The Inquisitor's Key: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “A man as handsome as you should make many babies, Simone. Look at me—I am the ugliest man in Florence, but I have six children. Do you wish to know my secret?” Simone nods, miserable but polite. “The darkness.”

  “The darkness? How do you mean?”

  “In the darkness, Simone, I am as handsome as any man!” The old painter laughs at his joke. “Now clean your brushes and come with me. We’re dining with your father-in-law. I’ve just seen his frescoes in San Gimignano, and I want to know how he did it.”

  “Did what, Master Giotto?”

  “Got paid to paint men and women—naked men and women!—bathing together, going to bed together! On the walls in the palace of government! A man can bear to paint only so many martyrs and virgins. Let us move to San Gimignano, Simone—or better yet, to Avignon; that’s where the money is now—and let us start a new fashion of painting there. Courtesans, concubines, and lusty country wenches. Get me those commissions, my boy, and I will pay you ten times more than I paid you to mix plaster.”

  Simone laughs. “At that rate, Master Giotto, I would still starve.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Avignon

  The Present

  I’D BEEN UP SINCE 5 A.M., DESPITE THE FACT THAT I’D been wandering the streets with Stefan until one, and I was obsessively checking my e-mail inbox every five minutes. I’d hoped Joe might send me a picture of his facial reconstruction by now. It was 8 A.M. in Avignon, which made it 2 A.M. for Joe; I couldn’t imagine he was still up and working.

  I’d just decided to head downstairs for a croissant when my computer chirped to announce a new e-mail. My heart began to thump when I saw that it was from Joe. I opened it eagerly but there was no message, only a small icon indicating that an image file was attached. I clicked on the attachment, and with maddening, line-by-line slowness the masklike image of a clay face materialized on the screen. Joe had done it; he’d restored a face to the skull from the Palace of the Popes.

  As I studied the features, I had the eerie feeling that I knew the guy, or at least that I’d seen him before. Was it just that I’d seen Joe’s work before? Facial reconstructions, especially when done by the same forensic artist, do share similarities: “white female #7”; “black male #4.” Was that the reason this face looked familiar? I turned away, looked out the window to clear my mind, and then directed my gaze at the screen again.

  Again I felt the tingle of unexpected familiarity. Who was this guy, and why did I think I knew him? It wasn’t simply that this was another generic white male, similar to a hundred other reconstructions I’d seen. This face was distinctive, the face of a unique individual: long and narrow, with prominent cheekbones and a slightly crooked nose, perhaps broken once in a fight. I’d noticed the general features when I’d examined the skull, but they were more pronounced now that Joe had fleshed out the bones.

  Suddenly a synapse in my sleep-deprived brain fired. Pulse racing, I fired off a message to Joe: got it. great work—thanks. are you still there?

  yes, came his answer a few seconds later.

  can you do a couple of quick tweaks?

  A pause. what sort of tweaks?

  can you give him long hair? and a mustache and beard? oh, and maybe smooth out some of the wrinkles, take 10 years off him?

  As I waited for his response, I feared he might balk.

  so, you want me to give him rogaine & botox—er, claytox, right, doc?

  right, joe.

  no problem.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, then sent another message: not to sound pushy, but how long will that take?

  depends. you want it fast, or want it good?

  I smiled. start with fast, I wrote back. if i need good, I’ll beg you for that tomorrow.

  good answer. fast is lots easier for me right now—just got a new case I need to jump on. give me twenty minutes. i’ll tinker with it and shoot you a revision ASAP.

  Twenty minutes was going to drive me crazy, so I went downstairs to grab breakfast. In my nervousness, I wolfed down three croissants and a dozen strawberries. Just as I reached the top of the stairs and opened the door of my room, I heard the chime of a new message arriving.

  how’s this? was written above the revised image.

  How was it? It was astonishing.

  If Joe’s facial reconstruction was accurate, the bones of Avignon belonged to a guy who was a dead ringer for the man on the Shroud of Turin.

  CHAPTER 12

  Turin, Italy

  The Present

  “WHAT’D YOU THINK,” SHE WHISPERED, “THAT THEY were gonna open the drapes, pull it down off the wall, and let you lay it out on the floor?”

