from the incisive questioning, why this one was in charge.
“I am. I teach anthropology at the University of Tennessee. When I’m not causing trouble for the TSA.”
The joke seemed to cut some of the tension. “Tennessee,” mused the midlevel guy. “What kind of football team is Tennessee gonna have this year?”
“Probably pretty good. But probably not as good as Florida’s.”
“Probably not,” agreed the big boss. He gave me a smile that combined smugness, superiority, and pity. And in the pitying part of that smile, I saw that after enduring a few more barbs about football, the loser unlucky enough to live in Tennessee would make his flight after all.
The rusty venetian blinds in the windows of the bone lab were shut—at least, as shut as their fraying cords and tattered tapes allowed them to be—but the morning sun still poured through gaps where slats had been broken or bent during the past forty years. On hot mornings, even early in May, the stadium’s steel girders and masonry foundations worked together like an immense solar oven, collecting the sun’s heat and radiating it through the south-facing wall of windows in the bone lab. During pleasant months of the year, the bank of tables lining those windows offered plenty of daylight for studying bones, but during summer and winter, the extremes of heat and cold along the expanse of glass tended to drive students as far away from the windows as possible.