Trail of Bones: More Cases from the Files of a Forensic Anthropologist

12. Unexpected Cargo

T Unexpected Cargo HE railroad tank car loomed ahead of me. It looked much larger up close than such cars do when you see them rolling along the track in a long chain pulled by a powerful locomotive. The call had come in the early afternoon. A detective had a bone he wanted me to evaluate. He was certain it was human, but he wanted my opinion to confirm it. The bone, a human thighbone, he thought, had been discovered in the belly of a railroad tank car that typically transported raw soybean oil to various refinery centers across the country. The tank car had a thermostat system that maintained a certain temperature in order to prevent the soybean oil from solidifying. It hadmalfunctioned , and the oil, approximately four feet deep in that particular car, had dried out.Railroad authorities had sidetracked the car.It had sat there for approximately six months and needed to be placed back into operation. However, the dried residue first had to be removed. The only way to do that was for someone to enter the car with a pressure washer and blast it out through the drain holes in the bottom of the car. That they did. The workers turned the powerful hoses on the sticky, dark brown material and began to break it up. As it broke apart, they flushed it through the drain holes and into barrels to be transported away from the site. Approximately halfway down into the hardened muck, they saw a brown object about twenty inches long that looked like a piece of a tree limb. When they examined it more closely, they called police. When I saw the thighbone, I understood why they had not recognized it at first as a human bone. It was dark brown in color. The color 12 Unexpected Cargo 99 was a result of sitting in the soybean oil for so long. Bone is porous and will take on the color of the environment around it. Secondly, the femur had an old, dramatic fracture near the mid shaft that had not been treated properly by a medical doctor and had healed out of alignment, giving the bone an irregular shape. Its appearance suggested that the person may not have visited a doctor at all. The detective asked if I would go down into the tank car and take a closer look at what seemed to the workers to be other bone fragments. Reluctantly, I agreed. The only problem was that there was just one way in and one way out of the tank car: through the hole at the top of the car—the hole that got smaller and smaller as I got closer and closer to it. I suited up in the oversized yellow slicker the detective provided for me. Then the assistants hooked me up in an apparatus positioned between my legs and up my back and arms, similar perhaps to a parachute harness, which was then attached to the cable on which they would lower me into the tank. They began to lower me inch by inch into the tank car; with every foot I went down, it got darker and darker inside the car and smelled sweeter and sweeter. The dried soybean oil gave off a heady scent reminiscent of old cotton candy. When I reached the bottom of the car, for only the second time in my life I felt extremely claustrophobic. The other time had been a fewyears earlier when I had climbed down into a large, fourteen-foot-deep water storage tank, or cistern, located in downtown Baton Rouge between the old military barracks there. It dated to the early nineteenth century and was not known to exist until discovered by accident one day. Naturally, being the curious person I am, I had to document its interior. I decided I was not so curious this time and quickly went to work. I pulled myflashlight from my pocket and directed its powerful beam at various points inside the car. The cleanup work had left pockets of soft soybean residue here and there, interspersed with lumps of hardened material, which made maneuvering with any degree of certainty almost impossible. Added to that was the puppetlike control the cable that lowered me into the car had over my every movement. Needless to say, my assessment would be brief. As I glanced around 100 TRAIL OF BONES inside...