Carved in Bone

up to the hubs in weeds.
    Our arrival was heralded by the baying of a gangly black-and-white hound that bounded off the front porch and galloped toward us. As the Suburban stopped he reared up, putting his paws on Angie’s windowsill and thrusting a snuffling muzzle through the open window. “Nice doggie,” Angie said, her tone somewhere between sarcasm and hope. She held a tentative hand toward him, close enough to sniff but not close enough to bite. After a quick whiff, the dog gave the hand a sloppy lick with a long, deceptively swift tongue. “Nice,” she grimaced, reaching for a container of wipes in the console.
    “At least he’s friendly.” I got out, and the dog loped around to my side of the car to check me out. After sniffing me briefly, he shifted his attention to the right-front tire, which he marked with a liberal sprinkling of pee. “Well mannered, too.” Sutton got out of the cruiser, and the dog gave him a perfunctory sniff and marked one of his tires, too, though with only a few token drops. Clearly he’d sized up the group and found the FDLE contingent to be the alpha dogs.
    The screen door of the cottage groaned open on a rusty spring. “Don’t mind Jasper,” called a stringy man who bore a vague resemblance to his dog. “He never did meet a stranger.” The screen whacked shut as the man descended the two porch steps and shambled toward us. He wore loose, faded jeans, cinched above bony hips with a belt of cracked black leather. On both thighs the denim was worn through to the layer of horizontal white threads; between gaps in the threads of one leg I glimpsed a scrawny thigh that was nearly as white–and nearly as thin–as the threads themselves. The man’s T-shirt looked as if it had been used for years as a painter’s drop cloth; I couldn’t tell if it was white under all the layers of color, or dark with numerous smears of white amid the other colors. Is a zebra white with black stripes, I found myself trying to remember, or black with white stripes?
    Angie stretched out a hand for him to shake. “Good to see you again, Mr. Pettis. How you doing today?”
    “Gettin’ by, Miss Angie,” he said, shaking his head doubtfully. “Battery on my damn car’s gone dead, and I need to patch a couple holes in my damn roof, but I can’t complain.”
    “There’s always something, isn’t there,” said Angie, who had much bigger cause to complain but refrained. “You remember Special Agent Vickery and Officer Sutton,” she told him, and Pettis nodded. “And this is Dr. Brockton. He’s a forensic anthropologist–a bone detective–who’s helping us out on this case.”
    “Bone detective,” he mused. “Like that gal on television? That one they call Bones?”
    “Like her,” I said. “Except she’s got fancier equipment than I’ve got.”
    “Fancier looks, too.” He grinned.
    I laughed. “Yeah, and she’s probably a lot smarter than I am. I just do the best I can with what I’ve got to work with.”
    “That’s all a man can do,” he said agreeably. “You want to see Jasper’s latest find?” I nodded. “It’s up here with the rest of the stuff he’s dragged in.” He led us up the steps and onto the screened-in porch. The screen was rusted, with several dog-sized rips in it; I suspected it did as good a job of keeping mosquitoes out as it did of keeping Jasper in. A wooden shelf, shoulder-high, ran nearly the width of the porch, mounted to the side of the house with triangular wooden braces. Perched on the shelf were a half-dozen skulls: three deer, an alligator, a cow, and a human, which–like the first one–lacked a mandible.
    “That’s quite a collection,” I said. “I’ve seen anthropology departments with smaller collections than Jasper’s building here.” I donned a pair of gloves from my back pocket and lifted the skull from the shelf. The light on the covered porch was dim, so I headed back into the daylight. Even in the dimness, though, I could tell that this skull had a grim story to recount.
    The other five people gathered around as I studied the skull, turning it slowly to inspect it from all angles. Pettis leaned in close as I flipped it to inspect the mouth. “So what-all can you tell from this?”
    “Quite a bit,” I said. “None of it very cheerful. Let’s start with the teeth, since we’re looking at them right now.” Two of them, the central incisors, had been snapped off at the gum line. “These were probably broken by