Flesh and Bone Read online

  “It’s Preston,” she said. “My ex. He’s sitting over there at the bar. He’s been watching us. That son of a bitch is stalking me.”

  I turned again. This time, I vaguely recalled having met the man at the corner of the bar once, several years earlier, at a forensic conference. He was a lawyer—a prosecutor, if memory served, which is probably how he and Jess first connected. “Do you want me to go tell him to get lost?”

  “No,” she said. “I need to deal with this.” She pushed away the crème brûlée, drew a deep breath, and set her jaw. Then she slid out of the booth and stormed over to the bar. I would not want to be in his shoes right about now, I thought. Jess’s hands flashed angrily as she spoke; I couldn’t hear any of her words, but her tone carried, and it was not happy. I saw him shake his head vigorously, as if denying something—that he had followed her?—and then he seemed to go on the offensive. He pointed at me, and for a while they both sounded mad. Then his tone turned pleading, and her tone softened. She sat down on a barstool beside him. By now I was staring openly at the two of them; for her part, Jess was looking intently at his face. He reached up and wiped his eyes. She wiped hers.

  Jess stayed at the bar for ten minutes going on eternity. When she finally came back to the booth, she would not meet my eyes. She sat down gingerly, as if the seat were wired with explosives. She didn’t speak. “Talk to me, Jess,” I said.

  “He’s in town for a DA’s conference,” she said. “Bob Roper, the Knox County DA, recommended this place. He swears he would never have come here if he’d had any inkling I’d be here with a date.” She glanced up at me briefly, then dropped her eyes again. “I believe what he said.”

  Every alarm I had was ringing like crazy. “What else did he say, Jess? You seem more upset, in a pulled-in sort of way, than you did when you thought he was following you.” I realized what my intuition was telling me. “You’ve just left me, haven’t you? We barely got started, and it’s already over. Is that it?”

  This time she faced me squarely. She was crying a little, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Dammit, Bill, you’re the last person I would ever want to hurt. You are the kindest, sweetest, smartest, most loving man I know. What you gave me the other night made me feel alive, and loved, and desired again for the first time in a long, long while. It was so lovely, and so healing. And maybe this is just a bump in the road.” She drew a deep breath and shook her head. “I thought I was done with him, but now I’m not so sure. Shit, the guy still gets to me. Look what this one chance encounter has done to me.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “The irony is, I could probably be happier with you. Preston doesn’t actually like me all that much. And when I’m with him, I don’t like me all that much.” She gave me the half smile again, and I thought it might tear my heart out. “You, on the other hand, like me a lot. These past few days, I’ve liked myself, too. More than I have in…maybe ever. You see me through eyes of kindness, and when I see myself reflected in your eyes, I see myself a little more kindly, too.” She slid a hand across the table, laid it tentatively on mine. Part of me wanted to clasp it and never let go; part of me wanted to fling it away from me. “I know I don’t have the right to ask this, but could you just give me some space for a while, let me try sorting through what I feel and what I want?” I couldn’t speak. I swallowed hard and looked down at the table, at our two hands. Neither of them seemed like mine anymore. “I worked with a therapist for a while when the breakup was at its worst,” Jess was saying. “Maybe she can help me untangle the stuff that’s underneath this. The deeper stuff—the stuff that seems to make it hard for me to choose things that would be good for me.”

  I considered trying to argue or reason with her, but I quickly concluded that any attempt to plead or pressure would only drive her farther away. I could behave stupidly, I could act pitiful, or I could strive for grace and dignity. When I opened my mouth, I landed somewhere in the murky middle of all three. “Are you leaving with him?”

  “No,” she said, nodding toward the bar. “He just left.” I looked, and it was true; his stool was empty, and the restaurant’s glass door was swinging shut. “I told him if he wants to talk, I’m willing to see a counselor with him. That’s it—there, or not at all.”

  “But you’re not leaving with me,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m leaving alone, and I’ll drive back to an empty house in Chattanooga and cry all night, I expect.”

