Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella

by Jefferson Bass

“I’m a forensic scientist,” I said. “I’m the one who identified your wife’s body. The man inside didn’t kill her.” A wave of discontent rippled through the crowd. “Denise Donnelly was strangled. Her throat crushed. That man’s a cripple—he couldn’t have done it.”

  “He’s full of shit,” yelled Donnelly. “That nigger is a rapist and a killer, and he’s got to hang.” His words prompted a raw, enraged chorus of agreement.

  “That man was behind bars in Brushy Mountain while she was being killed,” I shouted. “She was already dead—long since dead—by the time he escaped.” I fumbled at my shirt pocket, my shaky hand reaching for the small, folded paper bag—the bag containing the hyoid bone I’d plucked from the stained leaves on the hillside a few hours before. But before I could extract it, I was interrupted by a shout from the crowd.

  “Nigger-lover,” yelled someone deep in the pack, and the insult was taken up by dozens of voices. “Nigger-lover! Nigger-lover! Nigger-lover!”

  Donnelly held up a hand for quiet, and the taunts died away. “We don’t need some liberal, egghead scientist”—I saw spittle spray from his mouth when he spat out the word—“coming in here acting like he’s better and smarter than we are. Go back to your library, professor, and stay the hell out of our business.”

  “I’m on the staff of the Tennessee State Medical Examiner,” I said, reaching for my belt and grabbing my badge.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn about that,” he shouted. “We got plenty of rope. It wouldn’t take two minutes to cut another piece for you. And that oak limb is plenty strong enough for two men to swing from.”

  “Denise Donnelly fought for her life,” I yelled to the crowd. “She had her killer’s skin under her fingernails. A white man’s skin, and a red hair, too.” I pointed at Donnelly. “Y’all ought to be asking Mr. Donnelly here how he got those scratches on his hands and face.”

  Finally, my words seemed to be having some effect. The mob quieted, and I saw heads craning to peer at Donnelly.

  “I got these scratches clearing a briar patch last week,” Donnelly shouted. “Anybody wants to come see the brush pile tomorrow, you’re more’n welcome. But anybody calls me a liar to my face, you’ve got a fight on your hands.”

  I played the last card I had to play. “She’d been unfaithful to him. He had a motive to kill her.”

  There were mutterings in the crowd—the sounds of doubt—and I felt a surge of hope. Suddenly, from high overhead, came the sharp sound of glass shattering, followed by a shout from a second story window of the courthouse. “Hey! Hey!” The heads of the mob swiveled upward. Deputy Yates leaned out the broken window. “It’s the sheriff! They’ve got him handcuffed and locked in a cell up here!”

  “The sheriff was breaking the law,” shouted Cotterell. “Just like y’all are talking about doing. I couldn’t let him do that. I can’t let y’all do it, either.”

  “Get out of the way, Jim, before you get hurt,” warned Donnelly. “Come on, let’s get the sheriff out and give that nigger what he deserves.”

  The crowd surged forward. Cotterell snatched the shotgun from the deputy beside him. He fired it into the air, and they hesitated, but only briefly, then surged again. He racked the slide and fired once more, but by this time the mob was already swarming up the steps. Half a dozen hands laid hold of my arms; another half dozen began pummeling my head and shoulders. Beside me, I sensed the same thing happening to Cotterell.

  Suddenly my attackers hesitated, then froze, and over the shrieks of the mob, I heard the whine of sirens—many sirens, growing louder as they approached the courthouse. Then I heard the squawk of a loudspeaker. “This is the FBI. Put up your weapons and disperse immediately, or you will be arrested. Put up your weapons and disperse immediately, or you will be arrested on federal charges.”

  The hands clutching my arms let go, the rain of blows ceased, and I felt myself sag against the door as I was released and my attackers began backing away. I heard a commotion—a din of voices shouting “FBI! Make way! Make way!”—and the crowd parted and fell back, their faces scowling and cringing, like dogs who’ve attacked in a pack then were routed and set fleeing, tails between their legs. A wedge of federal agents—a dozen or more, all wearing body armor emblazoned FBI, all carrying short-barreled shotguns that they looked ready, willing, and able to use—forced their way to the courthouse steps. A man in civilian clothes stepped from the crowd and huddled with one of the agents. He pointed at Donnelly and at three others in the front ranks, and four agents spun from the wedge and put the men facedown on the ground, cuffing them in the blink of an eye.

