Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  There was a momentary silence on the other end of the line. “I know, Dad. So did my mom.”

  “Well, you seem to have had an easier time getting over it.” My tone was sharper than I meant it to be.

  “What is that supposed to mean? Is that some kind of accusation?”

  “No. Just an observation. You don’t seem to be especially grief-stricken.”

  I heard a deep intake of breath, then a long, forced exhalation. “You are way over the line here. I loved Mom. A lot. And when she died, it hurt like hell; sometimes it still does. But you know what, Dad? I cried a lot, and then I faced the fact that she had died, and I decided to carry on with my life. You, on the other hand, seem determined to make some sort of crusade out of wallowing in your grief—you carry it like a cross, you wear it like a crown of thorns, some self-inflicted stigmata. And anybody who doesn’t get down there and wallow with you, you think their grief just isn’t quite up to the mark, so maybe their love for her didn’t measure up, either. And when you do that, Dad, you alienate yourself from the people who love you and wish you well and want you to be happy again.”

  “I’ll be happy again when the time comes.”

  “No, you won’t. Because you resist it. It’s like some perverse challenge to you—seeing how long you can milk your misery and loneliness.”

  “And this conversation’s supposed to be cheering me up?”

  “I didn’t start this; you did. Come on, Dad, admit it—you’re hiding from life. You bury yourself in your work, and you immerse yourself in your grief. And those two things are all you do anymore.”

  “My work is very demanding.”

  “So demanding you don’t have time to call or see your son and your grandkids? So demanding you don’t have time to go out to dinner? When’s the last time you had a sit-down dinner with a woman? Or with a man? With me, for that matter?”

  “It’s hard to see you. It hurts.”

  “And why is that, Dad?”

  If I were telling the truth, I would have said to my son, “Because I blame us both for her death. I blame myself and I blame you, whose birth was so hard on her reproductive system.” But I was not telling the truth—I could not tell him that truth—so what I said was, “You remind me too much of her.”

  “Why can’t you take some comfort in that—in the fact that a part of her lives on in me?” I didn’t even attempt an answer. “Hell, if you still can’t handle an evening with me, at least see somebody. Preferably a therapist, but anybody would be better than nobody. I bet you haven’t had a social engagement since the funeral.”

  It was true, I hadn’t, but I didn’t want my son reminding me of it.

  “Look, Jeff, I appreciate your concern for my social life, but I’m fine. I’m a grown-up, and I can manage that quite well on my own.” It was a transparent lie, so I blustered as I served it up.

  “So are you seeing anybody yet?”

  “As if that’s any of your business?”

  “There, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re not, and you’re not even willing to acknowledge it. Jesus, Dad, you’re still in your prime—sort of—and you’re intelligent and energetic and full of amazing stories. Women would beat a path to your door, if you’d let them. But you’re so supremely sad, so militantly morose, it’s like an electric force field surrounding you. It shuts everybody out. Including me.”

  “Jeff, I’m not trying to shut you out.”

  “You sure could have fooled me. This is the fourth time in a row I’ve been the one to dial the phone, and the first thing you say is how you can’t talk long. Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw you. You’d think we lived on the other side of the damn world, not the other side of Knoxville.”

  Four times—could that be right? When had I seen him last? “I’m sorry. I am. I’m doing the best I can.”

  “Well, do better!” he shot back. It felt like a dentist had just drilled into a nerve.

  “And how do you suggest I do that, Jeff?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have any quick fixes for heartbreak. If I did, I’d be a zillionaire advice guru with a bestseller and a TV talk show. But it’s been two years now. Besides missing my dead mother, I miss my living father, and my boys miss their grandpa. Mom died, and I really hate that. She wasn’t my wife, so I don’t know what it’s like to lose a spouse. But she’s dead. We’re not, and you’re not. So quit acting like it.”

  Blood pounded in my temples, and my vision swam. I stared dumbly at the receiver, then moved it slowly toward the cradle.

  “Dad? Dad!” His voice was growing fainter. “Dad, don’t hang up on me. Please, don’t hang up.”

