DeVriess didn’t even stand up for his redirect. “Dr. Brockton, are you familiar with the Manhattan Project?” Of course I was; back during World War II, much of the top-secret work to develop the atomic bomb had taken place just twenty miles away, in Oak Ridge. “The Trinity test in New Mexico — the single experimental detonation of an atomic bomb before Hiroshima — would you call that shoddy science, Doctor? Or would you call that pretty convincing proof?”
I could have kissed that slick bastard. “I reckon I’d call that pretty convincing proof.”
Roper objected, but the judge just smiled and shook his head. Grease moved for an immediate dismissal of all charges; the judge turned him down, too, but did grant his motion to exhume the body of Billy Ray Ledbetter so I could examine it in the flesh — or in what was left of it.
As the dust settled and the hearing ended, I walked over to Roper, sitting glumly at his table. “Bob, I hope there’s no hard feelings. You do know I feel bad about this?”
He looked up, his eyes weary. “Yeah, me too. I like it a lot better when you’re sitting over here on my side.”
“So do I.” I offered my hand, and we shook like good Southern gentlemen. I made to pull away, but he tightened his grip.
“Bill? I’m…I’m real sorry, Bill.”
I gave him a smile I hoped was reassuring. “It’s okay. You’re just doing your job the best way you know how.”
He squeezed again. “I…meant about Kathleen. I should have said something a lot sooner, but I just didn’t know what to say. I’m so, so sorry.”
I tried to speak but found I could not. I looked away, extricated my hand, and fled.
CHAPTER 7
An hour after the walnut-paneled door of the Knox County Criminal Court closed behind me, the stainless-steel door of the cooler at the Regional Forensic Center opened before me. The room was as familiar to me as my own kitchen, and I felt just as much at home here. No: I felt more at home here, I realized, remembering the hours of pacing I’d done last night, trying to escape the painful loss of Kathleen. Here, at least, I was in control; here, death was always close at hand but never close to home; here, only anonymous strangers stared at me with lifeless eyes.
I extricated the gurney that held the body of my cavewoman, as I’d begun to think of her, and wheeled it down the hall to the decomp room. Parallel-parking it against the wall, I butted one end against the side of a big stainless-steel sink and latched the cart into place with a pair of large metal hooks that clipped onto brackets on the face of the sink.
At that moment Miranda — fetching in a fresh set of scrubs — walked in with a tray of instruments: scalpels, probes, scissors, tweezers, and, although I doubted we’d need it, a Stryker saw. The Stryker autopsy saw is a truly ingenious power tooclass="underline" its fine-toothed oscillating blade can lop off the top of a skull in a minute flat, but if it grazes your fingertip by mistake, it delivers nothing worse than a tickle, without so much as nicking the skin. I’ve used one hundreds of times, and every time, the first thing I do is press the chittering blade to the heel of my hand, just to appreciate anew the ingenuity of the design.
“Playing with your favorite toy, I see,” said Miranda.
“Simple pleasures for simple minds. You ever notice how similar this blade’s motion is to an electric toothbrush?”
“Ouch, man,” she said. “Quick way to lose some teeth.”
“I know, you wouldn’t want to get the two confused. But I wonder which came first, the toothbrush or the saw?”
“I think the egg came first,” she said. “Then the chicken. Then the autopsy toothbrush.”
“Okay, I get it, you’re over it,” I said. “You got the X-rays?”
“Across the hall in the lab. Be right back.”
Ratcheting the zipper of the body bag down, I marveled once more at how thoroughly the flesh had been transformed into the waxen features of a mummy. In some cultures, a corpse in this condition would have been considered an “incorruptible”—a holy relic or saint, perhaps capable of working miracles. A shrine might be established, to which the sick and the maimed would flock by the thousands in hopes of being made whole again. And all because of a trick of fat, moisture, and temperature. But then again, who was I to dismiss it as a trick? Maybe it was more than that. After all, here she was, almost perfectly preserved, just waiting to be found. Waiting to be identified. Waiting patiently to tell her story and ask for justice. If it was a trick of chemistry, it was a mighty slick one.
Normally the first step would be to remove the clothing from the body, but the garments had decayed to rotted shards enmeshed in adipocere. As the adipocere came off, so would the bits of fabric. I would start at the head and work my way down.
My eyes drifted to the neck, and something just below it caught my gaze — a slight bulge at the top of the chest. Just then Miranda brought in the X-rays. “Look,” I said, “I think she’s wearing something around her neck.” She leaned in and we both studied what appeared to be a flat, oblong pendant hidden beneath a veneer of adipocere. Whatever chain or cord it had once hung from had long since crumbled to a greenish-white line of oxide encircling the waxy neck.
“Oh, that,” she said. “I saw that on the X-rays.” There was an odd note in her voice. On the surface, she sounded nonchalant — practically bored — but underneath, she was almost quivering with excitement. I waited. After a tantalizing pause, she added, “That’s not all I saw on the X-rays.” She switched on a light box on the wall by the door and slipped one of the films into place. Her head blocked my view.
She turned toward me, still blocking my view, then, with her eyes locked on mine, leaned sideways to reveal the image. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” I breathed.
“Well, that’s probably not how you should word it in the report, but it is worth noting.”
“Let’s get to it.”
We turned back to the gurney and the waiting corpse. The hair mat had slid backward on the skull, shifting the hairline back to the top of the head. Despite being matted with adipocere and discolored by mold, the hair still showed traces of its original fineness and straw-blond color. The ears were mostly gone — with no bone to support them, they had gradually collapsed and merged with the waxy tissue of the scalp. The face looked almost masklike: the adipocere had separated slightly from the underlying bone, creating an eerie effect, as if a skeleton were masquerading as a mummy for some bizarre costume party of the dead. Although the lips were parted in an eternal scream, the teeth were tightly clenched. The eye orbits were filled with lumpy disks of wax, which stared blindly up at me, at Miranda, and at the harsh fluorescent lights that had taken the place of the cave’s velvety blackness.
The gurney had a lip of stainless steel running completely around its edge, as well as a screened drain near its foot. With the cart latched in place, the drain hung directly above the sink — a morbid but inspired design feature suggested by the person who’d cleaned more decomp spatters off walls and floors than anyone else in the world: me. A spray head, a twin to the one in my kitchen at home, hung from a bracket on the wall. I turned on the water, keeping the volume low but cranking the heat up almost to scalding. The adipocere’s texture was somewhere between wax and soap. Hot water would melt it like a cake of Ivory in a Jacuzzi.