MS. CARTWRIGHT: The day I got home from the hospital. Again, I can’t see it. For a while, I decided it was in my conditioner. In the Ivory soap. In the detergent we put in the washer. I decided that’s why I could never get it out.
MR. VEGA: Do you have glitter on you now?
MS. CARTWRIGHT: Just a little. The worst time, it was in the Parmesan cheese I put on my spaghetti. I threw up all night.
17 days until the execution
There are no Susan bones on Jo’s conference table. Just that lonely brown Kleenex box. My heart feels like someone hammered a nail into it.
I was worried I would be late for Jo’s meeting, but it’s apparent as I open the door to the conference room that everyone else is even later. The room is empty except for the table and chairs, unless you count the requiem of pain that Hannah’s mother and brother left behind. If there were a black light to reveal grief and anger, it would surely be streaked in graffiti, Dalí-like, on these walls. Not only sucked from Hannah’s family, but all of the others who sat here waiting for their loved ones to be reduced to the stubborn rules of science.
The door clicks shut behind me. The fluorescent glare feels like it’s restricting the flow of blood to my head. I slide into the chair where Hannah’s brother sat at attention in his dress blues not so long ago and, for a few minutes, try not to think.
The door opens, and all of them spill into the conference room at once. Bill; Lieutenant Myron; Jo; and her Russian friend, Dr. Igor Aristov, the genius from Galveston.
“Igor, as in Igor Stravinsky,” Jo had told me last night on the phone, knowing that I was, of course, imagining the hunchbacked Frankenstein one and not the one who composed The Rite of Spring.
This Igor, though, is not hunched, or wearing a black hood, or creeping me out with white golf ball eyes. He is tall and fit, wearing khakis and a red Polo. His eyes are warm and hazel. Fine wrinkles run out of the corner of his eyes and stop short. There are the tiniest shreds of gray at his temples.
He immediately crosses the room to take my hand first. “You must be Tessa. It is a pleasure.” His accent is thick as paste, and most women would want him to say their names over and to never let go of their hands. Not me. I’m only in this room as a conciliatory gesture to Jo. I don’t want to hear Igor’s maybes and ifs. Unless this lab genius is about to pull a miracle out of his ass, I need to listen to Bill. I need to come to terms with Terrell’s fate.
Lieutenant Myron is the first to slide into a chair. I wonder if I look as raw as she does. “Everybody, sit,” Jo says. “We’re going to make this as quick as possible. Ellen had a rough night.”
“A cop and his bride of six months,” Lieutenant Myron explains. “He fired a shot into her face for every month of marriage. Go ahead, Jo.”
Jo nods. Her hands are agitated with no place to go. I’ve never seen her this visibly on edge. “Usually,” she says, “I will send Igor samples of powder from the bones and he emails his findings to me. But that’s white paper between two scientists. I want the three of you to hear everything straight from his mouth just in case some detail tickles your brain.” She is careful not to look at me. It is obvious I am the one whose brain needs the most tickling.
Igor has settled himself at the head of the table. “I am a geochemist. A forensic geologist. Do any of you understand the basics of isotope analysis?
“I will keep it as simple as possible,” Igor continues, without waiting for an answer. “I will refer to each case as Susan One and Susan Two. I received samples from the femur of Susan One and from the skull and teeth of Susan Two. I also received a scraping from a fetus that belongs to Susan Two. I was able to determine that one of the women lived much of her life in Tennessee, and the other was most certainly from Mexico.”
“What?” Bill’s surprise pops the tension in the room. “How can you possibly know that?”
Igor shifts a level gaze to Bill. “Your bones absorb the distinct chemical markers in the soil where you live. Some of it has retained the same ratio of elements-oxygen, lead, zinc, et cetera-for hundreds of thousands of years, all the way back to when rivers and mountains formed. And then there are more modern markers. It’s easy to tell that Susan One is American, not European, because America and Europe used different refinery sources for leaded gas.”
“We’re soaking crap from the air into our bones?” Lieutenant Myron is pressing forward, suddenly engaged. “Regardless, we don’t use leaded gas for cars anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replies patiently. “The residue from leaded gas, even though it’s been banned for years, still clings to our soil and soaks into our bones. Susan One’s markers also indicate that for a significant portion of her life she lived near a specific set of mines, probably near Knoxville, Tennessee. I can’t tell you how long exactly. Or specifically where she died. I might have been able to if I had a rib bone. Ribs are constantly growing and remodeling and absorbing the environment. We can usually use them to guess at a victim’s residency for the last eight to ten years of life. And, of course, a lot of the bones were lost, so the grave only provided random puzzle pieces.”
“Mexico. Tennessee.” Bill’s eyes are trained on Lieutenant Myron. “Your killer could be a traveler. Terrell was a homebody.”
“He’s not my killer.” Lieutenant Myron’s sarcasm gets zero reaction from Bill, who continues tapping notes into his phone.
“Come on, guys, let him talk,” Jo says.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Igor says. “It’s thrilling to be out of the lab, frankly. To meet you, especially, Tessa. I rarely meet any victims. It makes my science… alive. And this case is particularly interesting. I was able to discern even more from Susan Two and her unborn fetus. Susan Two’s bones reflect a corn-based diet and the elements of volcanic soil. If I could hazard a guess, I’d say she was born in or near Mexico City. I concur with Jo that she was in her early twenties when she died.”
“What else?” Bill asks.
Igor lays his palms flat on the table. “There was only one skull in that grave, which belonged to Susan Two. I asked Jo to send me scrapings of very specific teeth because the teeth can give us a timeline.” His voice, so far in college lecture mode, has picked up a little excitement. “It’s fascinating, really, what this science reveals. As children, we put things in our mouths. The teeth enamel absorbs the dust. The first molar forms when a person is three, and freezes the isotope signal for that period of time. So I can say that Susan Two’s first molar tells us she was living in Mexico as a toddler. The incisors close at age six to seven. The chemical markers in one of her incisors indicate she was still living in Mexico. The third molar’s signal shuts down in the teen-age years. For Susan Two, still Mexico. After that, I don’t know. Sometime in her late teens or early twenties, she moved, or was kidnapped.”
“This is remarkable.” Lieutenant Myron glances around the table. “Isn’t this remarkable?” I can’t tell whether she is genuinely engaged or giddy from lack of sleep and a steady diet of savagery.
“How are you certain she left Mexico alive?” Bill asks. “We know the bones were moved at least once because they didn’t originate in that field of flowers where Tessa was dumped.” He flicks a look up at me, as if remembering I’m in the room. “Sorry, Tessa. My point is, maybe her bones were simply moved across the border.”
“Her baby tells that part of the story,” Igor says quickly. “This young woman lived in Texas for at least the last few months leading up to her death. I know this because fetal bones are the most current marker we can get. They were still developing and therefore still absorbing the current environment at the time of death.”