10. The Cracked Tooth
The Cracked Tooth
Ray got me into the room on the grounds that I was the custodian of the original records, which was true, and that Dr. Greaves had asked for me, which was also true, and which Ray delivered with a completely straight face.
"You found her in a basement," Greaves said, by way of greeting. He had the fragment of maxilla on a blue drape under a light. "Ostrander. I knew him. Not well. Careful man."
"Very."
"It shows." He adjusted the light. "All right. Look at this and tell me what you see and don't be polite about it, I've got two opinions already and they're both mine."
I looked for about four minutes.
"The composite's his," I said. "November 'ninety-eight, mesial-incisal on the upper left lateral, restoring a fracture.
That matches the chart and the radiograph.
It's a clean restoration over a clean fracture line and the fracture is — " I moved the light "— it's oblique, running down and mesially from the incisal edge, which is a direct-force pattern.
Something hit the front of her face from the left side and slightly above. "
"Right-handed," said Greaves. "If it's a hand. Go on."
And then I saw the other thing, and I put the light down.
"There's a second one," I said.
"Show me."
"Here." My voice had gone somewhere flat.
"Under the composite, there's — you can see it on the radiograph better than the specimen.
There's a healed line. That's not the same fracture.
That's an older incomplete fracture of the same tooth, the same tooth, and it's been there long enough to have laid down secondary dentin, which takes — Dr. Greaves, that takes years. "
"Six," said Harlan Greaves. "Give or take two.
I've got the radiograph from 'ninety-eight and an old bitewing from the same practice from 1994, and the line's on the 'ninety-four film too, which means it predates that, which means it happened before she was eighteen years old.
" He looked at me over the light. "And then somebody broke the same tooth again, in the same direction, in 1998. "
The room had a refrigerator in it that hummed.
"That's not a coincidence," I said.
"It is not a coincidence." Greaves straightened up and took his glasses off.
"I want to be precise, because this will end up in front of a jury and I will be cross-examined by somebody who has been paid to make me look like a man who guesses.
Two fractures of the same anterior tooth, same force vector, separated by four to eight years, is not diagnostic of anything by itself.
People fall down twice. People play sports. "
"But."
"But when a woman has an injury pattern at seventeen and the same injury pattern at twenty-two, from the same direction, and the second one comes with facial bruising that a dentist thought was worth writing down, then what you are looking at is not an accident repeated," said Dr. Harlan Greaves. "You are looking at a relationship."
I sat down on a lab stool.
"Four to eight years," I said. "Doctor, in 1992 she was sixteen years old."
"Then it started when she was a child," said Greaves, "or near enough to make no difference. And whoever did it was in her life before she was eighteen and was still in it at twenty-two."
Which ruled out a boyfriend of eight months.
I went out into the parking lot in Ventura and sat in my car for a while with my hands on the wheel, and then I called Rosalind Marsh, because there was one question left that only her mother could answer and I was not going to ask it on a doorstep.
"Mrs. Marsh, it's Lila Bennett. I'm sorry to call. I have to ask you something hard."
"Go on."
"When Casey was sixteen or seventeen — did she ever break a tooth?"
There was a silence on the line.
"She came home from work," said Rosalind Marsh slowly, "in the summer she turned seventeen, with her lip split and a chip off her front tooth, and she said a tray came off a stack in the kitchen and hit her in the face."
"Do you remember who took her to the dentist?"
"I did." A pause. "No. No, I didn't. I was working nights at the hospital that summer.
Carl took her. He called me at work to say he'd take care of it and I shouldn't worry about the bill because it happened on his property.
" Another pause, and then, in a completely different voice, very quiet: "Dr. Bennett. Why are you asking me who took her?"
"Because Walt Ostrander," I said, "writes down who brings a patient in."