Flesh and Bone Read online

  Jess’s mixture of scholarly erudition and quirky irreverence always caught me by surprise, like topspin on a serve in tennis or Ping-Pong. But I liked it, the way I liked iced tea on a hot day. “They teach you all this in med school over at Vanderbilt?”

  “Naw,” she said, “this is what I have to show for my four years at Smith. Scraps of poetry and philosophy. Oh, and that one unfulfilling foray into dating within my own gender.”

  “Ah. I had almost managed to forget,” I said, feeling awkward and sounding prudish.

  “Come on, Bill, that’s an experiment I did once, twenty years ago. Don’t turn it into something that defines me. Hell, I tried all sorts of things when I was young, didn’t you?” She was glaring at me now; I had pressed one of her hot buttons without intending to. “I mean, isn’t that part of how we grow and learn who we are, by trying things on and seeing what fits? I tried on another girl, and she didn’t fit. Big deal. I got drunk a few times in college, too, but that doesn’t make me an alcoholic. I cheated on a biology test in high school, but that doesn’t make me a cheat. I stole a candy bar when I was six, but I’m not a thief.”

  I felt ashamed of my small-mindedness. “I’m sorry, Jess. I don’t judge you for it. Or maybe I do, but I don’t like the part of me that does. I came along, what, ten years ahead of you? I grew up in a small town, where even straight sex was practically immoral. I went to a conservative college, and I settled into a traditional life—marriage and family—right after graduating. My horizons got drawn a little nearer, a little narrower, than yours. Doesn’t mean I want my mind or my heart to be narrow.” She still looked mad. “Please,” I said, “this is important to me. You are important to me. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but I’d like the chance to figure it out. I think maybe you would, too. At least, I hope you still do.”

  Her eyes bored into mine, fiercely still. And then, almost imperceptibly, something softened, yielded just a fraction. I smiled. She smiled. I laughed. So did she. “God,” she said, “you make me so mad sometimes. But you also make me feel so human.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” she said, but her eyes were smiling as she said it. “Do we never really grow up? Sometimes I feel as clueless and confused inside as I did when I was fourteen, and first started feeling these inexplicable, thrilling, terrifying stirrings.”

  “Oh my,” I said. “It thrills and terrifies me just to imagine you at fourteen.” I leaned toward her, angling for a kiss. She placed a hand on my chest and held me off. “Not here. Not now,” she said. “But soon, I hope. You need to get going if you want to have any daylight when you get out to Prentice Cooper.” She ended the conversation by reaching down and hefting something from beneath her desk. It was a small cooler, and as she handed it to me, I felt something round and heavy shift inside. It was the dead cross-dresser’s head.

  I set the cooler down on the desk long enough to stuff the keys and GPS receiver in the roomy pockets of my cargo pants. Then I hefted the cooler in hand, found the four-wheel drive Bronco Jess had offered me for the trip, and set out for Prentice Cooper State Forest, hoping I wouldn’t have a cooler-smashing accident or get pulled over by a curious cop.

  Prentice Cooper lay barely ten miles west of Chattanooga, but it was a world away, both topographically and culturally. Most of its 26,000 acres lined the slopes and rim of the Tennessee River Gorge, a thousand-foot-deep gash the river had carved through the southern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. In addition to the GPS, which would guide me to the exact spot where the body was found, I had a printed topo map of the area, too. To reach the forest, I would head west for about five miles on state highway 27, which was nestled between the base of Signal Mountain and the river’s north shore. Then the highway would veer north, up a smaller side gorge carved by Suck Creek, which—according to the topo map—would split into North Suck Creek and South Suck Creek. The highway angled and corkscrewed up the side of South Suck Creek, finally topping out—for two or three miles—near Suck Creek School. If I missed the turnoff to the state forest, I would quickly find myself descending the west flank of the mountain through Ketner Gap, which looked every bit as steep as Suck Creek, and appeared to offer few opportunities for a U-turn.

