Authors: Jefferson Bass
“Interesting. Frustrating. I’m actually going back.”
She blinked. “Going back? When?”
“Now.”
“Now?”
“Well, soon. As soon as I do a little research, and as soon as Joanna finishes the reconstruction.”
“How come?”
“Well, for one thing, I promised to do a report on the skull.”
She frowned and eyed me suspiciously. “So, let me see if I understand this right. You have to go back to Florida to write about a skull that’s here in the bone lab?”
It sounded absurd when she put it that way. “Well, they’re looking for the rest of the bones now, and I’d like to be there when they’re found. Besides, I told Angie St. Claire I’d help her look into her sister’s death. Burt DeVriess has an attorney friend in Georgia who’s helping us get an exhumation order, so I can look at the body. The local coroner says it was suicide, but Angie feels pretty sure the husband did it.”
“So Angie’s freelancing, and you’re freelancing with her?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Are you doing anything else with Angie?”
“How do you mean?”
“Are you falling in love with her?”
“In love? With Angie? Heavens no.” Miranda looked startled by the force with which I said it. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Angie. She’s great. I
like
Angie—she’s smart, she’s good at her job, and she’s fighting an uphill battle to find out if her sister was murdered. I’d like to help her, that’s all.” Miranda still looked skeptical—and I realized she had reason to doubt my candor. It hadn’t been long, after all, since I’d kept her totally in the dark about my role in an undercover FBI sting, one aimed at shutting down an unscrupulous tissue bank. Miranda had believed I was selling corpses from the Body Farm to the tissue bank, and by the time the truth came out, her faith in me had been shattered. Viewed in the light of that recent history, her current skepticism was understandable. “Okay, there is one other thing,” I said. Her eyes narrowed, and she drew back, on guard now. “The other thing is, it’s . . . too
quiet
around here at the moment. UT’s on break, my son and his family have gone to the beach, and unless somebody finds a dismembered body or a mass grave in the next hour or so, I’ll go stir-crazy. I’m going back to Florida because there’s something to
do
there. Something besides writing this damn sonar article I’ve been avoiding for months.”
Her expression softened, and she let out a big breath. “Okay, I can believe that. But what if all hell breaks loose up here while you’re down there?”
“If you need to work a death scene while I’m gone, call Hugh Berryman or Rick Snow.” Hugh and Rick were former students of mine who were now board-certified as forensic anthropologists. “I called them during my layover in Atlanta. They’ve offered to cover for me the next couple weeks.”
Miranda nodded. “Okay. But if you end up moving to Florida before I finish my PhD, I am going to be
so pissed
at you.”
I smiled. “Then you’d better start writing that dissertation. And I’d better get going on the experiment I need to do for Angie.” I started up the stairs, but Miranda grabbed me by the arm.
“What experiment?”
I was caught. “You’re not going to like it.”
“If you tell me I’m not going to like it, that means I’m going to
hate
it.” She’d put on her interrogator face, her inquisitor face. “
What
experiment?”
“Thing is,” I began, trying to ease into it, “Angie’s sister’s death was ruled a suicide. But suicide by shotgun is rare, especially among women. Angie and I sifted through everything the cleanup crew took out of the house, and in the dirt from the crawl space, I found the dens epistrophei and a piece of the axis. Which makes me think there’s something funny about the angle of the shotgun.”
Miranda’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, no. You wouldn’t. Dr. B, tell me you wouldn’t.”
“We’re trying to get an exhumation order to dig up the body. The stronger we can make the case, the more likely a judge is to let us do it.”
“You mean you plan to take one of our bodies and just blow the head off?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what
do
you mean?”
“I mean not exactly one.” Her eyes narrowed to slits.
“Christ. How many?”
“At least two.” She groaned. “Actually, three. To do it right, I need three.” She groaned again, louder.
“Jesus, you’re going to destroy three donated bodies—wreck three specimens that were supposed to go into the teaching collection—on the off chance that some Georgia cracker of a judge will be swayed by that?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Why
not
? Because these bodies have been donated to us,
entrusted
to us. We’re supposed to study them, learn from them, treat them with respect. We’re not supposed to abuse and mutilate them.”
“There are no restrictions on how we use donated bodies,” I said. “You know the language of the donation form by heart. Legally, we’re entitled to do whatever we want to them.”
“I’m not talking about what we can do
legally
,” she countered. “I’m talking about what we can do
ethically. Morally
.”
“Why is shooting them worse than letting bugs and raccoons and buzzards feed on them?”
“Because that’s the cycle of
nature
,” she protested. “Because that’s what
happens
to bodies.”
