In 1977, Will Bass realized a need for the farm, when he determined scientists simply did not know enough about normal and abnormal decay in human flesh. Bass was a visionary, a pioneer. He had turned the attitude and the tools of anthropology toward forensics long before anyone else connected the two fields. He made the tools of excavation and skeletal examination into one of the major modem weapons against crime.
All of Bass's best people were now sought after, and Syd Fielding was among the most sought after. Although Bass remained the paterfamilias of the Body Farm at age seventy- two, still held onto a set of keys, and kept close tabs on all the goings on, especially with the residents, Fielding had become the day-to-day manager of the facility. Aside from his duties here, Fielding was in demand on the lecture circuit, addressing M.E.'s and morticians, as well as consulting widely with law enforcement agencies, insurance investigators, and attorneys.
The farm had taught untold lessons to untold people in the field, lessons about whether or not larvae remained on the body, or whether or not empty pupae cases were left behind by maggots as they matured into flies. Such empty insect casings told a savvy forensics person whether or not at least one generation of flies had hatched and matured in the body or bodies, a cycle requiring two weeks or more.
Such information, along with milk labels, meat labels, the mold on the bread, the accumulated mail, all helped to point to a probable time of death, sometimes so accurate as to put a killer away.
On the ground now, the helicopter blades whining and winding down, Jessica was greeted behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center by a surprisingly young-looking Fielding, who had been sitting on the tailgate of a Dodge pickup. After introductions and handshakes, he led her to a large gate posted with Keep Out and No Trespassing signs. The stockade fence had not replaced an earlier chain-link fence but rather reinforced the interior chain-link fence, and it had the added feature of hiding from view what was going on inside. This Syd Fielding explained, adding, “We've had some attempts at sabotage; the new fence cost mightily, but it became necessary after the press got hold of our using bodies here that-in the local opinion-don't deserve our desecrating them as we do.”
Fielding was a short man with large hands and wide eyes behind thick glasses. An overbite gave him the appearance of a snapping turtle, and he had to work hard to get up a smile. His set of keys marked him as important here. He unlocked the stockade fence and snatched it open wide, but then he had to unlock the chain-link fence, and this gate pushed inward. Beyond these two gates, a huge wooden structure like something out of King Kong confronted them.
“ I see you've taken a great deal of precaution.”
“ Some fears never die. Fear of a rotting corpse in the neighborhood that is not under a cement slab to keep it in place is as alive here as it is in Transylvania, I can assure you. But we've also had attempts at break-ins, some serious protestor types, but more often local high schoolers.”
“ High schoolers, really?”
“ They don't call 'em the Wildcats for nothing. Place has become a beacon for Saturday night dares, a place to visit after the prom, you get the picture. Should something happen to a kid around here, you can bet we'd be shut down in a heartbeat, despite all the good we've done.”
“ Yeah, I can imagine.”
“ Place is not for the squeamish, Dr. Coran, and it's certainly not Peabody's Tomb or any other urban legend. It's a scientific experiment that has had multiple benefits for forensic science.”
“ You don't have to sell me. I know your work is necessary to the advancement of our understanding of decay, and that's precisely why I've come to you.”
“ Sorry Dr. Bass isn't here to meet you. Your reputation is well known here, however, and he did express his regrets.”
“ Likewise, sorry I missed him, but I'm sure you can help me.”
“ As we go through, you will see residents at work; most arrive before daybreak and leave early for classes. The lucky ones get to shower before they leave.”
He led her into the facility, and on entering, she was reminded of going to a private zoological garden. A thick layer of foliage encroached on the small pathway leading deeper into the wild forest, the foliage attempting to retake the road, to make it once more part of the hillside landscape. Here and there, Jessica saw a silent old automobile, weeds claiming it, that had been run up into the bushes. She saw another one in a small pond, half submerged.
At one clearing, she saw a handful of students with shovels, rakes, wire mesh screens, cameras, prongs, and specimen bags, all working away like a group of archeologists over a find, but the find here was a body, the skeletal remains of a decayed corpse.
“ They're simulating a case.”
“ Fascinating. How close is the simulation?”
“ As real as we can make it. They'll collect all the bone fragments from a victim who was set afire and then left to rot in a shallow grave. They'll take all the parts back with them to a clean, well-lit lab at the research facility. There they'll go at it like a jigsaw puzzle, putting the victim back together again and determining time of death, working backward, and learning exactly how he died.”
“ I would have killed for such training when I was younger,” she said.
“ Careful how you phrase that,” he joked. “Of course, our John Doe really didn't die of his burns.”
“ Oh, really?” She kept pace with Fielding, whose feet moved like they had eyes over the well-worn path.
“ You see, the body came to us via an incident report in which a homeless man doused himself with gasoline and set himself aflame. However, on closer inspection, I determined the man had been decaying for two weeks before he was set aflame, so he could not have doused himself with the gasoline or lit the match. He was a bit too dead to have pulled that off.”
She laughed at this. Fielding had an entertainer's delivery when he spoke of his first love, anthropological forensics.
“ He was torched two weeks after being killed?”
“ Not someone but a gang of some ones-teens who came on the body where it lay in a drain pipe, and they decided it would be fun to watch it bum. After my determination, police set out to find the culprits. They weren't exactly up on charges of murder, but that kind of depraved act can't go unpunished.”
They now rounded a comer, and there ahead of them in a shallow backwash of a pond, lying face up and staring out at them, floated a decomposing, eyeless corpse, its lifeless sockets like Jell-0 by this point. Jessica felt a surge of emotions commingle deep within; while on the one hand, she applauded what the facility did for science and forensics in particular, she also despised what was necessary in reaching the findings-a kind of willful disrespect for the human re-mains.
Instead of dwelling on the eyeless man whose clothes still clung to its now-formless flesh beneath, thinking how like a character in Night of the Living Dead the corpse appeared, she said, “Of course, the resident students aren't told the due history of how the bodies came to their respective ends, right?”
“ Right, and that means those who piece the truth together from the remains become our brightest among the class.”
“ They'll know from the green bone effect that Bass discovered,” she said. “That's right. Green bone fractures differently in a fire than drier bone. They'll know-or should know-John Doe's fractures match those of a burned body, not someone burned alive.”
“ Dry bones are more brittle, so the fracture pattern will be different.”
“ And only a microscope will tell you that.”
“ Appears you are doing a lot here… down on the farm.”