Marmolejo’s interested voice asked from the entry to the cubicle, “would seventeen to eighteen be better than fifteen to sixteen?”
Gideon was surprised to find out that Marmolejo had been standing there, but not at all surprised to learn he himself had been talking out loud. It was an old, comfortable habit, conversing with the skeletons, and he had long ago given up trying to break it; not, to be truthful, that he had ever tried very hard.
“Better in the sense that the skeletal maturation and the secondary sexual development of the skeleton would have been in sync, instead of one being well behind the other,” Gideon explained. “It’d just be less unusual, that’s all. Less peculiar.”
“But you are satisfied that it is indeed a female?”
“Oh, no question. Orihuela was right about that.”
“And the age? Fifteen to sixteen? How confident are you of that?”
A moment’s hesitation this time, and a shrug. “Pretty confident.”
“Pretty confident,” Marmolejo repeated, head cocked in that thoughtful-monkey way he had. “Am I wrong, or is ‘pretty confident’ somewhat lower on the scale of certainty than ‘Oh, no question’?”
Gideon smiled. “You’re right, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it-at least until I look at the cranial remains. Oh, and there’s one other thing I can tell you that I’m ‘pretty confident’ about. I think Orihuela may have underestimated the time since death. In the mine, the bones were largely protected from the environment. The weathering process would have been very slow. He estimated five years. I’d say ten to twenty is more likely. So when you go looking for evidence of what might have happened, take that into consideration.”
Marmolejo nodded, not looking happy with this information. “Very good. Anything else?”
“Sorry, that’s it for now. Haven’t come up with anything that qualifies as a rabbit yet. Give me another hour or so, though; you never know. I’ll stop by your office when I’m finished.” He glanced at his watch. “Probably about four. Okay?”
By now Gideon felt ready to deal with the bag containing the mandible and skull, and as soon as Marmolejo had gone he unfolded and opened the sack. When he began lifting out the contents he found that the jawbone was almost whole, with only the right mandibular condyle, the ball-like process that forms the “hinge” of the jaw, snapped off and missing. On the cranium per se -the braincase-some of the sutures had pulled apart, giving it a warped look, but it was still essentially bowl-shaped and whole. But the facial skeleton-my God, it was as if it had exploded. It must have been in fifty pieces, not counting the dust-like sediment that had settled at the bottom of the bag.
After twenty minutes of work, with a little thought, a little trial and error, a little piecing of them together, he was able to identify thirty-one of the pieces; the rest were too small, mostly particles and fragments of the thin, curling, complex structures of the inner face-the ethmoid, the sphenoid, the lacrimal portion of the pterygoid. Some of them might even be rodent bones. Some parts of the facial skeleton were missing altogether, probably carried off by animals or eaten on the spot. He set the smallest pieces aside and concentrated on the recognizable chunks.
Much of the damage was postmortem, the “too much chewing by animales” of Dr. Orihuela’s report. Very few bony edges failed to show some signs of carnivore gnawing. But the perimortem damage, the destruction that had been inflicted at the time of death, was as bad as you were likely to find on a human face. The maxilla, the main bone of the face, running from the eyes to the palate, had suffered what was known as a Le Fort I fracture, broken roughly in half by a side-to-side fracture that ran through the base of the nasal aperture, so that the palate and the upper teeth were separate from the rest of the face, like some grotesque parody of an upper denture. Both zygomatic bones-the cheekbones-had been crushed into crumbs just under and inside the bony orbits of the eyes. The inner and outer rims of the orbits had also been splintered and broken, with pieces missing. The nasal bone no longer existed and the sinuses behind them, on both sides, had been fragmented as well. That, along with the knocking-out of upper front teeth and the shattering of their sockets, was the major damage. There was plenty of minor damage too, all of it adding up to a confirmation of Dr. Orihuela’s fuerza despuntada, although “blunt force” hardly conveyed the horrific extent of the destruction. Someone had smashed this kid in the face, judging from the damage probably right in the middle of the face, and more than once-probably more than twice-with something really heavy: a lead pipe, or a crowbar, or maybe a baseball bat.
