Cut to the Bone (Body Farm 8)

“You’re on,” said Brockton. “I need to run upstairs and check the mail. When I come back, we’ll put your recognition hypothesis to the test.” He ducked out the steel door of the basement lab, and Tyler heard his footsteps jogging up the two flights of stairs to the Anthropology Department’s main office.

Ten minutes later he heard footsteps jogging back down, and the steel door banged open. “Time’s up. You ready?”

“One. More. Second. Okay, ready.” Tyler straightened and rolled his chair sideways, so Dr. B could get at the jar. “There’s been a slight revision to the research protocol,” he added with exaggerated academic pomposity, “due to attrition in the study sample size. The original cohort was eleven. Now the n is five.”

“Five?” said Brockton. “Out of eleven? Good God, your research subjects are dropping like flies.” Tyler groaned, as Brockton had surely hoped he would. “Remind me never to be one of your guinea pigs.” Dr. B picked up the jar and carried it to the large bank of windows lining the lab’s south wall. Holding it up to the light, he tilted it, turned it, and then grinned at it. Six flies lay dead or dying in the bottom of the jar, but the other five were buzzing or crawling, vigorously and vividly. Each of them sported a small but prominent dot on its thorax: a distinctive dab of UT orange.

* * *

“God damn it,” Tyler muttered, pinching the sides of his nose fiercely. He had scarcely settled back into his folding chair after his lunch break, and already his nostrils were being invaded again. The first fifty times it had happened, he’d puffed air out his nose to blast the intruder loose without inflicting damage. By now, though, he was in a murderous mood, and was more than happy to turn his nasal passages into death chambers. Releasing the nostril that had been violated, he blew, and the crushed fly shot out and landed on the concrete. Tyler leaned down, the nail of his middle finger circling to the tip of his thumb, coiled to flick the fly through the fence and into the woods. Then he froze, staring, and burst into a laugh. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

The dead fly was wearing UT orange.

CHAPTER 17

Brockton

“Excuse me?” I said into the telephone handset.

“I said, ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ ” the dean repeated, the edge in his voice growing even sharper.

“I heard what you said,” I told him, “and I even know it comes from a poem, but I don’t quite get what you mean by it.”

“I mean what the hell were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry,” I floundered, “but I still don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean I just spent half an hour on the phone with one of the groundskeepers from the Medical Center,” he snapped. “He’s trimming weeds at the edge of a parking lot, and he steps into the woods to take a leak. Guess what he sees?”

I had an uneasy feeling that I knew, but I decided to play innocent, in hopes that I was wrong. “Uh… a marijuana patch?”

“No. Wait—what? Are you growing pot in the woods now, too?”

“No!” Perhaps I should’ve chosen my alternative scenario more carefully. “No, of course we’re not growing pot in the woods.”

“Well, thank God for small favors,” he said. “So this poor, unsuspecting bastard goes behind a tree to pee and nearly craps his pants instead, because he suddenly finds himself face-to-face with a human corpse. A very nasty-looking, nasty-smelling human corpse.”

“Ooh,” I managed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You’ll be even sorrier if he files a lawsuit. Which he’s threatening to do.”

“Ouch,” I said. “I’m really sorry to hear that.” That was no exaggeration, though I said it not so much from contrition as from a sense of foreboding. “Reckon it’d help if I go see him? Grovel awhile — apologize a lot — and explain how important the research project is?”

“Try the groveling on me, first,” he grumbled. “And while you’re explaining, don’t forget to explain the fence project.”

“What fence project?”

“The new fence you’re going to build around that whole patch of ground. Eight feet high. Wood, and solid — so nobody else gets traumatized.”

Christ, I thought, where do we get the money for that? Fencing in the wooded area would cost far more than building the chain-link cube had cost. I was about to make that point to the dean — before embarking on the groveling and apologizing he’d demanded — when I heard a bloodcurdling shriek just outside my office door. This did not bode well as a first-day experience.

Ten feet away, my new secretary, Peggy something-or-other — Williams? no: Wilhoit — had settled into her chair and begun scaling the months-high mountains of mail, memos, and other departmental detritus that had accumulated over the past several months. For the past hour I’d heard her clucking and sighing her way through the task, lobbing an occasional question across the divide and through my open door. “Do you want to order personalized pocket protectors for all the faculty?” she lobbed. I didn’t. “Do you want this catalog from the Edmund Scientific Company?” I did. “Do you already know about the faculty meeting next Tuesday?”

“What faculty meeting?”

That was when she shrieked: a full-throated, long-lasting scream. Hastily hanging up on the dean, I leaped up and rushed through the door to the outer office. My new secretary had pushed as far away from her desk as she could get, the back of her chair pressed against the windowsill. Her arms were extended in front of her, her fingers spread, her hands shaking. In front of her, in the small, semicircular clearing of desktop she’d managed to create, I saw an oversized manila envelope, an eight-by-ten photograph pulled halfway out of the opening. I didn’t need to see the rest of the photo to recognize it — or to know why it had prompted such distress.

The photo showed a nude woman — a nude dead woman — lying on a hillside in the woods. Her legs, which had no feet, were opened wide, splayed on either side of a small tree; her crotch was jammed tightly against the sapling’s trunk, in what appeared to be a shocking pose of sexual violation.

I snatched the envelope from the desk and quickly slid the picture back inside.

“Why?” whispered Peggy hoarsely.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. Reaching behind me, through the doorway, I tucked the envelope into the bookshelf just inside my office.

“Why?” she repeated. “Why would someone send you that? And what kind of sick person would take such a picture?”

I winced. “Actually, I took it,” I told her. “It’s an old crime-scene photo, from a murder I worked up in Morgan County a couple years ago. December twenty-fourth, 1990. Christmas Eve.” I sighed. “I don’t know why this copy just came in the mail. I guess the sheriff’s office or the TBI is cleaning out old case files. That, or they misread a request I sent out a few months ago, for copies of my forensic reports. A bunch of my files got thrown out last spring by mistake — by a temporary secretary, matter of fact.” I frowned at her reflexively, as if the missing files were somehow her fault, then inwardly scolded myself. “I’m sorry you ran across that with no warning,” I said. Pulling the envelope from the bookshelf, I looked to see whether it had been Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot who’d scared the bejesus out of my new secretary, but there was no return address, and I tucked the envelope away again. She drew several deep breaths, each one sounding steadier than the one before. “Most of what we do here’s pretty boring,” I said, “but some of it’s strong stuff — not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.”

She exhaled slowly through pursed lips, her cheeks puffing out as she did. “Well, you did warn me — sort of — when you interviewed me. I just hadn’t expected something like… this… my first day on the job. ‘A mean surprise’—that’s what my mama would call it.”

I smiled at the phrase. “Well, I’m sorry for the mean surprise, Betty.”

“Peggy,” she corrected.

“I’m sorry for the mean surprise, Peggy.” I smiled in a way I hoped was rea

ssuring. “Around here, you’ll get used to things like that.”

She didn’t return the smile. “No offense, Dr. Brockton,” she said, “but if I ever get used to things like that, it’s time for me to look for a different job.”

Suddenly I realized that I’d hung up on the dean in mid-scolding. “It might be time for me to look for a different job,” I said ruefully, reaching for the phone and preparing to grovel.

* * *

“Hello,” I barked, snatching the handset from the cradle with a dripping, slippery hand.

“Uh… hello? Is this Dr. Brockton?” The caller sounded tentative and timid, as if she hoped I were someone else.