Jordan's Stormy Banks (Body Farm 7.5)

“I’m a forensic scientist,” I said. “I’m the one who identified your wife’s body. The man inside didn’t kill her.” A wave of discontent rippled through the crowd. “Denise Donnelly was strangled. Her throat crushed. That man’s a cripple—he couldn’t have done it.”

“He’s full of shit,” yelled Donnelly. “That nigger is a rapist and a killer, and he’s got to hang.” His words prompted a raw, enraged chorus of agreement.

“That man was behind bars in Brushy Mountain while she was being killed,” I shouted. “She was already dead—long since dead—by the time he escaped.” I fumbled at my shirt pocket, my shaky hand reaching for the small, folded paper bag—the bag containing the hyoid bone I’d plucked from the stained leaves on the hillside a few hours before. But before I could extract it, I was interrupted by a shout from the crowd.

“Nigger-lover,” yelled someone deep in the pack, and the insult was taken up by dozens of voices. “Nigger-lover! Nigger-lover! Nigger-lover!”

Donnelly held up a hand for quiet, and the taunts died away. “We don’t need some liberal, egghead scientist”—I saw spittle spray from his mouth when he spat out the word—“coming in here acting like he’s better and smarter than we are. Go back to your library, professor, and stay the hell out of our business.”

“I’m on the staff of the Tennessee State Medical Examiner,” I said, reaching for my belt and grabbing my badge.

“I don’t give a good goddamn about that,” he shouted. “We got plenty of rope. It wouldn’t take two minutes to cut another piece for you. And that oak limb is plenty strong enough for two men to swing from.”

“Denise Donnelly fought for her life,” I yelled to the crowd. “She had her killer’s skin under her fingernails. A white man’s skin, and a red hair, too.” I pointed at Donnelly. “Y’all ought to be asking Mr. Donnelly here how he got those scratches on his hands and face.”

Finally, my words seemed to be having some effect. The mob quieted, and I saw heads craning to peer at Donnelly.

“I got these scratches clearing a briar patch last week,” Donnelly shouted. “Anybody wants to come see the brush pile tomorrow, you’re more’n welcome. But anybody calls me a liar to my face, you’ve got a fight on your hands.”

I played the last card I had to play. “She’d been unfaithful to him. He had a motive to kill her.”

There were mutterings in the crowd—the sounds of doubt—and I felt a surge of hope. Suddenly, from high overhead, came the sharp sound of glass shattering, followed by a shout from a second story window of the courthouse. “Hey! Hey!” The heads of the mob swiveled upward. Deputy Yates leaned out the broken window. “It’s the sheriff! They’ve got him handcuffed and locked in a cell up here!”

“The sheriff was breaking the law,” shouted Cotterell. “Just like y’all are talking about doing. I couldn’t let him do that. I can’t let y’all do it, either.”

“Get out of the way, Jim, before you get hurt,” warned Donnelly. “Come on, let’s get the sheriff out and give that nigger what he deserves.”

The crowd surged forward. Cotterell snatched the shotgun from the deputy beside him. He fired it into the air, and they hesitated, but only briefly, then surged again. He racked the slide and fired once more, but by this time the mob was already swarming up the steps. Half a dozen hands laid hold of my arms; another half dozen began pummeling my head and shoulders. Beside me, I sensed the same thing happening to Cotterell.

Suddenly my attackers hesitated, then froze, and over the shrieks of the mob, I heard the whine of sirens—many sirens, growing louder as they approached the courthouse. Then I heard the squawk of a loudspeaker. “This is the FBI. Put up your weapons and disperse immediately, or you will be arrested. Put up your weapons and disperse immediately, or you will be arrested on federal charges.”

The hands clutching my arms let go, the rain of blows ceased, and I felt myself sag against the door as I was released and my attackers began backing away. I heard a commotion—a din of voices shouting “FBI! Make way! Make way!”—and the crowd parted and fell back, their faces scowling and cringing, like dogs who’ve attacked in a pack then were routed and set fleeing, tails between their legs. A wedge of federal agents—a dozen or more, all wearing body armor emblazoned FBI, all carrying short-barreled shotguns that they looked ready, willing, and able to use—forced their way to the courthouse steps. A man in civilian clothes stepped from the crowd and huddled with one of the agents. He pointed at Donnelly and at three others in the front ranks, and four agents spun from the wedge and put the men facedown on the ground, cuffing them in the blink of an eye.

