The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  “So you want me to do a forensic analysis on this set of cremains?”

  “Cremains?” He snorted. “Who the hell came up with ‘cremains’?”

  “Not me,” I said. “Some funeral director, probably. Easier to say than ‘cremated human remains,’ I reckon.”

  “Cornier, too,” he said. “Listen, I’ll pay your hourly expert-witness rate, for however many hours you need to spend on this.” My rate was two hundred dollars an hour; that meant I’d need to poke around in the cremains for 250 hours to recoup the fifty thousand dollars I’d forked over to Grease a few months earlier. I didn’t want to spend 250 hours breathing the dust of Aunt Jean, but I was intrigued by the case—and impressed that the lawyer had zeroed in on the puzzling things in the mixture.

  “I’ll find out everything I can,” I said.

  “Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I owe you.”

  “Not yet,” I said, “but you will.”

  He laughed. “I guess I’d better sell one of the Bentleys,” he said, but we both knew that my bill wouldn’t amount to a fraction of what I’d paid Burt to defend me. He gave me a few more details—his aunt’s date of death, the name of the funeral home and the crematorium, and the phone number of his Uncle Edgar, who lived in Polk County—then signed off, saying “’Preciate you, Doc.”

  I dialed the extension for the bone lab, tucked beneath the other end of the stadium, a five-minute walk through curving hallways along the base of the enormous ellipse. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda. Can I help you?”

  “I sure hope so,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s just you.”

  “Try to contain your enthusiasm,” I said.

  “Oh, ex-cuse me,” she gushed. “Dr. Brockton, how may I be of assistance?”

  “That’s more like it,” I said. “Soon as you finish genuflecting, could I trouble you to dig up the melting point of titanium?”

  “I live to serve,” she said. “Elemental or alloy?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I heard the rapid clatter of keystrokes. “Well, if you’re talking pure titanium metal,” she said, “the melting point is a toasty nineteen hundred and thirty-three. That’s on the Kelvin scale, which is”—clatterclatterCLATTERclatter—“three thousand and change, Fahrenheit.”

  “How’d you find that so fast?”

  “The wonders of Google,” she said. “Google also lives to serve.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Google, YouTube, MySpace—I feel like a dinosaur, Miranda.”

  “Well, admitting you have a problem is the first step toward change,” she said. “So is that it? You just got curious about the properties of titanium?”

  “No, actually, what I’m wondering about is the melting point of artificial knees.”

  I heard another flurry of keystrokes. “Looks like most orthopedic implants are made of titanium alloy, cobalt chromium steel, or stainless steel. Also oxidized zirconium—sort of a cross between a metal and ceramic—which is harder than metal but tougher than ceramic.” More keystrokes. “The most common material seems to be titanium-662, though, an alloy of titanium, aluminum, and vanadium, plus a pinch of this and a dash of that.”

  “Vanadium? Is that really an element, or are you just making that up?”

  “Making it up? Moi? You cut me to the quick. That would be a violation of the Research Slave Code of Ethics. Besides, if I were going to make up an element, don’t you think I could come up with something better than ‘vanadium’? I think ‘mirandium’ has a nice ring, don’t you? And ‘loveladium’ rolls trippingly off the tongue, too.”

  “What was I thinking? You’re right,” I said. “The periodic table really should revolve around you.”

  “I’ll let the implication that I’m egocentric pass for the moment, because I’m so delighted to be doing your grunt work. Let’s see, titanium-662…. Melting point is…durn it…a closely guarded military secret, it would appear. Not really, but I’m not getting any Google hits that look like the answer. You want me to call some equally downtrodden peon in Engineering?”

  “Nah, hold off for now,” I said. “I wouldn’t think the alloy’s melting point would be a whole lot lower.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “More often than I’d like,” I said.

  “Ha, ha. I think if you’re running a high enough fever to melt your knees, you’re long since toasted.”

  “Toasted is right,” I said. “The question is, could a cremation furnace melt a pair of knee implants?”

  “I’d say it depends how hot the furnace gets.”

