Dead Man's Bones (10 page)

I reached for another topic. “The sheriff also mentioned that you’re doing some forensic work on the bones Brian found.”

The curtain pulled aside, and she was totally there again. “Oh, yes,” she said, probably as eager as I to have something we could talk about easily. “Yes, indeed, the bones from the cave. They present some very interesting problems.” She leaned forward, her words coming faster, a little slurred, maybe, but that was no surprise, given the amount of tequila she’d been putting down. “Of course, the cave dig itself has been fascinating. Did Brian tell you that the first two skeletons we found are from the Paleo-Indian period? They’re close to ten thousand years old.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s hard to imagine ten thousand years, somehow.” Those bones predated the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China. They were very old bones. I imagined that they had some stories to tell.

She nodded. “We’ve also found several Folsom points, and one very fine Clovis point, and quite a bit of detritus from later periods. I’m sure there’s much more to be discovered in other parts of the cave. Everyone in the department is quite excited about the finds, of course. But these recent bones—”

Our dinners arrived then, her taco salad and my barbecued brisket and sausage, spicy and fragrant, and we ate while she told me about the skeleton Brian had stumbled on to the previous Friday. It had been moved to her laboratory at the university, but she hadn’t yet had an opportunity to study it in detail, she said. She’d need time, and she’d have to use equipment in other labs around the campus, since she didn’t have much of her own. She had already formed some preliminary conclusions, though. Gender, for one.

“The narrow sciatic notch, the short pubic bone, the small pelvic inlet—I wouldn’t say it definitively yet, but I’m fairly confident that we’re dealing with a man here, rather than a woman.”

Her voice had taken on confidence, assurance, authority; her shoulders had straightened; her expression had become lively, animated. I could easily picture her as an expert witness, talking to the jury, commanding their attention. If I were in the courtroom with this woman, I’d much rather have her on my side.

“As to age,” she went on, “I’m guessing that the individual wasn’t much older than thirty. I’ll have to do more osteological analysis, of course, but the auricular region of the hip bone doesn’t reveal the kind of pitting and wear that we would expect to see in an older person, and the medial end of the collarbone—the end closest to the spine—exhibits the raised ridges that are usually associated with a young adult. There’s a rather distinctive and visible gold tooth—the right central upper incisor—that may help with identification.”

“A gold tooth?”

Alana nodded. “Now, restorations are made of tooth-colored porcelain or resin. But this didn’t become common practice until the 1970s.” She paused. “There are also a number of severe injuries to the femur and tibia of the right leg and to the right humerus, probably within three or four years of death. Difficult repairs, too. As to the skull—”

I stared at her. She had taken a fragmented collection of speechless bones and given them a voice—a fascinating, if somewhat macabre skill, this speaking for the dead. And equally fascinating, perhaps even more, was the way she had come to life as she talked about what she’d learned, as if the dead man’s bones had given
her
a voice.

Catching my expression, she stopped in midsentence. “Oh, sorry. It isn’t exactly dinner table conversation.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I’m impressed, Alana. No wonder they call you the bone doc. Brian told me that,” I added, in explanation.

That brought a smile. “I like that title.”

I paused. “So how did you get into forensic anthropology in the first place? It seems like a strange field for a—” At the bar, somebody broke a glass. The noise obliterated the rest of my sentence.

“For a woman?” Her expression darkened. “Or for a Latina?”

Damn. There was that sensitivity again, and it was getting to me. Life is one long challenge under the best of circumstances. If you’re balancing a heavy chip on your shoulder, and you go around daring people to knock it off, the challenges multiply.

“Of all the forensic anthropologists I worked with in court or out,” I said, deliberately ignoring her second question, “I don’t think any were women. You must have to love bones.”

