Carved in Bone

that?”
    “I reckon I’ll have to.” I regretted the petulance of that as soon as I said it. “Sorry. Yes, of course.”
    “Do you feel safe there?”
    It hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about that. “Yes, I think so. Thanks for asking. A UT officer should be here any minute. In fact—yes, there’s his car now.”
    “Good. Keep in touch. Don’t give up on us.” She rang off without another word, and I met the campus cop at the door. He looked young enough to be a student himself; his gun was drawn and his hand was shaking. When I explained that a TBI team was on the way, his big eyes got even bigger. Mercifully, he holstered the trembling weapon, then scurried back to his patrol car and returned with a roll of crime scene tape. With it, he fashioned a big X across the open doorway. When Steve Morgan arrived ten minutes later, he eyed the crime scene tape and sized up the eager young cop. “Anybody been in here besides Dr. Brockton?”
    “No, sir, ” said the young patrolman, all but saluting.
    “Good work,” smiled Morgan. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks.”
    The young man’s face fell. “You don’t need me here?” Morgan looked surprised by the question, maybe faintly amused. I felt bad for the UT officer, but he wasn’t ready to slink away just yet. “I, um, was sort of hoping to watch—to observe —how the TBI works a crime scene.”
    Morgan smiled. It hadn’t been all that long since he was standing in my office apologizing for classroom hijinks. “Now that I think about it, Officer, if you’ve got time to stick around and control the perimeter here, the TBI would be much obliged.”
    The lad practically trembled with excitement as he fished out his radio. “Unit Three to Dispatch,” he blurted. When the dispatcher responded, he snapped to attention, as if she could see him. “TBI is requesting officer assistance at the scene.”
    “Copy that,” drawled the dispatcher, not nearly as impressed as he’d hoped. “Holler when you’re done. We’re starving, and we need somebody to make the deli run.”
    It wasn’t long before two TBI techs arrived, light sources and evidence kits in hand, and began surveying the room methodically. Morgan and I stepped out into the hallway, but I leaned into the doorway to watch the techs at work. When they turned on the ultraviolet lights, purple prints showed up on every surface. Most of them were mine, I knew, and probably the rest belonged to graduate students. “Excuse me, sir,” said one of the techs, “can you tell me where this door leads?”
    “Sure, it leads to the skeletal collection room.”
    He wiggled the knob—it was locked, I knew from checking it myself—and inspected the frame for signs of forced entry. Finding none, he turned his attention back to my desktop.
    Morgan cleared his throat to get my attention, then began a litany of questions—when had I left my office, how long was I gone, who knew my class schedule, how many different exits could the thief have taken, did I see anybody or anything suspicious, and so on, and so on. Finally, when he’d exhausted my factual knowledge, he asked the question that had been hanging in the air all along: “So who do you think might have done it?”
    “Well, my first thought is the sheriff, of course. I still think he’s afraid of where the murder investigation is leading.”
    “Has he ever been here before?”
    “No, but it wouldn’t be hard to find out where it is.”
    “Yeah, but that’s only half the battle,” said Morgan. “This office isn’t exactly easy to get to. You’re tucked away about as far from the rest of the Anthropology Department as you can get without burrowing clear under the AstroTurf.”
    “Makes it easier to hole up and concentrate,” I said defensively.
    “I’m not criticizing; just thinking out loud. Is there anybody who has been here before that might have an interest in stealing that skeleton?”
    “Well, there’s the sheriff’s deputy, Leon Williams.”
    “A deputy?” Morgan sounded dubious.
    “You asked, and he’s been here before. He could have come to fetch it for the sheriff.” Suddenly I remembered Art’s Scenario E, the unknown possibility: “Or he could be working some angle we don’t even know about. Maybe he’s setting up the sheriff for a fall?” The more I thought about it, the surer I was that this was Williams’s handiwork.
    “ ’Scuse us,” Morgan said to the UT policeman, taking my elbow and