Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  As I approached the desk from the morgue’s inner recesses, I struggled to dredge up the name of the young woman perched there. She was the latest in a long line of short-lived receptionists. Short-tenured, anyway. Tiffany? Kimberly? Tamara? As I got closer, I decided I hadn’t even met this one yet. That meant the last one had come and gone in less than a month.

  “Good morning, young lady, I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said, extending my right hand to introduce myself. We both noticed my purple rubber glove at the same instant. “You really don’t want to shake my hand right now. I’m Dr. Brockton.”

  She shook her head and sighed. “Hi, Dr. B., I’m Katie. We have met. Twice. You’re looking better, by the way.”

  Okay, perhaps we had met after all. What was wrong with my memory, and what had been wrong with me last time she saw me? I didn’t have the time or the heart to pursue either question. I asked if she’d seen the morgue tech I needed, hoping I wasn’t too late. “Joey? I think he’s doing a burn.” Not good, I thought. I spun on my heel and sprinted down the corridor that led out one side of the morgue, where the medical waste incinerator was tucked into an out-of-the-way angle of the hospital complex.

  Joey Weeks, the lowest-ranking morgue assistant, stood beside the incinerator’s open hatch, a gurney parked beside him. I saw him toss a bag into the burner, then grab another off the cart. “Wait!” I yelled.

  “Hey, Doc,” he said as I skidded to a stop. “What’s up?”

  “Joey, I’m looking for some tissue that came from an exhumation a couple of days ago.”

  “Exhumation? Oh, you mean that one autopsied by Dr. Carter from Chattanooga? The guy that ain’t got nothin’ between the head and the waist? That’s creepy, man.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. You know anything about that? There was a biohazard bag with some tissue in it with the body in the cooler.”

  “Sure. Dr. Hamilton told me it was waste. Said to incinerate it. Probably going up in smoke right now.”

  Hamilton? “Damn.”

  “Problem?”

  “I was hoping to take one last look at something.”

  He motioned toward the cart. “Well, I got a few bags left here. Maybe it’s not too late. Let’s take a look. Do you know the number?”

  I racked my brain. “It had two autopsy numbers on it—the original was from last year, but I don’t remember what came after the ‘A-2004.’ But Dr. Carter added a number when she looked at it the other day, A-2005-125, maybe.”

  “Can’t be too many with double numbers. If it’s here, we’ll find it.”

  We checked the cart. It wasn’t there, and my heart sank. Then I noticed the bag still dangling from Joey’s right hand. If I’d arrived a second later, it would have gone up in flames.

  I bore the putrid organs before me with both hands, like the crown jewels on a velvet pillow. It wasn’t so much a gesture of reverence as a stance of caution: the bag had been punctured and was dripping steadily. Entering the decomp lab, I laid my prize on a countertop and sliced open the top. The contents slithered and plopped out onto the absorbent surgical pad.

  I fished out the remnants of the heart, stomach, and intestines first, then what I believed to be the liver, then various other organs that were more or less recognizable as themselves, or at least as something other than lung. That left a mound of lung tissue, which looked like a chocolate pudding gone terribly wrong in the making.

  The most efficient way to do this was also the messiest. Picking up the nearest blob of tissue, I began to squeeze, squishing it through loosely clenched fingers. Nothing. I repeated the process with half a dozen other lungish-looking blobs. Still nothing. I scooped up the last of the blobs and gave it a hard, frustrated squeeze…and when I did, something sharp jabbed the heel of my hand. It was a shard of bone, an inch long, a quarter-inch wide, and tapering to a wicked point. It had nicked my glove; I hoped it hadn’t also broken the skin. I rinsed it off, set it in a small pot to simmer, and then cleaned and disinfected my hands. The skin appeared unbroken, but I still gave it a pretty thorough marinade in Betadine.

  Just as I was drying off, the door opened and in walked Miranda, sporting a bright orange fiberglass cast. She pirouetted, angling the cast in all directions. “UT orange,” I said. “Very sporty.”

  “Thought it might get me a close-up on ESPN at the football game next weekend,” she said. “Any luck with our friend here?”

