Read Online Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 by Jefferson Bass - Free Book Online

small-caliber bullet—maybe a twenty-two,” she murmured, but she sounded dubious. She glared at the bone accusingly, as if it were guilty of something. “But there are some things that don’t fit with that.”
    “Such as?”
    “For one thing, it seems too big a coincidence for a gunshot wound to line up exactly with the midline.” I kept my mouth shut. “For another, the hole looks beveled on the front and the back sides, and bullet wounds widen only in the direction of the bullet’s travel.”
    “Right,” I said. “As the bullet smashes through the bone, the shock wave propagates in the shape of a cone, producing a larger hole at the exit. Like those funnel-shaped holes BB guns make in plate-glass windows—tiny on the outside, big on the inside.”
    “Spoken like a boy who had a BB gun,” she said.
    “Hey, a guy hears stories,” I said. “Now quit stalling. What else do you notice about this hole, which might or might not have been left by a gunshot?”
    “Okay, what looks like beveling on both sides of the bone isn’t, really—it’s a smooth, undamaged surface. The beveling made by a bullet is rougher, and there are usually fracture lines radiating from the hole.”
    “Excellent,” I said. “So this is…?”
    She furrowed her brow. “A foramen?”
    “Exactly. A natural opening in the bone. Rare in the female sternum, by the way—ten percent of men have them, but only about four percent of women. That’s why you’ve never seen one before.” She grinned, excited by the new nugget of firsthand knowledge. This, too—like the thrill of finding forensic clues—I found addictive. “Okay, let’s keep moving. Are you ready for what comes next?” Her grin vanished, and she took a deep breath. “This could be disturbing,” I added. She nodded. “If you have any trouble, just take a break and step outside. No shame in that.” She nodded again, eyes wide. I took up the sprayer again, but not before turning down the pressure by half. As the adipocere melted away from the center of the woman’s body, I felt a sense of amazement I’d experienced only a few other times in my life. A thicket of tiny, nested bones began to appear, suspended in a paler lump of adipocere—
    a lump that had once been amniotic fluid and fetal tissue. Our young woman had been pregnant—was pregnant still, in a way—with a baby whose birth, at my hands now, was years overdue. It was a grim, sad delivery I was about to perform.
    “We’re going to need a two-millimeter screen over the drain please, Miranda.”
    She scurried over to a cabinet and pulled out a disk of wire mesh, which she fitted into the round neck of the drain. I hoped it was fine enough to catch everything.
    The tiny vertebrae were like little seed pearls on a string; the body, or centrum, of each vertebra was no bigger than a lentil. On either side of each vertebral body floated the two halves of the neural arch, which would have fused to one another in the first few years of life, then fused to the centrum sometime around preschool or kindergarten age. At the base of the spine nestled the minute beginnings of the hip bones, about the size and shape of baby lima beans. Folded up alongside the spine were the legs: the femur was about the size of the middle bone of my index finger; the tibia was more like a pinky bone. The bones of the feet were so small, they’d have to be screened out with a sieve. Arching at right angles to the axis of the spine and legs were ribs—thin, curving slivers so light and frail they might have come from a quail or a trout. The bones of the skull, which was the lowermost point of the fetal skeleton, were also birdsized; the occipital, which formed the base of the skull, was no bigger than a quarter.
    “Hard to believe we all start out this small and fragile,” I said. “Looks like she was just about midway through her pregnancy.”
    “How can you tell? Who’s researched this? Who could bear to?”
    “A couple of