Flesh and Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  Next morning at six, I awakened to birdsong, and by seven I was immersed in my revisions. Papers sprawled across the entire top of a picnic table, anchored against the breeze by rocks that sparkled with quartz and glossy black streaks of coal.

  DeVriess called at ten; I’d phoned him on the drive up the evening before and left the cellphone number on his voice mail. “I’m heading into court on a bank fraud case,” he said, “so I only have a minute. But I wanted to pass along what I just heard by way of the grapevine. I was wrong about your friend Bob Roper, the DA.”

  “You mean when you said he’d prosecute me even if I were innocent, long as he thought he could win.”

  “Something like that. I underestimated Roper. He’s recusing himself and his staff from your case—says it represents an irreconcilable conflict of interests and loyalties for the entire office.”

  “That’s good news,” I said. “Mighty decent of Bob.”

  “Maybe,” said Grease. “Or maybe, next time he’s up for reelection, he just doesn’t want the voters of Knox County to remember him as the guy who nailed Dr. Brockton to the cross.”

  “Burt, you’re too cynical.”

  “I defend the scum of the earth. Present company excepted, of course. Not a job for an optimist.”

  “Point taken. Practically speaking, what does this mean?”

  “For starters,” he said, “it means the Tennessee Conference of District Attorneys General has got to scout around and find some other DA to handle the case. Preferably somebody who hasn’t worked with you.”

  “They might have to go to Middle Tennessee or even West Tennessee for that,” I said. “I think I’ve testified for all the DAs here in East Tennessee.”

  “So depending on how long it takes to find somebody, we could be in limbo for a while. Weeks, maybe months.”

  “Ah. Then that’s not such good news after all,” I said. “I hate limbo. I’m suspended from my teaching job, I’m holed up in a state park, my grandkids think I’m a monster, and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “I’ll press the court for a speedy trial, Bill, but I don’t know that I have any influence.”

  “Well, do your best.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you whenever there’s news.”

  I forced myself to refocus on my revisions, and soon I was immersed again. I spent the rest of the morning combing through five years’ worth of research papers on the pubic symphysis—the joint at the midline of the pelvis, where the left and right pubic bones meet—and updating my textbook’s discussion of how features and changes in the bone at that junction could be used to estimate the age of a female skeleton with remarkable accuracy. After lunch, I switched to cranial fractures; one of the department’s graduate students had just completed a fascinating thesis describing a series of experiments with skulls and a “drop tower” in the Engineering Department: a platform attached to a vertical slide which allowed her to subject the skulls to measurable, precisely controlled impacts and compare the results. It was doubtful that a living person would ever be strapped to the drop tower and smashed to death—unless intradepartmental rivalries were far worse in engineering than in anthropology—but the data from the thesis could prove extremely useful in helping determine whether the force inflicted by, say, a baseball bat or a fall down a staircase was sufficient to cause a fatal fracture.

  Absorbed in the science, I was blessedly oblivious for hours. Just as the light was fading and I was gathering up my papers for the night, the phone rang again. It was DeVriess once more. “There’s good news and bad news,” he said.

  “What’s the good news?”

  “The good news is, you’re out of limbo. They found a DA who can take the case. New guy down in Polk County. Doesn’t know you from Adam. The Tennessee Highway Patrol actually picked him up in a chopper and set him down on the roof of the City County Building at noon today.”

  “I’m afraid to ask, but what’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news is, the other shoe has already dropped. The DA pro tem and Evers went to the grand jury this afternoon. I just got a courtesy call from Evers. Bill, the grand jury has issued a warrant for your arrest.”

  CHAPTER 34

  IT WAS STILL EARLY April, but the midday sun hit me like a slap in the face from a mean streak of late August as I locked the front door of my house and pushed through the driveway’s shimmer to the Taurus. Thirty-six hours after settling into a shady cabin at Norris Dam State Park, I’d been summoned back to Knoxville, back to the world of suits and ties and surveillance cameras and arrest warrants.