  “Yeah, barely. Pure, blind, last-second luck.” I fished the bone fragment out of the pot with some tongs. She whistled appreciatively. “It wasn’t a knife that punctured his lung and made him bleed to death—it was a piece of his own rib.”

  “And that happened eighteen days before he collapsed and died?”

  “Assuming it splintered off during the stomping he took in that bar fight.”

  “So the guy you’re helping…”

  “…was helping his pal fight off the gang who did this. Unfortunately, he just happened to be on hand when Billy Ray finally collapsed. I’m sure DeVriess won’t have any trouble getting Dr. Carter to testify to that effect.”

  I thought I saw a frown when I mentioned Jess Carter, but I didn’t pursue it. “You, Dr. Carter, and Grease,” Miranda said. “Strange bedfellows.”

  “Very strange,” I agreed. I couldn’t help wondering if she meant more by “bedfellows” than just courtroom allies, but I let that slide, too. I wasn’t touching that one with a ten-foot pole. A pole of any length, for that matter.

  CHAPTER 24

  “YOU SURE THIS IS where we turn?”

  Art swiveled and gave me his most withering dead-eyed cop stare. “Didn’t Waylon tell you to follow the signs for the church?”

  “I don’t see a sign,” I said.

  Art pointed toward the trunk of a big tulip poplar, then swung his finger down toward the ground. There, nestled amid some weeds, lay a rusted, bullet-riddled sign: “CAVE SPRINGS PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH.”

  “Oh, how could I have missed it? I guess if you need the sign to find it, they don’t want you there.”

  Art grunted. “I’m guessing if you get there by following a sign, they invite you to reach into the box and hand out the rattlesnakes.”

  “I don’t think Primitive Baptists are snake-handlers,” I said. “I think that’s Church of Holiness with Signs Following, or something like that.”

  “What does that mean, ‘Signs Following’? Besides, aren’t we doing some sign-following here?”

  “It’s a reference to a Bible verse—signs of the true Christian, supposedly: healing the sick, sipping cyanide, handling vipers. Y’all don’t do that in the Episcopal church?”

  Art shook his head. “Not so much. We keep in touch with the Lord by sipping wine and handling golf clubs.”

  “So tell me again what this octogenarian caver told you about this place?”

  “You listening this time?”

  “I was listening last time. I just wasn’t remembering.”

  “Lord, grant me patience,” he sighed. “Okay, he said it’s been a long time since he was up here—like, forty years’ worth of long time—but caves don’t change all that fast, you know? I told him one of the locals had called it Russell’s Cave, and I relayed the description just the way you gave it to me. He said he’s sure it’s the same one he mapped a long time ago. And he said your pal Waylon’s right: there is another entrance, right by the church, which is a lot easier to get to than the one the sheriff took you in. He said you went in the back door.”

  “And where, exactly, is the front door?”

  “I believe his last words were, ‘You can’t miss it.’”

  “I’ve heard that phrase a lot of times before, and I’ve finally figured out what it means. It means, ‘You’re about to get hopelessly lost, sucker.’”

  As we rounded a curve at a dip in the road, we came upon a small church nestled at the base of a bluff. Off to one side sat a small, weathered farmhouse, which I guessed might be where the pastor lived. We whipp
ed into the gravel parking lot and skidded to a stop—the church had snuck up on us—and got out to have a look.

  We had nearly clipped another sign. This one stood at the road’s edge, so close as to seem almost challenging, daring the heathen to vandalize it—or even just ignore it—at their eternal peril. It was laid up of smooth river rock, mortared into an approximation of a Greek pediment; cradled within the rock was a weathered wooden slab inscribed “CAVE SPRINGS PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH.”

  The church matched the sign: river rock in shades of tan and brown, nestled deep in a matrix of mottled gray mortar. The building appeared to have been created by geologic action rather than human hands. The double doors set into the front were stout wood, silver with age; their black hardware was forged iron, the hammer blows still visible on its surface. A pair of metal license plates was nailed to the doors: “JESUS IS COMING R-U READY?” asked one; the other read “HEAVEN OR HELL—WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?”

