Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel bf-2

by Jefferson Bass

  Owen had watched his computer screen impassively as I read the threats, but he, too, looked relieved to have put the distasteful task behind us. He closed the computer program he’d used to record my voice, unplugged the microphone, and coiled the cable neatly. “Okay, that’s out of the way,” he said. “Now let’s see what we can see on the video.”

  DeVriess punched the intercom button on a phone that had been shoved precariously close to one edge of the table. “Chloe, would you mind showing the officer back to the conference room? Thank you.” He turned to Thomas. “Tell us a little about the system,” he said. He eyed Thomas’s clip-on tie. “But only a little.”

  If he felt insulted, Thomas didn’t show it. “This is a turnkey system called dTective,” he said, “from a company called Ocean Systems. They start with an Avid video editing system-the thing most TV shows are cut together on-and they develop hardware and software tools to customize it for forensic work. They’ve sold well over a thousand of these to police departments all over North America, including KPD, here in Knoxville. Most of those are desktop or rack-mounted systems. They call this version the ‘Luggable’; I call it the ‘Hernia-Maker.’” So he had a sense of humor. I liked that.

  Chloe appeared in the doorway and ushered in a uniformed officer who was carry ing a videotape case in one hand. Thomas reached out a hand for the tape case; the officer frowned, then handed it over grudgingly.

  Thomas opened the case and studied it. “And this is the original tape, right?”

  “Right,” said Burt, as if the police officer weren’t even there. “You wouldn’t believe how hard I had to fight to get this. The DA’s office and KDP insisted you could work with a copy. I told them the original was the best evidence, and reminded them we’re legally entitled to the best evidence.”

  He nodded. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll show you why in a minute.” He clicked the computer’s mouse, and the screen lit up. I had expected it to show a TV-like image from the UT surveillance camera, but instead it was a normal Windows screen, just like on my computer, except that it had a lot more program icons on it than my machine’s handful, and most of these looked unfamiliar. He clicked on one of the icons, and the screen filled with several horizontal bands, and a pair of dark circles that looked a bit like maps of the night sky, and a rectangle several inches square. He reached out a hand and Burt gave him the tape case, which he flipped open. He looked at one edge of the tape and frowned, then used a thumbnail to pry out a small tab of black plastic.

  “Hey,” barked the officer, “what the fuck are you doing?”

  “That’s the RECORD tab,” Thomas said. “If you want to make sure the tape doesn’t accidentally get erased or recorded over, you have to remove that tab. Your video guy should have done that the moment he got the tape.” He popped the tape into the machine, then hit PLAY. The small rectangle on his screen turned blue, with numerals, just like my television at home did when I put a tape into the VCR. Then the images began, a series of seemingly unrelated images, each on-screen for a fraction of a second, like a visual burst of machine-gun fire. After a few seconds, though, I detected a pattern. The images cycled past in a regular sequence, which I gradually recognized as hospital entrances, parking garages, and-the one that most caught my eye-the Body Farm’s gate. It was as if the pages of a dozen different books had been shuffled together at the book bindery, and to follow one story, you’d have to read one page, then flip forward ten or twelve pages to pick up the thread again. Suddenly my truck flashed past a couple of times, and I lunged toward the VCR’s controls to hit PAUSE. Thomas reached over and batted away my hand.

  “Don’t touch that,” he snapped. “Do not touch that.” The officer grabbed my arm and pulled me back several feet.

  “I just wanted to pause it on the truck,” I said.

  “Do not touch the controls,” Thomas said. “Every time you start or stop or pause a tape, you damage it. Do it enough times, all you’re left with is snow.” He glanced in Burt’s direction. “This is one reason I hate having clients in the room,” he said. “It always complicates things.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again. Promise. I just didn’t know.”

  “Okay,” he said grudgingly, then-less grudgingly-“Okay, but you’re on probation.” It sounded like maybe I wouldn’t get kicked out after all.

  “Well,” I said, “that sure beats death row.”

