Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 by Jefferson Bass Page B

scientific inquiry. The truth was, though, it was more like a drug. Other people were hooked on cocaine or cigarettes or runner’s high; I was addicted to forensic discovery.
    “We’ll want lots of photographs of this,” I said. “Thirty-five millimeter; use the closeup lens and get in as tight as you can. Take it over to the engineering lab, too, and use their scanning-electron microscope. Besides these visible fractures, the SEM will probably show lots of microscopic avulsion fractures, too, where the cartilage has torn from the bone. We’ll need good evidence photos if this ever comes to trial.” Miranda nodded. “Okay, let’s pry off that pendant and then see what the clavicles tell us.”
    We returned to the remains on the gurney, and I slid a long, thin spatula beneath the rectangular lump near the top of the sternum. It pried loose with a spackling sound, like cold bacon grease letting go. I gave it an exploratory feel; it was thin and hard, with well-defined edges beneath the irregular layer of goo. Miranda held open a small ziplock bag; after I’d slipped the object inside, she sealed it, then labeled it with the case number, the date, and the words
    “necklace/pendant.” As she wrote, I unleashed a spray of hot water across the dead woman’s collarbones.
    They came free with almost no effort. Their lateral ends, where they met the upper arms and shoulder blades to form the shoulders, merged seamlessly with the shafts. Their sternal ends, though—where they joined the breastbone at the top of the rib cage—hung raggedly. The epiphyses—the ends of the bones—
    were connected to the shafts by a narrow zone of tissue that had not yet fully matured from cartilage into bone.
    “So she’s still maturing skeletally,” said Miranda. “She’s not a kid anymore, but she’s not fully a woman, either.”
    “Just like you,” I said. She elbowed me in the ribs, hard. “Ouch!
    ‘Skeletally speaking,’ that was all I meant. Under the age of twenty-five. Aren’t you?” I knew she was, but only by a few months. I didn’t have many students who would challenge me or tease me, and none who would throw the occasional elbow. Miranda felt free to spar with me, and I liked the confidence and ease that reflected. She’d long since become immune to the lesbian and prostitute jokes about her last name, Lovelady, and she’d turned down countless cops who’d asked her to handcuff and “Mirandize” them. She was smart, strong, tough, and funny, and she didn’t take herself too seriously. But she was young enough to be my daughter, and she was my student, to boot. I cranked up the water pressure a bit. As the adipocere and intercostal cartilage dropped away, the rib cage emerged like some ancient shipwreck being scoured from a sandy seabed. Rib by rib I began dismantling the wreckage, wriggling each bone free of the sternum and free of the vertebra that it joined in the back. As I extracted the bones I handed them to Miranda, who laid them on the table beneath the skull in their proper anatomical position. As the adipocere-clad body departed the gurney piecemeal, a skeleton slowly took shape on the nearby countertop.
    When I’d worked my way down the first seven pairs of ribs, I handed Miranda the sternum. She gasped, and I looked up. “What is it?”
    “Look at that.” She pointed to a neat round hole, dead center in the lower end of the bone. “Was she shot, too?”
    I studied the hole. “Well, it sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” When I said it, she glanced sharply at me, sensing a trick of some sort.
    She studied the sternum more closely, first on the front side of the bone, then from the back. I could see her searching her data banks, trying to match what she saw with something she’d read or seen in my osteology handbook, my bible of bone science. It was in there, all right—a drawing at the top of page 117—but I wasn’t giving her any clues. “Well, it’s about the right size for a