Without Mercy Read online

  When the immense bear hit Glass, Peggy shrieked, and when it ripped him open, she grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard it hurt. After a moment, her grip eased, but she didn’t let go, and I found myself only half watching the movie. Had she forgotten that she was holding my hand? Should I extricate my palm from her grip? Probably, I told myself. But not yet. It had been years since I’d held hands with anyone, but I hadn’t even realized how much I’d missed it, that simple human touch. On any given day, it wasn’t uncommon for me to shake hands with ten or twenty or even a hundred people, but a handshake was different—profoundly different—from holding hands.

  I sat like that, silent and unmoving, though moved, for the next two hours, Peggy’s grip occasionally tightening again, when yet another brutal calamity occurred on-screen. And when the end came, she gave my hand a final, gentler squeeze, as if to say “thank you” or perhaps “good night”—it was now after eight o’clock—then wiped tears from her eyes, stood up, and hurried out of the office, leaving me sitting in half darkness and utter confusion.

  She also left me surrounded by ghosts. The ghost of Kathleen, my wife of thirty years, who had died a swift, unexpected death from cancer a decade before. The ghost of Jess Carter, a medical examiner from Chattanooga who had coaxed me from my cave of grief and shown me that I could love again—had shown me that I wanted to love again—but had been murdered by a jealous colleague. The ghost of Isabella Arakawa Morgan, a beautiful, brilliant, but deranged Japanese American librarian I’d worked with—and slept with, once—before discovering that she had murdered a scientist she blamed for the atomic blast that had killed her parents decades earlier, at the end of World War II. The only two women in my life now, apart from my son’s wife, were my graduate assistant and my secretary: one of them thirty years my junior, and about to leave; the other a longtime subordinate who—despite her fearful clutching of my hand—surely knew my failings far too well to harbor romantic feelings for me.

  “Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery,” a famous French doctor wrote in his memoir. I myself carried multiple cemeteries within myself, though only one of them was small: the cemetery where the women I’d loved and lost were buried. Others—the crime victims whose bodies and bones I’d studied; the donated corpses whose decay my students and I had scrutinized and charted—numbered in the many hundreds by now.

  But most numerous in my cemeteries were the Arikara Indians, some six thousand of them, carefully shelved and kept one floor beneath me, in the vast, cavernous recess beneath the stadium’s south end zone. And as I locked the building—full of the dead, but emptied of the living—and headed home, it was the ghosts of the Arikara I seemed to hear whispering as I wound my way downriver alongside the dark, spooling currents of the Tennessee.

  They whispered of loss: the loss of their lands, their civilization, their women and children and homes. They whispered of slaughtered bison and ferocious bears and wounded hunters. Above all they whispered of life and love, and the tenuous, fragile, crucial entwining of one with the other.

  CHAPTER 13

  I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I WAS STANDING on a grassy shore, water lapping at my work boots. It was night, and the moon was full and bright, reflecting off the rippling water. At my feet was a grave—circular, to minimize the amount of digging needed in the hard prairie soil—and within the grave, gleaming faintly in the moonlight, were bones, half covered by a buffalo robe. The skeleton was flexed into a fetal position to fit within the grave; atop and alongside and among the bones was a profusion of grave goods: heaps of beads and bangles and carved birds and bears.

  Reaching down into the grave, I lifted out the skull. It was a woman’s skull, an adult, and as I held it up in the moonlight, I recognized it as the skull of Kathleen, my own wife, whom I myself had buried in this spot years before. “I’m so sorry to disturb you,” I said, “but I have to move you. They’ve dammed the river, and the water’s rising. I’ll go get a box and come right back to get you.”

  I laid the skull gently on the grass and headed to the tent camp my students and I had pitched on the flattened, grassy shelf above the water. Except for the gentle lapping of water on the shore and the soft sigh of wind through the grass, the camp was silent, the white canvas tents shining. Even the inside of my tent was faintly illuminated by the moonlight filtering through the canvas.

  I knew that I had an empty bone box in the tent, but for some reason I couldn’t find it. I rummaged through everything once, twice, three times, confused and growing agitated. Where was Kathleen’s box? What if I’d lost it? Finally, tucked beneath my army cot, I found it. Nestling it beneath one arm, I hurried back to the shore.

