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

be seen; instead an area measuring less than one inch square filled the Smithsonian’s twenty-foot screen. The surface of the outer, cortical bone—ivory smooth to the naked eye and to probing fingertips—appeared ragged and spongy, like bread dough allowed to rise for too long. The small notch was now an immense fissure, wider than the span of my arms. I outlined it with the pointer. “Look carefully at the cut mark,” I said. “What do you see?”
    “There’s a chunk of something down in the cut,” a man near the front called out quickly. This fifty-dollar-a-head crowd was quick and competitive, like a bunch of straight-A students competing in Brain Bowl.
    “Very good,” I said. Lodged deep in the fissure was what appeared to be a boulder, several times the size of my head. “That looks pretty big under the electron microscope, but it’s actually a tiny speck, about a thousandth of an inch in diameter. About the thickness of the down on a newborn baby’s head. We analyzed that speck with an attachment to the microscope, something called an atom probe. Anybody want to guess what that speck is?”
    Comments popped like kernels of corn. “Blood.” “DNA.” “Semen?” “Ooh, gross.” “Blood.” “Steel.”
    “Steel’s close,” I said, “but not quite right. That’s a particle of cerium oxide. Cerium oxide is a ceramic that’s used to make knife sharpeners. The man who stabbed this girl had just sharpened his knife.”
    A woman exclaimed, “Oh, dear God.”
    The man near the front said, “So they did catch the killer?”
    I always hated answering this question. “Unfortunately, no. If this were an episode ofCSI, they would have arrested him after fifty-nine minutes. But in real life, people get away with murder. The police thought she’d been killed by one of her relatives, an uncle; the rumor was, he had a big pot patch and Leatha had threatened to tell the police about it. Her body was found in the woods near his house, hidden in a trash heap.” I always had trouble telling the next part. “The police actually found a cerium knife sharpener in his kitchen drawer.” I heard murmurs of distress and indignation from the audience.
    “But there was no direct evidence tying him to the crime. ‘A lot of people have cerium knife sharpeners,’
    the prosecutor told me. ‘Hell,I have a cerium knife sharpener, but that doesn’t make me a killer.’ They never made an arrest, and that’s one of the sad parts of this job: Sometimes your best just isn’t quite good enough. I think we let Leatha down.”
    I ended my lecture with a case that was gruesome but not so sad: the case of a woman who died at home and whose body was eventually eaten by her three hungry dogs. By the time I recounted the search for the woman’s missing diamond ring—a search that required a hapless sheriff’s deputy to collect a bushel of dog crap, which I X-rayed in a fruitless search for the ring—the audience was shrieking in horrified amusement.Leave them laughing if you can, I thought.They’ll get sad again soon enough. After the lights came up and the screen came down, I packed up my slides and answered a few individual questions, things people hadn’t felt comfortable asking in a crowd—one woman wondered whether I would be able to tell, twenty years postmortem, if a sister’s fatal gunshot wound was a case of murder or suicide. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Women don’t tend to commit suicide by gunshot, but if the M.E. who did the autopsy was competent, I doubt that I’d see it any differently.”
    As the crowd gradually trickled out, I noticed a man lingering near the back of the auditorium. Unlike most of the jeans-and-sweater crowd, he wore a wool suit, an oxford-cloth shirt, and a silk tie. The clothes looked expensive but subdued, as if the man wore them because he liked them, not because he wanted to impress others. He made his way forward as I finished packing my slides and