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

  He edges closer, listening to the older man’s comments with keen interest, a critical ear, and rising irritation. Fournier’s no Dominican, but he’s taken a keen interest in the Inquisition since his arrival at Fontfroide. Geographically, the center of the Inquisition—Toulouse—is near Fournier’s abbey; theologically, the spirit of the Inquisition is close to Fournier’s stern and austere heart. During the past year, in fact, he’s spent weeks in Toulouse, observing and admiring the work of Bernard Gui, the devout Dominican whose masterful wielding of physical pain, theological cunning, and abject terror has broken hundreds of heretics during his seven years as Chief Inquisitor. Fournier wonders if Gui is here today, but he doubts that the Inquisitor’s busy schedule allows him time to travel from Toulouse to Paris, even for such a worthy cause.

  Suddenly, from the knot of Dominicans, he hears Gui’s name spoken aloud, as if the older friar has somehow been reading his thoughts. The man is speaking in Latin so that the rabble around him cannot understand, but his words are clear to Fournier. The Dominican is criticizing Gui—and not just criticizing him, but mocking him: mocking a brother friar, and the Chief Inquisitor at that. “He has the fierceness of a bull,” the man says with a smile. “The intelligence of a bull, too.”

  Fournier pushes sideways, further closing the distance between himself and the Dominican. The movement catches the eye of the friar, and when he meets Fournier’s gaze, Fournier calls to him in Latin: “Would you dare to say such things about Bernard if he were here to listen?”

  The older man registers mild surprise, but not the contrition and fear that Fournier expected from him. “My words will reach his ears soon enough, I feel certain,” he says to the hulking young Cistercian. “When you relay them, be sure to tell Brother Bernard who spoke them: Johannes Eckhart, master and chair of Dominican theology here at the University of Paris.” He bows, with a slight smile and a sideways tilt to his head—is he mocking Fournier now?—and then turns his back on the indignant abbot.

  “God is not pleased,” Fournier mutters beneath his breath. He considers pushing through the half-dozen people who stand between them, considers teaching the old man a lesson in respect. Suddenly a shout ripples up the shore, like a bow wave from the boat that is making its way upstream toward the Isle of the Jews, making its way toward the towering stake and the stacks of wood.

  The boat, rowed by eight men, carries half a dozen of the king’s guards, as well as Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charny. One of the guards raises a flaming torch high overhead, and the mob roars.

  THE PYRE BURNS UNTIL MIDNIGHT. THE TWO TEMPLARS are long since incinerated, but the crowd lingers, loath to leave until every stick of wood is consumed.

  When the flames finally gutter and die, the Order of the Knights Templar has been extinguished. But hanging in the air, like the lingering smoke and the scent of charred flesh, is the dying cry of Grand Master Jacques de Molay: “I summon the king and the pope to meet me before God!”

  CHAPTER 1

  Sevierville, Tennessee

  The Present

  I HEARD A CLICK IN MY HEADSET, FOLLOWED BY THE voice of the TBI pilot. “Dr. Brockton, you okay back there?”

  “I’m still kinda puckered from that takeoff,” I answered, “but yeah, I’m fine.”

  He laughed. “I’ll go easier on the landing.”

  He circled the plume of smoke, which rose from the ruins of a house. Fifty yards away was what might have been an airstrip except for the fact that it was hemmed in by houses. I pointed at the ribbon of asphalt. “What’s up with that? Looks like they accidentally put a runway smack-dab in the middle of a neighborhood.”

  “They did, but not by accident,” the pilot said. “This is Smoky Mountain Airpark. A subdivision for aviation nuts. Instead of a garage, every house has its own airplane hangar.”

  A small fleet of vehicles ringed the smoldering hangar and half-burned house we landed beside. In addition to the helicopter, I counted four fire trucks—two of them still spraying water on the house—plus three Sevier County Sheriff’s Office cruisers and four unmarked cars, which I supposed were TBI vehicles.

  I was only half right, I learned when four investigators met me halfway between the helicopter and the house.

  “Good to see you again, Doc,” shouted Steve Morgan over the ebbing noise of the turbine and the rotor wash. Steve had majored in anthropology, but he’d been working for the TBI for about ten years now, and he was the one who’d called to ask if I could take a quick look at a death scene. “Where’s your assistant? Miranda? I thought you two were joined at the ileum.”