  But the grave was gone: vanished beneath the rising waters. “Kathleen,” I called, stricken, “where are you?” The only answer was the sound of small waves lapping at my feet. Frantic now, I set the box down on the embankment and dropped to my knees, groping the submerged ground, seeking the curved edge of the circular pit. Nothing.

  The water continued to rise. Soon it was up to my thighs, and then to my waist. I kept searching, now taking a deep breath and submerging myself, swimming blindly in the murky water, feeling for the grave, the buffalo robe, the bones, anything. At last my fingers closed around the straight, smooth shaft of a long bone, a bone so stout it could only have been a femur. Gripping tightly, I fought to free it. By now the water was deep, completely over my head, and I braced my feet on the muddy bottom to pull. The bone came free, and with the last bit of air in my lungs, I kicked to the surface and swam, exhausted, to the shore with the bone.

  But it was not a bone. It was only a bare, brittle branch, and when I saw it, mocking in the moonlight, I knew Kathleen was lost to me forever. Dragging myself from the water, I lay in the grass and wept.

  At some point in my dream I must have fallen asleep, for I felt myself awaken. It was still night; the moon still up, though low in the western sky, casting a broad, shimmering track across the rippling water: a river of moonlight. Suddenly the moon river was shattered into sparkling shards, and I saw something—someone—swimming through it, swimming down the dancing light, swimming directly toward me. Then, some distance short of the shore, the swimmer stopped and stood. It—she, an Arikara woman—was waist-deep in the water, her black hair slick and shining, water sheeting off her shoulders and dropping, like shining quicksilver, from the undercurve of her breasts and the dark tips of her nipples.

  She looked at me frankly, with no trace of embarrassment or fear, and allowed me to look at her, her face mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Slowly she reached behind her neck, gathered her hair to one side, and began to twist, wringing water from it. Then, releasing the long rope of hair, she began to swing her head from side to side, back and forth, causing her hair to pendulum, faster and faster, until soon she was whipping it around and around in a great circle, an immense dark halo, surrounded by a galaxy of glowing droplets radiating outward, as if she were some dark cosmic goddess creating the very universe, spinning out stars and planets.

  When she had finished, she looked at me again, then stretched a hand toward me, palm upward. Hesitant at first, I rose, then walked to the water’s edge, where I stopped and stood. She waited, her hand still out, and at last I took a step, then another and another, into the water to join her. Just before I reached her, the bottom dropped from beneath me, and I sank beneath the surface. I reached out for her hand, but could not find it.

  Flailing and struggling, swallowing water, I fought my way to the empty surface.

  I awoke, in a fit of coughing, in my empty bed in my empty house in my sleeping Knoxville neighborhood.

  CHAPTER 14

  IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS, I UNLOCKED THE DOOR of the bone lab, the steel door grating harshly as it dragged free of the sill. Switching on the lights, I closed my eyes against the glare of the fluorescents, gradually relaxing my squint so that my eyelids glowed red, the spider work of capillaries showing through, until I opened the lids and
blinked in the cold brightness.

  Venturing deep into the ranks of steel shelves in the lab’s inner recesses, where the stadium’s grandstands sloped down from overhead, I chose three boxes at random—three from among the thousands—and carried them to an empty table at the front of the room.

  The corrugated boxes, measuring three feet long by a foot square, felt as dry and brittle as the bones within them. The labels on the ends of the boxes, listing the site and grave number and date of excavation, had faded and begun to peel during the decades since they had been printed and glued to the cardboard. A thick layer of dust—some of it Tennessee dust, some of it South Dakota dust, perhaps some of it the dust of Caesar—whirled away when I puffed a breath across the top of the boxes. Dust in the wind, I thought. All we are is dust in the wind.

