“My grandpa used to play it on the Victrola,” she said, “whenever he grilled up a woolly mammoth he’d clubbed.” She grinned, and her teeth shone golden in the glow of the flame.
“Very funny,” I said. “Remind me to laugh on the way back to the old folks’ home.”
“Ouch,” she said, but she wasn’t smarting from my snappy retort. She took her thumb off the trigger, and the flame died.
“Serves you right,” I said. “Okay, let’s get some data.” I walked toward one of the cars, and Miranda headed to the other. Fishing a book of paper matches from one pocket, I lit one—it took three tries to get enough friction from the tiny strip at the base of the book—then used that match to set off the rest. The matchbook erupted in a fusillade of flame, flaring bigger than I’d expected, and I reflexively flung it through the open window of the car. The gas-soaked upholstery ignited with a flash and a whoosh, and I wondered if I’d been too liberal with the accelerant. I also wondered, as I felt the heat searing my face, if I had any eyebrows left.
Through the rush and crackle of the growing fire, I caught the drone of an airplane overhead. A small plane, just off the runway from the nearby airport, banked in our direction. As it circled, the flash of its wingtip strobes illuminated the smoke from the burning cars in bursts, like flash grenades, minus the boom. I tried to wave them off, but if they could even see me, they ignored my frantic gestures.
Backing away from my vehicle, I glanced over at the other car, also engulfed in flames. Despite the intensity of the inferno, Miranda stood barely ten feet from the car, one arm shielding her face, a look of utter fascination in her eyes. I forced my way through the blast of heat and took her by the arm. “You’re too close,” I shouted over the hiss and roar of the fire.
“But look!” she shouted back, never moving her eyes, pointing into the vehicle at the figure slumped in the driver’s seat. I looked just in time to see the skin of the forehead peel slowly backward, almost like an old-fashioned bathing cap. As it continued to peel backward, I realized that what I was seeing was a scalping. A scalping done by fire, not by knife.
“Very interesting!” I yelled. “But you’re still too close. That’s what we’ve got the video cameras for. This is dangerous.”
As if to underscore my point, a thunderous boom shook the air. Miranda yelped, and I instinctively wrapped both arms around her and tucked my head. I saw a puff of smoke from one of the tires—the heat had increased the pressure and weakened the rubber to the bursting point. Miranda and I scurried to join Art in the shelter of the water truck. “I hope you took off the gas tanks,” Art shouted, “or filled them up with water!”
“Why?”
“In case there’s any gas left. You don’t want any vapors,” he said.
“Since they came from the junkyard—” I began, but I didn’t get to finish the sentence. Just then the gas tank of the car Miranda had been standing beside exploded, and pellets of hot glass rained down on us like some infernal version of hailstones. The car’s spare tire—launched from the trunk by the blast—arced toward the water truck, slammed into the hood, and smashed through the windshield. It’s going to be a long, hot summer, Bill Brockton, I said to myself, and you’ve got some serious ’splainin’ to do.
The circling airplane beat a hasty retreat into the safety of darkness, and a moment later I heard sirens.
CHAPTER 2
MY PHONE RANG FOR WHAT SEEMED THE EIGHTY-SEVENTH time of the morning, and I was hardening my heart to the plea of the ringer—resisting the reflex to answer—when I noticed that the caller was my secretary, Peggy.
It wasn’t as if Peggy could just roll back from her desk and lean her head through my doorway. My office—my working office, as opposed to my administrative, ceremonial office—was a couple hundred yards from hers, clear on the other side of the stadium. Years ago I had laid claim to the last office at the end of the long, curving hallway that ran beneath the grandstands. I was as far off the beaten track as it was possible to get, at least within the shabby quarters inhabited by the Anthropology Department. The isolation allowed me to get five times as much work done as I would if my desk were situated along the daily path of every undergraduate, grad student, and faculty member in the department. But the deal I’d made with Peggy, when I latched on to this distant sanctuary, was that any time she called, I’d answer. I could ignore the rest of the world, but not her.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Incoming,” was all she said.