  Miranda and I were kneeling—kneeling and bickering—in a corner of the Duomo di Torino, Turin Cathedral, where we’d journeyed after seeing the face Joe Mullins had sculpted on the Avignon skull. Miranda had tried to talk me out of the trip, a seven-hour drive, insisting that nothing short of a direct order from the pope himself would get us a glimpse of the Shroud. But I’d refused to be deterred; somehow I’d convinced myself that if I showed a photo of Joe’s facial reconstruction to someone in authority—the senior priest? a bishop? an archbishop?—he’d be so astonished by the resemblance that he’d happily arrange for me to compare the images side by side.

  There was another reason I’d pushed for the trip, though I’d not mentioned it to Miranda. Rocky Stone had phoned shortly after I received the facial reconstruction. “Doc, I’ve got good news and bad news,” he’d told me. “The good news is, I know who the shooter in Sevierville was—a Colombian named Cesar Morales. The bad news is, he got off a plane in Amsterdam an hour ago.” Morales was in Amsterdam to negotiate a drug shipment, Stone believed. “But I can’t guarantee he’s not looking for you, too,” he’d added. “I’ve contacted Interpol,” he went on, “so the police in the Netherlands and France will be looking for him. But I want you to be careful. Lay low. Get out of town for a day or two, if you can.” What he said next had surprised and moved me. “I’m on the next flight for Amsterdam,” Rocky had added. “I’ll be there tomorrow morning…and I won’t stop looking till I find him.”

  An hour after Rocky’s unsettling call, I borrowed Jean and Elisabeth’s car again—this time I was putting some serious mileage on the venerable Peugeot—and Miranda and I had raced up the flat belly of France to the foothills of the Alps, then angled eastward and careened through mountain passes and granite tunnels before finally looping down into the Po River Valley and the grimy sprawl of Turin.

  Turin Cathedral was tucked inconspicuously at the edge of a paved plaza, flanked by the ruins of an ancient Roman gate and city wall. I might have overlooked the church entirely if not for the tall, freestanding bell tower beside it. I was surprised at what a small, drab building held the Christian world’s most famous relic. Turning to Miranda, I’d joked, “I’m reminded of my friend Sybil’s comment when she saw the Grand Canyon. ‘I thought it’d be bigger,’ was all Syb said.”

  “I’ve had that same thought on a few occasions,” Miranda had answered with a sly grin as we crossed the threshold.

  Inside, too, the cathedral was spare and austere: plain wooden benches, unadorned columns and plaster walls, a stone floor inlaid with octagons of white and gray, linked by small squares of red.

  The Shroud was housed in a side chapel at the front of the nave, on the left side of the building. In front of the relic was a simple kneeling rail eight or ten feet long, and—between the rail and the Shroud—a wall of glass stretching from floor to ceiling. Within the glassed-in chapel, the Shroud was mounted above a long white altar garnished with woven thorn vines—reminders of the barbed crown placed on Jesus’s head before he was crucified. A black curtain, the width of the chapel, hid the relic completely from view; a poster-size enlargement of the face on the Shroud—a ghostly gray negative, which was more dramatic than the faint, reddish-brown image the cloth actually bore—was suspended above the altar. The poster was a consolation prize, of sorts, for
those of us whose pilgrimage to Turin was thwarted by the black curtain.

  Still kneeling, I unfolded the two prints I’d brought with me. One was a normal, positive print of the face Joe had made; the other was a negative image, which Miranda had created by Photoshopping Joe’s file. The likeness between the images I held in my hand and the poster behind the glass wall was uncanny, especially when I compared the Photoshopped negative with the poster.

  Unfortunately, no one in authority had been astonished by the images we’d brought, because no one in authority was anywhere to be found. Except for one other pilgrim—a stout woman who knelt beside me and cast disapproving glances as we whispered—the only person we’d managed to find in the cathedral was an ancient woman selling Holy Shroud bookmarks, postcards, posters, books, and other mementos at the tiny gift shop at the rear of the nave.

  “It’s almost closing time,” I whispered. “Maybe we’ll have better luck in the morning.”

