She motioned for them to set the boxes on a long, black stone-topped table.
‘As we discussed on the phone,’ Mac said, ‘I’ll be grateful for any impressions you might be able to offer.’ He handed her an envelope. Inside was a check for three hundred and seventy-five dollars, money April thought was to be used to buy new seals for two of their freezers.
Dr Wilhausen frowned. ‘I will give you no impressions. I will give you specific, defensible conclusions. It may take some time.’
And there it ended. The woman and her colleague wanted no additional information, no background details beyond what little Mac had already provided on the phone.
Their footsteps echoed loudly on the wood floor in the hallway as they left Wilhausen’s lab.
‘She didn’t even open the boxes,’ Reed said.
‘She wants to work without us hovering over her shoulder.’
‘If she finds the skull doesn’t match the vertebrae, that proves the sheriff’s department botched the chain of custody before my sister was buried?’
‘It’s real leverage. You can threaten to sue the Peering County Sheriff’s Department for mishandling their custody of your sister’s remains. What we really want is to light a fire under someone, Fed, state or local, to reopen the investigation.’
‘I still can’t believe Bud Wiley or Luther would have switched her head.’
‘Or Doc Farmont, or Randall White. Or your midnight buddy, Horace Wiggins, whose sleep you’ve probably forever ruined.’
Reed chuckled. ‘All by spreading the word there’s another picture.’
The campus was almost deserted. Summer classes were done for the day; few students lazed on the grass between the broad walks. They stretched their legs for a time, walking around the quadrangle, admiring the century-old architecture. And then they headed toward Campus Town, that strip of stores adjacent to the quadrangle that looked to sell toothpaste, T-shirts, and decals for those who had cars, to have dinner before heading up to Grand Point.
‘They look so very, very young,’ Reed said, of a pair of coeds passing them, heading in the opposite direction.
‘Nothing like a college campus to make you feel old,’ Mac said.
‘Those girls are barely older than Betty Jo was.’
Or Laurel Jessup, who’d actually gone to this college. Mac thought then of Jen, wondering if she’d attended Illinois, like her sister.
‘Did your parents ever mention what Betty Jo’s plans might have been?’ he asked as they crossed a street.
‘People in our neighborhood didn’t spend a lot of time talking about plans.’
‘Pinktown?’
‘Pinktown,’ Reed said.
They went into a place that advertised itself as a microbrewery. The young waitress called each of them ‘Sir,’ took their orders for cheeseburgers and Cokes, then left.
‘I don’t think we fit in,’ Mac said.
‘Pinktown?’ Reed asked, grinning for the first time that day.
‘Nah, it’s your redneck NASCAR cap.’
They both laughed and talked of other things as they drank their Cokes.
‘It must have been someone I talked to at the Bird’s Nest last night who called Wiggins to alert him that I’d gotten a new picture,’ Reed said as the waitress set down their burgers.
‘Or someone who called someone else who called Wiggins.’
Mac’s cell phone rang.
It was Francine Wilhausen. ‘Are you close enough to turn around, Mr Bassett?’
‘We never left. We’re having dinner.’
‘You might want to come over.’
Mac left cash next to their untouched burgers and they bolted for the door.
SIXTY-THREE
The skull and seven small, irregularly-shaped, thick round pieces of bone – the vertebrae that descend from the base of the skull onto the larger vertebrae of the spinal column – lay on the black stone table, almost white in the harsh glare of powerful lights on adjustable arms.
Dr Wilhausen set a small digital voice recorder on the table and switched it on.
‘For the record, I am Doctor Francine Wilhausen. I was asked by Mr Mac Bassett and Mr Reed Dean to analyze skeletonized head and neck remains that they provided, with special attention to age at death, sex, ancestry, cause of death indicators and compatibility of the skeletal elements. I am joined by Doctor Hargrave, professor of anatomy, path physiology and forensics at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois. Any comments I now make are very preliminary in nature and subject to revision upon more detailed analysis.’
Dr Wilhausen then went through the markers she found in the skull that determined that it belonged to a Caucasian female greater in age than fourteen and probably younger than twenty-three.
‘There are multiple and conflicting signs of trauma,’ she continued. ‘First, cervical vertebra C2 presents evidence of a crude decapitation. The skull and the vertebra C1 immediately at its base do not correlate this finding-’
‘Meaning the skull does not belong to the vertebrae?’ Mac said.
Dr Wilhausen frowned at the interruption and switched off the recorder. ‘I’d prefer to finish my preliminary presentation, but yes, all indices are that there is no match. The C2 vertebra we have here, which fits the rest of the vertebrae, does not match the C1 which came with the skull.’
‘The C2 here was chopped off from another C1, which – along with its skull – is not here?’
She sighed. ‘Sawed off, and very roughly.’
‘No chop marks on the C1 we brought?’ Mac pressed, to be sure.
‘The C1 you brought belongs to the skull you brought, but not to the rest of the vertebrae we have here. Now, may I continue?’
Without waiting for an answer, the anthropologist switched on the recorder. ‘The skull offers evidence of a gunshot wound entering the left side of the nasal cavity, destroying the medial maxillary wall… and exiting through the posterior-inferior portion. In other words,’ she said, looking directly now at Mac, ‘the bullet entered the skull through the nose and exited at the base of the skull, in the back.’
‘We now move on,’ she continued. ‘The seven cervical vertebrae, numbers two through seven, articulate well into a cervical column.’
Mac raised his hand like a confused school kid. ‘Articulate?’
Dr Wilhausen smiled a teacher’s indulgent smile and left the recorder running. ‘They nest together like they were made for each other, which they were. Each of us has unique cervical vertebrae that nestle perfectly into one another. If they didn’t nestle perfectly we would be unable to move our heads or upper bodies.’
She went on: ‘As I’ve already indicated, the uppermost cervical vertebra, C1, does not articulate with C2, the next vertebra going down. There was a poor fit on all three articulation points.’ She named the three places where the top vertebra – C1, immediately at the base of the skull – should have fit perfectly into C2, the next vertebra down.
‘Yet, to repeat: C1 fits perfectly into the skull,’ she said.
She raised her voice just enough to alert everyone in the room that what was to follow was her most crucial finding. ‘There is only one obvious explanation for this. C1 and C2 do not belong to the same individual. In other words, C1 and the skull are from one individual, while C2 through C7 are from another individual of similar age.’
She switched off the recorder, stepped back from the table and looked at Mac, then Reed. ‘But you knew that,’ she said.
‘We were told only that the skull was detached so that a bullet could be extracted.’
She frowned. ‘There are two problems with that explanation.’ She took a pencil from her pocket and pointed to the base of the skull at the back. ‘See this beveled, slightly pushed-out matter around the hole?’
‘Yes,’ Mac said.
‘That defines it as an exit hole. As I said earlier, the bullet came out. There was nothing to find inside this skull.’