Carved in Bone

would make the excavation far quicker and simpler. I didn’t want to risk damaging the skull, though, so I reached into my tool case and removed a scalpel. Tilting the skull gently backward with one hand, I worked the blade back and forth with the other, severing the burned remnants of ligamentous tissue and spinal cord. As I lifted the skull, I backed out of the wreck and turned to show the skull to my teammates.
    Art whistled when he saw the hole at the center of the forehead. It measured nearly an inch in diameter; the edges were jagged, and fracture lines radiated from it like crooked spokes in a mangled wheel. “That’s a big entry wound,” he said. “Bullet must’ve mushroomed some when it hit the windshield. Damn good shooting, too,” he added. “Or incredibly lucky. I bet Orbin was looking the shooter right in the eye when he pulled the trigger. Talk about staring death in the face.”
    “If he’d been Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, ” said Miranda, “he coulda dodged the bullet.”
    “If he’d been Christopher Reeve in Superman, it woulda bounced right off,” I said.
    “If he’d been Superman, he wouldn’t have been flying a helicopter,” Sarah pointed out.
    “That’s right,” chimed in Art. “And he’d’ve used his telescopic vision to spot the guy. And his heat vision to burn him up.”
    “Enough, already,” I said. “These complex forensic hypotheses are making my head spin.”
    I handed off the skull to Miranda, then leaned back in to determine whether how much of the body remained intact. The arms and lower legs, not surprisingly, had burned off—thin, cylindrical, and surrounded by oxygen, they were always the first to go in a hot fire. Some of those bones lay on the warped metal of the pilot’s door; others were fused into a bizarre aggregate with the Plexiglas that had shattered, then melted, then cooled and hardened into a lumpy black mess.
    His ribs were almost completely exposed, except at the back, where they joined the vertebrae. There, the seat’s padding and leather had protected the flesh from the fire during its first several minutes, as it had beneath the buttocks and backs of the thighs. It would be an awkward, two-person job to wrestle his torso out through the windshield opening. “Miranda, y’all get a disaster bag open on the ground here,” I called out. “Art, are you gloved up?”
    “Yeah,” he said, wiggling his fingers in a pair of purple gloves, “I’ve got the gloves on, but I couldn’t find my matching handbag anywhere. Whatcha need?”
    “Come help me wrestle him out of here, would you?”
    “Love to.”
    As soon as Miranda and Sarah had unzipped the white bag and laid it open at my feet, I reached through the cockpit’s left side and slid my hands beneath the torso’s left hip and ribs. Art leaned in through the opening on the right, levering his hands behind the right shoulder and hip. “On three,” I said. “One, two, three! ” As we grunted with the strain, the charred torso lifted free of the seat and door frame and lurched toward the windshield opening.
    “Hang on a sec; I’ve got to shift my grip,” said Art, and with that, I found myself bearing the torso’s entire weight—admittedly, considerably reduced from what it once was, but still a hefty load for a middle-aged academic stooped at an awkward angle.
    “Hurry, I can’t hold him long,” I gasped.
    “Okay, got him; let’s go,” Art said, and I felt my burden ease.
    As we maneuvered the torso out the opening, a femur snagged on the windshield’s center post, throwing me off balance. I stumbled backward, into Miranda’s arms. The body cartwheeled downward, thudding onto my feet. “Damn,” I said.
    “Good thing we aren’t EMTs,” said Art. “If he weren’t dead already, he would be now. Either that or speed-dialing his lawyer.”
    I tugged the bag’s sides up around the torso, then zipped it closed. “Let’s each grab a corner,” I said, “and go ahead and get this into the truck.” Distributed among the four of us, the weight was surprisingly light—no more than twenty pounds apiece.
    Miranda and Sarah reached the back of the truck with their end of the bag first. “Let’s set it down here on the tailgate, then climb inside and slide him in,” said Miranda. They scampered up and inside the low cap over the bed a lot more gracefully than I could have. “Oh, to be young and nimble again,” I said, lifting and sliding my corner toward