The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  Great, I thought, nothing like an encouraging word.

  “Think of this as a scrimmage, or maybe war games, so you’re mentally prepared for the real thing. You were doing great till right there at the end. It’s okay to get sad on the stand. Just don’t get mad. If you get mad, you’re playing their game. They’ll make you look vindictive, and they’ll make him look like a victim.”

  “But there’s a recording of him admitting he killed Jess. A recording of him bragging about killing Jess.”

  “They’ll try to suppress that. Or undermine it any way they can. Besides, it’s a recording, and a pretty scratchy one to boot. Your testimony will carry a lot more weight with the jurors than that. So roll with the punches and hang on to your temper, for God’s sake. For Dr. Carter’s sake.”

  We sparred a few more rounds, the prosecutor and I. Finally, after two hours of rolling with the punches of her mock cross-examination, I was allowed to step down from the witness stand she’d set up in the practice courtroom. I left the City-County Building and headed along Neyland Drive feeling jangled and unsettled. It wasn’t until I found myself taking the Cherokee Trail exit off Alcoa Highway that I realized I wasn’t heading back to my office but to the Body Farm. Even after I realized that, it took a moment longer to grasp why I was headed there.

  There were no other cars in the distant corner of the hospital employees’ parking lot that bordered the research facility. The chain-link gate was locked, as was the high wooden gate within. Even so, after letting myself in, I called out to make sure I had the place to myself. When I was certain of that, I locked the gate behind me and walked up the hill into the woods.

  It was the first time I’d had the nerve to visit the spot in the three months since I’d dug the recess in the rocky dirt and laid the slab at the base of the big pine. The black granite was dull with dust, so I knelt down and took a handkerchief to it. The grime proved more stubborn than I expected, so I wiped my face and neck with the cloth to moisten it—one pass got it plenty damp—then set to work on the marker again. “Sorry about the sweat, Jess,” I said. “You never were the squeamish sort, so I’m thinking you wouldn’t mind.”

  The moisture loosened the dirt, and after I’d turned and folded the handkerchief several times to expose clean fabric to scrub with, the black granite gleamed again, silver flecks of mica shimmering within its depths. Closing my eyes, I ran my fingers across the surface. The chiseled edges of the inscription tugged at my fingertips and clutched at my heart. IN MEMORY OF DR. JESS CARTER, WHO WORKED FOR JUSTICE, the words read. WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE. I laid my palm on the warm stone, flat and steady, the same way Constance Creed had laid hers on my shoulder not long before. I thought back to the period when Jess and I had been mere colleagues—she a rising star among the state’s medical examiners, me an odd-duck anthropologist who conferred with corpses as they turned to goo or bare bones. It seemed several lifetimes ago, though in fact we had collaborated platonically scarcely six months before. Then I flashed ahead to the night everything had changed.

  “God, Jess, I miss you,” I said. We had spent just one night together, but that night seemed to encapsulate years’ worth of meaning. And it had cost Jess her life. Garland Hamilton had followed me to Jess’s house, had lurked outside, listening, as we made love, and then—just days later—had abducted Jess from a restaurant parking lot, taken her to his basement, and shot her. In a final, perverse twist, he’d staged her body in a gruesome tableau here at the Body Farm—here at this very tree—and had nearly succeeded in framing me for the murder.

  It haunted me to realize that, given a chance, Jess and I might have built a remarkable life together, a rare partnership of like minds and kindred spirits. “I guess we’ll never know,” I said aloud, but even as I spoke the words, I knew they were false: I did know, all the way down to my core. Only three things in my life had ever rung true enough to redefine everything else. The first was the life I’d built with Kathleen, my late wife, and our son, Jeff. The second was the bizarre career path I had half followed, half created. The third, I was realizing only in hindsight, was the love I’d begun to feel for Jess.

  Kathleen and I had shared a solid, steady love, and it carried us through three decades of partnership and parenthood, until cancer claimed her three years earlier. I’d spent two years grieving for Kathleen. Then, to my surprise, I was ready for love again; ready for Jess.