  “She’s in France for the summer,” I yelled. “Left a couple days ago. On a dig with some fancy French archaeologist.” Whatever expression my face was showing, it made him laugh.

  “Doc, do you know Dave Pendergrast, from our Sevier County office?”

  “I didn’t, but I do now. Good to meet you.” I shook Pendergrast’s hand.

  “This is Special Agent Craig Drucker, of the FBI,” Steve went on. He turned and nodded toward a man striding toward us from the ruined building. “And Special Agent Robert Stone of the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  I smiled. “No need to introduce me to this guy,” I said. “Rocky Stone and I go way back. Last time we worked together was that big meth-lab explosion that killed a couple guys up in Scott County. That was, what, three, four years ago, Rocky?”

  “Ha. More like six or eight.” He grinned. “My oldest kid was being born while you were piecing those two bodies together.” I smiled, remembering how antsy Rocky had been to get to the hospital to see his wife and the baby, and how proud he’d been the next day when I dropped by the maternity ward to see them. “Thanks for coming on such short notice,” Rocky said. “Sorry we kept you in the dark on the ride over.”

  “Hey, I’m not complaining,” I assured him. “I’ll do just about anything for a helicopter ride.”

  The subdivision wasn’t just an aviation nut’s dream; it was also, the DEA agent explained, a drug runner’s dream. “For the past year,” Rocky said, “we’ve been investigating a smuggling ring based in Colombia. They’ve been flying cocaine into small airports all over the Southeast, changing the drop point every time. But this place is perfect as a more permanent base—a clandestine hub, I guess you could call it. No control tower, very little traffic, virtually no risk of detection. You land whenever you’ve got a shipment, taxi the plane into your own private hangar, lock the door, and unload in complete privacy. This operation could have run without a hitch for years.”

  “So what happened?” I asked, nodding at the smoking ruins. “Turf war? A raid that got too hot to handle?”

  “I wish,” Rocky said. “One of our undercover agents had infiltrated the operation. What’s left of him is there, in what’s left of the hangar. We’ve got an arson investigator coming, but we’d like you to examine the body. See if he died during the fire or died before the fire. We need to know if it was an accident or a homicide.”

  “Dr. Garcia’s the medical examiner,” I pointed out. “He’s got primary jurisdiction here.” Dr. Edelberto Garcia—Eddie—served as ME for Knoxville, Knox County, and several surrounding counties.

  “Actually, we called Dr. Garcia just before we called you. He says if the body’s rotten or burned, you’re the guy to look at it.”

  “That’s damned decent of Eddie,” I joked, “letting me have all the good ones.” All four agents smiled.

  “The scary thing is,” Rocky said, “the Doc’s not being sarcastic. He actually means it.”

  The truth was, Rocky was right. I actually did.

  THE DEAD AGENT WAS MAURICE WATSON, ALIAS “Perry Hutchinson,” whom the DEA had planted as the manager of the airpark. Six months before, working through the drug smugglers’ distributors in Atlanta, Hutchinson had offered them a sweet deal: a house, a hangar, and a key to the gas pump in exchange for a small cut of the profits.

  “They brought in the first load two weeks ago
,” said Rocky. “It was small—just a test run. Smooth as silk. They were planning another run next week. A big load. We were all set to come down on them. But somebody got spooked—or got tipped off.” He shook his head grimly. “You ready to take a look?”

  “Sure. Let’s go.”

  The intense heat of the fire had reduced the hangar to scorched brick walls and sagging steel roof trusses silhouetted against blue sky and gray smoke. Entering through a side door, I found myself sloshing through an inch of muck—a slimy mixture of water, ash, soot, and petrochemicals—and I was grateful that I’d put on my waterproof boots before delivering corpse 49-12 to the Body Farm.

  Occupying one side of the hangar was a blackened Ford pickup; on the other side was a scorched plane, a V-tailed Beechcraft Bonanza; and tucked between them was a riding lawn mower, its gas cap removed. Lying on the floor next to the mower, faceup in the muck, was the corpse, its facial features all but obliterated, its left hand still clutching a five-gallon gasoline can. The heat of the fire had shrunk the flexor muscles of the arm, locking the man’s fingers around the handle in what was, quite literally, a death grip. “So, looks like an accident,” Stone said. “Might even have been an accident.”

