The Inquisitor's Key: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “So where’s the C-14 lab?” I asked. “In Paris?”

  “Non, mon ami. Guess again.”

  “Oxford? That’s one of the places that tested the Shroud of Turin, right?”

  “Wrong again. I think you will not guess. We send the teeth to Miami.”

  “Miami? Florida? Why on earth?”

  “Because the world’s biggest C-14 lab is there. Beta Analytic. They have offices in Europe—and Asia and Australia—but they’re just offices. The only lab is in Miami. They have two AMS systems and fifty-two liquid scintillation counters.”

  “What’s a liquid scintillation counter?” Before he could answer, I waved my hand. “Never mind—I don’t need to know. How long does it take? A week? A month?”

  “Pas du tout—not at all! Days. One or two days, after they get the sample. Last year I sent them a goat bone from a first-century site in Turkey. Four days later, voilà, I get the results.”

  “That’s faster than I can grade a batch of test papers,” I said. “Must be expensive.”

  “Not so bad. This will cost eight hundred euros. Twelve hundred U.S. dollars. Sure, it’s a lot. But if these are the bones of Christ, that’s a small price to pay to find out, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Jesus!” Miranda exclaimed, then laughed at her unintended double entendre. “Just imagine—if the Virgin Mary on toast can fetch thirty thousand bucks…”

  “Excuse me?” I felt a step behind her in the conversation. “The Virgin Mary? Toast? What are you talking about?”

  “The Sacred Sandwich.” Now I was two steps behind. “Don’t you pay any attention to the world outside the Body Farm?” She rolled her eyes happily; one of her great joys in life was giving me grief. “Some lady in Florida takes a bite out of her grilled cheese sandwich and then she notices the BVM—”

  “The what?” Three steps.

  “The BVM—the Blessed Virgin Mary. A portrait of Mary’s face was scorched into the bread. So the woman seals the sammy in Tupperware and keeps it on her nightstand for ten years. Then she sells it on eBay. Some online casino buys it for thirty grand.”

  “That’s so bizarre,” I said, “on so many levels.” A host of questions popped into my mind: White or whole wheat? Why Tupperware rather than a Baggie? Didn’t Mary mold? But I decided there was no future—no worthwhile future, at least—in delving further into the Sacred Sandwich. “I am amazed, and know not what to say.”

  “I say, ‘Praise the Lord and pass the pickles,’” she cracked. “Anyhow, if somebody will pay thirty K for the BVM on loaf bread, think what the bones of Jesus might fetch. Not, of course, that you’d sell him on eBay, right, Stefan?”

  “Non, never.” He smiled ironically. “People who shop on eBay can afford a sandwich sacré, maybe, but not the bones of God.”

  IT WAS A JUXTAPOSITION OF ANCIENT AND MODERN, in more ways than one.

  Avignon’s hospital was a complex of concrete-and-glass buildings located several miles outside the stone wall ringing the city. The contrast between the medieval city and the new suburbs was more than just striking; it was deeply disorienting, given how far back into the past I’d traveled in the space of twenty-four hours. Sure, the battering ram of modernity had smashed through the city’s ramparts; in addition to ancient buildings, the walls encircled cars, computers, even a few Segways. But those were trivial, fleeting artifacts; they seemed to skim the city’s surface like water bugs on a pond, without penetrating its depths or altering its medieval essence. Outside the walls, though, Avignon was not so different from Knoxville, and this hospital could have been transplanted to any suburb in the United States without looking out of place.

  A deeper, more interesting juxtaposition, though, was the one about to transpire within the hospital—specifically, in the Clinique Radiologique, where we were bringing the skull for a CT scan: ancient bones, twenty-first-century technology.

  “You know there’s no compelling scientific reason for this,” Miranda pointed out, not for the first time.

  “Sure there is,” I repeated.

  “Is not,” she said. “Admit it. We’re burning time and X-rays just for fun.”

  “O ye of little curiosity,” I countered. “O thou scoffer; vile, mocking spirit. We are gathered together in the spirit of scientific inquiry.” I held the boxed skull aloft as I walked, as if I were a priest and the skull some sacred relic—which, after all, it might actually be. “Besides, don’t you want to know what he looked like?”