  “I guess I’m better off than I thought,” I said. “I only have to drive about five minutes before I can curl up with the Kleenex box.” I smiled, or tried to, to let her know that was meant as a joke. Amazingly, she laughed, though I wasn’t sure if the laugh was at the joke or at my facial contortions.

  “You dear, sweet man,” she said. “I will call you when I figure out what the hell I’m doing, I promise. Even if I’m calling to tell you something that I think will be hard for you to hear.”

  “Swell,” I said. “With promises like that, who needs curses?” Again I approximated a smile. “Meantime, what about the casework?”

  “Garland’s back tomorrow,” she said, then laughed briefly and added, “May God help you. And we’ve both done all we can do with the Willis case unless they make an arrest and it goes to trial.” She was right; it was just that I would miss her terribly, even simply as a colleague.

  Almost before I knew it, she had slipped out of the booth and stood up. She walked to my side of the table, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, and said, “Thank you, Bill. You might not understand this or believe it, but I do love you.”

  And then she was gone.

  CHAPTER 23

  THREE DAYS HAD PASSED since Jess and I had parted. Three days with no call, no e-mail, no note in my in-box.

  The gates to the Body Farm were slightly ajar, which probably meant that one of the graduate students was inside checking on a research subject. I parked in the slot closest to the gate—the Body Farm being the only place I could think of where the closest parking space was actually the least desirable, at least in terms of ambience—and swung the chain-link gate outward. As I stepped toward the inner wooden gate, something suddenly registered as odd, and I stepped back into the parking lot and did a quick scan. Mine was the only vehicle, I saw, anywhere near the gate, and that puzzled me. It was unlikely that a student would have arrived on foot: the research facility was three miles from the Anthropology Department by road, and road was the only way to get from one to the other unless you wanted to swim the Tennessee River, thereby shortening the distance to a mile. Someone could have walked over from the morgue or forensic center, but a half mile of access roads and parking lots separated the facility from the hospital. It wasn’t inconceivable that someone had walked over from the morgue, but I had never known a student to do it.

  As I reached the gate, I noticed a note wedged between two of the wooden planks. “Bill—I’m inside. Come find me. Jess.” I scanned the parking lot again, more widely this time, but there was no sign of a fire-engine red Porsche.

  I walked into the main clearing, half expecting to see Jess chatting with some graduate student she’d roped into letting her in. It was empty. “Hello?” I called. “Jess?” No answer. I took a short stroll downhill, along what remained of an old gravel roadbed where we generally set bodies that were brought here simply to skeletonize. Jess had sent a dozen or more up from Chattanooga over the past two years. She was building a skeletal collection for the ME’s office down there, not to compete with ours, but simply for reference purposes and teaching material. I seemed to recall that we had two or three Chattanooga bodies skeletonizing at the moment, so it was possible she was checking on their progress.

  The Chattanooga bodies were there, two of them, but Jess wasn’t. One was down to bare bone, except for a few patches of mummified skin over the rib cage; the other had passed through the bloat and active decay stages and on to the dry stage, so it would soon be ready to process and send back as well. The cleaner one
had been autopsied, I noticed; the top of his cranium, which had been neatly sliced off—by Jess, no doubt—sat on the ground to one side of the rest of his skull, looking a bit like an unusually smooth turtle shell. Judging from the prominence of the brow ridge and the smoothness of the cranial sutures, whose meandering joints had almost entirely filled in and disappeared, he was an older man. The robust bones of the rib cage and arms, and the large muscle-attachment points on the arms, spoke of great upper-body strength. But the leg bones didn’t fit with this picture: they were delicate and spindly, like those of a thin, frail old woman, and one leg looked shorter and distorted. Paralysis, I thought at first. Then: No. Polio. Polio had cut a huge and tragic swath through an entire generation of American children in the 1930s and ’40s and early ’50s, attacking the myelin sheaths of muscles and nerves, warping young bones ruinously in a matter of days or weeks. I had considered polio virtually eradicated from the planet, much as smallpox had been vanquished, but lately I’d read a disturbing story in the New York Times about the disease’s resurgence in India and Africa. Villagers there had grown suspicious and fearful about government vaccination programs. One rumor running rampant in Nigeria claimed that the vaccine contained a sinister American drug designed to sterilize unsuspecting African children. As fear and anger spread from village to village, causing public health workers to flee for their lives, the vaccination program was halted. Polio cases soon began spiking and spreading, setting back the global eradication effort by months or even years. What fools these mortals be, I thought. And how mortal we fools be.

