I wished the department could put Joanna on salary, because her work was important and her skills were rare. The sad reality, though, was that we just didn’t have the money. So she worked for peanuts, charging law enforcement agencies a pittance for the time it took to do their reconstructions. Tight as law enforcement budgets were, I suspected that Joanna occasionally did reconstructions for free, if the investigator—or the skull itself—told her a particularly moving tale.
Joanna had made a believer out of me two years earlier. I’d been contacted by a family whose matriarch had gone missing twenty-five years before. The woman had disappeared one fall, and when a female skeleton was found the following spring, it seemed logical for investigators to think that the skeleton was hers. The medical examiner had concluded that the bones were indeed hers, and she’d been buried in the family plot. The identification wasn’t conclusive, though, because the case happened before the advent of DNA testing. So, a quarter of a century later—after the O. J. Simpson trial and the show CSI had made DNA a household word—the family had asked to have the bones exhumed and DNA samples taken. After examining the bones—which showed me nothing that contradicted the medical examiner’s identification—I pulled a couple teeth and cut two cross sections of bone, which the family planned to send to a DNA lab, along with cheek swabs from one of the woman’s daughters and one of her granddaughters. After taking the samples, I put the bones back in the coffin and—within hours after it was unearthed—it was reburied. Several months later, startling news arrived: the DNA lab said that the skeletal woman in the coffin was not, in fact, the woman the M.E. and the headstone proclaimed her to be. The daughters and granddaughters of the missing woman were not, the lab reported, genetically related to the woman buried in the family cemetery. The district attorney reopened the case of the missing woman, as well as a second case: the case of the mysterious, unidentified woman in the coffin.
That’s when Joanna had entered the picture. We exhumed the coffin a second time, and this time I brought the mystery woman’s skull back to UT. Joanna studied its shape, then spent two weeks sculpting the face she thought had once resided on the skull. When I walked into the lab and saw her finished handiwork, I was stunned. Guided by nothing more than the shape of the skull and the information that it was a middle-aged white female, Joanna had sculpted a face that bore an astonishing resemblance to one of the missing woman’s daughters. Could the resemblance really be purely coincidental? Or was it possible the DNA lab had erred? Eventually—many months and many complications later—we learned that the DNA lab had botched the analysis . . . and that the M.E. and the headstone had been right all along. If not for Joanna’s remarkable reconstruction, though, the investigation would surely have continued down the wrong path, and we’d never have learned the truth.
So now, as I unwrapped the skull that had caused such a furor at the Tallahassee airport, I handed it to Joanna with a powerful mixture of hope and pessimism. “It’s Caucasian,” I said, “somewhere around age twelve, plus or minus a year or two. Beyond that, I can’t give you much to go on. Might be male, might be female.”
She took the skull from me and cradled it in both hands, turning it this way and that to inspect it from multiple angles. “Where’d it come from?”
“Florida. Somewhere in the woods. A dog brought it home.”
“And the sex is a complete coin toss? You’re not leaning one way or the other?”
I shook my head. “I wish I were. Can you split the difference? Do an androgynous face?”
“Sure, why not? Kids are androgynous, till they’re not. Main difference is how they wear their hair. If I make it vague, a relative should be able to fill in the gender blank.” She looked at the skull again. “I’ve never done a reconstruction on a skull that was missing the mandible. Any suggestions?”
I thought for a moment. “Well, you could just take an educated guess and freehand it, based on what you know about anatomy. But it might be easier if you could borrow a mandible from somebody of the same race and age.” I searched my mental memory banks. “Seems like we have a couple of skeletons in the collection that might be in the right zone. Miranda can search the database by age; I’d try ages ten to thirteen, see what pops up, and use whichever one fits best. Just don’t forget where you got it, and be sure you put it back in the box, once we’ve taken plenty of photos and you’re ready to take the clay back off.”
“Okay. I’ll try to get started on it this afternoon. Assuming I can get this guy’s nose fixed this morning.”
“Great. Any idea when you might be done?”
“Pushy, pushy. Well, usually it takes me two weeks, but I don’t have two weeks this time.”
“Because I’m so pushy?”
“No, because I’m nine months pregnant, in case you hadn’t noticed, and my due date is in six days.”