Carved in Bone

killer’s footprints were actually an inept anthropologist’s.
    The only things I’d brought from Knoxville besides my camera were a pair of latex gloves, a small tape measure, and a pocketknife. I opened the pocketknife and set it on the rock shelf, then donned the gloves and picked it back up. Using the tip of the blade, I gently picked at the adipocere in the region of the cheek. As I suspected, underneath was nothing but bone. “Can’t tell the race from the skin,” I said, “because there’s no skin left.”
    Williams spoke up. “Got to be white. We don’t have black folks up here. Not after sundown, anyhow.” He snickered. “Not if a black man values his life.”
    I leveled a look at the deputy. “Then again, if a black man was to have car trouble or get lost up here when the sun went down, this might be just the sort of spot he’d wind up in, mightn’t it?”
    “Leon, you dumbass hillbilly redneck,” Kitchings spat.
    Williams blinked and looked away, his jaw muscles twitching hard.
    “You’re probably right, I’m pretty sure it’s a Caucasian,” I went on. “The hair looks straight and blond, and the mouth structure is textbook Caucasoid—see how vertical the teeth are?” I touched the tip of the knife blade to what was once the upper lip, just below where the nose had collapsed, then swung the flat side of the blade down across the lips, resting it on the greasy chin. “If this individual were Negroid, the teeth and jawbones would angle forward, and this straight edge wouldn’t touch the chin.”
    I pulled out the tape. With Williams holding one end gingerly, I measured the corpse. “About five feet eight,” I read. “Allowing for postmortem shrinkage of the cartilage, could’ve been another two or three inches taller than that in life. Just from the stature, I’d have guessed male, but from the facial features, the small skull, and the wide pelvis, I’m thinking female. Any guesses? Any women—tall women—missing in Cooke County?”
    They thought awhile before Kitchings broke the silence. “Not that I know of. How long you reckon she’s been here, Doc?”
    “Between the cave and the adipocere, it’s hard to say. Caves are cool, and it doesn’t look like the flies and maggots ever got to her. So it could have been a long time—I’d say years rather than months, maybe even be a whole lot of years.”
    “Well, that’s gonna mean going back through the files quite a ways, then,” Kitchings said. “Might take awhile. Some of the files aren’t too good, either. The ones since I took office are okay, but the older ones are a mess.”
    “Well, see what you can find,” I said. “There might be some folks who’d remember right off. Didn’t I see some old-timers whittling on a bench outside the courthouse? You’d be amazed what guys like that can tell you.”
    “Well, I’m not sure I’d put too much stock in the memories of those guys, but I’ll ask. What else can you tell me about her?”
    “Not much right here, right now. I need to get the body back to the Forensic Center at UT Medical Center and process the remains,” I said. “Clean off the tissue, study the bones closely. Then I can tell you how old she was, how tall, what race. We’ll take X-rays, look for healed injuries that might show up in somebody’s medical chart, try to find dental records. If we get lucky, we’ll find out who she was and maybe even how she died.”
    “That would be lucky,” he said. But he didn’t say it with the hearty conviction you’d expect from a sheriff with an unidentified murder victim on his hands.
    While I took a few final photos, Kitchings and Williams retrieved the body bag and the litter that were lashed to the back of the deputy’s ATV. I unzipped the bag, bunched the opening under one side of the body, and gently worked the corpse up off the rock and into the bag. Then I zipped it up and we slid it off the rock ledge and into the litter. We hauled it back to the vehicles, where the officers retied it to the rear rack. The rack had been designed to haul beer coolers and deer carcasses, but it would serve to haul a body. The added weight, though, rocked the vehicle back on its haunches, making the headlight angle upward. As we retraced our route back to the mouth of the cave, I heard Williams curse more than once as he thumped into unseen rocks in his path. When we emerged, squinting, into the afternoon light, he faced a different challenge. On the trek up