When I called Martha after lunch to tell her I was ten-eight, she told me to call Doc Howard. I did. He told me to come pick up my jigsaw puzzle.
“Ain’t you gonna do a autopsy?”
“What’s to autopsy? You come get your box of parts so I can have my cooler back.”
The pathology lab at the state medical school always gives me the creeps. The big walk-in cooler has dead bodies laid out in it like turkeys in the meat section at Saveway. Doc Howard ain’t at all bothered—he’s been doin’ this since Moby Dick was a minnow. When I got there, he went in the cooler an’ come out with the state cops’ ice chest. It had a manila envelope duct-taped to the lid with the chain of custody form stuck to the outside with sticky tape. Half a dozen signatures’d been added to the form since I’d seen it last.
“You been passin’ my victim around like the latest joke,” I complained.
“I had faculty members from several specialties look at him. Their reports are in the envelope as addenda to mine.”
“So you figured out he was male. What else?”
“Yes. We were able to reconstruct enough of the pelvic girdle to determine sex, and the beveling around the hole in his frontal bone fragment makes the cause and manner of death rather apparent.”
I held up my hands. “Just gimme the short version, Doc. In English.”
He sighed like talkin’ to me was a pitiful waste of his time. “The bottom line is that all we can tell you is that your victim, a male who was probably in good antemortem health, was shot through the skull before or very shortly after death. He was subsequently consumed—eaten in the vernacular—by large carnivores, probably bears.” He gave me a Happy-now? look an’ waited.
“Thanks, Doc. That pretty much confirms what we figured. Any idea how old he was or how long he’s been dead?”
“He was old enough for the cranial sutures to have closed and the long-bone ends to have ossified, but not old enough to have any osteoporosis or arthritis—at least not in the joints you’ve got there. My guess is he was between eighteen and thirty-five. As for time of death, the condition of the remaining cartilage and ligament is consistent with a period between a few days and a couple of months.”
“Anythin’ else I should know?”
“Nothing comes to mind.”
“One more thing—Was he shot from the front or the back?”
“If the bullet had impacted just an inch lower, it would have hit him between the eyes.”