I was just about to ask for clarification when I heard a sharp rap on my doorframe. “Gee, thanks for the warning,” I said. I hung up just as Amanda Whiting strode in, all pinstripes and power pumps.
“Do you have any idea how many local, state, and federal ordinances you violated last night with your little bonfire of the vanities?”
Amanda was UT’s general counsel, and she took both her job and herself quite seriously.
“From the way you phrase the question,” I said, “I suspect that ‘zero’ is not the answer you’re looking for.”
“It’s the answer I wish I had,” she said, “but it’s not the answer I’ve got.”
“Okay, I give up,” I said. “How many?”
“I don’t even know yet,” she said. “For one, you didn’t have a burn permit—hell, Bill, there’s been a moratorium on open burning for the past month because everything’s dry as tinder. For another, you destroyed state property.”
“What state property—the circle of grass we burned?”
“The Ag farm’s water truck.”
Ooh. I had hoped she didn’t know about the truck. “Come on, Amanda,” I said. “I’ve seen university presidents throw out thousands of dollars’ worth of perfectly good carpeting just because the office hadn’t been redecorated lately. You’re busting my chops about breaking the windshield and denting the hood of a twenty-year-old farm truck?”
She glared. “And the Federal Aviation Administration says you’re a menace to air traffic.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. “That’s like saying the candle is a menace to the moth,” I said. “That plane went out of its way to come down and circle those burning cars. If anybody’s a menace, it’s that idiot of a pilot. Miranda and I could have been killed. Hacked to bits by the propeller. Aren’t pilots supposed to keep at least five feet away from innocent bystanders and enormous fires?”
“You think this is all a joke,” she said, “but it’s not. What if the truck had caught fire? What if the house on the adjoining property had burned down? What if the plane had crashed or your graduate student had been hit by that wheel? Any of those things could have happened if something had gone just a little more wrong. And then the university would be held accountable. And I’d be the one who had to clean up behind you.”
“But none of them did happen, Amanda,” I said gently, trying to soothe her now.
“But they could have.”
I was tempted to reply, But they didn’t, only I didn’t see much to be gained by it. Amanda and I could contradict each other all day long, like two bickering dogs, but we wouldn’t have anything to show for it except sore throats and ragged nerves. “Can I show you something, Amanda?” She eyed me suspiciously, as if I were about to unfasten my pants and flash her, then acquiesced with a shrug. Twisting around to the table behind my desk, I picked up a left femur—a thighbone, burned to a grayish white—and held it under the lamp on my desk. “This is from one of the bodies we burned last night,” I said. “You see these fractures? This rectangular, rectilinear pattern?” I pointed with the tip of a pencil, and she leaned in, curiosity gradually outweighing her indignation. “This body was partially skeletonized when we put it in the car, and the bone was already drying. Now look at this one.” I took another femur from a second tray of bones and held it alongside the first. “This was green bone,” I said, “from a fresh body. Lots of moisture still in the bones—just like green wood with lots of sap in it. See the difference in th
e fractures?” She gave it a perfunctory glance, but then her gaze sharpened and took hold of something, and her eyes darted from one bone to the other.
“The fractures in the green bone aren’t as regular,” she said.
“They’re more random.” She peered closer. “They kind of spiral or corkscrew around the shaft, don’t they? Almost like the bone is splintering apart instead of just cracking.”
“Very good,” I said. I debated whether to play her the video clip showing the scalp peeling off the skull but decided that might be too graphic. “You’d have made a good forensic anthropologist.”
Her guard went back up—she guessed I was herding her somewhere that she didn’t want to go. “So why are you showing me this? What’s your point?”
