Flesh and Bone Read online

  UT’s College of Agriculture had a dairy farm beside the hospital, bounded by a big bend in the river; on a morning like this, with the trees in full flower and the black-and-white Holsteins arranged on the emerald grass, the view was like something out of a painting: Tennessee Pastoral, it might be titled. Tuck the Body Farm into one corner, and it would be like one of those seventeenth-century memento mori paintings featuring a skull or bludgeoned animal nestled among the dewy fruits and vegetables to remind us of our mortality. Sort of like the role I played at UT faculty meetings, I supposed.

  I parked beside the entrance and unlocked the padlocks on the chain-link fence and the inner wooden gate. We didn’t have any redbuds or dogwoods inside the Body Farm, but we did have dandelions galore in the clearing, bright splashes of yellow amid the new grass and old bones.

  As Miranda and I trudged up the path toward the upper end of the facility, I noticed a new body bag a few feet off the trail, with one hand and one foot exposed. “Is that the highway fatality?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We brought him out from the morgue yesterday morning.”

  I knelt down beside the body and folded the bag back. As I did, a small squadron of blowflies swarmed up from around and beneath the black plastic. “And he was walking on I-40?”

  “Yeah, wandering along that elevated stretch downtown where there’s no shoulder. Stumbled into the traffic lane, and some high school student smacked right into him. I feel sorry for the kid—apparently he’s pretty torn up about it.”

  “Be hard not to be,” I said. “I ran over a dog once, and it made me throw up. I can’t imagine accidentally killing a person.”

  “He’s lucky he was driving a big SUV. Otherwise, he might’ve been killed, too. The front end was pretty smashed up. Smaller car, this guy might’ve come right over the hood and blown through the windshield at sixty or seventy miles an hour.”

  I studied the dead man, who looked to have lived four or five tough de cades before dying in the fast lane. One side of the face and head had been crushed; shards of glass and paint were tangled in the hair, and a number of teeth had snapped off at the gum line. The left arm, shoulder, and ribs appeared shattered as well. I noticed clumps of white fly eggs, which looked like grainy paste or Cream of Wheat, scattered across his many wounds. Twenty-four hours from now, his entire body would be swarming with newly hatched maggots.

  “Looks like a coin toss whether he died of brain damage or internal injuries,” I said. “I guess Jess could pin it down, if it mattered.”

  “The family said they didn’t want an autopsy, and they didn’t want the body, either,” Miranda said. “He’d been living on the street for a while; problems with drinking and probably mental illness. Apparently no love lost between him and his relatives. The death certificate simply lists ‘multiple injuries from automobile impact’ as the cause of death.”

  “Well, it’s too bad,” I said, “but he’ll be an interesting addition to the skeletal collection. Good example of massive blunt-force trauma, and how you can tell the direction of impact from the way the bones are fractured.”

  “Also a good example of why it’s not a good idea to drink and walk.”

  “That too,” I said.

  I folded the body bag back over the man, nudged his hand and foot beneath its shade. The shade would keep the skin from turning leathery-tough, as it would in the sunshine; it would also keep the maggots—which shun daylight, and the predatory birds that accompany it—munching busily around the clock. With that, we turned and headed up the path again toward our Chattanooga victim’s stand-in.

  As we got close, I saw why Miranda had been eager to bring me out for a look. The body still hung from the tree, its head sagging forward nearly to its chest. Despite the facial injuries I had replicated—bloody injuries that would normally prompt a feeding frenzy by teeming maggots—most of the soft tissue remained. Even the exaggerated eye makeup remained intact. But the body’s feet, ankles, and lower legs had been reduced almost to bare bone.

  “Wow,” I said, “he’s looking a lot like the murder victim, except that his abdomen is still bloated. Another couple days, maybe, and I’d say he’ll correspond almost exactly.” I knelt down and checked the feet and legs for signs of carnivore chewing, but I didn’t see any—again, just like the Chattanooga victim. All I saw were maggots, fighting over what little tissue remained on the lower extremities.

  We had set an infrared camera on a tripod, aimed at the body; it was rigged to a motion sensor so if a nocturnal animal managed to breach the fence and chew on the body, we’d capture a photo of it. “Have you checked the camera?” Miranda nodded. “Has anything triggered it?”

  “Nope. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

  I stood up to study the face more closely. I had to crouch slightly, and look up from below the dangling head, to get a good view. As I did, I felt a tiny maggot drop onto my cheek. And then another. And another. I jumped back, shaking my head like a wet dog, then brushing my cheeks for good measure. “Woof,” I said. “I think I understand now why there’s such differential decay between the upper body and the feet.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. Once the blowfly eggs hatch, the maggots fall off. There’s no good horizontal surface, the way there is when a body’s lying on the ground.” I pointed down at the feet. “They fall down there, and the feet are easy for them to reach. Some of them manage to crawl up the ankles, and a few even make it partway up the lower leg. But the higher you look, the fewer you see.”

  Miranda leaned in, but not so far as to place herself beneath the rain of maggots drizzling down from the head. “You’re right,” she said. “You could graph the distribution as an asymptotic curve. As X—the distance above the ground—increases, Y—the number of maggots—drops from near infinity to near zero.”

