The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (2 page)

That did ring a bell, I realized.

“Her YouTube clip’s been watched fifty or sixty million times. She became this overnight megacelebrity. Of course, that was a year or so ago. She’s old news by now.” Miranda studied the newswoman’s face, reaching down to shoo away a cloud of blowflies. It was absurd, of course, since the whole point of putting Gershwin out here was to allow nature to have its way with her, but the fly shooing was a reflexive gesture of respect, so I kept my mouth shut. “What do you plan to do with all these pictures of The Face of Channel 10?”

“Couple things, probably,” I said. “I need to do a funding proposal for the dean’s office—apparently they’ve got some deep-pocket donor they think might be interested in adopting us—and I could see using a few of these photos to illustrate our decomposition research. I’ll probably also do a slide presentation at the national forensic-science conference next February. ‘Decomposition Day by Day’ or some such. Thirty slides, thirty days, talk for a minute about each slide.”

Miranda closed her eyes and let her head slump forward, then feigned a loud snore. “A slide presentation? That’s lame, totally twentieth century,” she said. “How about a podcast—a real-time video camera, streaming continuous images to the Web? That would actually fit the spirit of our gal’s life and work and last request.”

“Broadcast this on the Web?” I shook my head. “No way. I don’t have nearly enough fingers and toes to count the ways that could get us in hot water.”

“Well, at least make a movie instead of slides for your presentation,” she said.

“But this is a still camera,” I pointed out. “Besides, neither one of us has the time to hang around and film a documentary.”

“Neither one of us needs to,” she said. “You’re setting the timer to take a picture, what, every few minutes or every few hours?”

I nodded.

“So once she’s through skeletonizing, in a month or two, string all the pictures together into a video and it’ll fast-forward through the entire decomp sequence in a couple of minutes. That would be cool.”

“You think that would work for the funding proposal, too?”

She cringed. “Why would seeing this woman’s face decay inspire some rich alumnus to fork over big bucks for body bags and bone boxes and the like?”

“Actually, I’m hoping to raise money for your assistantship,” I said. Miranda’s head whipped around, and I wished I hadn’t said it, even though there was some truth to it. “Sorry. Bad joke. You’re covered.”

She shot me a piercing look, hard enough to make me flinch. Miranda would make a terrific prosecutor or detective, I thought, if she ever got tired of forensic anthropology. “At least Ithink you’re covered.”

“You’re the chairman of the Anthropology Department,” she responded. “If anybody should know, it’s you.”

“I do know you’re not affected by the cuts I proposed,” I said. “But the dean has to approve the budget before it goes to the chancellor and the president. The football scholarships are safe and the coaching salaries are safe, but nothing else is guaranteed.” She didn’t say anything, but the worry in her eyes pained me. “By the way,” I added, “I’m giving a lecture at the Smithsonian on Saturday afternoon, and I’m having lunch with Ed Ulrich beforehand.” Ulrich had been one of my earliest and brightest Ph.D. students at UT; now he was head of the Smithsonian’s Division of Physical Anthropology. “I’m going to see if I can twist his arm for some research funding. Enough to support two graduate assistantships.”

“Tell Ed I said hi.” She was too young to have been a classmate of Ulrich’s, but she’d talked with him at conferences many times, and he’d made two or three trips to UT during the time she’d been my assistant.

“Tell Ed I said help!”

I zoomed in a bit more, filling the viewfinder with The Face, then snapped another test picture. Taking care not to jostle the tripod, I removed the camera from the mount and huddled under my jacket to block out the daylight. The photo showed a lovely woman, but her face had gone slack, and the light and life had faded from her eyes. I used the cursor to enlarge the center of the image and saw that the camera had caught one blowfly in midair, just above her face; another was already emerging from the slightly opened mouth. Looking from the camera’s display to the body on the ground, I saw that those two flies had been joined already by dozens of others, swiftly drawn to the odor of death, even though I could detect no trace of it yet. Within minutes small smears of grainy white paste—clumps of blowfly eggs—would begin to fill her mouth and nose and eyes and ears, and by this time tomorrow her face would be covered with blowfly larvae, a writhing mass of newly hatched maggots. I fiddled with the camera’s digital menu, calling up the control screen for the built-in timer. Initially I’d planned to set it to take a photo every twelve hours, but as I glanced down at the swarming flies, I realized that twelve-hour intervals would miss many details of her decomposition. The funding people might not be interested in the subtle shifts of her decay, but I certainly was. What about a photo every half hour, or even every ten minutes? For that matter, why not just camp out here in person and watch it all in real time? Finally I compromised: one picture every fifty minutes, the length of a typical classroom lecture. I did the math: A picture every fifty minutes would yield thirty pictures a day. At the end of two months, I’d have eighteen hundred images. At thirty images a second—the speed of television images, I’d heard—eighteen hundred images would make a video sixty seconds long: exactly the running time of