She seemed to relax a little. “And you have to learn not to throw up at the smell of rotting flesh. It helps if you don’t mind working forty-eight straight hours on a case, and sleeping in the lab, either. And it also helps if you can tolerate snakes, skunks, and poison ivy.” She smiled wryly. “I tell my female students all this. And then I show them photos of me, soaked to the skin and up to my knees in mud. And if they continue to be interested, I give them a list of all the biology and chemistry they’ll need—almost as much as if they were planning to go into medicine. Then I tell them that fewer than half of the women who start the program are likely to finish it. If they’re going to drop out, I’d rather have them do it at the beginning, before they’ve invested a couple of years of their lives. A lot of them quit.” She raised a hand and let it drop, half-amused. “Maybe they don’t love bones enough.”

At the dart board, Barry scored big and let out a triumphant yell. Somebody at the bar called, “Way to go, Barry,” and there was a round of applause. George wins a dozen games to Barry’s one, so this was cause for community celebration.

“But you made it,” I pointed out, over the ruckus. “Were you always interested in anthropology? Was that your undergraduate major?”

She nodded. She was talking more easily now. I couldn’t decide whether it was the subject or the alcohol—the second double had disappeared while I was still on my first single. “I did a couple of summer field schools while I was an undergraduate. Then I married an American and came to the U.S., to Baton Rouge, where my husband was a professor. I applied to the master’s program in anthropology. When I finished, I went to work in the forensic lab. I was there for over ten years. I got the chance to work with police departments and to serve as an expert witness.” She paused, then added bleakly, “My husband and I divorced. It turned out that he didn’t like the idea of another anthropologist in the family, after all.”

The spare understatement, rich with significance, told a familiar story of professional competitiveness, complicated by ethnicity. Perhaps Alana had been his student, and he had liked her better when she was clearly his subordinate, his inferior. Perhaps, when she grew to be his professional equal, she became competitive, a personal threat. Perhaps—

But I was speculating, trespassing where I had no invitation to enter. I pushed my plate away and went back to the subject of Brian’s caveman. “The sheriff said he thought the bones were fairly recent—the late 1970s, maybe. He said he discovered some coins.”

If she wondered how I had come to discuss the matter with Blackie, she didn’t let on. “The latest, I think, was from 1975. Those coins were a lucky find,” she added. “It’s next to impossible to date a skeleton like this by the bones themselves.”

“The guy died of a crushed skull?”

“Well, the skull was certainly crushed,” she said cautiously. “Whether that was the cause of death—it’s too soon to tell. I won’t know until I have time to look more carefully at the interior of the skull.”

She had only half-finished her taco salad, but she pushed her plate away. There was another silence, a longer one. Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias were crooning to all the girls they’d loved before. I like Willie, but this particular song is so charged with macho bravado and sexual exploitation that it makes me want to go kick the jukebox. In the back room, there was the sharp crack of a pool cue and somebody yelled “Gotcha, you sumbitch!”

Alana picked up her margarita and took another swallow. “You asked how I got into forensic anthropology. Are you still interested in hearing the story?”

I nodded.

“It happened because of a young mother in New Orleans, who was murdered several years before I came to the States. I never knew her, of course, but by the time it was all over, she was like a friend. Her bones told me things about her that even her mother didn’t know.”

She looked at me, checking to see whether I was listening. I was, so she went on, her words definitely slurry now. There was no doubt about it, Alana was looped.

“The first year of graduate study, I took a summer job as an intern in the LSU forensics lab. I’d been there a couple of weeks when a woman’s remains were brought in for analysis. Somebody was putting in a new sewer line, and the skeleton had been dug up by a backhoe. As we pieced the bones together, you could see that her skull had been badly fractured, as well as most of her ribs, the bones in both arms, one ankle, even her foot.” Her mouth tightened. “A great many fractures, with various degrees of healing. Obviously, they occurred over quite a few years, some of them shortly before her death. It was the skull fracture that killed her.”

