Flesh and Bone (Body Farm 2)

“He’s getting pretty interesting. You might want to come out and take a look.”

“I was planning to h

ead that way after I finished grading these papers and eating lunch,” I said, “but somehow those seem less compelling now. Let’s go.”

The department’s pickup truck was parked a flight of stairs away, near the tunnel that penetrated the stadium at field level, at the north end zone-the tunnel the UT football team ran through to the cheers of a hundred thousand people on game days. The truck was angled nose-first between two of the columns holding up the stadium’s upper deck. I backed around, tucking its rear bumper between two other columns, and threaded the one-lane ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, weaving a path around several students and an oncoming maintenance truck.

Turning right onto Neyland Drive, we paralleled the river, driving downstream. The morning was sunny and unseasonably warm for mid-March-at least, what used to pass for unseasonably warm-and there were already a fair number of cyclists and runners on the greenway that bordered Neyland. The School of Agriculture’s trial gardens-a couple of carefully landscaped acres radiating from a large circular arbor-were already ablaze with daffodils, forsythia, and tulips. I slowed to admire the view, which was just as well, because a hundred yards ahead, a truck hauling a long horse trailer was making a leisurely right turn into the entrance of the veterinary school.

“Hey, speaking of horses, what ever happened to Mike Henderson?” asked Miranda. “He was doing research on the effects of fire on bone a while back. Worked at the vet school part-time, and used to burn horse and cow bones to study the fracture patterns, didn’t he? Laying the groundwork for a big project with human bone.”

“Well, that was his plan,” I said. “His M.A. thesis had some problems. He burned a lot of bones, and he got some nice pictures showing the difference between how dry bone and green bone fracture in a fire. But I’m not sure he added much in the way of interpretation or analysis.”

“I saw some of those pictures at a poster session at the forensic conference a year or two ago,” she said. “Really interesting. The dry bones he burned fractured in a sort of rectilinear pattern, like logs in a campfire. But the green bones fractured in a sort of spiraling pattern, right?” I nodded. “How come?”

“Not sure,” I said. “Nobody is. You wanna know my personal theory?”

“Oh yes, please, Doctor,” Miranda whispered huskily. “I love it when you share your personal theories with me.” I’d laid myself wide open to that brickbat of sarcasm.

“Okay, smart-ass, I think it has to do with the collagen,” I said. “There’s still a lot of collagen in fresh bone. I don’t think anybody’s done research that supports this yet, but my theory is, the collagen matrix has a little twist to it. That would make the bone stronger. Sort of like those twisted pine trees you see growing on windy cliff-tops, you know? The spiral grain makes them a lot tougher than the tall, straight trees that grow where the wind doesn’t blow so hard.”

“Nature’s a pretty good structural engineer,” she agreed.

I turned onto the entrance ramp that would carry us up to Alcoa Highway, which spanned the river and led to the medical complex and the Body Farm. “It’s not too late to change your dissertation topic,” I said. “I bet if you took comparative X-rays and MRIs of bones when they were fresh and then after they’d dried, you could shed some light on the structure of the collagen.”

“Sure,” she said. “Just flush all my data on osteoporosis down the toilet and start over.” I nodded. “So when I hit the seven-year mark as a graduate student, can you get me tenure?”

“If it means I get to keep you as a colleague,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “You’d feel threatened by me if I were a colleague.”

“Ha,” I said. “I feel threatened by you already.” I laughed. “I guess that means I’m either brave or foolish.”

“Guess so,” she said. She didn’t indicate which one her money was on.

As we crossed the bridge over the river, I noticed the water level had risen during the night. Every winter, the Tennessee Valley Authority lowers the levels in its chain of reservoirs so that there’s room to accommodate plenty of runoff during the rainy season. By mid-March, though, the rains tend to taper off, so TVA begins refilling the pools to their normal summertime highs. Some of the lakes up in the mountains-Norris and Fontana, especially-dropped ten or twenty feet in the winter, exposing high layers of red clay banks ringing the green waters. Fort Loudoun, though-as a mainline reservoir that had to be kept open to barge traffic-only dropped about three feet. It was enough to expose shoreline for arrowhead-hunters, but not enough to strand boats on the mud like beached whales.

The redbuds and dogwoods along Alcoa Highway were starting to bloom. Normally the redbuds came first, then-just as they were winding down-the dogwoods burst out. Some years, though, when the botanical planets aligned in some magical way, the two species bloomed in unison, and this was shaping up as one of those glorious years. Maybe it was just because I was finally getting clear of my two-year grieving spell over Kathleen’s death, or maybe because I felt the stirrings of desire for Jess-encouraged by what I took to be flirting on her part-but this spring seemed to reek of wanton, shameless fertility. The air was almost indecent with the scent of blossoms and pollen. It was the sort of spring that had inspired pagan festivals in other cultures, other centuries.

