KEY POINTS:
Some cases smell worse than others. After you've been there a while cops come in and go, "Oooh", but you're fine.
I originally worked as an archaeologist in North Carolina. When bones were found police would take them out to the bone lady at the university, and
that was me. Now I'm called in when the body is so compromised or decomposed you can't do a visual ID or a normal autopsy.
At first I probably seem very abrupt, but I like efficiency. There's work and there's play, and I always think: let's get the work over with so we can thoroughly enjoy the play.
For identifying gender I'd rather have a pelvis. For ethnicity I'd take a skull.
I've only ever once been threatened in court. I was explaining exactly how the defendant had killed his girlfriend, cut her up and thrown her in the river, so he was getting agitated.
Facial reconstruction is very much a last-ditch thing. I had a case in Montreal where a guy was found in a box in a park, and his hands, nose and ears had been cut off, and his face had been flayed. So I had seven different facial reconstructs done in labs around the world, and they came back looking like seven different people.
There are certain narrowly defined cases where I could support capital punishment. A multiple child rapist or somebody who walks into a McDonald's and cold-bloodedly shoots 10 people for their wallets just doesn't deserve to suck air from the planet.
My heroine, Temperance Brennan, has the same CV as me. But she's different: she's got the alcoholism, the marriage difficulties, the kid who's giving her problems. That's all fiction.
During the period of atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices from about 1955 to 1963, you get a spike of carbon-14 in the bones of people across the world. So you can tell if someone died before or after 1963; narrowing it down more can be very difficult.
I do interviews and signings and readings and all of these people just hang off my every word. And then I go home and have dinner with my family and nobody lets me get a word in.
My kids tell me I was more restrictive when I was working on a child homicide. I'd keep them on a shorter leash. But I wasn't doing it consciously.
The ones you don't solve are the ones that bug you. The little skeleton of a 5-year-old girl from my first case, I've had that for almost 20 years. We hold on to the relevant part of a skeleton until a case is fully through the appeals process, so with unsolved crimes that's forever.
The suddenness gets me. Most of the people who come through our doors dead woke up that morning and were perfectly fine.
* Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs (William Heinemann, $18.99)