  Opening the first box—its lid hinged along one side—I peered inside and saw a large, magnificent specimen: a tall, robust male, his bones the rich color of caramel. The skeleton was virtually complete and in remarkable condition; even the long, thinly arching ribs were unbroken. A string had been threaded through the spinal canal of each vertebra and then tied in a loop to keep them together, and for a moment I imagined them as a bizarre necklace, a trophy that a warrior might wear to strike fear into an enemy from another tribe. The bones of the man’s leg—the tibia and especially the femur—were long and massive. Aligning the two and holding them alongside my own leg, I saw that the man would have towered over me.

  I laid him out in anatomical position on one of the lab’s long tables, and he stretched from one end all the way to the other. He was an adult, but a young one, I saw when I looked at his teeth. He had a complete set of molars—first, second, and third—so he must have been at least eighteen. But the surfaces of the molars, especially the third molars, showed little of the rapid, characteristic occlusal wear caused by the Plains Indians’ gritty diet of stone-ground corn. Clearly he was in his prime, and an impressive prime it must have been. Hoping to pin down his age more closely, I checked the distal end of a femur, as well as the medial end of a clavicle. Neither end had fully fused to the shaft just yet, so the man was probably not yet twenty-five. His relative youth was also corroborated by the cranial sutures, the joints in the skull. The sutures showed up as dark, sharp lines squiggling between the bones; they were only just beginning to blur and fill and smooth, as the body began to apply its own bony spackling compound to seal and conceal the joints. By the time he was sixty, those cranial sutures would be entirely obliterated . . . except that this magnificent young man would not, could not, did not make it to sixty. At twenty years of age, his left temporal bone had been shattered by a blunt object—a war club, I suspected—wielded by a Mandan or Pawnee or Sioux warrior who had been stronger, or faster, or stealthier than this remarkable young man.

  The second box contained a young woman—a girl, really, no more than fifteen, when she died. She was tall for her age, I realized when I removed the leg bones from the box, perhaps five feet eight inches already, and still growing. I could see this because the epiphyses, the ends and edges of her bones, had not yet fully fused to stop her growth. Her sacrum, the assemblage of the five lowest vertebrae, was already large, suggesting that her pelvic cavity would have had plenty of room to bear strapping babies. But her hips not yet reached their full womanly width. The iliac crest—the outer, curving edge of the hip bones—was not yet fused to the body of the ileum, so the growth plate between the two surfaces was still building. She was still growing . . . except that, because of fever or exposure or some other cause that had left no signs of trauma on her bones, she wasn’t still growing. And she would never, of course, bear those strapping babies her body had been readying itself to bear. I laid her out in anatomical order, too, alongside the male, struck by the resemblance they bore to medieval European grave markers, the full-length stones bearing effigies of skeletons to remind the living of the inevitability of death.

  The smallest, yet somehow the most powerful, was the third, a child. A meager cluster of bones—scarcely more than a handful—surrounded by crumpled newspaper and foam padding to keep it from rattling around in the vastly overscaled, adult-sized box. The teenaged girl’s hipbone had been as big as my hand; this child’s—there was no way to tell if it was male or female—was smaller than my ear. But what was most striking about the child—who was a month or so shy of its second birthday, judging by the presence of a full set of baby teeth—was the head: the disproportionately large cranium and eye orbits that make the skulls of babies and children look otherworldly, almost like little aliens. The child’s cranial sutures—at this stage rather like jagged sawteeth or the ragged edges of splintered wood—had not yet started to interlock, as they would begin to do by adolescence. As a result, after the soft tissue had decayed, the skull had literally fallen to pieces in the grave: the frontal bone, containing the forehead and the upper halves of the immense, staring eye orbits; the parietal bones, which had formed the left and right sides of the skull; the occipital bone, whose convex outer surface and ridged inner surface reminded me of the weathered shell of a dead tortoise I had found one summer when I was a boy.

  A folded piece of paper was tucked into one end of the box. I took it out, unfolded it, and read the inventory of grave goods buried with the baby:

  This burial was associated with many artifacts:

  bison robe

  shell pendant

  glass marbles

  small glass bottle

  brass baby spoon

  blue glass pendant

  clay buffalo effigy

  In addition, there were many types of glass beads with this burial, including the following types and numbers: 11,067 blue glass seed beads, about 300 of which were still attached to a bison robe; 70 white glass seed beads; 9 ellipsoidal, red, transparent beads; 16 ellipsoidal, white, wire-wound beads; 10 ellipsoidal, milky white, wire-wound beads; 1 ellipsoidal green faceted transparent bead; 2 tubular blue beads; 3 compound tubular red on white beads; 22 spherical peacock blue beads; 19 yellow-and-blue spherical transparent beads; 17 spherical blue beads with white and yellow spots; 5 spherical clear beads; 3 amber-colored spherical transparent beads; and 3 spherical green beads.

