The Inquisitor's Key: A Body Farm Novel Read online

  The idea was startling; stunning, even. Could she possibly be right? Could the Shroud depict a deliberately staged fourteenth-century murder? And could the bones of Avignon—our “zhondo,” as Elisabeth called him—be the bones of the victim?

  I looked at the image again in this new light. Yes, it looked like our zhondo’s face. But not our zhondo’s stature. I had a tape measure in my overnight bag, but for starters, I lay down on the floor alongside the Shroud, side by side with the man’s image. “So, who’s taller?”

  “He is. He’s got a couple inches on you, maybe more. How tall are you?”

  “Five-ten.”

  “So he’s a six-footer,” she said. “That’s pretty damn tall, whether he was first century or fourteenth. Most guys back then were, like, five feet, five five, right?”

  She was right. During the twentieth century, the average stature of adult males had increased by six inches or more—in developed countries, though not in Third World countries—as a result of better diet and health care. “Yeah, little bitty guys,” I agreed. “I’ve seen suits of armor my twelve-year-old grandson couldn’t fit into.” My heart sank as I realized the implications. “Damn. It’s not our zhondo, is it, Miranda? Can’t be.”

  “’Fraid not,” she said. “This guy’s half a head taller than our guy. Sorry, Dr. B; I know the facial reconstruction got you all excited about connecting the dots.”

  “Oh well,” I said breezily. “It was an interesting possibility. But so’s your snuff-Shroud theory. Wouldn’t that be ironic, if somebody was killed to make a ‘holy’ relic? Anyhow, we’ve still got a medieval murder on our hands in Avignon, right?” I nodded at the Shroud. “And now maybe we’ve got two medieval murder cases. Twice the bodies, twice the fun, right?”

  She didn’t find my little pep talk any more convincing than I did.

  Slipping my shoes back on, I rolled up the Shroud and tucked it under my arm. “I’m pooped,” I said, heading for my room, which was at the end of the hall—right where the foot of the Shroud had been moments before. “Sorry I brought you on a wild-goose chase.” I stepped through the doorway.

  “Dr. B?” I stopped and leaned my head back into the hallway, just far enough to see her smiling at me. “Just for the record? I love chasing wild geese. Good night, Dr. B. Sleep well.”

  I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I WENT BACK TO the chapel in Turin Cathedral; went back to make one final attempt to see the Shroud.

  As I walked down the center aisle, I saw a man dressed as a high priest—a bishop or cardinal, perhaps even a pope—behind the chapel’s glass wall. The black curtain hiding the Shroud had been opened, and I hurried forward, eager to see the relic at last. But above the altar, behind the curtain, was nothing but a blank wall.

  Astonished, I stared at the priest. Beside him, in the shadows, stood another man. This man, his face in shadow, was holding a small bundle, which I recognized as the Shroud, folded like a bedsheet. The man handed something to the priest; it was a thick bundle of money, I realized. The priest bowed, and the man disappeared through a dark doorway in the back of the chapel. Then the priest turned and saw me. He pointed a finger at me, and then reached for a golden cord hanging from the ceiling. He pulled the cord, and a heavy black drape slid shut, hiding not only the blank wall and the empty altar, but the entire chapel from my view.

  CHAPTER 13

  I AWOKE AT DAYBREAK, DISTURBED BY THE DREAM, and trudged back to the cathedral, where again I was confronted by the maddening curtain that shrouded the Shroud. Was it possible that my dream was actually true—that the wall behind the black drape was indeed blank? Could the Shroud be elsewhere—locked in an underground Vatican vault for safekeeping? Rented out to some devout billionaire who paid a fortune to possess it during the long intervals between public exhibitions?

  Leaning forward, I studied the glass wall that separated me from the artifact I’d hoped to see. The thickness of the glass was hard to gauge, but I assumed it was at least an inch thick, maybe more—possibly bulletproof; at any rate, surely Brockton-proof. There must be a back door into that chapel, I thought. A way in, so the pope can open the magic curtain every decade or two…or the cleaning lady can dust it once a month. Could I bribe the cleaning lady? Jimmy the door with a credit card or a paper clip? Suddenly I laughed—was I really fantasizing about breaking into a heavily protected chapel in order to scrutinize what was probably a fake relic? I took one last wistful look, then headed out in search of a café.

