The bone sizzled in Ruby’s hands all the way across the immaculate Reed College lawns, watered green with summer, to where a small set of stairs led down to an unmarked door. A small skull and crossbones plaque outside warned of danger.
Ruby opened this door to find a narrow hall, with a fan releasing the air of lab odors. Here Reed College students and staff worked on all sorts of projects, including the only nuclear reactor run by undergraduate students in the country.
But it was not nuclear power that interested Ruby. It was the small lab that lay at the end of the hall. Her best friend—arguably her only friend—had fought for a miniscule funding stream to create the lab, the first and only one of its kind in the country.
Ruby opened the heavy metal door and stood in the tiny area marked with orange tape where visitors were allowed without decontamination or a jumpsuit.
Her friend Delaney Ford was the only person in the lab, which was white on white. White floor, white shelves, white computers, white machines. The only color was the brown of the stacked body bags, all neatly labeled and numbered, on the white shelves. Delaney was a vision of white, too, wearing a white jumpsuit, white sneakers, and a white bonnet over her hair. Her face was covered with goggles and a mask.
She had not heard Ruby, because she was drilling.
The jawbone she was drilling had been placed in a metal vise on the white table where she worked. The molars glared across the room like malevolent eyes. Delaney was using a dental drill to bore into the core of one of the molars. It was here, Ruby knew, that she could potentially extract a DNA sample. The smell of burning bone filled the air, before being whisked away by the fans. It smelled like a dentist’s office.
Ruby waited, patiently watching the back of her studious friend. There were even more body bags than the last time she had visited. They were stacked all over. Some were full-sized bags containing entire skeletons, or close to it, while others were small parcels containing a single bone. In one corner was a stack of parcels, all labeledWillamette River. Thousands of unidentified bones had been pulled from the shipping river over the years. No one had any idea to whom they belonged, but Delaney planned to figure it out.
Ruby remembered the day they had met, years before at a public defense conference. Both had been invited for their work helping the innocent. Delaney was a single mom, trying to balance her job as an adjunct professor at Reed College with using her expertise in the growingfield of DNA to exonerate the falsely convicted. Ruby was making a name for herself as an exonerator—and earning an income, which helped pay for the missing women work—for her hands-on and often fearless investigations.
They had sat together at lunch, eating from the usual tray of stale sandwiches. Ruby had grabbed a dry and tasteless ham and Swiss, and Delaney was nibbling on a square of egg salad. Both drank black coffee and bottled water.
“There must,” Delaney had said, “be a better way.”
“What do you mean?” Ruby had asked.
“Imagine if instead of approaching each case piecemeal and testing for DNA like we’ve never had a murder case before, we had our own lab? We could create a system. One part of the system would be a DNA database. In upcoming years, we’re going to see a spike in testing, trust me. The other part would be collecting unidentified remains.”
Even now, Ruby could still see the dry sandwich in her hand. She could see the paper cup of coffee. Certain moments were like that. Gold-plated.
“You’re not just talking about false convictions,” she had said.
“No. I’m talking about righting a wrong. Do you know we literally have hundreds of thousands of unidentified remains in this country? What if we knew who they were? Some might just be lost, unknown to history. But don’t those people deserve names, too? Others are victims of crimes, and we don’t even know it. Think of all the innocents we could exonerate. Think of all the cases we could solve.”
In that moment, Ruby knew they would become great friends, because they would have this, a mission to unite them. They thought alike.
It had taken years, but now Ruby was looking at it, the lab they had created.
The molar had split, and Delaney carefully removed a sample, dropping it in a glass tube. She stood up, stretching her back, and saw Ruby.
In a few long steps, the forensic scientist crossed the immaculate lab and smiled at her friend. Ruby smiled back—a huge smile, warm and happy. She held out the bone like a gift.
“What you got there?” Delaney asked.
“An old man found it in Chinook.”
Delaney looked into her friend’s eyes. She knew Ruby’s story.
“That had to be a hard place for you to visit,” she said.
She gently took the bundle and carried it to an exam table. She opened up the scrap of quilt. Ruby was waiting to see if the bone spoke to her, but she saw no reaction.
Delaney turned the bone over, examining the ends.
She frowned.
“These look like tooth marks.”
“There are wild pigs up there.”
“You lead the most interesting life.”
