Leathery skin and tangled knots of nerves cloak miniature bones, the mouth is pursed tightly, only slightly revealing a neat row of little teeth. The tiny plaque beneath its feet reads simply "skeleton".
Forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs peers through the glass cabinet to inspect the long-dead remains a little closer. Perhaps with time, a well-equipped laboratory and a microscope, she might be able to unravel the secrets of its short life and its untimely demise.
For death - even that of a 19th-century Edinburgh child - is just the beginning of the story for one of the few women in the world who can make bones talk.
The skeleton continues its incessant sway backwards and forwards as Kathy, a petite, no-nonsense blonde in a pink shirt and neat denims, casts her experienced eye around the bottles of human specimens, gnarled sections of bones and slivers of body parts that once formed the living and whose role in death has been to educate and inform the doctors of the future at the Royal College of Surgeons in Nicolson Street.
She's curious about the child but she's not here for the day job. She's come to Edinburgh in her other role, that of international best-selling author whose forensic thrillers combining murder, mystery and medical science have snared a legion of devoted fans who can't get enough of the blood and gore of the autopsy table. The latest offering - her seventh - sees her transport her central character Temperance Brennan, a straight-talking forensic anthropologist not unlike herself, to Israel to unearth biblical mysteries surrounding ancient bones.
But could her next novel take the fictional forensic anthropologist to a city which can claim a major role in laying down the foundations for modern forensic science, right here in Edinburgh? "My next book will be along the lines of Burke and Hare", Kathy reveals in her soft American drawl. "Not so much robbing graves, it will be about people stealing bodies to sell the organs. But Burke and Hare will feature in it and it will have a Scottish theme."
That novel is still a work in progress - Kathy's hectic schedule as forensic anthropologist working for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina, and the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale in Quebec, is juggled alongside international book appearances and work on an eagerly awaited TV series, Bones. It means opportunities to write fiction are crunched down to the "spare moment" category.
"I'm still in the middle of researching and it hasn't yet got a title, but I think it will have by next week," she reveals, casting her experienced eye around the exhibits contained in the Surgeons' Hall Museum. "So while I'm here I'd like to buy a book about Burke and Hare."
Perhaps the Alexander McCall Smith Edinburgh-based novel 44 Scotland Street, which is peeking out of her pink leather handbag, is helping with her research, along with her good friend, Rebus author Ian Rankin - the pair have both spoken admiringly of each other's work.
Back at Surgeons' Hall she pauses in front of an exhibit of Professor Robert Knox, the Edinburgh anatomist who gratefully accepted Burke and Hare's newly dispatched cadavers in exchange for a princely GBP 7.10/. Skeletons are positioned on either side of the disgraced doctor's desk, grisly human specimens in glass jars are arranged on the floor yet they hardly receive a second glance from Kathy.
After all, her entire career has revolved around the deceased; her sharp powers of observation - she once identified the bones of a seamstress nun from the grooves years of pulling thread had made in her teeth - have helped to lay to rest dozens of tortured souls.
Away from the book tours, she may be found up to her elbows in putrefying remains, trudging through mass graves of murdered women and their young children slaughtered by death squads in Guatemala, unearthing Second World War victims or sifting through the rubble of Ground Zero, separating animal bones from human remains. The dead are never far away.
SHE has become internationally recognised for her ability to decipher skeletons' secrets, usually employing simply her powers of observation - she is no fan of modern scientific gizmos and technology. It is a skill that has taken her from examining remains from the US Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to Rwanda, to testify in the UN genocide tribunal.
She has examined ancient Egyptian mummies and held in her hands the Child of Taung, the fossilised infant skull found near Taung in South Africa and dated at about 2.5 million years old.
That experience was closest to her roots. Originally trained as an archaeologist, Kathy almost fell into her forensic anthropologist's role when murder investigators in North Carolina sought her help analysing the skeleton of a five-year-old girl. "I had been dealing with ancient bones and then suddenly the police started to bring me bones to look at. As I started working with the coroner, I saw it was work that impacted on someone's life, giving answers to their questions and helping put some of these violent offenders away."
By its very nature, it's work - whether on her hands and knees scraping mud off bones in a filthy pit or battering away on her PC for the next blockbusting novel or television drama - that is often grim, grisly and sometimes grotesque. Why on earth would anyone choose to spend their days surrounded by rotting flesh, squirming maggots and the putrid aroma of death?
"I have to detach myself from it," she explains simply. "You can't go about with it on your mind. It would send you mad. The hardest cases are the ones involving battered children in any circumstances but especially those that are victims of violence from abusive parents. The difficult cases are ones where the victims are totally innocent, battered women, battered children. Innocent, helpless victims."
"I have some cases that are not solved, they are still in my warehouse," she continues.
"I go through them periodically, looking at them. There's a young woman who looks like she was beheaded with cut marks on the back of her neck and skull.
"I've had her since 1996. I've got some kids that I have had for a while but never identified.
"Once the bones are completely dried and there is no soft tissue, then it's very hard to pinpoint much about them."
There are some cases that can't fail to strike an emotional chord despite Kathy's archaeological and forensic background. After all, she's a mother of three herself.
"I've got one little skeleton. This child has had fillings in their teeth. So there must have been a parent that cared enough about this child to take them to the dentist to have their teeth fixed, yet we haven't been able to identify them. That is very hard."
Man's inhumanity to his fellow man, woman and child no longer surprises her. Death in its many forms has become a way of life: she even admits to tuning into some of the multitude of television dramas hooking into the fascination with forensics.
"Honestly, they aren't my preferred choice, I'd rather be reading a book," she admits. "And quite often I find them very unrealistic. Take CSI. In reality, scene-of-crime officers don't run around investigating crimes the way those ones do. However I watch them because I feel I should keep a pulse on them even though most are not quite true to life."
She's quick to add that Bones is. Her own TV drama, already snapped up by Sky One, it is due to be screened next spring.
"Bones will strive for a level of realism other series can only hope to imitate," say series producers Fox Television.
It's real-life death, stories often gleaned from her own very real caseload. Kathy knows only too well that sometimes fact is far better than fiction.
"Now," she says, turnin
g to leave behind the swaying child's skeleton in its final resting place of Surgeons' Hall Museum. "Where can I buy a book about Burke and Hare?"
Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs is published by William Heinemann, hardback price £17.99
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