‘You’re looking robust,’ I said to him as we shook hands.
‘I just got back from vacation. Charleston. I trust you’ve been there?’ he said as the three of us boarded the elevator.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I know the chief there very well. You remember Captain Marino?’
‘Of course.’
We rose three levels above the eight-ton African bush elephant in the rotunda, the voices of children floating up like wisps of smoke. The museum was, in truth, little more than a huge granite warehouse. Some thirty thousand human skeletons were stored in green wooden drawers stacked from floor to ceiling. It was a rare collection used to study people of the past, specifically Native Americans who of late had been determined to get their ancestors’ bones back. Laws had been passed, and Vessey had been through hell on the Hill, his life’s work halfway out the door and headed back to the not-so-wild west.
‘We’ve got a repatriation staff that collects data to supply to this group and that,’ he was saying as we accompanied him along a crowded, dim corridor. ‘Respective tribes have to be informed as to what we’ve got, and it’s really up to them to determine what’s done. In another couple years, our American Indian material may be back in the earth again, only to be dug up again by archaeologists in the next century, my guess is.’
He talked on as he walked.
‘Every group is so angry these days they don’t realize how much they’re hurting themselves. If we don’t learn from the dead, who do we learn from?’
‘Alex, you’re singing to the choir,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, if it was my great-grandfather in one of these drawers,’ Marino retorted, ‘I’m not so sure I’d feel too good about that.’
‘But the point is we don’t know who is in these drawers, and neither do any of the people who are upset,’ said Vessey. ‘What we do know is that these specimens have helped us know a lot more about the diseases of the American Indian population, which is clearly a benefit to those now feeling threatened. Oh well, don’t get me started.’
Where Vessey worked was a series of small laboratory rooms that were a jumble of black counter space and sinks, and thousands of books and boxes of slides, and professional journals. Displayed here and there were the usual shrunken heads and shattered skulls and various animal bones mistaken as human. On a corkboard were large, painful photographs of the aftermath of Waco, where Vessey had spent weeks recovering and identifying the decomposing burned remains of Branch Davidians.
‘Let’s see what you’ve got for me,’ Vessey said.
I set my package on a counter and he slit the tape with a pocket knife. Styrofoam rattled as I dug out the cranium, then the very fragile lower portion of the skull that included the bones of the face. I set these on a clean blue cloth and he turned on lamps and fetched a lens.
‘Right here,’ I directed him to the fine cut on bone. ‘It corresponds with hemorrhage in the temporal area. But around it, the flesh was too burned for me to tell anything about what sort of injury we were dealing with. I didn’t have a clue until I found this on the bone.’
‘A very straight incision,’ he said as he slowly turned the skull to look at it from different angles. ‘And we’re certain this wasn’t perhaps accidentally done during autopsy, when, for example, the scalp was reflected back to remove the skull cap?’
‘We’re certain,’ I said. ‘And as you can see by putting the two together’ — I fit the cranium back in place — ‘the cut is about an inch and a half below where the skull was opened during autopsy. And it’s an angle that would make no sense if one were reflecting back the scalp. See?’
My index finger was suddenly huge as I looked through the lens and pointed.
‘This incision is vertical versus horizontal,’ I made my case.
‘You’re right,’ he said, and his face was vibrant with interest. ‘As an artifact of autopsy, that would make no sense at all, unless your morgue assistant was drunk.’