The Skeleton's Knee (16 page)

“With a door, though, nothing happens where the metal hinge touches the wood. The metal might rust a bit, and the wood might swell in the dampness, but they remain two separate entities, as does the sawdust, unless you or a breeze removes it. With bone, it’s different; over time, it begins to heal over, removing the rough edges of the cut, along with any residual blood, and also reabsorbing the minute shards of bone dust that were created by the surgeon’s saw blade.”

“Here, however, there was very little healing. The line where the bone ends and the metal begins is only a couple of months old at the most. The residual blood has been reabsorbed, which takes a few weeks, but microscopic remnants of bone dust remain. Also, I could still see the striations left behind by the surgeon’s saw—not fresh, but again, not very old.”

I shook my head, amazed at my luck. “There’s no way you could know why the knee was replaced?”

She smiled regretfully. “’Fraid not, Lieutenant. Could have been any number of things. There was one additional aspect I thought was odd, though.”

I looked at her carefully. “What was that?”

For the first time, she seemed slightly hesitant. “Well, it’s trespassing into an area I really know nothing about, so there’s probably a perfectly mundane explanation for it, but one last indicator that this surgery took place slightly before his death is the amount of leachate surrounding the bone cement. Normally, after an operation like this, the cement, as it sets, leaches out somewhat over the next few months. The leachate is carried away and cleansed by the circulatory system.”

“And here you found some leachate still hanging around?”

I could tell by her tone that there was a little more to it. “Yes, that’s true, and it helped corroborate my time estimate based on the bone fragments, but it was the leachate itself that caught my eye. It looked different from what I’m used to. Now, I admit, it’s not every day that I have a skeleton with a prosthesis implanted, so I’m hardly an expert in the field, but still, it made me wonder. So I did a scraping and had the cement analyzed. The results came back just before you got here. It turns out the cement was a slurry of sorts, heavily impregnated with antibiotics.”

“And that’s not normal?” I asked.

She gave me a rueful smile and shrugged. “That’s just it. I don’t know, and I haven’t had time to check around. Bev’s the only physician I had immediately available, but she didn’t know, either.”

I immediately thought of Michael Brook, Ellen’s old doctor, and the man who had hoped to operate on Abraham Fuller. He was both old enough to have been practicing back in the sixties and experienced enough to at least get me started in the right direction. “Were there any markings on the knee? Something I could use to trace it?”

She pulled a piece of paper out of her lab coat and gave it to me. “Two separate numbers. I have to admit, though, I’m not sure how useful they’ll be. I don’t know if they’re serial numbers or not.”

I glanced at them, one with four digits, a dash, and two more, the other starting with a letter, followed by three digits. I shoved the paper into my pocket; that would make another question to ask Brook. “How about the way he looked? Can’t you reconstruct a face from the skull?”

She shrugged. “You can. Some of the same people who spent their lives measuring bones also took fresh cadavers and stuck pins into their faces, trying to determine if there were any common denominators between peoples’ skin thicknesses. There are reams of figures for chins and foreheads and cheekbones and upper and lower lips. The cadavers must have been wonderful to look at afterward. Needless to say, this was done in the good old days, and not to the aristocracy, either.”

She grabbed a stool at this point and sat, giving a small shrug. “In answer to your question, I can’t really answer. I don’t think much of the technique myself, but others have had success with it. Clyde Snow, one of the giants in the business, once tested how accurate reconstructions could be. He had one done of a male skull, took a photograph of it, and then placed that photo on a poster with seven other head shots, one of which was actually the real guy. People were asked to match the clay reconstruction to the original. Of two hundred guesses, one hundred and thirty-five were right. Pretty good numbers.”

“So why don’t you like the system?”

“How often have you seen two faces that really look the same? Like twins? It’s pretty rare. But can you say the same about two skulls? Even to us, they look pretty similar—we have to work hard just to tell the girls from the boys. I don’t know how you can slap some clay on a bone and make it look like the original; there’re just too many variables, from scars to fat to facial hair. I’ve always felt that reconstructions are expensive and time-consuming shots in the dark.”

