Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  “I’m all right,” Tyler assured him. “Only had two beers for breakfast today.” He was probably joking, but given how morose he seemed over his girlfriend’s move to Memphis, he might have been telling the truth.

  Eventually the Bronco bucked to a stop beside a high, ragged wall of stone, and the four of us staggered out of the vehicle. The shattered surface beneath our feet might have been the surface of the moon, if not for the kudzu vines and scrubby trees. “Watch your step there, Doc,” Cotterell warned over his shoulder as he and Meffert led us toward the looming wall. The warning was absurdly unnecessary—not because the footing was good, but because it was so spectacularly bad. The jagged shale debris left behind by the strip-mining ranged from brick-sized chunks to sofa-sized slabs.

  “I’m glad y’all are leading the way,” I told the backs of the lumbering lawmen.

  “Be hard to find on your own,” said the sheriff.

  “True, but not what I meant,” I replied. “I figure if anybody’s going to get snakebit, it’ll be the guy walking in front. Or maybe the second guy, if the snake’s slow on the draw.”

  “Maybe,” conceded Meffert. “Or maybe the two crazy fools sticking their hands down in the rocks, rooting for bones.”

  “Dang, Bubba,” I said, wincing at the image he’d conjured. “That’ll teach me to be a smart-ass.”

  “Man,” muttered Tyler after a hundred slow yards. “Every step here is a broken ankle waiting to happen.” The gear he was lugging—a big plastic bin containing two cameras, paper evidence bags, latex gloves, trowels and tweezers, clipboards and forms—couldn’t have made it easy to see his footing or keep his balance. The trees were too sparse and scrubby to serve as props or handholds; about all they were good for was to obscure the footing and impede progress.

  “Bubba,” I huffed, “you came out with the guy that found the bones?”

  “Yup,” Meffert puffed. The TBI agent appeared to be carrying an extra twenty pounds or so around his middle.

  “He said he was hunting fossils,” I went on. “You believe him?”

  “Seemed believable. Name’s Ro-chelle. Some kind of engineer at the bomb factory in Oak Ridge. Environmental engineer. Maybe that’s why he likes poking around old mines. Fossils plus acid runoff—a twofer for a guy like that, I guess. There’s damn good fossils right around the bones. You’ll see in just a minute.” He paused to take a deeper breath and reach into a hip pocket. “Yeah, I believe him,” he repeated, mopping his head and neck with a bandanna. “He came into the sheriff’s office and then brought us all the way back up here. No reason to do that, except to help, far as I can see. Hell, that shot his Sunday right there.”

  “You never know,” I said. “Sometimes a killer will actually initiate contact with the police. Insert himself in the investigation.”

  “Return to the scene,” grunted the sheriff.

  “Sometimes more than that, even,” I said. “An FBI profiler I worked with a few years back told me about a California killer who spent a lot of time hanging out in a cop bar, making friends, talking about cases. Ed Kemper—‘Big Ed’—was the guy’s name. When Big Ed finally confessed to a string of murders and dismemberments, his cop buddies thought he was joking.”

  Meffert shrugged. “This Rochelle guy seemed okay,” he said. “He’s got a high-level security clearance, for whatever that’s worth. But like you say, you never know.”

  Fifty yards ahead, I saw yellow-and-black crime-scene tape draped around an oval of scrubby foliage and rugged shale. “Did somebody actually stay out here overnight to secure the scene?” I asked.

  Cotterell made a guttural, grunting sound, which I gradually realized was a laugh. “Secure the scene? Secure it from who, Doc?”

  MEFFERT WAS RIGHT ABOUT the fossils. Just outside the uneven perimeter of crime-scene tape lay a flagstone-sized slab of black shale, imprinted with a lacelike tracery of ancient leaves. Beside it, angling through the rubble, was a stone rod the length of a baseball bat. Its shape and symmetry made it stand out against the random raggedness of the other rocks, and I stooped for a closer look. Diamond-shaped dimples, thousands of them, dotted the entire surface of the shaft. “I’ll be damned,” I said to Tyler. “Look at that. A lepidodendron.”

  “A what?” Tyler set down the bin and squatted beside me. “Butterfly fossil?”