  “Really? Amazing. Do the folks who give out the MacArthur genius grants know about you?”

  “Don’t get smart with me, boss.”

  “Or else?”

  “Or else I’ll hang up.”

  “Ooh,” I said, “now you’re really scaring me.”

  I laughed when the line went dead. I was pretty sure she was laughing, too.

  My next call was to Norman Witherspoon, a Knoxville funeral director who’d sent me a half dozen or so corpses during the past decade—people who’d wanted their bodies donated to science but who hadn’t made the arrangements before dying. “Norm, what do you do when somebody asks to be cremated?”

  “I say, ‘Sorry, I have to wait until you’re dead.’”

  “Everybody’s a comedian,” I said. “Let me rephrase the question. Norm, where do you send bodies to be cremated?”

  “East Tennessee Cremation Services,” he said. “Out near the airport. In the Rockford industrial park, off Alcoa Highway.”

  “I’ve got a case involving cremated remains. You reckon East Tennessee Cremation would let me come look at their equipment and ask a few questions?”

  “Long as the case doesn’t involve them. Does it?”

  “No,” I said. “A place down in the northwest part of Georgia—Trinity Crematorium.”

  “Oh, that place.”

  “Why do you say ‘that place’?”

  “Well, that’s where funeral homes send cremations if they want to save a few bucks or a little time.”

  “How many bucks is ‘a few’?”

  “Not too many—about a hundred per cremation. We handle about sixty cremation requests a year, so we’d save about six thousand dollars if we switched. But if you factor in Trinity’s pickup and drop-off, the savings would be bigger.”

  “How so?”

  “We have to take the bodies out to East Tennessee Cremation, and then we have to go pick them up, either at the end of the day or sometime the next day. So that’s a hundred and twenty roundtrips. We’re only about fifteen miles from there, so it’s not a huge problem, but it can get complicated, especially if we have several burials going on at the same time, too. Trinity picks up the bodies and then returns the cremains, and that can save a lot of time. They courted us pretty hard, and we thought about switching, but in the end we decided to stick with East Tennessee Cremation.”

  “Because?”

  “I’ve known the folks there for twenty years. They do a good job, they keep their facility spotless, and they’re extremely professional.”

  “Unlike the folks at that Georgia place?”

  He laughed. “You sound like some fast-talking courtroom lawyer now. You’ve been spending way too much time being cross-examined. Look, I don’t know anything bad about them. But I don’t know anything great about them either. What it comes down to is, I don’t want to stop doing business with people I know and like, just for the sake of a hundred bucks here and there.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “No further questions at this time. Oh, except the name and number of the person I should call at the place over in Alcoa?”

  “EAST TENNESSEE CREMATION.” The woman who answered sounded slightly out of breath, as if she’d had to dash for the phone.

  “Is this Helen Taylor?”

  “Yes. Can I help you?”

  I introduced myself and began a convoluted explanation of why I was calling.


  “Norm Witherspoon told me you’d probably be calling,” she said, as soon as I gave her an opening. “I heard you lecture a few years ago at the Tennessee Association of Funeral Directors. You were showing pictures of how a body decays if the embalming job’s not good. You’re welcome to come out anytime.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was extending the welcome in spite of my criticisms or because of them. Either way, I was quick to accept the invitation. “When would be a good time to visit?”

  “Up to you. I’m here Monday through Friday, eight A.M. to five P.M. We’ve got three cremations scheduled today, so pretty much anytime you come, I’ll be putting somebody in, taking ’em out, or running them through the processor.”

  “Sounds like they’re getting their money’s worth from you,” I said. “No wonder you sounded winded when you answered the phone.”

  “There’s not a lot of downtime, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’m just finishing one now, and I thought I’d start the next one right after lunch.”

  I checked my watch; I’d just eaten a sandwich at my desk, but I tended to eat early. It was not quite eleven-thirty.

  “All right if I come on over in about an hour?”