  God forgive me, I hung up.

  And then I sat, alone in my empty kitchen—a place more unnerving to me than the morgue—and wondered: How had this happened? How had my family—once my greatest joy—become my greatest sorrow? Kathleen had nearly died to give me Jeff, yet here I was treating him like a curse instead of a gift. She would be heartbroken if she could see it, I knew, but despite my shame, I seemed incapable of opening my heart to our son.

  After Kathleen’s death, some well-meaning friend had given me a copy of The Prophet, a book of essays by Kahlil Gibran. I had never opened it. Now, for the first time, I pried it out of the bookcase and opened it to a chapter marked by a purple ribbon. It was headed “On Joy and Sorrow.”

  Trembling, I read: “When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. They are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”

  I thought of Jeff, and the difficulty we’d had conceiving him, and our gratitude when he, too, survived the difficult birth. He and she—both, together—had been my delight, and I hadn’t found a way to separate him from the sorrow that slammed into me when she died.

  “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,” read another line.

  If that’s true, I thought, I must be making room for one hell of a lot of joy.

  CHAPTER 15

  I WAS HALF AN HOUR early for Billy Ray Ledbetter’s exhumation, even though the cemetery, in Morgan County, lay forty two-lane miles northwest of Knoxville, perched on the edge of the Cumberland Mountains.

  People in Cooke County tapped the Appalachians for ginseng and moonshine and marijuana. People in the Cumberlands—including the county seat, the unfortunately named Wartburg—ripped open the mountains themselves, raking low-grade coal from strip mines and bench mines, leaving the ridgetops mutilated and the streams choked with debris and acid.

  Billy Ray had worked a wildcat mine—an illegal, unlicensed one—until the Office of Surface Mining had found it and shut it down. After that, he mined food stamps and disability checks for whatever he could, spending most of what he got in the county’s windowless cinder-block roadhouses. It was in one of them that he and his friend Eddie Meacham had squared off against half a dozen badass bikers. Unfortunately for Meacham, Billy Ray survived his stomping for eighteen days—until the day, in fact, Billy Ray hitched a ride into Knoxville to ask Eddie to take him to a hospital. He never made it there alive, according to Eddie, because upon staggering into Meacham’s apartment, he promptly keeled over, crashed into a glass-topped coffee table, and expired. That, at least, was the story Meacham was telling, and that was the story Burt DeVriess hoped the exhumation and examination would corroborate.

  A freshly waxed black hearse idled at the cemetery entrance, its tinted windows pulsing with rock music cranked up loud enough to wake the dead. Parked beside it was a Caterpillar backhoe in a two-tone color scheme of yellow and rust. From the backhoe’s cab, Tammy Wynette pleaded with me to stand by my man. I wondered if anyone had ever stood by the poor bastard whose eternal rest we were about
to interrupt so rudely.

  Native Americans and New Agers alike say it’s wrong to dig up a body after it’s been laid to rest—it disturbs the spirit of the departed, they say—and I’m inclined to agree. Unfortunately, sometimes the alternative is even worse: letting a killer go scot-free…or sending an innocent person to life behind bars. It was the latter misfortune I hoped to avert by disturbing the spirit of the late Billy Ray.

  The morning was gray and chilly as half a dozen of us clustered around a sad little grave outside Wartburg. The cemetery was wedged onto a narrow strip of Cumberland ridgetop, shared by a tiny white clapboard church. The crowd that gathered was quiet and grim. Two uniformed Morgan County sheriff’s deputies stood guard, as if someone might be interested in making off with a plywood coffin and pauper’s corpse that had been deteriorating in the ground for nine months. Knox County prosecutor Bob Roper, still hoping to salvage his murder case against Meacham, stood alongside a Louisiana forensic anthropologist he’d brought in to try to refute my testimony about the impossible wound path. I found myself in the unenviable position of standing next to Burt DeVriess, my nemesis-turned-employer—an arrangement I hoped would prove brief and never to be repeated.

