“But Garcia’s not,” I pointed out. “He’s a board-certified M.D., a forensic pathologist.”
“But that’s recent. He’s been Mexican all his life. And his parents were working class, so he knows what it’s like to be looked down on. He comes by that chip on his shoulder honestly.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of that,” I said. “So you know Garcia?”
“A little. Eddie’s okay. Yeah, he’s a little touchy. But cut him some slack, talk some shop, and things should be fine. He’s a forensic guy, you’re a forensic guy. Bond over the bones, Dr. B.”
“Jorge” I said over my shoulder, “you could have had a brilliant career in psychology. You’re pretty damn smart, for a Latino.”
He laughed. “Bastardo!” he called after me. I decided that was Spanish for “Amen, brother!”
GARCIA STOOD and nodded slightly when I entered his office at the Forensic Center, but he didn’t offer a hand, so I simply returned the nod. “Please, have a seat,” he said.
“It might be a little easier if we laid these bones out on a lab table,” I said.
“Very well,” he said again. Swell, I thought. Mr. Personality. I followed him down the hallway to the main lab and set my box on a countertop. The counter was covered with a large, absorbent blue pad, which helped cushion the fragile bones. I had brought three femora—femurs; thighbones—which I laid side by side. Garcia leaned down toward the closest, which was from the body that had been fully fleshed when it burned. The bone exhibited a range of colors, from ashy white at the distal end, near the knee, to a deep reddish brown at the proximal end, where it had joined the hip.
I chose my words carefully, as I didn’t want to appear to be lecturing him, even though I was. “We used two gallons of gasoline in each car, so it was a very hot fire,” I said. “It peaked at around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit—about eleven hundred Celsius. It burned away all the soft tissue, except for some on the central region of the torso.” I pointed to the femur from the fresh cadaver. “Down here at the distal end, the bone is obviously completely calcined, since the lower legs and knees get more oxygen and burn away before the thighs and torso do. Up here, where the thicker muscle tissue provided some protection for a while, the bone started to char, but it’s not calcined.”
He studied the bone closely.
“There’s still some organic material in there,” I went on. “You could probably get DNA—at least mitochondrial DNA, if not nuclear DNA—from a cross section of the bone up in this region.”
He nodded.
“What’s really interesting to me,” I went on, “is the fracture pattern here. It’s very irregular. Notice how the fractures seem to corkscrew around the bone in a sort of helical pattern. There’s also some fracturing between layers of the bone.”
“Yes, very interesting,” he said, sounding more animated. He reached up and swung a magnifying lamp into position, switching on the light that encircled the back side of the round lens. “It’s almost as if the bone is peeling apart. From the moisture inside turning to steam?”
“Probably,” I said. “Now compare that to the dry, defleshed bone. It’s completely calcined, not surprisingly, since there was no muscle to shield it. Notice how regular and rectangular the fracture pattern is, almost like crosshatching.”
He repositioned the magnifying glass over the uniformly burned femur.
“This reminds me of a big log,” I said, “that’s been burned very slowly in a bonfire.”
“Or a dead tree lying in the desert,” he said. “After years in the sun, they get that same burned look.”
“Here’s another one for you,” I said. “I was over in Memphis a few summers ago, when they had the worst drought in a century. The Mississippi River dropped fifteen or twenty feet. It exposed huge sandbars, a half mile wide and miles long. Walking on them was like walking along the beach at the ocean. And the river shrank from a mile wide to a narrow channel, a few hundred yards across—I could have skipped a rock to the other side.”
His mouth twitched, but I wasn’t sure if he was suppressing a smile or stifling a yawn. Either way, I was caught up in the memory.