Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  “I’m always happy to help,” I told O’Conner.

  “He’s not kidding,” Miranda added. “When he’s in a foul mood, I’m sometimes tempted to murder somebody, just so he’ll get a case and lighten up.”

  O’Conner grimaced and shook his head—not to dispute what she’d said, but to express dismay, as best I could tell, about the case we’d be helping with. “Y’all might not feel the same when you see what we’ve got here,” he said.

  I held up a hand to interrupt him. “Don’t tell us anything,” I reminded him.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “You want to draw your own conclusions. It’s a good idea; I just don’t see how your conclusions can be anything but terrible when you see this.” With that, he turned and led us forward, higher up the hill. The farther we went, the darker and more sinister the woods seemed to grow, though I told myself that the effect was created purely by my imagination, in response to the sheriff’s ominous words.

  Suddenly a man stepped from behind a tree, so unexpectedly I spooked like a horse spotting a snake in its path. He held up a hand, and I recognized Steve Morgan, a former student of mine from years back, now a special agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Steve and his wife, Christie, had met in my osteology class, so I was always glad to see him, feeling entitled to take credit for both his professional success and his personal happiness. “Steve,” I said, holding out my hand. “Good to see you. Glad to see the TBI is sending in the A-team on this one. But who’d you piss off at headquarters to get sent back to Cooke County? I thought Meffert was assigned up here.”

  Morgan’s face fell. “I’m just temporary. Maybe. Bubba’s on medical right now.”

  “Something serious?”

  He nodded gravely. “Looks like pancreatic cancer. Not good.”

  “I hate to hear that.” I meant it, not just because Meffert was a good agent and an old friend, but also, especially, because I had a deep and abiding hatred of cancer in all its insidious forms, ever since it had snatched my wife, Kathleen, from me years before. “Where is he? And is he up to visitors?”

  “Not right now. He’s out at MD Anderson. I’ll let you know once he’s back.”

  “I’d appreciate that. How about you? You glad to be back in Cooke County for a while?”

  “Doc, that question is more loaded than my service weapon. Take this case here, for instance.”

  “Not a word,” I told him, and he grinned. I turned to O’Conner. “Why didn’t you tell me this guy was waiting in ambush up here, ready to give me a heart attack?”

  O’Conner looked at me and shrugged, all innocence. “Hey, aren’t you the one that keeps saying, ‘Don’t tell me anything’?”

  I looked to Miranda and Waylon to chime in on my behalf, but Miranda arched a single, serves-you-right eyebrow at me, and Waylon was carefully studying his grubby fingernails.

  “I see how it’s gonna be with this crew,” I said, feigning martyrdom. “Okay. Fine. Let’s go.”

  The hillside steepened for ten feet or so, then plateaued into a flat, level area—possibly a natural landform, but more likely an area that had been shaped to accommodate a cabin or farmhouse a century ago. On the nearer side of the shelf, some twenty feet ahead of us, was a large tulip poplar—easily two feet in diameter, and a good eighty feet tall. All around us, other tulip poplars were just beginning to turn from green to gold—the gold that gave the Great Smoky Mountains their characteristic autumnal incandescence—but this one was completely bare: It was dead, but clearly it hadn’t been dead for long, as its branches had not yet begun to rot and break.

  Something near the bottom of the trunk caught my eye, and I moved closer to inspect it. It was a horizontal line, roughly the height of my waist—a line that had been etched into the trunk, an inch deep and apparently all the way around. Walking closer, I saw that what had etched the line—girdling the bark, and therefore killing the tree—was a heavy chain, its links made of steel as thick as my pinkie finger. Puzzled, I turned back and gave O’Conner a questioning look. His only response was a grim nod of his head.

  Showtime, I thought, opening the case of the 35-millimeter camera that was hanging from my neck. With the zoom lens at its widest setting, I began shooting photos of the area, taking in not just the dead tulip poplar but the entire shelf. Once I was sure I had documented the overall scene, I began moving closer, ever mindful of the advice of one of my earliest law enforcement mentors, a legendary agent at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. “Photographing a crime scene is like robbing a bank, Bill,” he told me a dozen times or more. “First you shoot your way in, and then you shoot your way out.” His advice had served me well throughout my career.

