The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

  Vickery removed the cigar, studying the damp, bitten end as if it might contain some guidance. “So we’ve got a Johnny or a Janie Doe, teenager or less. What more can you tell from the skull? Any idea how this kid died?”

  “We were just about to get to that,” I said. I took the skull back from Angie and pointed to the left cheek. “You can see that the zygomatic arch, which connects the cheekbone to the temporal bone, has been gnawed off. There are fresh chew marks at both ends of the arch.” Angie and Vickery both leaned in to peer at the damage. “Now look at the right cheek. What do you see?”

  “The arch is missing there, too,” said Vickery. “But it doesn’t look like Fido’s to blame for that.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The right zygomatic arch wasn’t chewed. It was snapped.”

  “And it’s darker than the chew marks,” Angie observed.

  “And what do you suppose that means?”

  “It happened a while back?” I nodded but kept quiet, to encourage her to finish the thought. “At the time of death?”

  “Yes. Probably. More or less,” I said. “It’s stained the same color as the rest of the skull. That means the bone was already broken when the soft tissue began decomposing. But see how the edges of this break are a little less jagged than the edges of the other zygomatic arch, the one the dog snapped? It’s possible that this break was already beginning to heal before the kid died.”

  Vickery frowned, causing his cigar to twitch in his mouth. “What does that tell you about the timing of the injury? Can you be any more specific?”

  “Not much more specific,” I answered. “Antemortem or perimortem—before death, or right around the time of death.”

  Vickery nibbled on his cigar. “Couldn’t it have happened sometime afterward? Like, when the body was buried or dumped out of a car or whatever?”

  “Never say never,” I answered. “But I’m pretty sure this fracture occurred days or even weeks before death. And I’m pretty sure the other fracture was the fatal one.”

  Angie and Vickery both looked down at the skull, then up at me. Angie spoke first. “What other fracture?”

  “This one,” I said, tracing a thin line that angled up the skull from just above the left ear, up through the temporal bone and into the parietal, which formed the top of the cranial vault. I’d rubbed a thumbnail over the line; the break in the surface was so subtle I could barely feel it, but it was there, and it showed no signs of healing, so I knew that it had occurred at or near the time of death.

  Vickery spoke through cigar-clamping teeth. “So it’s likely, or at least possible, that this kid was murdered?” I nodded. “May I?”

  “Sure.” Before I had a chance to add “but you might want gloves,” he took the skull from me and raised it close to his face, his eyes ranging up and down the fine, dark crack. He rotated it, scrutinizing the crack from all angles; he tried peering through the eye orbits to see the inner surface of the cranial vault, but the openings were too small.

  He handed the skull back to me, and took his cigar out of his mouth. “Eww,” said Angie. Vickery gave her a puzzled look, then followed her gaze down to the cigar he now held between contaminated fingers.

  “Eww,” he echoed. “I hate it when I do that.” He tossed the cigar into a trash can, then washed his hands with sanitizer from a pump dispenser mounted on the wall beside the door. “No offense, Doc,” he began, pointing at the fracture, “but this doesn’t look all that bad to me. I mean, it’s not like the skull’s bashed in. You certain this would be enough to kill him?”

  I shrugged. “Certain, no; confident, yes. A defense lawyer could probably hire another anthropologist or a pathologist to disagree in court. But on the inside of the skull, right about here”—with my pinky, I traced a line that crossed the fracture at its midpoint—“runs the middle meningeal artery. The fracture could have ruptured that artery, causing a cerebral hemorrhage. Obviously something killed this kid, and my money’s on this fracture.”

  Vickery fished a tan leather case from an inside coat pocket and extracted a fresh cigar. “Okay, I’ll buy it. For now. Until we find bullet-riddled bones or a knife in the ribs.” He unwrapped the cigar, tossed the cellophane in the trash, and began gnawing on the end of the replacement.

  “Mind if I ask you something, Agent Vickery?”

  “I do if you call me ‘Agent Vickery.’ I don’t if you call me ‘Stu.’ ”

  “Okay, Stu. Do you ever light ’em? The cigars?”