“This difference in the fracture pattern of dry bone and green bone could be important in a murder case,” I said. “Actually, not ‘could be’—is important in a murder case. That’s why I needed to do the experiment. The difference tells us whether the victim was burned alive or whether she’d been dead awhile.” She frowned. “The police and the district attorney are trying to decide, right now, whether to charge someone with murder in this case.” I was pushing my luck, but I decided to press a point. “Tell me the truth, Amanda,” I said. “If I’d come to you and described this experiment—setting fire to two cars at night, with bodies and amputated limbs in them—how long would it have taken to get the approvals you’d need? Weeks? Months? Forever?”
She shrugged and held out her hands, palms up, unable or unwilling to guess.
“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “You’ve been here, what, five or six years now?”
“Seven,” she said.
“The Body Farm was already a fixture here when you came. If it hadn’t been—if I came to you today and said, ‘Listen, I think we need to set aside a piece of land where we put dead bodies and study what happens to them as they decay,’ what would you say?”
“Frankly, I’d say you were nuts,” she snapped. And then something shifted in her expression, and she laughed. “And I’m pretty sure I’d be right.”
I laughed, too. “Maybe so,” I said. “But the police and the FBI and the TBI don’t think so. Or maybe they do, but they also appreciate the research we do. It helps them solve crimes. Isn’t that worth a broken windshield or an FAA reprimand every now and then?”
She gave me a stern look, but it seemed at least partly for show. “Are you asking me for permission to break the rules? I can’t give you that.”
“No,” I said. “Not permission. A little understanding. And maybe occasional forgiveness.”
She took a deep breath and puffed it out between pursed lips. “I’m going to the beach next week for vacation,” she said. “Would you promise to try—really, really hard—not to stir up any more trouble the rest of this week?”
I held up the first three fingers of my right hand, my pinkie folded down and tucked beneath the tip of my thumb. “Scout’s honor,” I said.
“Fair enough,” she said, then hesitated. “There’s one other thing,” she said awkwardly.
“I’ve done something else wrong?”
“No,” she said, “you haven’t. Actually, I have. When Dr. Carter was killed…” I froze, and she faltered, possibly because of what she saw in my face when she mentioned Jess’s murder. “I was too quick…. I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said.
“You mean when you exiled me? Told me I wasn’t allowed on campus?” I hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but I did. Jess was a smart and capable medical examiner; she was also a lovely and spirited woman, and I was just beginning to fall in love with her when she was killed. Her death had devastated me, being suspected of her murder had stunned me, and being treated as a pariah by the university had just about knocked the last prop out from under me.
She reddened. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I mean. We should have stood by you. I should have stood by you. I was wrong, and I apologize. It might be too little, too late, but it’s all I can do at this point. Even attorneys sometimes need—what was it you said?—understanding and occasional forgiveness. But I was harsh when you were on the ropes, I know, and forgiveness might be too much to ask.” She glanced down at her sleek black pumps, then turned to go.
“Amanda?” She stopped in the doorway and looked back at me. “I understand why you suspended me. I didn’t like it—still don’t—but I do understand it. Now I’ll try to work on the forgiveness part.” I stepped toward her and held out my hand.
She shook it and said, “Thank you.” And then she was gone, leaving only the brisk echo of her heels in the hallway. That and the ghost of Jess Carter in my office.
CHAPTER 3
THREE HOURS AFTER MY EXCHANGE WITH UT’S TOP legal eagle, a hawkish young prosecutor—Constance Creed was her name—looked up from a yellow notepad, adjusted her glasses, and took a step toward the witness box where I sat. “Isn’t it true, Dr. Brockton, that there had been conflict between yourself and Dr. Hamilton for quite some time?”
“I’m not sure I would characterize it as conflict,” I said.
“How would you characterize it, then?”
“I disagreed with the conclusions of one of his autopsy reports,” I said. She waited, seeming to expect me to say something more, so I did. “And I expressed those disagreements.”