  I heard angry mutterings and wondered if the mob might turn on the FBI agents, but over the mutterings there were more sirens and more commotion at the back of the square. Moments later a phalanx of uniformed Tennessee state troopers, led by Special Agent Meffert, mounted the courthouse steps and stood shoulder-to-shoulder facing the crowd.

  Meffert conferred briefly with the ranking FBI agent, then from the top step called out, in a voice that might well have carried halfway to Knoxville, “You have two minutes to disperse. It is now 8:03. Anyone still on the courthouse grounds at 8:05 will be arrested. You’ll be charged with engaging in a hate crime, and you will be cuffed and transported to arraignment in a United States criminal court. Make your choice, and make it fast. The man in that jail is not an innocent man, but he didn’t kill that woman. Anybody wants to go to prison for trying to lynch him, step right up—your future beckons.”

  The crowd had fallen back, but it had not scattered. Meffert made a show of checking his watch. “Y’all got one minute,” he called, then added, as if it were an afterthought, “Now, I don’t know from personal experience, but I hear there’s a lot of big black men in federal prison be glad to add a little white meat to their diet, if you catch my drift. Variety bein’ the spice of life and all. Who wants to be first in line for that? Step right up, step right up, you cowardly sons of bitches. I’ll drive you there myself. I’ll even hand you the soap and point you toward the showers. Come on, by God!”

  As his challenge hung in the air, the flaming cross flickered and went dark, the fire went out of the mob’s eyes, and the men slunk away, by twos and threes and tens, their tails tucked between their legs.

  When the square stood empty—except for the law enforcement officers and the cuffed men and the undercover agent who’d pointed out the ringleaders—Meffert turned to Cotterell and me. “Well that was fun,” he said, shaking his head. “Jim, you interested in running for sheriff again? I’m thinking you might win this time around.”

  “I’ll give it some thought,” muttered Cotterell. “First, though, I got to go change my britches.”

  Meffert smiled, then clapped me on the shoulder. “Welcome to the Volunteer State, Doc. How you likin’ it so far?”

  I stared at him, then heard myself chuckle. Within moments the three of us were howling with laughter—laughter of relief and disbelief and, above all, gratitude for our unlikely deliverance—there on the courthouse steps.

  Murder is as old as the human species, but the forensic work of the Body Farm is a modern weapon in the war on crime. Back in 1992, Dr. Bill Brockton—the promising young chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee—wages a baffling, deadly battle of wits with a sadistic serial killer, one who seems to be circling ever closer to Brockton himself. In the next Body Farm novel, Brockton finds his lifelong research mission . . . but risks losing everything he holds dear.

  Enjoy a sneak preview of

  CUT TO THE BONE

  Available September 2013

  From William Morrow

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  Prologue

  SOME WOUNDS HEAL QUICKLY, the scars vanishing or at least fading to thin white lines over the years. Some assaults are too grave, though; some things can never be set right, never be made whol
e or healthy again, no matter how many seasons pass.

  In this regard, wounded mountains are like wounded beings. Cut them deeply—slice off their tops or carve open their flanks—and the disfigurement is beyond healing.

  So it was with Frozen Head Mountain, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. In the early 1960s, Frozen Head’s northern slope—thickly forested with hardwoods and hemlocks—was blasted and bulldozed away by wildcat strip miners to expose a thick vein of soft, sulfurous coal. Geologists called it the Big Mary vein, and for three years, Big Mary was illegally carved up, carted away, and fed into the insatiable maw of Bull Run Steam Plant, forty mountainous miles south. Then Big Mary’s vein ran dry, and the miners and their machines—their dredges and draglines and stubby, hulking haul trucks—departed as abruptly as they’d appeared.