  I nudged it with my toe, and it shifted slightly. “Close, but no cigar. Your Latin’s rusty.”

  He snorted. “My Latin’s nonexistent.”

  “Butterflies are Lepidoptera—‘scaly wings.’ This is a lepidodendron—‘scaly tree’—a stalk from a giant tree fern. Ferns a hundred feet tall. Carboniferous period. That plant is three hundred million years old if it’s a day.”

  Tyler grasped the exposed end of the fossil and gently tugged and twisted, extricating it in a succession of rasping clinks. He sighted along its length, studying the intricate geometry of the diamond-shaped pattern. “You sure this is a scaly stem? Not a scaly snake?”

  “Those scales are leaf scars,” I said. “Also called leaf cushions. But they do look like reptile scales, for sure. Actually, circus sideshows used to exhibit these as fossilized snakes. You’re a born huckster, Tyler.” I stood up, scanning the ground ahead and catching a telltale flash of grayish white: weathered bone. “But enough with the paleo lesson. We’ve got work to do. Let’s start with pictures.” Tyler laid the fossil aside and opened the equipment bin.

  A few years before—when I’d first started working with the police on murder cases—a detective at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had taught me a crucial forensic lesson: You can never have too many crime-scene photos, because working a crime scene requires dismantling it; destroying it. The KBI agent’s approach to crime-scene photography sounded like something straight from Bonnie and Clyde’s bank-robbery playbook: “Shoot your way in, and shoot your way out”—start with wide shots, then get closer and closer, eventually reversing the process as you’re finishing up and leaving the scene. Tyler had been quick to master the technique, and even before we stepped across the tape at the strip mine, he had the camera up and the shutter clicking. It wasn’t unusual for Tyler or me—sometimes both of us—to come home with a hundred 35-millimeter slides from a death scene, ranging from curbside shots of a house to frame-filling close-ups of a .45-caliber exit wound.

  As Tyler shot his way in, so did I, though I was shooting with my eyes and my brain rather than a camera. The pelvis: female, I could tell at a glance; subadult; probably adolescent. The size: small—five feet, plus or minus. As I zoomed in on the skull, I reached out to pluck a seedling that was growing beside it and obscuring my view. As I tugged, though, the skull shifted—bone grating against rock—and I froze. “I’ll be damned,” I said, for the second time in minutes. The seedling, I realized, wasn’t growing beside the skull; it was growing from the skull—from the left eye orbit, in fact—something I’d never seen before. Wriggling my fingers gently beneath the skull, I cradled it, then lifted and twisted, tugging tendrils of root from the rocky crevices below. The seedling was a foot tall, the fronds of tiny oval leaves reminding me of a fern. As I held it up, with Tyler snapping photographs and the sheriff and TBI agent looking on, I felt as if I were displaying a bizarrely potted houseplant. “Bubba,” I said, nodding toward the bin, “would you mind opening one of those evidence bags for me?” Meffert scrambled to comply, unfolding the paper bag and setting it on the most level patch of rubble he could find.

  Leaning down, I set the skull inside the bag.

  “You gonna just leave that tree in it?” asked Meffert.

  “For now,” I said, bending the seedling so I could tuck it completely into the bag. “When we get back to UT, I’ll take it over to a botanist—a guy I know in the Forestry Department—and get him to slice it open, count the growth rings. However many rings he finds, we’ll know she’s been here at least that many years.”


  “Huh,” Meffert grunted, nodding. Suddenly he added, “Watch it!”

  Just as he spoke, I felt a sharp pain on my wrist. I looked down in time to see a wasp pumping the last of its venom into the narrow band of skin between the top of my glove and the bottom of my sleeve. “Damnation,” I muttered, flattening the wasp with a hard slap. “Where the hell did that come from?”

  “Yonder comes another one,” Meffert said, “right out of the evidence bag.” Sure enough, at that moment a second wasp emerged from the open bag and made a beeline for my wrist, drawn by the “danger” pheromones the first one had given off. Meffert’s hand darted downward, and by the time I realized what he was doing, he had caught and crushed the wasp in midair, barehanded. “Sumbitches must be nesting in that skull,” he said. I was dubious, but not for long; two more wasps emerged from the bag, both of them deftly dispatched by Meffert. We watched and waited, but the attack seemed to be over.