  He snorted, and Burt laughed; the cop frowned. “We’ll look at everything a frame at a time in a minute,” Thomas said. “This pass, I’m just reviewing the tape, and optimizing the levels. Then we’ll digitize it-load it into the computer’s hard drive-and once we’ve done that, we can pause, or stop and start, as many times as we want without hurting anything. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I am sorry.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, cops make that mistake all the time,” he said with an apologetic glance at the officer. “They get to the spot on a tape where an incident occurs-a convenience store shooting or a bank robbery-and they stop and start and rewind and slo-mo, and by the time the case comes to trial, the tape’s useless. I make two passes, three at the most, without ever stopping the tape anywhere in the event sequence.”

  As he talked and the images strobed by, he slid and clicked the mouse rapidly, and the computer’s cursor flitted from one pull-down menu to another. As it did, I noticed slight changes in some of the images flickering past-dark images got brighter, washed-out images got toned down, and some colors seemed to fade while details got crisper in shades of gray. After a few minutes, the dark, nighttime shots gave way to sunlit images, and I noticed police vehicles and uniformed cops at the Body Farm. Thomas looked at Burt and asked, “We’re past the event sequence now?” Burt nodded. Thomas hit STOP and rewound the tape to the beginning, then hit PLAY again.

  “How are we going to tell anything meaningful from that jumble of images?” I asked as they flashed past again. “It looks like they wired a whole bunch of cameras to one VCR.”

  “That’s exactly what they did,” he said. “It’s called multiplexing. Saves a lot of money on recording decks and tape. In an ideal world, you’d have a separate tape for each camera, recording in real time, and you’d archive all the tapes. But if you did, you’d end up with seventy thousand tapes a year.”

  “That’s a lot of tapes,” I conceded.

  “A video camera records at thirty frames a second, and it looks like they have sixteen cameras, so in this setup, each camera grabs one frame of video about every half second. Not a bad compromise.”

  “But everything’s all jumbled up,” I said.

  “Patience, my friend,” he said. “There’s a tool in dTective called ‘Deplex’ that demultiplexes the feeds-separates them, like unraveling a rope into individual strands-so we can play the video from one camera at a time.”

  After he’d recorded the entire nighttime sequence, he stopped and rewound the tape once more, then ejected it, tucked it back into its case, and handed it to the police officer. “Okay, we’re done,” he said. “Thanks very much.” The officer nodded; he hesitated, almost as if hoping to be asked to stay, then turned and left.

  “You’re done?” I asked. “But we haven’t looked at anything yet.”

  “I just meant I’m through digitizing the original,” Thomas said. “Now we’ll work with this digital copy. And if something terrible happens as we’re working with it, all we lose is a copy, not the original.”

  “How come UT’s still recording on videotape,” I asked, “given that even home video cameras are starting to record on memory cards and hard drives?”

  “Storage space and data quality,” he said. “One hour of images from these cameras would require seventy-two gigabytes of storage. Multiply that times twenty-four hours in a day, times thirty days in a month, and pretty soon you’d need a supercomputer to store it all. You can save space by compressing the images, but when you compress, you lose a lot of the details. To us
e a nontechnical analogy, the image quality goes from being more like a glossy photographic print to being more like a newspaper photo, which turns into a grainy collection of dots if you look at it closely. More and more surveillance systems are going to digital,” he acknowledged, “but nearly all the big Las Vegas casinos-which spend millions on security-still think tape is better.” He did more clicking, and sixteen postage-stamp-sized images came up on the monitor. “Okay, there are the sixteen camera angles, separated by the deplexer. Looks like it’s camera nine that we’re interested in.” He clicked on the thumbnail showing the Body Farm’s gate, illuminated by the streetlights in the parking lot, and that image enlarged until it filled about half the screen.

  He scrolled forward, and as a few cars flitted past the edge of the picture, I saw that the deplexer had indeed plucked this one strand of footage from the multitude of others. “That’s amazing,” I said. “How does it do that?”

