She flipped the pieces over so we could see where the inner layer of bone had peeled away, revealing the sinus cavity. Along one portion of each piece that she held, I saw a faint line where the sinus cavity ended.
“We’ve got some edge line here and here”—she pointed—“but there’s not much, and it’s not particularly distinctive. You want to flip the X-ray over, since we’re looking from the back side?”
I flipped it, and she shifted and rotated the pieces of bone above the X-ray, seeking some elusive alignment.
“Hard to say.” I frowned.
“Very hard,” she agreed. “How reliable did you say frontal-sinus comparison is?”
“Very,” I said. “No two are the same.”
“You’re sure?”
“I think I’m sure.”
“Who’s researched it?”
“Doug Ubelaker, up at the Smithsonian, did an article on this about ten years ago. He concluded it was a good basis for identification or exclusion.”
“How many sinuses did he look at? And how’d he quantify the match?”
“He looked at a few dozen,” I said. “I don’t know that he quantified it on any numerical scale. I think he drew on his experience and judgment to determine whether or not things matched.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Sounds like the way they compared fingerprints about a hundred years ago.”
“You got a better idea?” I was feeling a little defensive, though I wasn’t sure why.
“No,” she said, but then, after a pause, “Well, maybe. I mean, the edge of the sinus traces a curving line, right?”
“Right.”
“So if you can define those curves mathematically—the curve shown in Parnell’s X-ray here and the curve of Humpty Dumpty here, once we get him back together again—you should be able to graph how closely those equations match.”
I was having trouble following her, but she seemed to be warming to the idea.
“Actually,” she said, “that might be a pretty nifty dissertation topic. I’m in the market, since you just erased my proposal.”
“I did not,” I said. “Besides, I have a draft of your proposal. You’re going to refine age estimates using the pubic symphysis.”
“I thought I was,” she said. “But the more I think about it, the less excited I get. The idea of squinting at four or five hundred pubic bones for a year seems like a very tedious project.”
“Gee, not like squinting at graphs and statistics for a year,” I said.
“But it would be original graphs and statistics,” she said.
“The pubic symphysis has already been studied up one side and down the other, so anything I did would be so derivative. This could be new territory. It could help us with exactly the problem we’ve got right here: Is this Freddie Parnell’s burned skull or isn’t it? We don’t have the mathematical tools to measure that right now. My experience and my judgment—that’s what I’m supposed to rely on, in the absence of statistical tools, right?—my experience and my judgment say this ain’t Freddie.” Her voice was rising, and I heard her frustration rising, too.
“But my experience and my judgment also say we don’t have near enough of this damn puzzle done yet to say that with any damn confidence.”
With that, she laid the two pieces of bone in the sand, stood up, and walked out of the bone lab.
As the door banged shut behind her, I realized that she’d been pushed—by me, by eight days of squinting at skull fragments, and by her terrifying assault—to the breaking point.
I also realized she was right about the frontal sinus. It would indeed be a good dissertation topic. And this particular scrap of reconstructed sinus wasn’t nearly enough to tell us whether Garland Hamilton was safely dead or dangerously alive.
CHAPTER 31
EVER SINCE BURT DEVRIESS HAD FILED HIS CLASS-ACTION lawsuit against Trinity Crematorium in Georgia, he’d been sending me a steady stream of cremains to analyze. I’d also been making frequent trips to Alcoa with my postage scale to weigh the cremains from Helen Taylor’s furnaces.
By now I was nearing thirty cases from Trinity, and they showed interesting similarities and fascinating differences. One consistent trend was the weight of the cremains: Those from Georgia tended to weigh three or four pounds, which was less than two-thirds the weight of those from Tennessee.