  “Sure I do. I think it’ll be…fun.”

  I shook my head, exasperated and amused. She was stubborn. And she was right, of course: what fun, to get a forensic facial reconstruction of what might be—almost certainly wasn’t, but yet might be—the face of Jesus, a face that I had arranged for a forensic artist to “sculpt,” in virtual clay, on a 3-D scan of the skull.

  Stefan had persuaded a friend in the hospital’s Radiology Department to do the scan. We’d parked at a loading dock behind one of the hospital’s two low towers and threaded a maze of service corridors. After enough turns to make me wish I’d left a trail of bread crumbs behind—the hospital was nearly as labyrinthine as the palace, though a lot better lit—we entered a wide public corridor and followed signs that even I had no trouble translating from the French: RADIOLOGIE.

  Stefan’s friend turned out to be an attractive young woman named Giselle, whose name tag identified her as a MANIPULATRICE ERM, which appeared to mean she was an X-ray tech. She led us to a room containing a large, doughnut-shaped CT scanner, and turned to me. “Monsieur, s’il vous plaît.” Please, sir. My French was getting better by the minute, I said to myself, but I unsaid it a panicked instant later, when she added, “Mettez-le ici.” Seeing my blank look, she pointed to the box under my arm, then to the machine’s scanning bed. I nodded sheepishly. Removing the skull carefully, I set it on the pillow Giselle offered, then rolled up the towel I’d used as padding in the box and wrapped it around the base of the skull to stabilize it. After a final check to make sure the mandible was correctly articulated at the jaw’s hinge points, I nodded at Giselle, and she led us through a doorway and into a control room. As I watched through thick windows whose glass contained lead—less elegant but more protective than the leaded windows of Avignon’s chapels—the bed of the scanner moved in and out of the opening in the scanning head. Slice by slice, X-rays cut through the bone, and the differing densities they encountered registered on the screen; line by line, a detailed picture of the skull materialized on the screen. When it was done, Giselle slowly rotated and inspected it, making sure the entire skull had been imaged. The detail was astonishing; so was the ease with which the manipulatrice could manipulate the image: removing the top of the skull, for instance, to show the floor of the cranial vault, or slicing open the tiny caverns of the frontal sinus. As she effortlessly explored the hidden, inmost structural secrets of the skull, I found myself marveling, Miranda-like, How does it do that?

  JOE MULLINS WAS THREE THOUSAND MILES TO THE west of France, but ten minutes after Giselle scanned the skull in Avignon, Joe was looking at it in Alexandria, Virginia.

  Joe was a forensic artist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a mouthful of a name that he mercifully shortened to the acronym NCMEC, pronounced “nickmeck.” After a traditional fine arts training in painting and drawing, Joe had taken an unusual detour. He’d traded in his paintbrushes and palette knives for a computer and a 3-D digitizing probe; he’d forsaken blank canvases for bare skulls—unknown skulls on which he sculpted faces in virtual clay. By restoring faces to skulls, Joe could help police and citizens identify unknown crime victims.

  I’d worked with Joe on a prior case, one involving boys who’d been beaten to death at a reform school in Florida, but the Avignon case was different from the reform-school case in a multitude of ways. For one, we already knew the identity, or at least the supposed identity: Jesus of Nazareth. But was it, really? ForDisc hadn’t been able to shed much light, but perhaps Joe
’s facial reconstruction—based on the skull’s shape and the artist’s subtle eye—could tell us whether our man had been a first-century Jew from Palestine.

  Joe wasn’t looking at the actual skull, of course. After the CT scan, Giselle and Miranda had uploaded a massive file containing the 3-D image of the skull and sent it to a file-sharing Web site—a cyberspace crossroads, of sorts—called Dropbox. Joe had then gone to Dropbox and downloaded the file, and, as the French would say, voilà.

  The case clearly didn’t involve a missing or exploited child, so Joe couldn’t do the reconstruction on NCMEC time. But he was willing to do it as a moonlight gig, a side job, and when I’d first e-mailed to ask if he’d be able to do it—and do it fast—he’d promised that if we got the scan to him by Friday afternoon, he’d have it waiting for us first thing Monday.