  I stared at her. “Asymptotic curve? What language are you speaking?” She stared back, puzzled at my puzzlement, then we burst into simultaneous laughter.

  “Okay, I admit it: I’ve become the world’s biggest, weirdest nerd,” she said. “But it is a nice curve, and a classic asymptote.” She raised one index finger high overhead, traced a near-vertical line downward, then gradually, gracefully swooped it toward horizontal.

  “Very nice indeed,” I agreed. “Actually, you probably could get a paper about this published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Especially if you include a video of yourself tracing the asymptotic curve in the air like that.”

  She made a face at me. “Eat maggots and die,” she said.

  I didn’t die, but I did suddenly feel my scalp itching in half a dozen places.

  CHAPTER 11

  THERE WAS A LIGHT tap on my doorframe, and a millisecond later—even before I had time to look up—a female voice said, “Knock knock.”

  “Come in,” I said, not yet looking up. I was writing a note on a student’s test paper, and I wanted to finish the sentence before I forgot the second half of it. As I tapped the period into place, I realized that the voice was familiar, but that it was also not one I was accustomed to hearing in the dingy quarters of Stadium Hall.

  My first glance explained the disconnect. The voice belonged to Amanda Whiting, and I had never heard it except in the walnut-paneled confines of the President’s Dining Room and the similarly veneered interior of the UT president’s home.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “I must be in some mighty deep trouble if you’ve come all the way down here looking for me.” Amanda was a UT vice president; she was also the university’s chief counsel, its highest-flying legal eagle. “What did I do this time? I’ve tried to cut back on the dirty jokes in class. Really, I have.”

  “I wish it were as simple as a coed offended by your Neanderthal sense of humor,” she said. “This is about Jason Lane.”

  “Jason Lane? He’s one of my students; I do recognize the name. But beyond that, I’m drawing a blank.”

  She heaved a sigh. “Jason Lane is a devout young man. A devoutly
fundamentalist Christian young man.” I suddenly saw where this was heading, and I didn’t like what I saw. “He believes the Bible to be the literal, unerring word of God. He believes the Book of Genesis to be the definitive account of the creation of the earth and of all the life-forms therein.”

  “And in class the other day, I begged to differ,” I said.

  “Begged to differ? Hell, Bill, you stomped all over this kid’s belief system in front of a hundred other people.” She folded her arms across her chest and gave me a stern look over the top of her reading glasses.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I was hard on him, and I feel bad about it. But dang it, Amanda, I’m a scientist. Am I really supposed to check my brain and my education at the classroom door, pretend that everything we know from paleontology and zoology and molecular biology is idle speculation? And if some kid says everything was conjured up in six days, am I supposed say, ‘Gosh, Jason, maybe you’re right and the Nobel laureates are wrong’? When did that become UT’s policy on academic freedom?” I glared at her; she glared back, and then she softened.

  “I know,” she said. “Intellectually and scientifically, you’re right. And you do have the freedom to teach what you think is right. Nevertheless, we do have a problem.”

  “So what do I need to do, apologize? In private, or in front of the class so my humiliation corresponds to his?”

  “That’s not it,” she said. “He’s not after a pound of flesh.”

  “Then how many pounds is he after?”

  “How many pounds you got?” she said. “It’s not just you, and it’s not just him now. That’s why it’s a problem. This student is just the convenient opportunity, and you’re just the door about to get knocked on, or knocked down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You ever heard of Jennings Bryan?”

  “William Jennings Bryan? Sure. Lawyer, senator, and presidential candidate in the late 1800s. He argued the case against evolution at the Scopes trial, just down the road in Dayton, didn’t he?”

  “That one did; this one was born at least a hundred years later, and he’s very much alive and kicking. No relation to the monkey-trial attorney, by the way, but many parallels. He’s a lawyer, too. And an antievolutionist as well. A philosophical chip off the old Bryan block. Even has political aspirations—he and that former Alabama Supreme Court justice, the Ten Commandments judge, are getting some buzz as the dream ticket of the far right in the 2008 presidential election.”

  “Then even I might start praying without ceasing,” I said. “So how does young Jennings Bryan, Esquire, fit into this?”

  “As best I can tell, your student Jason called home upset about what you said in class. His parents, who are of the same persuasion as Jason when it comes to matters of faith and evolution, called their minister. And their minister’s flock just happens to include Mr. Bryan, who has been making a name for himself in fundamentalist circles by spearheading several successful efforts to teach creationism—or at least undermine evolution—in public schools.”

  “Was he part of the campaign out in Kansas that got the state Board of Education to muzzle science teachers?”

  “Behind the scenes,” she said. “He’s also filed friend-of-the-court briefs in half a dozen cases involving public education, evolution, and intelligent design. The scary thing about him is, he actually knows the scientific issues pretty well, so he can target what he sees as the Achilles’ heel of evolution.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like the gaps in the fossil record. As I understand it, you’d logically expect fossils to show steady changes over millions of years, but instead, they show long periods with small changes and few transition species, then boom, this explosion of new species or variations appears.”

