One Grave Less

children were always sad—a life just starting . . . and ending too soon . . . often violently.
    Diane put on her white lab coat and disposable gloves and picked up the bone. It was only a diaphysis—the bone shaft. The ends were gone. The epiphyses hadn’t fused.
    The bone was a light yellow-gray in color, the color of the soil from which it was taken. She sniffed it. It wasn’t old, perhaps a few years. Not from an archaeological dig.
    She measured the length of the bone and looked on a reference chart on the wall. The child was just over three feet tall. Probably between four and six years of age. Small for six.
    The bone had no abnormalities, no healed breaks, no evidence of malnourishment, nor of any pathology. Murder victim? Illegally disinterred? What was it doing in the backpack with a bunch of feathers and animal parts?
    Diane slipped off her gloves and dropped them in a trashcan. She walked across the room and opened the door. As she crossed the threshold, she took off her museum hat and put on her hat as director of the crime lab of the city of Rosewood, Georgia.
    The first thing she saw when she entered the lab was an image of feathers projected on the large viewing screen. Elegant plumes with their parts neatly labeled.
    Feathers are one of nature’s many well-designed inventions. They look and feel fragile and soft, they have great beauty, yet they are great protectors, better than an overcoat.
    Diane recognized the illustration as being from one of David’s many databases. He was telling Izzy about feathers. They sat at the conference table looking at the screen. The new system they had recently installed for debriefing about evidence was money well spent. She pulled a chair out, sat down, and listened patiently, only because she knew when she finished with her crime scene crew, she had to go have lunch with Vanessa and Laura.
    “Two main types,” David said.
    He clipped his phrases short, as if he were going down a bulleted list of characteristics. Probably because deep down he felt Izzy had a short attention span for details.
    “Contour and down. A contour feather is the large, flat feather that covers the body of an adult bird.”
    “The ones Indians wear in a headdress,” said Izzy. He grinned at David.
    Izzy, like Jin, liked to irritate David whenever the opportunity arose. And the main way to irritate David was to act either sophomoric or not interested in his databases.
    “And down is in pillows. See, I know feathers.”
    David rolled his eyes. “Contour feathers have a long, thick central shaft called a rachis.” He pointed at examples on the projection as he talked. “The branches off the rachis are called barbs. More branches off the barbs are called barbules, and they are held together by tiny hooks called barbicels. Together these form the vane or vexillum of the feather—the main part of the feather. All this structure makes it so you can zip a feather up and down. Got that? Because I’m giving a test.”
    “What?” said Izzy. “Zip them?”
    “In a manner of speaking,” interrupted Diane. “Kind of like Velcro. It protects the bird. Now, David, will you bottom-line it for me?”
    Diane was getting impatient, even though finishing meant having to go to lunch. But she knew David would expand his explanation into the variations in feathers that allowed people like him to tell what kind of bird a feather came from.
    David frowned. He loved to lecture and he was usually pretty good at it. But sometimes the other members of the team were a trial and he would make it boring and long on purpose.
    “I was just joshing you, David. I always thought feathers were just feathers,” said Izzy.
    “Everything in the universe has qualities that are unique enough that they can be differentiated apart from other like things if we just examine the characteristics closely,” David said.
    “And I can see you’ve made a fine start,” said Izzy. He turned toward Diane. “Have you seen the number of databases he has?”
    “Yes,” said Diane. She grinned at David. “It’s one of the things that makes us unique. So, what do we have?”
    David clicked the remote and displayed the evidence from the knapsack up on the screen.
    “The talons are from a harpy eagle. The mummified paws are from a woolly monkey. The beak is from a keel-billed toucan. The teeth are from a jaguar. They have holes drilled in them and were once probably part of a necklace. The holes were all made with the