  My phone warbled. “Hey, Doc, I’ve got him up on my screen,” Joe said. “What can you tell me about this guy?”

  “Not much, Joe.” I didn’t want to muddy the water by telling him what the ossuary inscription claimed. “Adult male; maybe in his fifties or sixties. Could be European but might be Middle Eastern.”

  “Geez, Doc, that doesn’t narrow it down much.”

  “Hey, I didn’t include African or Asian or Native American,” I said. “Give me at least a little credit.”

  “Okay, I give you a little credit. Very, very little.”

  “You sound just like Miranda, my assistant. Way too uppity.”

  He laughed. “This Miranda, she sounds pretty smart. She single, by any chance?”

  Sheesh, I thought. “Take a number,” I said.

  CHAPTER 5

  “SHALL WE FIND SOME FISHING POLES,” I JOKED, “and see what we can catch from the end of this fancy pier?”

  Miranda, Stefan, and I were standing on the ancient stone bridge that stretched halfway across the Rhône. After we left the hospital’s Radiology Department, Stefan had headed for Lumani, skirting the city wall—the fastest way to cross old Avignon was to detour around it—but as we’d passed under the bridge, I’d admired the four graceful arches. In response, Stefan had whipped the car off the road, parked, and led us up through a tower and onto the bridge, or what was left of it.

  “No fishing,” he said in response to my question. “You don’t want to eat anything that comes out of the Rhône.”

  I peered down at the emerald water. “Looks pretty clean to me,” I said, leaning over the metal rail for a better view.

  “Be careful,” he cautioned. “That railing isn’t strong. See, a piece of it is missing.” He pointed to a nearby gap in the rail, cordoned off by orange plastic safety mesh. “The river is full of industrial chemicals,” he went on. “Terrible toxins and carcinogens. Not just in the water; the sediment in the bottom of the river is full of them, too.”

  “Okay, I take your point,” I said. “I won’t fish, I won’t swim, and I won’t eat the mud. It’s still a pretty river, though.” He made a grimace of disagreement.

  A few paces farther out on the span, Miranda hummed a few bars of music, then began twirling, singing in French, “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse”; a moment later Stefan chimed in, trailing a line behind, turning the song into a round. Miranda and I had never sung together at all, I realized with a pang, much less sung rounds. Halfway through the verse, Miranda lost her place in the lyrics, falling into sync with Stefan for the last two lines.

  “Crap,” she laughed. “I mean merde. I can’t sing rounds worth a damn. I lack the courage of my melodic convictions.”

  “What’s the song?” I asked. “How do you know it?”

  “It’s about dancing on this bridge, the pont of Avignon. My mom used to sing it to me as a lullaby.” She smiled at the memory.

  “It has lots of silly verses,” Stefan added. “You dance, I dance, we all dance. The girls dance, the boys dance. The dolls dance, the soldiers dance. Frogs. Gorillas.”

  “Frogs and gorillas? My mom never mentioned those,” Miranda said. “She just sang the first verse over and over. No wonder it put me to sleep—it was so boring! Matter of fact, I could use a nap right now.” She faked a yawn.

  Halfway along the bridge was a small stone building, ancient and showing its age badly. The front of the building partially blocked the bridge; the back, though, jutted above the river, supported by an extension of one of the bridge pilings. “Nice fishing shack,” I observed.

  “The chapel of Saint Bénézet,” said Stefan.

  “Saint who?”

  “Bénézet,” said Miranda. “The kid that built the bridge.”

  “This bridge?” She nodded. “It was built by a kid?”

  “Yep. Maybe a teenager. Hard to be sure. ‘A young shepherd boy’ is how most of the stories put it. I read up on it after Stefan brought me here.” Suddenly I was less excited about the bridge, now that I knew I was retracing an outing they’d made together. But Miranda went on. “The kid’s minding his flock, minding his business, and suddenly he has a vision, or an angel swoops down, or some such. God tells him to build a bridge over the Rhône, right here. So Bénézet goes and relays this message to the bishop of Avignon. The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid—’”

  “Wait,” I interrupted. “Really? The bishop says, ‘Yeah, sure, kid’?”

  She cut her eyes at me. “What, you’re thinking the bishop says, ‘Forsooth, callow youth, thou pullest my leg’?”

