Flesh and Bone (Body Farm 2)

“Swell,” I said. “With promises like that, who needs curses?” Again I approximated a smile. “Meantime, what about the casework?”

“Garland’s back tomorrow,” she said, then laughed briefly and added, “May God help you. And we’ve both done all we can do with the Willis case unless they make an arrest and it goes to trial.” She was right; it was just that I would miss her terribly, even simply as a colleague.

Almost before I knew it, she had slipped out of the booth and stood up. She walked to my side of the table, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, and said, “Thank you, Bill. You might not understand this or believe it, but I do love you.”

And then she was gone.

CHAPTER 23

THREE DAYS HAD PASSED since Jess and I had parted. Three days with no call, no e-mail, no note in my in-box.

The gates to the Body Farm were slightly ajar, which probably meant that one of the graduate students was inside checking on a research subject. I parked in the slot closest to the gate-the Body Farm being the only place I could think of where the closest parking space was actually the least desirable, at least in terms of ambience-and swung the chain-link gate outward. As I stepped toward the inner wooden gate, something suddenly registered as odd, and I stepped back into the parking lot and did a quick scan. Mine was the only vehicle, I saw, anywhere near the gate, and that puzzled me. It was unlikely that a student would have arrived on foot: the research facility was three miles from the Anthropology Department by road, and road was the only way to get from one to the other unless you wanted to swim the Tennessee River, thereby shortening the distance to a mile. Someone could have walked over from the morgue or forensic center, but a half mile of access roads and parking lots separated the facility from the hospital. It wasn’t inconceivable that someone had walked over from the morgue, but I had never known a student to do it.

As I reached the gate, I noticed a note wedged between two of the wooden planks. “Bill-I’m inside. Come find me. Jess.” I scanned the parking lot again, more widely this time, but there was no sign of a fire-engine red Porsche.

I walked into the main clearing, half expecting to see Jess chatting with some graduate student she’d roped into letting her in. It was empty. “Hello?” I called. “Jess?” No answer. I took a short stroll downhill, along what remained of an old gravel roadbed where we generally set bodies that were brought here simply to skeletonize. Jess had sent a dozen or more up from Chattanooga over the past two years. She was building a skeletal collection for the ME’s office down there, not to compete with ours, but simply for reference purposes and teaching material. I seemed to recall that we had two or three Chattanooga bodies skeletonizing at the moment, so it was possible she was checking on their progress.

The Chattanooga bodies were there, two of them, but Jess wasn’t. One was down to bare bone, except for a few patches of mummified skin over the rib cage; the other had passed through the bloat and active decay stages and on to the dry stage, so it would soon be ready to process and send back as well. The cleaner one had been autopsied, I noticed; the top of his cranium, which had been neatly sliced off-by Jess, no doubt-sat on the ground to one side of the rest of his skull, looking a bit like an unusually smooth turtle shell. Judging from the prominence of the brow ridge and the smoothness of the cranial sutures, whose meandering joints had almost entirely filled in and disappeared, he was an older man. The robust bones of the rib cage and arms, and the large muscle-attachment points on the arms, spoke of great upper-body strength. But the leg bones didn’t fit with this picture: they were delicate and spindly, like those of a thin, frail old woman, and one leg looked shorter and distorted. Paralysis, I thought at first. Then: No. Polio. Polio had cut a huge and tragic swath through an entire generation of American children in the 1930s and ’40s and early ’50s, attacking the myelin sheaths of muscles and nerves, warping young bones ruinously in a matter of days or weeks. I had considered polio virtually eradicated from the planet, much as smallpox had been vanquished, but lately I’d read a disturbing story in the New York Times about the disease’s resurgence in India and Africa. Villagers there had grown suspicious and fearful about government vaccination programs. One rumor running rampant in Nigeria claimed that the vaccine contained a sinister American drug designed to sterilize unsuspecting African children. As fear and anger spread from village to village, causing public health workers to flee for their lives, the vaccination program was halted. Polio cases soon began spiking and spreading, setting back the global eradication effort by months or even years. What fools these mortals be, I thought. And how mortal we fools be.

I trudged back up the hill, through the clearing, and along the trail that led to Jess’s experiment near the upper fence. Through the unfurling spring foliage, I began to catch glimpses of our research subject, still tied to the tree, the blond wig practically glowing against the gray-black bark of the oak. But where was Jess?

“Jess? Are you here? Jess, you’re not hiding from me somewhere, are you?”

There was no answer. And as I got clear of the last thicket of underbrush between me and the big pine tree, I saw that Jess was indeed here, but I understood why she had not answered me.

