hesitated. “Go ahead.” She peeled off her right glove and pressed the tips of her fingers to her eyebrows, then to mine.
“Yours feel like a Neanderthal’s.”
“Well, back in the days of cavemen, guys who could shrug off a whack in the head were more likely to survive and reproduce than guys who had skulls like eggshells,” I explained. “In females, thickheadedness wasn’t as crucial to survival as prettiness was. Women’s skulls evolved to be more delicate, with thinner brows and smaller muscle markings—‘gracile’ is the nerdy anthropologist’s word for it. Looks kinda like ‘graceful’ but rhymes with ‘hassle,’ which is what women’s lives are filled with.” She smiled. “Want me to tell you more about the age?”
“Sure. How much can you narrow it down, and how do you do that?”
I cradled the skull in the palm of my left hand. “Let me show you something in the upper jaw, the maxilla.” A prominent line ran along its midline, starting just behind the incisors. I traced the line with my right pinky finger. “See this seam?” She nodded. “This is the intermaxillary suture.” Running crosswise were two others. “This one, just behind the front teeth, is the incisive suture, and back here at the molars is the palatomaxillary suture.” She nodded again. “So, in the same way the cranial sutures fuse and fade over time—obliterate—so do the maxillary sutures. My maxillary sutures are fused solid by now, like they’ve been welded shut. Yours probably are, too. How would you describe these?”
She bent down and took a close look. “It looks like the roof of the mouth is cracked.”
“It looks cracked,” I agreed, “but it’s not; it just hasn’t finished growing together. That tells us we’re looking at a subadult. A teenager, maybe even preteen. That’s consistent with the smaller size of the skull, too. Be a big help if we can find the rest of the bones.”
“From your lips to God’s ear,” said Angie. “We did a grid search across a pretty big area around the cabin. A quarter mile in every direction. That’s almost forty acres. Nothing so far.”
Just then the door opened and a fiftysomething man walked in, nodding at Angie. His clothes were rumpled, his white shirt bore a coffee stain, and he held an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. If he’d been wearing an old raincoat, I’d have taken him for Columbo, the bumblingly brilliant television detective from the 1970s. He took out the cigar, shifted it to his left hand, and held out his right. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Slow line at Starbucks. Stu Vickery. Good to meet you. Angie came back from Tennessee raving about the Body Farm.” He shook my hand, then shifted the cigar from his left hand to his right before clamping it back between his teeth. I wondered how many times in his life he’d repeated that sequence of movements: remove cigar with right hand, shift cigar to left hand, do something with right hand, shift cigar back from left hand, put cigar back into mouth. I wondered, too, how long an unlit cigar would last before it got totally soggy and crumbled in his mouth.
“Angie and I were just taking a look at the skull,” I said. “Angie, you want to tell him what we know so far about the sex, race, and age?”
“Me?”
“You. It’s a pop quiz, to see if you were paying attention.” She took the skull from my hand and drew a deep breath, then succinctly recapped everything I’d said about the cranial sutures, the muscle markings, the maxillary sutures, and the ambiguous gender. “Good job,” I commended. “You made a hundred.” She smiled slightly and flushed a faint shade of pink.
Vickery removed the cigar, studying the damp, bitten end as if it might contain some guidance. “So we’ve got a Johnny or a Janie Doe, teenager or less. What more can you tell from the skull? Any idea how this kid died?”
“We were just about to get to that,” I said. I took the skull back from