  “Okay, smarty, I guess ‘Yeah, sure, kid’ is more like it.”

  “Anyhow,” she resumed. “So then the bishop says—and I’m paraphrasing, mind you—‘Okay, junior, if you want me to believe that God sent you, you gotta prove it. See that huge stone over there? Thirty men can’t lift that stone. If you can, I’ll believe you; if you can’t, go back to the farm and quit wasting my time.’ So the kid—”

  “Young Bénézet?”

  “Our boy Benny. Benny goes over and hoists it with his pinky—”

  “With his pinky?”

  She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “So maybe he uses both pinkies. The point, Dr. Hairsplitter, is that Benny hoists the giant rock, plunks it in the river, and voilà, the bridge building has commenced. Seven years later, while the bridge is still going up, Benny goes down—dies, at age twenty-five, plus or minus.”

  “Of overwork?”

  She shrugged. “Overwork. Underfeeding. A surfeit of saintliness. Who knows? The historical record is vague on cause of death.”

  “But that’s why the bridge only goes halfway across the river.”

  “Not at all. When Bénézet dies, it’s far enough along that other, lesser mortals can finish it. But maybe their workmanship wasn’t as miraculous as his, because after four or five centuries, most of the arches collapsed during floods and wars. Anyhow. Bénézet’s body was entombed in this sweet little chapel they built on the bridge to commemorate him.”

  “Is it still here?”

  “Duh. If you keep walking another twenty feet, you’ll smack into it.”

  “Not the chapel, smart-ass, the body. Is it still here in the chapel?”

  “Non,” said Stefan, who had kept quiet for what was—for him—a remarkably long time. “During the French Revolution it was moved to a convent outside the city to protect it.”

  I couldn’t resist a joke, though I feared it would trigger another round of pedantry. “Even corpses got guillotined during the Revolution?”

  “The revolutionaries considered religion an institution of tyranny,” he began, and my fears were confirmed. “All over France, they destroyed churches, religious statues, other symbols of oppression.”

  God save us from oppressors, I prayed. And from pedants.

  “But,” Miranda interrupted, snatching back the reins of the narrative, “here’s some trivia you’ll find interesting. He was an Incorruptible.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bénézet. He was an Incorruptible.” She stopped and nodded at the stone chapel, whose stout wooden door faced the bridge
. “Bénézet’s body, lying here for centuries, did not decompose. Leading one of the popes, in the sixteen hundreds, to proclaim Bénézet one of the Incorruptibles.”

  “The Incorruptibles.” I sounded it out slowly, savoring the syllables and the meaning. “Sounds like a band of crime-fighting comic-book superheroes waging war on bribery and embezzlement. ‘Holy hedge fund, Miranda—someone on Wall Street is making insider trades! This looks like a job for the Incorruptibles!’”

  She groaned, as I’d figured she would, and as I’d hoped she would. But she was right: I was intrigued to learn that Saint Bénézet was an Incorruptible—someone whose corpse did not decay. Catholics considered incorruptibility a sign of sainthood, but I looked at it through the lens of science. A few years back, I’d examined the body of a young woman—a pregnant young woman—who’d been killed and hidden in a cave for thirty years. The cave’s cool, damp conditions turned her soft tissue into a substance called adipocere—sometimes called “grave wax”—and the transformation was so complete, she might almost have come from a wax museum rather than a crime scene. In the morgue, I’d paused to admire her lovely features, and then I’d sprayed her body with hot water, watching with wonder as her prettiness and her half-formed baby melted away, dissolving like some sweet sad dream in the heat of a summer’s day.

  I thought of her—that lovely murdered young woman who had spent three decades as an Incorruptible—as I stood on the ancient bridge beside an antique chapel where a shepherd-turned-engineer had lain in state for centuries.

  According to Stefan, the move to the convent for safekeeping had not agreed with Bénézet. Some years after the French Revolution, the nuns to whom he’d been entrusted opened the saint’s coffin, the better to revere his perfectly preserved remains. Imagine their disappointment to discover that the miracle—like the man himself—had expired, and his mortal coil had shuffled off silently, unheralded by angelic fanfare or human notice.