  Sssshhhh, came an annoyed hiss from the woman on my left. She was German; I knew this not from the accent of her sssshhhh, but from the wording on the prayer card she’d chosen to kneel before. A Shroud-inspired prayer had been printed in seven different languages and posted on the railing for the convenience of the faithful. Between angry glances our way, the woman at my elbow was muttering the German prayer in a guttural growl.

  “They get a zillion requests a year to see the Shroud, touch the Shroud, cut a tiny snippet of the Shroud,” Miranda whispered on. She’d dropped her voice so low it was barely audible; she was all but breathing the words into my ear, and I found the intimacy of the communication both unsettling and exhilarating. “You think your request is special. So does everybody else—the parents of the dying kid, the nun who’s had a vision, the physicist who’s thought of a new way to authenticate the image on the cloth. Everybody thinks they’re special. And everybody is. So the priest or the bishop or whoever has to treat everyone as if no one is special.”

  “I know, I know,” I whispered back. “But I thought it was worth a try. I thought maybe…” I shrugged.

  “I know what you thought. You thought maybe you could convince him your case was extra special. Especially special.” I couldn’t help laughing—she knew me so well.

  Ssshhh!

  “Yeah, right,” I conceded. “My specialness and two euros will get me a cup of cappuccino.”

  “More like four,” she corrected.

  “Four euros? Six bucks? For something I don’t even like?”

  “That’s your own fault. It’s never too late to grow, expand your horizons.”

  “Yeah, well, show me the Shroud of Turin and I’ll drink all the cappuccino you want.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Tenured, full professor’s word of honor?”

  “Word of honor.”

  “Prepare to chug some caffeine with your humble pie,” she said, looking mischievous.

  SSSSHHHH!!!! The angry shush filled the nave. The German lurched to her feet and stormed out, the accusatory echoes of her clogs ricocheting like gunshots.

  LAID OUT FLAT IN THE HALLWAY OF THE HOTEL DIPLOMATIC, where Miranda and I had booked rooms for the night, the Shroud of Turin ran half the length of the corridor. The tips of the toes practically touched the elevator; the other end of the image stretched to a window overlooking a noisy Turin street. What filled the floor was not, of course, the sacred relic itself; rather, it was a full-length, life-size, high-resolution photographic print of the entire Shroud, all 14.3 feet of it, plus another six inches of border at each end.

  The print had arrived rolled like a scroll, tightly packed in a cardboard shipping tube. To flatten it, we’d briefly rerolled it the opposite way, inside out; that had mostly tamed the curl, though we’d had to anchor the corners with our shoes.

  On my hands and knees, studying the face, I looked up at Miranda. “Come on, you gotta tell me. Where’d you really get this? It did not ‘miraculously appear’ at the front desk.”

  “Sure it did,” she chirped. “Okay, with a little help from Holy Shroud Guild dot org.”

  “A Web site?”

  She nodded. “A Web site with an online gift shop. Through the miracles of Google, AmEx, and FedEx, I ordered it yesterday morning, right before we left Avignon on this wild-goose chase. I had the image file—a huge file—sent to a blueprint shop here, and I got them to deliver it to the hotel.”

  “I take it back,” I marveled. “It did ‘miraculously appear.’ So how much does a full-length, high-res, special-delivery print of the Holy Shroud go for these days?”

  “About a week’s pay,” she said. I whistled, but she cut me off. “A week of my pay, not yours. That’s actually dirt cheap, as miracles go.”

  I turned my attention once more to the image on the replica of the Shroud. The body apparently had been laid faceup on the linen, with the feet at one end and seven or eight feet of fabric extending beyond the head. That part was then doubled back and folded down over the face, torso, and legs. The front and back images linked at the top of the head—an odd, hinged effect, rather like Siamese twins conjoined at the crown of the skull. Judging by the photo, the Shroud’s linen fabric was a stained and dingy ivory color; the image of the man was a faint reddish brown, with brighter red splotches and trickles here and there—in places consistent with wounds from scourging, crucifixion, and lacerations from a crown of thorns.

