We sat there and ate a leisurely lunch. We didn’t say a word to one another, but enjoyed one of those rare companionships that are comfortable in silence.
15
WE ARRIVED AT THE CAMPUS at a little before one, and wound our way to the visitors’ parking lot. A student at the parking kiosk pointed us in the right direction, and we walked across a common to a tall brick building. As we walked, I was struck by how young the students looked to me. I stopped to calculate the number of years it had been since I got my bachelor’s, and realized why. To these people, the Beatles were what the Andrews Sisters had been to me — something your parents had danced to.
We found MacPherson’s office, but he wasn’t in. It was on the second floor of a building filled with labs and lecture rooms, with an occasional faculty office here or there. Between the rooms, the hallways were lined with lighted display cases. They were the old wooden-style cases, and they were all full of human jawbones and skulls. We started browsing among the displays while we waited.
There were little tags next to each set of bones and teeth, telling about conditions that could be found in them, as well as the gender and approximate age of the former owners. There were also some historical collections of dentures and an array of rather intimidating antique dental instruments. It made me glad I was born after Novocain was invented.
A tall, gray-haired gentleman in a tan corduroy sports jacket came walking past us, and put a key in the office door. He looked up at us as he let himself in.
“Miss Kelly?”
“Dr. MacPherson?”
We both nodded yes, and shook hands. He had a nice firm grip. I introduced him to Frank, and we went into the small cubicle of an office. He sat at his desk, the windows backlighting his hair, which was done up exactly like Albert Einstein’s. He looked like God had sent him.
“So, if you will excuse an old man for being particular, could I please see some identification, Detective Harriman?”
Frank obliged. Dr. MacPherson didn’t just glance at it; he could have written a dissertation on the subject if he had studied it much longer. He handed it back, saying, “Well, everything seems to be in order.”
“Dr. MacPherson,” Frank began, “I spoke with Dr. Carlos Hernandez of the Las Piernas Coroner’s Office earlier today.”
“Then you know how I came to be involved?”
“Yes. Dr. Hernandez told me that last month, he sent you the skull of a Jane Doe who has been unidentified since 1955. He said you might be able to learn if there was a condition called fluorosis in the teeth, and possibly to give his office information that would help to identify the woman.”
MacPherson slammed his open palm on the desktop, making us jump. “Exactly!” he said, as if we were students. He stood up and went over to a file cabinet. From the top of it, he gathered up a box and some loose papers. He sat down and leaned back in his chair, pulling on his left earlobe. He swiveled in the chair and looked out the window. Frank and I looked at one another and shrugged.
Suddenly he swiveled back toward us and slammed his hand on the desk again. You’d think we would have wised up, but he got us to jump the second time too. He was going to have to quit that.
“We begin with some background. According to the copy of the coroner’s report — by a Dr. Woolsey—” He spoke the coroner’s name with a disparaging tone. “Well, let’s just say you are quite fortunate to have Dr. Hernandez now.” He found this immensely funny, and we waited for him to get himself settled down again.
“Oh, forgive me. I just haven’t seen work this bad in years. To continue — according to the report, this is a pregnant female who was approximately twenty to twenty-five years of age. Now, the body was found — or, I should say, most of the body was found — in June 1955. That means this woman was most likely to have been born between 1930 and 1935. Most unfortunate. If she had been born just a few years later, her teeth might not have carried these stains.”
Here he pulled out the contents of the box, and there, grinning at us with brown teeth, was Hannah.
Although I had known what was in that box, it was still an unsettling sight. Her eye sockets staring out, areas around her nose and teeth obviously made up of fragments glued in place.
After the first shock of seeing her passed, I felt ashamed to be looking at her. Although I had just looked at cases full of skulls, I didn’t know anything at all about those people, while I had known at least one part of Hannah’s story. It dawned on me that nothing was private for a victim like her. Everything that could be, would be examined, studied, displayed, and written up by people she had never known.
“Just about the time she was born,” MacPherson went on, “a group of American dental researchers had figured out that high levels of fluoride in the water supplies caused this stain, but nothing was scientifically proven until about 1931, and it was sometime after that that the U.S. Public Health Service surveyed fluoride levels.
“As anyone who has waited for the tooth fairy knows, teeth are developed in childhood. The staining appears to occur partly from surface contact, but mainly from fluoride in the bloodstream. During the years of dental development — that is to say, in children under ten — those who ingest too much fluoride are likely to develop fluorosis. So your Jane Doe — I believe Mr. O’Connor called her Hannah — Hannah was most likely to have received these stains from the water she drank as a child.”
He stood up and paced the two or three steps he could pace in the area behind his desk. He gestured as he spoke, a natural showman.
“Fluoride occurs naturally in a great many substances. It occurs in varying levels in water supplies, generally low in most areas, especially in the Great Lakes region. There are primarily three regions of the country where the levels would be high enough to produce fluorosis.”
“So we might narrow down the areas she could come from by knowing she had this condition?” I asked.
“Precisely!”
“As I told Mr. O’Connor, your most likely candidates are three regions.” He counted them off on his hand. “They are: one, that part of the Midwest comprised of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois; two, the Rocky Mountain area, especially South Dakota and Colorado; and three, the Southwest — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona.”
I didn’t think this did much narrowing, although I supposed it was better than nothing. Dr. MacPherson must