  “I’ll be looking for you.” She gave me directions, and after I’d gone through the morning’s mail, I headed out. The mail gave me an idea, so on the way I made a quick stop by Peggy’s. She wasn’t in, luckily, because I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have let me borrow her postage scale if she’d known what I planned to use it for.

  CHAPTER 7

  FROM THE STADIUM I HEADED DOWNSTREAM ALONG Neyland Drive, past the veterinary school and under the Alcoa Highway bridge. The bridge pilings were marked with horizontal lines at one-foot intervals, showing towboat pilots how much clearance they had between the waterline and the bottom of the bridge. Why are they called towboats, I wondered, when they move the barges by pushing, not pulling? Between the heat and the drought, the river was down as low as I’d ever seen it in summer. That meant there was plenty of clearance overhead—fifty-seven feet, according to the markings, which was two feet more than usual. But two feet more clearance overhead also meant two feet less water underneath. That wasn’t a worry here, where the river was narrow and the channel deep, but a few miles downstream the river spread into broad shallows, where even a fishing boat risked a mangled prop if it strayed from the center of the navigation channel. We need rain, I thought, and a hell of a cold front.

  At the intersection of Neyland and Kingston Pike, I turned right, then also took the next right, onto the ramp for Alcoa Highway southbound. Crossing the high concrete bridge that I’d passed beneath only a moment before, I looked downriver, where the mansions of Sequoyah Hills lined the right-hand bank. I lived in Sequoyah, but my house—tucked into an incongruously modest little block of bungalows and ranchers—was probably worth one-tenth the price of these riverfront villas. I’d had the chance, when I first started teaching at UT, to buy one of the big houses, but the price—fifty-five thousand dollars—seemed astronomical at the time, at least on a professor’s salary. Twenty years later that house was worth at least a million, maybe more. The ones lining the waterfront were even more expensive. “Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about barge traffic washing away my yard,” I said out loud, then laughed at myself. “Okay, Brockton, not only are you talking to yourself, but what you’re saying is a total crock.”

  UT Hospital and the hills behind the Body Farm reared up on my left. On my right a UT cattle farm—green pastures dotted with black-and-white Holsteins—nestled in the big bend of the river. It was the place where the Tennessee first curved southward, starting its serpentine slide toward the Gulf of Mexico, sixteen hundred meandering miles away.

  Acting on a sudden impulse, I veered off at the Cherokee Trail exit—the exit for the medical center—and threaded under the highway and around to the back corner of the hospital employees’ parking lot. We’d received a donated body several weeks before, and I remembered a note in the chart indicating that the donor—a man in his seventies—had undergone double knee replacement within the past two years. That made his knees newer than any I’d dug out of the boxes in the skeletal collection, and I had a sudden hankering to see them.

  I found him just off the main trail curving up into the woods and toward the river. He lay on his back near a fallen tree trunk, his skull detached and slightly downhill from his postcranial skeleton. A camera tripod stood nearby, with a black plastic mailbox fastened incongruously to the top. The mailbox was an improvised housing for a night-vision camera; the camera, sheltered by the weatherproof plastic, was connected to a motion sensor, so that when nocturnal carnivores—raccoons and opossums, mainly—came foraging, we could capture their feeding habits. The project was a Ph.D. candidate’s dissertation research, and I’d marveled over some of the photos, which showed cuddly raccoons reaching deep into body cavities to pluck out special delicacies. In the cold, clear light of dawn—actually the scorching, hazy light of high noon—I could see gnaw marks on the cheekbones, the hands, and the feet. But I was more interested at the moment in the hingelike hardware installed where the knees had once been.

  I’d had the opportunity during my teaching career to witness two orthopedic surgeries—a hip replacement and a cervical-spine fusion—and I’d come away from both procedures marveling at the combination of precise control and bloody brute force. The neck surgery in particular was an astonishingly choreographed performance by a neurosurgeon and an orthopedist. First they yanked and gouged out three crumbling disks from the patient’s neck, at times reaming within a millimeter of the spinal cord; next they tapped pegs of precisely machined cadaver bone into place between the sagging vertebrae; finally they screwed an arched titanium bracket onto the front of the neck, to buttress the spine while the bones knitted together. As the pair of surgeons drilled and tapped and bolted, I couldn’t help comparing them to cabinetmakers. The hip replacement by comparison was heavy carpentry—sawing off the proximal end of the femur, drilling a hole down into the shaft, and then pounding the stem of the metal prosthesis into the opening.

