Cut to the Bone (Body Farm 8)

“Yes, this is Dr. Brockton,” I snapped. I’d just returned from helping Tyler haul a fresh body from the morgue to the research facility. He now had two research subjects in the cage—“Double your data, double your smell,” I’d joked — and I’d brought some of the aroma back with me. I’d ducked into the shower to wash it off, and the phone had begun to ring just as I’d lathered up. I’d ignored the first dozen rings, but finally the insistent jangling had gotten to me. For the second time in as many weeks, water pooled beneath my bare feet on the grimy concrete floor, the grime turning to slime.

There was silence on the other end of the line, and my annoyance ramped another notch higher. “I said, this is Dr. Brockton. How can I help you?”

“It’s… it’s Peggy.”

“Peggy? Peggy who?”

“Peggy Wilhoit.” The hesitancy and fear in her voice faded, displaced by what sounded like indignation. “Your new secretary Peggy.” Oops, I thought. “Peggy, who opens your gruesome, disgusting mail.”

“Oh, Peggy,” I gushed. “Sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you,” I fibbed. “There’s a leaf blower right outside my hideout.” I waited for a response — a No problem or That’s okay or other phrase of forgiveness — but instead, I heard only silence. Deafening, damning silence, on her end of the call and also on mine: no droning leaf blower backing up my story. I cleared my throat. “How are you settling in by now, Peggy?”

“Well, the backlog’s a bit overwhelming, but I can see most of the desktop now. And I haven’t come across anything else that’s made me scream. Yet.” She paused. “Where did you say you are?”

“In my hideout. My sanctuary. My secret office, up at the north end of the stadium. I only use the one next to yours when I’m being a bureaucrat,” I explained. “Pushing papers, counseling students, chewing out junior faculty. I use this one when I need to get real work done.”

“Ah. Well, perhaps you’ll be so good as to show me where it is sometime. Meanwhile, you have a visitor here at Bureaucracy Central.”

Oh, hell — not a visitor, I thought, but then I checked my watch: eleven thirty. “Ah,” I said. “Tell him to meet me here.”

“Him who?”

“Him Jeff,” I said, sighing at the woman’s denseness. “My son. My visitor.”

“Could this be a different visitor? A young woman?”

“You’re asking me if it’s a woman? Can’t you tell the difference?”

“Yes, of course I can…” She paused, and when she resumed speaking, I felt frostbite nibbling my ear. “Let me start over. You have a visitor, Dr. Brockton. She is a young woman. Her name is Jenny Earhart.”

“Oh — the artist?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Brockton; I didn’t ask her about her talents. But I’ll do so now.” I heard a murmured exchange, then, “Yes, Jenny Earhart, the artist.”

“Does she have a sketch for me?”

Another murmured exchange. “Yes, she says she has a sketch for you.”

“Excellent! Send her my way.”

“Which way would that be, Dr. Brockton?” Clearly I had gotten off on the wrong foot with my new secretary.

“Oh. Right. Tell her I’ll be right there. Thank you, Peggy.” Without waiting for a reply, I hung up the phone, toweled off, and yanked on clean clothes, which snagged and dragged on my damp skin. Then I jogged through the curving concrete corridor beneath the stadium, skidding to a stop outside Peggy’s door just in time to avoid colliding with my son.

“Jeff. What are you doing here?”

“Gee, try to contain your excitement, Dad. It’s a teacher-training day at school. You invited me to lunch, remember? Ribs at Calhoun’s?”

“Sure. I knew that. I meant, what are you doing here now? Is it lunchtime already?” I brushed past him, squeezing through the doorway into the outer office. Behind the desk sat the new secretary, Peggy the Frosty, eyeing me coolly. In front of her, sitting sideways, wedged into the narrow gap between the desk and the doorway to my inner office, was Jenny, a leather portfolio and a skull-sized hatbox on her lap.

“Good morning,” I said, taking the box off her lap and setting it on the corner of Peggy’s desk. “Don’t open that,” I warned Peggy. “You won’t like what’s inside.” I gave Jenny a conspiratorial smile. “That was quick,” I said to her. “I figured it’d take you at least a week.”

She shrugged. “I got really caught up in it — stayed up all night working on it. It was like she was… I don’t know, trying to reach out to me.” She blushed. “Sounds silly, I know.”

“Actually, not at all,” I assured her. “I sometimes imagine I hear the dead when I’m looking at their bones. Hear them whispering — telling me what happened.”

“Yes, yes. Like that. Like… communing with the dead, almost. Amazing.”

