Final analysis of the skeleton was left to one of the senior members of the forensic anthropology team, either Dr. Doug Ubelaker or Dr. Doug Owsley, both former students of Dr. Bass who now worked at the Smithsonian. The medical examiner's protocol required that only certain credentialed experts conduct the final analysis and sign their names to the official autopsy report. Fine with me. Still a graduate student, I was well aware of my limitations and was quite content to be a “worker bee.”

So now, as I laid the final piece of the skeleton in place, I called for Chip to come photograph the skull's face with his Polaroid camera. Though I knew that taking Polaroids of the teeth was standard procedure, no one had ever actually explained to me exactly what the snaps were for. I later learned that during the siege, law enforcement negotiators had insisted that the adults in charge send out videotapes of the children in order to prove that they were well cared for and unharmed. Now FBI agents and dentists were analyzing the freeze-frame images from these same videotapes and comparing them to our “dental Polaroids.” Since most of these children had never been to a dentist or doctor, this process of comparison was the only way to identify them, short of DNA analysis.

I was, frankly, proud of my burgeoning skill in assembling children's skeletons, and I soon learned to lean on that pride as a way to get through the long and grueling days. Satisfaction in a job well done filled me each time I called Chip over, refueling my energy for the next pile of bones.

One day, just as I was putting a child's last tiny tooth in place, I was asked to make a special trip to the conference room to deliver some autopsy findings. I walked into the conference room, my mind on the coffee break I was planning to take-and there on the screen was a freeze-frame image of a child who was strikingly similar to the one I had just been working on, a joyous little face, baring tiny teeth in a bright smile and waving “bye-bye” to the camera.

I was stunned. Tears welled up in my eyes, and my chest tightened. I looked away as quickly as I could, but it was too late. The image had burned itself into my retinas and suddenly my body was on its own recognizance, trembling and shaking in a way I didn't recognize.

I had to escape. I must have turned pale. I couldn't seem to move. Then, out of nowhere, a strong hand took hold of my elbow, and before I knew it I was in the inner sanctum of Dr. Peerwani's private office, as dazed as if I were lost in a sleepwalker's trance. When I finally became aware of my surroundings again, I discovered that I was sobbing uncontrollably in the arms of Harold Elliott, the strong and gentle police chaplain who was also my host.

Harold let me cry for what must have been about five minutes. Then he gently led me away-out of Dr. Peerwani's office, away from the morgue, the conference room, the videotape, away from the unforgettable image of that happy, smiling child whose little hand was still waving bye-bye in my mind.

“It's all right,” Harold said softly as he ushered me into the front seat of his car. “Just let the feelings come.”

I shook my head. How could I ever do my job with feelings like these?

Harold drove me to a nearby botanical garden, where for the first time in days I saw the midday sun and heard birds singing. When I was ready, I started to talk, and Harold listened. He was very good at listening.

“I just feel so helpless,” I found myself saying. I hadn't known I felt this way-but then, I hadn't known I was ready to burst into tears, either. “All those people-all those children. Led like lambs to the slaughter, by people they trusted. And there's nothing I can do for them. It's too late.”

“I know,” Harold said quietly. “All you can do is what you're doing. But that doesn't mean it isn't hard.”

Harold had spent most of his career as a chaplain for the Arlington Police Department. He was used to helping strong men deal with the despair and helplessness that seem to erupt routinely in situations where death and human destruction are served up on a daily basis. He knew that if I was to spend my life dealing with the dead, I had to learn to protect myself from the dead.

“You're no different from anyone else,” he assured me. “If you didn't feel this way once in a while, you'd be a machine.”

“But they all saw me,” I said, mortified now by my loss of control in front of my colleagues. “What will they think?”

Harold shrugged. “They've all been there. The ones who have learned to deal with it will think exactly what I do-that you can't do this work without falling apart once in a while. The test comes in what you do next.”

We sat for a while longer in the peaceful garden, the bright sun glinting off the shiny green grass at my feet. I realized how long it had been since I had seen any other light than the harsh white fluorescent bulbs in the morgue. How long it had been since I had smelled anything other than burnt bones and rotting flesh and smoke. I took a deep breath.

“All right,” I said. “Let's go back.”

Walking through the door of the morgue that afternoon was one of the hardest things I ever did. Maybe Harold understood what had happened to me-but these people were professionals. They hadn't lost control, and I couldn't expect them to be charitable about the fact that I had. And, indeed, some of my colleagues refused to look me in the eye as I walked in, pointedly turning away or simply ignoring my presence. The woman who had given me the hair dryer, though, made it a point to smile weakly and nod my way. So did the doctor who had pulled me into my first autopsy. He called me over now and handed me another blue plastic pan full of skull fragments. I took it quickly and gratefully slipped over to my favorite little sink. I picked out the pieces one by one, washing each one carefully in the warm soapy water. As I glued the skull back together, just as I had done on that very first day, a sense of déjà vu, settled over my shoulders as I watched yet another gunshot wound emerge.

Immersed as I was in the daily details of the investigation, it was easy to forget the big picture. But over the next week, I began to realize that we had gathered an increasing amount of evidence suggesting that many of the Branch Davidians had died in a mass murder-suicide. The half-dozen anthropologists on the project had found a total of eighteen gunshot wounds-eight definite, two probable, and eight “possible.” The forensic pathologists examining the remaining soft tissue had found additional irrefutable evidence of gunshot injuries, bludgeoning, and at least one suspected stabbing. While the fragmented and incinerated remains would always hide the cause and manner of death for some victims, the evidence we uncovered was highly significant, and our supervisors meticulously documented even the tiniest details: carefully cataloguing the remains as they were recovered, conducting thorough autopsies on every victim, painstakingly reconstructing each shattered skull.

Ever since my first day, when I had managed to put that skull together in just a few hours, my colleagues had sought me out as the “skull lady,” my own special niche in what we now called the “disassembly line.” Practice makes perfect, and I could now pull apart and then put together these three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles in record time. It didn't always go as smoothly as it had the first time. Some of those skulls were extremely fragile, with large sections of bone blown away or burned up. But if I needed help holding pieces together while the glue dried or bridging the gaps with makeshift struts, Bill or Max was always right there by my side.

As our investigation drew to a close, we had established irrefutable evidence that more than one third of Waco 's victims had sustained “non-heat-related trauma,” which included contact or close-range gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds, and blunt-force trauma-all before their bodies had ever felt the fire. We all believed that the true figure was a lot higher than one third, though without the evidence to prove it, the medical examiners duly listed many victims' cause and manner of death as “undetermined.”