Page 22
Mara moves easily around the room, slipping back into work mode. She points things out as she goes.
“Gloves are here,” she taps a cabinet. “Cleaning tools are laid out already, but there’s more if you need them. Scale, calipers, camera setup—battery’s charged.”
I nod, tracking everything as she points, letting the familiarity settle me. It’s not my usual environment, but it’s close enough to feel workable.
“The M.E. isn’t here. He covers the whole region. He finished his initial exam this morning and got called out on another case, so you’ll have the place to yourself.” She hesitates for a beat, then nods, already retreating. “I’ll be close by. Call if you need anything.”
The door closes softly behind her.
I step closer to the table and let the noise in my head settle, already beginning a quiet mental inventory.
I reach into my bag for my recorder and pick up the heavy manila folder resting on the instrument tray, my eyes scanning the bold, black ink on the tab before I click Record.
“Case File SH-2026-042. Serena Harper, forensic anthropologist. September 29th, 2026, zero eight fifteen hours. Commencing preliminary skeletal examination,” I say, my voice flat and clinical, completely at odds with the woman Mara just hugged.
“Evidence of blunt force trauma is extensive and catastrophic,” I continue, the red light on the device bleeding into the stainless steel. “Multiple long bones exhibit comminuted fractures consistent with high-energy blunt force trauma.”
High-energy impact. A fall.
Casey flashes through my mind.
She chased risk like it was a debt she had to collect, filming herself jumping off structures that made my palms sweat just from the playback. BASE jumping. Free climbing. A fall would be the logical conclusion to her narrative—a predictable biological consequence for a girl who lived like gravity was a suggestion.
Except something doesn’t fit.
I lean closer to the skull.
“The postcranial blunt force trauma is consistent with a fall,” I say slowly.
I adjust the light.
“But this isn’t.”
The injury to the skull is focal. Localized. Different from the widespread catastrophic damage I’ve been cataloging.
Someone hit her.
I can feel the thought tightening in my chest, a physical constriction of my own intercostal muscles. What the fuck happened to you, Casey?
No.
Stop.
I don’t know if this is her. I don’t know anything yet, and speculating on an unconfirmed identity is a failure of intellectual rigor. I need to pull back. I need to be the examiner, not the friend.
“Subject is provisionally estimated to be female,” I say, forcing my eyes back to the remains. “Available pelvic morphology is consistent with female sex, but the ossa coxae are incomplete. Cranial features—including the supraorbital margins and mastoid processes—also suggest female sex, though damage from blunt force trauma limits their diagnostic value. Definitive determination will require recovery of the missing elements or confirmatory DNA analysis.”
I move on before my thoughts can follow the implications.
“Epiphyseal fusion is nearly complete in the primary long bones, but the medial clavicular epiphysis remains unfused. The iliac crest shows stage three ossification. Morphology is consistent with a late-adolescent sub-adult.”
Late teens. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Old enough to have a driver’s license and a life full of secrets, but young enough that her skeleton was still deciding who it wanted to be. The smoothness of the bone is devastating; there hasn't been enough time for the world to leave any other marks besides the ones that killed her and what came after.
This distal femur is incomplete, as is the proximal tibia. Enough bone is absent around the knee that reconstruction of the joint is impossible from what has been recovered.
I am fighting back tears.
Casey shattered that leg in ninth grade. The surgeons used a modular endoprosthesis because there wasn’t enough bone left for a conventional reconstruction.
