“This is case number twenty-three for the year,” I reminded Miranda, though clearly she already knew, because she handed me a radiographically opaque tag she’d prepared for the X-rays. The tag included the last two digits of the year, followed by the case number. In my first few years as state forensic anthropologist, I’d never gotten out of single digits — it was probably 1990 before I needed a number as high as 90–10. During the past decade, though, I’d gradually edged up through the twenties and into the thirties.
We started at the head and worked our way down. We would try to match the cranial X-rays with antemortem dental X-rays from missing persons — if we could find any missing folks who fit the description of our body. In addition, we’d search the films for any signs of skeletal trauma, such as fractures or cut marks, or radiographically opaque material such as lead. Even if a bullet has passed completely through a body, it often leaves a telltale smear or splatter inside the skull or on a rib.
I worked the film cassette under the body bag in the region of the head, and Miranda snapped the exposure. As I slid the cassette out and held it up for her, she took it in her left hand, swapping it for an unexposed cassette that she handed me with her right. We worked wordlessly; having done this dozens of times before, we could have performed this macabre dance in our sleep.
After X-raying the head, we took films of the chest, the abdomen, and finally the pelvis. Besides showing us the bones, the pelvic X-rays would also reveal any metallic objects that had been in the pockets of the clothing. Although the clothes themselves had rotted — a hint that they were all cotton, and therefore pretty old — the adipocere in the region of the hips and thighs might well contain small objects that had been in the pockets.
While Miranda stashed away the X-ray machine, I wheeled the gurney into the cooler. Miranda called out, “Aren’t we processing this one tonight?”
“It’s pretty late. How about tomorrow? Like the sheriff said, one more night ain’t gonna hurt this one none. Besides, I’ve got to be in court early tomorrow for a hearing in the Ledbetter murder.”
“Oh, you mean the case where you’re going to destroy the medical examiner’s career and put a cold-blooded killer back on the streets?” I winced, but she grinned and wagged a finger at me. “You’re doing the right thing, you know you are — he should have retired years ago, and he totally blew that case. Go home. Sleep the sleep of the just and the competent.”
Only after I emerged onto the barren loading dock did I remember that my truck was parked a quarter-mile of asphalt away, over at the Body Farm, where I’d left it fourteen hours ago. I sagged in dismay and sudden fatigue.
The one thing I needed most was a good night’s sleep. But that was also the one thing I was least likely to get.
CHAPTER 5
My truck sat all alone at the far corner of the hospital parking lot. By day, the Body Farm’s weathered, wooden privacy fence — an eight-foot screen that shields the corpses from sightseers, and shields squeamish hospital workers from the corpses — blends into the woods. Now, under the glare of the sodium security lights, it shone a garish yellow-orange.
Unlocking the cab of my truck, I turned back toward the hospital and waved at the surveillance camera mounted high atop the roof. I doubted anyone was scrutinizing the monitor that closely, but just in case, I wanted the campus police to know I appreciated their round-the-clock vigil over my unorthodox extended family.
At this time of night, almost eleven, the highway was practically empty as I crossed the river and swooped down the Kingston Pike exit. Kingston Pike — Knoxville’s main east — west thoroughfare — grazed one edge of the UT campus. If I turned right at the light at the bottom of the exit ramp, I would traverse the lively six-block stretch called “The Strip,” which was lined with crowded restaurants, noisy bars, and inebriated students. Turning left instead, I made for the quieter precincts of Sequoyah Hills, where I threaded my way along the grand median of Cherokee Boulevard for half a mile before diving off into the maze of dark, quiet streets that led to my house.
Most Sequoyah Hills real estate was unaffordable on a college professor’s salary, or even ten professors’ salaries. The riverfront homes had especially astronomical prices, some of them selling for millions. Here and there in the wealthy, wooded enclave, though — like patches of crabgrass in the lawn of an estate — persisted small pockets of ordinary ranch houses, split-levels, even a handful of rental bungalows fronting a tiny park. It was in one such pocket, thirty years before, that Kathleen and I had found a charming 1940s-era cottage. White brick with a stone chimney, a slate roof, a yard brimming with dogwoods and redbuds, and an only slightly ruinous price tag, it looked like a postcard-perfect place for a pair of academics to settle down and start a family. And it was. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Instead, it now hung around my neck like a millstone, and tonight — as always — I fished out the key with a sense of foreboding. The deadbolt slithered open, the door swung into silent darkness, and I knew it had been a mistake to go home. My footsteps clattered on the slate foyer with all the warmth of frozen earth shoveled upon the glinting lid of a steel coffin.
I showered off the mud and grit of Cooke County, and I tried to steam away the ache in my thighs and shoulders. Then — with a mixture of sinking hope and rising dread — I crawled into my unmade bed.
After hours of tossing, I finally slept, and I dreamt of a woman. In the way that is common in dreams, she was a generic, unspecified woman at first, doing something generic and unspecified. Then she looked at me, and suddenly she looked quite specific and very afraid. A hand reached out and stroked her cheek. Then it slid downward and closed around her throat. The woman, I now saw, was my wife, and the hand, I now realized, was my own. A look of pleading filled her eyes, and then a look of sorrow. And then her eyes turned to empty sockets, and her mouth to a vacant oval. But I was the one who gave voice to the scream. “Kathleen!”
Heart pounding, sweat and tears flowing, I awoke — as I had every night for the past two years — to find myself alone in the bed. Alone in our bed. No — alone in my bed. My empty, lifeless bed in my empty, lifeless house in my empty, lifeless life.
CHAPTER 6
The district attorney, Robert Roper, gave me a rueful nod as I headed toward the witness stand, ragged and bleary-eyed. I’d testified as a witness for Bob in half a dozen murder cases, but today I was testifying for the other side, hoping to demolish his charge that Eddie Meacham had murdered Billy Ray Ledbetter.
As a forensic anthropologist, my obligation is to the truth, not to prosecutors or police. In practice, speaking the truth usually means speaking for murder victims, and often that means testifying for prosecutors. Not this time, though. This time, I was speaking for Billy Ray Ledbetter, and I was convinced he hadn’t been murdered by his friend Eddie. But speaking that truth — at least, on behalf of the defense attorney who had roped me into this — was going to stick in my craw so tight I might need to be Heimliched right there on the witness stand.
The bailiff rattled off what I assume was the routine swearing-in question — I wondered if he dabbled in auctioneering on the side, such was his speed — and I assented. Then Burt DeVriess stood to question me, and I felt my hackles rise.
I reminded myself that I was here as a witness for DeVriess and his client, but it wasn’t easy to suppress years of animosity. In almost every East Tennessee murder trial in which I’d testified for the prosecution, DeVriess — nicknamed “Da Grease” by local cops — had served as defense counsel. The guiltier you were, and the more heinous your crime, the more you needed Grease. At least, that’s the way things seemed. Serial rapists, child molesters, drug kingpins, stone-cold killers: the dregs of humanity — or inhumanity — were Burt DeVriess’s bread and butter. I had faced him from the witness chair a dozen times before, and his cross-examinations had never failed to enrage me. Some of that anger was a natural response to the legal system’s adversarial structure, which I didn’t much like. It was maddening to do a meticulous forensic exam, then hear it challenged and undermined by the sort of careerist witnesses widely known as “defense whores”: Yes, theoretically, I suppose it’s possible, as Dr. Brockton claims, that the skull fracture might have been caused by the bloody baseball bat found beside the body. However, in my expert opinion, the fracture more likely resulted from the impact of a large, anomalous hailstone…