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said.
    Andy was bagging a
couple of the bricks, and into another envelope he was scraping the
substance that had bonded each of them to the others. "Whatever this
cementlike compound is might give us a clue about age."
    He laid the bags
carefully on the floor, to be tagged and numbered, just as each piece
of stone had come down from the wall.
    I picked one up and
ran my gloved finger over the surface, smoothing out the plastic so I
could examine the stone. It was the color of a burnt sienna Crayola,
faded from its once red glaze. It was pocked and pitted on the exterior
surface, smooth on the sides where it had been resting against one of
its mates. The taupecolored sealant was clumped on the top and bottom,
some substance that had fixed it in place for all the years it had been
here.
    "You and Alex mind
holding hands with him for a minute?" Andy asked. "Gently, Mike. Not
like he's a suspect in a homicide."
    We stood on either
side of the Thin Man, an arm under each elbow, as Andy directed us
while he worked below us to free the last foot of space to ease the
rest of the removal. I had handled bones before at the morgue, and I
had seen my share of human skeletons on late-night visits to the
medical school at the University of Virginia when I was engaged to a
student there. This was eerily different and discomforting, as I
wondered what brought our unfortunate soul to such a macabre resting
place, naturally or unnaturally.
    "You see anything down
there?" Mike asked.
    "Nothing from this
angle, but it's too dark to tell." He picked up his camera and took
more photographs, including close-ups from head to legs. "Okay, guys,
let's go."
    The technicians who
were assisting Andy moved in next to him. They replaced Mike and me,
one of them taking hold of the arms and the other of the skull, while
Andy secured the lower torso. Together they moved the skeleton slowly
and painstakingly out of the brick niche and swiveled it onto the
sheet, laying it out flat. Leg bones fell away and clattered to the
bottom of the brick shaft, and Andy returned to reach in to retrieve
them. One by one, he kneeled and laid them out to complete his human
jigsaw puzzle, gently and deliberately.
    "First thing we're
going to do, Mike, is give your pal a new name," Andy said, leaning
back on his heels.
    "Because?"
    "Because I think he's
a she."
    "Ah-hah! Once some
more of the bricks came down I was beginning to wonder. But then I've
been told you need a magnifying glass to see my private parts,
too."
    "The hips on this one
give her away."
    "Why's that?"
    "See where this flares
out over here?" Andy said, pointing his finger to the large bones
coming out of the lower vertebrae. "Nature's way of accommodating
childbirth. The sciatic notch spreads as a young woman matures, and the
pelvis gets wider to be able to hold a fetus. Look at the forehead,
too."
    "What?"
    "Vertical. Straight up
and down. Men's foreheads tend to slope more, form a brow ridge above
the eye sockets, while women's generally are like this." He turned to
one of the techs. "Want to pass the big torch?"
    "What are you looking
for?" Mike asked.
    "You want to know who
this is, right? We've got a start on gender. We need to figure out her
age, race, height-anything that will direct the scope of your
investigation."
    "How about when she
went missing behind the wall?"
    "That's what I'm about
to dig for." Andy turned on the light and moved it slowly over the
surface of the crude wooden floor behind the remaining few inches of
bricks.
    He lifted out some
tiny sepia-colored chips, pieces of bone that seemed to have absorbed
color from the brown earth on which they had rested. He turned them
over and examined them, placing them next to the digitless hands.
"Fingers, probably. Toes are down there, too. Camera, please."
    The tech passed the
equipment back to Andy, who took the shots himself. When he finished
that task, he bent down close to the wall and reached in again, sifting
through some of the remains and