The Devil's Bones bf-3

by Jefferson Bass

  “Bill, this is Lisa; she runs the dayroom. Lisa, this is Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from UT. He’s trying to identify a murder victim.” She reached through the window to shake my hand and flashed me the dimples on high beam. I nearly forgot the question I’d wanted to ask her.

  “If one of these people went missing,” I finally said, gesturing toward the dayroom, “how likely is it they’d be missed?”

  She didn’t have to think long. “You know that old saying about a tree falling in the forest-if nobody’s there to hear it, does it still make a sound? Most of these people don’t have anybody there to hear them if they fall. It’s when they’re not missing-when they’re out walking the streets, or sleeping under a bridge, or asking for money-that folks notice them. If some scruffy guy stops wandering past your downtown business or condo, you’re probably just grateful he’s moved on.” I nodded; she was probably expressing the sentiments of ninety-nine out of a hundred people. A car behind us honked, so we waved good-bye. She smiled one last time as she waved, and I guessed that her smile would be the brightest thing most people in the dayroom would see today. I found myself wanting to hang out in the dayroom awhile, just for the sake of that smile. But Roger was already pulling away from the curb.

  He made a quick right at the corner of Jackson and Gay, taking us through a block of upscale lofts and condos tucked into high-ceilinged brick warehouses and retail stores dating from the early 1900s. Some of these stylish urban residences sold for half a million dollars or more, and I couldn’t help commenting on their ironic proximity to the dayroom and its homeless clientele.

  “That’s not all,” said Roger, pointing to the building right on the corner. “Volunteer Ministry Center has sixteen apartments in this building”-transitional housing, he said, for people trying to get back on their feet. The rest of the block revolved around fancy condos, galleries, design firms, and a trendy sushi restaurant. I was guessing that the clientele for the businesses came from the lofts and condos, not the dayroom or the transitional housing.

  “As you can see, there are two very different worlds here,” he said,

  “and those worlds collide just about every day. The police get a lot of complaints from the merchants and residents in this block. Sometimes they’re legitimate-cars getting broken into, drunks wanting to use the bathroom or the telephone. But sometimes it’s just harassment-the haves wanting the have-nots chased away.”

  “Chased to where?”

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “It can turn into a shell game. They get forced out of downtown, so they head up Broadway, toward the Kroger and the pawn shops. Or way west, to the truck stops on Lovell Road. Or they just hang out in the bushes or under bridges. Here, I’ll show you.” He made two more rights, turning north on Broadway. As we passed beneath the eight-lane viaduct that carried I-40 past downtown and my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw twenty or thirty people in the gloom-some standing in clusters on the sidewalk, some sitting on a low wall that bordered it, others stretched out on the barren ground farther back. Some had backpacks or duffel bags or trash bags filled with possessions; others had just the dingy clothes they wore. A few stared at us as we idled past; some ignored us, intent on conversations with other people or with voices in their heads; others slept or stared off into space. “The businesses down here really hate this,” he said, nodding at a paint store and a company that sold industrial pumps. “Except for that convenience market”-he pointed at a small store I’d never noticed, its plate glass gridded with stout steel bars-“which sells a lot of beer.”

  Emerging from the shadow of the viaduct, we came to the missions. The Salvation Army, on the west side of Broadway, ran a large thrift store fronting Broadway-a store where many of my graduate students over the years had bought cheap clothing, worn furniture, or battered kitchen gadgets. Behind the thrift store were other buildings-offices and a modern dormitory-style building. Strictly speaking, the Salvation Army wasn’t sheltering street people or transients, Roger said. Like Volunteer Ministry Center, the Salvation Army provided transitional housing, for families in crisis and for people enrolled in Operation Bootstrap, a six-month program designed to treat drug or alcohol problems and find people jobs. “In general, the Bootstrap people aren’t the ones you see roaming around or hanging out during the day,” said Roger. “They’re inside, or off taking a class or working a job.”

