“Then I don’t suppose you’d know where we might get hold of his dental records?”
“Dental records? No,” she said. “The people we work with are barely hanging on, Dr. Brockton. We’ve got a dentist who volunteers one day a month, to provide very basic care, but dental records? Not on the radar screen of our clients.”
“That’s what I figured,” I said, “but I had to ask. It’d be a lot easier to identify this burned skeleton if we had dental X-rays.”
“X-rays?” Even over the street noise, I heard something in her voice shift. “Do they have to be dental?”
“Dental’s usually best. An arm or leg X-ray might work, if it showed something we could compare to—a healed fracture or an orthopedic plate or some such.”
“How about a head?”
“A head?”
“An X-ray of the head. The skull?”
I heard something in my own voice shift. “Do you have an X-ray of Freddie’s skull?”
“I don’t, but UT Hospital might. Not long after he started coming around here, he slipped in the lunchroom and hit his head hard—knocked him out cold. We called an ambulance, and they took him to the ER at UT.”
I got Freddie’s last name from Lisa, then phoned the Radiology Department.
“Hi, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said to Theresa, the Radiology receptionist. “A guy from one of the homeless missions might have come through the ER for a cranial X-ray about four months ago. Name was Freddie Darnell, D-A-R-N-E-L-L. We’re trying to ID a murder victim, and we think there’s a chance it’s Darnell. Would you be willing to check and see if you’ve got a record for him? We can get a court order if you need us to.”
“Hang on just a second, Dr. Brockton,” she said. She put me on hold. A minute passed, then three, then five. I was watching the bars on my cell phone, which I’d forgotten to charge overnight. Now I was down to one battery bar, and I worried the phone might die before she came back.
“I couldn’t find anything filed under Darnell,” she said. My heart sank. “But we did have a guy named Parnell, with a P,” she said. “Could that be it? Maybe somebody at the mission got it wrong—or maybe the ER intake clerk misunderstood.”
My pulse started to race. “First name Freddie—Fred or Frederick, maybe? White male, forty-five, give or take a few years?”
She hesitated. ”I don’t suppose you have a HIPAA release from him, do you?”
“I don’t,” I said, “and I’m afraid he’s too dead to sign one for me. Would you need a subpoena to let me look at his X-rays?”
“Hang on one more minute, Doc.”
I hung on. My cell phone’s low-battery indicator started to beep—draining the battery all the faster.
Finally she came back on the line. “This is such a coincidence, Dr. B.,” she said. “Dr. Shepherd was just saying that he needs to consult with you about that very case.”
I laughed. “Theresa, you’re the best. Can I come over in about ten minutes?”
“I’ve already pulled the file,” she said. “I’ll tell Dr. Shepherd you’re coming to speak with him.”
Fifteen minutes later Ben Shepherd switched on a light box and clipped a cranial X-ray onto the glass. Dr. Sherpherd and I had worked together on several cases, and it was Ben who’d gotten me a portable X-ray machine to use down at the loading dock, so that when decomposing bodies needed to be X-rayed, we didn’t have to haul them inside and stink up his department. I gave a slide lecture every year for the Radiology staff and residents, showing shattered skulls and dismembered bodies. “I like a good gunshot wound,” he’d said to me once. “The beveling of the entry and exit wounds. The lead wipe around the edges. The lead spatter inside the cranium. It’s so much more interesting than a skateboarder’s broken arm.”
Ben studied Parnell’s cranial X-ray. “Hmmm,” he said. “Not much to see. His chart says he had a mild concussion, but of course that doesn’t show up in an X-ray.”