“So does this,” I pointed out. “Not as often, but sometimes. Don’t we have a right, even a responsibility, to study
this
cycle, the cycle of violence? To understand more about how it affects bodies?” She made a face of distaste and shook her head slowly. “Am I remembering wrong, Miranda? Weren’t you the research assistant who helped me put two bodies in cars and set them on fire a couple of years ago? And at this very moment,” I reminded her, “don’t we have three bodies dangling from nooses?” She scowled, annoyed that I was boxing her in. I decided to stop bludgeoning her and appeal to her sense of justice, which ran strong and deep. “Look, I know it’s disturbing. But remember the experiment I did for Burt DeVriess in that murder case a couple years ago? I stabbed a body, trying to re-create the path of what a medical examiner called the fatal wound. But I couldn’t do it; it was physically impossible to make a knife zigzag around the spine and the rib cage the way the M.E. said it had. Remember that?” She nodded. “If I hadn’t taken a knife to that donated body, Grease’s client—an innocent man—would’ve been convicted of murder.” Her scowl eased slightly, and her shoulders—which had cinched up toward her ears—dropped back to horizontal. “You’ve got a younger sister, Miranda. What’s her name? Cordelia?”
“Not fair,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she really meant it. “Ophelia.”
“What if Ophelia’s partner murdered her, and was getting away with it? Wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to bring the truth to light? Wouldn’t you want other people to do that, too?”
She sighed. “We’ve got two bodies in the cooler at the morgue—they came in over the weekend—and another on the way down from Oncology this morning, probably still warm. Do you want to use those, or use the three we buried for the NFA class last week?”
“Any of the fresh ones women?”
“One. The cancer patient. Forty-two. Ovarian cancer.”
I winced. “I hate to put her through anything more.”
“She won’t feel it. And she’s a better stand-in for Angie’s sister than some eighty-year-old guy would be.”
“You’re right. Okay, let’s use her and whichever others are youngest and slightest.”
“Okay, I’ll let the morgue know we’re coming.” She started past me down the stairs.
“Oh, and Miranda?” She stopped, on the same stair where I was standing. “Thanks.”
She smiled slightly. “I live to serve. Anything else?”
“Well, long as you’re asking, have you got a twelve-gauge?”
She reared back and punched me in the shoulder, hard. Almost as hard as I deserved.
T
he woman’s body jerked, her arms and legs flopping, as the shotgun blast slammed her head backward and the slug punched through the base of her skull, through the sofa, and into the earth below. Her limbs twitched in brief aftershocks, then grew still. Even through the protective earplugs, the roar of the gun was almost deafening, and it took a few moments before the dull rush in my ears subsided and was replaced by the normal background sounds of the Body Farm: the rotor blades of a Lifestar helicopter making its final approach along the Tennessee River to UT Medical Center; a police siren wailing out on Alcoa Highway, a half mile beyond the hospital; the chittering of an indignant squirrel overhead and the metallic thuds of a jackhammer chipping away at an unwanted piece of concrete somewhere across the river; the whir of the autofocus mechanism on the camera with which Miranda was photographing every aspect of the violent experiment and its effects.
“I’ve been in police work for a lot of years, and I never shot anybody before,” said Art. “Now I’ve shot three, in the space of twenty minutes. I sure hope this isn’t the start of a trend.” Art Bohanan—a longtime colleague and friend, and a senior criminalist with the Knoxville Police Department—stepped back from the blasted body and wiped the bloody barrel of the shotgun with a rag. The rag was already smeared with blood and tissue from the prior two shots, into the prior two bodies. His white Tyvek biohazard suit looked like something a slaughterhouse worker had worn for a double shift on the killing floor. Art surveyed the blood spatter on the suit. “And the sheriff’s office down in Georgia didn’t find a mess of bloody clothes in the husband’s laundry hamper? Wasn’t there a husband-shaped clean spot on the floor or the wall, where his body blocked the spatter?”
I shrugged. “The photos didn’t show much. He didn’t call it in until eight or ten hours after it happened. He had plenty of time to get rid of his clothes and do some cleaning. I don’t know about the spatter pattern; maybe he wiped some things down with bleach; hell, maybe he used a sheet or a shower curtain or something to contain the spatter. I figure we’ll never know, since the scene was worked so poorly and cleaned up right away. I’m just hoping we learn something useful by wrecking three perfectly good skeletons.”
Miranda and I had laid our three research subjects side by side on a trio of secondhand sofas, procured from Goodwill for twenty bucks apiece and positioned atop waferboard and pads of dirt I’d bulldozed into place with the Bobcat, our miniature bulldozer. The pad of dirt was a foot deep; I’d put big road signs—
SCHOOL CROSSING
,
SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY
, and
DEER CROSSING
, with the image of the deer already riddled with bullet holes—under the dirt as a secondary backstop. Judging by the test shot Art had fired through one end of a sofa, just before we placed the bodies, the dirt itself was thick enough to stop the slug and collect all the debris. But it couldn’t hurt—it could never hurt, I figured, although I’d forgotten this lesson in my life from time to time—to have contingencies and backups and backstops.