  In the sweltering heat that engulfed me, the rental car’s vanilla paint looked brilliant rather than boring. The American president might remain unconvinced about global warming, but I was a devout believer. Spring came earlier and earlier to East Tennessee, and fall hung on longer and longer before anything remotely approaching winter weather set in—for what seemed like only a few weeks—and then things began heating up again. By the time I got the car started and the air conditioner blasting, my T-shirt was glued to my skin, my dress shirt was beginning to stick to my T-shirt, and my suit coat was bunched and wrinkled.

  Of course, global warming might not have been entirely to blame for the sweat. I was headed to Burt DeVriess’s office, and from there, Burt was driving me to the Knox County Detention Center. I was turning myself in: surrendering voluntarily on charges of first-degree murder and—a charge I hadn’t even thought to worry about—desecrating a corpse. Of course, if I got the death penalty for first-degree murder, there wasn’t much way for the state to up the penalty for the second charge, so maybe it was just as well I hadn’t sweated that one.

  Burt had had to explain the proceedings to me three times before I retained all the details. Detective Evers and Michael Donner, the Polk County DA who’d agreed to fill in for Bob Roper, had spent a brisk twenty minutes summarizing the evidence against me for the grand jury. On the basis of the surveillance video, the bloody sheets, and hair and fibers linking me to Jess Carter’s body, the grand jury had signed a “presentment,” which prompted the Knox County Criminal Court clerk to issue a capias for me. “What’s a capias?” I asked.

  “Legalese for arrest warrant,” he said. “You’ve heard the Latin phrase carpe diem, ‘seize the day’? Capias is a noun form, but it means ‘grab that sumbitch,’ bottom line.”

  “But they’re not coming after me with blue lights and handcuffs?”

  “They will,” he said, “if you make them. But I negotiated to drive you out to the booking facility in my car so you can turn yourself in with some semblance of dignity.”

  He had negotiated for more than that, as it turned out. DeVriess didn’t want me to have to walk in the front door of the detention center, as he figured there was a fair chance someone might leak the news to the media. Instead, he worked out a deal that would allow him to drive me into the booking facility’s “sally port,” a lower-level entrance with a big garage door, used by police cruisers and paddy wagons transporting prisoners to court and back. Normally only official vehicles were allowed in the sally port, but Grease persuaded Evers to let him drive me inside in his own car. Evers would meet us there and accompany us into the sally port in his unmarked Crown Vic, where I would be frisked, then taken inside and fingerprinted and booked. “Jesus,” I said, “fingerprinted like a common criminal.”

  “Trust me, Doc,” DeVriess had responded, “you’re being treated like a very uncommon criminal. This is what they call a high-profile booking, which means you’re getting the kid-glove treatment normally reserved for elected officials and old-money millionaires.” He’d paused. “Speaking of money, Doc, we need to arrange for your bond.” My bail had been set at $500,000, a sum that had made me gasp.

  “Hell, I don’t have that kind of money,” I’d said. “If I sold my house and my truck and what little stock I own, I’m not sure I’d have it.”

  “It’s okay. That’s why God created bail bondsmen.” For the low
, low price of $50,000—a sum that would drain all my reserves and still tap my credit to its limits—a bail bondsman would post the required 10 percent of the bail. “The bondsman will need to put a lien on your property,” DeVriess had added, “just in case you skip town and leave him on the hook for the other $450,000.”

  “I had no idea being a criminal was so damn expensive,” I said. “You need to be rich to be a murderer.”

  “Not to be a murderer,” he corrected. “Just to beat the rap.”

  When I reached DeVriess’s office, his receptionist, Chloe, greeted me with a sunny smile, as if I were here to set up educational trust funds for my grandsons. “Hello, Dr. Brockton. Nice to see you again,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. DeVriess you’re here. Can I get you some coffee or tea, or a soft drink?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I have to sign some ruinous paperwork, but then I think we’re gonna saddle up and move out.”

  Chloe smiled. “One for the road?” I shook my head, and she pressed an intercom button on her phone. “Mr. DeVriess? Dr. Brockton is here…I did, but he turned me down.” She looked up at me and winked. “He seems itchy to saddle up and move out…All right, I’ll bring him.”

