Ouch, I thought. “No, send him down. He’s been here before. He knows how to find me.” She rang off without saying good-bye. A fine mess you’ve made with her, I thought. Maybe our hand-holding was the opening of some sort of door to romance, or maybe it was simply a onetime fluke, a reflexive response to a scary scene in a movie. But I’d never know, if I kept acting as if it simply hadn’t happened. What’s more, I was introducing a barrier, a layer of awkwardness between Peggy and me, that hadn’t existed until now.
Five minutes later I heard the stairwell door open and close, followed by a staccato tap-tap-tapping at my chamber door. I unlocked and opened the door, and Steve entered, a U-Haul book box tucked under one arm. “Looks like you’ve brought me a present,” I said. “And it’s not even my birthday.” He set the box on my desk. “Can I shake it?”
“You could, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “You might want to glove up, though.”
My pulse quickening, I snagged a pair of gloves from the box I kept at the ready—most people keep tissues on their desktops, but forensic anthropologists keep gloves—and then pulled on the gloves. Beneath the cardboard flaps was a thick wad of bubble wrap, which I grasped and lifted gingerly. “Is this what I think it is?” Steve’s only answer was a one-shouldered shrug, accompanied by a we’ll-see hoist of his eyebrows. I laid the bubble wrap to the side before I peered into the box’s interior. “Yes,” I said, reaching in with both hands, my fingers meeting at the bottom of the box. Carefully, like a priest raising the Communion host to be sanctified, I lifted the object: a human skull, surely as much in need of a blessing as any loaf of bread ever was. The skull was clean and pale, except for a vivid mark on the forehead—a reddish-brown swastika, ragged and smeared, as if traced by a finger dripped in blood.
I felt sure that the skull had come from a twenty-something male whose skeleton appeared European, both to me and to ForDisc; a male whose DNA looked Middle Eastern, to Delia’s sequencing machines; and whose death, to any decent human being, had been horrific. “This was in Shiflett’s house? A trophy?”
“Kinda looks that way.”
The white-supremacist symbol on the forehead seemed not merely offensive but deeply ironic, for without the flesh, this skull—from a brown-skinned Middle Easterner—was indistinguishable from the skulls of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryans that the Nazis and the neo-Nazis considered the “master race.” It had the same narrow nasal opening; the same sharp nasal sill beneath that opening; the same geometry in the cheekbones and eye orbits. Brothers under the skin, Delia had said when I’d given her the DNA sample a few days before. Trouble was, so many people had trouble seeing beneath the skin—beneath the surface differences—to the shared humanity at the core.
Steve nodded grimly. “That’s not all. There’s more in the bottom of the box.”
I set the skull down gently on the bubble wrap I had already removed from the box, then peered inside again, but I saw only more bubble wrap. I took that out and saw that what I had taken for the box’s bottom was actually a second box tucked inside, square but shallow. I slid my fingers down two sides of this box and lifted it out, then set it on the desk and removed a close-fitting lid. Inside, resting on a bed of odd, squiggly packing material, was a small leather-bound volume. Its dark green cover was embossed with ornate geometric designs in gold and red; the title was also stamped in gold—an exotic, swirling script I guessed to be Arabic.
The book’s cover had been mutilated—the entire book had been mutilated, in fact—by what appeared to be a large-caliber gunshot. The entry wound, as I would have termed it if it were in a corpse, was a neat half-inch hole in the center of the cover. The exit, out the back, was ragged and twice that size. Bizarrely, the “wound” appeared to be bloody, and I stared in puzzlement, riffling through the volume, whose pages were all stained around the edges of the hole. I turned to Steve. “What on earth?”
“I suspect it’s related to those,” he said, pointing at the packing material in the shallow box. “The book and the skull were both settin’ on those.”
“But what are they?” He didn’t answer, so I leaned down to examine the material. I had assumed they were made of cardboard, but looking closer, I saw they were furry, with longer tufts of hair at their ends. I reached in and plucked one from the box, holding it up to the light, my face a foot away. One end bore a tapered, inch-long tuft of hair; the other end was blunt—was cut—and bloody. “My God,” I said. “These are pig tails?”
“Looks like it to me,” he said, “but I’ll ask the lab to confirm it.”
I nodded in the direction of the other items. “So I’m guessing that’s pig blood on the skull and on the Quran?”
“Could be,” he said, “but it might be Shiflett’s—he might have wanted to mark his territory, like a dog pissing on a tree. The lab can test it with HemaTrace, tell us if it’s human or animal. Do you want to keep the skull?”