“Maurie’s Minutes.”

Swapping out the camera’s small digital memory card for a larger one—a two-gigabyte chip, large enough to hold hundreds of images—I latched the camera back onto the tripod, and Miranda and I left the Body Farm, chaining the wooden gate shut and fastening the metal fence behind us. As I snapped the outer padlock shut on the Body Farm’s newest and most famous resident, I found myself thinking of the words she’d used at the end of every newscast for years. “Good night,” I murmured. “See you tomorrow.”

THE MAN’S FACE STARED BACK AT ME, HIS EXPRESSION
hovering somewhere in a zone bordered by detachment, curiosity, weariness, and disappointment. I wished I could discern more kindness and compassion in his eyes, because his eyes were my own: I was scrutinizing Bill Brockton’s face in my bathroom mirror, much as I’d scrutinized Maureen Gershwin’s features through a camera lens six hours before.

I glanced down to the counter, at the photo of Gershwin I’d taken at the Body Farm and printed before leaving campus for the day. Seeing it gave me a pang of guilt—partly because Miranda had seemed uncomfortable about the photo shoot and partly because, anthropologically speaking, Miranda had a lot of opinion on her side. People in a number of cultures—Native Americans and Chinese, for instance—traditionally believed that taking people’s pictures could steal their souls. By that reasoning, Maureen Gershwin’s soul had been stolen on a nightly basis for years, sucked into television cameras and dispersed like dust—puffs of electrons or photons or whatever television sets generated—throughout East Tennessee. Was I now stealing whatever scraps had remained? On the other hand, since Gershwin was already dead, might the camera somehow be restoring a bit of soul to an empty husk of a body?

Studying her image, I revised the assessment I’d made earlier in the day. There certainly wasn’t light or life in Gershwin’s eyes, but there was something eerie, a haunting quality, in the photo. It was elusive, but it was there all the same: almost as if the eyes were challenging me, challenging the world, by their very vacancy. I’m not who you think I am,they seemed to say. Or maybe just,Nobody’s home. Leave a message.

I raised my hands, stretching my thumbs and forefingers into L-shaped brackets, and framed my face in the handmade viewfinder. Leaning closer to the mirror, I turned my head slightly to the right and widened the space between my hands. There: That was how I’d framed the shot of Gershwin’s face, almost face-on but favoring the left side just a bit. Glancing down at Gershwin’s photo again, I realized that I’d photographed her at exactly the same angle as the television camera had, night after night.Interesting, I thought.Even though she’s dead, I still wanted her to look the same; I still wanted her to bethe same. But even before death, who had she been? For that matter, who was I? A professor, a scientist, a student of death, a consultant to the state’s medical examiners and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I was also a father, a grandfather, and a widower; since losing my wife to cancer several years earlier, I’d had two brief romances. A year or so back, I’d fallen for a smart, sassy medical examiner from Chattanooga; then, just months ago, I’d gotten involved with a beautiful, baffling librarian. To say that both romances had ended badly would be a huge understatement: the M.E. had been murdered, and—by a twist of fate whose bizarre mirror-image symmetry I only now recognized—the librarian had turned out to be a murderer.

