The Bone Yard (Body Farm 6)

“What kind of skeleton? Old or new? Indian or white or what?”

“That’s exactly what the trooper wanted to know. I said I’d be glad to take a look.”

“And?”

“Exposed bones in a dry wash. Not Indian.”

“How’d you know?”

“Indians have shovel-shaped incisors — their front teeth are scooped out on the back side. So do Asians. Caucasian incisors are pretty much flat across the back.”

Angie rubbed her teeth, then asked, “Old bones, or new?”

“Old enough to be bare and sun-bleached. New enough to have an amalgam filling, though that could have been anytime in the twentieth century. She — it was a woman in her twenties — had only two cavities, so she was probably born sometime after the 1950s.”

“How do you figure that?”

“That’s when America’s cities and towns started adding fluoride to their drinking water.”

“A dastardly commie plot,” teased Vickery.

“Indeed,” I said. “Those Communists wanted our kids to have strong teeth. So this woman was all set for the commie takeover, dentally speaking. Although it’s possible that she grew up earlier, before fluoridation, in an area where the groundwater’s naturally high in minerals.”

“Interesting,” he mused. “You can tell all that just from the teeth?”

“You can tell a lot more than that just from the teeth,” I said. “You can also tell that she had good dental care as a kid, because the one filling she had was in a second molar — a ‘twelve-year molar.’ But then something happened, her life changed for the worse. She had a big unfilled cavity in one of her third molars — her wisdom teeth — which means that she wasn’t going to the dentist anymore. Maybe she’d run away from home; maybe she was on her own and not making enough money to afford dental care. I’ve seen this a lot over the years, and often far worse, in murdered prostitutes — they leave home, lose touch with their families, fall on hard times, can’t afford a dentist. So their teeth start to go. Which makes them less attractive, and makes it even harder for them to earn money. Vicious downward spiral.”

Angie picked at the chicken salad with her fork. “So this dead woman in South Dakota — she was a hooker?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Unfortunately, she was never identified. Maybe a hooker, maybe a hitchhiker; maybe both. The body was dumped in a draw near Interstate 90, not far from an exit. I’m guessing a trucker picked her up, had sex with her, then killed her and dumped her body hundreds of miles from where she’d gotten into the truck.”

“And how do you know she was killed?”

“Because her hyoid bone — the U-shaped bone in the throat — had been crushed. Means she was strangled.”

Vickery nodded. “I’ll buy it,” he said. “It all fits together. Too bad. Young women without money are very vulnerable. Not many options, and plenty of people ready to prey on them.” He inspected his cigar again, frowned at it, and laid it on his plate, alongside his knife and fork and one uneaten bite of mashed potatoes. “So that was the case that got you going on modern forensics?”

“I guess it was,” I said. “After that, word got around South Dakota that I was willing to look at modern bones and bodies. At the end of the summer, when I went back to the University of Kansas, a KBI agent called me up. Turned out that he was the brother of a South Dakota sheriff I’d helped. Pretty soon I was looking at bones from all over Kansas. And by the time I moved to Tennessee, the TBI and the Tennessee state medical examiner knew about me, and asked me to consult on cases.” I sopped up the last of my coleslaw sauce with the last bit of hush puppy. “So. Like I said, one thing led to another. South Dakota led me to north Florida. And raw oysters. And fried cat.”

I left the Waffle Iron full and happy. The diner’s food was good, and I’d enjoyed reminiscing about my summer excavations in South Dakota. We’d parked the Suburban in the back corner of the parking lot, which had largely emptied out by now. As we neared the vehicle, I noticed a folded paper underneath the left windshield wiper — a sale circular or political flyer, I figured. “Uh-oh,” I joked over my shoulder to Angie and Vickery. “Looks like we’ve gotten a parking ticket. These Sinking Springs folks sure keep an eye out for foreigners.” I plucked the paper from beneath the wiper blade and unfolded it. It was not a circular or flyer; it was a hand-lettered note on plain white paper. It read, “Find the Bone Yard.”

I stared at the note; it was the second time I’d read the words bone yard today, but this note, I felt certain, had been written half a century after the diary entry. I shifted my fingers to a corner of the paper and showed the message to Angie and Vickery. Angie whistled softly. “I guess I shouldn’t have handled this,” I said. “Sorry. I might have just contaminated some evidence.”

Vickery shrugged, then took out a clean handkerchief and carefully wrapped the note in it, then handed it to Angie. “Hell, everything’s evidence of something, Doc,” he said. “This whole world’s one big crime scene. The trick’s figuring out what to send to the lab. And where to stop stringing the tape.”

As Angie and I followed Vickery’s taillights back to Tallahassee, I phoned my son, who was at Myrtle Beach with his wife and two boys. “Hi, Dad,” said Jeff when he answered. “How are you? What’s up?”

“I’m fine. Still in Florida. I just wanted to talk to Walker and Tyler.”

“So, what am I, chopped liver?”

“No, of course not.” I laughed. “I just wanted to talk to the boys. Just wanted to tell them…” Tell them what? Tell them how lucky they were? Tell them not to become orphans, not to be abused, not to get sent to reform school, not to get murde

red and dumped somewhere in the woods?

Yes. Those things, and more.

Jeff put the speakerphone on and handed the phone to the boys.

“Grandpa Bill,” said Walker. “I caught a fish today.”

“I went body surfing,” Tyler shouted.

“Wonderful, boys,” I said. But what I meant was “what wonderful boys.”

Chapter 13

My shovel scraped across a chunk of timber a few inches beneath the ground, near one of the chimneys. The timber was black and crumbling; as I leaned down to inspect it more closely, I saw that it was rotted but also charred. It was embedded in earth that was undisturbed — that is, as I dug deeper, I saw that there were no other artifacts beneath it — so I guessed that the wood had been a floor joist rather than a ceiling joist or rafter.

Angie and I had returned to the ruins of the reform school; Vickery had spun off to start interviewing people about the school’s grim life and fiery end.

I wondered if Angie and I might find charred bones amid the ruins — Stevenson’s initial research hadn’t ruled out the possibility that one or more bodies hadn’t been recovered after the fire — but it was a big job: the ruins were a whole bunch of haystacks, and whatever skeletal needles lay hidden in them might well have crumbled to rust or to dust by now.

I’d spent the morning skimming vegetation and the top layer of burned material from the center of the dormitory area. My clothes were soggy and grimy and my back was grumbling, so I was relieved when Vickery’s Jeep pulled up and emitted a brief chirp of the siren. He rolled down the window and waved Angie and me over.