The first shot Art had fired, into the body of a small sixty-two-year-old white male, had been angled the way I’d expect in a shotgun suicide: the trigger down around waist level, the barrel pressed against the underside of the chin, rather than in the mouth. That shot, as I’d expected, had taken off the top of the cranium and some of the occipital, but had left the cervical spine unscathed. His second shot, into a medium-sized, twenty-eight-year-old black male, had been fired into the mouth, angled closer to straight on, though still slightly upward. That shot had blown off the back of the head and the base of the skull; the concussion had also fractured the first two vertebrae, but it had not destroyed them.
Art had fired the third shot into the mouth of the female cancer victim straight on, at a ninety-degree angle to the body. This shot, I saw with grim satisfaction, had obliterated the occipital and shattered the top of the spinal column, sending fragments of vertebrae splintering into the dirt. As I sifted the soil from beneath the mangled corpse, I found myself growing surprisingly nervous. What if I’d misinterpreted the bone trauma? What if I’d told Art the wrong trajectory? What if I’d ruined three perfectly good skeletal specimens for nothing?
Then, as I sifted the dirt from beneath the woman’s body, I saw bone fragments—familiar-looking fragments—shimmy into view as I shook the coarse wire screen. “Bingo,” said Miranda, zooming in with the lens as I paused to look closer. “There’s the dens epistrophei, and that looks like the back of the atlas. Good geometry, Dr. B.”
Whir, click. Whir, click click click.
“Good shooting, Art.”
“Not exactly sporting,” said Art ruefully, “but if it persuades GBI to open a case, maybe it’s done some good.”
Looking at the three ravaged bodies, I hoped he was right about that. I also hoped that the shattered skulls and spine might shed light on other, similar cases. I felt a debt, an obligation, to these three donors, and I realized I could repay the debt by sharing what I’d learned in forensic lectures and scientific articles. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said silently to each of the bodies. And again, aloud this time, to Art and Miranda: “Thank you.”
J
oanna finished the facial reconstruction on Thursday afternoon—only four days after she’d started, which was a speed record for her. She was urged on by occasional contractions, which, luckily, turned out to be false labor.
She wasn’t thrilled with the reconstruction, but then again, being a perfectionist, Joanna was almost
never
thrilled with her reconstructions. She’d had to make some compromises, for the sake of the sexual ambiguity. As a result, the youthful face she’d sculpted could have been either a long-haired boy’s or a short-haired girl’s; it could also, without much of a stretch, have belonged to a mannequin in the children’s section of Target. In the absence of well-defined male or female characteristics, the face had an unavoidable, unsatisfying blankness. Still, if a photograph of the reconstruction were seen by the right person—by someone who’d once known this child—that person’s memory might well fill in the blankness, and perhaps more easily than if Joanna had done a more detailed face. The goal in reconstructing a face wasn’t to nail the victim’s likeness with magical pinpoint accuracy; the goal was to hint, to suggest: to get close enough to the mark to prompt someone, somewhere, to call and say, “That looks like so-and-so, who went missing years ago . . .”
But the vagueness made me uneasy, as vagueness generally did, in any arena in my life.
The clay-covered skull stared up at me from a hatbox in the passenger floorboard of my truck. I was taking a chance, carrying it that way; I probably should have put the lid on and tucked the box securely behind the driver’s seat, but—vague and unsatisfying though the face was—I wanted to be able to glance at it from time to time during the eight-hour drive to Tallahassee. Maybe, just maybe, something in the face would trigger some insight that had been swimming unseen beneath the surface of my mind for the past few days.
The blank face in the box wasn’t the only ambiguity accompanying me on the drive south. Several months before, I’d made love to a librarian who’d been helping me research the history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee—the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and the location of the recent murder of an atomic scientist. Just days after sleeping with the librarian—Isabella—I’d been stunned to learn that it was she who’d killed the scientist, in a bizarre act of vengeance for the suffering that the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, had caused her family. Some weeks after that, as the FBI tried to follow Isabella’s trail, I’d been even more stunned to learn that she might be pregnant. I’d received a cryptic message from her that seemed to confirm her pregnancy: from San Francisco, she’d mailed me an origami bird—a paper crane, symbol of peace—that contained, within its folds, a much smaller crane. Two months had passed since I’d received the origami message: two months in which I’d twisted in the wind, wondering where Isabella might be; wondering if she were indeed pregnant with my child; wondering whether she’d be caught; half hoping she would be; half hoping she wouldn’t. A psychologist I’d consulted, as I’d sorted through my conflicting feelings, had summed up my dilemma. “You’re at a crossroads,” he’d said, “a place of not-knowing. And you need to pitch your tent there for a while.”
So even as I steered my GMC pickup south on I-75 toward Atlanta and Tallahassee, I was pitched in my karmic tent, camped at an intersection from which fog-shrouded roads diverged toward unseen, unknowable futures. I was not an especially happy camper.