  I needn’t have worried. The left turn to Prentice Cooper was well marked, as was another left through a meandering collection of small rural houses. Civilization dropped away fast, though, as soon as I crossed the boundary into the forest. Asphalt gave way to gravel; yards gave way to woods.

  I rolled down the windows on the Bronco. The weather was sunny but cool, and the air up here was as crisp and sweet as a good apple.

  Suddenly I heard a gunshot. Then another, and another. I hit the brakes, and the Bronco rasped to a stop, enveloping me in a cloud of my own dust. The dust kept me from seeing my assailant coming, but it also hid me from sight, and from aim, so I figured I was no worse off than I’d been.

  Just as I was about to back around and hightail it back to civilization, the dust settled and I saw it: RIFLE RANGE, said a brown and white sign pointing down a side road to the right. The direction of the gunshots. Amused and appalled by my paranoia, I wiped a fresh layer of dusty sweat—or was it sweaty dust?—from my forehead and headed south again. Suck Creek Mountain was more plateau than peak, so the road ran surprisingly straight over gently rolling terrain. Two or three miles in, I bisected a cluster of forest ser vice structures, including a fire lookout tower on a rise to the right. “Well, I might be paranoid,” I said out loud, “but at least I’m still on Tower Road.” Then I said, “I might be turning into a guy who talks to himself, though.” After a pause, I added, “Yep. I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that.”

  Jess had told me that the body was found just off a Jeep trail near Pot Point. The name had concerned me—in the course of my last case involving a body in a mountainous rural area, I’d learned firsthand that where there were pot patches, there were often booby traps, too, ranging from shotguns with trip wires to poisonous snakes staked out with fishhooks through their tails—so I had asked Jess if “Pot Point” referred to illegal agriculture. “No, I’m pretty sure the name is some historical reference,” she had answered, “but I don’t know the particulars.”

  On the little GPS screen, it hadn’t looked far from the forest entrance to Pot Point, but on the ground, it seemed to be taking forever. The road was good, but it was gravel, so my speed rarely topped twenty miles an hour. I perked up when I passed Sheep Rock Road, as that meant I was more than halfway there.

  Two miles later, I reached a fork in the road. Tower Road, the main artery through the forest, bore right; Davis Pond Road—my turn—angled left. The terrain became hillier, which meant I was nearing the edge of the plateau. The road began to pitch and curve, and the woods closed in. After an undulating mile, I passed a small pond on the left, and the gravel road suddenly became a dirt road. Then it forked into two smaller dirt roads and I stopped, unsure which way to go. The GPS display showed only one road here, bearing east near the rim of the gorge; my printed topo map showed two roads, roughly parallel, which I assumed were branching from the spot where I’d just stopped: Upper Pot Point Road and Lower Pot Point Road. Unfortunately, the waypoint marking the crime scene was on the GPS, so I couldn’t tell which of the two roads to take.

  I pulled out my cellphone to call Jess for clarification, but I wasn’t getting any signal bars. Civilization, or at least cellphone ser vice, had dropped away as I had threaded my way up Suck Creek, and my journey into the forest hadn’t done much to restore either one. I got out of the Bronco and flattened the USGS map across the hood, hoping a side-by-side comparison of the two maps might help. And indeed it did, though not quite as I’d expected. A white Ford 4 × 4 pickup came slewing off of Upper Pot Point Road; when the driver saw me, he stopped alongside me and rolled down his window. There was a Tennessee Department of Forestry logo on the door of the truck—the tree in the center tipped me off—an
d the shoulder of the man’s tan shirt bore a patch with the same logo. I caught a brief snatch of country music—“I know you’re married, but I love you still,” wailed a woman—before he switched off the radio and leaned out the window. He was tall and lanky, with curly red hair going to gray, and a short beard that had already gone to white. His face was weathered and ruddy except in the deep crinkles that years of smiling or squinting had etched in it. He glanced at the official logo on the side of the ME’s vehicle, then at me and my map. “You returning to the scene of the crime?” he asked.

  “Not returning. Headed there for my first look,” I said. “But I can’t tell from the map whether I want Upper Pot Point Road or Lower.”