  I trudged back up the hill, through the clearing, and along the trail that led to Jess’s experiment near the upper fence. Through the unfurling spring foliage, I began to catch glimpses of our research subject, still tied to the tree, the blond wig practically glowing against the gray-black bark of the oak. But where was Jess?

  “Jess? Are you here? Jess, you’re not hiding from me somewhere, are you?”

  There was no answer. And as I got clear of the last thicket of underbrush between me and the big pine tree, I saw that Jess was indeed here, but I understood why she had not answered me.

  Jess was against the tree, her naked body tied to the donated cadaver in an obscene parody of sexual intercourse. A blond wig and smears of blood partly obscured the face, but there was no doubt that it was Jess’s face, no doubt that it was Jess’s body. And no doubt that Jess was dead.

  I had worked hundreds of death scenes, but never one where I had a personal stake, an intimate connection to the victim. That wasn’t who I was or what I did: I was the forensic scientist, the dispassionate observer, the eagle-eyed Ph.D. summoned to solve the puzzle. I was not, never had been, and still—even as I stared at Jess’s mutilated body—could not conceive of myself being the person who stumbles upon a scene that could tear out his heart, buckle his knees, burst a vessel in his brain.

  My feet were locked in place, my brain scrambling wildly. My first impulse was to rush to Jess, feel for a pulse, pray that I’d misjudged the vacancy in her eyes and the stillness in her limp form. No, another impulse said, don’t touch anything, don’t take so much as one step closer. It’s a crime scene, and you shouldn’t contaminate it. Those, at least, must be something like the words that impulse would have used if my mind had been capable of wielding words, because I fought back the impulse to go to her.

  So there I stood, rooted to the spot, for an instant that was also an eternity. Finally I felt one hand close around something hard in my hip pocket, and I pulled it out to see what it was. It was small and oblong and silver; I stared at it as if it were a mysterious artifact from some ancient or interplanetary civilization; finally I recognized it as my cellphone. Clumsily I pawed it open, struggling to remember and press the numbers 9 and 1 and 1 again. Nothing happened. I fought to recall how I had once used this device, in a former life; gradually I became dimly aware of the SEND button, and willed myself to press it. When I heard a female voice say “911,” I nearly dropped the phone.

  I stared at it dumbly. “This is 911, do you have an emergency?” What was I supposed to say—how and where could I begin to describe what I had, what I beheld? “Hello, can you hear me? Do you have an emergency?”

  “Yes,” I finally managed to say. “I do. Help. Oh God, please help.”

  The phone fell to the ground, and I sank to my knees, and I heard and saw nothing more, or at least noticed nothing more, until a strong pair of hands raised me to my feet. A police officer maneuvered his face directly in front of mine and said, “Dr. Brockton? Dr. Brockton? Tell us what happened here.”

  PART TWO

  AFTER

  CHAPTER 24

  THE UNIFORMED POLICE OFFICER led me down the path to the main clearing, just inside the gate of the Body Farm. A warped, weathered picnic table sat askew under a tree at one edge of the clearing; the patrolman took me there and set me on one of its benches. “Do you mind waiting here while we secure the scene and get some more people here?” I shook my head. “Are you all right?”

  “Not really. But I’ll manage. You do what ever you need to do.”

  I heard a series of sirens approaching, at least half a dozen in all. Someone had already stretched crime scene tape across the open gate; through the opening, I saw a fast-growing throng of officers—city police, UT campus police, and Medical Center security guards—as well as EMS personnel and firefighters. Heads leaned in through the gate, over the tape, peering at the facility. Peering at me.