  “You’re quick, Bubba,” I said, rubbing my wrist. “You that fast on the draw with a gun?”

  He smiled. “Nobody’s ever give me a reason to find out.”

  “Well, watch my back, if you don’t mind.”

  I resumed my inspection of the postcranial skeleton, scanning the bones from neck to feet. “Y’all were right about the size,” I said. “Just guessing, I’d say right around five feet. And female,” I added, bending low over the flare of the hip bones. “And young.”

  “How young?” asked Cotterell.

  I hedged. “Be easier to tell once we get the bones back to the lab and finish cleaning ’em up. But I’m guessing teenager.”

  “Any chance this is just some old Indian skeleton?” the sheriff asked hopefully. “Make our job a hell of a lot easier if she was.”

  “Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “She’s definitely modern.”

  Meffert chuckled. “Isn’t that what you said about that dead guy over near Nashville a couple years ago? The one turned out to be a Civil War soldier?”

  “Well, she’s lying on top of all this shale,” I pointed out. “If she’s not modern, this must be the world’s oldest strip mine.” I said it with a smile, but the smile was forced, and it was contradicted by the deep crimson my face had turned at the reminder of the Civil War soldier.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Doc,” Meffert added. “You only missed it by a hunnerd-something years.”

  “Too bad that soldier didn’t have a tree growing outta his head,” the sheriff added. “Big ol’ pecan tree, with a historical marker on it? You’da got it right for sure.”

  Meffert grinned. So did I, my teeth clenched behind drawn lips.

  WE RODE IN SILENCE down the winding mountain blacktop toward Wartburg. Tyler was absorbed in the fossil he’d brought back, his fingers tracing the intricate diamond patterning as if he were blind, examining it by touch alone.

  For my part, I was brooding about the parting shots by the TBI agent and the sheriff. They’d been joking, good-naturedly, no doubt, but the conversation had stung, even worse than the wasp, and the sting took me back, in my mind, to the event they were dredging up. Just after my move to Knoxville, I’d been called to a rural county in Middle Tennessee, where a decomposing body had been found in a shallow grave behind a house. The remains were in fairly good shape, as rotting bodies go—pink tissue still clung to the bones—and I’d estimated that the man had died about a year before. In fact, we later learned, the dead man was Col. William Shy, a Civil War soldier killed in the Battle of Nashville in 1864.

  In hindsight, there were logical reasons I’d missed the time-since-death mark so widely. Colonel Shy had been embalmed, and until modern-day grave robbers had looted the grave—looking for relics—the body had been sealed in an airtight cast-iron coffin, which had kept bugs and bacteria at bay. But those explanations sounded more like excuses than I liked. They also provided precious little comfort in court, I’d learned, again and again: Hostile defense attorneys in contemporary criminal cases took great delight in bringing up Colonel Shy, rubbing my nose in my blunder as a way of undermining my testimony against their clients.

  Colonel Shy wasn’t the only case where I’d been derailed by difficulty in determining time since death. Another murder case—a case I’d consulted on shortly before my move to Knoxville—still haunted me. A suspect in the case had been seen with the victim two weeks before the body had been found—the last known sighting of the victim—and the investigator and prosecutor pressed me hard: Could I testify, with certainty, that the murder had occurred then? “No,” I’d been forced to admit, “not with any scientific confidence.” As a result, the suspect had gone free.

  Hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge—determined to avoid such frustrations and humiliations in the future—I had combed through stacks of scientific journals, seeking data on decomposition. But apart from a few musty articles about insect carcasses—dead bugs found in bodies exhumed from old cemeteries—I’d found virtually nothing. Nothing recent, at any rate, though I had come across a fascinating handbook written by a death investigator in China centuries before, in 1247 A.D.—a research gap of more than seven centuries. The good news was, I wasn’t the only forensic anthropologist who was flying by the seat of his pants when estimating time since death. The bad news was, every forensic anthropologist was flying by the seat of his pants.

  The interesting news, I realized now, as Tyler and I reached the base of the mountain, and the road’s hairpin curves gave way to a long, flat straightaway, was that the field was wide open. Time since death—understanding the processes and the timing of postmortem decomposition—was fertile ground for research.

