Carved in Bone

who never drew breath.
    Our knowledge, like the specimens on our counter, was skeletal: we knew this was a young white female of unusual height. We knew that she was pregnant, and that halfway through her pregnancy, possibly around the time she began to show, she’d been murdered—strangled, with no other signs of trauma, at least nothing visible so far. We still didn’t know her name, but the examination had told us other things that would help us seek her name. The echoes and whispers from these bones might help us understand why she’d been killed…and if we listened carefully enough, they might even suggest whose hands had encircled her throat and squeezed without mercy, leaving a record of violence for us to find.
    I looked at Miranda. Her face was drawn; her eyes, which had danced and shone when she’d delivered the X-rays triumphantly, now looked drained and bleak.
    “I know,” I said, “this one’s tough.”
    She nodded.
    “And Miranda?” I waited until her eyes met mine. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for a while.”

CHAPTER 8
    ART BOHANAN WAS GLUED to his microscope. Literally, and unhappily.
    The fingerprint lab was in the basement of the Knoxville Police Department—a grim beige fortress in a grim black section of the city, surrounded by acres of asphalt and low-income housing projects. The uniformed officer on guard at the front had buzzed me into the elevator and pointed toward the floor. “He’s down there. Like always.”
    The acrid scent of superglue bit my nostrils as I entered the lab in the basement. Art looked up as I walked in. “Hey, you wanna give me a hand here? Squirt some of that acetone on my fingers, would you?” His left thumb and index finger were fastened to the focus knob of a stereo microscope; his right hand gripped the light source. An open tube of superglue lay on the counter.
    “So you’re really stuck?”
    “Last ten times I checked. You wanna tug for yourself, or you gonna help?”
    “Hold on—oh, wait, that’s what you’re doing already,” I teased. “When’s the last time you got pantsed? You got a camera somewhere?”
    “Great, now I’m supposed to help you humiliate me even further? Thanks.”
    “Don’t mention it.”
    “Come on, Bill, this light’s hot. Durn it, I’m not kidding.”
    I picked up a small can of acetone and dribbled a bit over the edges of Art’s fingers, starting with the ones gripping the metal housing of the light source. “So what’s the flash point of acetone? And what’s the temp of that light?” As the solvent soaked in, Art’s taut skin slowly peeled free. The fingers were an angry red. He rubbed them with a rag, then some hand lotion.
    “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I owe you.” I wasn’t sure whether he was thanking me for setting him free or threatening me for dragging my feet about it. Both, knowing Art. I made a mental note to sniff my steering wheel in future before grabbing hold of it.
    “Next time you really oughta read the label. That stuff sticks to your fingers.”
    “Ha-ha. Very funny.”
    If anybody knew about superglue and fingers, it was Art. Not only was he KPD’s senior criminalist, he was one of the nation’s leading fingerprint experts. In crime labs all over the country, technicians were using superglue-fuming gizmos to coat objects with sticky fumes that could pick up latent prints. And the gizmos they were using had been designed and patented by my buddy Art. Even the FBI had taken a shine to Art’s superglue gizmo, which in forensics is like Michael Jordan taking a shine to your basketball shoe.
    Spread on the counter beside the scope was a batch of photos. Most looked to be crime scene photos showing the interior of a car, a battered blue Impala. One, though, was a school portrait of a girl, maybe eight years old. Little girl, big smile. I recognized the photo: I’d seen it in the paper half a dozen times in the past two weeks, which is how long Stacy Beaman had been missing. She was last seen getting into a rusty blue car. The one in the photos belonged to a registered sex offender who’d been seen near the girl’s school three times in the days before her disappearance.
    I looked at Art’s scope. There was a car window crank clamped to the specimen stage. It didn’t take a forensic genius to figure out that the crank had come from the passenger door of that rusted Impala.
    “You getting anything?”
    “Hell, no. Not even a partial. Not from her, anyhow. His,