Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  The Smithsonian possessed a similar corpse, that of Wilhelm von Ellenbogen, who had been dug up in the course of moving a cemetery more than a century ago. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia—home to some of the most bizarre medical and forensic oddities on the planet—had his female counterpart, whom they nicknamed “the Soap Lady” because of adipocere’s chemical kinship to soap. But those were misshapen and repulsive compared to the eerily preserved corpse before me. It was not an image of repose, mind you—the eyes stared blindly and the mouth gaped in an eternal scream—and yet despite the grotesque expression, there was something oddly beautiful about it.

  I started forward, then caught myself and called out, “Have you all been in here?”

  “Just far enough to see the body. Didn’t want to disturb the scene before you got a chance to look at it.”

  “Good man. I wish more of your colleagues would be so careful.”

  I took out the 35-millimeter camera I’d brought with me from Knoxville. Early in my career, one of the smartest cops I ever worked with gave me a piece of advice that sounded equally apt for crime scene photographers and ruthless bank robbers: “Shoot your way in and shoot your way out,” he said, and I’d been doing it ever since. Standing in the opening to the crystalline grotto, I started with wide shots from eye level, to establish the scene as a whole. Then I squatted down and shot across the floor of the cave at a low angle—another photography trick he’d taught me—to cast shadows that would throw footprints into sharper relief.

  The flash was too quick and bright for me to see what it was getting, so I played the flashlight beam across the floor. The unevenness made it hard to tell for sure, but I thought I saw prints leading toward the body. I zoomed in on what seemed to be the best ones and fired off shots from several angles. Then I turned my attention and my lens toward the body.

  I approached, slowly and circuitously, taking photographs every time I moved more than a few feet. I’d started with a fresh roll of 36 exposures—slides, as always, because a carousel tray was easy to carry into a classroom or a courtroom, and the film’s resolution was still far better than any digital image. You could project a good slide on a movie theater screen and it’d still look crisp; try that with a digital image and it would turn into some murky Impressionist rendering of a crime scene shrouded in fog. Besides, the one occasion when I’d tried using a digital camera, every picture I snapped erased the one before, so I left that crime scene with just one photo, a close-up of a stab wound. But I had read that the last Kodak carousel slide projector had rolled off the assembly line a year or so back, so I knew my nondigital days were numbered. “Progress, hell,” I muttered.

  “What’s that, Doc?”

  “Sorry, just talking to myself in here. Y’all come on back.”

  They squeezed through the crevice into the grotto. Williams, who was skinny as a stray dog, slipped through easily. Kitchings required considerable time and effort. He turned sideways, his arms raised, for the first part. Then, when he reached the narrowest part of the passage—“Fat Man’s Squeeze,” the gap would be called if this were a commercial cave tour—he reached down, cupped his hands under his belly, and squished it upward like some gargantuan breast in a cyclopean Miracle Bra. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist: I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.

  He yelped when the flash seared his eyes. “Goddamn! What the hell?”

  I grinned. “Just making sure I document everything at the scene.”

  “Document my ass. Looka here, Doc, forensic legend or not, you show that picture to a soul, and I figure any jury in Cooke County would call your death justifiable homicide.”

  Williams piped up, “Could be, Tom, but to beat the rap, you’d have to show the picture to all twelve of ’em.” He chuckled at the notion.

  “Well, shit. That complicates my damn plan, don’t it? I reckon maybe I better just confiscate the doc’s film.”

  “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, Sheriff,” I said. “I think I had the lens cap on anyhow.”

  When they were both standing beside me, I asked, “Mind if I take a picture of your feet?”

  They looked puzzled for a moment, then the light dawned. Kitchings held Williams’s shoulder to steady himself, then raised one boot sole toward me for a photo, followed by the other. Next, Williams braced on Kitchings and I photographed his feet, too. Finally, I handed the camera to Kitchings and had him snap mine. It was unlikely to come up in court, but I didn’t want some defense lawyer claiming that what the prosecution presented as a ruthless killer’s footprints were actually an inept anthropologist’s.