  Owen looked over his shoulder at me. “There’s a nerdy technical term for it,” he said with a twitchy smile. “We call it ‘magic.’”

  Suddenly a pickup entered the frame and nosed toward the Body Farm gate. He paused, and as I took in the truck’s profile-a bronze General Motors pickup with a matching camper shell-I felt the floor drop from beneath me. “Oh Jesus,” I breathed. “How in bloody hell…” Evers had told me the tape showed my truck, but until this moment, I had dared to hope he was wrong.

  The driver’s door opened, and all three of us leaned toward the screen. The atmosphere in the room was as charged as the storm crackling outside the office tower, and my heart had crawled so far up my throat I could almost feel it on the back of my tongue. Was I about to see my own face on the camera? By this point, I halfway expected that.

  Instead, I saw no one’s face. The man-at least, it appeared to be a man-was wearing a cap, pulled low over his eyes. Dark pants, a light-colored shirt. His head was bent down and turned at an odd angle. “Pause it,” I said, and I devoured the image. “He knows,” I said. “He knows there’s a camera. He even knows where it is. Look how he’s careful to keep from turning his face toward us.”

  This realization thrilled me. For the first time since Jess’s death, I felt something shift subtly; I felt I had something to work with; a tiny piece of the puzzle. I wasn’t completely powerless any longer. “You son of a bitch,” I said to this man who had killed Jess Carter and set me up. “You sorry son of a bitch. I am coming after you.”

  I spun my index finger at Thomas and he started the footage again. The man walked up to the chain-link gate and fumbled with the lock. Then he swung the gate open a foot or two and stepped toward the inner, wooden gate. “He’s got keys,” I said. “That bastard has a set of keys. Who the hell is that?” In my mind, I began reviewing every male who had been issued keys to the facility over the past few years, since the last lock change. There were only a handful-a couple of faculty members and four or five grad students-and it seemed inconceivable that any of them could have killed Jess and laid the blame at my feet.

  Suddenly an idea hit me with the force of an electric shock. “Go back, go back,” I said. “Let me see that again.” This time, I wasn’t looking for the face; this time, I was looking for breasts, for female hips, a female gait. Could we be seeing Miranda? She had keys to the facility and even to my truck, and she had once, on a case several months ago, seemed jealous of Jess. Had that jealousy festered into something more sinister? I couldn’t believe it, but neither could I ignore the possibility. As I studied the figure’s silhouette and gait, I was relieved and deeply ashamed to see that both were unambiguously male.

  “What is it?” Burt asked. “Did you see something?”

  “No,” I said. “I was afraid I might. I was wrong.”

  The man climbed back into the truck and backed out of the frame. “Where’s he going?” Burt asked.

  “He parked too close to the gate,” I said. “He had to back up so he could open it. I would never make that mistake.” Neither would Miranda, who drove into the gate more often than I did these days.

  “Good,” said Burt. “I’ll be sure to ask you about that on the witness stand.”

  “But won’t the DA say that I was just trying to look like I wasn’t me?”

  “Maybe,” Burt said, “but if you were smart enough to act dumb about this, wouldn’t you be smart enough not to drive your own damn vehicle?”

  “Wait a minute,” I laughed, “you’ve already got me confused.”

  He smiled and took a bow. “Confusion, my friend, is only a hop, skip, and a vote away from reasonable doubt.”

  The man walked back into the frame, again keeping his head down and turned slightly to the right, away from the camera. He swung the chain-link gate outward and the wooden gate inward, then walked back to the truck and idled through the gate. Then the wooden gate closed behind him. Burt pointed to the time code in the upper right corner of the screen; it read 5:03 A.M. “Pretty shrewd,” he said. “Early enough that nobody else is out and about yet.”

  “The hospital shift change isn’t till seven,” I agreed.

  “But it’s close enough to daybreak so the guy watching the camera feeds will figure that crazy Dr. Brockton is up really early today. Those guys all know what your truck looks like, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “They’ve seen me drive in there hundreds of times. Hell, I’ve given every campus cop and hospital security guard a tour of the place.”

