Carved in Bone

pubic symphysis—the joint where the two pubic bones meet at the midline of the abdomen—changes with age, and how those changes could reveal a person’s age at death. I passed around two additional pubic bones—one from an eighteen-year-old female, the other from a forty-four-year-old—so they could see for themselves the erosion that occurs during a quarter-century of wear and tear.
    As the female pelvis reached Sarah, I noticed her rotating it, scrutinizing it from every angle. She furrowed her brow and chewed on her lower lip, concentrating intently. I walked toward her row. “Did you have another question?”
    She looked up. “Can you tell just from the bones whether this female—whether any female—has given birth?”
    It was a simple, logical, and innocent question, and it blindsided me completely. Visions of Kathleen—in the throes of labor, and then in the throes of death—writhed in my head, mingling with images of the strangled young woman and her sad little fetus. After what could have been either half a minute or half an hour, I became aware of the students’ stares.
    “Yes,” I finally murmured. “Yes. You can.”
    I stumbled toward the door.
    “Class dismissed.”

CHAPTER 10
    BY THE TIME I THREADED my way back to the hallway beneath the stadium, my runaway pulse had slowed to a trot and the ragged edge had left my breathing.
    The hallways in the Anthropology Department echo the shape of the stadium above, so where the stands wrap around the end zones, the hallways bend as well. Walking along a dim, curving tunnel that continuously unspools ahead, you get the sensation that you’re in some miraculously preserved Minoan labyrinth or some prodigiously dilapidated space station. As I banked toward my office, Deputy Leon Williams came into view, studying a posterboard presentation on nineteenth-century Navajo skulls.
    “We’re going to make an anthropologist out of you yet,” I said.
    “Well, it might not be too bad if I could stick to bones like these. I don’t have any trouble with ’em when they’re clean and dry.”
    “Yeah, but it’s a whole lot more work to dig those up. There are always tradeoffs and compromises, Deputy, even in science.”
    He waited for me to open my door, but I didn’t. “Don’t you need anything, Doc—notes or bones or something?”
    “No, I’m not quite finished defleshing the skeleton—the skull and pelvis are still simmering in the crock pot. It’s pretty easy to remember what I’ve found so far.” He looked eager to hear more, but I wasn’t feeling chatty. “Sounds like your boss is in a hurry. Reckon we better get going?”
    “Sure thing.” He spun on his heel, and I followed him out to the Cherokee, which was tucked between two of the diagonal steel girders supporting the stadium’s grandstands. A one-lane strip of asphalt encircled—or would it be “en-ovaled”?—the base of the stadium, threading between the rows of massive girders and branching, in places, into short, dark spurs of pavement that led into catacombs where I imagined the high priests of the religion of Southeastern Conference football must be entombed.
    Williams and I talked UT football for a while, but I could tell he was itching to ask other questions. Finally, as we merged onto the interstate, he broke. “I bet you’ve had some interesting cases, huh, Doc?”
    “Well, they’re all interesting to me.”
    “But what’s the most interesting? Or the most unusual?”
    “Hard to say.” I thought for a minute. “One of the most unusual, I suppose, was the woman in Connecticut whose husband—a former police officer, by the way—killed her and cut her up and burned her body in the front yard.”
    He whistled. “Sounds like a TV show— When Good Cops Go Bad. ”
    “I’m not sure he was ever a good cop; he may have just gone from bad to worse. There were several odd things about that case. One is that we were never able to figure out what he used to cut her up. Another is that he went to the fire department and got an open-burning permit the day he cremated her.”
    He hooted, then turned to face me for an unnervingly long time, considering that he was now driving at seventy-five miles an hour. “A permit? Are you shittin’ me, Doc?”
    “No, I’m not, Deputy. I guess he didn’t want to break any really important laws in the course of murdering and dismembering his wife.”
    Mercifully, Williams refocused his gaze on the road ahead. His voice got