  Back when I was in college, I’d taken a class in Greek mythology, and we’d read Homer’s Odyssey. Since Jess, an image from Homer kept coming back to me: the marriage bed of Ulysses and Penelope. Ulysses had carved their bed from a mammoth tree trunk, still rooted in the earth, and then built their home around it. It was a secret known only to them—the secret by which she would recognize him when he returned from his years of warfare and wandering. The love Jess and I were starting to discover could have been like that, I sometimes thought—something rooted in earth and bedrock, a mystery understood only by us—if we’d had the chance to build around it. If Garland Hamilton hadn’t uprooted it, driven by jealousy of Jess and hatred of me.

  Hamilton had been enraged to learn that Jess was about to become the state’s chief M.E. But he had murdered her not just out of a misplaced sense of rivalry. He’d done it mainly to hurt me—to break my heart before killing me as well. The second part of his plan had failed, and Hamilton was now facing a possible death sentence for killing Jess. But Jess’s death was a wound I’d carry far longer than if he’d killed me. Yet I’d also be carrying the memory of Jess, and though I’d always mourn the loss, I’d never regret the love.

  “I miss you, Jess,” I said. “And I’m so sorry.”

  The only answer was the dull thud of helicopter rotors as a LifeStar air ambulance skimmed low above the Body Farm, inbound to UT Hospital with a patient hanging between life and death.

  CHAPTER 4

  AFTER MY VISIT TO JESS’S MARKER, I WASN’T READY to face my empty house. I called Jeff, my son, and asked if I could swing by for a visit.

  “Sure,” he said. “We’re just about to grill some burgers. Come on out—I’ll throw one on for you.”

  “Hmm, charbroiled meat,” I said, picturing my recent nighttime experiment. “I’m not sure I’m all that hungry.”

  “Have you seen a doctor yet? You must be ill. I’ve never known you to turn down anything cooked on the grill.”

  “Long story,” I said. I realized that my need for company outweighed my aversion to the smell of searing flesh. “I’ll tell you over dinner.”

  Jeff’s house was about fifteen miles west of downtown Knoxville, in the bedroom community of Farragut. Compared to Knoxville’s other bedroom communities, Farragut tended toward bedsheets with a higher thread count. Named for a Civil War hero born nearby, Admiral David (“Damn the torpedoes”) Farragut, the town was a sprawling collection of upscale shopping centers, golf courses, and subdivisions with names like Andover Place and Berkeley Park. There was no downtown; the “town center” consisted of a municipal building that housed a library branch and a county clerk’s office. Across the parking lot was a post office, a bank branch, and a couple of restaurants. Farragut wasn’t my idea of a town, but it seemed to suit a lot of people, because it was the fastest-growing part of Knox County.

  Jeff and his wife, Jenny, and their two boys, Tyler and Walker, lived at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, the sort of place where parents still let their kids roller-skate and ride bikes in the street. Maybe that was the appeal. Maybe in some ways Farragut was a town, or pieces of a town, the way towns used to be, back before the streets became places of peril.

  I saw a wisp of smoke curling up from behind their house, so I let myself in the wooden gate to the backyard and circled around to the patio. Jeff was just spreading out a glowing mound of charcoal briquettes. His hands were smudged with soot, and his face glistened with sweat.

  “Glad to see you haven’t gone over to the dark side and switched to gas,” I said.

  “Never
happen,” he said. “You taught me well, and I’ve eaten too many tasteless burgers at my neighbors’ houses.”

  “You know, of course, it’s the carcinogens that give the good smoky flavor,” I said.

  “Actually,” he said, “not necessarily. Apparently some researchers at Johns Hopkins did a study on this very thing. The carcinogens form when you let the fire flare up—for some reason that particular temperature causes a chemical reaction that creates the carcinogens. So you don’t want to cook the meat over open flame—just hot coals. Close the lid, hold in the smoke, keep the fire low, and everything’s okay.”

  “I’ll sleep better knowing this, son.”

