No wonder I was starving.
Stripping off gloves and mask, I washed with antibacterial soap and threw a lab coat over my scrubs. Then I went to my office and washed down a granola bar with a can of Diet Coke.
As I ate, I scanned my phone messages.
A journalist from the
Skinny Slidell. Something about the Banks baby case.
Sheila Jansen. She’d called early. The NTSB works hard.
The fourth pink slip caught my attention.
Geneva Banks.
I tried the Bankses’ number. No answer.
I tried Jansen.
Her voice mail invited a message.
I left one.
I stopped back into the main autopsy room. The passenger lay where the pilot had been, and Larabee had just made his second Y incision of the day.
I walked over and looked at the body. Though gender was clear, age and race were not. Those aspects would have to be determined skeletally.
I explained the discrepancy in racial features. Larabee said he’d spotted nothing useful in the body.
I asked for the pubic symphyses, the portions of the pelvis where the two halves meet in front, and the sternal ends of the third through fifth ribs to tighten my age estimate. Larabee said he’d send them over.
Larabee told me he’d talked with Jansen. The NTSB investigator would be dropping by in the late afternoon. Neither Geneva Banks nor Skinny Slidell had phoned him.
When I returned to the stinky room, Hawkins had popped the dental X rays onto the light boxes.
The roots of the left canine and second molar, and of both wisdom teeth, were visible in various jaw fragments. While the canine and M-2 were complete to their tips, the M-3s were not quite over the plate.
Dentally, the passenger looked eighteen to twenty-five.
Race was still a crapshoot.
Back to the zygomatic arch.
Yep. Mongoloid-looking cheeks.
Back to the maxilla and frontal.
Yep. Caucasoid-looking nose.
As I was staring at the frontal bone, an irregularity on the nasal caught my eye. I carried the fragment to the scope and adjusted focus.
Under magnification the irregularity looked circular and more porous than the surrounding bone. The edges of the circle were clearly defined.
A puzzling lesion, unlike usual findings in nasal bones. I had no idea what it meant.
I spent the next hour mining fragments, stripping flesh, and recording observations. Though I found no other signs of disease, I decided to request X rays of the rest of the skeleton. The nasal lesion looked active, suggesting a chronic condition of some sort.
At three-thirty, Hawkins delivered the ribs and pubes. He promised to take a full set of films when Larabee finished with the passenger’s body.
I was placing the pubes and ribs in a solution of hot water and Spic and Span when Larabee entered, followed by Sheila Jansen. Today the NTSB investigator wore black jeans and a sleeveless red shirt.
Hours of exposure had numbed me to the smell of the passenger’s unrefrigerated head, now decomposing on my table. My greasy, soot-stained gloves and scrubs undoubtedly added to the room’s bouquet.
Jansen’s lips and nostrils tightened. Her expression went opaque as she attempted to regain control of her face.
“Time to swap stories?” I asked, peeling off mask and gloves and tossing them into a biohazard container.
Jansen nodded.
“Why don’t I meet you two in the conference room?”
“Good idea,” Larabee said.
When I joined them, the ME was going over his findings.
“—multiple traumatic injuries.”
“Soot in the airways?” Jansen asked.
“No.”
“That makes sense,” Jansen said. “When the plane slammed the cliff face, the fuel tanks ruptured. There was immediate ignition and fireball. I figure both victims died on impact.”
