lamplight, like some restless ghost from a campfire story, checking each outside door to be sure it was dead-bolted. Then I went into my bedroom, locked the door, and sat in my bed, my back against the headboard. I set the oil lamp on the nightstand beside me, scooting its useless electric companion to the far edge to make room. Then I slid open the nightstand drawer and took out the handgun Steve Morgan had loaned me. I studied it-the tiny blue-black pyramids machined into the grip, the matter-of-fact words and numbers etched into the barrel, the small, precise button of the safety, which I clicked back and forth, off and on, in a hypnotic pattern that was nearly as regular as the ticking of a clock.
I told time that way until a pale gray light seeped through the window, gradually erasing the reflection of the lamp’s glow, replacing it with the shapes of raindrops and bits of shredded leaves on the outside of the panes.
CHAPTER 33
THE ANTHROPOLOGY DEPARTMENT WAS LOCKED AND dark when I arrived-not surprising at eight o’clock on a summer Sunday morning. Without bothering to shower or even change my rumpled clothes, I had eased my truck down the narrow service drive that ringed the base of the stadium, parking at the foot of the stairs beside the bone lab. Once inside, I flipped on the fluorescent lights overhead, then impulsively flipped them off again. Enough light filtered between the stadium’s girders and through the grimy windows to guide me across the lab, and for what I needed to do, semidarkness was better than the glare of the fluorescents.
The slide sorter was still plugged in, and the cranial X-ray of Freddie Parnell still lay atop the frosted glass. I switched on the light, and the homeless man’s ghostly skull lit up. I studied the overall contours awhile, then focused on the scalloped edges of the frontal sinus. The contours resembled a coastline, but it was an unknown country I was trying to steer toward. Retrieving the tray of cranial fragments from the Cooke County fire scene, I sighed in despair. It wasn’t a matter of simple navigation; what I had to do-what Miranda had been struggling for days to do-was reassemble a second map, the map of tiny, charred bits we’d plucked from the smoldering ruins of the cabin. If we couldn’t piece together more of that second map, we’d never be able to tell whether its landmarks matched Parnell’s or not.
I flipped the X-ray, so I was looking at the frontal sinus from the back-from the inside of Parnell’s skull, in effect-and then laid the two fragments Miranda had painstakingly reassembled just below the image of the sinus, with their curved inner surfaces facing up. Framed by the openings of the stadium’s steelwork, the daylight was spilling through the windows at a low angle, an angle that highlighted the contours of the cavities in the blackened bone. Staring first at one fragment, then at the other, I rotated and angled the bits in almost microscopically small shifts, my eyes darting from the bone to the X-ray and back again with each subtle movement. You’d think it would be easy to tell if a half-inch stretch of bone corresponded to some portion of a two-inch image, but it was maddening. Instead of a coastal map, I decided, what I was working with was a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle depicting an overcast sky. I was trying to match one tiny detail to the image on the cover of the puzzle box-that’s what the X-ray was like-without actually knowing that this puzzle had indeed come out of that box.
After half an hour of this, my eyes were playing tricks on me. I didn’t think the fragments matched the X-ray, but then again, I didn’t want them to match. I wanted this to be the skull of Garland Hamilton, not some down-on- his-luck derelict. In any other forensic case, I’d have been able to compare the sinuses with scientific rigor and objectivity-I wouldn’t have anything personal invested in whether the comparison yielded a positive identification, a positive exclusion, or insufficient information to support either conclusion. Go with the facts, speak the truth, and let the chips fall where they may-that had always been one of my guiding principles. But never before had the chips come solely from the pockets of my own life. What’s more, the facts here were proving mighty hard to pin down.
Still holding both skull fragments, I reached up to rub my eyes with the back of one hand. That’s when I saw it: a sliver of light glinting through one of the seams where Miranda had pieced together the larger of the two fragments. I angled the piece this way and that, studying the slight gap. Then I laid down the other piece so I could examine this one more closely. Swiveling around to the lab table behind me, I switched on the magnifying lamp and held the piece under the lens. The bone practically glowed beneath the built-in fluorescent light that encircled the lens. Magnified five times, the glue joints appeared wavy and jagged, almost like the sutures that form naturally in the skull as its individual plates knit together during childhood. The innermost of the skull’s three layers of bone, the diploe, had peeled away, exposing the boundary where the sinus cavity stopped and the spongy inner layer of bone began. If not for the peeling, Miranda and I would be forced to X-ray the reconstructed pieces to see the sinus boundary, rather than being able to see the cavity take shape as we worked.
Even under the magnifying glass, it was difficult to find the gap where I’d seen the light shining through. Twice I had to twist the head of the lamp upside down, shining it up toward my face, in order to send light through the tiny opening again; the second time I did this, I took a pencil and drew faint arrows on both the inner and outer surfaces of the bone so I could find the spot again easily. Having marked the location, I held the bone beneath the magnifier once more and leaned in for a close look. From the outside, the fit looked fine: From one piece to the next, the edges of bone transitioned almost perfectly across the glue joint. But from the inside-a spot that would have lain just beneath the left eyebrow-something didn’t exactly match up.
Rebuilding a shattered skull is a lot like rebuilding a Ming dynasty vase you’ve hurled into the fireplace in a fit of rage. The first few pieces fit together perfectly, zigs and zags and undulations mating exactly-partly because you’ve started with the biggest, easiest pieces, but also because it’s too soon for imperfection and distortion to rear their cumulative, misshapen heads. Gradually, though, minor imperfections start to compound, and the jig is up. Even if you tell yourself you can live with the cracks showing-they add a certain character and drama to the vase, after all, like tattoos and scars on skin-you know that the cemented shards will never again possess those elegant Ming lines. A missing crumb here or there distorts the fit by a thousandth of a degree; the china glue, though it be thin as water and only a few molecules thick, enlarges a reconstructed triangle just enough to keep it from nestling into its triangular niche. The edges and angles gradually cease to mate, forcing you into approximations and compromises-just as in the rest of life.
The piece of frontal bone I held in my hand had been patched together from seven irregular fragments, none as large as the nail of my little finger; glued together, the seven pieces were about the size of the fat end of a Grade-A Large egg. The chunk of bone fit within the palm of my hand-with an inch of palm showing all around it. Even so, even as small as it was, the multitude of irregular seams and angles and edges had begun to rebel against being forced back together. As I zeroed in on the edges marked by my penciled arrow, I could see that the fracture lines on one edge didn’t correspond exactly to those of the adjoining edge. What’s more, now that I was examining the fit with a dubious eye, I gradually became aware of a slight difference in the hue of the char on the bone’s outer surface. The difference was slight-so slight it tended to vanish if I looked at it directly, the way a faint star vanishes if you look at it directly-but whenever I glanced at it slantwise, rather than dead on, there it was, an elusive and skittish truth, crouching in the forensic underbrush: Miranda had glued the wrong piece here. I batted the magnifying lamp away; it spun around in a half circle on the end of its spring-loaded arm, then stopped and swayed in place. “Damn,” I said angrily, then “damn” again, this time softly and sadly. The angry damn was for the wasted time and misdirected effort, butting our heads against the wrong wall, in our efforts to compare a faulty reconstruction with an X-ray. The sad damn was for Miranda, who would doubtless be devastated to learn of her mistake.
I thought on that for a while. Did she actually need to learn of her mistake? Did she need to learn