  Jenny came out the back door with a platter of burgers. “Hey, Bill,” she said. I liked it that she called me “Bill” rather than “Dad” or some other in-law title; it allowed us to relate as equals.

  “Good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, too,” I said. I noticed their boys peering out the glass of the storm door. Tyler was seven, and Walker was five. Both were wearing the baseball uniforms they seemed to live in all summer long.

  Jenny followed my gaze. “Guys, come on out and see Grandpa Bill,” she called, a little too cheerily.

  They did as they were told, but they hesitated, and that hesitation nearly broke my heart. It had scared and confused them when I was charged with Jess Carter’s murder. Their friends had said cruel things to them, as children will do, about Grandpa the killer. A parent can do a lot of explaining, but it might still take years to restore the openness and easy trust my grandsons had once felt with me. By then, of course, they wouldn’t be five and seven anymore.

  Jenny set the burgers down on the patio table and came up to give me a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The warm greeting was partly for my sake, but partly for the boys as well—a message to them that yes, I was still their grandfather, and yes, I was someone safe to love.

  Jenny looked searchingly into my eyes, and this part, I knew, was just for the grown-ups. “How are you?” she said.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Mostly.”

  “I think about you all the time,” she said. “I’d give anything if I could undo all the things that went wrong last spring.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Sometimes I feel lonelier than I did before Jess—or maybe I just notice the loneliness more now. The trial starts next week, and I figure that’ll be hard. But maybe once it’s done, I’ll feel some closure. I want to hear sentence pronounced on him. And I want it to be a harsh one.”

  “Would you like us to be there when you testify?”

  I didn’t trust my voice to answer the question, so I just nodded.

  “Then we will,” she said. “You tell us when, and we’ll be there. And if there’s anything else you need, you call Jeff or you call me.”

  I nodded again.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “Dr. Brockton? This is Lynette Wilkins, at the Regional Forensic Center.”

  Lynette didn’t need to tell me who she was or where she worked; I’d heard her voice a thousand times or more—every time I dialed the morgue or popped in for a visit. The Regional Forensic Center and the Knox County Medical Examiner’s Office shared space in the morgue of UT Medical Center, located across the river and downstream from the stadium. There was also a custom-designed processing room—complete with steam-jacketed kettles and industrial-grade garbage disposals—where my graduate students and I could remove the last traces of tissue from skeletons after they’d been picked relatively clean by the bugs at the Body Farm. From fresh, warm gunshot victims to sun-bleached bones, the basement complex in the hospital dealt with them all.

  “Good morning, Lynette,” I said. “And how are you?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, although she didn’t actually sound fine. She sounded extremely nervous and formal—an odd combination, I thought, in a woman who had once, at a Christmas party, planted a memorable kiss on my mouth. Spiked punch could be blamed for most of that lapse in office decorum; still, our frequent conversations—in person and by phone—had been marked by the ease and casualness of comrades-in-arms, fellow soldiers in the trenches of gruesome accidents and grisly murders.

  “Dr. Garcia, the medical examiner, would like to speak with you,” she said, and as I pictured an unfamiliar M.E. sitting a few feet away from her, I understood why she didn’t sound like her usual self. “Could you hold on for just a moment?”

  “Sure, Lynette,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

  The line clicked, and I waited. Nothing. I waited some more. Still nothing. Then I heard a man’s voice say, “Ms. Wilkins, are you sure he’s there?” A pause followed, then, “I don’t think so.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  Another pause.

  “Mr. Brockton?”

  Now it was my turn to pause. “This is Bill Brockton,” I said.

  “Dr. Bill Brockton. How can I help you?”

  “This is Dr. Edelberto Garcia,” said a cool voice, whose careful emphasis was meant to let me know that not all doctors are created equal. His first name sounded elegant and aristocratic the way he pronounced it—“ay-del-BARE-toe”—but then I remembered a bit about Spanish pronunciations, and I realized that the English version of his name would be “Ethelbert,” and I nearly laughed. “I’ve been appointed by the commissioner of health to serve as director of the Regional Forensic Center.”

