The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 Read Online Free PDF

THE rib that was projected, ten times larger than life, on a screen deep beneath the Mall in Washington, D.C. I was lecturing, as part of a series called Smithsonian Saturdays, to three hundred people who’d given up a weekend afternoon—and given up fifty bucks apiece—to sit in a windowless underground auditorium and view slides of decaying corpses, bullet-riddled skulls, and incinerated skeletons.
    I’d had a disappointing lunch meeting with Ed Ulrich, my former student. Actually, the lunch was great—we sampled a tasty variety of Native American dishes at the Museum of the American Indian—but the meeting was discouraging. Ed had sympathized with my funding plight, but his own program at the Smithsonian was confronting painful budget cuts, too, so he had no research money to funnel to his alma mater.
    Deflated by the bad news, I’d gotten off to a slow start in my talk, but by the time I reached the slide of the rib, my energy was as focused as the laser pointer. “That little notch in the rib is a cut mark made by a knife,” I told the audience. Clicking the projector’s remote, I advanced to the next slide, a close-up of the notch. At this magnification the rib looked the size of a tree trunk, and the cut might have been inflicted by a dull chain saw. “See how the outer layer of bone, the cortical bone, looks torn? You can tell by the way the fibers angle that the knife thrust was going from front to back.” I tapped my chest, just below my right collarbone. “This is the first right rib, by the way, so as the knife penetrated beyond the rib, it punctured the upper lobe of the lung.”
    “Excuse me?” A woman’s voice floated up to me from the darkness at the rear of the auditorium.
    “Did you have a question?”
    “Yes. You said a medical examiner did an autopsy on this girl’s body?”
    “Yes. The state medical examiner in Kentucky. The body of the girl—Leatha Rutherford was her name—was found hidden in a trash pile outside Lexington.”
    “Why didn’t the medical examiner see the stab wound?”
    “Good question. By the time she was found, she’d been dead nearly six months, so there just wasn’t enough soft tissue left to show the traces of a stab wound. The M.E. also took X-rays, but because the first rib runs underneath the clavicle”—I tapped my chest again—“the knife mark was masked on the X-rays.”
    “And how did you happen to find it?”
    “Dumb luck,” I said, earning a few laughs. “Actually, I have to give maternal doggedness the credit for this. Leatha was eighteen when she disappeared. The M.E. ruled her death a homicide, but he listed the actual cause of death as ‘unknown.’ She was buried, and the case more or less came to a dead end, but her mother wouldn’t give up. She kept nagging the detectives, and then she contacted me. She’d seen me on a television show—60 Minutes? no, wait, it was48 Hours, I think—and she sent me a letter. ‘If anyone can figure out how Leatha died, it’s you,’ she wrote. ‘Please help me.’ How do you say no to something like that? So I took a graduate student up to Kentucky, and we exhumed the bones. We brought them back to the morgue in Lexington, cleaned off the remaining tissue, and we got lucky. If dogs had gotten to the bones or if the knife had passed cleanly between the ribs instead of nicking this one, we would never have known what killed her.”
    The red laser dot twitched and skittered along the cut mark again.No wonder cats love these things, I thought. “That nick in the bone is about half an inch long, an eighth inch wide, and a quarter inch deep,” I said, “but here’s how it looks up really, really close.” I flicked to the next slide. “We wondered if we could learn anything more about the murder by examining the cut mark more closely, so we took the rib back to UT and looked at it under a scanning electron microscope.” At this scale, magnified hundreds of times, the edges of the rib could not