“So you’re saying our victim wasn’t black?”
“I can’t be sure—there’s plenty of room for individual skeletal variations, and this is just a reconstruction, so I wouldn’t put a huge amount of faith in its accuracy. But there’s a second thing. A measurement from another bone—a shinbone—also seems to tip the scales toward white. So just guessing, which is all I can do at this point, I’d guess we’re not looking at a white-on-black hate crime.”
O’Conner was silent a long while. Finally I heard him take a deep breath, then blow it out. “Well, looks like we’re back to square one,” he said. “I’ll tell Morgan and Waylon. And we’ll go back to beating the bushes on the white side of the tracks.”
“A whole lot more foliage on that side,” I said. “Up in Cooke County, anyhow.”
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Tell me about it, Doc.”
I hung up, more frustrated than I could remember feeling in a long time. It was maddening, not knowing something as simple as the race of our victim—and not being likely to know for nearly eight weeks. In my mind’s eye, I saw the bone sample I had sent to the TBI crime lab sitting, overlooked and forgotten and gathering dust, while other samples, and other cases, raced ahead.
Patience, Brockton, I counseled myself. Eight weeks isn’t that long. It’ll go by in the blink of an eye.
Bullshit, retorted a far less serene, far more honest version of myself.
CHAPTER 11
“DELIA ANSELMETTI,” ANSWERED A WARM VOICE.
“Good morning,” I said. “It’s Dr. Brockton. How’s my newest assistant professor?”
“I’m good. Mostly settled in, except for some of the lab equipment, and enjoying my students.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Are you in your dingy old office, or your shiny new lab?”
“I’m in the office. If you shout, I can probably hear you even without the phone.”
That was true; Delia’s office was only a half-dozen doors down from my administrative office, where I’d started my day. “I’d hate to shout at you, since I’m asking for a favor. Can I pop in and see you for a minute?”
“Sure. I have to teach a class in ten minutes, but come on down. Even if we don’t get to finish, we can at least get started.”
“I’m on my way.” I hung up the phone, made a quick exit from my office, and took a right turn down the corridor.
Sometimes Stadium Hall reminded me of the interior of a space station, its curving hallway—bent by the arc of Neyland Stadium’s grandstands, beneath which a wedge-shaped building had been shoehorned—calling to mind the gigantic space wheels spinning through the fantasies of sci-fi films and early NASA visionaries.
At other times, though, the building’s lopsided configuration, with rooms lining only one side of the corridor, called to mind the image of a giant brain that was lacking one of its hemispheres. Since I was walking counterclockwise from my office—from south to north, along the stadium’s southeastern rim—it appeared to be the brain’s left hemisphere that had been removed, leaving behind only a solid wall of reinforced concrete, whose vast beige expanse was enlivened only by a few outdated bulletin boards and large, fading academic posters, dense with text, graphs, and tables.
On my way to Delia’s, I passed three of these posters, which had been presented at academic conferences by job-seeking graduate students in recent years. “Morphological Variations in the Acromium Process” was the first thrilling title. “Weight Gain in Third-Instar Maggots at the Anthropology Research Facility,” offered the second poster. Or, Eating More and Enjoying It Less, I mentally subtitled that one. “Synthetic Training Aids for Cadaver Dogs,” read the third one. “What Is the Optimal Ratio of Cadaverine and Putrescine?” Doggone if I know, I silently responded.
Just beyond the third poster was Delia’s office, the door ajar. I knocked, heard “Come in,” and did as I was told.
Delia Anselmetti had the olive complexion, dark hair, and dark eyes that her Italian name seemed to call for. Even her office seemed Mediterranean: unlike most of the drab, beige walls in Stadium Hall, Delia’s were a warm reddish orange, as if by stepping through her doorway, I had suddenly been transported to a room in Venice or Florence. Delia’s education and expertise were exotic, too, at least to me. A molecular anthropologist, she had focused on biochemistry, genetics, microbiology, statistics, and computer modeling—courses that only slightly overlapped my own background and interests in archaeology, anatomy, osteology, skeletal trauma, and forensics. Scarcely older than Miranda, and only just embarking on her career, Delia represented a new generation of anthropologists, a generation I admired for their scientific savvy, even as I struggled to keep up with their conversations and publications.