  “Friendly crowd,” I observed. I tried the iron latch, but the door seemed to be bolted from the inside somehow.

  “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” deadpanned Art, striking a Jesus pose. He rapped on the wood. “Ow! Looks like oak, feels like ironwood. Let’s see what we can see through a window.”

  The windows were miserly—few, small, and high—minimizing the temptation, I supposed, to admire the trees instead of heeding the sermons. Luckily the stonework made it easy to climb the wall. Art and I hauled ourselves up a few feet and peered through a grimy pane. There wasn’t much to see: a dozen backless benches, a scattering of ragged hymnals, a battered upright piano, and a lopsided wooden lectern. “Now I see why they call it ‘primitive,’” I said. We clambered down and began circumnavigating the little building.

  A wide, well-worn path ran alongside the church, then led to the base of the bluff out back. The pathway ended at a natural rock basin, waist-deep or so, filled with clear water. The surface rippled slightly in the center, where water from a fissure welled up continuously. At the back of the pool, the water gurgled over a lip in the basin and disappeared into an opening in the cliff. “Now I see why they call it ‘Cave Springs,’” Art said. “Handy for baptisms, huh?”

  “Very. Okay, your spelunking friend was right—hard to miss.” The opening in the rock wall was an oval about eight feet high by four feet wide. A grate of rusting bars blocked the entrance, supported by iron hinges pounded into the rock; a stout padlock hung from the hasp. “Dang,” I said. “Now what?”

  “Pray,” said Art as he moved to study the lock. I heard a jangling of keys, then the click of a lock popping open.

  “Hey, how’d you do that?”

  “God provides,” he intoned, looking heavenward as he slipped a master key back among its fellows and dropped the key ring into his pocket.

  We made a quick trip back to the truck for flashlights, jackets, Art’s headlamp and evidence kit, and my camera, then returned to the opening. Despite the rust on the grate, the hinges turned easily and silently. I noticed a liberal coating of grease on the pins. “Be nice to know who greases the hinges and carries the keys,” I said.

  As we entered the mouth of the tunnel, a cool wind fanned our faces. I sniffed the air, wondering if I might pick up a faint whiff of decomp or adipocere, but I knew that if I did, it would be emanating from my imagination, not the cave itself. Just inside, once the harsh daylight began to fade behind us, Art knelt down, his flashlight angling low along the dirt floor. “Look familiar?”

  I crouched, and felt a chill that had little to do with the cave’s temperature. “See all those? Those are the same work boot prints as in the slides.” He played the beam slowly back and forth, and I clutched his arm. “There—that’s the sheriff’s track, or one just like it.” Just as in the photos I’d taken in the grotto, the crisped lugged prints were superimposed over the worn tracks. At least, in the closest set of prints. But as Art played his beam farther along the cave floor, he let out a low whistle.

  “This place gets more traffic than a bathroom in a sports bar,” he said. “Looks like whoever owns that beat-up old pair of boots has been back one more time since your friendly neighborhood sheriff was in here.” Sure enough, here the worn prints were clearly uppermost, smashing the lug marks nearly flat.

  “So whoever it is, he knows that somebody else knows.”

  “Maybe. Probably. But that’s not all.” Art wiggled his flashlight beam slightly to the right of the layered prints. “Somebody else has been here, too.”

  I studied the area he was illuminating, but I couldn’t see any more prints. I leaned closer, but all I saw were what appeared to be vague smears in the mud. I looked at Art in puzzlement.

  “That one was smart enough to cover his tracks,” Art said. “Maybe dragged a board or something along behind him to wipe ’em out. Lot of work.”

  Art snapped open his evidence kit and took out a small headlamp, which he snugged into place, then removed a big ziplock bag. The bag was half-filled with a white powder that I recognized as dental stone, a stronger, harder cousin of plaster of paris. “What say we grab some casts?” said Art. “Just for kicks. So to speak.”

  “You are the sole of wit,” I said. “I’ll take some pictures, too.”