  Across the street, facing the Salvation Army, was Knox Area Rescue Ministries, which Roger referred to by the acronym, KARM. It was one letter shy of “karma,” I noticed. KARM had renovated an old church, converting the education building into an overnight shelter, Lazarus House, with more than 250 beds. “The shelter doesn’t open until suppertime,” he said, “so a lot of those people under the viaduct are waiting for that. The police come through every couple of hours and chase folks away, but five minutes later they start congregating again.”

  Roger headed north another few blocks on Broadway, then angled left onto Central, another artery radiating out of downtown. Like Broadway, Central had largely gone to seed, at least in this section, though its downtown stretch had gotten gentrified over the past couple of decades, the century-old brick buildings transformed into a two-block cluster of restaurants, bars, and boutiques called the Old City. The northern boundary of the Old City was a clear and rough-hewn one: a bumpy two-track railroad crossing, just before the White Lily flour mill and the Greyhound bus depot, another Knoxville crossroads for the downwardly mobile.

  Roger turned left off of Central, taking us around the back side of the national cemetery-a neatly mowed veterans’ burial ground, its hundreds of graves marked by precise rows of identical white tombstones: the soldiers uniformly outfitted and holding perfect formation, even in death. Just behind the cemetery, after crossing another set of railroad tracks, Roger turned off-road again, jouncing onto a wide gravel service road that ran alongside the tracks. On the left, the tracks bordered a row of industrial-looking buildings that I guessed to be machine shops. On the right, out my window, was a wall of greenery. He stopped the Honda and led me into the trees along a broad, well-worn path. The patch of woods was surprisingly large-it sprawled for fifty yards or so to the banks of First Creek. Along the path, we passed shirts and pants hanging from branches, piles of bedding nestled in small clearings, heaps of trash and garments everywhere. “Until a few days ago, this was a pretty big camp,” Roger said. “Probably two dozen people in here. The railroad had some big metal culverts stacked along the edge of the trees back there, and there were people sleeping in the culverts, so the railroad called the police and asked them to clear the whole area.”

  “How do they do that? A bunch of cops come in and arrest people, or drive through with the loudspeaker on, telling them to get moving, or what?”

  “It’s not quite that harsh,” he said. “The police tell the missions and the social-service agencies they’re about to shut down a camp, so then the social workers come out and warn people, tell them if they’ve got stuff they don’t want to lose, they should pack up and leave beforehand. The railroad’s already hauled the culverts to somewhere else, and the city will probably send a crew to clear out everything else here in a few days or weeks or months. Meanwhile, the people find some other place to camp.”

  “The shell game?”

  “The shell game.”

  We walked back to the Honda and bounced along the gravel, back toward town. Up ahead, I could see the rear of the Salvation Army complex approaching, and the looming concrete supports and decking of the I-40 viaduct. We’d come almost full circle, although we were off-road still, a hundred yards west of Broadway, approaching a large graveled area beneath the interstate. Earlier I’d been surprised at how many people were gathered under the viaduct where it crossed Broadway; now I was astonished at the bustling scene taking shape. It was almost as if I’d wandered down a staircase and found myself in the service tunnels hidden beneath Disney World-a realm I’d barely known existed, yet o
ne alive with people and activity.

  Dozens of cars and trucks were pulled off to one side of the graveled area beneath the viaduct, which measured roughly the size of a football field. Near the parked vehicles sat a steel storage unit, of the heavy, corrugated type carried by container ships. The yellow container was labeled LOST SHEEP MINISTRIES, though if I’d been naming the program, I’d have called it “Worker Bee Ministries” or “Well-Oiled-Machine Ministries,” because I’d never seen such efficiency. A steady stream of workers, mostly fresh-faced teenagers and young adults, ferried folding chairs and tables from the container’s interior and set them up, row on row, facing a portable lectern or pulpit. A bank of high-intensity lights-the sort used by highway construction crews at night-switched on, banishing the gloom beneath the viaduct. As Roger and I watched, the space beneath the rumbling viaduct became an impromptu assembly hall, filled with dozens of tables and hundreds of chairs. Several tables were set up end to end farther back from the pulpit, and a separate squad of workers began loading these with restaurant-style steam tables, hundreds of soft drinks, stacks of sandwiches and potato chips.