  The only things I’d brought from Knoxville besides my camera were a pair of latex gloves, a small tape measure, and a pocketknife. I opened the pocketknife and set it on the rock shelf, then donned the gloves and picked it back up. Using the tip of the blade, I gently picked at the adipocere in the region of the cheek. As I suspected, underneath was nothing but bone. “Can’t tell the race from the skin,” I said, “because there’s no skin left.”

  Williams spoke up. “Got to be white. We don’t have black folks up here. Not after sundown, anyhow.” He snickered. “Not if a black man values his life.”

  I leveled a look at the deputy. “Then again, if a black man was to have car trouble or get lost up here when the sun went down, this might be just the sort of spot he’d wind up in, mightn’t it?”

  “Leon, you dumbass hillbilly redneck,” Kitchings spat.

  Williams blinked and looked away, his jaw muscles twitching hard.

  “You’re probably right, I’m pretty sure it’s a Caucasian,” I went on. “The hair looks straight and blond, and the mouth structure is textbook Caucasoid—see how vertical the teeth are?” I touched the tip of the knife blade to what was once the upper lip, just below where the nose had collapsed, then swung the flat side of the blade down across the lips, resting it on the greasy chin. “If this individual were Negroid, the teeth and jawbones would angle forward, and this straight edge wouldn’t touch the chin.”

  I pulled out the tape. With Williams holding one end gingerly, I measured the corpse. “About five feet eight,” I read. “Allowing for postmortem shrinkage of the cartilage, could’ve been another two or three inches taller than that in life. Just from the stature, I’d have guessed male, but from the facial features, the small skull, and the wide pelvis, I’m thinking female. Any guesses? Any women—tall women—missing in Cooke County?”

  They thought awhile before Kitchings broke the silence. “Not that I know of. How long you reckon she’s been here, Doc?”

  “Between the cave and the adipocere, it’s hard to say. Caves are cool, and it doesn’t look like the flies and maggots ever got to her. So it could have been a long time—I’d say years rather than months, maybe even be a whole lot of years.”

  “Well, that’s gonna mean going back through the files quite a ways, then,” Kitchings said. “Might take awhile. Some of the files aren’t too good, either. The ones since I took office are okay, but the older ones are a mess.”

  “Well, see what you can find,” I said. “There might be some folks who’d remember right off. Didn’t I see some old-timers whittling on a bench outside the courthouse? You’d be amazed what guys like that can tell you.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I’d put too much stock in the memories of those guys, but I’ll ask. What else can you tell me about her?”

  “Not much right here, right now. I need to get the body back to the Forensic Center at UT Medical Center and process the remains,” I said. “Clean off the tissue, study the bones closely. Then I can tell you how old she was, how tall, what race. We’ll take X-rays, look for healed injuries that might show up in somebody’s medical chart, try to find dental records. If we get lucky, we’ll find out who she was and maybe even how she died.”

  “That would be lucky,” he said. But he didn’t say it with the hearty conviction you’d expect from a sheriff with an unidentified murder victim on his hands.r />
  While I took a few final photos, Kitchings and Williams retrieved the body bag and the litter that were lashed to the back of the deputy’s ATV. I unzipped the bag, bunched the opening under one side of the body, and gently worked the corpse up off the rock and into the bag. Then I zipped it up and we slid it off the rock ledge and into the litter. We hauled it back to the vehicles, where the officers retied it to the rear rack. The rack had been designed to haul beer coolers and deer carcasses, but it would serve to haul a body. The added weight, though, rocked the vehicle back on its haunches, making the headlight angle upward. As we retraced our route back to the mouth of the cave, I heard Williams curse more than once as he thumped into unseen rocks in his path. When we emerged, squinting, into the afternoon light, he faced a different challenge. On the trek up the mountain, the empty litter had been lashed lengthwise, projecting several feet off the back of the deputy’s ATV; now, weighted with the body, it was crosswise, and the six-foot litter was wider than many parts of the trail. Whenever the trail necked down, Williams was forced to execute a series of tricky, needle-threading maneuvers, which he accompanied with a volley of curses.