I smiled at her conviction. “I guess I won’t ask you to recommend a sculptor.”

She chuckled then. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind. It’s just that you can get so much solid information from remains like these, and still people jump up and down for the Hollywood special effects.”

I waved my hands in protest. “Not me. I’m quite content. I do have to ask the big question, though. What killed him?”

“At last,” Hillstrom exclaimed, throwing up her hands.

Nora Gold began to laugh.

I stared at both of them, nonplussed.

“Nora promised me that if you asked for the cause of death,” Hillstrom explained, “I, as medical examiner, could have the honors. Otherwise, I’d never get to say anything.”

I looked at them both quizzically.

“You’ll have to excuse us. We are old, old friends…”

“And very, very tired,” Gold added.

Over the years, I had become genuinely fond of Beverly Hillstrom, despite a professional coolness that I took merely as her style but that others often misinterpreted as barely veiled hostility. Seeing her cutting up with her small dynamo of a friend reinforced my appreciation of her and marked, I thought, a small turning point in our friendship. I doubted she would have let many people see her so relaxed.

Hillstrom moved to the skeleton’s chest, putting her finger on a neat hole slightly below the center of the sternum. “In my opinion, Lieutenant, a single bullet killed him, or at least could have. This hole fits the bullet we recovered to a tee, and the breakout pattern on the inside is entirely consistent with a bullet wound. Also, bone growth stopped at the time trauma was inflicted; none of the remodeling Nora mentioned earlier happened here. However, since we don’t actually have any soft tissue to consult, I can’t swear that the bullet hit his heart in a lethal fashion. But that’s what I think happened.”

I pointed to several broken ribs. “What about these?”

She pursed her lips. “Those are from last night’s ambush. We didn’t find a single indication of any old trauma beyond the one bullet hole, which encourages me to think the cardiac wound was the culprit. But who can tell? He could have had half his midsection removed by a simultaneous shotgun blast without a scratch left on his skeleton.”

“But you’re not saying he might have died of pneumonia or scarlet fever or something nonhomicidal, are you?”

“My opinion is homicide, and that’s what’s going on the certificate. But anything’s possible when you have this little to work on.”

I turned to Dr. Gold. “How long would you guess he’d been underground?”

She made a face at that. “That’s a tough one—it depends so much on the burial site. Quite a few years, certainly.”

“Closer to five, or twenty-five?”

“Longer rather than shorter. Fifteen to twenty years wouldn’t be out of line—possibly more.”

There was a long pause as we all found ourselves staring at the remains of our now certified murder victim, the stillness of his tarnished bones in violent contradiction to the manner of his death.

Dr. Gold laid her hand on my arm gently. “We’ve told you everything we can. We’ll be giving you the photos and the X-rays and whatever else you need and you’ll be on your own; so I was wondering if I could ask you a favor.”

“Sure—anything…”

“Tell me what happened—tell me who he was.”

I squeezed her hand and looked back at the skeleton, realizing for the first time the bonds she established with each of her “patients” in order to do her work well. It was a startling glimpse at the humanity that underlay professions like hers and Beverly Hillstrom’s—occupations that were at best regarded with ghoulish curiosity.

“If I ever find out, I will.”

I DROVE STRAIGHT FROM BURLINGTON
to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, not bothering to check in at the office. What Nora Gold and Beverly Hillstrom had given me was the breakthrough I’d been hungering for—tangible evidence linking the skeleton, and therefore Abraham Fuller, to a concrete historical event. If I was lucky, the metal knee would not only lead to the surgeon who’d implanted it but to the identity of the skeleton, and possibly that of last night’s sniper, whose desperate attempt to destroy the knee had given my hopes a boost.

I found Michael Brook where his nurse said I would, in the hospital cafeteria—a small, pleasant, sunlit room with one window looking out on the parking lot and another overseeing the front lobby. It was one of the town’s best-kept secrets: a low-priced, high-quality, friendly place to eat that was rarely crowded.

Mike was sitting by the outside window, his artificial leg stuck straight under the chair opposite him, finishing up a chicken-salad sandwich. It was well beyond the lunch hour, and there were only two other people in the place, sitting together in a far corner.