  “And this guy knows that somehow,” Burt said. “Knows they know your truck.”

  Owen scrolled forward in the clip until the man opened the wooden gate and pulled out. This time, he pulled far enough forward to clear the chain-link gate. As he closed both gates behind him, I studied the truck more closely. This time it was angled slightly down the parking lot, slightly downhill, so more of its roof was exposed. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Stop.”

  “What?” Burt asked.

  “Look at the roof of the cab.”

  “What about it?”

  “What’s that dark patch?”

  Owen worked his mouse, cranking up the brightness and doubling the size of the image. “It’s a moonroof,” he said.

  I laughed. Wildly. Hysterically.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Burt.

  “My truck…doesn’t have…a roonmoof,” I gasped. “A moonroof.”

  “You’re sure?” said Burt.

  “Sure I’m sure. It was an option, but it cost an extra five hundred bucks, and I was too damn cheap.”

  Burt, Thomas, and I exchanged high fives.

  “Oh God, I feel better,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Burt. “I actually believe you now.”

  “You didn’t before? You acted like you did.”

  “It’s a courtesy thing,” he said. “My clients always claim they’re innocent. I aways pretend to believe them. It’s more convenient all the way around. Not many of them are telling the truth.” He looked me in the eye. “Doc, I’m really glad you’re one of the exceptions.”

  Owen cleared his throat. “Are we through bonding? Shall we look at the rest of this?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s see what else we can see.” I could feel excitement stirring, the same excitement I often felt at death scenes whenever I began finding clues in decaying flesh and damaged bones.

  What we saw was another handful of details that would clearly refute the prosecution’s claim that this was my truck. The wheels had five spokes; mine, I knew-I had recently had to replace one-had six spokes. One headlight angled crazily down and toward the right. “That’s good,” said Thomas. “Headlight spray patterns are as distinctive as fingerprints. Unless yours are misaligned in that same way, that’s very persuasive. And if we can find a truck like this, with a headlight spray like this, we’ve nailed it.”

  “Even if we can’t,” said Burt, “we can get footage of the Doc’s truck in that same spot at night and show how his headlights differ, right? And show he’s got no moonroof?
”

  “Right,” said Thomas. “This will blow the jurors away. Jurors love this shit. This is nearly as good as CSI.”

  I no longer begrudged Thomas his $3,000 a day. He had earned it just now, I figured, and then some. In fact, he’d earned every damn cent I had forked over to Burt DeVriess so far. “Will you tell all this to Evers and the DA, or wait and spring it at the trial?” I asked Burt.

  “Actually, I’ll file a motion to dismiss as soon as I get Owen’s report,” he said. “We’ll get some good press. But the judge won’t dismiss the case. Too much other evidence. No judge in his right mind would dismiss a case against a guy whose bed is drenched in his dead lover’s blood.” He shook his head. “A shame those sheets didn’t just disappear.”

  “I play by the rules,” I said. And then I thought of something else. “This guy knows that, too. He was counting on that. Counting on the fact that I’d call the cops when I found the sheets. Giving me the rope he knew I’d use to hang myself.”

  “Then that tells us even more about him,” Burt said. “Maybe a name will pop into your head in the wee small hours. Maybe Evers will have another, friendlier chat with us. Maybe he’ll start asking and thinking about who else might have done this. Start casting his net a little wider.”

  Burt clapped Thomas on the shoulder; Thomas flinched, either from the force of it or from the violation of his boundaries. “Okay, I think we’re done for now,” Burt said. “How soon can you send me that report?”

  “I’ll write it on the plane and e-mail it to you to night. That soon enough?”

  “Yeah, that’ll do; thanks. Chloe will be in touch once we have a trial date. I’m gonna go start drafting that motion.” As he left the conference room, Burt yanked up the blinds, flooding the room with light. It was that scrubbed version of sunlight that follows a hard spring storm. I took it as a good omen.