  “Evolution proceeds in fits and starts,” I said. “Just because we don’t yet understand why, that doesn’t mean we should chuck it.”

  “Believe me, Bill, I agree with you completely. I’m just saying, Bryan is shrewd. He knows how to frame the issues in ways that resonate with middle-of-the-road people. Including judges and juries.”

  “So how does Mr. Bryan propose to complicate our lives, exactly?”

  “In three ways, from what I’m hearing through various grapevines,” she said. “First, by filing a class-action suit against you, the university, and the state for discriminating against students who believe in the literal truth of the six-day creation story. Second, by petitioning the board of trustees to adopt a policy that would require any evolution-oriented instruction to be balanced by alternative theories.”

  “Swell,” I said. “I’ve always liked the Native American alternative, which holds that North America is carried along on the back of a giant sea turtle.”

  “It’s easy to see the absurd side of this,” she said, “but I tell you, I can’t promise which way the vote would go if the trustees started getting a lot of pressure.”

  That was two ways. “What’s the third circle of hell he wants to consign us to?”

  “Legislation, modeled after a 1980 Louisiana law that requires teachers who discuss evolution to also present scientific evidence for creation.”

  “But there’s no such evidence,” I protested. “Besides, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that law years ago.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Twenty years and six justices ago. The Court’s changed since then, become a lot more conservative. Today’s Court might uphold a law similar to the one overturned by the 1987 court. This proposed Tennessee law—and I’m told he’s already got sponsors in both the House and the Senate—is crafted with enough differences from the Louisiana law that the Supreme Court might be willing to hear the case.”

  “Damn,” I said, “wouldn’t that be ironic if Bill Brockton—a guy whose scientific career is founded on evolutionary change in the human skeleton—handed the creationists a landmark victory in the Supreme Court?” She gave me an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile. “Even more ironic,” I said, “if eight de cades after the Scopes trial, where science won the battle for public opinion, Tennessee’s educators and legislators turned their backs on science.”

  She stood up to go. “You know the most important thing you can do now to keep that from happening?” I waited. “Keep quiet.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I HAD JUST PARKED my truck outside the loading bay behind UT Medical Center when Miranda stuck her head out the door. “Peggy called,” she said. Peggy was the Anthropology Department’s overworked secretary. “She says Dr. Carter wants you to call her at her office in Chattanooga. ASAP.”

  I hurried in, trying to imagine what could prompt the added note of urgency. I came up empty. “Jess, it’s Bill,” I said. “Is something wrong?”

  “I just got a call from Nashville,” she said. “From the Board of Medical Examiners.” It was the group weighing the fate—and the medical license—of Dr. Garland Hamilton, the disgraced Knoxville medical examiner whose vacancy she had been filling for weeks now. “Bill, they chickened out. They voted to suspend him for ninety days. From the date of the complaint. The complaint was filed eighty-three days ago. That means in another week, he’s back on the job.”

  I groaned. How could they have let him off with such a token punishment? Hamilton’s incompetent autopsy had put a man on trial for a “murder” that hadn’t been committed. It was the sloppiest postmortem examination I had ever seen, and while it was the worst of his lapses, it was by no means the only one. I had testified for the wrongly accused defendant in the “murder” case, and Hamilton had confronted me angrily, even threateningly, outside the court house afterward. But by the time of last week’s licensing hearing, he seemed to have gotten over his animosity; he had shaken my hand, and assured me he bore no hard feelings. Even so, I didn’t relish the idea of having him restored to the position of medical examiner for Knox County and eighteen surrounding counties.

  “Well, damn,” I said. “We were just getting used to having a competent ME up this way. I know
all the driving between Chattanooga and Knoxville has been hard on you, but we’ll sure miss you.” I hesitated, then added, “I’ll sure miss you.”

  The line fell silent, and I felt panic rising, then she said, “Doesn’t mean we can’t still see each other. Just means we have to find time outside of work.” I felt a rush of relief and hope.

  “We’re both smart people,” I said. “We ought to be able to manage that sometimes.”

  “Don’t overestimate us,” she joked. We chatted a few more moments, then Jess got paged so we hung up.

  Almost the instant I put the handset back in its cradle, the phone rang again. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said.

  “Bill? Garland Hamilton. Listen, I wanted you to hear this from me. The Board of Medical Examiners voted to put me in the stocks for ninety days, but they gave me credit for time served. So I’ll be back in the office a week from today.”

  “Well, I know that must come as good news to you,” I said carefully.

  “Oh, I’m dying to get back to work,” he said. “Listen, Bill, I meant what I said the other day. I know we didn’t see eye to eye in that Ledbetter case”—I almost laughed at the understatement; it was like saying George Bush and Al Gore didn’t see eye to eye—“but I hope we can put that behind us and start with a clean page.”

  I hesitated. Again I sought refuge in ambiguity. “A clean page would be nice.”

  “Great,” he said. “What’d I miss? Any interesting cases come through while I was out?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to brief him on Jess’s work. “Well, I’ve been working on a homicide, but it’s from Chattanooga, so it’s in Jess’s jurisdiction anyhow,” I said. “Other than that, it’s been pretty quiet lately.”