  The body on the hillside—body 67–07, the sixty-seventh donated body of the year 2007—was almost entirely skeletonized after three weeks of decomposition. The metallic knees gleamed dully; faint saw marks were still visible where the arthritic joints had been cut away and removed from his legs. Remarkable, I thought, that people can walk again after having their knees chopped out. “Chopped” was probably not how this man’s surgeon had described the procedure, but as I studied the trauma that had been dealt to the bones, the drastic verb seemed to fit.

  My reverie was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter buzzing low over the treetops. The air ambulances of LifeStar often passed directly over the Body Farm on their way to and from the hospital’s helipad, but this chopper, I realized, wasn’t flying a typical approach. The pitch of the rotor blades seemed steep and urgent, and the aircraft wheeled and banked abruptly, repeatedly. A siren—then two, then more—screamed toward the hospital, and a second helicopter joined the cacophony.

  Over the rising din I suddenly heard my name. “Dr. Brockton! Dr. B., where are you?” It was Miranda, and as she called me, I heard something I’d never expected to hear from Miranda Lovelady: I heard fear.

  “Bill!” shouted a man’s voice, and I saw Art Bohanan running toward me, Miranda two steps behind. Art’s face was flushed, his eyes were as focused as lasers, and his weapon was drawn.

  “What on earth?!”

  Art said only a few words, but when I heard the fourth one, I felt my knees go weak.

  “Garland Hamilton just escaped,” he said.

  CHAPTER 8

  ART GRABBED ONE OF MY ARMS AND MIRANDA grabbed the other, and they practically dragged me down the hill, through the clearing, and out the gate of the Body Farm. Miranda paused just long enough to close the gates and snap the padlocks shut, while Art led me to my truck, peering inside and even underneath before allowing me to
get in.

  Once Miranda was in her car, Art hustled into his unmarked sedan, hit the siren, and switched on the blue lights hidden inside the grille. With Miranda’s Jetta in the rear, Art led us out of the hospital complex in a haze of smoking tires. As we careened onto Cherokee Trail, headed for Alcoa Highway, half a dozen police vehicles—KPD, Knox County Sheriff’s Office, and Tennessee Highway Patrol—screamed past in the opposite direction.

  Five minutes later Art, Miranda, and I surveyed one another glumly across my desk beneath Neyland Stadium. “How did this happen?” I said. “Where? When? With his trial coming up, I’d have thought Hamilton would be watched like a hawk.”

  Art sighed. “You and me both.”

  “Was he in the Knox County Detention Center? Hell, they’ve got cameras by the hundreds out there—I don’t see how a prisoner could pick his nose without three cameras recording the boogers for posterity.”

  He shook his head. “The reason we hustled you away from the Farm so fast is that he was only a stone’s throw away when he escaped.” I stared at Art uncomprehendingly. “He was in the ER at UT Hospital. They’d rushed him there after he went into convulsions,” Art said. “Or appeared to go into convulsions. As they were wheeling him into the ER, he jumped off the gurney and ran into a stairwell.”

  “Damn it,” I said, “that’s the worst possible place for him to get loose. He knows every nook and cranny of that hospital. If they didn’t have it locked down in sixty seconds, he could have taken a hundred ways out.”

  “They didn’t have it locked down in sixty seconds,” Art said.

  I didn’t need him to tell me that. The chorus of helicopter rotors and police sirens told me Hamilton had gotten away. What I didn’t know was where he’d go and what he’d do: lie low, slip away, or try again to kill me?

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, I was still in shock. I’d spent a bad night, followed by a dismal day and an even more wretched night. Every sudden noise made me jump, and the only thing worse than the sound of the phone ringing was the sound of it not ringing—the sound of Hamilton slipping silently away.