  By the time we’d bumped down the mountainside and rumbled to a stop behind the courthouse, the sun was slipping behind a ridge, and my thighs and buttocks were burning from their hours of shock-absorber duty. The courthouse whittlers were long gone. Night fell early in the mountains, I realized, and I wondered if that had anything to do with the darkness that seemed to dwell within many of the souls who inhabited these shadowy hills and hollows.

  Williams drove me out of Cooke County at a funereal pace. Maybe it was the body in the back of the Cherokee, maybe it was my earlier bout of sickness; whatever the reason, I was grateful. On the winding river road back to I-40, I watched for onrushing headlights, but there were none. I also listened for the squealing tires and screaming engine of someone desperate enough to run this road without lights, but we were the only car around. With each passing mile, the isolated town and the remote cave seemed to fall away, not just into the distance but into some other time and dimension. It reminded me of Brigadoon, the mythical village said to materialize in the Scottish Highlands for just one day every century. But I knew, despite my wish to the contrary, that the places I had just visited were not about to vanish for a hundred years. They would revisit me in far less time, I was sure, and with far less charm.

  CHAPTER 4

  I DIRECTED WILLIAMS TO THE garage door that led into the Regional Forensic Center, which was housed in the basement of the University of Tennessee Medical Center. An imposing tower inhabiting a bend in the river just across from the main campus, the hospital complex hovered over the wooded hillside that was home to the Body Farm.

  The Regional Forensic Center, which shared space with the hospital’s morgue, was one of five forensic centers in the state. The others were in Nashville, Johnson City, Chattanooga, and Memphis, the cities that anchored the state’s midpoint and its northeast, southeast, and southwest corners. Although Knoxville wasn’t nearly the size of Memphis or Nashville, our forensic center was the newest and the best of the bunch. The forensic center in Memphis—a city with five times as many residents and fifteen times as many murder victims—was half the size of this one and consisted of little more than one large, dingy autopsy room and an undersized cooler. Ours, on the other hand, had a walk-in cooler the size of a three-car garage, two clean, well-lighted autopsy stations, and a third station in its own room, dedicated to cleaning the ripest of human remains. The decomp room, as everyone called this room, owed its existence to me and the Body Farm. It was outfitted with electric burners and steam-jacketed kettles for simmering bones; laundry-sized sinks for scraping and scrubbing them clean; and industrial-strength garbage disposals for grinding up whatever came loose from my parade of decayed murder victims and rotted research corpses. The only amenity that was lacking was an underground conveyor to ferry my bodies out to the Farm and back.

  A video camera at the loading dock tracked our arrival, and as Williams backed toward the building, the garage door rolled upward to let the Jeep enter the loading bay. As I clambered out into the bay, an interior door opened and Miranda Lovelady emerged, rolling a gurney to the back of the Cherokee. Miranda was a graduate assistant in the Anthropology Department’s forensic program. Instead of grading sophomore exams and checking for plagiarized papers, like a typical graduate assistant, we had put Miranda to work defleshing corpses and cataloguing bones. She couldn’t have been happier.

  Miranda helped me wrestle the body bag out of the SUV and onto the gurney. Williams watched warily from the far end of the garage bay. As I latched the vehicle’s back door, he practically leapt into the driver’s seat. “Reckon I’d better head on back,” he said. “We’ll be in touch. Thanks, Doc.”

  “Glad to help,” I said. “You drive careful, now.”

  “Always.”

  As he idled out of the garage bay, his brake lights added a rosy overtone to the floodlights illuminating the concrete, the corpse, and Miranda. I paused to admire the effect. On most people, I’d noticed, a scrub suit hung like a tent. Miranda’s scrubs, on the other hand, somehow accentuated her curves. How she managed to look so shapely in such a shapeless garment was a mystery I found endlessly fascinating.

  She interrupted my reverie. “Whatcha got here, Dr. B.?”

  I reminded myself why we were here. “You’re gonna like this case, Miranda. A body from a cave in Cooke County. Most extensive adipocere formation I’ve ever seen.”

  She nodded appreciatively. “Cool. You ready to bring it in, or you wanna take some pictures first?”

  “Let’s take some pictures.”