  Chloe led me back to DeVriess’s office. “Thanks, Chloe,” he said, coming around the glass desk to shake my hand. Twenty grand bought a lot of courtesy, it seemed. “Bill, have a seat.” I sat. “Let me go over the bonding agreement, and tell you what to expect out at the detention facility,” he said. I found it hard to focus on the details of my financial destruction and impending arrest, but when he slid papers across the desk at me, I signed on the lines indicated by the cheerily colored tabs labeled SIGN HERE. After I had signed over all my assets, and perhaps my immortal soul, DeVriess said, “Okay, unless there’s something I haven’t covered, we should probably saddle up now.” He smiled to make sure I noticed the echo of my words. I tried to smile back, to show him I appreciated the effort, but a grimace was as close as I could get. He dialed a number on his phone and said, “Detective? Burt DeVriess. We’re heading out now. We’ll see you out at the detention center.”

  We descended in silence to his car, which was parked directly beside the elevator. “I’ll bet I’m the first Knox County prisoner ever delivered in a Bentley,” I said as I opened the door. We left downtown on the James White Parkway, then bore east on I-40 to the 640 bypass, where we backtracked north and west a couple of miles. We got off 640 onto Washington Pike and angled northeast for maybe five miles. This corner of Knox County had been farm country for most of my twenty-five years in Knoxville, but I noticed that even here, condos and subdivisions were sprouting like fungus amid the weathered farm houses.

  DeVriess slowed and signaled a left, and we turned onto Maloneyville Road and threaded a small pocket of ranch houses. Then we came to an S-curve, and the road wound down into a wide valley. On the right, behind a fence of chain link and barbed wire, stood the old Knox County Penal Farm, a barracks of ancient concrete with a rusting tin roof and a square brick smokestack. Ahead—below and to our left—sprawled a new golf course and, just beyond it, a huge, multiwing complex. There were no guard towers, and there wasn’t a perimeter of high razor wire, yet it was unmistakably a correctional facility. Confronted with the grim, tangible reality of it, I felt my stomach clench. “Jesus, I had no idea it was so big,” I said. “How many prisoners are in there?”

  “Right now? No idea,” said DeVriess. “The capacity is 667. Any more than that, they’re violating a federal cap. See that new cell block they’re building right beside the golf course? That’ll bring the maximum to nearly a thousand.” He sounded sad as he said it. I glanced at him and he looked thoughtful, a word I had never associated with Burt DeVriess. “Did you know, Doc, that two million Americans are behind bars right now? Biggest prison population on earth.” I did not know that. “We also have the highest incarceration rate of any nation. Six times higher than China, a place we like to believe is far more oppressive than we are.”

  “You sure about that statistic, Burt?”

  “I study this stuff the way you study teeth and bones, Doc. The US of A is home to only five percent of the world’s population, but one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. Something’s wrong with that.”

  He was right, though I didn’t know precisely how. “Well, let’s hope you can keep me from becoming prisoner number two million and one.”

  The main entrance was a large driveway to our left, marked by a seven-pointed star on a grassy embankment. The star was eight or ten feet across, labeled KNOX COUNTY SHERIFF. DeVriess continued past the driveway, past the main building, and turned behind a smaller building, a two-story barracks set inside a high fence. A basketball court was tucked into the angle formed by the L-shaped building. Just beyond this building, we bore left onto a one-lane driveway which circled back toward the central complex. The building’s main entrance was actually at the front of the second floor; we were heading for a large garage door notched into the ground floor, almost like a basement garage. An unmarked Crown Victoria sat idling to one side. When DeVriess approached in the Bentley, the Crown Vic pulled up to a speaker and John Evers leaned out and spoke as if he were ordering fast food in a drive-through lane. With a thunk and a whir, the big garage door began rolling upward. Evers edged forward, into the dark opening, and DeVriess followed, practically on his bumper. When both cars were inside, the door whirred and clunked down again.

