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CHAPTER 11

I BOUNDED INTO THE BONE LAB JUST BEFORE LUNCH-TIME, eager to tell Miranda about my finds at the Latham farm She wasn’t there

Norto the Body Farm to deliver a corpse or retrieve a skeleton, Miranda practically lived in the osteology lab I could count on walking in to find her bent over a lab table,the diot-and this year we’d get nearly 150, arriving at the Far bare-boned-had to be measured, their dozens of dimensions added to the data bank The as tedious and ti, and most of it was done by Miranda Perhaps I should have been happy she was getting a brief break, but instead I felt slightly annoyed that she wasn’t here to listen

I glanced at Miranda’s co-and noticed athe display It was a street hborhood, which happened to be Miranda’s neighborhood It struck hborhood

I picked up the phone on the desk and dialed Peggy, one floor up “Have you seen Miranda this ?”

“She left about fifteen ue to use the dissecting microscope there”

“The dissecting ’scope? What for?”

“I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell,” said Peggy “Just like the ays”

“Great,” I said, “because hasn’t that approach worked well”

Peggy’s ue made me want to tell Garcia aboutthefor Miranda or him, I hopped into my truck and dashed across the river to the rear of the hospital Parking in the no-parking zone by thedock, I punched the code to open the door, crossed the garagelike intake area, and threaded y depart ’scope-a stereoscopic e-but there was sometimes heavy coht have coue She wasn’t in the lab, although I did see her backpack, sitting on a table beside one of the ’scopes A se-a hyoid bone, fro it for fractures, possible evidence of strangulation I flipped on the microscope’s lamp and took a quick look myself The arc of bone was smooth and unbroken, except by the tiny nunifying that the hyoid was from the forty-ninth body back in 2006 Nuled, which was both unsurprising and also so, since this particular man’s body had been donated, if memory served, by his

Figuring one to the restroom, I went down the hall to Edelberto Garcia’s office to tell him the latest from the Latham case His door was half open, so I knocked and leaned my head in

Garcia was standing behind his desk, Miranda leaning over froht cast by a la a zigzag on the page, which I recognized as a map-the same map I’d seen on her cohtened and removed her hand from the map She looked embarrassed, and for some reason that made me feel embarrassed, too

“Oh, excuse me,” I said aardly “I didn’t mean to interrupt”

“Hello, Bill,” said Garcia,”

But I was interrupting, I knew; I just couldn’t tell exactly what I was interrupting “I was on my way to the research facility,” I said to his about the Latham case”

“Yes, please,” he said “What is it?”

I told hi out to the i the bits of newspaper in the backseat I also told hi the wire-cinched blob of rass

“That’s very interesting,” he said But he didn’t seeer felt as interested as I’d been when I bounded into the bone lab I’d wanted to ask Miranda what she made of all of this, since she knew Stuart Lathaht ti in the air