  Not present was Dr. Jessamine Carter, the regional medical examiner from Chattanooga, one hundred miles south of Knoxville. She would rendezvous with us—or, rather, with the body—in the morgue back at UT Medical Center once the exhumation was complete.

  The lawyers had wrangled about which pathologist should reau-topsy the body. Obviously Knox County’s medical examiner, Dr. Garland Hamilton, couldn’t do it, since the competence of his initial autopsy was the issue on which Meacham’s guilt or innocence now turned. Grease had argued that a big-name out-of-state pathologist should be called in—Dr. Michael Baden, for instance, or Dr. Kay Scarpetta—since Hamilton’s Tennessee colleagues might be reluctant to contradict him. The prosecutor countered that if the other MEs in the state couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth in a difficult case, they should all be fired anyhow—was that what Mr. DeVriess was suggesting? After a few sarcastic exchanges along these lines, both lawyers had finally stipulated that Dr. Carter might possibly be acceptable for the job. Dr. Carter—Jess, I was allowed to call her, since we’d worked together on a handful of cases during the past five years—was a graduate of Harvard Medical School. How and why she’d landed in Chattanooga remained a bit of a mystery to me, but she was widely considered an expert in discriminating between antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem trauma—that is, between wounds inflicted before, during, or after the time of death. If there was enough soft tissue left for her to examine, she might be able to tell whether Ledbetter had bled to death from a bizarre knife wound, one whose trajectory I had been unable to replicate in a corpse.

  As Tammy Wynette belted out the final chorus, the backhoe rumbled into the cemetery and followed a deputy’s hand signals to Ledbetter’s grave. At a nod from Bob Roper, the machine began clawing at the rocky red soil.

  The soil was still soft—it takes years for disturbed earth to re-compact, and even then, it’s never as hard as it was before being disturbed. Anthropologists depend heavily on that property; it’s what allows us to find and excavate ancient burials. Early in my career, for instance, I had spent more than a dozen summers excavating centuries-old graves of Arikira Indians in South Dakota, staying just one step ahead of the rising waters of a new Corps of Engineers reservoir. The Arikira graves—circular in shape—lay beneath a foot of fine, windblown topsoil. After a couple of summers of backbreaking manual searching, I did some experimenting and found that a road grader was the perfect tool for exposing the tops of the graves: a series of shallow passes with the grader would gradually remove the foot of topsoil in long, even rows; as soon as it reached the level of the graves, neat circles of fluffier, disturbed earth would appear. The power equipment increased our speed by a factor of ten—delighting our Smithsonian sponsors at the time, and dismaying Indian activists years later.

  Crime scene technicians rely on this property of the soil, too. Rather than digging up an entire field or forest where a body is thought to be buried, the technician jabs the ground with a T-shaped probe—a thin steel rod with a handle welded across one end. If the probe resists going in, the soil is probably undisturbed, but if it plunges in easily, the technician knows somebody’s been digging there recently. An even higher-tech version of the soil probe is ground-penetrating radar, which we’ve helped refine at the Body Farm: just by dragging a scanner across the surface of the ground, a skilled technician can tell (by reading magnetic sworls and squiggles that look utterly random to me) the relative density of the soil and can spot areas of disturbance.

  The backhoe clattered and bucked as it clawed open the grave. Scoop by scoop, the pile of dirt beside the grave grew steadily. Finally a sharp clatter and scraping sound told us that the operator had reached the top of the concrete vault that surrounded the coffin itself. After a few more scrapes—which set my teeth on edge like a hundred sets of fingernails raking down a hundred blackboards—he raised the scoop and clambered down off the tractor. Retrieving a pair of steel chains from the back of the rig, he snagged four metal hooks into eyebolts on the lid of the vault and tied the chain over the bucket of the backhoe. Once back in the driver’s seat, he took up the slack in the chain and hoisted the concrete lid. As it rose from the grave, red clay crumbled off the edges of the concrete. Swinging it to one side, the operator set it on the damp grass, crushing a stray and faded plastic bouquet.

