LITMIR.BIZ

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dryly.

      “Pardon?”

      “My last patient. The bleached blond with the big boobs. She came back to my office girl and started pumping her about you.”

      “I thought she had a nice smile.”

      Hennon kissed her fingertips and spread them outward.

      “My six-to-eleven porcelain fused to gold. Didn’t I do a great job?”

      “I’ll say. She has a great set of teeth.”

      “Now she does,” the dentist said emphatically. “You should have seen her when she walked through my door. Bucky Beaver.” She waved her hand in the air. “Babs is all right—narcissistic as hell, but she’s reliable. Keeps her appointments and pays her bills. I wish I had a thousand of those.”

      She walked out of the room and came back carrying two cups of black coffee.

      “You want some sugar? I’m all out of cream.”

      “Black’s fine,” he said.

      She noticed the forensic report.

      “Been to the morgue, huh? The county one, that is, not the one out there.” She jerked her head toward the waiting room. “My partner’s wife and her decorator spent six months and ten thousand dollars redoing it to achieve the look of death. No accounting for taste. Anyway, what does the anthropologist say?”

      “The report came in this morning. Doesn’t tell me too much, although I realize there’s not a hell of a lot to go on.”

      “What did he come up with?” she asked, sipping her coffee.

      “From the bone structure, he surmises that they were both female, young—in their late teens or early twenties at most—and Caucasian. Jane Doe One looked to be about five-four, five-five and small-boned. She had reached ninety-five percent of her postpuberty growth. Number Two was taller, maybe five eight, and had a large frame. She’d stopped growing according to the bone plates. The bodies weren’t lying in the mountains as long as I would have thought. From the skin fragments he said they probably were dumped about three months ago. They were burnt either alive or shortly after they were shot, because their fists had curled from muscle contraction due to the heat, which would only happen if there was still some muscle tone prior to rigor mortis. He also found a few partial fingerprints lodged in the inner folds of the finger joints, but that doesn’t help unless the girls had been printed. So far, I’ve struck out with that. There’s no record of their prints in our computer. They were shot with the same .38 caliber weapon—the bone rills match—and his guess is that the firearm was a Colt.”

      Decker slapped down the report.

      “He said you may have a thing or two to add.”

      “Burnt alive?”

      “Probably.”

      “That’s revolting,” Hennon said, sticking out her tongue.

      Decker threw up his hands. “Lots of perverts out there. I’ve got a teenage daughter of my own. I’m constantly restraining the urge to call her and ask if she’s okay.”

      “And they ask me how can I stand looking in mouths all day. Hey, I’d rather look at tooth decay than deal with sicko deviates who burn people alive.”

      She sighed and flicked on the light of the X-ray screen. Decker pulled out a notepad.

      “Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ve got it all written down for you.”

      “I like to take notes.”

      “You’re trying to quit smoking,” she said matter-of-factly. “It gives you something to do with your hands.”

      “You missed your calling as a detective.”

      “Your teeth—smoker’s stain. Probably also coffee stain,” she said, staring at his mouth. “Sorry. It’s an occupational hazard. Make an appointment with Kelly and I’ll do a really nice polish job, gratis.”

      “I’ll do that just as soon as I find a spare minute.”

      “I’ve heard that excuse before.” She smiled impishly and covered the screen with a four-by-ten radiograph.

      “This X ray is a panoramic view of Doe One’s mouth. It covers all the bony structures of the mandible and maxilla from ear to ear, thereby giving us a good overall look at jawbones and teeth. It’s not great for detail, but you can see her third molars hadn’t erupted. Here they are, just tooth buds in her jaw.”

      She pointed to four spots on the radiograph. Inside the jawbone next to well-defined teeth were small white disks that looked like cotton balls delineated by a white circle.

      “What’s the circle?” he asked.

      “The lining of the tooth follicle. Normal radiographic feature. You can see her third molars—the wisdom teeth—much more clearly on these radiographs.” She placed several small X rays on the screen. “These are called ‘periapicals’ and these are called ‘bite-wings’—the kind of X rays you normally have taken by the dentist. They give much better detail than the orthopantogram. Judging from the maturation of her molars, I’d put Jane Doe One at about fifteen or sixteen.”

      She placed another celluloid on the screen. “This is the panoramic of Doe Two. Her third molars hadn’t erupted either, but that’s because they were impacted. Eventually, they would have had to be extracted. But you can see for yourself how much more differentiation there is in the tooth crown; root development had already taken place. This girl was around twenty, twenty-one at the time of her death.”

      She clicked off the light and looked at Decker.

      “I’ll tell you something else about the two girls, Pete. They may have died on the pyre together, but they didn’t come from the same neighborhood.”

      “Why do you say that?”

      Hennon walked over to the Formica table and picked up several pink plaster casts of teeth and gums.

      “This is a cast of Jane Doe One’s teeth. Let’s call her Jean. Jean has had orthodonture; her teeth are beautifully aligned, although I betcha she hadn’t been wearing her retainer as much as she should have. We’ve got a little lippage here. But be that as it may, her occlusion is A-1 and she’s had serial extraction.”

      “What’s that?”

      “A standard procedure. In a small mouth with an otherwise normal bite, you extract specific teeth to make room in the jaw for the incoming canines or molars. It prevents overcrowding. Her first premolars have been extracted. Somebody spent money on her teeth, Pete. Orthodonture isn’t cheap. And her general dental work was done by someone with integrity. The few silver fillings she does have were carved neatly. There’s a tiny sliver of an overhang on number three but it happens to the best of us. Little Jean took good care of her teeth and had excellent dental care—middle class or above.

      “Now take a look at the second Jane Doe. Let’s call her Jan.”

      Decker winced and the dentist noticed it.

      “Did I hit a nerve?” She grimaced. “Sorry—bad choice of words for a dentist.”

      “Jan’s my ex-wife’s name. I don’t carry the torch for her, but let’s call the bones Joan instead.”

      “Joan, it is. Poor Joanie. She never had a chance. Look at these teeth.”

      Decker picked up the pink casts. The first thing he noticed were the odd-looking front teeth.

      “They look like pegs,” he said.

      “Right. Pegs notched up the center. And her first lower molars are odd-looking also. The occlusal table or biting surface is a mushy pile of oatmeal, suggesting to me Hutchinson’s incisors and mulberry molars—congenital syphilis. Dollars to doughnuts Joan was born with VD. Furthermore, Mom didn’t do much to help

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