Body Farm 01 - Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  DeVriess leaned in. “Hey, how about sharing the love? I’m the one that cried foul.”

  “Go to hell, Burt,” said Roper. “Bill, I look forward to working with you again. With you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I smiled. “See you.” He nodded and started down the marble hallway. “Oh, and Bob?” He looked back. “Thanks for what you said about Kathleen the other day. It’s been rough, and I’m not good at talking about it, but it helps to hear from folks who care.” He smiled and walked away.

  “Bastard,” muttered DeVriess. “Dr. Brockton, I’ve got somebody who really wants to meet you.” I had a class to teach, I protested, but he persisted. “This’ll just take a second, and I think you’ll be glad.” I relented, and he led me away from the judge’s chambers office and into a part of the court building where I’d never been before. A uniformed guard buzzed us through a security door; DeVriess opened a door marked “Dock” and led me into a bare white room. A scrawny man in faded jeans and a white shirt rose from a plastic chair. “Eddie, I want you to meet Dr. Brockton. Doctor, this is Eddie Meacham, the man whose name you just cleared. The man who just got his life back.”

  Meacham stared as if I were some alien species, then flung himself at me and wrapped me in a bony hug. I patted him on the back a few times, then extricated myself so I could breathe again. Meacham made several attempts to speak. Finally he whispered, “Thank you. Thank you.” That was all he managed to get out. But it was enough. I nodded, moved myself, and backed out of the room.

  DeVriess had been right—I was glad. Glad I’d met his client; glad I’d taken the case—taken the bait that Grease, pervert-protecting bastard that he was, had lobbed my way that day over lunch. Miranda was right: “Strange bedfellows indeed,” I murmured as I pushed open the courthouse door and stepped into the early October sunshine.

  CHAPTER 32

  I WAS STILL BASKING IN the glow of the sunshine and Meacham’s gratitude when a man fell in beside me on the sidewalk. “Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” he hissed. I stopped in midstride and turned toward him, and found myself facing Dr. Garland Hamilton. “Think you’re hot shit, don’t you?”

  “Hello, Garland,” I said to the medical examiner whose credibility I had just destroyed. “I’m sorry this played out the way it did. It wasn’t personal, you know.”

  “Wasn’t personal? Wasn’t personal? You sanctimonious son of a bitch. It’s sure as hell personal to me. Try losing your career and your reputation, and then tell me it’s not personal.” He jabbed a finger into my chest to punctuate his words. “You have destroyed me. And I take that very, very personally.”

  I took hold of his finger; he yanked it away in fury. I wanted to punch him, but I knew that absolutely no good and probably lots of trouble would come of it—lurid headlines and a huge lawsuit. “Look, Garland, you botched the exam, not me. If I hadn’t pointed it out, somebody else would have.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You and Jess Carter put your heads together and came up with a perfect scheme to get me out of the way. Ironic, isn’t it—turns out I’m the one who really got stabbed in the back in this case.” I just shook my head; there was no point trying to argue with him. “Jess has wanted to take over the forensic center here ever since she got divorced,” he continued. “Did she screw you, Bill? Is that how she got you to help her screw me over?”

  “Not true, Garland. Dr. Carter and I have never had anything but a professional relationship.”

  “Dr. Carter and I,” he mocked. “You make me sick.”

  “Frankly, Garland, I don’t give a damn,” I said. “There’s nothing between Jess and me, never has been, never will be. She’s happily lesbian, in case you didn’t know.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, right. Tell that to the guy I saw her wrapped around in the bar of the Hilton last week in Chattanooga.”

  I tried not to be surprised at that. “Good-bye, Dr. Hamilton.” I turned and began walking away.

  “Don’t you walk away from me,” he yelled. “I’m not finished with you!” I kept walking. “Do you hear me? I’m nowhere near finished with you!”

  CHAPTER 33

  THE PHONE ON MY desk jangled, startling me from a daydream that mostly involved Miranda, Sarah, and Jess Carter, with occasional nightmarish interruptions by a deranged medical examiner hell-bent on revenge.