  “Doc, how come graves are lined with those big concrete things, anyway?” DeVriess asked. “Seems kinda pointless. I mean, the body’s going to decay anyway, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But people—the living, the ones that funerals and coffins and cemeteries are meant to console—don’t like to think about that, so they try to postpone it with embalming fluid and stainless-steel coffins and reinforced concrete vaults.” DeVriess rolled his eyes and shook his head at the folly. I didn’t like that—didn’t like his smug, superior attitude—so I went on. “You think it’s dumb?” He gave a noncommittal sideways nod. “For the sake of your client, you better hope this vault stayed nice and tight, and that flimsy wooden coffin stayed dry, and the undertaker didn’t scrimp on the embalming fluid the way so many of them do. Those might be the only things that can save his neck and save your case.” My voice had risen as I spoke, and I noticed several people looking at us. I snapped my mouth shut and moved to the other side of the grave.

  The vault had kept out most of the groundwater, but not all. The rubber gasket that ran around the top of the vault’s walls must have slipped slightly out of position, for a small loop of it dangled muddily into the vault, showing where the seal had failed. A greasy moat several inches deep surrounded the coffin, which bobbed slightly from the aftershocks of the backhoe’s jarring. Perching precariously on the concrete edges, the gravedigger slipped straps of webbing underneath each end of the coffin and worked them in a foot or so, like dental floss slipping down around a giant tooth. After tying the straps to the bucket he hoisted the coffin, just as he had raised the vault lid. As it rose from the grave, a putrid stream of gray water dribbled out of one corner. It continued to drip even after it was settled on the ground, and I was glad I hadn’t offered to haul the coffin back to the morgue in my truck. The gravedigger, the hearse driver, and the two deputies heaved the coffin into the back of the hearse, and the small convoy headed back to Knoxville, a funeral procession in bizarre rewind.

  CHAPTER 16

  DR. JESS CARTER HAD offered to let me observe the autopsy, an invitation I accepted eagerly. I wasn’t qualified to testify in court about pathology—the medical aspects of disease and trauma, manifested in bodies that were fresher than the ones I usually studied—but I seized every opportunity I could to learn more about it. After all, what separated Jess’s work from mine was only a few days of decomposition—or even a few hours, in conditions of extreme heat, or a few saw cuts, in c
ases of dismemberment. So the more I knew about finding forensic evidence in fresh tissue, the better I’d be able to spot evidence in not-so-fresh tissue. Besides, Jess was a hoot—funny and irreverent, yet also dead serious about the quality of her work. She had a keen wit, a quick scalpel, and sharp eyes, and she wielded them all with equal deftness.

  Her red Porsche Carrera was already parked behind the morgue when I pulled in, followed by the Cadillac hearse bearing Ledbetter’s sodden coffin. As the hearse backed into the loading dock, the metal door opened and Jess emerged in scrubs, followed by Miranda, whom I hadn’t seen since the night she walked in on Sarah and me kissing. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be in on this autopsy after all.

  They looked up as I approached, so I waved. “Hi,” I called to Jess, “welcome to the hornet’s nest. You’re pretty gutsy to get mixed up in all this.”

  She shrugged. “Or not too bright. Never did like to take the safe route—usually boring.” She gave me a smile. A very tight smile, first cousin to a grimace. “Miranda’s been telling me about some of your recent doings. Sounds like you’ve got a handful of trouble yourself.” I looked at Miranda, whose eyes flashed when they met mine. My face flushed, and I turned toward the hearse. Why was that infernal driver taking so long to unload the damn coffin?

  I cleared my throat. “Well, I do have an interesting, um, case right now. I’ll t-t-tell you about it later. Right now, let me go get changed so I don’t keep you waiting.” With that, I fled into the morgue, slinking into the safety of the men’s changing room. What a mess I’d made of things with Miranda. What an idiot.

  When I entered the autopsy room, taking refuge behind a surgical mask, I saw only Jess, scalpel in hand and headlamp on her forehead, leaning over the body. The coffin sat in a corner by a floor drain, still oozing a bit of water, or something. “Looks like you’re my diener today,” she said.