The professor in me couldn’t let that stand unchallenged. “Hey, Cooke County is a multicultural melting pot compared to Pickett County, up on the Kentucky border,” I said. “Last time I checked, their black population was two-tenths of a percent.” She looked dubious. “True fact,” I assured her. “Zero point two percent. One black person for every five hundred whites.”
“Must be a whole lotta fun for that one,” she observed dryly. “But we digress. So: The victim might or might not have been a white male. Let’s see if we can tell how old he was.”
She picked up a clavicle—luckily, there was one to pick up, though only one. “The clavicle, the collarbone, is a good indicator of age,” she said. “The ends of the bone, called the epiphyses, are connected to the shaft by cartilage before adulthood, but then they fuse, and growth stops. But luckily, the ends of the clavicle don’t fuse at the same time. The distal end, where it joins the shoulder, fuses first, at age nineteen or twenty.” She examined the bone. “And that appears to have happened, although . . .” She peered more closely. “Perhaps not 100 percent.” She studied the other end, which had once been attached to the sternum. “The medial epiphysis fuses later,” she went on, “usually during the twenties. Here, the fusion has just begun, so we know he’s younger than thirty.”
I didn’t say anything—I didn’t want to interrupt her—but inwardly I was cheering, Yes! You are going to be a terrific professor someday, Miranda!
She frowned at me, and for an absurd moment I wondered if she’d heard my thoughts and found them discomfiting, but then the reason for the frown became clear. “Too bad so many of the elements are missing,” she said finally. “The skull could help us narrow down the age further. The sutures—the seams—in the roof of the mouth fuse at different ages, too. But based on the clavicle, I’d estimate the age at right around twenty. No more than twenty-five. Maybe as young as nineteen.”
“What a shame,” said O’Conner. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, this would be awful at any age, but twenty’s just a kid. Unbelievable.”
“It might be unbelievable,” I told him, “but I’m afraid it’s all too true.”
I put the sheriff, the deputy, and the TBI agent to work, helping Miranda and me inventory and bag the bones. I’d brought a diagram of the skeleton, the bones drawn as outlines. As I picked up each bone and handed it off to the lawmen to bag, I called out its name, and Miranda filled in the bone’s outline on the diagram. “Cervical vertebrae,” I said. “C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7.” That was the biggest collection of adjacent elements. Below the neck, the remaining bones were few, far between, and badly chewed—especially the long bones of the arms and legs. Given how many of the skeletal elements were missing, it didn’t take long to collect them all. At the end, though, we got lucky: Two of the long bones—the right humerus and right femur—bore recently healed fractures. Comminuted fractures, in which the bones had been broken into several pieces. And those pieces had been fastened back together with metal plates and screws. “Look at this,” I said, holding up the two shafts. “This could help a lot with identification.”
Waylon gave a low whistle. “Them parts can be tracked, right, Doc? Like the serial number on a gun or a car?”
I shook my head. “I wish. But no. If we can find x-rays that match these, we’ll have a positive I.D. But first we have to find a missing-person report that seems to fit, then see if we can get the medical records.”
“Huh,” Waylon grunted, clearly disappointed.
Once the bones were all charted and bagged, I put everyone else to work gathering up the bags, cans, and other debris. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I told them. They probably assumed I needed to step behind a tree and pee. Instead I ambled away, wandering the site, alternating between scanning the ground for anything that might happen to lie outside the circular path and, especially, examining the trunks of surrounding trees. After a while, I sensed that I was being watched.
“Dr. B?” I’d been so intent on my search that I hadn’t heard Miranda come up behind me. “You look like you’re looking for something. I mean, something specific.”
“I am,” I said, stepping closer to a medium-sized tulip poplar and running my fingers over the bark. “And I just found it. Y’all come take a look.”
The others laid down their trash bags and approached. Waylon was the first to spot what I was looking at. “God a’mighty,” he said. “I was afraid we was gonna find something like that.”
“Me, too,” said O’Conner, “though I didn’t want to say so.”
“What?” demanded Miranda, looking from their faces to mine. “Somebody want to let me in on the secret?”
I reached up and tapped the tree trunk, slightly above my head. “Claw marks,” I said. “From a bear. A big one, judging by the height of the marks.”
Miranda blanched. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
I nodded. “You mentioned coyote scavenging, but I figured it for bear,” I told her.