They didn't match.

No. It wasn't possible. I knew the chart had to be wrong. But how could I explain the discrepancy? The chart indicated that Henry was missing a molar. That same molar was present in the skull I held in my hand.

I decided that the dentist had simply made a mistake, and with more bravado than brains, I ignored the dental chart. “Let's do a DNA comparison,” I told Mark and Detective Daly. “At this point, we've got to know.”

I guess Mark and Daly were as eager as I was to know the truth, because they eventually agreed. But a DNA analysis wouldn't be easy. DNA analysis is based upon the premise that every cell of our bodies contains a genetic code, identical throughout our bodies and highly similar to the codes found among our close relatives. In theory, then, any cell from any body can be used to do a comparative DNA analysis.

When living people or fresh bodies are involved, this process is relatively easy. You use the DNA found in a cell's nucleus, but nucleic DNA is quite fragile and cannot withstand the ravages of time. So when long-dead bodies are involved, another part of the cell must be invaded to extract the more durable mitochrondrial DNA, a tedious and expensive process.

Extraction is only half the problem. Mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from the mother. So it must be compared to the blood of a relative within the maternal lineage.

Then we got our final and most important break. We found out that Henry Scharf's sister was still alive.

“Mrs. Greenberg?”

After delicate negotiations with members of Henry's extended family, I had been granted permission to speak with Henry's sister, Minna Greenberg (not her real name). Henry's niece had told her mother that Henry's body had been found, and Mrs. Greenberg knew I'd had something to do with that. But this eighty-year-old woman knew very little else, only that her beloved brother had mysteriously disappeared well over a quarter of a century ago, leaving his family bereft.

It wasn't the first tragedy Minna had suffered. In 1939, she and her brother had fled Austria in the wake of the Nazi invasion. As Jews, they were eager to leave, though they'd had to leave behind a large number of loved ones. Although Minna had eventually lost everyone except her beloved brother, she had never given up hope until now.

“So, you're the one who found my dear Henry.” Her voice was quavering but surprisingly strong, her Austrian accent still evident.

“I was one of the people who helped find him, yes.” I'd never had a conversation like this before. Usually it's the police and the coroners who talk to the survivors. “At least, I think we've found him. That's why we need your help.” I told her what we knew and what we didn't know.

“And what do you need from me?”

I explained about the DNA test, my voice hesitant as I stumbled over the words. In her place, I'd want to know for sure, even thirty-four years later. But perhaps she preferred not to know. Or maybe she'd spun out some fantasy of Henry living happily, safely, somewhere else, unable, for some inexplicable reason, to tell his family where he was. Maybe she didn't want closure. Maybe, having lost so many others, she preferred to keep this door open.

After I finished talking, there was a long pause. I searched wildly for something else to say, something that might convince her or maybe just something that would bring her comfort. But before I could say anything, Minna spoke.

“All right,” she said simply. “You can have some of my blood. How do we proceed?”

The final arrangements were made with the help of the FBI. A sample of Minna's blood was taken in Florida and flown to LabCorp in North Carolina, where the mitochondrial DNA was compared to a sample from a bone of our victim.

It was a match.

The rest of the puzzle remains maddeningly incomplete. Why had Henry flown to Cincinnati? What was his connection (if any) to the Cleveland Syndicate? Why had he been killed? When I think back on the case of Henry Scharf, I sometimes see it as my greatest triumph. Identifying a victim who's been dead and hidden for over thirty years is an extremely rare achievement. Yet if it's a triumph, it's an extremely frustrating one, my happy memories of discovering the bullet and reading the keys intermixed with the heart-wrenching thought of that final phone call. I would have liked to have given Minna Greenberg the satisfaction of telling her who had killed her brother and why. But maybe, after everything else she'd been through, just knowing that he hadn't willingly deserted her was enough.

6. Finding Names for the Dead

OKAY, GUYS, I MADE IT. We're going to start digging now.” I was trying to sound positive, but my voice rang hollow, even to me.

“Don't get too comfortable down there, Doc. We still have to haul you out.”

I looked at the dirt walls surrounding me and shook my head. I was standing literally at the bottom of a grave, on a gray, freezing, late-winter day. Comfort was not an option.

I don't participate in all that many exhumations, but even if I had, this one would have been special. We were trying to recover the buried bones of the “Tent Girl,” a mysterious young woman whose remains had been found some thirty years ago.

I'd first learned of Tent Girl only a few days after I'd taken the job as state forensic anthropologist. Scott County Coroner Marvin Yokum had come to me with Tent Girl's picture, explaining that this was a case that had gone unsolved for decades.

It all started on the morning of May 17, 1968, when an unemployed well-driller living in Monterey, Kentucky, was out looking for old glass telephone insulators, which he used to sell for extra money. That morning, as he searched through the underbrush around Eagle Creek, he stumbled over an old green tarpaulin tied with a small thin cord. Inside the tarp were the badly decomposed remains of a naked young woman with a piece of white fabric wrapped around her head.

Marvin took charge. His autopsy report eventually described the woman as sixteen to nineteen years old, 5'1'' tall, weighing 110-115 pounds, with short, reddish-brown hair. A pathologist brought in from nearby Hamilton County, Ohio, told Marvin that the young woman had probably been wrapped up in the canvas, bound, and left to die, slowly, of suffocation.

The investigation had gone on for months, and Marvin had even called in the FBI. The Bureau had managed to determine that the white cloth was probably a diaper, but found very little else that could be used to identify her. When the local newspaper ran a story on the victim, they called her Tent Girl, because of the canvas tarp. The paper had asked Covington police officer Harold Musser for sketches based on the autopsy photos, and something about the wistful young woman with her waifishly short hair caught the public's imagination. When Tent Girl was finally laid to rest in the Georgetown Cemetery-only a few miles from where I now live-the marker on her grave read simply “#90”-the number of her anonymous plot.

Three years later, two men who owned a local monument company built her a special headstone-red, to match her hair-with a version of the sketch etched into the granite. The Tent Girl became a local legend, drawing visitors from all over Kentucky and Ohio, especially young women, who seemed to feel a special kinship with her.