  “Well, you want Lower Pot Point, but you don’t want it much. Gets kinda rough in spots, but you should be all right in that Bronco. Take your right-hand fork here for about a mile; there’s a turnout just past a little water crossing. Then you got to bushwhack about a hundred yards to the rim trail…” He trailed off, studying me and my navigational aids doubtfully. “Tell you what,” he said, “let me show you the way. If you haven’t been there before, I’m not sure you’ll find it on your own.”

  I thanked him, and started folding up the big topo map. “Oh, one other question, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Fire away.”

  “Why is it called Pot Point? Does the name refer to marijuana, or Native American artifacts?”

  “Neither,” he said. “Back before TVA built Nickajack Dam, there were three big rapids in the river just below that overlook. The one farthest downstream was called the Frying Pan, the middle one was called the Skillet, and the uppermost was called the Boiling Pot. Pretty ferocious, supposedly—there’s a house on the shore there that was built partly from the wreckage of old riverboats. I guess the Boiling Pot must’ve been the biggest, since the overlook is called Pot Point. Me, if I’d been naming the rapids, I’d have called the middle rapid the Frying Pan and the next one downstream the Fire. Get it? Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire?”

  “Oh, I got it,” I said. “Yep, that’s a good one, all right.”

  “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

  “Fire away,” I said.

  “The body’s been gone for a week. What are you hoping to find?”

  “Couple things,” I said. “Be better to show you than try to explain. You want to hang around and see?”

  He checked his watch—it was close to three o’clock, and I could practically see him calculating how long before his workday ended, and subtracting the half hour it would take to drive back to the highway. “It won’t take more than an hour, will it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “And if it does, you can leave me on my own. I was expecting to be out there by myself anyway.”

  He put his truck in reverse, cut his wheels sharply, and eased back until his rear bumper nudged a sapling at the edge of the woods. Then he spun the steering wheel to the left and edged forward, narrowly clearing the Bronco’s fender as he turned. Motioning for me to follow him, he idled down the narrowing dirt track.

  The road was a fresh reddish brown cut through the woods, a wound whose edges had not yet healed; its newness explained why it hadn’t shown on the GPS map. Rutted clay alternated with stretches of tan sand and exposed sandstone. After several minutes, we bumped across a rocky little stream, then the pickup nosed into a cut in the treeline where the bulldozer that carved the road had shoved a pile of dirt and roots twenty feet into the woods. The F-150 pulled far enough forward to allow me room behind him, and we got out.

  A crisscrossing of knobby tire tracks testified to a spate of recent traffic here, but otherwise, there was no hint that a crime scene lay nearby. “I’m mighty glad I ran into you,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d have found this on my own. Probably not.”

  “Glad to do it,” he said. “Gives me an excuse to get out of the truck and walk in the woods on a nice day. Name’s Gassoway, by the by. Clifton. Call me Cliff.”

  “Cliff, I’m Bill Brockton. I’m a forensic anthropologist from UT-Knoxville.” We shook hands.

  “Are you the one with all the bodies?”

  “That’s me,” I said. “Some folks collect antiques; I collect corpses.” I glanced back at the Bronco, considering whether to show him the contents of the cooler in the rear floorboard, but decided that might be too much, too soon. “Lead on.”

  We followed the small stream for a short distance; there was no clearly defined path, but the leaves and underbrush looked recently trampled. After a hundred yards or so, we intersected a well-worn trail marked by blazes of white paint on tree trunks every so often. He turned right, and I followed. “Looks like we’re not as far off the beaten path as I’d thought,” I said.

  “We’re near the southern end of the Cumberland Trail,” he said. “It’s still a work in progress, but eventually it’ll stretch three hundred miles along the Cumberland Plateau, clear up to Kentucky. We don’t get as many hikers as sections a little farther north—Fiery Gizzard and Devil’s Staircase and the Big South Fork have some spectacular scenery—but I like seeing the river gorge here.”

