Lit Circle Work Week 5, "Dead Men Do Tell Tales"

Maples does not know where evil comes from but he has encountered it both in victims and in executed evildoers. He has seen the bodies of the wicked on full display; their brains fascinate him. The instruments of murder are vast; Maples has seen hammers, wrenches, tree limbs,building blocks and artificial legs used to kill. Murderers rarely use heavy objects. To see the depths of human depravity, one need only look to the Medico-legal Investigation of Death, a 623-page tome that sears the eyes of the unfamiliar. The worst is Chapter Eighteen which deals with wrongful childhood deaths.The cases of young children that Maples faces remain the most vivid in his memory, such as the remains of a five-year-old girl found in a cloth bag thrown into a pond. She is murdered, very likely by her mother and her mother's boyfriend.

Lit Circle Work Week 4, "Dead Men Do Tell Tales"

Lit Circle Work Week 3, "Dead Men Do Tell Tales"

Lit Circle Work Week 2, "Dead Men Do Tell Tales"

Maples's laboratory is full of dry bones but the bones can still tell stories to him and his students. Bones are often burned, boiled, desiccated, are bones of martyrs, murderers, and so on. Skeletons of all kinds are housed there. The lab is built according to Maples' design in 1991. The securityis as tight as it can be, given the legal importance of the skeletons. It has a safety shower, three "odor hoods" and many ventilated enclosures. Sometimes the odors are terrible.

Full skeletonization can be very rapid, as quickly as nine days depending on the environment. Maples's friend, Bill Bass, helps uncover a decay rate facility to study just this problem. In Maples's morgue, they process thirty to forty bodies a year, all of which are documented in detail. You must get used to the smell of reeking corpses but Maples has seen many policemen, lawyers and others.