Carved in Bone

a blow of some sort,” I said. “Maybe he just tripped and fell on the sidewalk, but more likely, somebody knocked them out. Maybe with a baseball bat or a piece of pipe. If we can find the lower jaw, I’ll bet the central incisors are missing from it, too.” I studied the remaining teeth. “One of his twelve-year molars is gone, and the jawbone’s already starting to resorb, to fill the empty socket. Four of the other teeth have unfilled cavities.” I pointed with my pinky to one of the six-year molars. “This cavity goes deep enough to reach the root. That had to be painful. So this was a poor boy; he probably never even went to the dentist.”
    “So it is a male,” said Angie. “I thought so; this skull’s a good bit bigger than the other.”
    “He’s bigger, several years older,” I said. “Still a sub-adult, though.” I point to the roof of the mouth. “Remember how open the sutures in the palate looked in the other skull? These are nearly fused, but not quite. So this boy–young man, really–could be sixteen, seventeen. Judging by how that socket’s already filling in, he probably lost that missing molar not too long after he got it. I’d say he started out poor, and things went downhill from there.”
    Vickery used his cigar to point to a jagged gap behind the left ear opening, at the base of the temporal bone. “Looks like a fair-sized chunk of bone is missing.”
    I nodded. “The left mastoid process–the heavy piece that’s almost like a corner of the skull–has been knocked clean off. That’s a pretty stout piece of bone, so something hit him hard. Again, maybe something like a baseball bat. A two-by-four. A rifle butt.”
    There was a sober pause while they took this in.
    “What about time since death?” asked Angie. “Was this kid killed around the same time as the other?”
    “Hard to say,” I shrugged. “There’s a little bit of tissue on this one, too, so they could be from the same time period. But the range of uncertainty’s big. They might’ve died the same day; they might have died years apart.”
    “But we know we have two adolescents,” Vickery mused, “at least one of them male, maybe both of them male.” I nodded. “Both killed by blunt force trauma, both found in the same general area. So we’re probably looking for a serial killer?” Angie drew a long, grim breath.
    “Hmm,” I said doubtfully.
    Angie’s eyes swiveled up to mine. “Hmm? What do you mean, 'hmm’?”
    “Well,” I hedged, “on the one hand, we’ve got two young victims, who were found near one another.”
    “On the other hand?” asked Vickery.
    “I don’t know a lot about serial killers,” I began, “but don’t they often choose similar-looking victims? Take Ted Bundy, for instance. Didn’t he target women who looked like his ex-girlfriend?”
    “Bundy said the cops had made too much of that,” Vickery answered, “but then again, Bundy was a monster and a liar, so how much stock can you put in what he said? I actually thought all his victims did resemble one another.” He studied me. “Are you saying these two kids didn’t look similar? How can you tell?”
    All eyes were on me. “Well, 'similar’ is in the eye of the beholder, right? But if you asked me to pick out two similar-looking boys from a crowd, I probably wouldn’t pick a young white boy and an older black boy.”
    “This one’s black?” Pettis was the one who asked. “How can you tell that?”
    “Couple ways,” I said. “First, look at the teeth again.” I turned the skull upside-down again. “See how bumpy the tops of these teeth are?” I pointed to the numerous, irregular cusps of the molars. “We call teeth like that 'crenulated,’ and they’re a distinctive feature of Negroid skulls. If you run your tongue over the surfaces of your molars, you’ll find that they’re smoother than that.” I paused to give them a chance to do the experiment, and through the flesh of their cheeks, I saw their tongues probing their teeth.
    I turned the skull, cupping the damaged back of the head in my left palm, pointing the broken incisors skyward. “The jaw structure here is classically Negroid. See how the jaw juts forward? It’d be easier to see if the front teeth weren’t broken, but the jawbone itself angles, also. And the lower jaw, if we had it, would jut forward, too. It’s called 'prognathism.’ Our white faces are flatter–the shape’s called 'orthognathous’–and the jaws don’t