  By the time I was arm’s length from the tree, I could see the welds in each link of the chain. I could also see the smoothness of the groove worn deep into the wood: a groove worn, it would seem, by sustained movement of the chain, rotating around the trunk again and again and again, the links sliding and gouging with each revolution. How many revolutions? Hundreds, surely, to cause such wear; maybe even thousands.

  When I stepped to the side, I felt a visceral shock that was like a punch in the gut. First, my peripheral vision took in the heavy padlock beside me, securing the chain around the trunk. But it took only an instant for my eyes to follow the chain outward from the tree—ten feet, twenty, twenty-five. Thirty feet out, the chain ended in another loop of padlocked links.

  This loop was much smaller in diameter: perhaps five inches, no more than six—about the size of the circle I could make by touching the tips of my index fingers and my thumbs. It lay a few inches from a handful of cervical vertebrae, directly beneath the skull’s location. Except that there was no skull; only a scattering of other bones, many of them splintered and incomplete.

  Behind me, I heard Miranda gasp. “Sweet Jesus on the cross,” she murmured. It was her strongest profanity, a phrase I’d heard her use only a handful of times in all the years we’d worked together. “Chained to a tree to die.”

  “Can you imagine dyin’ thataway?” rumbled Waylon. It was a question no one bothered to answer; a question no one needed to answer.

  I turned toward Miranda, Waylon, and the sheriff, and as I turned, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: a shallow trough in the ground, curving away from the bones in either direction; curving, in fact, in a wide circle around the tree, a uniform thirty feet from the trunk. It was a path, I realized with a new jolt: a path worn around the tree, etched in the earth, by the victim’s footsteps—thousands of footsteps, maybe millions—on a long journey to nowhere. No, I realized, not to nowhere. To death.

  A circuitous, ironclad journey to death.

  I HAD PAUSED IN MY PHOTOGRAPHY TO ABSORB THE horror of the gruesome death sentence imposed on the person chained to the tree, but after a moment, I got back to work. I was still standing beside the tulip poplar, some thirty feet from the bones, but I wasn’t yet ready to approach them. There were more things to photograph where I stood.

  I had noticed an assortment of litter strewn across the ground, though initially I hadn’t focused on it. Litter is common in rural counties, where household trash isn’t always collected by garbage trucks, but litter is generally confined to roadside ditches and gullies, not strewn in remote forests. I now took a closer look. Here, the litter was largely confined to the sixty-foot circle worn in the ground, and for an absurd instant, I wondered why a murderer—for unless this death was the world’s strangest suicide, it was surely a murder—would choose a dump as the scene of the crime. Then the grim truth hit me, again with terrible force: The trash had accumulated after the victim was chained to the tree, not before; the trash—empty cans, plastic wrappers, milk jugs, shards of chicken bones—had arrived over the course of days or even weeks, during which the chained, circling victim had been fed. Had been kept terribly, terrifyingly alive. No, Waylon, I silently answered him, I can’t imagine dying thataway.

  I took a series of photos of the trash, on
ce more starting with wide-angle shots, then zooming in on representative samples. Bumblebee Tuna. Underwood Deviled Ham. Hormel Bacon. Armour Vienna Sausage. Van Camp’s Beanee Weenees. The combination—a profusion of high-fat, chemical-laden processed meats, plus the terrible purpose to which they had been put—turned my stomach, and several times I had to look away and breathe deeply to keep nausea at bay. It was ironic; comical, even: In decades of forensic work, dealing with decomposing and even dismembered bodies, at every stage of decay, I had thrown up only once, on my very first case, when an exhumed coffin was opened to reveal a rotting, dripping corpse. Yet here I was, brought to the brink of vomiting by a scattering of empty cans and wrappers.

  “Let’s be sure to bring up a couple of rakes and trash bags,” I said over my shoulder to Miranda. “I want to bag this stuff and take it back with us.”

  “What do you think it’ll tell you?” asked the sheriff.