  The café’s barista was a pretty brunette with immense brown eyes and a microscopic English vocabulary. After several fruitless, awkward attempts to request hot tea, I stammered out the words “caffè crema,” which I guessed to be Italian for “coffee with cream.” She smiled and nodded, and I congratulated myself on my suave Italian.

  I uncongratulated myself two minutes later, when she handed me a thimble-size vessel containing what looked—and tasted—like soft-serve mocha ice cream. It was 8 A.M., far too early for ice cream. The barista looked my way, saw my confusion, and hurried over, cocking her head to punctuate the question in her eyes. I took another taste, and she beamed when I shrugged and smiled and trotted out the only other Italian word I knew: “Magnifico!”

  Suddenly a dusty file drawer in my memory flew open. Magnifico: One of my all-time favorite graduate students used to say that a lot—and her name sprang to the tip of my chilled tongue and from there into the café, right out loud: “Emily Craig!” Years before, Emily had written an article that had something to do with the Shroud of Turin, though I couldn’t quite dredge up the details from that file drawer in my mind. Emily was now the forensic anthropologist for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and we kept in touch across the mountains between Knoxville and Frankfort. Did I have Emily’s number in my phone? I did! I hit “send” to place the call.

  She answered on the sixth ring, just as I’d expected the call to roll to voice mail. “Hello?”

  “Emily? Hi, it’s Bill Brockton.”

  “Who?”

  Perhaps we’d not kept in touch quite as well as I’d imagined. “Bill Brockton.”

  “Bill who? Oh…Dr. B? Uh…okay. Yeah. Hi. Give me, uh, give me just a second here.”

  Her speech was slow and thick. Was it possible that she’d been drinking? At 8 A.M.? “Am I catching you at a bad time, Emily?”

  “Well, since you ask, yeah. I don’t know what time it is where you are, but where I am, it’s two in the morning.”

  “Oh, crap, Emily, I’m so sorry. It’s eight here—I’m in Italy—and I was so interested in what I’m calling about, I didn’t even think about the time difference. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you again at a reasonable hour.”

  “Hell, I’m awake now,” she said, “and you’ve got me all intrigued. If you hang up now, I’ll just lie awake all night wondering why you called. So spill it.”

  “Okay. If I’m remembering right, a few years ago you wrote a journal article that had something to do with the Shroud of Turin.”

  “A few years ago?” She gave a groggy laugh. “Try fifteen years ago. Maybe more. I was still in the Ph.D. program at the time, so let’s see, that would have been 1994 or ’95. It was in the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology. Probably not on your regular reading list.”

  “Can you give me the skinny on that article? Like, an abstract of the abstract?”

  “Sure, more or less.” There was a pause. “Wait. Did you say you’re in Italy?”

  “I did.”

  “Where in Italy?”

  “Three guesses.”

  “You’re in Turin? My God, are you looking at the Shroud?”

  “Ha. I wish. I’m definitely, damnably not looking at the Shroud. Everybody’s not looking at the Shroud; it’s under wraps until 2025, they say. But I am looking, or at least have been looking, and will be looking again, at a full-size, high-resolution photo of it.”

  “No offense, but wouldn’t it have been easier and cheaper and smarter to just have that sent to
Knoxville?”

  “Long story,” I said. “Yeah, it would’ve. But I was in France, so Italy was right next door. Sort of. Anyhow, that article you wrote—didn’t it have something to do with your prior career as a medical illustrator? Or am I imagining that?”

  “No, that’s right. Very good. Okay, here’s the story. One afternoon at UT, I was sitting in a lecture by Randy Bresee—”

  “Randy Bresee—textile scientist?”

  “Exactly. I was taking his course on textile forensics. And that particular day, he showed slides of the Shroud of Turin. He called it ‘the greatest unsolved textile mystery of all time.’”

