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 let the job get to me too often, because then I’m no use to the very people who need my help the most. But you’re right, sixteen or seventeen is too early to have a baby for most young women. I’m not so sure I agree with you on the whole adoption thing. It depends on what kind of family a mom has, how close they are. If an aunt or a grandmother can raise the child, everything is fine.”
“That sounds good, but I don’t think you really believe it,” Josh said, his words back to the flatter tone he’d used most of the time. “Everything isn’t going to be fine in a situation that allows the body of a young girl to be missing for seven or eight years without a lot of public outcry.” His eyes narrowed as Kyra watched him think.
“You said before that you might know by Monday what ethnic makeup these kids were. How do you figure that out from bones?”
“The differences can be subtle,” Kyra admitted. “Different bone densities in some structures, the shape of an eye socket…”
“You can say orbit. I know that much. My mom was a nurse.” Something about that memory was painful for him, because now Josh was the one to have a brief look of sadness across his face. Kyra filed that away as something else to discuss later.
“Okay. I’m never sure with people whether or not I should keep things simple in case I’m talking way over their heads, or just talk to them the way I would to a colleague. It sounds like you’re closer to the colleague level.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but coming from you that’s a compliment. So, colleague, how long are you going to stay and work on all of this tonight?”
Kyra shrugged. “As long as it takes. There’s nobody waiting at home except Ranger, and he’s pretty self-sufficient.”
Joshua’s forehead wrinkled. “I don’t remember you mentioning a live-in…friend before.”
Kyra stifled a giggle. “That’s because Ranger’s a cat. About fourteen pounds of black fur and attitude who keeps my place free of field mice and crickets, and still doesn’t understand after eight years why I won’t let him go outside and stalk them out there.”
“Oh.” Josh smiled faintly. “Well, if you’re not going to hurry home to him, would you like to grab dinner someplace? I’ve heard some of the other staff members talking about a Thai restaurant not too far from here.”
“I am hungry. And as long as this is just colleague-to-colleague,”