  “Mighty convenient accident,” I said, “the way the fire just happened to break out so close to so much gasoline.”

  “Damned convenient,” Rocky agreed.

  I knelt beside the body. “I assume he’s not carrying his DEA badge,” I said, “but have you checked him for other identification? What was his undercover name? Hutchinson?”

  Rocky nodded. “He’s got the Hutchinson driver’s license. Can you get a DNA sample so we can be sure? Or did the heat…? Is the DNA…?”

  I finished the question for him. “Is the DNA cooked? Probably not. The femur is pretty well insulated by the muscles of the thigh, and most of that tissue’s still there, so we can probably get a good DNA sample. But the dental records might be quicker and easier. Can you get me those?” Tugging on a pair of gloves and kneeling beside the corpse, I opened the mouth. “Agent Stone? Unless your man had just come from a barroom brawl, he wasn’t refueling his lawn mower when he died.” Leaning back so Rocky could get a better view, I showed him the teeth. All eight incisors had been snapped off at the roots.

  “Shit,” Rocky muttered. “That doesn’t look like something the fire did.”

  “No way,” I told him. “See how the teeth are folded backward into the mouth? That’s called a ‘hinge fracture,’ and it means somebody swung something at him—a baseball bat or a steel pipe or the butt of a rifle—and caught him square on the mouth.” I studied the face with my eyes, and then with my fingertips, pressing and squeezing in order to feel the bones through the burned flesh. From there I worked my way down the entire body. When I finally got down to the feet, I looked up at Rocky. “I’ll X-ray the body when I get it back to the Regional Forensic Center,” I said, “but I can tell you already he’s got multiple fractures. Half a dozen, at least. I hate to say it, Rocky, but somebody broke your man, bone by bone, before they killed him.”

  Stone’s eyes had gone narrow and cold, and his jaw muscles pulsed rhythmically, forming knots the size of walnuts. “Damn those bastards to hell,” he said. “How long will it take you to do the exam?”

  “The exam itself, half a day,” I said. “But I’ve got to get the tissue off the bones to do it right. And that’ll take a couple weeks—we’ll put him out at the Body Farm and let Mother Nature clean him off.”

  He grimaced. “Isn’t there any other way? Something more respectful? More dignified?”

  I shook my head. “I could dismember him, put him in kettles, and cook him down. That’d be a little faster. But it seems less respectful, to my way of thinking. And an aggressive defense attorney would claim that I damaged the bones in taking him apart.”

  He sighed. “All right, do it the way you think is best. Just find everything—everything—so we can nail these scum-sucking bastards.” He looked at the vehicles. “Thank God we got the fire out so fast. If the gas tanks had gone up, I doubt there’d’ve been any of him left for you to look at.”

  “Wait. Wait.” I looked up, my gaze swiveling from his face to the blackened vehicles. “You’re saying there’s still unburned gas in here?” He nodded. “In the truck and in the airplane?”

  “Yup. The truck holds twenty-six gallons; the plane holds ninety.”

  “There’s almost a hundred gallons of high-octane aviation fuel sitting right over our heads? We shouldn’t even be in here, should we?”

  Stone shrugged. “Fire’s out.”

  “There might be an ember somewhere in that plane. One of the tanks might fail. The roof could collapse. A spark from—”

  I was interrupted by a metallic clatter—the clatter of metal punching through metal—and a neat round hole suddenly appeared in the side of the airplane.

  “Shots! Shots! Take cover!” yelled one of the agents. Another bullet slammed into the plane, this time into the wing, and a thin stream of pale blue liquid began dribbling from the wing and pooling atop the muck.

  “Jesus, that’s avgas,” said Stone. “We gotta get outta here.” He hoisted me to my feet and began pulling me toward the door. All around us, agents and deputies were scrambling, staring and pointing in various directions, drawing weapons. Another bullet chipped a cinder block and ricocheted off in a shower of sparks. A flame bloomed at the base of the far wall. From there it followed a finger of gas, a finger beckoning it toward the center of the hangar, toward the leaking airplane.