She closed the distance between us and leaned forward, her face no more than two feet from mine. I shifted in the straight-backed chair and wished I could not smell the onions she’d eaten at lunch. She wore Coke-bottle glasses, the lenses round and a quarter inch thick at the edges; instead of magnifying her eyes, the concave lenses made them appear small and beady. “You ‘expressed’ those disagreements?” She removed the glasses and glared at me. As nearsighted as she must be, I knew that the gesture was purely for effect, and I wondered how blurry my features appeared to her. I briefly considered making a face at her, to see if she’d even notice, but decided that the outcome of the experiment could get unpleasant if she did notice. Creed’s eyes were an icy blue, and even without the distortion of the lenses her pupils were barely the size of buckshot. “Wouldn’t it be more accurate, sir, to say you destroyed Dr. Hamilton’s reputation as a medical examiner?”
“No, I don’t think—”
“Did you or did you not testify against Dr. Hamilton in the case of Billy Ray Ledbetter?”
“No, I didn’t testify against Dr. Hamilton.”
“No? I have a copy of the hearing transcript, and it quotes you at length. Was that another forensic anthropologist named Dr. William Brockton?”
“No, that was me testifying,” I said, resisting the urge to mirror her sarcasm. “But I wasn’t testifying against Dr. Hamilton; I was describing an experiment. I tried to reproduce what Dr. Hamilton had described as a stab wound that killed Billy Ray Ledbetter. It wasn’t possible to reproduce it—a rigid knife blade couldn’t make the wound he described.” As I spoke, I used one hand to demonstrate the zigs and zags that Hamilton’s theory would have required. “My testimony disproved Dr. Hamilton’s theory, but I wasn’t attacking him. I was just reporting my research results.”
“Just ‘reporting your research results,’” she said sarcastically.
“And were you also just ‘reporting your research results’ when you told the state board of medical examiners that Dr. Hamilton’s conclusions ‘violated the laws of physics and metallurgy’? Would you call that objective, scientific reporting?”
“I probably wouldn’t use that phrase in a peer-reviewed journal article, but the fact remains—”
“The fact I’m interested in,” she interrupted, “is who initiated the contact between you and the board of medical examiners—the board or you?”
I felt myself redden. “I think maybe I did.”
“You think? Maybe? Do you consider it a trivial matter to call a physician’s competence into question? A matter not even worth remembering?”
“No, I—”
“I’ll ask you once more, then. Who initiated the contact, the board or you?”
“I did.”
“So you could ‘report your research results’ to them, too? Are all anthropologists so eager to report their research results?”
Something in me snapped then. “Damn it,” I said, “Dr. Hamilton nearly sent a man to prison for a murder the guy didn’t commit. A murder no one committed, because it wasn’t a murder. That—that—is not a trivial matter, Ms. Creed. And I am not the one on trial for killing Jess Carter.”
She leveled a finger at me, almost as if she were aiming a gun. “But you nearly were, weren’t you, Doctor?”
“Okay, stop right there,” I said.
“You were the prime suspect, weren’t you, Doctor? In fact, initially you were charged with killing her, weren’t you?”
“I said stop!”
“How did it feel, Doctor, to get off the hook for the murder and be able to point the finger at Dr. Hamilton?”
“Enough!” I shouted, leaping to my feet. “I loved Jess Carter, and I will not…How dare you…” My voice failed me, and I put a hand over my eyes.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, warm and steady. “I’m sorry, Dr. Brockton,” I heard her say, suddenly sounding human and pained. “I hate to put you through the wringer. But believe me, this is gentle compared to what Hamilton’s attorney will do next week during the trial. When he gets up to cross-examine you, he will go for your throat like an attack dog. You’re our key witness, so the defense will do everything they can to undermine you, throw you off balance, make you mad.”
I looked up, and she met my gaze steadily, compassionately. Her eyes didn’t look beady now; they just looked tired, from years spent straining to see the world through a wall of glass and the darkness of crime. “God, this is hard,” I said. I fished out my handkerchief, wiped my face, and blew my nose.
“I know,” she said, “and I wish I could tell you it’ll get easier. But it won’t.”
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