it going?” she asked softly from where she sat a few feet away doing paperwork.
“Okay, I guess,” he said without looking up. “There are a couple of dozen missing teens listed in the corridor during those four years you pointed out. If you’re sure your victims are female, that takes out a few but leaves plenty more. Any ideas yet how many we’re looking at?”
“I think we have three individuals,” Kyra said, trying to give Josh a reminder that these were people they were talking about. “And they’re definitely female. I can tell from the brow ridges on the skulls and the size and shape of the pelvic bones.”
Joshua winced but didn’t turn away from his computer. “I guess that narrows it down a little bit. How specific are you going to be able to get, anyway?”
“You’ll probably be surprised by how much I’ll probably be able to tell you,” Kyra told him. “Haven’t you ever hung out with any of the forensic experts at the bureau?”
Joshua shook his head, and Kyra noticed that the light caught small glints of silver in the ginger of his temples. That was new and it disturbed her a little. What kind of stress did that to someone who had to be in his mid-thirties? “Not by choice. For the most part I took the information they had to give me and went back to my own investigations.”
Ouch. They were definitely going to have to work on Josh’s attitude toward people. Kyra tried to think of ways to help him start seeing the individual nature of those around him, whether they were crime victims or fellow workers. Maybe a little education was the answer. “Do you want to know more?” Kyra wasn’t sure what his response was going to be, or why she was so interested. In the past two days Joshua had come in on time, done his job quietly and left when the rest of the day shift did. If he’d gotten to know anyone yet it would be news to her.
“I’m not sure. What would that entail?” His normally pale face appeared even paler. Why hadn’t she ever noticed that he had a dusting of light freckles across his cheekbones? As his face blanched a little, they stood out in relief.
“Depends on how much you want to know. I won’t force you into anything you don’t want to be part of.” Kyra gave him a quick smile, expecting him to answer with one in return, but he stayed solemn. “I think most of it is really interesting, but not everybody does.” She thought about bringing up the young state policeman a few days back, but held back. That might just bring out Josh’s competitive nature and she didn’t want him doing anything just to prove that he could best somebody else.
“I’d like to know a little more, but I’ll warn you up front that I don’t handle detailed medical stuff very well. I know there won’t be blood involved here, but there have to be plenty of other things that will bother me in your labs.”
“That’s possible. I’ll sketch things out in broad terms for you and if you want to know more about an area, ask me, okay?”
Josh nodded, a tiny bit of color coming back into his face. His shoulders began to lower from the tense position they’d held almost up to his ears, and he looked like somebody who was really listening.
She took a deep breath and prayed silently for guidance and wisdom. “So, the first thing that we do when all we’ve got to work with is bones is try to find as many teeth as possible. Even if we can’t match dental records to a victim, the condition of their mouth tells us a lot about who they were.”
Josh’s brow wrinkled for a minute, and then his expression cleared. “Okay, that makes sense. I guess people out on the fringes of things don’t really have great dental insurance or anything, do they?”
“They don’t.” Kyra was glad that he had picked up on what she said this quickly. “When you’re down on your luck there are a lot of things more important than dental care, like eating and having a roof over your head. We can also tell a lot about age from looking at somebody’s teeth. If their third molars have erupted they’re probably past eighteen.”
“Third molars. Does that mean wisdom teeth?” He really did catch on fast. Now, if she could just somehow steer that intellect into learning a little compassion…
“Right. And one of the reasons I could figure out that these three girls were younger than eighteen was that none of them show any signs of having wisdom teeth coming through to the surface.”
“What if you don’t have any teeth?”
“Then it’s a lot harder to come up with an individual’s identity. We can figure out whether they’re male or female, and approximate size and age, but without teeth most skeletons are hard to identify. The only other help is if someone has had some kind of bone reconstruction that led to plates or rods being left in their body, or if injuries that show up on X rays leave a mark.”
“Do you have enough teeth to identify these three girls?” Kyra still wasn’t sure if his question came out of concern or merely the hope that the work he was doing wouldn’t be in vain.
“I think so. At least two of the three have had some dental work, so if we can match up X rays of a missing person we’ll be okay.”
“And the third one?”
“That’s going to be a bit more difficult. She should have gotten some dental work, but never did. There are unfilled cavities in a couple of her teeth and she could have used braces. I’m working on one angle that may help identify her, though.”
“Okay, you just admitted that without teeth or dental records it’s hard to identify somebody. Did she have broken bones, or some kind of screws somewhere?”
“No, but hers is probably the most recent of the three sets of bones to be left where they were. And there’s one other identification help if you’re dealing with female bones.” She stopped there, giving Josh a little time to figure out what she was talking about on his own.
He had his thoughtful look, then sadness flashed across his features. “You just said all of these girls were probably under eighteen, right? The only other thing I can think of that bones could tell you would be if they’d given birth. That’s awfully young, isn’t it?”
Kyra felt her emotions spiral back to a place she didn’t really want to revisit. It took her a minute or two to gather herself together to answer him. “Younger than most people, but it might help explain the lack of dental work. If this girl was already a mom before her eighteenth birthday, she had lots of other things on her mind.”
Joshua’s expression stayed clouded. “And it also means that someplace out there is a kid whose mother never came home one day. For his sake, or hers, I kind of hope she’d given the baby up for adoption.”
His statement showed more intensity, and more caring, than Kyra had seen from Josh so far. Maybe helping him care about others wouldn’t be as difficult as she’d thought. What he said also made Kyra wonder what his own childhood had been like. It wasn’t something she was going to ask him about, at least not yet. When she looked at him again he seemed to be studying her. “What?” she said reflexively, hoping she didn’t sound too sharp.
“I don’t know. You had a different look on your face there for a minute. Sad and kind of faraway. It’s not what I usually see.” And with that statement Kyra felt the slow heat of anger and confusion rise in her. How could she be so easy to read?
She gave herself a mental shake and straightened her shoulders. “Well, I guess it’s just these kids. I don’t
