Bones of the Barbary Coast (2 page)

I
AN UNINTENTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1

T
HE BONES HAD BEEN assembled in roughly their former working order, a symmetrical array of odd, ivory-brown shapes that took up virtually the whole length of an eight-foot stainless-steel table. Cree stood at the foot of the pallet with Uncle Bert and Dr. Horace Skobold, head of the University of California Forensic Anthropology lab, as Skobold introduced her to the skeleton.

"First, some generalities. From a cursory look at bone development, I'd say our subject was male, about five-foot eight in stature, and between twenty and forty years old. Race uncertain, given the, um, obvious developmental abnormalities."

Horace Skobold was a tall, apple-cheeked man in his midsixties, dressed in khakis, a white shirt, and a bow tie. He paused to appraise Cree with watery blue eyes that were owlish behind thick-lensed glasses. "Do you have much background in anatomy, Ms. Black?"

"Unfortunately, no. More in psychology."

"Well, for an adult human male of his age and size, the phalanges—toe bones—have very unusual proportions. The distal and medial sections are extremely short and stubby. If I had seen them alone, I might have said they indicated brachydactylia, type BHA1. The typical foreshortening is readily apparent in the fingers as well."

Cree bent to look more closely as Dr. Skobold used a chopstick to point out each feature. The bones of both feet had been arranged in two fans at the end of the table: raying longer shafts ending in a series of short, knuckly knobs. They had been dry-brushed but not yet washed, Skobold explained, so as to preserve any instructive chemical traces or DNA sources. He hadn't had time to do much with the skeleton since Bert had brought it over from the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office.

The array on the table gave off a chalky, earthy scent that Cree was a little reluctant to inhale. Even to her inexperienced eyes, these bones didn't look right.

"But brachydactylia is contraindicated by other features," Skobold went on. "Such as the metatarsals, the bones of the foot, which are unusually
long
and rather delicate. Highly unusual. Factoring in aspects of the heel, I would guess that this man had a hard time walking on the soles of his feet. It's likely he would have felt more comfortable with his heel raised." The chopstick traced the various foot bones.

Skobold's style reminded Cree less of a distinguished scholar than of a small-town funeral home director—a sober air, blandly pious, resigned. Either he had faced some deep sorrow in his life, she thought, or it was something he affected because it seemed the appropriate tone around the dead. Whichever, it couldn't hide his enthusiasm for his work. He was clearly enjoying his presentation and like a good showman was saving the best for last. She dutifully studied the metatarsals as he talked about them, but she couldn't resist a quick glance at the skull. Though bones had never bothered her, she shivered at the thought of the living face those angles and protrusions had once supported.

As if feeling the same thing, Uncle Bert stood well back from the table. Or, more likely, he'd seen enough of the skeleton earlier, or enough bones and bodies in his lifetime, and was giving this show to Cree.

She and Bert hadn't had time to catch up at all, having come straight from the Oakland airport in separate cars. Given that they were already on the East Bay side, not that far from the University of California and the lab, Cree thought it made sense to begin by looking at the bones. Bert had called ahead to let Dr. Skobold know they were coming.

After so many years, she hadn't recognized Bert right away. She'd scanned the crowd around the baggage carrousel for several minutes before spotting something familiar in the tired, top-heavy-looking man in the rumpled gray suit. Their eyes met a couple of times before it clicked for both of them, and then Bert bulled through the crowd to give her a brief, clumsy embrace. Definitely a gentleman of his generation: He'd insisted on carrying her bags, even though it made opening doors for her awkward. He'd driven her to the rental lot where she'd picked up a little red Honda SUV, then she'd followed his Crown Victoria to Berkeley.

The lab was in the Life Sciences Building, a neo-Romanesque, gray monolith at the center of campus. Its big basement room and side offices were pleasant in a clinical way, well lit by overhead fluorescent tubes and a row of windows opening to a view of a narrow concrete light well and a slice of sky and treetops. The space was largely occupied by cranio-facial reconstruction projects and the tools the science required: Stainless-steel lab benches supported bones, computer terminals, microscopes, X-ray film viewers, equipment for making molds and casts, a variety of specialized measuring devices. The only disturbing element was a faint smell of rotting meat.

