have some actual information to pass along. Are you ready?”

Gil went over to his desk and grabbed a blank piece of paper in front of him, saying, “Go ahead.”

“Okay. Before I get started, I just want to remind you that all of this is still preliminary, you know the drill,” she said. “Let’s start with the bones. The ones we have so far appear to match the age and decay rate of the skull.”

“So the general consensus is that the skull and the bones are from the same person?”

“Yes. Next, the bones and the skull performed well under stress tests, meaning that they were exposed to the environment for no more than two years. Also, given the desiccation, the bones were free of flesh for at least six months.”

“So they’ve been dead at least six months, but not more than two years,” Gil said, repeating it back to her. “We can’t do any better with time of death?”

“Nope. Sorry. Next thing is the age and sex of the victim. Now this part is actually straightforward because kids’ bones aren’t fully developed, especially toddlers’. That makes it easier to determine age.”

“Right,” Gil said, remembering how his daughters had the soft spot on their heads—where their skull was still forming—until they were almost two. Gil wondered if Liz ever thought of her own daughter while she did this work.

“Now, the posterior fontanelle in the skull was fully ossified, as was the anterior fontanelle, but the anterior cranial sutures weren’t. In fact, we’re lucky the fire wasn’t hot enough to separate the skull at the sutures, which weren’t very strong yet. Then, of course, as another age indicator, we have the epiphyseal plate’s growth zone.”

“Of course,” Gil said. He knew Liz would eventually spell it out in laymen’s terms, but she liked to use her clinical-speak to ease herself into the eventual normal, everyday language.

“All of this all puts the age right around one and a half to two years old,” she said finally.

“Consistent with Brianna’s age, although she was over two,” Gil said as Joe came over to eavesdrop.

“Yes, but according to medical records she was a preemie, so she would have delayed development,” Liz said. “Then we get to gender. Usually, we determine the sex by the pelvic bone, but that remodeling comes during puberty. So in kids, there isn’t really any sexual dimorphism, which means it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to tell you the gender.”

“Okay,” Gil said. He had been hoping to get a slam-dunk with the forensics, having it point either exactly to Brianna or exactly away.

“Last but not least, the identification,” Liz said, sighing. “We’re checking dental records in the national missing kids registry, but Brianna never went to the dentist, so we have nothing to compare in her case. That leaves DNA. We don’t have any DNA from Brianna, but both of her parents gave us blood and DNA samples last year. So we can use them to verify that the bones are Brianna’s. I’m supposed to tell you that DNA will take a minimum of a week to run, but I can get it done by Tuesday, I think.”

“Thank you, Liz,” Gil said.

“That leaves cause of death,” she continued. “Again, all of this is preliminary. The rest of the bones didn’t show anything unusual, but once we got the melted plastic off the skull, there were three distinct knife strikes through it.”

“Let me make sure I got all this,” Gil said. “We have a one-and-a-half- or two-year-old child of indeterminate sex who was killed in the last year or so.” Gil looked over at Joe before he added, “And was murdered.” As expected, Joe swore loudly.

Gladys Soliz Portilla sat in the hotel break room with the other maids and a few of the janitors. She was waiting for one of the cooks, who had promised to help her buy a Social Security number. He had said it would cost a hundred dollars, but she wanted to talk to him more before she made up her mind.

She already had her driver’s license—which in New Mexico anyone could get as long as they had other ID, even from Mexico—and she had gotten a tax ID number, so she could pay her taxes as an undocumented worker, and a bank account at one of the credit unions. She didn’t necessarily need the Social Security number. She could get along here without it. She was going to try to take some classes at the community college and get her