  “Dr. Brockton?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is David Welton.” I struggled to place the name. “The FBI’s district counsel.”

  “Oh, yes. Sorry.”

  “No problem. Listen, I may have some good news for you.”

  “I can always use some.”

  “Angela Price and I were talking about your Cooke County homicide case. As you know, we’re up against a sort of catch-22 on obstruction of justice, and that’s frustrating.”

  “Frustrating for the FBI, or frustrating for me?”

  “Both. Despite what you may think, Price is a dedicated agent, but she has to work within fairly strict protocols. Also, there’s a lot more politics involved in law enforcement than most people realize, especially in places like Cooke County. Nearly everybody up there is related to everybody else in some way or other, and they have their own notions of justice, as you’re painfully aware.”

  “Right. And even the TBI can’t touch them, sounds like.”

  “Well, that’s a little cynical, but it is true that an obstruction case would be really tough for the state to win up there.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the good news you mentioned.”

  “Sorry, I’m just getting to that,” he said. “We might have more options than we thought. I was trying to figure out some creative way for us to turn this into a federal offense, and I remembered a pretty creative maneuver the Bureau used a few years ago to prosecute one of our own guys.” He had my attention. “The name JJ Smith mean anything to you?”

  “No, ’fraid not. Should it?”

  “If you worked for the Bureau, it sure would. JJ Smith was an FBI agent in Los Angeles who was handling Chinese spies.”

  “Their spies, or our spies?”

  “Exactly. Thereby hangs the crux of the matter,” he said. “Or the crotch of it, you might say. Smith was giving one of his female assets, code-named ‘Parlor Maid,’ some very special handling. They would meet and have sex, and sometime in the course of those encounters, she would take classified papers from his briefcase, copy the information, then relay it to Beijing.”

  “Sounds like Mata Hari,” I said.

  “Very like. There’s a name for a female spy who uses her charms to seduce sources and obtain secrets. She’s called a honey pot.”

  “Hmm. My grandpa used to call my grandma that. Although the only secrets he had were the bottles of Jack Daniels he had tucked away in the barn, and I’m pretty sure she never seduced those away from him.”

  “Well, then, your grandma wasn’t as shrewd as this Chinese agent, ’cause she plucked JJ Smith like a turkey. We were having one hell of a time building an espionage case against him, though. The thing we finally got him for was mail fraud.”

  “Which spelling of the word are we talking here?”

  He laughed. “The mail fraud statutes make it a crime to use the U.S. mail, radio, telephone, or other communications over an interstate carrier to commit fraud. And fraud is defined very broadly—so broadly, it can include simply depriving a person of what’s called the ‘intangible right of honest service.’ In JJ Smith’s case, having hot sex with a Chinese spy, on the Bureau’s clock and at taxpayer expense, hardly counts as ‘honest service.’ Sounds like grasping at straws, but it worked.”

  “Sort of like Al Capone eventually serving time, not for murder or bootlegging but for tax evasion?”

  “Exactly. If Plan A doesn’t work, switch to Plan B.”

  “And how does this relate to Sheriff Kitchings? We send Price up there in something by Victoria’s Secret?”

  “Whoa. If she ever even suspected you’d said somethi
ng like that, you’d need emergency admission to the Witness Protection Program.”

  “Sorry. The ‘dishonest service’ charge just seems a little vague.”

  “It is,” he conceded. “That’s why I’m hoping to relegate that strategy to Plan B.”

  “Does that mean you’ve got a Plan A?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I’m looking at a map of Cooke County right now. Think you can steer me to the cave where the woman’s body was found?”

  I described the route east from Knoxville on I-40, directing him to the Jonesport exit and then taking him along the winding river road. “Okay, about six or eight miles upriver, look for a right-hand turn that heads up into the mountains,” I said.

  There was a pause. “Okay, got it. Now what?”

  “Go three or four miles up that, then look for a road to the left. Cave Springs is another mile up that road.”