Most interesting were the clay busts, eight or ten reconstruction projects in various stages of completion. The finished ones were fully fleshed likenesses, but most were only partially covered by straps and pads of brown clay. A few were still naked plaster skulls, marked with index points and bristling with cylindrical spacers, indication of the painstaking effort required to build a recognizable face from anonymous bones. The completed busts were very lifelike; clearly, Skobold was a superb sculptor.

"Moving up," Skobold continued, "to the lower leg. Where we immediately spot a significant disproportion between tibia and fibula. This fellow has an extremely robust tibia—shinbone—with pronounced thickening at the proximal end, at the knee. By comparison, the fibula is unusually delicate. And the femur, the bone of the thigh . . . it's ordinarily about the same length as the lower leg bones, and is a reliable rough guide to the height of the individual. But as you can see, it's substantially shorter than the lower leg assembly. Remarkable, isn't it?"

"I'll have to take your word for it," Cree apologized.

The door at the far end of the lab opened and a middle-aged woman entered, wearing a lab smock and carrying several files. She nodded to them, then sat on a stool in front of one of the reconstructions and immersed herself in her work.

Skobold's watery eyes went back to his subject, and he tapped his chopstick on one of a pair of bones shaped like fragments of a ceramic bowl that had fallen and broken into two mirrorimage pieces. "The innominates—the pelvic bones—show many interesting characteristics which I'll need to study more closely . . . The spine, fairly normal except for the coccyx. Normally, the end of the tailbone consists of three fused vertebrae. But this fellow's aren't fused, and he has three extras at the end—supernumeraries, not common, but not unheard of . . . Moving up, multiple deformities in the scapulae, shoulder joint, and rib cage suggest that the arms would be better suited to projecting somewhat forward from the torso as opposed to depending downward from the shoulder in the normal way"

There wasn't really a rib "cage" at the moment; the individual ribs were laid out in a series of arcs, flat on the table. Several had been broken, their curves reassembled from two or three pieces.

Cree followed Skobold when he shuffled up toward the head of the table, but Uncle Bert's cell phone buzzed and he stepped away to talk. Something to do with trace evidence analysis, Bert apparently pulling a favor with the Crime Lab. As a veteran inspector with SFPD's Homicide Detail, thirty-five years in and retirement approaching, he was no doubt eager to clear his remaining cases.

Cree looked down at the splayed hand bones, stubby rows of knots and carbuncles. "Are you sure all these bones belong to the same person? Couldn't they be from several people of different ages, or have some . . . animal bones mixed in?"

"Actually, that was my first thought, too. We often receive remains of several commingled individuals, and it can be hard to sort them out. And you're right that there's a superficial resemblance to the features of certain animals. I am frequently asked to look at skeletal remains that prove to be of nonhuman origin. People bring in dog or deer bones, thinking they've found a murder victim or prehistoric remains in their backyard. But, no, this fellow is human and all these bones are his. Every bone accounted for, no redundancies. And the geometry of the aricular surfaces . . . the heads of the bones . . . shows they belong together."

Cree nodded.

Skobold glanced at Uncle Bert, still on his phone, then made a mournful face and rubbed his hands together with a gesture that conveyed both excitement and reluctance. "Well. On to the
piece de resistance.
The skull."

Skobold took a position at the head of the table and picked up the cranium, a smooth orb intact but for an irregular, egg-size hole on its upper left side. Again he used his chopstick to point out each feature.

"The most obvious deviation is the unusual development of his maxillary bone and dentition—particularly the extraordinary length of the canine teeth. And, as you can see from the side view, the whole nasal and maxillary region is protruded by two inches or more."

