A Merciful Silence (Mercy Kilpatrick #4)(45)

Protect my gun.

He started to push to his feet and turn to face his attacker as his left hand tried to reach his weapon at his right hip. His balance relied on his right hand’s still gripping the railing, preventing him from using his gun hand. His body burned as if a mine had exploded in his back.

The second strike hit his left kidney, and Truman fell to both knees. Both his hands shot forward to stop his skull from crashing into the concrete steps. Fire radiated from two places in his back. Bright lights flashed behind his eyes, momentarily blinding him.

A baseball bat?

“Fucking cop!”

“Asshole!”

Two attackers.

He tried to turn again. A blow hit his temple, and the flashes of light went black.

Simon will be hungry.

His head bounced off the concrete, and then he knew no more.





TWENTY-ONE

“This has to be boring for you,” Dr. Harper said to Mercy as they looked at dental films in the medical examiner’s office for the second time that week.

“Heck no. I find it fascinating,” corrected Mercy. It was true.

The Hartlage films from the Burns office had been delivered to Dr. Harper, who’d called Mercy within an hour to tell her the first Caucasian skulls they’d found were definitely Corrine and Richard Hartlage. Mercy asked Dr. Harper to demonstrate how she’d come to the conclusion.

Again the small grayscale rectangles on the screen looked like a jumbled mess to Mercy.

“How long did it take for you to learn to read these?” she asked the dentist.

Dr. Harper tilted her head as she thought. “It feels like I’ve always known, but we learned to identify the teeth in films very early in dental school. Years of working with them after I graduated also taught me hundreds of things I never encountered during school. I’ve easily examined fifty thousand films. Everyone has unique qualities to their teeth, the roots, and the bone around them.”

Mercy looked again. She could recognize fillings and crowns and root canals, but that was about it.

“What did you find?” she asked.

“Let’s start with Richard Hartlage.” Dr. Harper’s lips twisted. “The copies his old office made aren’t the greatest. They’re dark. I would have told the assistant to redo them, but I can work with them. I put the films I shot at the top of the screen.”

Mercy nodded, noting the films on the bottom were much darker.

“On my film, he’s missing two molars on the lower right side.” She indicated a wide empty space on her film. “On the dark film, he has those teeth, but do you see how the crest of the bone steeply angles down toward the roots of both of those teeth? This was caused by gum disease. Over time it destroys the bone that anchors teeth. A healthy bone level would have been higher on the root, just below the bulbous part of the tooth, like on this one.” Dr. Harper pointed at another tooth on the film. The crest of bone was flat.

“You’re not surprised that those teeth are missing on the films you took.”

“Not at all. When comparing old films and new, teeth and their roots can always be missing on the newest films, but you can’t add a tooth and root that weren’t there before. Unless you count implants, but those are completely different. They look like screws in the jaw.”

“That still doesn’t prove this is Richard. It could be someone else.”

“It doesn’t. But then I look at the amalgam filling on tooth number thirteen on this old film, and it’s still the exact same shape on the new. Same with these three other amalgam fillings. They are identical on both sets of films. But on number five, the old film shows an amalgam filling that involves two surfaces of the tooth. Now that tooth has a filling that involves three surfaces.”

“There’s an inconsistency?”

“No. The filling was replaced with a bigger one. Fillings will never be replaced by smaller ones or disappear, but they can be replaced with larger ones. If tooth five had no filling, I’d know this isn’t Richard.”

“You’re convinced it’s him?”

“Without a doubt.” Confidence rang in her voice.

“And Corrine?”

Dr. Harper pulled up new films. “Corrine had better dental health. Her old films show no fillings, but she’s received two amalgam fillings which show up in the films I took on the skull.”

“Then how can you be sure it’s her?”

Mercy swore the dentist’s eyes twinkled.

“There are other markers besides fillings. Look at the roots on this tooth. See how the ends suddenly point toward the back of the mouth instead of going straight down?”

Mercy noted that all the other teeth had perfectly straight roots.

“I’d hate to extract this tooth with those difficult root tips—I’d send her to a specialist if she’d needed it removed. But my point is that the roots are identical on both sets of films. The same tooth on the opposite side of her mouth does the same thing, and they match.”

“It’s not a common root formation?”

“It’s not uncommon. But these are identical.” She moved one of her films over the old one and Mercy saw that everything lined up perfectly. The crooked roots, the straight roots, and the shapes of the other teeth. “I had to retake the new film a few times to match the angle of the old one, but I caught it.”