  I tore free of Stone’s grasp and ran back toward the plane. Behind me, I heard him shouting, “Doc, come back! Get out!”

  A wall of flame had engulfed the far wing of the plane by the time I reached the dead agent. Grabbing his feet—the closest things to me—I tucked them under my arms and dragged him behind me like a sleigh, slipping and staggering as I hauled him through the muck. I’d almost made it to the door when the plane exploded, and a fist of fire slammed into my back and knocked me flat.

  ROCKY STONE HELPED ME CARRY THE BODY OF HIS dead agent to the most secluded corner of the Body Farm and lay him at the foot of a big oak. Unzipping the body bag, I tugged it free, fastened ID tags on the left arm and left ankle, and then draped the bag over the corpse.

  “You broke half a dozen procedures and every rule of common sense, going back for him like that,” Stone said. “And I am incredibly grateful. If you hadn’t gotten him out, we wouldn’t have a prayer of making a murder case.”

  “I wish the shooter hadn’t gotten away.”

  “You and me both, Doc. He was only a couple hundred yards away—up on that low ridge—but by the time any of our guys got there, he was gone.” Stone knelt and laid a DEA medallion on top of the bag. Closing his eyes, he said a few silent words, then stood. “So, you say it’ll take about two weeks to get us a report?”

  “More or less. More if it turns cool, less if it gets really hot. Once the bugs and I have cleaned him off, I’ll take photos of all the fractures.” I had already documented them, or at least most of them, with X-rays, which I took with a portable machine at the loading dock of the Forensic Center. But if the case came to trial, the prosecutors would need crisp photos to corroborate the fuzzy X-ray images.

  Normally I’d have delegated the cleanup to my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, who ran the bone lab and did much of the legwork at the Body Farm. Miranda had left for France only three days before, but already I was feeling her absence. I missed her help, and I missed her camaraderie. At the moment, though, I was relieved she hadn’t been with me in Sevierville. I’d narrowly escaped being incinerated; in fact, the hair on the back of my head was singed, and if I’d been wearing my usual outfit—jeans and a cotton shirt—instead of the Nomex jumpsuit, my clothes would surely have caught fire. Thank God Miranda wasn’t there, I thought.

  She’d left on short notice, under circumstances that remained slightly mysterious to me. A week earlier, she’d rec
eived an urgent e-mail and then a phone call from a French archaeologist, Stefan Beauvoir, asking her to come help with a hastily arranged excavation. The site was a medieval palace dating from the thirteen hundreds—practically prehistoric by American standards, but nearly modern for Europe.

  I’d hesitated before saying I could spare her; after all, during half a decade as my graduate assistant, she’d made herself indispensable. I valued and respected Miranda’s intelligence and forensic expertise. But it went deeper than that, I had to admit: She was as important to me personally as she was professionally. In some ways, I felt closer to Miranda than to anyone else on earth, even my own son. If you took DNA out of the equation, Miranda was my next of kin. I felt certain that the bone lab and the Body Farm could limp along without Miranda for six weeks, but I wasn’t sure I could manage that long.

  “Excuse me, Doc?” Rocky’s voice seemed to come from far away, not so much interrupting my thoughts as awakening me from some dream. “So if we’re done here, I guess I’ll be taking off. The TBI’s gonna think we’ve hijacked their chopper.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to check out on you there. Hang on—I’ll walk you out and lock up.”

  I bent to straighten one corner of the body bag, and as I did, my cell phone began bleating. Fishing the phone from the pocket of the jumpsuit, I glanced at the display. I didn’t recognize the number; it started with 330, an area code I didn’t know, and it looked longer than a phone number should be. I stared dumbly for a moment before I realized why. It was a foreign call, and 33 was the country code—the code, I suddenly remembered, for France. Miranda! I flipped open the phone, but in my excitement, I fumbled it, and it fell onto my foot and skittered beneath the body bag. Flinging aside the bag, I rooted for the phone, which had lodged—ironically and absurdly—beside the dead man’s left ear. I had just laid hold of it when it fell silent. “Damn it,” I muttered. I punched the “send” button, only to be told by a robotic voice that my call “cannot be completed as dialed,” doubtless because it was an overseas number. “Damn damn damn,” I muttered, but just as I finished the third damn, the phone rang again, displaying the same number.