By phoning Cukura Kundze, I learned that Lassie stood six-two and weighed roughly 190. Long bone measurements put Skeleton Man’s height at five-six, tops.

I pulled the case to double-check the stature estimate. Right on.

“Not your boy,” Corcoran said.

“No,” I agreed.

We were standing beside a worktable in the CCME storage room. Corcoran was watching as I replaced Skeleton Man’s bones in their box.

“Who does your anthropology?” I asked, snugging the lid into place.

“For years we used a guy out of Oklahoma. Now that he’s retired, it’s pretty haphazard. Sometimes a graduate student. Sometimes a resident doing a rotation here. Sometimes a staff pathologist.”

“People who’ll work for free,” I guessed.

“Walczak claims there’s no money in the budget.”

“One day that approach will bite him in the ass.”

“Hey, don’t jump on me. I agree we should use only board-certified specialists. Would make my job easier.”

“Who analyzed this fellow?” I laid a palm on Skeleton Man’s box.

Corcoran checked the case file.

“AP. That would be Tony Papatados, a doctoral candidate at UIC. Excavates bones in Peru. Or maybe it’s Bolivia. I don’t remember.”

“An archaeologist.”

“Weren’t you an archaeologist?”

“Yes. Don’t get me wrong. Many bio-archaeologists and physical anthropologists are excellent researchers. Many know a lot of osteology, how to estimate age, sex, how to measure bones properly. But they’re not trained in the full range of forensic issues. Most have little experience with modern populations.”

Sudden thought. If Walczak had underqualified people working his anthropology cases, it was possible some remains had been improperly evaluated.

“Mind if I spend a little time in here?”

“Fine with me. Why?”

“Laszlo Tot was military. And reported missing. If he came here, even as a decomp, the ID would have been a snap with dentals and prints. But suppose his body wasn’t found for a while. What if he was skeletonized and the bones were examined by someone with, shall we say, limited skills?”

“We could be overlooking him because the report is misleading.”

“Or flat-ass wrong.”

“I guess it’s possible.” Corcoran sounded dubious.

“Can you search your database for unidentified decomps and skeletons arriving during the past four years?”

Corcoran tapped the computer keyboard, peered at the monitor, tapped some more, then hit a single key.

“Hold on. There’s a printer in my office.”

He returned moments later with a list containing fourteen CCME numbers. He’d also pulled the police incident, morgue intake, and anthropology reports for each case.

Seven corpses had arrived badly decomposed. For those, the flesh had been stripped, then the skeletons cleaned by boiling. One individual had been burned, one mummified. For those, the remains had been left untouched. Five folks had rolled in as nothing but bone.

“They’re all over there.” Corcoran indicated the shelving to which I’d returned Skeleton Man in his absence. “But you’re on your own. A battered toddler just showed up. I caught the autopsy.”

“No problem.”

Corcoran showed me where the necessary equipment was stored, and jotted a number should I have need of a tech. Then he was gone.

Starting with those who’d arrived as skeletons, I constructed a biological profile for each: age, sex, race, and height. When finished, I checked my findings against the case files.

At one fifteen Corcoran came to see if I wanted to break for lunch. Over a machine sandwich of very questionable-looking chicken salad, a six-pack of Oreos, and a Diet Coke, we discussed my intentions with regard to Jurmain. I told him I’d be phoning Edward Allen first thing in the morning, maybe even driving to Winnetka to pay a surprise call.

Corcoran apologized again. As before, I assured him he was not the target of my ire.

At one forty-five I returned to the storeroom.

By four I’d finished the skeletons. One Mongoloid female had been classified as Negroid. One elderly white male had a surgically pinned right “humerus” that was actually a femur from a very large dog.

No Lassie candidate.

Knowing I’d need X-rays, I skipped the mummified and burned individuals and moved on to the cleaned-up decomps. On the third set of bones I hit pay dirt.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Cook County was one of the leading producers of limestone and dolomite in the U.S. The bulk of the stone came from quarries situated in suburbs to the west and south of Chicago: Elmhurst, Riverside, La Grange, Bellwood, McCook, Hodgkins, Thornton. Most was shipped on the Illinois Michigan Canal, later on the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

Though the golden age of quarrying has long since passed, the scarred landscapes remain. I’m not talking little dents in the ground. These pits are whoppers.

And great places to off-load bodies.

According to Police Officer Cyril Powers, on July 28, 2005, a decomposed corpse was spotted floating facedown just south of a bridge carrying the Tri-State Tollway over the Thornton Quarry. Powers contacted personnel at the Material Service Corporation, owners and operators of the quarry, then called for grappling hooks and a morgue van.

The remains were logged in as 287JUL05. A staff pathologist named Bandhura Jayamaran was assigned to the case. Jayamaran estimated PMI at two to three weeks.

Due to advanced putrefaction and severe cranial damage, including absence of most of the left side of the face and all of the lower jaw, only three teeth remained, the upper-right premolars and the first molar. None had a unique characteristic or dental restoration.

Fingerprinting was not an option. Concluding that little could be done with the body, Jayamaran ordered it cleaned and the bones stored pending anthropological analysis.

One month later, 287JUL05 was examined by someone identified only by the initials ML, who determined that the individual was a white male, approximately thirty-five years of age, with a height of five foot eight, plus or minus one inch. Age was based on the condition of the pubic symphyses, the small surfaces where the pelvic halves meet in front. Stature was calculated using the length of the femur.

ML noted trauma to the vertebrae, ribs, and skull, caused by the victim’s fall into the quarry, and healed antemortem fractures of the right distal radius and ulna. ML ventured no opinion as to manner of death.

ML’s descriptors were entered into a database at the Chicago PD missing persons unit, one week later into NCIC, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Neither submission resulted in a positive ID.

287JUL05 went onto a shelf in the CCME storage room on September 4, 2005. He’d been there ever since.

OK, ML. Let’s see how you did.

First, I arranged the cranial fragments into what resembled an exploded skull. Then I aligned the postcranial bones anatomically.

I began my assessment with gender, viewing first the skull, then the pelvis.

The right frontal bone bulged into a large, rounded ridge at the bottom of the forehead, above the orbit. The occipital had a prominent muscle attachment site dead center at the skull’s back. The right mastoid, a hunk of bone projecting downward behind the ear opening, was impressive.

When articulated, the pelvis had a chunky pubic area, with an acute angle below the point where the two halves meet in front. Laterally, each side curved upward into a deep, narrow notch inferior to the hip blade.

OK. Agreed. 287JUL05 was male.

I made notes then turned to ancestry.

This was tougher, since little facial architecture remained, and the skull was too damaged to yield meaningful measurements. Nevertheless, I could see that the cranium had been moderate with regard to shape, not particularly long and narrow or short and globular. The cheekbones had been tight to the maxilla, the nasal bridge high, the nasal opening quite narrow.