Carved in Bone

Miranda would simmer the bones in a vat of hot water (seasoned with a dash of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer and a bit of Biz laundry detergent to nudge the process along), followed by a gentle scrubbing with a toothbrush to remove any remaining tissue.
    Having exposed the bones of the face, I directed the spray at the sides and top of the head, gradually peeling the hair mat off the skull, like some bizarre aquatic scalping. As the mat peeled free, I continued rinsing to remove the scalp residue. Miranda lifted the soggy tangle of hair, squeezed out most of the water, and set it on the pad to dry.
    That’s odd, I thought as I studied the upper jaw. The woman didn’t have any upper lateral incisors; she was missing the two teeth that should have flanked her “two front teeth.” I didn’t see any extra space between the central incisors and the canines, nor any signs that the jawbone had filled in any gaps. So it wasn’t that she’d lost them; she’d never had them in the first place. Anomalous absence of teeth, as it’s called, is pretty rare, but it does happen. I kept quiet, waiting to see if Miranda would notice. If she did, she didn’t mention it.
    With the mandible removed, the top of the spinal column was now visible. I directed the spray onto the first and second cervical vertebrae to expose them fully. The first vertebra is little more than a ring of bone—a spacer or washer, basically; it’s the second vertebra that actually bears the load of whatever weighty matter causes the human head to tip the scales at roughly ten pounds. “Okay, let’s remove the skull,” I said. Miranda nodded and moved into position at the end of the table.
    Grasping the skull with both hands, she tilted it back slightly to widen the joints between the vertebrae. I took a scalpel from the instrument tray on the counter and eased it into the space between them, working it back and forth to sever the remaining bits of cartilage holding them together. The gap widened, then the skull pulled free in Miranda’s hands. She held it over the sink to drain for a moment, then took it to the counter and set it down. I shut off the water and followed.
    We studied the skull in silence for a while. “Tell me what you see,” I said to her, as I had said to students hundreds of times before over the years. Miranda took up the skull and took up the challenge.
    “Well,” she began in a careful, formal tone, “the skull is gracile, very smooth. The eye orbits are sharp-edged and the brow ridge is minimal”—here she paused, rotating the skull—“and so is the external occipital protuberance at the base of the skull. Clearly female, in my humble opinion.”
    “Mine, too.” I smiled. We were almost mocking each other, and our skeletal Socratic dialogue, but not quite—certainly no more than we were mocking ourselves and our own tendency toward scientific stuffiness. “What about race?”
    “The mouth structure is orthagnic—strongly vertical—so it doesn’t appear Negroid. No appreciable occlusal wear, so she didn’t have an edge-to-edge bite, and the incisors are definitely not shovel-shaped. That probably rules out Native American or Asian, though to be sure, we should put the skull measurements into ForDisc.” ForDisc—short for “Forensic Discrimination”—was a UT-developed computer program that used skeletal data to calculate, with great precision and accuracy, an unidentified person’s age, race, sex, and stature. Miranda took a final survey of the face and mouth. “Yup, she’s textbook Caucasoid, I’d say.”
    “I’d say so, too. How old would you say she is?” This was a trick question, but Miranda didn’t hesitate more than a nanosecond.
    “Approximately twenty years, ten months, five days, and seventeen-point-two minutes,” she rattled off. I stared at her, dumbstruck, and she laughed. “Gotcha. You know I can’t tell till we see the clavicles and pubic symphysis.” She studied the zigzag seams in the skull. “The cranial sutures aren’t obliterating yet, so she’s young. Third molars haven’t erupted, but that doesn’t mean much—she might be one of those highly evolved people whose bodies know that wisdom teeth are a waste of good calcium.” She tilted the skull backward to study the seams in the roof of the mouth. “The maxillary sutures are beginning to fuse, so she’s adult, not subadult. But I can’t say if she’s eighteen or twenty-eight until we deflesh the clavicles and the