I heard angry mutterings and wondered if the mob might turn on the FBI agents, but over the mutterings there were more sirens and more commotion at the back of the square. Moments later a phalanx of uniformed Tennessee state troopers, led by Special Agent Meffert, mounted the courthouse steps and stood shoulder-to-shoulder facing the crowd.

Meffert conferred briefly with the ranking FBI agent, then from the top step called out, in a voice that might well have carried halfway to Knoxville, “You have two minutes to disperse. It is now 8:03. Anyone still on the courthouse grounds at 8:05 will be arrested. You’ll be charged with engaging in a hate crime, and you will be cuffed and transported to arraignment in a United States criminal court. Make your choice, and make it fast. The man in that jail is not an innocent man, but he didn’t kill that woman. Anybody wants to go to prison for trying to lynch him, step right up—your future beckons.”

The crowd had fallen back, but it had not scattered. Meffert made a show of checking his watch. “Y’all got one minute,” he called, then added, as if it were an afterthought, “Now, I don’t know from personal experience, but I hear there’s a lot of big black men in federal prison be glad to add a little white meat to their diet, if you catch my drift. Variety bein’ the spice of life and all. Who wants to be first in line for that? Step right up, step right up, you cowardly sons of bitches. I’ll drive you there myself. I’ll even hand you the soap and point you toward the showers. Come on, by God!”

As his challenge hung in the air, the flaming cross flickered and went dark, the fire went out of the mob’s eyes, and the men slunk away, by twos and threes and tens, their tails tucked between their legs.

When the square stood empty—except for the law enforcement officers and the cuffed men and the undercover agent who’d pointed out the ringleaders—Meffert turned to Cotterell and me. “Well that was fun,” he said, shaking his head. “Jim, you interested in running for sheriff again? I’m thinking you might win this time around.”

“I’ll give it some thought,” muttered Cotterell. “First, though, I got to go change my britches.”

Meffert smiled, then clapped me on the shoulder. “Welcome to the Volunteer State, Doc. How you likin’ it so far?”

I stared at him, then heard myself chuckle. Within moments the three of us were howling with laughter—laughter of relief and disbelief and, above all, gratitude for our unlikely deliverance—there on the courthouse steps.

Murder is as old as the human species, but the forensic work of the Body Farm is a modern weapon in the war on crime. Back in 1992, Dr. Bill Brockton—the promising young chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee—wages a baffling, deadly battle of wits with a sadistic serial killer, one who seems to be circling ever closer to Brockton himself. In the next Body Farm novel, Brockton finds his lifelong research mission . . . but risks losing everything he holds dear.

Enjoy a sneak preview of

CUT TO THE BONE

Available September 2013

From William Morrow

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Prologue

SOME WOUNDS HEAL QUICKLY, the scars vanishing or at least fading to thin white lines over the years. Some assaults are too grave, though; some things can never be set right, never be made whol

e or healthy again, no matter how many seasons pass.

In this regard, wounded mountains are like wounded beings. Cut them deeply—slice off their tops or carve open their flanks—and the disfigurement is beyond healing.

So it was with Frozen Head Mountain, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. In the early 1960s, Frozen Head’s northern slope—thickly forested with hardwoods and hemlocks—was blasted and bulldozed away by wildcat strip miners to expose a thick vein of soft, sulfurous coal. Geologists called it the Big Mary vein, and for three years, Big Mary was illegally carved up, carted away, and fed into the insatiable maw of Bull Run Steam Plant, forty mountainous miles south. Then Big Mary’s vein ran dry, and the miners and their machines—their dredges and draglines and stubby, hulking haul trucks—departed as abruptly as they’d appeared.

They left behind a mutilated mountainside, naked and exposed, its rocky bones battered by the sun and the rain, the heat and the cold. After every rain, a witch’s brew of acids and heavy metals seeped from the ravaged slope, blighting the soil and streams in its path.

And yet; and yet. Nature is persistent and insistent. Years after the wildcatters moved on, kudzu vines began slithering into the shale, latching onto bits of windblown soil and leaves. Scrubby trees—black locust and Virginia pine—slowly followed, clawing tenuous toeholds in the rubble. A stunted sham of a forest returned, one instinctively shunned by birds and deer and even humans of right spirit.