  “Maybe nothing, maybe a lot,” I said. “If we hit the jackpot, we might get fingerprints or DNA—from the victim or the suspect. Maybe from both. But even if we don’t, we could still learn some things about when this happened, and how long it went on. We might not get much insight from the Vienna sausage cans—processed meat has a shelf life that’s measured in years. But—”

  Miranda snorted. “Decades, more like it. Maybe centuries. Mmmm,” she said sarcastically. “Vienna sausage—every bit as tasty and nutritious in a thousand years as the day it went into the can!”

  “Hey, now,” Waylon protested. “Don’t be talkin’ bad ’bout Vienna sausage. I had me some for lunch, and like as not I’ll have me some more for dinner.”

  “Lucky you,” she said.

  I ignored their culinary bickering. “The milk jugs might tell us something,” I went on. “The pull dates—‘sell by’—might help us pin down the time since death. Maybe even on how long he was out here.” A chilling thought hit me. “Or she.”

  “OKAY, MIRANDA, YOU KNOW THE DRILL. TELL ME what you see.”

  It was one of my favorite teaching techniques: putting my students on the spot and testing their knowledge, in the same way chief residents quiz medical students during hospital rounds. Miranda, of course, hardly counted as a student by now; she was more like a junior colleague, but this was a ritual we’d performed for years, and I suspected she had come to share my fondness for it.

  After I had “shot my way in” to close-ups of the bones, we had switched gears, returning to the truck to fetch rakes, trash bags, trowels, gloves, and evidence bags. We hadn’t bothered with a body bag; there was no body—just a skeleton, and only a partial one, at that. No point wasting an eighty-dollar vinyl bag when a few fifty-cent paper bags would do the job just fine.

  Miranda bent down, then dropped to one knee and studied the bones for a long moment. Drawing a deep breath, she began. “The remains are fully skeletonized, indicating a considerable time since death—perhaps several months, though almost certainly less than a year; in fact, probably less than six months.”

  “Explain,” I said, trying not to show that I was pleased that she had reached the same conclusion I had.

  “Given the elevation here in the mountains, and the declining average temperatures in September and October, there would almost certainly be soft tissue on the bones if the death had occurred in the fall, when the weather cools off and decay slows down. But if the death occurred no later than, say, mid-August—we’ll need to check the temperature records, of course—the corpse could have skeletonized fast, in just two or three weeks.”

  “Excuse me,” said Sheriff O’Conner. “What makes you think it wasn’t more than six months or so ago?”

  “The remains are on top of last fall’s leaf litter,” she said, gesturing at the ground. “True, there are some dead leaves on the bones”—she leaned forward and picked up a brown leaf that was lying on a long-bone shaft—“but these aren’t from last year.” She pointed upward, toward the crown of the dead tulip poplar. “These are from the tree the victim was chained to.” Good girl, Miranda, I thought, though of course Miranda—was she about to turn thirty?—was far from a girl now. “Also,” she went on, “there’s no vegetation growing up through the skeletal elements. That suggests the remains hadn’t yet skeletonized by spring or early summer, when seeds germinate.”

  Her mention of seeds germinating reminded me of a case a few years ago—my God, I realized, twenty years ago—in the Cumberland Mountains, where I found a two-year-old black-locust seedling growing from the eye orbit of a dead girl’s skull. I had so many ghosts floating around in my head by now; every new case seemed to remind me of an old case, or two or three or five old cases. Concentrate, Brockton, I scolded myself. Be here now.

  “Clearly there’s been a lot of carnivore activity and scatter,” Miranda was saying. “Possibly dogs; more likely, coyotes. As you can see, in addition to the skull, we’re missing the hands and feet, along with the ends of the long bones. In fact, we’re missing a lot of the elements of the axial skeleton.”

  “The which of the what?” asked Waylon.

  “The elements of the axial skeleton,” she repeated. “The bones below the skull—the ribs, sternum, lumbar vertebrae from the lower spine—most of them are gone. So it could have been a whole pack of coyotes.”

  I would circle back to that shortly, but meanwhile, I wanted her to move on. “So what can you tell us about the victim?”

