“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll open a window. Besides, I’ve got you on speed dial. If I start to pass out, I’ll call you.”
“You do that,” she said sweetly. “I’ll come running. The last thing you’ll hear, as you start climbing those stairs to the bright white light, will be the sound of my voice, saying, ‘I tried to tell you, but would you listen?’”
She was kidding. Surely she was kidding.
ONE HUNDRED AND TEN YARDS AWAY FROM THE BONE lab—right beside Neyland’s north end zone—was my sanctuary: the private, off-the-beaten-track office to which I retreated whenever I needed to hole up, bear down, or zone out. It wasn’t exactly a secret hideout—my colleagues and graduate students knew where it was—but it was distant and inconvenient enough from the department’s main crossroads to allow me to concentrate with minimal interruptions. My not-so-secret hideout.
I had brought with me two metal trays from the bone lab, along with the two gnawed femurs from the Cooke County victim, plus a bag filled with the bone shards I’d recovered from the bear scat Waylon had brought me. Setting the trays on my desk, I switched on my desk lamp, a gooseneck lamp featuring a large magnifying glass encircled by a doughnut-shaped fluorescent bulb. The lens magnified objects by a factor of three; if I didn’t need the magnification, I could angle the light from one side, but if I wanted to see fine details—and fat fingers, kielbasa-sized beneath the lens—I could swing the lamp directly into my line of vision and peer through the glass.
I kept a small bottle of adhesive in the office, in a nozzle-tipped plastic bottle I’d gotten from a pastry chef. The chef had used it to create delicate designs with icing—swirls and inscriptions on birthday cakes and wedding cakes—but I had repurposed it to apply precise lines of a high-tech bone glue. Called Paraloid B-72, the glue was made by dissolving pellets of clear acrylic in acetone. Besides being clear, strong, and fast-setting, Paraloid had the advantage of being easy to unglue: all it took to break the bond was a quick brushing with acetone, and the hard plastic would soften and let go, as easily as clear nail polish dissolved with polish remover—the chemical country cousins, I supposed, of my scientific-sounding adhesive.
I had already simmered the fragments overnight to clean and deodorize them. Now, as a first step toward simplifying the two-part, 3-D puzzle of the femurs, I began by removing fragments that were clearly not femoral in origin. The easiest to exclude were the tips of fingers and toes: tiny bones that were entirely or largely intact, and therefore easily recognizable. Luckily, of the double handful of bones and fragments I’d sifted from the scat, almost half fit into this category. Once I had set those aside, my job was 50 percent simpler.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t: The remaining material fragments were ten times harder to identify. It had taken only a matter of minutes to eliminate the finger and toe bones—about the same amount of time it took the bear to eliminate them, I realized—but it took the rest of the morning to sort the splintered fragments into yes, no, and maybe piles. The yes fragments tended to include the broad, convex surfaces of the condyles, the knee’s knobby “knuckles.” The no bits tended to include enough dense surface material, or cortical bone, to allow me to tell that they came from smaller bones, such as ribs or arms. The maybes—the pain-in-the-ass maybes—consisted largely of chunks of spongy bone—cancellous bone—from the interior of bone shafts and vertebrae. Randomly shaped, with a texture and a heft similar to volcanic pumice, these pieces struck me as capable of coming from virtually anywhere in the skeleton.
I took a break to wolf down a boring turkey sandwich I’d brought from home, washing it down with a Diet Coke from the apartment-sized fridge that Peggy restocked once a week. Then, after a pit stop and a few stretches to work the kinks out of my back and shoulders, I hunkered down and began piecing fragments together, rotating bits this way and that, seeking surfaces that would mate, and then applying a thin coating of Paraloid and holding the pieces together until the acetone evaporated and the glue set.