I shifted my gaze from the screen to her exhausted face. “Angie? Is there any chance the sheriff might find anything that could implicate you?”
“No,” she said. She shook her head and then I thought I saw a hint of a smile, so brief and slight and enigmatic I instantly doubted whether I’d seen it. “Not a chance.”
That enigmatic smile scared the hell out of me.
Chapter 27
Angie was back at the scene by late afternoon, looking wrung out. Don Nicely had died from a shotgun blast to the head—a blast virtually identical to the one that had killed Kate. The Cheatham County sheriff had questioned Angie for two hours, she said, and would expect her to come back for another interview soon. The sheriff had also questioned her husband, Ned. Ned had confirmed that she’d been with him all night, at the movies and then at home, but the sheriff seemed unconvinced.
She related this to me as she swept a metal detector over a grave—the outermost of the graves we’d discovered. It was the seventh and last of the graves to be excavated; it was also, I suspected, the last of the graves to have been dug, lying as it did on the outermost margin of the Bone Yard.
The skull, which I’d excavated first, was that of another young white male. Judging by the presence of the twelve-year molars and the partial fusion of the sutures in the palate, his age was probably somewhere between twelve and fifteen. Although I couldn’t be sure, because of the dirt and remnants of tissue on the bone, I didn’t see any skull fractures. The absence of trauma gave me some small hope—foolish, perhaps—that his death had been less brutal than the other boys’ deaths appeared to have been.
The bones were slight of stature, and still not fully developed; the ends of the long bones were not yet fused to the shafts, I saw as I began working inward from the margins, so he—like the others—had still been growing at the time of his death. My guess, which I’d be able to confirm or correct when I examined the teeth and bones more closely, was that he’d been in his early teens—older than the prepubescent child whose skull had been Jasper’s first find, but certainly younger than the robust lad whose skull had been Jasper’s second find.
So: fourteen, perhaps. His hip bones, though, could have come from an arthritic seventy-year-old.
Viewed from the front, human hip bones show more than a passing resemblance to a big, bony pair of ears—the ears of an African bull elephant, to be specific, spread wide as he’s about to charge. The top of the hip bone, the iliac crest, looks a bit like the ear’s thick upper edge, sculpted in bone. During childhood, the iliac crest is attached to the ear-shaped ilium by cartilage that eventually ossifies, turns to bone, once the hips have finished growing; during adulthood, the sutures fade, just as the sutures in the skull gradually fill in and disappear over the decades of adult life. In this boy’s pelvis, the iliac crest had not yet fully fused, because his growth spurt was just winding down, and the suture was more like a fissure, a valley, than a plain. I’d expected that.
What I hadn’t expected, and what I’d never seen before in any adolescent pelvis, was the arthritic appearance of the hips in the region of the iliac crest. Instead of being smooth and graceful, the bone along the suture line—the bone that had most recently been deposited along the growth plate—was thick, uneven, and lumpy, especially on the right side, though somewhat on the left as well.
As I studied the deformity, the realization of what had caused it dawned on me with chilling horror. When soft tissue or bone is damaged, inflammation occurs. Inflammation is painful, but it’s crucial to healing, especially in broken bones: blood flows to the site of the break, bringing with it an abundant supply of cells that clot into a thick, collagen-rich splice called a “healing callus.” Over the course of six or eight weeks, the collagen matrix in the callus fills in with calcium and becomes new bone. In this boy’s case, I realized, trauma to the hip bones—trauma at the vulnerable growth plate—caused inflammation, creating a callus that calcified into the thick, lumpy contours I was now seeing. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the likely cause of the trauma to the hip bones was a five-foot leather strap, slamming again and again into the buttocks and hips of a growing boy. A boy who lived long enough to heal, in a slightly misshapen way, before being killed.