  “Sure,” I said, resisting the urge to add “Ethelbert” to my answer. “I had lunch with Jerry last week. He told me he’d hired you. Welcome to Knoxville.”

  “Thank you,” he said. If he noticed my first-name reference to Gerald Freeman, the health commissioner, he didn’t let on. I considered adding that six weeks earlier Jerry had shown me the files on the three finalists for the job, and had asked for my opinion. Garcia had been my second choice—and Jerry’s, too—but the strongest of the finalists had taken a job at a far higher salary in the M.E.’s office in New York City.

  “We’re currently investigating the death of a Knoxville woman whose burned body was found last week in her car,” he said. Again I nearly laughed out loud.

  “Why, yes,” I said, “I believe I heard something about that. Can I be of some assistance?”

  “I’m told by a police investigator, a Sergeant Evers, that you’ve done some—shall we say research?—that might be relevant.”

  “Ah, Sergeant Evers,” I said. “Good man, Evers. Dogged investigator. Fearsome interrogator.” I didn’t add that Evers had fearsomely interrogated me only a few months before and had arrested me on suspicion of homicide, in the death of Jess Carter, who had served a brief stint as acting M.E. here in Knoxville. Maybe Garcia already knew that; if he didn’t, he was the only person in a hundred-mile radius who didn’t. “If Sergeant Evers thinks my research might be relevant, far be it from me to disagree.” I could hear him weighing my words and my tone for the sarcasm I’d added to them, and I suspected he was about to respond by turning even more stuffy and condescending. No point getting into a pissing match with the new M.E., I decided. “Actually, Dr. Garcia, that research is pretty interesting. What we’ve done is compare fire-induced fractures in green bone—fleshed bone—with fractures in dry bone. We burned two cars containing cadavers and limbs from the immediate postmortem interval, as well as from one week and two weeks postmortem. No point going past two weeks in the summer—by then you’re down to bare, dry bone already.”

  He mulled this over briefly. “And have you documented your research results? Do you have something you could messenger over?”

  “Nothing in writing,” I said. “Got some burned bones I could messenger over.”

  “Thank you, but without some methodological context, I’m not sure—”

  “Hell, I’ll be the messenger, and I’ll give you the context,” I said. “I’m coming over that direction anyhow. I’ll bring a few of the bones and show you what it
is I’ll be writing up, soon as I get around to it. You can ask questions, and I can try to answer them. If any of it’s relevant, great. If it’s not, neither one of us has lost more than a few minutes. You want to take a look?”

  “Very well,” he said.

  Very well? I thought. Who says “Very well” anymore? And why does this guy have such a big broomstick up his ass? “Swell,” I said, then thought, Who the hell says “Swell” anymore, Brockton? Then I thought, Apparently I do. “I’ll be over there in about ten minutes. Looking forward to meeting you.”

  “I’ll see you then,” was all he said before hanging up.

  I selected half a dozen bones from the fiery nighttime experiment, then wrapped them in bubble wrap and laid them in one of the long boxes we used to store the specimens in the skeletal collection. As I headed down the hall that traced the curve of the stadium’s end zone, I passed the open door of Jorge Jimenez, a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology from Buenos Aires. Jorge’s name sounded anything but aristocratic, I realized, since the first syllable was pronounced like “whore.” I tapped on Jorge’s door with one knuckle. “Come in,” he said, not looking up from his computer screen. The screen showed a young couple doing what appeared to be the tango, but suddenly they spun apart and began break-dancing.

  “That’s an interesting dance,” I said. “I don’t believe I know that one.”

  “Ah, Dr. Brockton,” he said, looking up. “Sorry to be rude. This is actually research. Did you know that in Buenos Aires, where this dance video was shot, one out of every twenty teenagers has posted a video on YouTube?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “What’s U-2?” It didn’t sound like he was talking about a Cold War spy plane or a rock band.

  “Not U-2. YouTube.” He scrawled it on a piece of paper for me. “An Internet site where people post videos they’ve made. Very popular with young people. Like MySpace.”

  “Your space? You have a Web site that’s popular with kids?”