  As he said it, I began noticing gaps in the vegetation to our left, gaps that soon widened to reveal a spectacular view. A mile to the south, a steep mountainside rose in a dark, concave curve; at its base, the Tennessee River made a wide U-turn, flowing south from Chattanooga, deflected back to the north by this immovable geologic object, then finding passage to the west in an S-curve two miles long.

  The overlook where we stood consisted of a half dozen sandstone ledges carpeted with moss and straw from a grove of widely spaced pines. Some of the trees looked healthy; others had fallen victim to pine beetles and violent winds, which had snapped their trunks ten feet above the ground.

  The ledges adjoined one another, each one slightly higher or lower than its neighbors. The geometry reminded me of Falling-water, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house whose many balconies jutted daringly above a rocky stream and waterfall in Pennsylvania. Near the edge of the westernmost terrace, only a few feet from the bluff, stood a large pine swathed in yellow and black crime scene tape. I looked from the tree to the river gorge.

  “Murder with a view,” I said. “You think that was intentional?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Otherwise, I can’t quite figure why this particular spot. Be a pain in the ass to get a body out here.”

  “Sure would,” I said.

  “Also,” he added, “it’s not much of a hiding place. Not nearly as isolated as some areas over in the western side of the forest. Hell, over toward Long Point and Inman Point, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another vehicle or a person. If I wanted to dump a body, I’d take it over thataways.”

  “So maybe the killer wanted the body to be found,” I said. “Just not right away.”

  “I think you’re right,” he said.

  I studied the mountain across the river. The top looked unnaturally flat, with a stone or concrete dike-looking wall along the edge. I pointed to it. “What’s that?”

  “That’s Raccoon Mountain,” he said. “TVA has a big pumped-storage reservoir up there, a lake nearly a mile wide. They pump water from the river up there at night, or whenever there’s not much demand for power. Then, whenever the demand for power ramps way up—hot summer afternoons, cold winter mornings—they draw it down, letting the water spin generating turbines down there by the river.” He pointed down into the gorge, to the shore directly opposite us; several buildings and a parking lot had been set at the base of the steep mountainside, and I saw water churning out a spillway and into the river channel.

  “You’re a good tour guide,” I said.

  “Not many people have this kind of view from their workplace,” he said. “I eat lunch out here probably once a week if the weather’s decent.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t find the body, then,” I said. Looking to my right, I eyed the crime scene tape staked out around the big pine.

  �
��I was out here on a Monday about three weeks ago,” he said. “Then I was off for a week—not that week, but the next one. Hiker found him on a Sunday, day before I got back. So it could’ve happened anytime during those thirteen days. Pretty big window of time.”

  I did the arithmetic; at the outside, the murder had occurred twenty days ago; at the inside, a mere eight—but that seemed too recent, given the decomposition of the lower legs. “Well, if we’re lucky, we can narrow it down a little more than that,” I said. I walked slowly toward the tree, bent over to study the ground closely. After stepping over the tape, I knelt and continued the last six or eight feet on all fours.

  Jess had shown me the report from the evidence techs who’d worked the crime scene. They’d done a reasonably good job, it sounded like, including collecting some key insect evidence. Since the creation of the Body Farm—and partly because of research conducted there—forensic entomology had advanced remarkably. In our first pioneering study of insect activity in human corpses, one of my graduate students had spent months studying the sequence of bugs that came to feed on bodies, making detailed notes about what bugs appeared, and precisely when. While observing and collecting bugs, he also fended off food-crazed blowflies, the first and most numerous visitors, as they landed on his face and tried to crawl into his own nostrils and ears and mouth. Within seconds after a body bag was unzipped, he had documented, the blowflies began homing in on the fresh scent of death; within minutes, some of the females would begin seeking out the body’s moist orifices or bloody wounds as ideal spots to lay masses of eggs, which looked rather like dabs of grainy white toothpaste. And sometimes within only a few hours after a fly laid her eggs—especially in warm weather—they would hatch into hundreds of tiny maggots, the larval form of the blowfly.