‘‘You mean there may be more than one body? Well, hell,’’ said the sheriff.
‘‘I don’t know,’’ said Diane. She looked from Henry to Arlen. ‘‘Are these all the bones you found?’’
Henry nodded. ‘‘We just looked in that one spot where they turned up in the plowed ground,’’ said Henry. ‘‘We didn’t go digging around.’’
‘‘How big a field are we talking about?’’ asked the sheriff.
‘‘Well,’’ said Arlen. ‘‘The part we was plowing’s a three-acre bit that’s circled by trees. It’s connected to a bigger, fifteen-acre field by a path just about wide enough for me to get the tractor through. A creek runs along the far edge in the woods. That’s why the owner wanted it seeded. It’s where the cows would go to get water. Not that he’s really going to put cows there. He’ll change his mind.’’
‘‘So we have eighteen acres to search?’’ interrupted the sheriff. ‘‘That’s just great.’’
‘‘Well, I don’t know if you’d need to look at the fifteen,’’ said Arlen. ‘‘See, the owner had me plow the three- acre field a couple of years ago. So it’s easier digging if you’re of a mind to bury something. The fifteen-acre parcel’s rock hard. Two years ago the owner got it into his head he wanted to plant sun flowers on the small piece and grow peanuts on the larger field. He changed his mind—he’s always doing that, doesn’t really know anything about farming—and ended up not doing anything with either field. So, I’m thinking that maybe whoever did it used the small field only, being as it’s kind of off by itself and the dirt was already roughed up from the earlier plowing.’’
‘‘Did you hear anything like a wood chipper?’’ asked the sheriff.
‘‘No. And might not have. Our house is about five miles away,’’ said Arlen. ‘‘Sometimes you can hear things through the woods—depends on the weather.’’
‘‘How long do you think they’ve been in the ground?’’ the sheriff asked Diane.
She picked up one of the fragments and examined it, felt it. She put it to her nose and sniffed it. She did the same thing to another one.
‘‘I’d say not more than a few months—could be a few weeks,’’ she said. ‘‘This is fairly new bone. Chopped up like this, the flesh would decompose very quickly.’’
The sheriff sighed. ‘‘I suppose I can get those ar chaeology students at the university, like we did be fore, to grid and sift,’’ said the sheriff, more to himself than to Diane and the other two.
Diane looked at the box of bone fragments. She had successfully reconstructed bones from an explosion and from plane crashes. She should be able to do something with these.
‘‘If you can find the right pieces . . . ,’’ she began and picked up the petrosal. ‘‘This is the auditory canal.’’ She pointed to an opening in the bone. ‘‘I can make a mold of the canal, measure the angle, and estimate the sex of the person who owns this piece, with a little over eighty percent accuracy.’’
‘‘Well, that’ll be a good start,’’ said the sheriff. ‘‘What about DNA? Can Jin give us a profile?’’
Diane smiled to herself. No matter what fascinating thing she could do with bones, DNA was always going to be king.
‘‘If any DNA survived,’’ she said. ‘‘And that’s a big
‘‘Why?’’ asked Henry. He hovered over the box like it was his stuff inside. His grandfather gently pulled him back.
‘‘DNA is very fragile,’’ said Diane. ‘‘It degrades quickly.’’
‘‘Then how can they find DNA in Neanderthals— they’re something like thirty thousand years old—and not these bones?’’ asked Henry.
‘‘That’s a good question,’’ said the sheriff. ‘‘Those Neanderthals have tougher DNA?’’
The three of them looked at Diane as if demanding an explanation for what looked to them to be a con tradiction.
‘‘No,’’ said Diane. She put down the bone fragment and stepped back from the table so she could look at the three of them.
‘‘For DNA to be preserved, it has to be protected from the elements. The Neanderthal skeletons that have survived to modern times were buried deep in the ground or inside caves. That gave them enough protection. Even then, scientists had to look for DNA in inner protected places like the roots of teeth and deep in the long bones.’’
Diane gestured toward the box of bones. ‘‘I doubt these remains were covered with more than a thin layer of soil. Chopping them up caused them to de compose quickly and destroyed most of the places that DNA could be preserved.’’
It was written on their faces that they weren’t convinced—after all, she could just see them thinking, thirty thousand years verses a few weeks. Diane took a deep breath. ‘‘Okay. Until fairly recently the prob lem was that even when there was DNA present, there was simply not enough to do anything with. We now have better methods of copying the DNA, duplicating it to make more of it.’’
Diane stepped to the table and began putting the bones back in the box. She kept the petrosal out, got a smaller box from a cabinet, and dropped the bone inside.
‘‘Well, just how does that work, exactly?’’ asked the sheriff. ‘‘I hear all the time about copying DNA, PCR tests, and this and that, but I don’t understand how you can copy something like DNA. They always talk about it as if they were making a Xerox copy.’’
‘‘I don’t understand it either,’’ said Henry.
‘‘Every living thing has a mechanism to copy its DNA—if we didn’t, we couldn’t grow or make new cells. And there is not a lot of variation across the animal and plant kingdoms in the way the copying is done. One of the big breakthroughs came when peo ple working with DNA figured out how to make that copying process happen in a test tube.’’
