Carved in Bone

them.
    “Oh, to be tenured and tended by assistants,” shot back Miranda. In the dark interior of the cap, Sarah coughed back a laugh.
    “It’ll never happen,” I said, “if you piss off the department head and he flunks you.”
    “He wouldn’t dare. I’ve been propping him up for the last two years. He’d be lost without me.”
    “True,” I said, “but I’m grooming your replacement right now.”
    “I don’t think so,” said Sarah. “The pay’s lousy and the hours stink. So do the patients.” They emerged and hopped down from the truck.
    “Ooh, that’s a new one,” I said. “Let me just retreat to my work while I compose a witty retort.” I went back to the cockpit to begin extricating bones that had separated from the corpse. The first one I pulled out was a humerus. “Looks like the impact tore his left arm off,” I said to Miranda. “Do you know how I can tell?”
    Miranda studied the bone as Sarah inked in the outline of the bone on the element inventory. “Well, one end is all black, and the other is gray,” said Miranda. “I assume that’s a clue?”
    “Is that what you call differential burning?” asked Sarah, leaning in.
    “Right—very good,” I said. Miranda raised her eyebrows, then smiled in grudging admiration. “See the humeral head,” I went on, “where the arm joins the shoulder? It’s completely calcined; that gray color means all the organic matter has been completely incinerated, leaving nothing behind but the minerals. Look at how fractured it is.” They both studied it intently. “Be careful with it—it’s very fragile, like bones that have been cremated. The distal end, at the elbow, is sort of caramel colored, which means it didn’t burn nearly as much. Because…?”
    “Because there was still soft tissue shielding it for a while,” said Miranda quickly. She handed off the humerus to Sarah, who placed it in a brown paper evidence bag, which she labeled and numbered.
    “Exactly.” I reached into the cockpit and pulled out a pair of bones, still attached to one another at the lower end. “Looks like the left tibia and fibula have that same pattern of differential burning, so the impact probably tore off his lower leg as well.” I handed out the leg bones for them to inventory, examine, and bag. “And the left femur has some midshaft calcining; that means the muscle probably split open from the force of the impact.” As I held out the femur, Art leaned in to take close-up photos of the burn pattern. The flash seared my eyes. “That’s okay, Art,” I said, “I didn’t really need those retinas to work here.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve heard you can ID bones with your eyes closed, so I figured you weren’t looking. This differential burning you’re talking about—is it forensically significant?”
    “Not in this case—we already know how he was killed, because I saw it. So did two other people—three, actually, counting the shooter. But suppose we found these bones in a burned-out house. In that setting, the differential burning would be important—it would probably mean that the body was traumatized or dismembered before it was burned. Not exactly an accidental fire, then—more likely arson intended to conceal evidence of a murder.”
    After the first few bones, and the first few minilectures, we got into a quiet, efficient rhythm. Without even looking or turning or speaking, I’d hand pieces out to Miranda, who would verbally ID them. As Sarah got busy inking the bones on the skeleton diagram, Art took over bagging and labeling. Soon the ground was covered with brown paper bags, like some gruesome, cannibalistic picnic lunch.
    I had gradually worked my way down to the pedals near the pilot’s floor bubble, or what had once been the floor bubble. “Hey, Art,” I called as I began extricating a handful of calcined foot bones, “I know the pedals on an airplane work the rudder, but what do they do on a helicopter, which doesn’t have a rudder? They don’t control the throttle, do they?”
    “Naw,” he said, reaching around me to point at a twisted metal tube mounted in the center of the cabin floor, “throttle’s built into the stick here, which is called the ‘collective’ in a chopper. The pedals control the tail rotor, which works like a rudder, in a frighteningly complex way. To yaw—pivot—to the left, the pilot mashes the left pedal, which actually causes the tail rotor to shove the tail boom to the