Scattered Graves

straightened up and
put her feet on the floor.
‘‘Lloyd,’’ she said, ‘‘the DNA lab tests and analyzes
samples. There is no ‘working with’ anyone in the way
that you are suggesting. And Crabtree is off-limits
here. That’s the end of the discussion.’’
‘‘You’re being foolish,’’ he said.
That word again. ‘‘I don’t think there is much point
in continuing this conversation.’’ Diane flipped her
cell shut.
Diane called security and made arrangements with
Chanell Napier, her head of security, to post a guard
in the museum basement at Jin’s lab until further
notice.
‘‘That’s a hell of a note, isn’t it?’’ said Jin. ‘‘We have
to post a guard to keep out the crime scene people.’’ ‘‘It’s a peculiar turn of events,’’ agreed Diane, stand
ing up. ‘‘Call me if there are any more problems.’’ Diane took her box of bones and rode the elevator
up to her osteology lab—adjacent to the Rosewood
Crime Lab. She entered, locking the door behind her.
Like the DNA lab, the osteology lab was part of the
museum—and her domain. She liked being in the
quiet room. Its shiny tables, white cabinets, and sterile
atmosphere were calming to her.
She set the box down on one of the metal tables
and donned her lab coat and a pair of gloves. Then
she tore a piece of white paper from a roll, spread it
on the table, and began taking the broken bones from
the box. She examined each piece as she laid them
out, looking for anything of note that might be cling
ing to them, examining them for tool marks. All of
them had deep cuts. Diane tried to keep the image
out of her mind of someone feeding body parts into
a wood chipper.
She picked up a fragment cut from the left zygo
matic arch—the cheekbone. Muscles anchored to the
head for chewing pass through the zygomatic arch and
attach to the lower mandible. She noted that the piece she held in her hand was small compared to the early hominid replicas she had been working with for the Neanderthal exhibit. Small zygomatic arches meant smaller jaw muscles and were thought to be indicators of the introduction of tool use in early hominids. Be fore tools were developed for slicing and dicing food, the jaw was the power tool, and a big muscle gave a significant advantage for survival. After tools came into use, just any old size of zygomatic arch had sur
vivability. At least that was one hypothesis. She had a brief unbidden mental image of a head
going through a chipper. She pushed it from her mind. Diane took the bones to one of the sinks, put them
on a screen, and gently sprayed the dirt and detritus off
them, passing the runoff over a finer-meshed screen to
filter out smaller items, and from there catching the
wash water in a plastic tub. She placed the cleaned
bones on a drying screen and the screen onto a rack.
Returning to the finer-meshed screen, she collected
the fragments that had dropped through the holes of
the first screen.
A small object caught her eye, and she picked it up.
She recognized it as a piece sliced from the greater
horn of the hyoid bone—the small bone in the throat
critical to speech that anchors the tongue and is con
nected to the muscles of the jaw and larynx. Higher apes don’t have hyoid bones, but Neander
thals did—ones very much like human hyoids—which
led to the hypothesis that Neanderthals had the same
higher-order speech capability that humans have. The hyoid bone, the zygomatic arch—tiny clues to
human evolution. The pelvis, bones of the hand, shape
of the skull, cranial capacity, shape of the spine and the
long bones—bigger clues. And then there was context—
stone tools, hearths, graves, and grave goods—more
big clues. All the tiny clues and big clues together
provided an idea of what early ancestors of man were
like. These were the things she was incorporating into
the exhibit. Diane hoped that the bone fragments she
had of this unknown skeleton held as many clues to who the individual was and why he or she was now
in bits and pieces.
Something metallic, partly covered by the detritus
in the dirt on the small screen, reflected a glint of
light. She picked it up and swished it in the water. It
was a piece of thick wire, iridescent blue-green in
color. She turned it over in her palm and examined it
before she took it to the dissecting microscope—one
that allowed her to view three-dimensional objects.
The microscope confirmed that the mashed piece of
metal had been round or oval. Was it