Luckily, a few of the pieces were fairly large, as big as the end of my thumb, and I felt a surge of optimism when I managed to cobble together most of a medial condyle and affix it to the right femur. But that was the easy part, and from there, the going got tougher and more tedious, the pieces smaller, the joints more jagged, the seams sloppier. The ragged appearance of the bone made me think of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, crudely assembled from ill-fitting parts. Reinforcing that impression was the orthopedic repair work: the compression plate—a long metal bracket—fastened to the side of the shaft by nine stainless-steel screws.
My head was pounding, possibly from neck tension and eyestrain, but also perhaps from acetone fumes. Somewhere in the back of my muddled brain, I heard an imagined Miranda saying, I told you to work under an exhaust hood. But would you listen? Oh, no.
I looked up, closing my eyes to rest them briefly, but even then, I couldn’t escape my project: the bright light and jagged shapes left a vivid afterimage, like an x-ray or photo negative, of magnified fingers and bone fragments pulsing on my retinas. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to see my own reflection in the grimy glass of my office window, my face looking haggard. Outside, night had fallen, transforming the window into a mirror. I had spent the past eight hours—no, nine—piecing together the femur puzzle. A line from a children’s book popped into my head, from Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which I’d read and watched dozens of times, first with my son, Jeff, and, years later, with Jeff’s sons, Tyler and Walker: “He puzzled and puzzled, ’till his puzzler was sore.”
I wasn’t done yet. Still, gradually, imperfectly, the bone knitted back together, almost as if it were healing from yet another comminuted fracture—the sort that might result from falling two stories and hitting the sidewalk in a kneeling position. If I swung the magnifier to the side, held the bone at arm’s length, and squinted slightly, it wasn’t so bad. I’d seen far worse repair jobs done by the body’s own healing processes. In fact, I realized, if this bone were inside a living leg, instead of lying on a metal tray, it would remodel and smooth out quite nicely over the course of a year or two.
Building on my initial success, I had focused entirely on the right femur, and now, although a few gaps remained in the surface of the condyles, the overall shape of the bone was restored—certainly enough for my purposes. Gently, in case the glue wasn’t fully cured, I laid the femur on the desktop, positioning it so that the anterior surface of the bone—the front of the thigh—faced the ceiling and the pair of condyles was solidly planted on the desk. Then I studied the bone, scrutinized the bone, stared at it; finally I slid my hand beneath its shaft.
“I’ll be damned,” I murmured.
I called Richard, our resident expert—hell, the world’s resident expert—on ForDisc. “So,” I said, “I need a second opinion, and I’m wondering if there’s any way ForDisc can give it to me. Seems a long shot, but I’m desperately trying to determine if my Cooke County John Doe is black or white.” I described my painstaking reconstruction of the femur, and what I inferred from it.
“I wouldn’t put much faith in a reconstruction,” he said. “Let’s see if ForDisc can help out. Have you got a tibia?”
“Only one,” I said glumly. “And only part of it. I’m telling you, that was one hungry bear.”
“Which part do you have?”
I picked up the ravaged tibia and surveyed it. “I’ve got ten or twelve inches of the shaft. He chewed off both ends.”
“We might be in luck,” Richard said. “Does your piece of shaft include the nutrient foramen?”
“Let me see,” I said, rotating the bone to study the back side. Just below the ragged edge of what had once been the proximal end—the “knee” end—was a small hole angling down into the bone: an opening through which a small artery had once carried nutrients to the bone’s interior. “Yes, it does. I’m looking right at it.”
“Excellent. You got a caliper handy?”
“Sure. Somewhere. Hang on.” I opened my desk drawer and rummaged around until I found one.
The other end of the line was silent for a moment. “Okay, I’ve got ForDisc booted up,” Richard said.
“I didn’t hear any computer keys clattering.”
“It opens with a mouse click,” he reminded me. “We made it easy to use.”
“Right. Good work.”
I heard what might have been a slightly exasperated sigh from Richard. “Measure the transverse diameter of the shaft,” he said. “Right at the nutrient foramen.”
“Measuring,” I said. “Okay, it measures a little less than an inch. What does that tell you?”
“It tells me you need to switch to the metric system, Bill. What’s the diameter in millimeters?”
“Ah.” I squinted at the gauge. “Twenty-three . . . point . . . one.”
“ForDisc doesn’t take decimals,” he said.
“What? How can it be accurate if it’s not precise?”
This time his sigh sounded more than slightly exasperated. “You’re saying your caliper reading—on a chewed-up bone—is accurate to within a tenth of a millimeter? One two-hundred-fiftieth of an inch? Besides, weren’t you the one who started out by saying it was ‘a little less than an inch’?”
“Okay, okay,” I grumbled. “Call it twenty-three millimeters.”