“Joe,” he called out, “you’ve been grabbing headlines again.”

He pulled a rolled up newspaper from his lab coat pocket and slapped it on the table.
CARS RIDDLED BY SNIPER ON I-91
, the headline screamed. There were pictures of the burial scene, a shot of the hearse on the interstate, and one of Red, our tracker dog, sitting on his butt, looking bored.

Mike hoisted his leg out of the way and I sat across the small table from him. “You got a couple of minutes?”

“Sure. This is my afternoon off. I was about to get rid of some paperwork. This about Fuller again?”

I shook my head and tapped the picture of the burial scene. “This.”

His eyes widened. “The skeleton? Who was it?”

“I’ve just spent the morning with Hillstrom and a forensic anthropologist friend of hers, trying to find out. I got an amazing amount of information from them, but a couple of things came up I was hoping you could help me with.”

He finished off his Coke and sat back. “Shoot.”

“The skeleton was outfitted with an artificial knee.”

An interested grin appeared between the mustache and the beard. “So I read.”

“Well, the anthropologist figures the guy died within a few months of getting that knee…”

“Of an infection?”

“No, no. He was shot; as far as I know, the operation went fine. But Nora Gold, the anthropologist, thought the leachate from the bone cement looked a little odd, so she had it analyzed. Turns out it was heavily laced with antibiotics.”

Brook stared at me for a long moment without moving. “Why was the knee put in?” he finally asked.

“We don’t know yet.”

He turned his gaze toward the window and scratched his whiskered cheek absentmindedly. “Huh. Did Nora Gold—or Hillstrom, for that matter—notice if any other kind of surgical procedure had been done on the leg?”

“They didn’t mention it if they did. I looked at the thing and it seemed clean as a whistle, except for the fancy metalwork. Why?”

“Just kicking a few ideas around in my head. What about the general condition of the guy. Could they tell if he’d been healthy, or suffering from hemophilia or TB?”

“No; in fact, Gold’s guess was he was a jock—a runner, a ballet dancer. She even hypothesized he’d had a bit of an ego, which further helped to keep him trim.”

He chuckled at that. “So, the ego’s in the bones. I always wondered. Look, let’s assume she’s right—that he was a perfectly healthy, normal specimen. That means the knee was a result of trauma. Now, normally, a patient comes in with his knee shattered, we open it up, clean it out, and let it sit for a few days, watching and treating for infection, which is almost a given in those cases. Then, we might even fuse the joint temporarily while we scratch our heads about the next move. To make a long story short, the guy’s left dangling for quite a while before we finally decide to slip him a metal knee, assuming that’s what we opt for. Then, we cut a little here, drill a little there, dab on a bunch of cement, and put the whole thing together.”

“The point is, by the time that happens, the infection-fighting stage—as a result of the wound, that is—is over, so there’s no need for antibiotics in the cement.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and gave me a satisfied look.

“That may mean something to you, Mike, but it don’t mean squat to me.”

He laughed loudly, drawing stares from the other table and giggles from the counter servers. “Right, right. I guess it wouldn’t. The point is, the only justification for a surgeon to apply a cement mixed with antibiotics is because he slapped the joint in right off the bat, with the wound still fresh. Very jazzy thing to do—also a bit foolish, for my money. Nowadays, with all those hungry lawyers running around, you’d have to have your head examined.”

“Those bones were twenty years old.”

He grew animated with interest. “The bonanza years. Between 1965 and 1975, there were about two hundred and fifty different knee designs out there. Everybody with a slide rule and a lathe was cranking them out. Then the FDA got twitchy and brought down the hammer. You wouldn’t have a picture of the thing, would you?”

I smiled at his enthusiasm, and my own good fortune. I opened the manila envelope Nora Gold had prepared for me and slid out the glossies of the knee assembly.

Brook studied them intently. “Can’t say I recognize it; probably built by one of the companies that went under. Big son of a gun—no wonder the metal detector sniffed it out.”

I was going to ask him how he knew about the detector, then remembered the newspaper. “They don’t make them that big anymore?”