“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.
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.