  “Never. And it’s not just because every place has banned smoking. Truth is, I hate the smell of cigar smoke. But I like the smell of cured tobacco. Like the flavor, too, in small doses.” He gave the cigar an appreciative chomp. “But chewing tobacco—doing dip—that is one nasty habit.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me about that,” I said, thinking back to my close Copenhagen encounter of the nausea-inducing kind. I chose not to point out that Stu had a thin line of brownish drool trickling from the corner of his mouth.

  It’s possible he noticed me looking at it, or maybe he simply felt a tickle on his chin; in any event, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed. “So,” he said to Angie, “did you ask him yet?”

  Angie turned red. Silence hung like a soap bubble in the air, so I popped it. “Ask me what?”

  “Um . . .” She hesitated. “Ask if you’d consult with us on this case.”

  “Which case? This case?” I raised the skull into the center of the triangular space defined by the three of us. Angie nodded. “Do you mean in a bigger way? More than a take-a-quick-look sort of way?” She nodded again. “Don’t you have forensic anthropologists in Florida who can help you with this?”

  She looked sheepish. “We’re a little shorthanded right now.”

  “What about Tony Falsetti,” I said, “over in Gainesville? Doesn’t he do a lot of work for FDLE?” Tony, who was a Knoxville native and a fine forensic anthropologist, had been hired some years ago to teach at the University of Florida. My impression was that his lab at UF worked with Florida investigators in the same way my own lab consulted with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and other agencies.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “To Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia. I sent him an e-mail, and he wrote me back from Sarajevo. He’s working on a huge project to identify people killed in the Balkan civil war. They’re searching for his replacement, but they haven’t filled the position yet.”

  I named another former student, now teaching in Tampa, at the University of South Florida. “Did you try her? I think she consults on forensic cases.”

  “She’s in Africa all month,” said Angie. “Teaching Nigerian medical students about skeletal trauma.”

  “Nigeria? Well, good for her. Sounds like I need to keep better tabs on our graduates, though. Maybe I should put tracking collars on them.”

  “Ha,” said Vickery. “While you’re at it, could you put shock collars on a few of my colleagues?”

  I laughed, and Angie laughed, too, which did my heart good. “So,” she said, “any chance we could beg, borrow, or steal an hour or so more of your expertise before I put you on your flight back to Knoxville?”

  I pulled out my pocket calendar and took a look. I’d blocked out the next two weeks to write a journal article—an account of an experiment in which we’d tested the ability of side-scan sonar to image a body we’d submerged in the Tennessee River—but my heart wasn’t in the project.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll make you a better offer. If you can sign this skull over to me for a few days, I’ll take it back to Tennessee, finish cleaning it, and write a forensic report on it. Then I’ll see if I can get you a facial reconstruction. There’s a forensic artist who works in the bone lab, and she does great work. If Joanna can put a face on this skull for us, somebody might recognize it.” I paused. “And if you can find me a cheaper place to stay, I’ll come back for a week and help you look into your sister’s death.”

  Angie,
not Stu, nearly caused me to miss my flight back to Knoxville. The reason was not that she was bad with a watch; the reason was that she took us on a three-hour detour to Associated Services.

  Associated Services—was there ever a vaguer name?—cleaned up messes. If your house got flooded by a broken pipe or a monsoon—as hundreds of homes did in 2008, when Tropical Storm Fay dumped twenty inches of water on Tallahassee—Associated Services would pump out the water, remove the sodden carpet, replace the soggy, moldy drywall. If you bought a run-down house that was jammed with junk and filth, they’d shovel it out and scrub and disinfect it for you. And if your sister’s brains got spattered all over her living-room sofa and carpet and subflooring, the strong-stomached employees of Associated Services would don their biohazard suits and their respirators, clean up the bloody mess, and dispose of it safely.

  Joe Walsh, whose father had started Associated Services thirty-five years before, met Angie and me at the company’s warehouselike facility near the campus of Florida State University. The building—brick and corrugated metal—had offices in the front half, a warehouse in the back. At one end of the building was a large gravel parking lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. Five company vans were parked in the lot, as was a pair of black enclosed trailers emblazoned with two-foot-high biohazard warning emblems.