  “What did he mean?”

  “He meant the mystery of how the image was put on the cloth. Part of the mystique of the Shroud is that supposedly there’s no way to reproduce that image with any technique known to man. ‘Not made with hands’ is how the church puts it, I think.”

  “What’s so special about it, besides the subject matter?”

  “The image is so faint, so superficial—it’s only on the surface of the fibers, not soaked in. It’s barely there at all. No brushstrokes; no snow fencing.”

  “Snow fencing?”

  “If you brush paint or pigment on fabric—even a really, really light coat—it piles up on one side of the fibers,” she explained, “like snow drifting against a fence. Tough to avoid that. Then there’s the way the image jumps out at you when you look at the photo negative of it. More lifelike than the positive, but more ghostly, too. So it really is an interesting mystery.”

  “Especially for an artist-turned-detective, like you.”

  “Absolutely. Anyhow, sitting there in that classroom that day, seeing the slides and hearing about this mystery, I got cold chills—I thought I might even throw up—because all of a sudden I knew. At the end of the class, I went up and said to Randy, ‘I know how they did it.’ He laughed and said, ‘Yeah, right.’ So I went home that night, got my friend Tyler to come over and pose for me, and I did it.”

  “Did what, exactly?”

  “I made an image of Tyler, on fabric, that had all the characteristics of the Shroud. It was on a linen handkerchief. It had no brushstrokes, it didn’t soak into the fibers, and when I took a photograph and looked at the negative, it had that same 3-D effect and that same ghostly look.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “So sitting in a UT classroom one afternoon, you solved a mystery that was six hundred and fifty years old? How’d you do it—and why didn’t I pay more attention at the time?”

  I could practically hear her shrug. “It wasn’t a murder case. And I was just a lowly student.”

  “One thing I don’t get, Emily. I stayed up late last night researching the Shroud on the Internet, and everything I read—even recent stuff, with science in it—still claims there’s no way to duplicate that image. Have you ever sent your article to the people who say that?”

  “Ha.” It wasn’t really a laugh. “I sent that article all over the place. I even demonstrated the technique, on camera, to a History Channel crew that was filming a documentary about the Shroud. The Shroudies—that’s what I call the die-hard believers—were incredibly hostile. I got hate mail: letters saying I was doomed to hell, letters calling me a Christ killer, letters threatening my life. So yeah, I’d say I described my work to some of the people who say that. And they were none too happy.”

  “How’d you do it, Emily? Tell me about the technique.”

  “Simple. Incredibly simple. Dust transfer. Medical illustrators use it all the time. I used it all the time, when I was a medical illustrator. You create the image on one surface, using charcoal or red ochre or—”

  “Red ochre?”

  “A pigment. Ferrous oxide—rust, basically. Ochre’s found in clays all over the world, in various shades. Red ochre—the best red ochre—comes from southern France.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck twitched. “Southern France?”

  “Yeah, somewhere down around Provence; I forget where. It was used in the cave paintings in France and Spain—fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand years ago. Dust transfer, too. Those paintings weren’t actually paintings; they were illustrations. They’d sketch the outlines of the figures—horses or bulls or whatever—with a burned stick, then rub on red ochre to add color.”

  I’d thought I was excited when I first dialed Emily’s number; now, I was beside myself. I felt my hands shaking as I cradled the phone to my ear with one hand and took notes with the other. “And that’s how you made the image of your friend Tyler? You just rubbed dust onto the handkerchief?”

  “Ah, no. It was a little more complicated than that. No snow fencing allowed, remember? So I added a step. I used a soft brush, dipped in dry, red-ochre powder, to dab an image of Tyler’s face onto a piece of newsprint. No outlines, just shading with dust; heavy in the high spots—the bridge of the nose, the eyebrows, and so on—and light in the low spots. I dabbed very gently, from different directions, so there wouldn’t be any strokes. Once I had a dense, smooth image, I laid the handkerchief on top and rubbed it with the back of a wooden spoon.”

  “Like doing a brass rubbing?”

  “Sort of, but much less pressure. So the cloth picked up only trace amounts of the pigment.”