  She ducked back inside, then reemerged a moment later wheeling a portable X-ray machine, which inhabited a small office just down the hall. I had learned, from years of experience, that X-rays could reveal remarkable things hidden in burned or decaying flesh: a bullet lodged in a skull or chest cavity; a cut in a rib or vertebra; a pacemaker or orthopedic device that could be traced back to a manufacturer, a surgeon, or even a patient. But I had also learned, from a memorable chewing-out, never to show up in the hospital’s radiology unit with a reeking corpse in tow. I suspected that even if the Forensic Center’s budget hadn’t covered the cost of a portable unit, the radiologists themselves might have gladly dug into their own pockets to keep me and my rotting friends at arm’s length.

  “This is case number twenty-three for the year,” I reminded Miranda, though clearly she already knew, because she handed me a radiographically opaque tag she’d prepared for the X-rays. The tag included the last two digits of the year, followed by the case number. In my first few years as state forensic anthropologist, I’d never gotten out of single digits—it was probably 1990 before I needed a number as high as 90–10. During the past decade, though, I’d gradually edged up through the twenties and into the thirties.

  We started at the head and worked our way down. We would try to match the cranial X-rays with antemortem dental X-rays from missing persons—if we could find any missing folks who fit the description of our body. In addition, we’d search the films for any signs of skeletal trauma, such as fractures or cut marks, or radiographically opaque material such as lead. Even if a bullet has passed completely through a body, it often leaves a telltale smear or splatter inside the skull or on a rib.

  I worked the film cassette under the body bag in the region of the head, and Miranda snapped the exposure. As I slid the cassette out and held it up for her, she took it in her left hand, swapping it for an unexposed cassette that she handed me with her right. We worked wordlessly; having done this dozens of times before, we could have performed this macabre dance in our sleep.

  After X-raying the head, we took films of the chest, the abdomen, and finally the pelvis. Besides showing us the bones, the pelvic X-rays would also reveal any metallic objects that had been in the pockets of the clothing. Although the clothes themselves had rotted—a hint that they were a
ll cotton, and therefore pretty old—the adipocere in the region of the hips and thighs might well contain small objects that had been in the pockets.

  While Miranda stashed away the X-ray machine, I wheeled the gurney into the cooler. Miranda called out, “Aren’t we processing this one tonight?”

  “It’s pretty late. How about tomorrow? Like the sheriff said, one more night ain’t gonna hurt this one none. Besides, I’ve got to be in court early tomorrow for a hearing in the Ledbetter murder.”

  “Oh, you mean the case where you’re going to destroy the medical examiner’s career and put a cold-blooded killer back on the streets?” I winced, but she grinned and wagged a finger at me. “You’re doing the right thing, you know you are—he should have retired years ago, and he totally blew that case. Go home. Sleep the sleep of the just and the competent.”

  Only after I emerged onto the barren loading dock did I remember that my truck was parked a quarter-mile of asphalt away, over at the Body Farm, where I’d left it fourteen hours ago. I sagged in dismay and sudden fatigue.

  The one thing I needed most was a good night’s sleep. But that was also the one thing I was least likely to get.

  CHAPTER 5

  MY TRUCK SAT ALL alone at the far corner of the hospital parking lot. By day, the Body Farm’s weathered, wooden privacy fence—an eight-foot screen that shields the corpses from sightseers, and shields squeamish hospital workers from the corpses—blends into the woods. Now, under the glare of the sodium security lights, it shone a garish yellow-orange.

  Unlocking the cab of my truck, I turned back toward the hospital and waved at the surveillance camera mounted high atop the roof. I doubted anyone was scrutinizing the monitor that closely, but just in case, I wanted the campus police to know I appreciated their round-the-clock vigil over my unorthodox extended family.

  At this time of night, almost eleven, the highway was practically empty as I crossed the river and swooped down the Kingston Pike exit. Kingston Pike—Knoxville’s main east–west thoroughfare—grazed one edge of the UT campus. If I turned right at the light at the bottom of the exit ramp, I would traverse the lively six-block stretch called “The Strip,” which was lined with crowded restaurants, noisy bars, and inebriated students. Turning left instead, I made for the quieter precincts of Sequoyah Hills, where I threaded my way along the grand median of Cherokee Boulevard for half a mile before diving off into the maze of dark, quiet streets that led to my house.