UT’s College of Agriculture had a dairy farm beside the hospital, bounded by a big bend in the river; on a morning like this, with the trees in full flower and the black-and-white Holsteins arranged on the emerald grass, the view was like something out of a painting: Tennessee Pastoral, it might be titled. Tuck the Body Farm into one corner, and it would be like one of those seventeenth-century memento mori paintings featuring a skull or bludgeoned animal nestled among the dewy fruits and vegetables to remind us of our mortality. Sort of like the role I played at UT faculty meetings, I supposed.

I parked beside the entrance and unlocked the padlocks on the chain-link fence and the inner wooden gate. We didn’t have any redbuds or dogwoods inside the Body Farm, but we did have dandelions galore in the clearing, bright splashes of yellow amid the new grass and old bones.

As Miranda and I trudged up the path toward the upper end of the facility, I noticed a new body bag a few feet off the trail, with one hand and one foot exposed. “Is that the highway fatality?”

“Yes,” she said. “We brought him out from the morgue yesterday morning.”

I knelt down beside the body and folded the bag back. As I did, a small squadron of blowflies swarmed up from around and beneath the black plastic. “And he was walking on I-40?”

“Yeah, wandering along that elevated stretch downtown where there’s no shoulder. Stumbled into the traffic lane, and some high school student smacked right into him. I feel sorry for the kid-apparently he’s pretty torn up about it.”

“Be hard not to be,” I said. “I ran over a dog once, and it made me throw up. I can’t imagine accidentally killing a person.”

“He’s lucky he was driving a big SUV. Otherwise, he might’ve been killed, too. The front end was pretty smashed up. Smaller car, this guy might’ve come right over the hood and blown through the windshield at sixty or seventy miles an hour.”

I studied the dead man, who looked to have lived four or five tough de cades before dying in the fast lane. One side of the face and head had been crushed; shards of glass and paint were tangled in the hair, and a number of teeth had snapped off at the gum line. The left arm, shoulder, and ribs appeared shattered as well. I noticed clumps of white fly eggs, which looked like grainy paste or Cream of Wheat, scattered across his many wounds. Twenty-four hours from now, his entire body would be swarming with newly hatched maggots.

“Looks like a coin toss whether he died of brain damage or internal injuries,” I said. “I guess Jess could pin it down, if it mattered.”

“The family said they didn’t want an autopsy, and they didn’t want the body, either,” Miranda said. “He’d been living on the street for a while; problems with drinking an

d probably mental illness. Apparently no love lost between him and his relatives. The death certificate simply lists ‘multiple injuries from automobile impact’ as the cause of death.”

“Well, it’s too bad,” I said, “but he’ll be an interesting addition to the skeletal collection. Good example of massive blunt-force trauma, and how you can tell the direction of impact from the way the bones are fractured.”

“Also a good example of why it’s not a good idea to drink and walk.”

“That too,” I said.

I folded the body bag back over the man, nudged his hand and foot beneath its shade. The shade would keep the skin from turning leathery-tough, as it would in the sunshine; it would also keep the maggots-which shun daylight, and the predatory birds that accompany it-munching busily around the clock. With that, we turned and headed up the path again toward our Chattanooga victim’s stand-in.

As we got close, I saw why Miranda had been eager to bring me out for a look. The body still hung from the tree, its head sagging forward nearly to its chest. Despite the facial injuries I had replicated-bloody injuries that would normally prompt a feeding frenzy by teeming maggots-most of the soft tissue remained. Even the exaggerated eye makeup remained intact. But the body’s feet, ankles, and lower legs had been reduced almost to bare bone.

“Wow,” I said, “he’s looking a lot like the murder victim, except that his abdomen is still bloated. Another couple days, maybe, and I’d say he’ll correspond almost exactly.” I knelt down and checked the feet and legs for signs of carnivore chewing, but I didn’t see any-again, just like the Chattanooga victim. All I saw were maggots, fighting over what little tissue remained on the lower extremities.

We had set an infrared camera on a tripod, aimed at the body; it was rigged to a motion sensor so if a nocturnal animal managed to breach the fence and chew on the body, we’d capture a photo of it. “Have you checked the camera?” Miranda nodded. “Has anything triggered it?”