Stone Cold Heart (Tracers #13)(14)

“Hey, you’re here,” Aaron said from the doorway. He wore a white lab coat over jeans and a T-shirt.

“Sorry I’m late. Had to stop for caffeine.” Sara grabbed her lab coat off the hook behind the door. “You ray her yet?”

The remains had been a her since the pelvis was unearthed yesterday afternoon. Because of the flared iliac blades and wide subpubic angle to accommodate childbirth, Sara had quickly determined the remains were female.

“All finished,” Aaron said. “X-rays are up on my laptop.”

“Great. Any messages?”

“No.”

“I’m expecting a phone call from Dr. Underwood sometime today.”

His eyes widened. “Clifton Underwood?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I haven’t heard anything, and definitely nothing from him. The phone’s been silent.”

After a gulp of coffee, Sara followed him into the lab and stopped short when she saw the bones spread out on a table. “You cleaned them already?”

He shrugged sheepishly. “I’ve been here since this morning.”

“You didn’t have to do all that.”

“I know.”

“Thanks. Wow.”

Cleaning bits of flesh from a skeleton was a messy, stinky process that involved boiling batches of bones in a giant kettle. It wasn’t the worst part of the job, but it certainly wasn’t her favorite.

She followed Aaron to his notebook computer, which was open on the black slate counter. He tapped the mouse to bring the screen to life. Half a dozen X-rays appeared, two rows of three.

“Not a lot to see, unfortunately.”

Sara frowned at the images, hoping to spot anything to contradict his assessment. But as she’d observed down in the gorge, the skeleton displayed no obvious cause of death, such as a bullet hole or a compression fracture to the skull. She tapped the skull image to enlarge it but didn’t see any traces of metal left by a projectile.

“No bullet wipe,” she said.

“None anywhere.”

“And we never recovered the hyoid.”

“Nope.”

She glanced across the room at the table. “Let’s have a look at the hands.”

Sara surveyed the skeleton—what they’d recovered of it, anyway. They’d collected a grand total of 152 bones, which wasn’t bad, given how long the remains had been exposed to the elements.

Sara stood for a long moment, studying everything. Aaron had done a nearly perfect job arranging the bones. She moved a metacarpal from the right hand to the left and then rotated a tarsal bone in the foot.

Of the 206 bones in the human body, fifty-four were in the hands, and they often told a story. Pulling a magnifying glass from her pocket, Sara leaned over the right hand and studied the phalanges.

“No parry wounds that would indicate she fought off a knife attack.” She walked around the table and examined the left hand. “I wish we had that hyoid.”

Not all strangulation cases resulted in a broken hyoid, but some did, and it could be a useful indicator for cause of death.

No such luck in this case.

“I couldn’t come up with anything,” Aaron said.

“I’ll keep looking.” She glanced up as he checked a text on his phone.

“So, listen—”

“Feel free to take off,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. You worked the weekend.”

“I don’t mind or anything, but I’ve got an Ultimate game later, so—”

“Go. And thanks for everything. You went above and beyond.”

“Okay, well, I sent you the films, so check your email.” He shut down his computer and took off his lab coat as Sara returned her attention to the hands.

“You can come, you know.”

She looked up, and Aaron was watching her from the doorway.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The game. It’s a bunch of us from Delphi—me, Ben, Roland, Laney. We play every second Monday at five.”

“Laney plays Ultimate Frisbee?” Sara tried to picture the pale-skinned cyber sleuth running around a field in the ninety-degree heat.

“Sometimes, yeah.” He shrugged. “Or she watches from the sidelines with friends. It’s a pretty good time, if you want to join us.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got to give a lecture tonight.” One she’d forgotten about until she woke up this morning and realized she hadn’t pulled her slides together. She’d been distracted with her trip to Springville. “Maybe next time.”

“Sure.” But he lifted an eyebrow skeptically as he left the room.

Sara refused to feel guilty for turning him down. It was nothing personal. She really did have a presentation to prep for. But she’d turned down quite a few invitations lately. At some point, her coworkers would simply stop asking, and she’d miss her window of opportunity to make friends. Not that she absolutely needed a lot of friends at her workplace, but she spent most of her time here, so it seemed like the logical place to start.

The problem was that most of the people she’d met at work were already part of a couple. Kelsey, Mia, Laney. Brooke had been one of the few holdouts when Sara first moved here, but as of Saturday, she was married, too. And married people tended to try to nudge their friends into relationships. Sara wasn’t interested. She was happily single.