Conclusion: the individual was a young to middle-aged adult. Possibly.

Terrific, Brennan. A grown-up dead guy with bad teeth and rearranged bones. Possibly.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I mimicked Ryan.

The clock said one-forty. I was starving.

Removing my lab coat, I clicked off the fiber-optic light and washed up. At the door, I hesitated.

Returning to the scope, I collected the photo and slid it under an agenda in my desk drawer.

By three I was no clearer on the Ferris fragments than I’d been at noon. If anything, I was more frustrated.

People can reach only so far. They shoot themselves in the forehead, the temple, the mouth, the chest. They do not shoot themselves in the spine or the back of the head. It’s too hard to position a barrel there and keep a finger or toe on the trigger. So bullet path can often be used to distinguish suicide from homicide.

Blasting through bone, a bullet dislodges small particles from the perimeter of the hole it creates, beveling an entrance wound internally, and an exit wound externally.

Bullet in. Bullet out. Trajectory. Manner of death.

So what was the problem? Did Avram Ferris put a gun to his own head, or did someone else do the honors?

The problem was that the affected parts of Ferris’s skull looked like puzzle pieces dumped from a box. To consider beveling, I’d first have to determine what went where.

Hours of jigsawing had allowed me to identify one oval defect behind Ferris’s right ear, near the junction of the parietal, occipital, and temporal sutures.

Within Ferris’s reach? A stretch, but you betcha.

Another problem. The hole was beveled on both its endocranial and ectocranial surfaces.

Forget beveling. I was going to have to rely on fracture sequencing.