The blows would have driven most of the skeleton of the face deep into the brain. He tried to visualize what they would have done to the fleshed, living head of a young girl. Then he tried not to visualize it. But certainly, the report’s probable cause of death could now be considered confirmed. Nobody could have lived through that.
Other than that, there wasn’t much these bone fragments could tell him beyond what he already knew. The unclosed cranial sutures were no help in aging, except to verify that she hadn’t reached her mid-twenties. The sex criteria were all either neutral or female.
The deciduous teeth had all been shed, and all of the permanent teeth (those that hadn’t been knocked out), except for the third molars, had come up. That was another nod in the direction of a minimum age of fifteen, because fifteen was generally accepted as the age at which the second molars were fully erupted. As for the state of development of the third molars, the upper jaw could tell him nothing because the back parts of it were gone. Not so in the mandible, however, and there he found that, while the third molars were not fully in place, they had broken through the bone and were a good third of the way up.
Predicting the age that wisdom teeth will erupt is risky business, since they are the most unpredictable of all the teeth, often not coming in at all. But a range of seventeen to twenty-one is a pretty safe bet. If these cranial fragments and teeth had been all that he’d had to work with, that would have been his guess: Seventeen to twenty-one-which would have fit nicely with the advanced sexual maturation. But in this case he also had the long bones, and they suggested fifteen to sixteen.
Taking everything together, which was what you did when you had data that didn’t fully match up (which is what you usually had), he was inclined to stick with his fifteen-to-sixteen estimate. The process of epiphyseal fusion was more reliable by far than the eruption of the wisdom teeth. As for the accelerated sexual maturation, that was just one of those things that you ran into from time to time, and, he supposed, maybe not all that that surprising if the girl was sixteen.
And that, he thought, hoisting himself off the stool for another stretching break, was probably all he was going to be able to… He hesitated, frowning. Wait a minute, wasn’t there something about…
He sat back down and picked up the mandible again, then the lower fragment of the maxilla, the one with the palate and the teeth. Of course. Four of the premolar teeth were missing. Normally, people have eight premolars or bicuspids, sets of two, left and right, upper and lower, between the canines and the molars. But this girl had only one in each place; none of her second premolars had come in. They hadn’t been knocked out or been lost on account of disease; they’d never developed in the first place.
Naturally, he’d noticed it earlier, but with his attention, emotional and intellectual, riveted on the horrible maiming of the face, he hadn’t really registered it until now. The condition was called hypodontia, and it was of forensic interest, both because it was rare-the incidence of one or more congenitally missing teeth ran at about 5 percent in most populations, but the probability of all four second molars being missing was-well, he didn’t know what the incidence was, but it was surely under 1 percent. And it was of interest because it was genetically linked; it ran in families. This, he thought with satisfaction, could well be the most important thing he’d turned up in terms of coming up with who the girl was. With some legwork and a little luck, she might yet end up with a better resting place than a cardboard box in a government warehouse in “Gideon-”
This time Marmolejo’s unexpected presence behind him made him jump. “Jeez! Javier, you have to stop sneaking up on me like that,” he said irritably. “Get some leather heels or cough or something.”
“You have my abject apology,” Marmolejo said unconvincingly. “I came to tell you that four o’clock won’t be possible. I’m on my way to a meeting in the office of the procurador general himself. The subject is the promotion of cooperation and teamwork between our various state and federal police agencies. This assures that it will be an extremely contentious meeting, and probably lengthy as well, so I may not be available for some time; perhaps as late as five. Or if that doesn’t work-”
“Five is fine. I’m running a little slow anyway.”
Marmolejo came a step closer and peered with interest at the bones. “Have you found anything more?”
“Actually, yes.”
He explained about the missing teeth. Marmolejo was gratifyingly impressed. “You see? I knew you would find something. Congenital hypodontia, that is new to me.”
