Flesh and Bone (Body Farm 2)

“Burt, don’t ever take the witness stand yourself,” I said. “You’re a shitty liar.”

He looked slightly embarrassed. And immensely gratified.

I took Art’s shovel from him and began scooping out a flat, shallow depression in the freshly spread earth, in a space we’d left amid the creeping juniper and laurel bushes. When I had the spot to my liking, I tore open a bag of pea gravel I’d brought. I poured a thin layer of gravel across the bottom of the circular hole, then a thicker layer around the rim. Then I bent down and lifted one edge of the granite plaque DeVriess and Evers had lugged up the hill, so it was standing vertical. Art and Evers stepped forward to help me, but I shook my head. “Thanks,” I said, “but I’d like to do this myself.”

Rocking the stone slab up onto first one corner, then another, I walked it over to the bed of gravel I’d laid. I fussed with the stone’s placement, lining up the bottom edge so that the corners would be equidistant from the rim of the circle, then eased it down to horizontal. I rotated it a fraction of an inch clockwise, then a smaller fraction back the other way, squaring it up with the pine tree and the plantings. Then I knelt down and spread more of the pebbles around it so the rough-hewn edges jutted up by about an inch all the way around.

I stood up and stepped back for a better look. As I did, Miranda came and stood close beside me on my right. I felt her take my right hand in her left, and then felt Art put an arm around me from the other direction. Evers and DeVriess and Miss Georgia Youngblood stepped forward, forming a circle around the marker, and I noticed hands clasping all around, heads bowing toward the inscription chiseled into the granite.

IN MEMORY OF DR. JESS CARTER

WHO WORKED FOR JUSTICE

WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE

“Sleep well, Jess,” I whispered for the third time in as many weeks.

We stood in silence. Somewhere overhead I heard the high, sweet song of a mockingbird.

The spell was broken by the beep of a pager. Hands came unclasped and reached into pockets, fumbled at belts. “I’m sorry; it’s mine,” said John Evers. He stepped away, and a moment later I heard him talking quietly on his cellphone. When he returned, he caught my eye. “That was Dispatch,” he said. “Fisherman just found a floater under the Henley Street bridge. Pretty ripe, apparently.”

“Suicide?”

“Not unless the guy shot himself in the back of the head on the way down. Could you come take a look?”

My adrenaline spiked even before he finished asking. “Let’s go,” I said, starting down the path toward the gate. After a few steps, I stopped and looked back. Evers drew alongside me and turned, too. Miranda, Art, Burt DeVriess, and Miss Georgia Youngblood remained circled around Jess’s marker-around Jess herself, it somehow seemed. At the same time, I felt their presence-friendship, maybe even love-encircling me as well. And not theirs alone: I felt Jess, too, around me and deep within me. The force of it-the gift of it-made my breath catch.

“You okay, Doc?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. Just fine.”

Reprinted from Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual (fourth edition), by William M. Bass. © Missouri Archaeological Society, Inc., 1995.