“Making progress with privy man?”
“Apt segue.” Tossing the privy case folder onto my desk, I dropped into my chair. “I just finished.”
“That took a while,” Ryan said.
“Toody and Muldoon came by twice today.”
“Slidell and his partner?”
I nodded.
“Aren’t you kind of hard on the guy?”
“Slidell probably needs instructions to make ice cubes.”
“Is he really that stupid?”
I thought about that.
Slidell was not actually stupid. Not in the way that a fern is stupid. Or a wood frog. Slidell was just Slidell.
“Probably not. But he’s off the bell curves for uncouth and annoying.”
“What did they want?”
I told Ryan about Jason Jack Wyatt and the cell phone link to Darryl Tyree.
“The boyfriend of the lady with the dead baby?”
I nodded.
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“Here’s another flash. Rinaldi remembers a headless, handless body inquiry a few years back. He and Slidell are tracking it down.”
“Descriptors match your privy guy?”
“Rinaldi’s recollection is a bit vague.”
“
“I think so.”
Ryan raised his brows in a question.
“There’s not a single cranial feature that’s definitive for gender. I ran every measurement possible through the Fordisc 2.0 program.”
“Let me guess. The skull falls into the overlap range.”
I nodded. “Though closer to the male than the female end.”
“Ditto for measurements on the hand bones?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your gut feeling?”
“Male.”
“A young-adult white person who probably used the little boys’ room. That’s not a bad start.”
“With lousy teeth.”
“Oh?”
“Lots of decay. At least on the teeth we recovered.”
“Missed a few?”
“Yeah.”
“Shitty job.”
“How did I know you would say that?”
“Any dental work?”
I shook my head. “The victim was not a believer in regular checkups.”
“Anything else?”
“Maybe some slight bone demineralization.”
“I think you’ve made an excellent start, Dr. Brennan.”
“Rinaldi also had feathers.”
“Doesn’t seem like his style.”
“They turned up with the coke in the cellar.”
“What kind of feathers?”
“He wants me to find out.”
“Do you know any big birdbrains?”