  “It wasn’t too faint to be seen?”

  “You’d be surprised. It takes only a tiny, tiny bit of red ochre to stain the fabric. If you get it on your clothes, it’s tough to get out.”

  “So you don’t have any trouble believing that an image created in this way could survive for hundreds of years?”

  “Hell, I don’t have any trouble believing it could survive for thousands of years. Some of those cave paintings have been on the walls for thirty thousand years. The fabric of the Shroud, on the other hand: That I’m not so sure about. And if I remember right, Randy Bresee seemed doubtful that a piece of first-century linen could hold up this long.”

  “But in either case—first century or fourteenth—you’re sure it’s a fake.”

  “Define fake. I’m sure it’s an illustration, Dr. B—I’d stake my life on that. I think it was created during the Middle Ages. And I’ve got a pretty good idea who did it. But fake? That implies fraud or deception. And there’s a chance—a small chance, at least—that it wasn’t created to defraud or deceive.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not following you, Emily.”

  “Okay, this might sound far-fetched,” she said, “but just consider this scenario for a second. What if the Shroud was created in the spirit of an autopsy photo? Back in the days before photography existed. What if it was an attempt to capture a moment, to document exactly how Jesus looked when he was taken down from the cross?”

  I hadn’t expected this wrinkle in the Shroud. “But you just said you thought it was made in the Middle Ages. So how could it capture a moment that happened fourteen centuries before?”

  She sighed. “Okay, here’s where it gets far-fetched. Suppose there was an earlier Shroud, one that did date back to the first century. Suppose that this original Shroud gradually starts to fade and crumble. Finally, suppose that in the thirteen hundreds, a brilliant artist is commissioned to make an exact copy, to preserve the image for another thousand years.”

  “Suppose pigs can fly,” I said. “You’re right; that sounds farfetched. If there was an ancient, authentic, first-century Shroud that got copied in the thirteen hundreds, what happened to it? Wouldn’t somebody have saved it, even if it was in shreds? I can’t imagine commissioning a copy but trashing the original.”

  “It’s a stretch, I grant you,” she conceded. “I came up with it as a way to mesh faith with facts—the radiocarbon dating, the presence of iron oxide in the image, the good condition of the linen. It worked, sort of, for a while. Before I floated that idea, none of the Shroudies would give me the time of day.”

  “And after?”

  “After, one of the Shroudie Web sites actually posted my article. Briefly. But I still got hate mail and threatenin
g phone calls.”

  “I admire your efforts to reconcile religion and science,” I said. “But I’m not convinced. Remember Occam’s razor?”

  “How could I forget? You drummed it into our heads over and over. ‘The simplest explanation that fits the facts is usually correct,’ right?”

  “Exactly. So what’s the simplest explanation for an image of Jesus that first surfaces in the Middle Ages—the heyday of fake relics—on fabric that C-14 labs tell us is fourteenth century? I can’t help thinking it’s a fake, created to attract pilgrims to Lirey, the French village where it appeared in 1357.”

  “I know, fakery fits the facts.” She sighed. “And yeah, it’s a lot simpler than my scenario.”

  “Can I circle back to something? You said you think you know who made the Shroud. Who?”

  “Ah. My money’s on Giotto di Bondoni,” she said at once. “Brilliant artist. Crucial, crucial figure in the transition from medieval art to the Renaissance. Giotto’s people look real, three-dimensional, not flat and stylized like medieval icons. Late twelve hundreds, early thirteen hundreds, so the timing’s right. The style’s right, too.”

  “How so?”

  “One, the guy on the Shroud is long and thin, and Giotto’s figures tend to be long in the face and in the body. Two, religious art was his bread and butter, but Giotto himself was a skeptic. Three, he was a notorious prankster. Think about it: If you’re a religious artist and a religious skeptic, what would be the ultimate prank? How about faking the burial shroud of Jesus—and getting away with it? Be tough to top that, wouldn’t it?”

  “But wait—if it’s a prank, doesn’t that contradict your autopsy-illustration theory?”