“Show me, please, Miss Craig.” Dr. Peerwani's good manners and respect for his workers never failed, even in this critical moment.

I picked up the skull and pointed to the semicircular hole in the middle of the forehead. It was beveled inward, surrounded with the sooty tattoo that was the earmark of a contact gunshot wound. Then I carefully turned the skull upside down so the doctor could see the exit wound. The bullet had left the lower part of the back of the skull, not too far from the spinal cord.

It was an unforgettable moment. We all stood in silence together, thinking back over the past weeks-all the remains we'd identified, the children we'd labored over, the death and destruction that Koresh had caused. We thought of the people whose remains had passed through our hands, the families who would never see their loved ones again. We thought of the horror of April 19, watching the flames flicker across our TV screens, and we thought of the rumors that had blared from those same TVs, the accusations that the FBI had murdered Koresh and his followers, the claims that the Bureau had set the fire that killed everyone. Now I held Koresh's skull in my hand for all of us to see, marked with the unmistakable evidence of the cult leader's death by an intimate hand. No FBI agent could ever have gotten close enough to Koresh to press a gun to his skull-and this beveled hole ringed with soot could only have been made by such a gun. Koresh was dead from a contact gunshot wound to the forehead, and we, together, had proven it.

Chip had been taking pictures throughout the reconstruction. Now he was hoping to get a good shot that would show the entrance and exit wounds at the same time. No camera could show both, however, no matter which way we turned the skull. I leaned over and whispered a suggestion to Max, who nodded in agreement. From our casual chitchat, he knew I was a certified medical illustrator, so when I offered to make drawings of the injuries-drawings that Dr. Peerwani could then use to describe his findings-Max readily agreed. Dr. Peerwani gave us his clearance right away, as did Dr. Doug Owsley, today's forensic-anthropology team leader.

Though I'd expected to draw only Koresh's head, Dr. Peerwani asked me to make drawings of his hip as well. While Max and I had been putting the skull together, our colleagues at the next table were examining his hip and lower spine. Spinal x-rays had matched x-rays taken by Koresh's chiropractor before the siege-one more proof that we had indeed found our man. Dr. Peerwani had also discovered that Koresh had a large, healing gunshot wound in his left innominate (hip) bone at the time he died, probably from the first shootout with ATF back in February. (Transcripts made from phone conversations and videotapes made during the siege had led investigators to this conclusion about Koresh's injury.) Chip had documented the hip bone with photographs, but Dr. Peerwani wanted a drawing as well. I was happy to oblige.

As I began my sketches, using the same sort of plain white paper and number 2 pencil that I'd used for Dr. Hughston, I couldn't help feeling that I had come full circle. I worked late into the night, making sketches of injuries in the rebuilt skull from four different angles, along with a view of the hole in Koresh's hip. These drawings became part of the autopsy report, which confirmed that Vernon Howell, a.k.a. David Koresh, had died from “massive craniocerebral trauma due to a contact gunshot wound to the mid forehead.” Before the next day was over, facsimiles of my drawings had been sent to FBI director William Sessions-and to his boss, Attorney General Janet Reno.

The drawings were such a success that Dr. Peerwani quickly asked me to illustrate several more of the gunshot wounds that had been sustained by the victims. That was how I spent my last week at Fort Worth -cleaning bloody brains from the skulls, gluing the pieces back together, and documenting my findings. Given how my first day had gone, it seemed a fitting conclusion.

I turned a page in my professional life during those few weeks. Now more than ever, I saw forensic anthropology as a crucial way of finding out what had happened, helping investigators solve the riddles of the dead. But I had also stumbled upon the contradiction that would always mark my work. No matter how skilled or professional I might become, my elation at solving forensic problems would forever coexist with suppressed despair for the victims.

When I returned to the university, I threw myself into my final year's casework with a new urgency. I was now more determined than ever to find a full-time job doing exactly the kind of work I had done at Waco. To do that job well, I'd need to soak up every bit of knowledge in the few months of school that remained to me. After all, my on-the-job initiation at Waco had put me under the supervision of some of the most distinguished forensic anthropologists in the world. Once I graduated, I'd be on my own.

THE BLACK BLOWFLIES were so heavy and slow in the summer air that I could knock them to the ground with my bare hand. The two dead bodies over which they swarmed already seethed with maggots, offspring of the flies that had gotten there several days before me. As I knelt beside the woman's body, sweat running from my forehead and puddling inside my oversized glasses, I felt as though someone had draped my shoulders with a hot, wet blanket.

The bodies lay only a few yards apart, so just by pacing back and forth through the weeds I could see that each of them was at the same stage of decay. They had both been killed at about the same time-not too long ago, judging by the faintly lighter green of the grass peeking out from underneath their bodies. If they'd been here more than a few days, the grass would have yellowed; if they'd been here longer than that, it would have died completely.

I was also fairly certain that someone had tossed these bodies here when they were already dead. Their arms and legs were in awkward disarray, and no nearby plants had been disrupted-no broken stems or wilted stalks to indicate a struggle. The lack of pooled or spattered blood on the grass also told me that the bodies had been put here after death, when blood remains within the body because there is no beating heart to force it out.

These two had not died gently. Their skulls had actually warped from the attacks they had sustained-a common occurrence with low-velocity blunt-force trauma, which can cause bone to literally bend before it breaks, never to return to its original shape. Only the murderer knew just how much force it had taken to do that, and to split the skulls into the pieces I saw here, but at least I could read part of these victims' story in the large gaps of missing bone and in the fracture lines that crisscrossed their caved-in skulls. I knew, too, that as they lay there, with their broken and bloody skulls, flies had chosen those warm, moist areas to lay their first eggs, and I could see their hatching larvae concentrated there now, busily consuming everything except hair, bones, and teeth.

A little more than a year had passed since I'd been at Waco, and this was the first case for which I was completely on my own. Just three working days ago, on July 1, I'd signed on as State Forensic Anthropologist, making me responsible for the analysis and identification of decomposed bodies and skeletal remains found anywhere in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. But even if I'd already worked a thousand cases, this would have been a tough one.