I caught myself frowning in the mirror. Those episodes, those details of my life, seemed oddly unrelated to the face of the middle-aged man staring out at me from the wall of glass. His face seemed almost to belong to someone else, not me. I glanced to my left, where a side mirror caught the same half-stranger’s face in three-quarter profile. In the corner, where the two mirrors met, was a third take on the same face, this one bisected by the vertical seam in the glass. Thus reflected and bisected, I stood transfixed by these partial, unrevealing stand-ins for myself, whoever “me” really was. The jangle of the telephone interrupted my reverie. The lateness of the call surprised me; as I answered the bedroom extension, I noticed that Randall Gibbons—formerly Maureen Gershwin’s coanchor and now the solo anchor—was wrapping up the eleven o’clock newscast. Usually the only calls that came this late were from police, so I suspected I was being called to a death scene, and as I hurried to the phone on the nightstand, I found myself hoping for the distraction and the mission of a case. Perhaps that was who I really was, I thought, perhaps that was what really defined me: Maybe I was merely a reflection of the call, the case, the crime scene, the forensic puzzle. The phone’s caller ID display told me it wasn’t the police contacting me. But it also told me that the caller—“Burton DeVriess LLC”—might have something almost as interesting to offer.

THE BACKHOE LURCHED AND BUCKED AS ITS CLAW
tore into the wet, rocky clay of Old Gray Cemetery, one of Knoxville’s oldest and loveliest burial grounds. The name felt apt; the day was dreary, and the air was as cold as the mound of chilly soil piling up beside the monument. Officially, spring was only a few days away, but the earth itself still felt as devoid of warmth and life as a corpse. The diesel engine labored against some sudden resistance, and as the machine strained, it wheezed out a cloud of black smoke. The soot drifted on a whisper of breeze for ten feet or so—just far enough to engulf Miranda and me—and then hovered.

Miranda fanned a hand dramatically across her face. “Remind me why we’re courting lung cancer and pneumonia here?” She punctuated the question with a delicate little stage cough. I was still a bit vague on our mission as well—not the task itself but the late-night, last-minute nature of the phone call I’d received barely ten hours before, asking for my help. “We’re here to help figure out if Trey Willoughby fathered a child by Sherry Burchfield,” I said.

Miranda nodded toward the inscription chiseled into the grave marker, a towering obelisk of polished pink granite. “‘Trey Willoughby, beloved and faithful husband’?”

“Trey Willoughby, at least,” I said. “Not sure about the ‘beloved’ and ‘faithful’ bits. ‘Beloved’ is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but the bone sample we’re about to take could cast a serious shadow on the ‘faithful’ part.”

“Or the unfaithful part,” she said. “So to speak.”

“So to speak.”

“What if the DNA’s too degraded for a paternity test?” I shrugged in response. “And what’s the story on Sherry Burchfield, who might be the mama? I take it she’s not Trey’s loving wife and grieving widow?”

I shook my head. “Sherry might have been someone’s loving wife and grieving widow,” I said, “once upon a time, but she wasn’t Willoughby’s. When I moved to Knoxville twenty years ago, Sherry Burchfield was Knoxville’s most famous madam.”

Miranda laughed. “She was definitely well named, I’ll give her that. Isn’t ‘Sherry’ taken from the French word for ‘dear’ or ‘darling’?”

“French is Greek to me,” I said, “but that sounds right. And it’s certainly consistent with her history. Sherry was arrested a bunch of times for prostitution-related crimes—pandering, soliciting, I don’t know what all—but she never actually came to trial. Perhaps the pen really is mightier than the sword.”

“The pen?”

“The pen that wrote in Sherry’s little black book,” I said. “Apparently she was a meticulous record keeper, and rumor had it that her client list included half the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys in Knoxville. Funny thing: When she died, which was maybe ten years ago, her little black book was never found. I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising associate of hers got hold of it and has been collecting hush money for a decade now.”

The backhoe’s bucket screeched—a harsh, grating sound, like immense steel fingernails on a monumental blackboard—as the claw raked mud from the top of Trey Willoughby’s metal burial vault. Miranda grimaced, then shook violently, like a wet dog flinging water from its fur. “Argh.” She shuddered. “Glad I don’t have any fillings—my head would be exploding right about now. So what’s the scoop on this love child Sherry might or might not have had with our man Willoughby? You say she died ten years ago; unless she died in childbirth, I assume the child is older than that.”

“Considerably,” I said. “Somewhere in his thirties. I’m not sure why he’s just now getting around to tracking down his paternity.”

Miranda shrugged. “Maybe he just found Sherry’s black book in a shoe box of memorabilia—with the words ‘Big Daddy’ down in the W section, beside Willoughby’s name.”