The skeleton — a robust white male — bore a striking resemblance to many of the male Indian skeletons I’d dug from their compact, circular graves: the skull struck by a heavy blunt object, which had left an oval depression — remarkably similar to that created by a Sioux war club. As it turned out, the dead white man actually had been struck by a Sioux war club. The man was a relic poacher, and — in a case of ironic just desserts — he’d been killed by a rival collector in a struggle over the club: a trophy that had emerged from a century of retirement to become once more a lethal weapon.
After I helped the sheriff’s office with that case, one thing had led to another, as things have a way of doing, and by the time I’d left Kansas for Tennessee, I was averaging six or eight forensic cases a year for local police, county sheriffs, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
But those six or eight cases invariably involved dry, weathered bones, not slimy, stinking corpses like the one that had just been delivered to me. Dumped on me, more like it, I thought. I could picture the relief — the utter delight — the Cumberland County medical examiner must have felt when he read his boss’s memo and realized that he could wash his hands of this body, literally and figuratively, by sending it to Knoxville. To me.
As I unzipped the body bag and folded back the large, C-shaped flap that formed the bag’s upper surface, I jumped back, startled and repulsed by the sudden sight and sound of thousands of maggots — blowfly larva — swarming and squirming and writhing to escape the light to which I’d suddenly exposed them. Diving for cover, they quickly slithered into the large openings they’d created in the face, neck, and lower abdomen of the body; as I watched their swift migration, my revulsion gave way to scientific fascination. Once they were out of sight, though, my gaze strayed back to the memo. God, how many more bodies like this am I gonna get? I wondered silently. Aloud, looking back at the body once more, I repeated, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
I was still without an answer an hour later when the phone rang. I started to ignore it — it was July Fourth, after all — but remembered that I’d given Kathleen, my wife, the bone lab’s number. “I’ll only be a minute,” I’d told her. “Just long enough to sign for some skeletal remains. Call me if you need me to pick up anything on the way home.”
“Hello?”
“Bill?” She sounded surprised to hear my voice, and that in turn surprised me, since I’d given her the number and told her that this was where I’d be.
“Hi, honey,” I said. “What’s up? Need something?”
“I need you. We have fifty people showing up for this cookout in twenty minutes. Your new colleagues and my new colleagues and our new neighbors. You said you’d be home half an hour ago to help.”
I checked my watch and felt myself wince. “Oh, crap — I’m sorry. This turned out to be more complicated than I expected. I’m leaving right now.”
As I hung up the phone, my earlier, unresolved question continued to hang in the air, nearly as tangible as the odor from the body on the gurney. Then inspiration came to me. “Ah,” I said to the corpse. “That’s what I’ll do with you.”
2
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight, perhaps what I’d done with the corpse hadn’t been so inspired after all.
The building that was shoehorned beneath the grandstands of Neyland Stadium — a wedge-shaped warren of grimy rooms named Stadium Hall — had begun its life, decades before, as an athletic dormitory. Now, deemed too dilapidated to house athletes, it housed the Anthropology Department. Stadium Hall’s chief virtues, as best I could tell during my first week on the job, were two: It contained plenty of rooms — hundreds of rooms — to accommodate what I hoped would be a fast-growing population of Anthropology faculty and graduate students. It also contained an abundance of bathrooms and showers, and it was in one of these showers — the one in the stairwell adjoining the basement bone lab — that I’d decided to stash the corpse over the July Fourth holiday, until I could figure out how best to clean and examine the bones of the dead man.
I returned to the stadium to reclaim the remains at 9:00 A.M. on July fifth. Unfortunately, the building’s janitor had returned at 8:00 A.M., and by the time I showed up, he was mad as a hornet. The university police officers summoned by the janitor were none too happy, either.
I explained the situation to the police officers briefly, showing them the memo about my appointment as State Forensic Anthropologist, and then phoned the Cumberland County medical examiner, so he could corroborate my story — something he did with evident amusement. Great, I thought as the grinning police officers departed. I’ll never hear the end of this — not from the campus police, and not from the M.E.’s, either.
It had taken only twenty minutes to resolve the police officers’ concerns. Not so those of the janitor, who, rightly or wrongly, considered Stadium Hall his territory, not mine, and who threatened me with a smorgasbord of dire fates if he ever found another rotting corpse in his building. “I don’t mind all them Indian bones you got in them boxes,” he said. “But this-here nastiness ain’t got no place in my building. I want it out of here, and I don’t mean tomorrow.”
“It’ll be gone by the end of the day,” I assured him, wondering how on earth I would manage to keep that promise.
“You’ve got a what in one of the showers in Stadium Hall?” The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences — my new boss, as of four days before — sounded groggy when he answered the phone, and the thought that I’d awakened him during a five-day holiday weekend made me wince.
“A decomposing body,” I repeated. I explained the situation to him. It was the third time in an hour I’d summarized the series of unexpected events, hasty decisions, and unhappy consequences.
“And what, exactly, do you want me to do about this?” He no longer sounded groggy; he sounded wide-awake and more than a little annoyed.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I think I need some land to put bodies on. The Cumberland County medical examiner isn’t the only one likely to send me rotting John Does. The way this memo reads, bodies will be coming in from all over the state. It wasn’t a problem out in Kansas — Kansas is twice the size of Tennessee, with only half as many people. So out there, it takes a while for folks to be found, and by that time they’re generally down to nice, dry bone. Here, on the other hand…”
He sighed. “I’ll make some calls.” I felt my spirits lift, but they plummeted a moment later when he added, “First thing Monday.”
“Monday? But that’s four days from now,” I squawked. “What am I supposed to do with this guy for the next four days?”
“You’re a bright young man,” he said. “You’ll think of something.”
“You’ve got a what in the back of your truck?” Kathleen stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“A decomposing body.” I explained the situation yet again; by now I could have told the story in my sleep.
“Where—here? In our garage?”
“No, no. Of course not. I’m not that dumb.”
“How dumb are you? Did you leave it parked somewhere at UT?”
“Uh, not exactly,” I hedged. She gave me a gimlet-eyed look, waiting me out. “It’s in the driveway. Halfway between the house and the street.”
“Bill Brockton,” she groaned. “What am I supposed to do with you?”