  Three uniformed officers stepped from a curb to our right. One walked around to meet Detective Evers as he emerged from his car; the other two positioned themselves beside my door. Evers handed over a form—the capias, I guessed—to the officer I assumed was in charge, and then motioned to me to get out. As DeVriess and I opened our doors and got out of the Bentley, the two deputies stepped to either side of me, each grasping an arm. DeVriess started around the front of the car, saying, “Hey, hey, that is not called for. You take your hands off of my client.” The two officers responded by tightening their grips.

  Their supervisor hustled around and laid his palm on Burt’s chest none too gently. “You listen up,” he barked, “this is our facility. Our rules. We are extending every possible courtesy to Dr. Brockton, but he has been charged with murder, and we will not risk the safety of our officers. If he does not cooperate fully—if you do not cooperate fully—all deals are off, we put him in restraints and stripes, and we treat him exactly like every other prisoner. Is that clear?”

  “Burt, it’s okay,” I said. “They’re doing their job, and they’re doing it right. This isn’t a battle we need to fight.” DeVriess looked unhappy, but he nodded and kept quiet, and the officers relaxed their grips a bit.

  “Thank you, Dr. Brockton,” said the officer in charge. “I’m Sergeant Andrews, by the way, the shift supervisor. We need you to step over here to this wall, please, so we can pat you down.” The deputies steered me toward the spot he had indicated. “Please place your hands against this blue safety pad, shoulder height, far apart.” I assumed the position I’d seen on television many times, and the deputies’ four hands gave me a thorough going-over. One of them removed the small leather case clipped to my belt; he looked surprised and a little sad when he saw what was inside. It was my consultant’s badge from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I’d worn it partly as a gesture of vain pride, partly as a not-so-subtle message to the people booking me, and partly as a desperate effort to hang on to my sense of who I was and what I stood for in this world.

  Once they were sure I wasn’t carry ing any concealed weapons, Andrews told me to empty my pockets, remove my watch and belt, and take off my dress shirt, leaving me in my T-shirt. On a clear plastic bag labeled INMATE PROPERTY BAG, he wrote my name, date of birth, Social Security number, and the date and time. Then he listed every item, including my TBI badge, and sealed them in the bag with a self-adhesive strip along the bag’s top flap. Then he had me sign the bag to indicate that the inventory was right. Down below, I noticed another line where I
would sign—presumably within an hour—when they gave me back my property and released me. In this part of the machine, at least, the wheels of justice appeared to be well-oiled cogs.

  I heard Andrews telling Evers and DeVriess to pull forward when the garage door ahead of Evers’s car was raised. But before that happened, I was escorted from the sally port and into the building’s interior through a glass door labeled INTAKE.

  The room was large, clean, and brightly lit by fluorescents. It was also equipped with at least three video cameras that I could see. I’d already noticed several on the roof of the facility as we approached—they swiveled, tracking our trajectory—another camera outside the sally port, and a couple inside the port. “Y’all sure have a lot of cameras,” I said to my escorts. “Must be quite a command post if you’ve got a monitor for every camera.”

  The deputies glanced at each other in surprise. Most prisoners didn’t engage in such conversation, I gathered. “Yes, sir,” said one, “it’s a pretty advanced system. Made by a company called Black Creek. We’ve got over two hundred cameras, so there’s no way to have separate monitors.” He pointed at the three cameras suspended from the ceiling of the main intake room. “Central Command has a touch-screen computer system that shows the position of every camera on every floor. All you do is touch the icon for the camera you want, and the video feed from that camera pops up on the screen.”

  I nodded. “Sounds smart. You archive the images on videotape, or on a big hard drive?”

  “A monster hard drive,” he said. “We brought this system online a month ago. We’ve saved every image from every camera since, and we’ve only used a fraction of the storage capacity so far.”

  “Well,” I said, “if I’d known I would be on so many cameras and archived for posterity, I’d have gotten a haircut this morning.”

  He laughed, but suddenly he seemed embarrassed, as if by joking about my arrest, I had reminded him why I had been arrested. “We need to go in here and take your picture and get your fingerprints,” he said, pointing to a small room off one corner of the intake area.