  The sun was low in the sky, a quarter moon high overhead, when Tyler and I passed through Wartburg’s town square on our way back to Knoxville. As I glanced up at the courthouse belfry, still pondering ways to unlock the secrets of time since death, I found myself surrounded by markers and measures of time: A frozen clock. A fossilized town. An ancient fern. The bones of a girl who would never reach adulthood.

  A girl for whom time had stopped, sometime after wildcat miners had ravaged a mountainside; sometime before a papery seed had wafted from a tree, and a wasp queen had begun building her papery palace in the dark.

  CHAPTER 2

  Satterfield

  SATTERFIELD OPENED THE DOOR and reached into the wire-mesh hutch. Grasping the soft, loose skin just behind the ears, he raised the animal slightly, then cupped a hand beneath the chest and lifted it out of the hutch. The rabbit was young and small—scarcely larger than the palm of Satterfield’s hand—and its large, luminous eyes dominated its face, in the way of all baby mammals. The eyes flitted back and forth, and the animal trembled.

  Satterfield crossed the room to a second enclosure, also made of wire mesh. This one was sturdier and larger—as big as a baby’s playpen, though only half as high—and its floor was covered with sandy earth, flat rocks, and good-sized pieces of driftwood. The enclosure was split down the middle by a removable panel of wire mesh, inserted through a narrow slit in the top. Cupping the rabbit to his chest, Satterfield stooped to unlatch the door in the top, then set the animal inside. It sat, motionless except for the tremor. On the other side of the divider, the other side of the cage, Satterfield glimpsed a trace of movement, slow at first, then more rapid: a slender, bifurcated black ribbon of tongue sliding in and out of a mouth, flicking as it sampled the new scent in the air.

  The snake—a fer-de-lance that Satterfield had paid a thousand dollars to have imported from Costa Rica—measured four feet long and three inches thick; its broad back was saddled, from neck to tail, by bold, black-and-tan diamonds. The head—a flat-topped triangle with thin black stripes running from the eyes to the back of the jaws—was nearly as broad as Satterfield’s hand.

  Satterfield had kept snakes for most of his life, but the fer-de-lance was different from others he’d had. It was fearless, irritable, and aggressive, and that
was on its mellow days. Most snakes in the present situation would’ve sat tight, studying the rabbit for a while, maybe even waiting for it to lower its guard, perhaps even wander foolishly toward the jaws of death. The fer-de-lance, though, after a few more confirmatory flicks of the tongue, slid slowly but confidently toward the rabbit. The rabbit emitted a squeal and then leaped away, huddling in the corner of the cage. The snake slithered along the divider, its head reared, its tongue flicking through open squares in the wire mesh one by one as it drew closer.

  Driven by some ancient, embedded survival instinct, the rabbit began lunging against the walls and roof of wire. After a few moments, Satterfield threaded a hand through the opening, managing to corner the creature and extract it from the cage. He cradled it against his chest as it panted, its small heart fluttering as fast as a hummingbird’s.

  Once the rabbit had stopped quaking, he lowered it into the cage again, both hands gripping tightly as it began to squirm and struggle. The snake had not moved, and when Satterfield released the rabbit—this time setting it practically against the divider—the triangular head darted forward, striking the mesh with enough force to make the cage shudder. Again the rabbit began battering itself against the corner and top of the cage, as the snake’s head, too, lashed against the screen with primitive force and ruthless frustration. After a few moments Satterfield retrieved the rabbit once more. He’d had a rat die swiftly of fright in just such circumstances on a prior occasion, and he did not want a repeat of that premature disappointment.

  By the time Satterfield had performed the ritual half a dozen times—insertion and extraction, insertion and extraction—the rabbit’s quaking was constant, even when it was cradled against his chest; any time Satterfield made the slightest movement toward the cage, the creature began to struggle. Satterfield experimented, extending the rabbit toward the cage and then pulling it away several times without actually putting it inside. The creature was now crazed with terror, all sense of safety having been systematically destroyed. Its breathing was ragged and shallow, and the flicker of the heartbeat felt weaker now, less regular against Satterfield’s palm. The rabbit was clearly approaching exhaustion.