  The color and faintness of the image surprised me. Most news articles and Web sites about the Shroud showed an eerie black-and-white face, like the large poster hanging in the cathedral. Those versions looked like photographic negatives, because they were negatives: dramatic, high-contrast images in which the linen backdrop appeared dark gray, the eye sockets looked dark gray, the eyelids a lighter shade of gray, and—lightest of all, in the photo-negative versions—the cheekbones, eyebrows, nose, mustache, and beard. The scroll Miranda and I were studying on the hotel floor, on the other hand, was a positive print, one that faithfully reproduced the actual image on the Shroud. In our copy, as in the real McCoy, the highest points were darkest, as if a damp cloth had been pressed onto a face and body coated with reddish-brown dust.

  Studying the man’s face, I found myself distracted by his hair. “Hmm,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Well, I don’t get it. He’s lying on his back, right?”

  “So they say. So it seems.”

  “Then how come his hair looks like it’s hanging straight down, the way it would if he were standing up?”

  “Hmm, indeed,” Miranda echoed. “Good question.”

  “And another thing,” I continued. “What’s with these bright red stains all over the body—the wrists, the feet, the side, the back, the forehead?”

  “Duh. They’re the wounds of Christ, dummy. From the nails, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the spear in the side. Remember?”

  “Duh yourself,” I retorted. “I do remember the wounds of Christ. But there shouldn’t be blood on them. He wouldn’t have kept bleeding after he was dead. Besides, he’s too perfect.”

  “How do you mean, perfect? He’s a bloody mess, Dr. B.”

  “Exactly. He’s the perfect bloody mess.” She looked at me as if I’d gone over the edge. “Take that trickle of blood on the head.” A red squiggle, three inches long by a half inch wide, meandered down the forehead from just below the hairline to the medial end of the right eyebrow. Along the way, it broadened in three spots, as if it had seeped into lines in the forehead.

  Miranda knelt and scrutinized it. “From the crown of thorns. What about it?”

  “According to the Bible, the crown of thorns was put on his head before he was crucified. Before he carried the cross through the streets of Jerusalem. Before he hung there for hours. In all that time and all that trauma, that neat little ribbon of blood doesn’t get smudged by a flood of sweat? Doesn’t get smeared as the body’s wrestled down from the cross and lugged to the tomb? Doesn’t get washed
away as they’re cleaning the body for burial? They’re burying him with sweet-smelling spices and wrapping him in this fancy piece of linen, right? Why wouldn’t they bother to wipe the blood off the face while they were at it?”

  “I take your point,” she conceded.

  “And look at that foot,” I went on. “That nice bloody sole is flat against the cloth, the knee bent the way it is on every Jesus on every crucifix you ever saw. Think about all those dead guys on the ground at the Body Farm—does one knee bend artfully like that? No way—their feet flop out to the sides.”

  Miranda nodded slowly. “It pains me to say it, but you might actually be right.” I smiled; she enjoyed the game of pretending I was slow-witted. “In fact, if you look at this forensically, the whole thing starts to seem totally staged—as if somebody was working from a checklist: Crown of thorns? Check. Spear wound? Check. Nail holes? Check. Scourge marks? Check.” Miranda was on a roll. But suddenly she clutched my arm and gasped. “Oh, my God.”

  “What?!?”

  “I just had an idea, Dr. B. A brilliant, awful idea. Millions of people believe the Shroud is a holy relic, right? But what if it’s exactly the opposite?”

  “The opposite of a holy relic? What do you mean?”

  She took a deep breath before heading down this new trail. “Let’s assume, for the moment, that those C-14 tests back in 1988 were right—that the Shroud is only seven centuries old. In that case, it’s a fake, right?” I nodded. “But what if it’s a fourteenth-century not-fake?”

  “Huh?” I stared at her, utterly confused.

  “What if it’s medieval but also genuine, Dr. B? What if all the bloodstains, all the wounds, are real?” She pointed at the image, moving her hand up and down as if she were doing a scan. “What if this piece of cloth documents actual trauma, but fourteenth-century trauma? Not the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus, but the scourging and crucifixion of a guy in Avignon—a guy killed specifically to create…this!” Her hand stopped scanning; her finger pointed accusingly at the face. “This could be the world’s first snuff film. A snuff Shroud. Created expressly, deliberately, in order to document the very murder it depicts.”