  From a plastic squeeze bottle, Art squirted a stream of water into the bag, zipped it shut, and began to knead the mixture through the plastic. “This is some kind of mess we’re stirring up here, Bill,” he said. This time he wasn’t joking.

  “I know. You wanna just pack up and forget about it?”

  “Naw, too late for that—hate for this dental stone to go to waste.” The mixture looked a lot like pancake batter, though I wouldn’t want to bite into a cake of it once it was hard. “Besides, you’ve got me curious now. You wanna bail?”

  “Guess not. Still can’t stop thinking about that girl and her baby.”

  “Okay then.” He dribbled the goopy mixture into four individual prints—two from each boot—as well as a short section of the obliterated track. “First time I ever tried to match a sawmill print,” he said. “These’ll take thirty minutes to set up. Meanwhile, you wanna see where these tracks go?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good guess. Let’s see if I’m right.”

  Hugging the wall of the passage so as not to disturb the other tracks, we followed the trail. It didn’t go far: barely two hundred yards from the entrance, the tracks veered sharply to the left and through a cleft in the tunnel wall. It was so narrow, Art and I had to plant our feet on the walls and straddle through to avoid trampling the sets of footprints. As the cleft opened up, I saw that we had emerged right where I’d thought we would: in the narrow end of the crystalline grotto. Directly ahead of us was the foot of the stone bench where Leena’s mummified body had lain. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Every time I decide he’s okay, I find out the sheriff’s playing more games with me. Hauled me up a damned mountainside, when he could’ve just dropped me off at the front door.” I remembered the hours I’d spent straddling the ATV, and the days of sore muscles. “Obviously he wanted me to think she was way out in the middle of nowhere.”

  Art’s headlamp bobbed assent. “Looks like it. Reckon how come?”

  “Something he didn’t want me to know about the front entrance, maybe.”

  He nodded again. “That’d be my guess, too.” He played his light across the stretch of floor between us and the bench. “That the same way it looked last time you saw it?” There was a mass of tracks in the room now. Amid the jumble, I could make out my own prints coming in from the opposite side, along with those of Tom Kitchings and Deputy Williams. I could see them departing, too. But ours were no longer the uppermost set of tracks: the work boots trumped us all. Heading into the grotto from where Art and I now stood, they approached the now-empty shelf, then turned and followed partway out the other side of the room before doubling back toward us and the church.

  “You know what this means?”

  “Yeah,” I said, with
a queasy feeling in my gut. “He’s been here within the past week.”

  “Yeah. So not only does he know that somebody knows, he knows that several somebodies know. Place like this, won’t take much asking around to find out that you’re one of those somebodies.”

  Suddenly there was a muffled thud, followed by the clatter of falling rock. A cloud of dust shot through the crevice, filling the grotto, sending us into spasms of coughing. I put my arm across my face and tried breathing through my shirtsleeve; Art pulled his face inside the neck of his pullover shirt, turtlelike. We stood stock-still, and gradually the clatter and the dust subsided, leaving behind a silence that was close and menacing. A silence like death.

  The rubble extended all the way up to the cleft in the grotto wall.

  “Just a guess,” Art said, “but I’d say somebody knew we were here.”

  It didn’t take a forensic genius to realize we’d have little hope of digging our way out through the rubble blocking the entrance by the church. “Guess it’s a good thing I know the back way after all,” I said. We headed for the opposite side of the grotto, but then I stopped to snap photos of the new footprints on the floor. “Not that I’m feeling real confident I’ll ever get to use these in court,” I muttered, “but I’m getting pissed off now.”

  “Yeah, this is getting personal,” Art said. “Those were some of my best plaster casts ever. That one of the board? I was gonna get a trip to a forensic conference outta that one.”

  “Easy come, easy go,” I said. “So the good news is, I know how to get out of here. The bad news is, the road is three or four miles down a rough trail, and that’s nowhere near the truck. It might take us—”

  A bright flash split the darkness, accompanied by a sharp crack. The floor shook, and rocks began raining down around us. Art grabbed my jacket and yanked me backward just as a stalactite plunged downward and shattered on the floor where I’d been standing. I jumped, then cursed. A lot.