  “This is amazing,” I said to Roger. “If the U.S. military moved with this much speed and focus, we’d have been in and out of Iraq in one week.”

  He nodded.

  I caught a whiff of beef stew wafting from the steam table, and it smelled better than any of the convenience foods I’d microwaved for myself this week. A ragtag band of humanity converged on the food tables from every direction-scores of people, then hundreds, emerging from the bushes and railroad tracks and sidewalks and streets-and began queuing up neatly for food. One of the first in line was a young woman with a pair of children, a boy and a girl who seemed to be about the ages of my grandsons. The mother and children appeared clean and healthy, but they had a wary, weary look in their eyes, even the kids, and that grieved me-to see them beaten down so early in life. Behind them in line was a man who moved with uneven, shuffling steps; his head and right arm twitched periodically as he mumbled, steadily and incoherently, to himself or to some unseen companion.

  A public-address system crackled to life, and I heard a woman introduce herself over the noise of the traffic overhead as Maxine Raines, the founder of Lost Sheep Ministries. She quoted a passage from the Bible-“Trust in the Lord with all thy heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths”-and then proceeded to expound on it. Maxine herself had been homeless once, Roger told me. Her brief sermon made it clear she believed that her divinely guided path had led to precisely this place, precisely this program of providing food and clothing under the interstate. Not everyone shared Maxine’s vision, according to Roger-some social workers saw Lost Sheep and other mission-type programs as “enablers,” crutches that made it easier for people to avoid getting jobs and becoming self-supporting. But what jobs, I wondered, could some of these lost and broken souls do?

  Maxine handed over the microphone to a young man who-by his own account-had been one of Knoxville’s biggest drug dealers before finding God and cleaning up his life. He was followed by a singer-a pretty young woman with long brown hair, an acoustic guitar, and the sweet, simple voice of a folksinger. “When the music fades,” she sang, “I simply come longing to bring something that’s of worth, that will bless your heart.” I wasn’t sure how many people were following the lyrics-most seemed more intent on what awaited them at the food tables or the tables of men’s and women’s clothing and over-the-counter medications-but perhaps the words weren’t the most important part of the message. I remembered the inscription on Jess’s plaque at the Body Farm-WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE-and I admired the compassion of this army of volunteers, more than a hundred strong, even if they were treating symptoms rather than curing the root causes of homelessness.

  Almost as swiftly as it had begun, the service-and the services-came to an end. Even as the final stragglers received their rations of stew and shoes and aspirin, the furniture brigade began folding and storing the chairs and tables. The plates of food had been picked clean by the five hundred people who had converged on them, and the throng dispersed toward the shelters and the bridges and the creek-side camps where they would lay their heads on this particular night. One of the last to wander off, I noticed, was the twitching, mumbling man I’d seen near the head of the food line. As he shuffled toward the trees flanking the railroad tracks, a man fell in beside him and took his arm, stopping him for a brief conversation at the edge of the darkness.

  It was one of the Lost Sheep volunteers, I realized, probably concerned for the man’s well-being. But it could just as easily have been Garland Hamilton waylaying him-offering money to a down-at-the-heels alcoholic, who might literally die for a drink.

  THE SURREAL scene beneath I-40 was still vivid in my mind the next morning as I studied skull fragments in the bone lab. When the phone rang, I ignored it, intent on the oval of pieced-together temporal bone cradled in one hand and the jagged shard clasped in a pair of tweezers. After half a dozen rings, the phone fell silent, then began clamoring again. Glancing at the display, I saw that it was Peggy, the one caller I couldn’t ignore. I sighed, laying the larger segment in the sand of the cake pan and the single piece back in the tray with countless other bits.