  Walsh emerged from the front door and led us into a simply furnished office, motioning us onto a sofa. “I’d offer you coffee, but it’s from this morning, so I wouldn’t be doing you a favor by letting you drink it.”

  He’d sounded hesitant, even suspicious, when Angie had called him—she’d phoned as she was driving me back to the Duval to check out—but as she’d talked about her sister’s death, and about why she and I hoped to sift through the shattered, spattered debris the company had removed from Kate’s living room, he’d lowered his guard, at least enough to agree to meet with us.

  “I Googled you after I got off the phone,” he said to me. “I’d heard of the Body Farm, but I didn’t really know much about it. That’s interesting work you do there.” I thanked him; then there was a brief, awkward pause before he went on. “I’m sorry if I seemed rude on the phone,” he said. “You get all sorts of calls in a business like this, you know? I had a guy call me once, asking questions about what we’d do to clean up a scene where somebody’d died this way or that way, and it sounded like he was planning ahead, you know? Trying to make some choices on the front end. I told him the first thing we’d do is make sure law enforcement had investigated thoroughly and released the scene. He hung up pretty quick then. So next thing I did, I called the sheriff’s office and gave them his number off my caller ID and suggested they check him out.”

  “It wasn’t by any chance a Georgia number,” asked Angie, “sometime in the past couple weeks?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said sympathetically. “That call came from Sopchoppy, and it was two, three years ago.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “Be great if your caller ID could point an incriminating finger at my scumbag brother-in-law.”

  He shrugged apologetically. “Wish I could help you there, but I can’t.”

  “But you can help us by letting us look through the debris you took out of my sister’s house.”

  He winced and sighed. “Here’s the thing, Ms. St. Claire. I’m more than happy to cooperate with law enforcement. If FDLE wants to examine this material, all you need to do is bring me a court order, and I’ll be glad for you to take it over to the crime lab and go through it with a fine-tooth comb. But I can’t let you go through it here. It’s a biohazard, and I can’t take a chance on the liability.”

  “Angie and I work with biohazardous materials all the time,” I pointed out.

  “But not on my property, you don’t,” he said. “If you got sick and sued, it could ruin me. My family, too.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but it seems to me that even the dumbest lawyer in Tallahassee could create reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind about the source of any nasty bugs Angie and I might happen to come down with.”

  Walsh smiled, but he shook his head. “Maybe so, but I don’t have enough time or money to take that chance.”

  “How about this,” I suggested. “How about if Angie and I sign liability releases, in blood, promising not to hold you or your company liable for anything that might happen?”

  “It’s not just that,” he said. “If we go opening up biohazard bags, our neighbors—businesses and residents right around here—are going to smell it and get upset. I can’t afford to risk the ill will.”

  “I understand your concern,” I said. “The Body Farm is only a few hundred yards downhill from a condominium development in Knoxville—fancy condos up on a bluff over the river—and on hot summer days when the air is just sitting still, our neighbors sometimes aren’t too happy.” I gestured out the window behind me. “But look out there. You really think anybody’s going to catch a whiff of anything right now?”

  He looked; a storm was blowing up, and across Madison Street trees were swaying in the wind—a wind that would have whisked away the odor from a hundred corpses, let alone from some bloody cushions and carpeting.

  Ten minutes later, he swiveled in his chair and took two hastily drafted liability releases from a computer printer on a table behind him. Angie and I glanced at what we were promising not to hold the company liable for: illness or injury, emotional trauma, even old age and eventual death, or so it seemed. We scrawled our signatures, and Walsh unlocked the chain-link gate so we could pull into the back lot alongside the biohazard storage trailers.

  I’d somehow imagined that the cleanup crew had hauled away the sofa and flooring materials intact, more or less, except for the damage from the gun blast. When I saw what we’d be sifting through—how thoroughly everything had been disassembled—my heart sank. The frame of the sleeper sofa had been stripped down to the bare metal of the folding mechanism, and all the porous materials—the heavy batting of the cushions and the mattress, the blood-soaked carpeting, the rubber carpet pad, and the waferboard subflooring—had been cut apart and sealed into plastic biohazard bags inside cardboard boxes measuring two feet square. Before we could search the scene, we’d have to reconstruct it.

