“Hey, it could be worse,” I pointed out.
“How, exactly?”
“I could’ve brought him home before the cookout.”
She shook her head and heaved a sigh. “Thank heaven for small favors,” she muttered.
The dean summoned me to his office at mid-morning Monday. By that time the cab of my truck smelled to high heaven, even though the body bag was back in the cargo bed. I’d driven to campus with the windows down and my head in the wind, like a dog’s.
As I left the stadium for the walk up the hill to the dean’s office, I noticed a thick cloud of flies surrounding the truck; on the camper shell’s window screens, they were packed wing-to-wing, as tightly as planes on an aircraft carrier’s deck.
An hour later, trailing a plume of flies in my wake, I pulled away from the stadium and threaded my way up the Tennessee River, a map open on the seat beside me. Six miles to the east — where the French Broad and the Holston rivers converged to form the Tennessee — the university owned a farm where, for half a century, the College of Agriculture had raised pigs. The pig-farming venture had ended a few years before, and the old sow barn, where countless piglets had been born and nursed, now sat empty and idle. That barn, the dean had informed me in our brief, curt meeting, was the place — the only place — where I was to warehouse any corpses I happened to receive from my colleagues in the medical examiner’s system.
“Empty and idle” were accurate descriptors, as far as they went, but they were not comprehensive. A complete description of the sow barn—my sow barn — required “crumbling and stinking,” too. Fair enough, I realized, considering that I’d be contributing more than a little decay and odor to the property myself.
I backed the truck up to the barn, opened the cargo shell and tailgate, then slid the body bag out. It dropped to the ground with a dull, squishy thud. By the time I dragged it across the wooden threshold and into the dim, foul-smelling interior of the barn, the bag and I were already being buzzed by a new squadron of flies.
“Welcome to Tennessee,” I said to myself.
3
Turning back from the office doorway, I snatched up the ringing phone. “Hi, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right there. I’m leaving this instant.” It was the Friday before Christmas, and all through the stadium I was the only creature stirring; everyone else was already home for the holidays, or at least en route.
I was answered by a gravelly, homespun voice, half an octave deeper than my own. “Well, darlin’, I sure ’preciate that,” the man chuckled. “But before you go, you reckon you could connect me with a Dr. Brockman? Dr. Bill Brockman?”
I felt my face redden. “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were my wife. This is Dr. Brockton. How can I help you?”
“This is Sheriff Dixon, Dr. Brockman. Up in Morgan County.”
“Hello, Sheriff,” I said. “It’s Brock-ton, by the way, not Brockman. What can I do for you?” Turning to the framed Tennessee map mounted on the wall, I scanned for Morgan County. The state had ninety-five counties, and in the six months since my arrival in Knoxville, I’d worked ten forensic cases — five of them in Knox County; one each in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Memphis; the janitor-infuriating case from Cumberland County, fifty miles to the west; and one from a rural county southeast of Knoxville. I seemed to recall that Morgan County was nearby, but I was having trouble finding it.
“Looks like maybe we’ve got a homicide up here. A hiker found a body in the woods, up in Frozen Head State Park. Unidentified nigrah woman. In pretty rough shape. The medical examiner took one look and told me to call and have you come get her. Reckon you could come on up this way?”
I felt a tinge of annoyance—that damned memo, I thought again — followed by a wave of excitement and then a ripple of guilt. My addiction to forensic adrenaline was, I suspected, as strong as any alcoholic’s thirst, and the truth was, I was happy to have a chance to slake it. But I’d promised Kathleen I’d be home by five o’clock, to help prepare for a Christmas party at six. “Where’s the body now, Sheriff?”
“Still in the woods. Just up the slope from a creek. Jordan Branch. It’s about five miles outside Wartburg. The M.E. said to leave it at the scene for you.”
I spotted Wartburg on the map — a small dot about fifty miles northwest of Knoxville — and then found the irregular green rectangle that marked the state park. Glancing out the office windows, through the grime on the glass and the latticework of girders supporting the stadium’s grandstands, I saw that the sky had already gone dark. “I don’t mean to put you off, Sheriff,” I said, “but I’d rather work the scene in the daylight. No matter how good your lights are, it’s easy to miss things in the dark. Any chance you could post somebody out there tonight, to keep an eye on things? Let me meet you there first thing in the morning?”
He considered this for a moment. “I reckon I could put Cotterell out there. One of my deputies. He ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”
I got directions and agreed to meet him at the Morgan County courthouse the next morning at nine. After hanging up, I called Kathleen. “Hi, honey,” I said with a sense of déjà vu, sheepishness, and amusement. “I’ll be right there. I’m leaving this instant.”
4
“Pretty rough shape” was putting it mildly. Very mildly. The truth was, in ten years of forensic casework, I’d never seen such a shocking death scene as the one Sheriff Dixon led me to.
We’d met at the Morgan County courthouse, a quaint brick building topped by an elegant, four-sided white cupola, each side dominated by a large clock face reading 9:05.
Ten minutes later, after backtracking several miles along the Knoxville highway, we’d turned onto a small side road that led to two destinations, according to a green sign at the turnoff: Frozen Head State Park, and Morgan County Correctional Center. The prison was first, a sprawling complex of dull brown brick and gleaming razor wire. A mile or so later, after a sharp turn and a narrow bridge over a tumbling creek — Jordan Branch, I guessed — we’d entered a narrow wooded valley. FROZEN HEAD STATE PARK, read a sign, its white-painted letters etched into dark brown boards. Two miles beyond the sign — past a gate marked AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY, where asphalt gave way to gravel — we’d stopped behind a Morgan County Sheriff’s Office cruiser and a black Ford Crown Victoria sporting a state government tag, a trunk-mounted radio antenna, and a side spotlight near the left outside mirror.
The body lay barely thirty yards from the road, within a ragged rectangle of crime-scene tape strung from tree trunks. The ground sloped down toward the creek, and as we picked our way through the rocky terrain, I saw that the legs were angled downhill, toward the stream.
The corpse — a woman’s corpse — was nude, and when we got close enough to make out details, I felt my stomach lurch. The body was bloated, the abdomen swollen with gases produced by bacteria and enzymes in the digestive tract. The skin of the torso, arms, and legs was largely intact, but virtually no soft tissue remained on the neck and face; the jaws and teeth were bared in a macabre grin, and the cheekbones and eye orbits — now vacant — were exposed as well, along with the vertebrae of the neck. So were the lower ends of the legs, the tibia and fibula of each leg jutting, footless, from the shredded flesh of the shins.
But gruesome as all those features were, they weren’t what I found shocking about the scene. What I found shocking was the way the woman’s body had been posed. Her legs were splayed on either side of a small tree, and her crotch — her decaying, decomposing crotch — was pressed tight against the trunk, as if, even long after death, she were still being sexually violated.