  “Well, a lot less than I could if we had the skull,” she said. “From the narrow pelvis, we can see that the victim was male. Unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us anything about his geographic ancestry.”

  “Excuse me, Miranda,” said Morgan. “Are you using ‘geographic ancestry’ the way we used to use ‘race,’ back in the age of dinosaurs, when I was in Dr. Brockton’s classes?”

  “I am,” she said, her smile tolerant but tight. Then, looking at O’Conner and Waylon, she explained, “We used to categorize people into three ‘races’: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which meant Asian or Native American. Now, anthropologists—most of them, anyway”—she glanced at me as she said it, knowing that I had not fully swallowed this politically correct batch of culturally sensitive Kool-Aid—“recognize ‘race’ to be a self-defined cultural identity. A label people choose for themselves, not an objective physical feature.”

  I kept silent, though inwardly I chafed a bit. If it looks like a Caucasoid and quacks like a Caucasoid, I thought, it is a Caucasoid. The three-race model had served forensic anthropologists extremely well, in my opinion, and it seemed a shame to discard it for the sake of what struck me as politically correct hairsplitting.

  “Is ‘dead redneck’ a cultural identity, too?” asked Waylon. “’Cause no matter what you call it, I reckon that’s most likely what we’re lookin’ at right here.”

  Miranda looked both appalled and puzzled. “Well,” she hedged after an awkward pause, during which I struggled to keep a straight face, “if you’re dead, it makes it hard to self-identify. But are you saying you don’t think the victim is African American?” Waylon nodded but didn’t elaborate, so Miranda pressed him. “Why not?”

  “Not many to choose from up here,” he said. “Ain’t but a handful of black folks live in Cooke County. Seems like we’da heard about it if one of ’em went missing.”

  Seeking a second opinion, she looked at the sheriff. “Really? They’re that scarce?”

  O’Conner shrugged, looking slightly self-conscious. “As counties go, it’s fairly monochrome,” he conceded.

  “How monochrome?” she persisted.

  “Ninety-five percent white, as of the 2010 Census,” he said. I was surprised and impressed that he knew the number off the top of his head. “Two percent black. Two percent Hispanic, supposedly, but I’m pretty sure that number’s rising, judging by the increase in Latinos I saw at the cockfights, back before we shut that operation down.”

  “Wowzer,” she said. “Double wowzer. Interesting method of demographic research, Sheriff. And int
eresting Census data. I didn’t know America still had such lily-white places.”

  The professor in me couldn’t let that stand unchallenged. “Hey, Cooke County is a multicultural melting pot compared to Pickett County, up on the Kentucky border,” I said. “Last time I checked, their black population was two-tenths of a percent.” She looked dubious. “True fact,” I assured her. “Zero point two percent. One black person for every five hundred whites.”

  “Must be a whole lotta fun for that one,” she observed dryly. “But we digress. So: The victim might or might not have been a white male. Let’s see if we can tell how old he was.”

  She picked up a clavicle—luckily, there was one to pick up, though only one. “The clavicle, the collarbone, is a good indicator of age,” she said. “The ends of the bone, called the epiphyses, are connected to the shaft by cartilage before adulthood, but then they fuse, and growth stops. But luckily, the ends of the clavicle don’t fuse at the same time. The distal end, where it joins the shoulder, fuses first, at age nineteen or twenty.” She examined the bone. “And that appears to have happened, although . . .” She peered more closely. “Perhaps not 100 percent.” She studied the other end, which had once been attached to the sternum. “The medial epiphysis fuses later,” she went on, “usually during the twenties. Here, the fusion has just begun, so we know he’s younger than thirty.”

  I didn’t say anything—I didn’t want to interrupt her—but inwardly I was cheering, Yes! You are going to be a terrific professor someday, Miranda!

  She frowned at me, and for an absurd moment I wondered if she’d heard my thoughts and found them discomfiting, but then the reason for the frown became clear. “Too bad so many of the elements are missing,” she said finally. “The skull could help us narrow down the age further. The sutures—the seams—in the roof of the mouth fuse at different ages, too. But based on the clavicle, I’d estimate the age at right around twenty. No more than twenty-five. Maybe as young as nineteen.”