“Sounds amazing.” Jeff’s voice came from just behind me. He’d followed me into Peggy’s office, and he leaned around me now, into Jenny’s field of view, waving. “Hi. I’m Jeff. His son.”

“Jeff, this is Jenny Earhart,” I said. “An artist. She’s doing a facial sketch for me — that girl whose bones we found on Labor Day up at the strip mine.” I turned back to her. “Why don’t you come into my office, where there’s a little more room, and show me what you’ve got?” I nodded toward the doorway, and she stood. “Give us a few minutes, son.”

“Why don’t we take her to lunch instead?” Jenny stopped in the doorway and turned to look at him. “You’re an artist,” he said. “That means you’re starving, right? Metaphorically speaking,” he added, flashing her a smile. I stared at him; was my son flirting with my forensic artist? And since when did he say things like metaphorically speaking? It must have worked, because she smiled back at him. “We’re walking over to Calhoun’s on the River,” he hurried on. “You got time to go with us?” She looked at me; all I could do was shrug, leaving it up to her. “I’m super-interested in art,” Jeff added. He caught my dubious glance. “Forensics, too, of course.”

“That’s good to know, son,” I said. “We’re putting a big wooden fence around the Body Farm. You can come help me paint it.”

* * *

Calhoun’s on the River was a five-minute walk from the Anthropology Department. Jeff, Jenny, and I took the stairwell down to the bone lab, exited at the base of the stadium — down at field level, near the south goal line — and angled across parking lots and four lanes of Neyland Drive to the big, barnlike restaurant perched on the north bank of the Tennessee River.

Calhoun’s was a Knoxville landmark, noted for its barbecued ribs, its unsurpassed view of the river, and its proximity to Neyland Stadium; the place was nearly always hopping, but on days when the Vols — the Tennessee Volunteers — were playing at home, it was mobbed. People arrived by car, on foot, even by boat. A small wharf adjoined the restaurant, and on home-game weekends, boats would begin arriving days ahead of time, some chugging upriver all the way from Chattanooga or even Alabama. The tradition had begun with a single small boat back in 1962, but in the thirty years since, it had taken off, turning into an immense, floating block party: tailgating, Knoxville style. The first few boats would tie up to the wharf; subsequent arrivals would tie to them, and so on. By kickoff time, a vast flotilla — yachts, houseboats, pontoon boats, even runabouts — extended halfway across the river. To get to an

d from the shore, people clambered from vessel to vessel, bobbing and weaving from the combined effects of the river and the revelry. “The Vol Navy,” this ad-hoc armada had been christened, and as an anthropologist, I found it a fascinating case study in social structure and cooperation.

On this day — three days before a much-anticipated match against the Florida Gators — a half-dozen early arrivals rocked gently in the water. Dangling high off the stern of one of the vessels, the reptilian eyes Xed out with black electrical tape, a ten-foot-long inflatable alligator swayed from an oversized hangman’s noose. Here’s hoping, I thought. The Vols looked promising this year.

The hostess seated us at a corner table overlooking the river — overhanging the river, in fact, as part of the restaurant extended above the water, supported by pilings. The windows on the river side extended from the floor to the ceiling; we sat down just in time to see a towboat and a load of empty barges, riding high in the water, making their way upriver. The headwaters of the Tennessee were only a few miles beyond, at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers. Both tributaries were navigable beyond Knoxville, but not for long, at least not for heavy traffic. A limestone quarry lay just above the confluence, on the French Broad — half a mile upstream from the UT pig farm — and my guess was, the barges were headed up there to take on a load of gravel. As the wake from the churning towboat reached the advance squadron of the Vol Navy, the boats rocked and heaved in the water.

“So,” Jeff intoned dramatically, “you two are probably wondering why I called you here today.”

“What?” I said, turning from the window. Jenny laughed.

* * *

She opened the portfolio slowly, dropping her gaze and fumbling with the latch on the leather case as if it were a complicated mechanism. It might have been my imagination, but her fingers appeared to be trembling a bit. Reaching inside, she took out a sheaf of papers and slid them onto the table. On top was a photograph — actually, a photocopy of a photograph — showing a frontal view of the dead girl’s skull, printed in high contrast to bring out the contours of the bone. “I wasn’t sure how to do this, so I started by taking pictures,” she said. She slid the frontal view aside; beneath it was another photocopied picture, this one showing the skull in three-quarter profile. “I used these as templates, underneath the paper I was drawing on, to make sure I didn’t change the shape or proportions.”