“Right here,” I directed him to the fine cut on bone. “It corresponds with hemorrhage in the temporal area. But around it, the flesh was too burned for me to tell anything about what sort of injury we were dealing with. I didn’t have a clue until I found this on the bone.”

“A very straight incision,” he said as he slowly turned the skull to look at it from different angles. “And we’re certain this wasn’t perhaps accidentally done during autopsy, when, for example, the scalp was reflected back to remove the skull cap?”

“We’re certain,” I said. “And as you can see by putting the two together”—I fit the cranium back in place—“the cut is about an inch and a half below where the skull was opened during autopsy. And it’s an angle that would make no sense if one were reflecting back the scalp. See?”

My index finger was suddenly huge as I looked through the lens and pointed.

“This incision is vertical versus horizontal,” I made my case.

“You’re right,” he said, and his face was vibrant with interest. “As an artifact of autopsy, that would make no sense at all, unless your morgue assistant was drunk.”

“Could it be maybe some kind of defense injury?” Marino suggested. “You know, if someone was coming at her with a knife. They struggle and her face gets cut?”

“Certainly that’s possible,” Vessey said as he continued to process every millimeter of bone. “But I find it curious that this incision is so fine and exact. And it appears to be the same depth from one end to the other, which would be unusual if one is swinging a knife at someone. Generally, the cut to bone would be deeper where the blade struck first, and then more shallow as the blade traveled down.”

He demonstrated, an imaginary knife cutting straight down through air.

“We also have to remember that a lot depends on the assailant’s position in relation to the victim when she was cut,” I commented. “Was the victim standing or lying down? Was the assailant in front or behind or to one side of her or on top of her?”

“Very true,” said Vessey.

He went to a dark oak cabinet with glass doors and lifted an old brown skull from a shelf. He carried it over to us and handed it to me, pointing to an obvious coarse cut in the left parietal and occipital area, or on the left side, high above the ear.

“You asked about scalpings,” he said to me. “An eight- or nine-year-old, scalped, then burned. Can’t tell the gender, but I know the poor kid had a foot infection. So he or she couldn’t run. Cuts and nicks like this are fairly typical in scalpings.”