“Abuse,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

She nodded. “Yes, years of it. The police didn’t have to look very far for the abuser, either. The woman, a black woman, was identified as a former resident of the house on the property where her remains were found. She had simply disappeared one day, about fifteen years earlier. Her mother reported her missing, and the police questioned her husband, who had a history of domestic violence. But he told them she’d been having an affair with another man and had simply taken off. And without a body . . .” She shrugged, her face impassive now, stony. “Well, you know.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.” Without a body, it’s sometimes hard to get the police to make a serious investigation—unless of course, the family begins calling press conferences. And even when an investigation leads to an arrest, it may be difficult to get a conviction. Not impossible, but definitely not easy. Not a gamble that most prosecutors want to take.

“Anyway, the police didn’t push it,” Alana went on, “until the body turned up, that is. Then they arrested the husband—by that time, he was married again—and charged him with his first wife’s murder, citing the extensive evidence of abuse. The evidence of the bones.”

She took another drink, then fell silent, as if she were engrossed in the story, playing it over in her head. As if she had gone back there, to that time and place.

After a minute, I nudged. “Go on. What happened, Alana?”

She focused on me, on the present. “What happened? The guy had a good defense lawyer, that’s what happened. A very aggressive woman, very smart and good with words. She argued that the backhoe broke up the woman’s bones in the process of digging them up.”

A logical strategy for the defense. “Is that what happened?”

“Of course—that is, some were damaged during the excavation. But the perimortem fractures could be easily identified by the staining on the older trauma and the way the bones had been broken and displaced. The damage caused by the backhoe was recent and entirely different.” She turned the stem of her glass in her fingers. Her voice was sharp, dry. “Any fool could see it.”

“Any fool. Except for the jury, that is.”

“Right. But they had help. The forensics expert—my boss—botched his testimony, and the defense attorney caught him on a couple of inconsistencies.” Her eyes had become dark, her voice fierce. “He’d just gotten back from a long trial in St. Louis, where he was the expert witness. This case seemed like an easy one, so he didn’t bother to do his homework. He made some mistakes, stupid mistakes, and the defense attorney pounced on him. She completely destroyed his credibility. The jury acquitted a guilty man.”

“It happens,” I murmured. I wanted to say that the defense attorney was only doing the job she was paid to do, the job that the system demanded, but I thought better of it. “So this was the case that made you decide to go into forensics?”

“Not quite.” Pain etched her face. “The man who had been acquitted—six weeks after he walked out of that courtroom, he beat his wife to death with a baseball bat. He didn’t break every single bone in her body, but he broke quite a few of them. Most of her ribs, all four bones in her forearms, her skull, her jaw.”

Alana was leaning forward now, but her voice had dropped to a grating whisper, and I had to lean forward, too, to hear her over the music, the sound of Willie crooning those abominable lyrics, “To all the girls I’ve loved before.” Love. Love and exploitation. Love and violence. Love and death.

I shivered, suddenly chilled to the bone, the image of Ruby rising like a ghost in my mind. Ruby, who was no longer listening to her common sense—or her uncommon sense, either. Ruby, who was joyfully falling in love again, abandoning herself to another wild leap off the precipice. But love didn’t mean living happily ever after. Love could mean betrayal. Love could mean—

I gave myself a hard shake. This was silly, totally and completely stupid. The story that Alana was telling me, grim as it was, had nothing to do with Ruby. The only danger she faced was another broken heart, and that wouldn’t take more than a month or two to mend.

Alana was going on, and I tuned back in. “Only this time,” she said grimly, “the bastard didn’t get away with it. This time, there was a witness, the woman’s ten-year-old daughter, his stepdaughter, who watched through the keyhole of a closet door. The prosecution didn’t need a forensics expert. The girl told the jury how her mother had cried and pleaded and screamed, until her stepfather finally crushed her skull, and she stopped screaming.”

She blew out her breath in a shuddery puff. More words came out on that breath, too, propelled by a bitter anger. “I’ll always remember the way that little girl cried, up there on the witness stand. That was what made me decide to stay in the business. If that damn fool of a forensics man had done his job right, the second victim would still be alive, and that little girl would never have had to witness her mother’s murder.” She gave me a penetrating look. “There’s only one consolation.”