Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs Page A

X-ray comparisons showed the deceased was a childless bachelor whose only living brother had moved to Greece. The man’s funeral had been paid for by money order two years earlier. Our ID chucked the ball into the coroner’s court.
    Back at my lab, Geneviève Doucet’s bones had finally come out of the cooker. I spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon examining each with my new Leica stereomicroscope with magnified digital display. After years of bending over a dinosaur that I’d had to herniate myself to position, I was now equipped with state of the art. I loved this scope.
    Nevertheless, magnification revealed little. Lipping of the interphalangeal joint surfaces of the right middle toe. An asymmetrical raised patch on the anterior midshaft of the right tibia. Other than those healed minor injuries, Geneviève’s skeleton was remarkably unremarkable.
    I phoned LaManche.
    “She jammed her toe and banged her shin,” he summarized my findings
.
    “Yes,” I agreed.
    “That didn’t kill her.”
    “No,” I agreed.
    “It is something.”
    “Sorry I don’t have more to report.”
    “How do you like the new microscope?”
    “The screen resolution is awesome.”
    “I am happy you are pleased.”
    I was disconnecting when Lisa entered my lab carrying a large cardboard box. Her hair was pulled into a curly ponytail, and she was wearing blue surgical scrubs. Wearing them well. Firm glutes, slim waist, breasts the size of the Grand Tetons, Lisa is very popular with cops. And the best autopsy tech at the lab.
    “Say you’re bringing me a skeleton from Rimouski.”
    “I’m bringing you a skeleton from Rimouski.” Lisa often used me to practice her English. She did that now. “It just arrived.”
    I flipped through the paperwork. The case had been assigned morgue and lab numbers. I noted the latter. LSJML-57748. The remains had been confiscated from
agent
Luc Tiquet, Sûreté du Québec, Rimouski. In the case overview cell, Bradette had written:
adolescent female, archaeological
.
    “We’ll see about that, hotshot.”
    Lisa looked a question at me.
    “Jerk thinks he can do my job. Are you busy downstairs?”
    “All autopsies are finished.”
    “Want to take a look?” I knew Lisa liked bones.
    “Sure.”
    As I collected a case report form, Lisa set the box on the table. Joining her, I removed the cover, and we both peered inside.
    Bradette was right about one thing. This wasn’t a grown-up.
    “It looks very old,” Lisa said.
    OK. Maybe two things.
    The skeleton was mottled yellow and brown and showed lots of breakage. The skull was misshapen, the face badly damaged. I could see spidery filaments deep in the orbits and in what remained of the nasal opening.
    The bones felt feather-light as I lifted and arranged them in anatomical alignment. When I’d finished, a small partial-person lay on my table.
    I took inventory. Six ribs, most of the finger and toe bones, one clavicle, one tibia, one ulna, and both kneecaps were missing. So were all eight incisors.
    “Why no front teeth?” Lisa asked.
    “Each has only one root. When the gums go, there’s nothing to hold them in place.”
    “There’s a lot of damage.”
    “Yes.”
    “Peri- or postmortem?” Lisa was asking if the injuries had occurred at the time of or following death.
    “I suspect most is postmortem. But I’ll have to study the fracture sites under magnification.”
    “It’s young, yes?”
    Flashbulb image. A girl in a swimsuit on a Carolina beach. Carrying a small white book with pale green lettering. Reading poetry aloud with an odd French accent.
    I pointed to a proximal right humerus, distal right ulna, proximal left fibula, and distal right femur. “See how some long bones look normal on their ends, while these look corrugated and incomplete?”
    Lisa nodded.
    “That means the epiphyses weren’t yet fused to the shafts. Growth was still ongoing.”
    I lifted the skull and rotated the base upward.
    Running between