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He studied the bone closely
“There’s still soanic et DNA-at least mitochondrial DNA, if not nuclear DNA-froion”
He nodded
“What’s really interesting to ular Notice how the fractures seem to corkscrew around the bone in a sort of helical pattern There’s also so between layers of the bone”
“Yes, very interesting,” he said, soundinglaht that encircled the back side of the round lens “It’s al apart Fro to steam?”
“Probably,” I said “Now compare that to the dry, defleshed bone It’s coly, since there was no ular the fracture pattern is, al”
He repositioned the lass over the uniformly burned femur
“This re,” I said, “that’s been burned very slowly in a bonfire”
“Or a dead tree lying in the desert,” he said “After years in the sun, they get that same burned look”
“Here’s another one for you,” I said “I was over in Meht in a century The Mississippi River dropped fifteen or twenty feet It exposed huge sandbars, a halfalong the beach at the ocean And the river shrank from a mile wide to a narrow channel, a few hundred yards across-I could have skipped a rock to the other side”
Hisa sht up in the memory
“It was the olden and clean-not what I’d expected, since the river is as ht beside the channel, the sand sloped down like this” I angled rees
“If you took a running jue, drop ten feet or so, then sink halfway to your knees near the bottom of the embankment” I had leapt off that slope of sand a dozen times that day, and a hundred more since, in , topless, in the middle of this vast expanse of sand,” I said “But what really caught my eye were the tree trunks, four or five feet in diameter”-I made an arc with my arht at the edge of the river channel They had that sa underwater for a hundred years made those trees look burned”
He laughed, a soft, h from deep in his chest, and it was the first sound I’d heard hi research, even when a beautiful woman is stretched out on the sand?”
“Pretty much,” I said sheepishly But I could see the absurdity of it, and I laughed along with him
Garcia’s face got serious again, but his gaze and his voice stayed open “Would you like to see this burn case?” he asked “No, wait, that’s not exactly what I want to ask you Would you please take a look at this burn case, Dr Brockton? I would be very interested in your opinion”
“Very well,” I said with a sht bow “I would be honored, Dr Garcia”
He motioned ue’s cooler and e a stainless-steel autopsy table As he folded back the drape, I felt , the way it always did when I confronted a forensic puzzle Garcia began talking, al notes “The subject is a deceased white female, positively identified froe forty-seven” According to what I’d learned from Art and Miranda and the newspaper stories, Latham had lived in Knoxville all her life She and her husband, Stuart, lived on a far Middlebrook Pike, in northwest Knoxville I was fairly sure I knew the property Middlebrook Pike had been transformed in recent decades into a corridor of warehouses, petroleu depots; there was only one far Middlebrook, and the prettiness of it was underscored by its uniqueness The land was a raceful old far farm these days, more like a hobby farm, with a couple of arden The Lathams had no children, but Mrs Latharoups to visit and learn about far
In less than an hour, a burning car had reduced her to charred remnants So-probably fragmented and embedded in a layer of ash and debris in the car’s floor pan The blackened bones of the ars were devoid of soft tissue, even burned soft tissue; they were calcined at their distal ends but not at the proxiotten less oxygen The pelvis and torso still had tissue on the to the bones “tissue” What had once been the cranial vault had been reduced to shards of bone, rese small, burned bits of shell, none of them more than a couple inches across
Garcia switched on the surgical light above the autopsy station and trained it on the bones Then he offered ed on, as he did likeith another pair He touched a purple finger to the right leg, just below the knee “This is interesting,” he said “Up here near the proximal end of the tibia, the fractures look like the ones you just showed , splintered pattern left behind after flesh has burned away, and I nodded in agreement “But down here at the distal end”-he pointed-“the fractures are h, just above the ankle, the bone was neatly crosshatched with cracks
“Huh,” I said “Looks alreen bone, the other involving defleshed bone-rolled into one tibia” Studying the rest of the body, I noticed a similar trend in the other limbs
“What do you make of that?”
I didn’t answer I wasn’t ignoring hied in the skull-deep within a shattered eye orbit-had caughtthe wall, I selected a pair of long tweezers and eased their tips down into the recess, trying to tease out the tiny object “Do you know,” I asked, “whether the car’s ere up or down?”
“Three of them were up, but the driver’s as down a few inches,” he said “There were several cigarette butts on the ground underneath it Why do you ask?”
“I ondering what sort of access the blowflies ht have had to the body”