Jess was against the tree, her naked body tied to the donated cadaver in an obscene parody of sexual intercourse. A blond wig and smears of blood partly obscured the face, but there was no doubt that it was Jess’s face, no doubt that it was Jess’s body. And no doubt that Jess was dead.

I had worked hundreds of death scenes, but never one where I had a personal stake, an intimate connection to the victim. That wasn’t who I was or what I did: I was the forensic scientist, the dispassionate observer, the eagle-eyed Ph.D. summoned to solve the puzzle. I was not, never had been, and still-even as I stared at Jess’s mutilated body-could not conceive of myself being the person who stumbles upon a scene that could tear out his heart, buckle his knees, burst a vessel in his brain.

My feet were locked in place, my brain scrambling wildly. My first impulse was to rush to Jess, feel for a pulse, pray that I’d misjudged the vacancy in her eyes and the stillness in her limp form. No, another impulse said, don’t touch anything, don’t take so much as one step closer. It’s a crime scene, and you shouldn’t contaminate it. Those, at least, must be something like the words that impulse would have used if my mind had been capable of wielding words, because I fought back the impulse to go to her.

So there I stood, rooted to the spot, for an instant that was also an eternity. Finally I felt one hand close around something hard in my hip pocket, and I pulled it out to see what it was. It was small and oblong and silver; I stared at it as if it were a mysterious artifact from some ancient or interplanetary civilization; finally I recognized it as my cellphone. Clumsily I pawed it open, struggling to remember and press the numbers 9 and 1 and 1 again. Nothing happened. I fought to recall how I had once used this device, in a former life; gradually I became dimly aware of the SEND button, and willed myself to press it. When I heard a female voice say “911,” I nearly dropped the phone.

I stared at it dumbly. “This is 911, do you have an emergency?” What was I supposed to say-how and where could I begin to describe what I had, what I beheld? “Hello, can you hear me? Do you have an emergency?”

“Yes,” I finally managed to say. “I do. Help. Oh God, please help.”

The phone fell to the ground, and I sank to my knees, and I heard and saw nothing more, or at least noticed nothing more, until a strong pair of hands raised me to my feet. A police officer maneuvered his face directly in front of mine and said, “Dr. Brockton? Dr. Brockton? Tell us what happened here.”

PART TWO. AFTER

CHAPTER 24

THE UNIFORMED POLICE OFFICER led me down the path to the main clearing, just inside the gate of the Body Farm. A warped, weathered picnic table sat askew under a tree at one edge of the clearing; the patrolman took me there and set me on one of its benches. “Do you mind waiting here while we secure the scene and get

some more people here?” I shook my head. “Are you all right?”

“Not really. But I’ll manage. You do what ever you need to do.”

I heard a series of sirens approaching, at least half a dozen in all. Someone had already stretched crime scene tape across the open gate; through the opening, I saw a fast-growing throng of officers-city police, UT campus police, and Medical Center security guards-as well as EMS personnel and firefighters. Heads leaned in through the gate, over the tape, peering at the facility. Peering at me.

After a while, a stylishly dressed man in a lavender dress shirt and yellow tie ducked under the tape and walked toward me. “Dr. Brockton?” I nodded. “I’m Sergeant John Evers,” he said. “I’m an investigator in Major Crimes. Including homicides.” He held out a suntanned hand and shook mine firmly, then handed me a business card. I pulled out my wallet and tucked it inside. “Can I get a brief statement from you here while things are fresh?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll want to talk to you in more detail downtown, since you’re the one who found the body. But for now, just some basic information.” He pulled out a pen and a small note pad, which he centered on one of the cupped boards of the tabletop. He took down my name, address, phone number, where I worked, and other data, then got to the particulars of where we were, and why. “What time did you arrive here this morning?”

“I think about eight,” I said. “I was listening to the news on the radio, so it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes after that.”

He nodded. “And what were you doing here?”

“I work here,” I said. “This is my research facility. The Anthropology Department’s research facility, I should say.”

“Yes, sir, of course. I meant, specifically, why had you come out this morning?”

“I came out to check on some research. To see what condition the body-the male body up there tied to the tree-was in by now.” I explained how we had staged the research subject, and why. “I was doing the research for the Chattanooga medical examiner,” I said. “Jess-Dr. Jessamine-Carter. I found her body when I went up there to check on my research subject.”

“So you recognized the victim?” I nodded. “You knew Dr. Carter personally?”

“Yes. We had worked together on several cases over the past few years. And we were collaborating on a current case, involving a murder victim whose body was found tied to a tree down near Chattanooga. That’s the death scene we were replicating here, so we could pinpoint the time since death more accurately for Dr. Carter.”