  They left behind a mutilated mountainside, naked and exposed, its rocky bones battered by the sun and the rain, the heat and the cold. After every rain, a witch’s brew of acids and heavy metals seeped from the ravaged slope, blighting the soil and streams in its path.

  And yet; and yet. Nature is persistent and insistent. Years after the wildcatters moved on, kudzu vines began slithering into the shale, latching onto bits of windblown soil and leaves. Scrubby trees—black locust and Virginia pine—slowly followed, clawing tenuous toeholds in the rubble. A stunted sham of a forest returned, one instinctively shunned by birds and deer and even humans of right spirit.

  And so it was the perfect place to conceal a body.

  Like the mountain, the corpse was partially reclaimed by the persistence and insistence of Nature. A year passed, or perhaps two or three or five. One spring afternoon, a seedpod on a black locust tree split open, and half a dozen dark, papery seeds wafted away on a warm mountain breeze. Five of the six seeds drifted and sifted into deep crevices in the shale. The sixth spun and swirled and settled into a neat oval recess: the vacant eye orbit of a now-bare skull. By summer the seed had germinated, sending pale tendrils of root threading downward through fissures in bone and rock. One day a female paper wasp—a queen with no court yet—lighted on the skull, tiptoed inside, and began to build her small papery palace. And so was formed an odd ecosystem, an improbable peaceable kingdom: wasp colony, flowering tree, crumbling corpse.

  The world contains a multitude of postmortem microcosms. Many remain forever undiscovered. But all leave some mark, some indelible stain, upon the world; upon the collective soul of mankind.

  Some—a handful—give rise to reclamation or redemption.

  PART I

  IN THE BEGINNING

  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

  GENESIS 1:2

  Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

  GENESIS 3:1

  Brockton

  September 1992

  TUGGING THE BATTERED STEEL door of the office tight against the frame—the only way to align the lock—I gave the key a quick, wiggling twist. Just as the dead bolt thunked into place, the phone on the other side of the door began to ring. Shaking my head, I removed the key and turned toward the stairwell. “It’s Labor Day,” I called over my shoulder, as if the caller could hear me. “It’s a holiday. I’m not here.”

  But the phone nagged me, scolding and contradicting me, as if to say, Oh, but you are. I wavered, turning back toward the door, the key still in my hand. Just as I was about to give in, the phone fell silent. “Thank you,” I said and turned away again. Before I had time to take even one step, the phone resumed ringing. Somebody else was laboring on Labor Day, and whoever it was, they were damned determined to reach me.

  “All right, all right,” I muttered, hurrying to unlock the bolt and fling open the door. “Hold your horses.” Leaning across the mounds of mail, memos, and other bureaucratic detritus that had accumulated over the course of the summer, I snatched up the receiver. “Anthropology Department,” I snapped. The phone cord snagged a stack of envelopes, setting off an avalanche, which I tried—and failed—to stop. I’d been without a secretary since May; a new one was scheduled to start soon, but meanwhile, I wasn’t just the department’s chairman; I was also its receptionist, mail sorter, and answering service, and I was lousy at all of those tasks. The envelopes hit the floor and fanned out beneath the desk. “Crap,” I muttered, then, “Sorry. Hello? Anthropology Department.”

  “Good mornin’, sir,” drawled a country-boy voice that sounded familiar. “This is Sheriff Jim Cotterell, up in Morgan County.” The voice was familiar; I’d worked with Cotterell on a murder case two years before, a few months after moving to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee. “I’m trying to reach Dr. Brockton.”

  “You’ve got him,” I said, my annoyance evaporating. “How are you, Sheriff?”

  “Oh, hey there, Doc. I’m hangin’ in; hangin’ in. Didn’t know this was your direct line.”

  “We’ve got the phone system programmed,” I deadpanned. “It puts VIP callers straight through to the boss. What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

  “We got another live one for you, Doc. I mean, another dead one.” He chuckled at the joke, one I’d heard a hundred times in a decade of forensic fieldwork. “Some fella was up on Frozen Head Mountain yesterday, fossil hunting—that’s what he says, leastwise—and he found some bones at a ol’ strip mine up there.”

