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“Doug Ubelaker, up at the So He concluded it was a good basis for identification or exclusion”

“How many sinuses did he look at? And how’d he quantify the match?”

“He looked at a few dozen,” I said “I don’t know that he quantified it on any nus matched”

“Herprints about a hundred years ago”

“You got a better idea?” I was feeling a little defensive, though I wasn’t sure why

“No,” she said, but then, after a pause, “Well,line, right?”

“Right”

“So if you can define those curves mathematically-the curve shown in Parnell’s X-ray here and the curve of Huain-you should be able to graph how closely those equations match”

I was having trouble following her, but she see to the idea

“Actually,” she said, “that ht be a pretty nifty dissertation topic I’m in the market, since you just erased my proposal”

“I did not,” I said “Besides, I have a draft of your proposal You’re going to refine age esti the pubic symphysis”

“I thought I was,” she said “But the et The idea of squinting at four or five hundred pubic bones for a year seems like a very tedious project”

“Gee, not like squinting at graphs and statistics for a year,” I said

“But it would be original graphs and statistics,” she said

“The pubic symphysis has already been studied up one side and down the other, so anything I did would be so derivative This could be new territory It could help us with exactly the probleht here: Is this Freddie Parnell’s burned skull or isn’t it? We don’t have the ht now My experience and ment-that’s what I’m supposed to rely on, in the absence of statistical tools, right? — , and I heard her frustration rising, too

“But h of this damn puzzle done yet to say that with any damn confidence”

With that, she laid the two pieces of bone in the sand, stood up, and walked out of the bone lab

As the door banged shut behind her, I realized that she’d been pushed-bypoint

I also realized she was right about the frontal sinus It would indeed be a good dissertation topic And this particular scrap of reconstructed sinus wasn’t nearly enough to tell us whether Garland Haerously alive

CHAPTER 31

EVER SINCE BURT DEVRIESS HAD FILED HIS CLASS-ACTION lawsuit against Trinity Cre me a steady strea frequent trips to Alcoa with h the cremains from Helen Taylor’s furnaces

By noas nearing thirty cases fro si differences One consistent trend was the weight of the creh three or four pounds, which was less than two-thirds the weight of those from Tennessee

The creia usually contained a mixture of hu array of extraneous contaminants: bits of charred wood, zippers, nails and screws, and heaping helpings of Quikrete concrete mix, which accounted for the powder, the sand, and the pebbles Most puzzling of all, the Georgia cremains contained s them “fuzzballs”-whose only purpose, as best I could tell, was to puff up the cre so skimpy

Early in Burt’s suit, I’d gone to Chattanooga to give a deposition I was cross-exa not just Trinity but a consortiu sued by DeVriess for defrauding their customers The lawyers made several scornful attempts to show that it was impossible to tell the difference between burned huht nuave me a chance to present a lecture on the distinctive differences between human bone and animal bone