“Please, be my guest.” And with a courtly gesture, including a slight, humorous bow, he stepped back to give me free access.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, never having examined a face that had been decimated by a blasting cap, but aside from the gruesome disfigurement, I found it fascinating. A few sluggish maggots—the eggs laid and hatched during the day or three when Shiflett’s body had been accessible to blowflies—were running for cover, fleeing down the throat or up into the skull. Their numbers were far fewer than I was accustomed to—corpses at the Body Farm teemed with maggots by the thousands—so I ignored them, figuring that they’d either get out of the way or get squashed by my probing hands.
The head was already tilted back, supported by a neck block that either Eddie or a morgue assistant had positioned beforehand, and the mangled mandible hung down, almost as if Shiflett were wearing a grisly war trophy around his neck—the jawbone of an enemy he had killed in battle. We have met the enemy, and he is us, I thought, a memorable quote from my favorite childhood comic strip, “Pogo.” Thanks to the neck block and the dangling mandible, I had an unobstructed view into the mouth cavity, or, rather, into what used to be the mouth cavity, once upon a time.
The blast damage was both massive and intricate: massive because the bones of the face and the floor of the skull tended to be far thinner and more delicate than, say, the cranium or the cheekbones, which were rugged enough to withstand substantial impacts; intricate because the bones were not just thin but also irregular in shape. I remembered Miranda’s description of the sphenoid, the floor of the skull, as the “bat-bone” because of its winged appearance.
As I explored the abyss of carnage—my spelunking lit by the surgical light I pulled down from above, angling and swiveling it this way and that—I found myself surprised by the depth of the damage. “Look at this, Eddie,” I said, stepping back so he could lean in for a better view. “If he was biting the blasting cap with his incisors, I’d expect most of the energy from the explosion to vent out of his mouth, wouldn’t you?”
“That seems reasonable,” he said mildly. “And yet there appears to be extensive trauma to the throat—the top of the trachea and the esophagus are macerated.” He reached a finger in and moved a flap of tissue aside. “Also, two of the cervical vertebrae are partially exposed. C-3 and C-4, it appears.”
“You’re kidding.” Eddie stepped back deferentially, and I peered in again. “I’ll be damned,” I murmured. “You’re right.” I straightened up, partly to fend off what felt like a neck cramp, partly to take a wider look, and partly to think. When I leaned down again, I focused on the teeth, and what I saw puzzled me. The incisors—which by rights ought to have been blown to kingdom come, roots and all—were simply snapped instead, folded forward in a hinge fracture.
I had seen hundreds of hinge fractures in my time. Land teeth-first on a concrete curb, or whack somebody across the mouth with a baseball bat, and the incisors will fold inward, breaking through the thin, bony walls of their sockets as they fold. Shiflett’s teeth, of course, were folded outward, not inward, but it was the fact that they were folded—not shattered or pulverized—that I found puzzling. No: electrifying—a slow, building buzz of mental current.
“Eddie,” I finally said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was swallowing that blasting cap, not biting down on the end, when it went off.”
Eddie studied my own face for several seconds before turning again to Shiflett’s. He leaned in again, swiveling the light, and then reached in with one hand, feeling the interior surfaces. “Jesus, Eddie, be careful. Some of that bone is really splintered. You don’t want to stick yourself.”
“That’s true,” he said. “I still have to take immunosuppressants to avoid rejection, so I need to be careful about bloodborne pathogens. But some things require touch, as you know.” I held my breath until he withdrew his hand. Seeing my nervousness, he smiled and held out his fingers so we could both inspect them. “You see,” he said calmly, “no damage.” He looked back at the corpse’s face again. “I think you are correct,” he mused. “The epicenter—if I may use that word for a small explosion rather than a large earthquake?—seems to be at the back of the buccal cavity, between the base of the tongue and the posterial wall of the oropharynx. The damage seems to radiate outward in all directions from there, rather than from the front of the mouth. In fact, if you wish to feel it, you’ll find a deep crater at the back of the tongue, consistent with immediate proximity to the blast.”
I believed him, and I didn’t particularly want to stick my hand down the guy’s throat. “It might be interesting to take x-rays and a CT scan,” I said, “to get a better look at the geometry of the damage—to confirm all this.”