  On our way over, Angie and I had made a quick stop at Home Depot to procure the makings of a bare-bones crime-scene kit, since she wasn’t allowed to use FDLE resources for an outside case. We’d bought Tyvek painter’s coveralls; rubber gloves; dust masks; curved needle-nose pliers; wooden dowel rods; tape measures and yardsticks; quarter-inch wire screening; a staple gun; and a large plastic tarp. After suiting up, Angie and I spread the tarp on the concrete floor of the warehouse, then began opening boxes and reassembling the scene, like some bloody, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. We started with the four pieces of waferboard that had been cut and pried from the floor joists. Pieced back together, the chunks of subflooring formed a roughly thirty-inch square, with a bloody six-inch hole at its center, and with assorted drips and runs at irregular intervals around it. Next we unpacked the padding and carpet and put those in position; they, too, had been cut, rather than folded, to fit into the boxes. Then we set the sofa frame in place, using a wooden dowel to center the holes one atop the other. Next, unfolding the bed’s metal frame, we pieced the cut mattress back together and refolded it, and finally wedged the sections of cushions into position. Once everything was in place and we’d rechecked and adjusted the alignment of the holes, Angie took dozens of photos with her camera—wide, medium, and tight shots—from every conceivable angle, with and without the scale provided by the yardsticks and tape measures. Finally satisfied that she’d documented the assemblage thoroughly, she allowed me to begin searching it—which meant disassembling the scene we’d just spent an hour painstakingly reassembling.

  The couch was a sobering testament to the destructive force of a twelve-gauge at close range. The shot had blown a ragged hole through the seat cushion, up near one arm of the so
fa. The hole was about three inches in diameter at the top of the cushion, where Kate’s head had lain; it was twice that diameter at the bottom of the cushion, as the force of the blast—not just from the slug itself, but also from the column of air forced out of the barrel ahead of the accelerating slug, as well as the hot gases from the exploding gunpowder behind the slug, pushing it—had widened in the shape of a cone. By the time it tore through the mattress and out the underside of the sofa, the shock wave had grown to a foot in diameter, though much of its force was then dispersed and absorbed by the carpet and padding.

  While Angie took more photographs, I used a flashlight and the forcepslike pliers—whose long, slender jaws I covered with the fingers from a rubber glove, to avoid damaging bone fragments or lead—to pick through the ragged walls of the blasted tunnel. The cushion and mattress were covered with a reddish-brown spray of blood, mixed with bits of tissue and short strands of hair; embedded here and there within the walls of the tunnel were shards of bone—plenty of them, but none large enough to be readily identifiable. “Not much to go on here,” I remarked, “except for the angle of the shot itself.” Angie lowered the camera and looked with her eyes rather than the lens. “If it were me,” I went on, thinking out loud, “I’d’ve sat on the sofa and leaned over, bracing the butt of the gun on the floor. That would’ve put spatter all over the walls and the ceiling.”

  “I know,” she agreed grimly. “Everywhere.”

  “But if,” I went on, “for some reason I decided to lie down instead, I think I’d probably prop my head up on the arm of the sofa. But see how vertical the hole is?” She nodded. “That means her head was lying flat on the sofa, and the gun was straight up and down. That’s a lot of weight to hold at an odd angle. Seems strange. Wrong.”

  She nodded grimly. “Everything about it seems strange and wrong.”

  But apart from the nagging sense that the angle of the shot was unusual, what did we have, really? Nothing, I was forced to admit as we reboxed the sofa cushions and sections of mattress, refolded the bed frame, and set the sofa aside so we could pack the ravaged layers of flooring once again. With the sofa removed, the circle of blue tarp showed through the hole in the carpet and pad and waferboard. The plastic was bright and clean, cheerful and mocking. I stared at it in frustration, and then with curiosity and the glimmer of an idea. “So your sister’s house,” I said, looking at the splintered edges of the subflooring, “it must not have been on a concrete slab.”