Ribs sounded like Tinker Toys quietly clacking together as I separated left from right.
“Twelve on each side,” I began to dictate. “Contrary to legend, women don’t have one more rib than men.”
“Huh?”
Marino looked up from the clipboard.
“Have you never read Genesis?”
He stared blankly at the ribs I had arranged on either side of the thoracic vertebrae.
“Never mind,” I said.
Next I began looking for carpals, the small bones of the wrist that look very much like stones you might find in a creek bed or dig up in your garden. It is hard to sort left from right, and this is where the anatomical skeleton was helpful. Moving him closer, 1 propped his bony hands on the edge of the table and began comparing. I went through the same process with the distal and proximal phalanges, or bones of the fingers.
“Looks like she’s missing eleven bones in her right hand and seventeen in her left,” I reported.
Marino scribbled this down. “Out of how many?”
“There are twenty-seven bones in the hand,” I replied as I worked. “Giving the hand its tremendous flexibility. It’s what makes it possible for us to paint, play the violin, love each other through touch.”
It is also what makes it possible for us to defend ourselves.
It was not until the following afternoon that I realized Deborah Harvey had attempted to ward off an assailant who had been armed with more than a gun. It had gotten considerably warmer out, the weather had cleared, and the police had been sifting through soil all day. At not quite four P.M., Morrell stopped by my office to deliver a number of small bones recovered from the scene. Five of them belonged to Deborah, and on the dorsal surface of her left proximal phalange – or the top of the shaft, the longest of the index finger bones I found a half-inch cut.
The first question when I find injury to bone or tissue is whether it is pre- or postmortem. If one is not aware of the artifacts that can occur after death, he can make serious mistakes.
People who burn up in fires come in with fractured bones and epidural hemorrhages, looking for all practical purposes as if someone worked them over and then torched the house to disguise a homicide, when the injuries are actually postmortem and caused by extreme heat. Bodies washed up on the beach or recovered from rivers and lakes often look as if a deranged killer mutilated faces, genitals, hands, and feet, when fish, crabs, and turtles are to blame. Skeletal remains get gnawed, chewed on, and torn from limb to limb by rats, buzzards, dogs, and raccoons.
Predators of the four-legged, winged, or finned variety inflict a lot of damage, but blessedly, not until the poor soul is already dead. Then nature simply begins recycling. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
The cut on Deborah Harvey’s proximal phalange was too neat and linear to have been caused by tooth or claw, it was my opinion. But this still left much open to speculation and suspicion, including the inevitable suggestion that I might have nicked the bone myself with a scalpel at the morgue.
By Wednesday evening the police had released Deborah’s and Fred’s identities to the press, and within the next forty-eight hours there were so many calls that the clerks in the front office could not manage their regular duties because all they did was answer the phone. Rose was informing everyone, including Benton Wesley and Pat Harvey, that the cases were pending while I stayed in the morgue.
By Sunday night, there was nothing more I could do. Deborah’s and Fred’s remains had been defleshed, degreased, photographed from every angle, the inventory of their bones completed. I was packing them in a cardboard box when the buzzer went off in back. I heard the night watchman’s footsteps down the hall and the bay door open. Then Marino was walking in.
“You sleeping down here or what?” he asked.
Glancing up at him, I was surprised to note that his overcoat and hair were wet.
“It’s snowing.”
He pulled off his gloves and set his portable radio on the edge of the autopsy table where I was working.