  “Hello, Peggy,” I grumbled.

  “Are we a tad grumpy this morning?”

  “We are,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “There’s a Lisa Wells on line one for you,” said Peggy.

  “Wells?” That name didn’t ring any bells. “Could you take a message? I’ve got my hands full at the moment.”

  A moment later the phone jangled again; Peggy again. I cursed under my breath as I reached for it. “Now what?”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. B., but Ms. Wells says it’s important. She says she might know a homeless man you’re looking for.”

  “Oh, put her on,” I said. A moment later the quiet background sounds of Peggy’s office were replaced by a cacophony of street noise in my left ear-cars whizzing past, wheels thumping into potholes, a jackhammer off in the telephonic distance somewhere. “Hello,” I said, “is this Lisa with the dimples?”

  “Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure whether she was taken aback or simply hadn’t heard me over the noise.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said, a bit louder and more formally. “It sounds busy there at the dayroom.”

  “I stepped outside to call,” she said. “There’s not a lot of privacy inside. Dr. Brockton, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you asked me yesterday.”

  “Thinking is good,” I said.

  “I’m in an awkward position,” she said. “I have to protect the confidentiality of our clients, but you’ve got me worried about one. A regular, a man named Freddie. He’s been here nearly every day for the past six months, but I haven’t seen him in over a week now.” She hesitated. “He does drink, but he’d been doing better lately. When he stopped showing up, I worried he’d gone on a binge. Now I’m afraid it’s something worse.”

  “Can you describe Freddie for me-white, black, short, tall, young, old?”

  “White,” she said. “Middle-aged-forty-five going on sixty. Homeless people tend to age fast-life on the street takes a toll. Probably about five-ten, fairly thin. A hundred fifty pounds, maybe.”

  “Remember anything about his teeth?”

  “You mean, did he have some?”

  I laughed. “Well, that would be a start.”

  She laughed, too. “Some of them don’t,” she said. “Beyond that, no, I don’t remember anything about his teeth.”

  “Then I don’t suppose you’d know where we might get hold of his dental records?”

  “Dental records? No,” she said. “The people we work with are barely hanging on, Dr. Brockton. We’ve got a dentist who volunteers one day a month, to provide very basic care, but dental records? Not on the radar screen of our clients.”

  “That’s what I figured,” I said,
“but I had to ask. It’d be a lot easier to identify this burned skeleton if we had dental X-rays.”

  “X-rays?” Even over the street noise, I heard something in her voice shift. “Do they have to be dental?”

  “Dental’s usually best. An arm or leg X-ray might work, if it showed something we could compare to-a healed fracture or an orthopedic plate or some such.”

  “How about a head?”

  “A head?”

  “An X-ray of the head. The skull?”

  I heard something in my own voice shift. “Do you have an X-ray of Freddie’s skull?”

  “I don’t, but UT Hospital might. Not long after he started coming around here, he slipped in the lunchroom and hit his head hard-knocked him out cold. We called an ambulance, and they took him to the ER at UT.”

  I got Freddie’s last name from Lisa, then phoned the Radiology Department.

  “Hi, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said to Theresa, the Radiology receptionist. “A guy from one of the homeless missions might have come through the ER for a cranial X-ray about four months ago. Name was Freddie Darnell, D-A-R-N-E-L–L. We’re trying to ID a murder victim, and we think there’s a chance it’s Darnell. Would you be willing to check and see if you’ve got a record for him? We can get a court order if you need us to.”

  “Hang on just a second, Dr. Brockton,” she said. She put me on hold. A minute passed, then three, then five. I was watching the bars on my cell phone, which I’d forgotten to charge overnight. Now I was down to one battery bar, and I worried the phone might die before she came back.

  “I couldn’t find anything filed under Darnell,” she said. My heart sank. “But we did have a guy named Parnell, with a P,” she said. “Could that be it? Maybe somebody at the mission got it wrong-or maybe the ER intake clerk misunderstood.”