“Excuse me,” said Sheriff O’Conner. “What makes you think it wasn’t more than six months or so ago?”
“The remains are on top of last fall’s leaf litter,” she said, gesturing at the ground. “True, there are some dead leaves on the bones”—she leaned forward and picked up a brown leaf that was lying on a long-bone shaft—“but these aren’t from last year.” She pointed upward, toward the crown of the dead tulip poplar. “These are from the tree the victim was chained to.” Good girl, Miranda, I thought, though of course Miranda—was she about to turn thirty?—was far from a girl now. “Also,” she went on, “there’s no vegetation growing up through the skeletal elements. That suggests the remains hadn’t yet skeletonized by spring or early summer, when seeds germinate.”
Her mention of seeds germinating reminded me of a case a few years ago—my God, I realized, twenty years ago—in the Cumberland Mountains, where I found a two-year-old black-locust seedling growing from the eye orbit of a dead girl’s skull. I had so many ghosts floating around in my head by now; every new case seemed to remind me of an old case, or two or three or five old cases. Concentrate, Brockton, I scolded myself. Be here now.
“Clearly there’s been a lot of carnivore activity and scatter,” Miranda was saying. “Possibly dogs; more likely, coyotes. As you can see, in addition to the skull, we’re missing the hands and feet, along with the ends of the long bones. In fact, we’re missing a lot of the elements of the axial skeleton.”
“The which of the what?” asked Waylon.
“The elements of the axial skeleton,” she repeated. “The bones below the skull—the ribs, sternum, lumbar vertebrae from the lower spine—most of them are gone. So it could have been a whole pack of coyotes.”
I would circle back to that shortly, but meanwhile, I wanted her to move on. “So what can you tell us about the victim?”
“Well, a lot less than I could if we had the skull,” she said. “From the narrow pelvis, we can see that the victim was male. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us anything about his geographic ancestry.”
“Excuse me, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Are you using ‘geographic ancestry’ the way we used to use ‘race,’ back in the age of dinosaurs, when I was in Dr. Brockton’s classes?”
“I am,” she said, her smile tolerant but tight. Then, looking at O’Conner and Waylon, she explained, “We used to categorize people into three ‘races’: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which meant Asian or Native American. Now, anthropologists—most of them, anyway”—she glanced at me as she said it, knowing that I had not fully swallowed this politically correct batch of culturally sensitive Kool-Aid—“recognize ‘race’ to be a self-defined cultural identity. A label people choose for themselves, not an objective physical feature.”
I kept silent, though inwardly I chafed a bit. If it looks like a Caucasoid and quacks like a Caucasoid, I thought, it is a Caucasoid. The three-race model had served forensic anthropologists extremely well, in my opinion, and it seemed a shame to discard it for the sake of what struck me as politically correct hairsplitting.
“Is ‘dead redneck’ a cultural identity, too?” asked Waylon. “’Cause no matter what you call it, I reckon that’s most likely what we’re lookin’ at right here.”
Miranda looked both appalled and puzzled. “Well,” she hedged after an awkward pause, during which I struggled to keep a straight face, “if you’re dead, it makes it hard to self-identify. But are you saying you don’t think the victim is African American?” Waylon nodded but didn’t elaborate, so Miranda pressed him. “Why not?”
“Not many to choose from up here,” he said. “Ain’t but a handful of black folks live in Cooke County. Seems like we’da heard about it if one of ’em went missing.”
Seeking a second opinion, she looked at the sheriff. “Really? They’re that scarce?”
O’Conner shrugged, looking slightly self-conscious. “As counties go, it’s fairly monochrome,” he conceded.
“How monochrome?” she persisted.
“Ninety-five percent white, as of the 2010 Census,” he said. I was surprised and impressed that he knew the number off the top of his head. “Two percent black. Two percent Hispanic, supposedly, but I’m pretty sure that number’s rising, judging by the increase in Latinos I saw at the cockfights, back before we shut that operation down.”
“Wowzer,” she said. “Double wowzer. Interesting method of demographic research, Sheriff. And interesting Census data. I didn’t know America still had such lily-white places.”