  “Hang on. Let me make sure I’ve got this. Yes, I see it.” I could hear the excitement rising in his voice. “Bingo,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “The law giveth, and the law taketh away. If a crime is committed on federal land, it can be prosecuted in federal court. Doesn’t make the crime federal—your Cooke County murder is a state crime, and always will be. But if it happened on U.S. land, we can make a federal case out of it.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that. Years before, some of my students were arrested for consuming alcohol in Great Smoky Mountains National Park—four of them shared a bottle of wine at a picnic beside Abrams Falls—and the entire Anthropology Department had shown up in federal court to lend moral support. I was vaguely familiar with the legal framework he was erecting here, so I hated to bring it crashing down. “Listen, I’m not sure I gave the directions quite right,” I said, hoping to let him down easy. “The body was found eight or ten miles north of I-40. The national park is all way to the south side of the interstate. I hate to say it, but it looks like we’re stuck with Plan B.”

  “Your directions were fine, Dr. Brockton,” he said cheerily. “Cave Springs Church is shown on this map. And it’s just inside a beautiful green strip of federal land.”

  “But the national park—”

  “I’m not talking about the park, Dr. Brockton. Your victim’s body was found a mile inside the boundary of Cherokee National Forest.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’d stake my orienteering merit badge on it.”

  “Hot damn,” I said. I could already hear the hoofbeats of the federal cavalry. “Hello, Plan A.”

  “Hello, Plan A,” he echoed. “There is one thing you need to understand, though, Dr. Brockton.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Plan A: it won’t happen overnight.”

  “Oh, I understand. These things can take weeks, even months, can’t they?”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. “Dr. Brockton, you’re not going to want to hear this. The average duration of an interagency task force involving undercover agents is two years, start to finish.”

  “Two years?”

  “Two years.”

  I thanked Welton for his interest, wished him happy hunting, and laid the receiver to rest, along with my hopes for Plan A.

  My hand had scarcely left the receiver when the phone rang again. It was Peggy, the Anthropology Department secretary. She sounded upset. “Did you take my spare keys again?”

  “No, why?”

  “They’re not in my desk drawer.”

  “They’ll turn up,” I said.

  “You’re the only one who ever takes them.”

  “When did you notice they were gone?”

  “Last week,” she said. “It was the same day someone broke into your office. You don’t think…?”

  I did think, and I got a very bad feeling.

  I hung up the phone and unlocked the door to the skeletal collection room. Accessible only through my office, the collection room housed all our forensic specimens—row upon row of metal shelves filled with cardboard boxes like the one stolen off my desk last week. Flipping on the fluorescent lights, I began scanning the shelves. The foot-square ends of the boxes presented themselves like books in a library—a library of murder mysteries, all of them carved in bone.

  Whoever had pried open my office had not broken into the collection room—of this I was certain, for a TBI technician, the university police officer, and I had all checked the door, finding it undamaged and securely locked. Or maybe carefully relocked, I now realized.

  As I reached the section of shelves containing the most recent years’ cases, my knees went weak. There was a one-foot-square gap in the boxes, and I knew without even checking which box should have been there.

  Billy Ray Ledbetter’s bones were gone.

  With a heavy heart, I called Steve Morgan’s TBI pager and reported the additional theft to him. “This complicates the picture,” he said, echoing my own thoughts exactly. It might mean that the theft of Leena’s bones was just a smokescreen, and the mangled outer door was just for show. It might also mean that Dr. Garland Hamilton, a disgraced and very angry medical examiner, hadn’t been making idle threats when he confronted me outside the courthouse.

  “Did you steal a blind man’s cane recently?” asked Morgan.

  “Rob a church collection plate? Take candy from a baby? Kick a nun? I gotta tell you, I haven’t seen this much bad karma in one place since Bernie Kerik’s nomination to head Homeland Security imploded in a half-dozen scandals.”

