I held the skull and for a moment imagined what Vessey had just said. I envisioned a cowering crippled child, and blood running to the earth as his screaming people were massacred and the camp went up in flames.

“Shit,” Marino angrily muttered. “How do you do something like that to a kid?”

“How do you do something like that at all?” I said. Then to Vessey, I added, “The cut on this”—I pointed at the skull I had brought in—“would be unusual for a scalping.”

Vessey took a deep breath and slowly blew out.

“You know, Kay,” he said, “it’s never exact. It’s whatever happened at the time. There were many ways that Indians scalped the enemy. Usually, the skin was incised in a circle over the skull down to the galea and periosteum so it could be easily removed from the cranial vault. Some scalpings were simple, others involved ears, eyes, the face, the neck. In some instances multiple scalps were taken from the same victim, or maybe just the scalp-lock, or small area of the crown of the head, was removed. Finally, and this is what you usually see in old Westerns, the victim was violently grabbed by his hair, the skin sliced away with a knife or saber.”

“Trophies,” Marino said.

“That and the ultimate macho symbol of skill and bravery,” said Vessey. “Of course, there were cultural, religious, and even medicinal motives, as well. In your case,” he added to me, “we know she wasn’t successfully scalped because she still had her hair, and I can tell you the injury to bone strikes me as having been inflicted carefully with a very sharp instrument. A very sharp knife. Maybe a razor blade or box cutter, or even something like a scalpel. It was inflicted while the victim was alive and it was not the cause of death.”

“No, her neck injury is what killed her,” I agreed.

“I can find no other cuts, except possibly here.”

He moved the lens closer to an area of the left zygomatic arch, or bone of the cheek. “Something very faint,” he muttered. “Too faint to be sure. See it?”

I leaned close to him to look.

“Maybe,” I said. “Almost like the thread of a spider web.”

“Exactly. It’s that faint. And it may be nothing, but interestingly enough, it’s positioned at very much the same angle as the other cut. Vertical versus horizontal or slanted.”

“This is getting sick,” Marino said ominously. “I mean, let’s cut to the chase, no pun intended. What are we saying here? That some squirrel cut this lady’s throat and then mutilated her face? And then torched the house?”

“I guess that’s one possibility,” Vessey said.

“Well, mutilating a face gets personal,” Marino went on. “Unless you’re dealing with a loony tune, you don’t find killers mutilating the faces of victims they don’t have some sort of connection with.”