  After a while, a stylishly dressed man in a lavender dress shirt and yellow tie ducked under the tape and walked toward me. “Dr. Brockton?” I nodded. “I’m Sergeant John Evers,” he said. “I’m an investigator in Major Crimes. Including homicides.” He held out a suntanned hand and shook mine firmly, then handed me a business card. I pulled out my wallet and tucked it inside. “Can I get a brief statement from you here while things are fresh?”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll want to talk to you in more detail downtown, since you’re the one who found the body. But for now, just some basic information.” He pulled out a pen and a small note pad, which he centered on one of the cupped boards of the tabletop. He took down my name, address, phone number, where I worked, and other data, then got to the particulars of where we were, and why. “What time did you arrive here this morning?”

  “I think about eight,” I said. “I was listening to the news on the radio, so it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes after that.”

  He nodded. “And what were you doing here?”

  “I work here,” I said. “This is my research facility. The Anthropology Department’s research facility, I should say.”

  “Yes, sir, of course. I meant, specifically, why had you come out this morning?”

  “I came out to check on some research. To see what condition the body—the male body up there tied to the tree—was in by now.” I explained how we had staged the research subject, and why. “I was doing the research for the Chattanooga medical examiner,” I said. “Jess—Dr. Jessamine—Carter. I found her body when I went up there to check on my research subject.”

  “So you recognized the victim?” I nodded. “You knew Dr. Carter personally?”

  “Yes. We had worked together on several cases over the past few years. And we were collaborating on a current case, involving a murder victim whose body was found tied to a tree down near Chattanooga. That’s the death scene we were replicating here, so we could pinpoint the time since death more accurately for Dr. Carter.”

  “Did you see anybody else out here this morning when you arrived, either inside the fence or out in the parking lot?” I shook my head. “Driving away from the parking lot?” Again I shook my head.

  “Was the gate open or closed when you got here?”

  I had to think for a moment; my arrival seemed a lifetime ago. “It was open,” I said. “That was the first thing out of the ordinary.”

  “It’s normally locked?”

  “
Yes, with two locks—one on the chain-link gate, one on the wooden gate.”

  “What else was unusual?”

  “There was a note for me on the inner gate.” I suddenly remembered it was in my pocket. I reached for it, then caught myself before I touched it. “I’ll let one of your evidence technicians get it out of my pocket and bag it. It’s a note from Dr. Carter. Or at least, supposedly from Dr. Carter. Saying, ‘I’m inside. Come find me.’ It’ll have my fingerprints on it, from when I pulled it off the gate and read it. But maybe it’ll have the prints of whoever put it there, too.”

  He nodded, and drew a box around the word NOTE, with arrows pointing at each corner of the box, for extra emphasis.

  “So when you found the note, what did you do?”

  “I came inside and looked around, called Dr. Carter’s name. I went down that way first”—I pointed to the lower area, where Jess sometimes put bodies to skeletonize—“and then I walked up that path leading to the research project. And that’s when I found her. Her corpse. Tied to the other one.”

  “What did you do when you saw her?”

  “Nothing, at first. I just stared. I couldn’t process it; I couldn’t think. Finally—I mean, it was probably only a minute or two, but it felt like forever—I called 911.”

  “And after you made the call, what did you do? Did you approach the body? Did you ever touch the body?”

  I shook my head. “No. I know better than to disturb a death scene.”

  “How close were you?”

  “Six feet. Maybe eight or ten.”

  “So how did you know she was dead?”

  I looked up at him; met his gaze for the first time, really. “Detective, I’ve spent the past twenty-five years studying the dead. I’ve seen corpses by the hundreds. I recognize the vacant, clouded eyes. I know the difference between shallow breath and no breath; between an unconscious person and a lifeless body.” I could feel my voice starting to rise, but it seemed to be someone else’s voice, not my own; a voice that was beyond my control. “I know that when blowflies are swarming around a woman’s bloody corpse, crawling in and out of her open mouth, I don’t need to feel for a pulse to tell me that woman is dead.”