  “When it rains, it pours,” I said miserably. “I’m on the hot seat. I’m wearing a bull’s-eye.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, but he promised to send the crime scene techs back to comb the collection room. We both knew they’d come up empty-handed.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE KUDZU TUNNEL TO Jim O’Conner’s hideaway was becoming as familiar to me as my own driveway. I had phoned an hour before with news of the additional bone theft, along with a discouraging reassessment of our prospects for recovering Leena. “I was pretty sure she was somewhere in Cooke County, in the hands of somebody who wears a badge,” I said. “Now I have no idea who’s got her, where she is, or whether we’ll ever get her back.”

  He took the news more calmly than I’d expected; he even tried to console me over the loss. “Well, I hope you recover the bones, and I hope you nail whoever took ’em. But remember, those bones aren’t Leena. They’re just what’s left of what used to be her, a long time ago.” This from the man I’d sent reeling, not once but twice—first with the news of her discovery, then with the bombshell about her pregnancy. He was a remarkably resilient human being. “Listen, if you’ve got the time, come up and see me,” he said next. “I’ve got something to show you. As an anthropologist, you’ll find it interesting; might cheer you up.” That was all he would divulge over the phone.

  On the drive up, my mind raced with the possibilities. Had he found something that shed light on Leena’s death, on the identity of her killer? His phrasing puzzled me, though: “as an anthropologist”—what did that mean? Had he unearthed some clue or piece of evidence from three decades ago? Some groundbreaking article about cave burials? Why would I be more interested in whatever it was as a scientist than as a guy who’d been dragged all over the hills of Cooke County—and underneath a few of them, too?

  When I pulled up in front of the vine-draped farmhouse, I noticed that the kudzu seemed to have swallowed another foot or two all around the edges. O’Conner seemed unconcerned, though. He was sitting in the same rocking chair where I’d first met him. He lifted a hand in greeting, but continued to rock in big, easy arcs.

  As I mounted the sagging steps to the porch, O’Conner reached over and pushed down on the arm of the rocker beside his, setting it into motion. I synchronized my timing, then eased down into it. I found my rhythm matching his.

  “Hey.” I said, “Why aren’t you in jail? The sheriff said he was gonna arrest you days ago.”

  He
chuckled. “They’re watching my house in town. They don’t know about this place yet.”

  After a minute, he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a photo and handed it to me. Its corners were unraveling and the colors had faded with age, but there was no mistaking the pretty blonde girl smiling at the camera. It was Leena.

  “She sent me that while I was overseas. Last letter I ever got from her.” I studied her face; she looked almost like I’d imagined her, but there was a trace of sadness or fear in her face that I hadn’t expected. Perhaps things had already started to unravel for her, too. Or maybe I was just imagining things in hindsight.

  “Mind if I borrow this and make a copy? I’ll take good care of it.”

  “ ’Course not. Anything that helps. Any headway on the case?”

  “Not really. Not unless you count the break-in and the cave-ins as headway. There might be some disgruntled students who’d consider an attempt on my life to be a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t shed any light on the murder.”

  “Maybe not directly. But somebody’s mighty nervous. Afraid there’s something more you’re about to find out, or about to figure out.”

  “Well, I wish I were as smart as someone seems to think I am.”

  “Answer’s bound to bubble up soon. You’ve just got to let it simmer for a while.” He stood up. “Speaking of simmering, how about a cup of tea?”

  “Sure, if you’re having some, too.”

  O’Conner disappeared through the screen door, then emerged a minute later and handed me one of two pottery mugs, handmade, imprinted with the outlines of lacy ferns. “Nice mugs,” I said, remembering some of what Kathleen had taught me about shapes and glazes. “Local potter?”

  He smiled. “Local as you can get. Made ’em myself. Everything you’re holding in your hand came off this property—the clay, the ferns, the spring water, the honey, even the tea.”

  “You’re a regular one-man biosphere.”

  “I like being self-sufficient when I can. Meeting your own needs for food and utensils seems satisfying at some deep level, at least to me. Helps keep a man honest, somehow.”