Miranda Lovelady was putting bones—the bones of the golf-club victim, I noticed—in a long cardboard box as I entered the lab. The box was three feet in length, with a one-foot-square cross section. We had thousands of such boxes stacked on shelves beneath the stands of the stadium. Each box contained the bones of a human skeleton, cleaned and neatly arranged. Several thousand of the skeletons were eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Native American skeletons from the Great Plains, which I’d excavated decades before, early in my career. Another thousand were modern skeletons from bodies donated to the Body Farm over the past twenty years. And a few hundred contained the broken, burned, shot, or stabbed skeletal remains of murder victims.
A small, separate compartment at one end of each box held the skull—in the case of the box Miranda was repacking, the putter-punched skull—while the main compartment housed all other bones (and, in this box, the broken putter). The long bones of the legs and arms lay parallel, the ribs spooned up together, and the vertebrae clumped, strung together on cord like bony beads on a warrior’s necklace. As the door closed behind me, Miranda looked up and asked, “How was your weekend?” Then she looked down at the box in my hand and added, “Whatcha got?”
“Fine,” I answered. “And a skull from Florida.”
“Florida? Who sent you a skull from Florida?”
“Nobody. I went and got it.” Her eyebrows shot up in an interrogatory manner. “I made a quick trip to Tallahassee. Got there Thursday. Came back Friday night. Spent the weekend cleaning this.”
“Do tell.”
“Angie St. Claire—the forensic tech from the state crime lab—called Friday and asked me to help look into her sister’s death. That’s why Angie left here so suddenly on Wednesday.” Miranda nodded and opened her mouth to speak, but I didn’t give her a chance. “Anyhow, while I was down there for that, a sheriff’s deputy brought in this kid’s skull from one of the rural counties outside Tallahassee. I thought I’d ask Joanna to do a reconstruction.”
Miranda clearly wanted to ask more, but I excused myself to talk to Joanna, and Miranda left with the bone box, presumably to reshelve it in the collection room.
Joanna Hughes was working at a small table—“her” table—on the opposite side of the room. Joanna’s table was unlike any other in the lab. Most of them were covered with trays of bones or skeletal fragments: bits of skull on one, for instance; gnawed ribs on another; a jumble of vertebrae on a third. Joanna’s table, by contrast, held beautiful human heads or, more precisely, beautiful clay sculptures of heads. Joanna was an artist who restored faces to the skulls of the unknown dead.
As I crossed the lab, Joanna leaned back from her current project, frowned, and then grabbed the nose and twisted it completely off the face.
“Ouch,” I said. “That’s gotta hurt.”
Joanna turned and smiled, waving at me with the wad of clay she’d just amputated. “He was getting too nosy for his own good,” she cracked.
Unlike the handful of other people in the lab, Joanna wasn’t a student; she had an undergraduate degree in forensic art—a degree program she’d created herself, through persistent and articulate pleas to the Art and Anthropology departments. She’d taken courses in anatomy, anthropology, and art, with one goal in mind: to restore faces to the dead. Somehow she’d known, even as a child, that this was the work she felt called to do. Joanna’s reconstructions were a last-ditch effort to identify someone once all other avenues had been exhausted. If her combination of art and skill allowed her to re-create the face of someone who’d gone missing or been killed years before, there was a chance—a slim chance, but better than none at all—that someone might see a picture of her work, in a newspaper or on television, and call the police to say, “Hey, I know who that was.” So far, she’d done twelve reconstructions, and five of those had led to identifications. In some fields that success rate would seem dismally low, but in the real world of cold-case investigations, it was remarkably high. She was batting over .400, and the work was a lot more meaningful than swatting a ball over a center-field fence. The woman was good. Very, very good.