  Marveling at the treasure trove of grave goods—the list took me back to the day we had unearthed the baby, and the crew and I had talked about how precious the child must have been in life, and how deeply grieved in death—I began laying out the bones, tucking them between those of the young man and the girl. Just as I finished, the bone lab’s door opened.

  “Good Lord,” said Peggy. “What are you doing, and why are you doing it so early in the morning? It’s not even seven yet.”

  “I woke up early,” I said.

  “You always wake up early,” she said, with the same half-exasperated tone in which Miranda had said the very same words to me a few days before.

  “I dreamed about Arikara Indians last night, so I came in to spend some time with them.” I turned and looked at her. “What about you? What are you doing here at this hour?”

  “I wasn’t sleeping either,” she said, and I thought I saw her cheeks flush slightly. “I saw the lights on and thought Miranda forgot to turn them off last night.” She stepped through the doorway, came into the lab, and walked over to the table where I stood. Looking down at the three Arikara skeletons, she caught her breath. “They’re beautiful,” she said softly. “Were they a family?”

  “What? No. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “They look like one,” she said. “Or like they could have been one, if they’d had the chance. They make me think of all those Renaissance paintings of the Holy Family, except that they’re Native American.” She laughed softly. “And skeletons. But still . . .”

  She laid a hand on my arm for just an instant, then turned and walked out, leaving me to ponder the dead Indians, the Holy Family, and the mysterious ways of women.

  CHAPTER 15

  I FELT STUPID. MIRANDA WAS MY STUDENT; I WASN’
T just her boss, I was her doctoral adviser and dissertation-committee chairman, so I occupied a far loftier rung of the academic and intellectual ladder. In theory, that is.

  But reading her dissertation—or, rather, attempting to read it—made me feel like an impostor and ignoramus. Hell, even the title intimidated me: “An Empirical Examination of Frontal Sinus Outline Variability Using Elliptic Fourier Analysis.” The good news was, I was on solid ground for the first nine words. The frontal sinus—the airspace in the bones of the forehead, just above the brow ridges—was familiar territory. Roughly fan shaped with scalloped edges, the frontal sinus sometimes reminded me of the lobes of a chanterelle mushroom. Forensically, the frontal sinus was a useful tool for confirming a dead person’s identity, provided that an antemortem x-ray of the person’s skull, showing the frontal sinus, could be found for comparison to the postmortem x-ray. Like fingerprints, teeth, DNA profiles, and snowflakes, frontal sinuses were unique: no two alike. So when it came to frontal sinus outline variability, and its forensic value, I was on board.

  But then, after breezing through the first nine words, I slammed into those final three: “Elliptic Fourier Analysis.” I knew, from looking him up, that Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in the 1700s. I also knew that he had found ways to use mathematical formulas to define shapes, outlines, and patterns. The main thing I knew, though, was that it took someone far more mathematically gifted than I was just to follow his thinking, let alone to harness it, to use it—as Miranda had done—to map the intricate, intracranial coastline of the frontal sinus. I didn’t know what the hell regular old Fourier analysis was, let alone elliptical Fourier analysis.

  Mercifully, Miranda’s dissertation committee included members who were quite comfortable with its terminology and methodology. My colleague Richard, the developer of ForDisc, didn’t bat an eye at the mention of Fourier analysis; it was quite possible that ForDisc relied on the magic of Fourier analysis—straight or elliptical or even zigzag, for all I knew—to evaluate unknown skeletons and issue its predictions about stature and race. And Dr. Gerald Grimes, who headed the Radiology Department at UT Medical Center, had seen thousands of frontal sinus x-rays in his long career, so if anybody qualified as an expert on the shape of the frontal sinus, surely he did.