He paused to pick up the jawbone, a long, narrow horseshoe with lower teeth that stuck up menacingly. With the expression of a parent regarding a troubled child, he fitted the jaw to the cranium and began levering it up and down in a biting motion.

"Striking, isn't it? Over the years, I've encountered a good number of deformed individuals. Hospitals and medical schools sometimes ask me to do morphometric analysis of fatal congenital deformities, mostly stillbirths or neonates, a few young children. I don't think I have ever seen this degree of elongation of the nasal, maxillary, and mandibular structures. Certainly never in an adult. Such extreme deformities are almost invariably accompanied by other problems that result in early mortality. The extent of his deviations from norms and the absence of a precedent will make analysis and reconstruction quite a challenge."

The chopstick hovered at the ragged nose hole and then went into it for most of its length.

"Note also the descended and enlarged sinus cavity. We'll be able to see it better when we get his X-rays, but even a cursory inspection shows that this fellow's nasal aperture has moved toward the end of the maxilar bone. He has a fully elaborated sinus cavity arrayed along a more horizontal axis than you would see in a normal human or one of the great apes, and suggests he had a superb sense of smell. Furthermore, the foramen magnum—the point at which the spinal cord enters the cranium—is located more posteriorly. The plane of the foramen magnum and the occipital plane converge in an acute angle, suggesting his head was carried somewhat forward from the neck and shoulders, rather than set atop the spine as we are used to. Among paleoanthropologists, such an angle typically implies a preference for quadrepedal locomotion."

Skobold rotated the skull and used his chopstick to demonstrate the likely angle. The head and neck would have been thrust aggressively forward.

Uncle Bert ceased pacing and put his phone away, but he still didn't join them. He stood, drumming his fingers on the counter and staring into the distance. He made a bulky silhouette, one big plug of a man, and looked to Cree like someone with a lot on his mind.

"Do you know what caused his death?" Cree asked.

"Well, the head injury is a presumptive candidate," Skobold said. "The sharp edges of the cranial hole and its crisp fracture lines tell me the injury occurred to living bone. But determining cause and manner of death isn't my job—the medical examiner's office does that, and they've already signed off on this as accidental death. No one's bothered with a post mortem."

"Why not?"

"Age of the remains. The general condition of the bones gives us some indication—their coloration and friability, the amount of rodent nibbling, and so on. Put that together with where the skeleton was found and the artifacts recovered from the site, we can safely presume this fellow died in the Great Earthquake of 1906."

"Yes, Bert told me. But to find bones that old . . . that's pretty amazing, isn't it?

"Actually, in San Francisco, it's by no means unheard of. Bertie—how many Great Quake victims would you say you've handled?"

Bert looked up at the ceiling as he made an effort to recall. "Personally? This is my second. In the department, maybe six, seven in my time."

"You have to remember what a cataclysm that was," Skobold said. "A major city, turned to rubble and ash. Utter chaos, a quarter of a million people rendered homeless. Besides the known casualties, around eight hundred people were lost—presumed dead but unaccounted for. But bones are durable. So they turn up every few years during road or sewer-line work, or when some handyman is fixing up his basement, as with this fellow. Remains this old are deemed 'historical.' Which means establishing cause and manner of death isn't a pressing matter for Bert and his boys."

"So . . . will you be doing a facial reconstruction?"

"Oh, I wouldn't miss it for the world! But I really shouldn't begin until we're done with Norma Jean there." Skobold tipped his head toward the woman in the lab smock, who was applying a small white cylinder to the plaster skull in front of her.

Cree gave him a questioning look. The woman was Chinese, ebony haired, barrel shaped, hardly Norma Jean.

Skobold smiled with doleful amusement. "Not my assistant—that's Karen Chang. I'm speaking of her subject. We tend to give them names. You have to remember, they're almost all John and Jane Does when they come in here. We've tagged those remains as 3019. Our chap here is 3024. But the numbers are depersonalizing. Having a name helps you give your reconstruction more of a real . . . personality."