  I felt a familiar surge of adrenaline—it happened every time a new forensic case came in—and I was glad I’d turned back to answer the phone. “Are the bones still where he found them?”

  “Still there. I reckon he knew better’n to mess with ’em—that, or he didn’t want to stink up his jeep. And you’ve got me and my deputies trained to leave things alone till you show up and do your thing.”

  “I wish my students paid me as much mind, Sheriff. Have you seen the bones? You sure they’re human?”

  “I ain’t seen ’em myself. They’re kindly hard to get to. But my chief deputy seen ’em yesterday evening. Him and Meffert—you remember Meffert? TBI agent?—both says it’s human. Small, maybe a woman or a kid, but human for sure.”

  “Meffert? You mean Bubba Hardknot?” Just saying the man’s name—his two names, rather—made me smile. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent assigned to Morgan County had a mouthful of a name—Wellington Harrison Meffert II—that made him sound like a member of Parliament. His nickname, on the other hand—“Bubba Hardknot”—sounded like something from a hillbilly comic strip. The names spanned a wide spectrum, and Meffert himself seemed to, also: I’d found him to be intelligent and quick-witted, but affable and respectful among good old boys like Sheriff Cotterell. “Bubba’s a good man,” I said. “If he says it’s human, I reckon it is.”

  “Me and Bubba, we figured there weren’t no point calling you out last night,” Cotterell drawled on. “Tough to find your way up that mountain in the damn daylight, let alone pitch dark. Besides, whoever it is, they ain’t any deader today’n what they was last night.”

  “Good point, Sheriff.” I smiled, tucking away his observation for my own possible future use. “Couldn’t’ve said it better myself.” I checked my watch. “It’s eight fifteen now. How’s about we—my assistant and I—meet you at the courthouse around nine forty-five?”

  “Bubba and me’ll be right here waitin’, Doc. ’Preciate you.”

  Tyler Wainwright, my graduate student, was deep in thought—figuratively and subterraneanly deep—and didn’t even glance up when I burst through the basement door and into the bone lab.

  Most of the Anthropology Department’s quarters—our classrooms, faculty offices, and graduate-student cubbyholes—were strung along one side of a long, curving hallway, which ran beneath the grandstands of Neyland Stadium, the University of Tennessee’s massive temple to Southeastern Conference football. The osteology laboratory lay two flights below,
deep beneath the stadium’s lowest stands. The department’s running joke was that if Anthropology was housed in the stadium’s bowels, the bone lab was in the descending colon. The lab’s left side—where a row of windows was tucked just above a retaining wall, offering a scenic view of steel girders and concrete footers—was occupied by rows of gray, government-surplus metal tables, their tops cluttered with trays of bones. A dozen gooseneck magnifying lamps peered down at the bones, their saucer-sized lenses encircled by halo-sized fluorescent tubes. The lab’s cavelike right side was crammed with shelving units—row upon row of racks marching back into the sloping darkness, laden with thousands of cardboard boxes, containing nearly a million bones. The skeletons were those of Arikara Indians who had lived and died two centuries before; my students and I had rescued them from rising river reservoirs in the Great Plains. Now they resided here in this makeshift mausoleum, a postmortem Indian reservation beneath America’s third-largest football stadium.

  Tyler laid down the bone he’d been scrutinizing and picked up another, still not glancing up as the steel door slammed shut behind me. “Hey, Dr. B,” he said as the reverberations died away. “Let me guess. We’ve got a case.”

  “How’d you know?” I asked.

  “A,” he said, “it’s a holiday, which means nobody’s here but me and you and a bunch of dead Indians. B, any time the door bangs open hard enough to make the stadium shake, it’s because you’re really pumped. C, you only get really pumped when UT scores a touchdown or somebody calls with a case. And D, there’s no game today. Ergo, you’re about to haul me out to a death scene.”

  “Impressive powers of deduction,” I said. “I knew there was a reason I made you my graduate assistant.”

  “Really? You picked me for my powers of deduction?” He pushed back from the lab table, revealing a shallow tray containing dozens of pubic bones, each numbered in indelible black ink. “I thought you picked me because I work like a dog for next to nothing.”