I snuck an impatient peek over her shoulder. “Is that it?”
She scrunched the left side of her face, her telltale early warning sign of irritation. “Should be, but it’s not. There’s one team still out. The ones calling themselves the Skelenators.”
“Really? Those guys? I thought they were working pretty fast.” I scanned the deepening shadows in the woods, but saw no signs of movement. “Weren’t they the first ones to bring in a skeleton?”
“Yup.” She checked her log. “They brought in number one at noon, just before we broke for lunch. Gave the other teams a ton of shit about being slowpokes, too.” Her eyes scrolled down the page. “They brought in their second at two o’clock. Number three at 3:15. At that rate, they should’ve delivered the last one at 4:30.” She checked her watch. “How come it’s five o’clock with no sign of ’em?”
I shrugged. “Maybe they’re having trouble finding some of the elements. What’s the case number?”
“Well, let’s see. They’ve brought in 63-12. And 89-12. And 97-12.” She tapped the corresponding X’s on the map, the numbers signifying that those were the 63rd, 89th, and the 97th donated bodies of 2012. “So the one still out is 28-11.”
“That one’s been out here a while,” I noted. “A year? More?”
“Since February 21, 2011.”
“Not surprising if that one’s harder. Plenty of time for the critters to scatter things. Where is it?”
“Up top.” She pointed to an X high on the hillside, in a seldom-used part of the facility. The terrain there was steeper, which meant that heavy rains could wash bones down the slope. Besides, hauling bodies up there was a lot of work. Down near the facility’s gate—especially around the edges of the main clearing, which was easily accessible by pickup—you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a body or three. In the woods higher up—especially the parts farthest from the one-lane gravel track that meandered halfway up the hillside—the Body Farm’s population density grew mighty sparse.
Leaving Nick to supervise the loading of the bagged skeletons into the back of the department’s pickup truck, Miranda and I headed up the gravel, pausing occasionally to consult the topo map. When we reached the spot marked by the X, we saw a dark, greasy spot on the ground—the stain left by volatile fatty acids as a body had decomposed. At the base of a nearby tree, I spotted a red biohazard bag and a clipboard. The bag was sealed, and the clipboard held a skeletal diagram labeled “28-11.” Miranda picked up the clipboard and studied the diagram.
“Huh,” she said, handing it to me. “Looks like they actually found all the elements. They’re done. So where the hell are they?” She made a V of her index fingers and tucked the fingertips between her teeth, then produced an earsplitting whistle. “Hey!” she shouted. “Skelenators! Where are you?”
A moment later, from farther up the hill, a voice called, “Coming,” followed by the crackling, shuffling sounds of three pairs of feet scampering downhill.
“Sorry,” puffed the first of the three to arrive, a rangy, red-haired junior named Kyle.
“We were just about to lock y’all in for the night,” Miranda groused. She pointed to the bag and the clipboard, then eyed the three suspiciously. “Why didn’t you bring these down already? You guys up there getting high?”
Kyle, the group’s self-appointed leader, flushed. “No, nothing like that. We were trying to decide whether we’d get extra points if we brought in that extra skeleton.”
“No,” snapped Miranda; then, “What?” Her look of annoyance gave way to one of confusion. “What are you even talking about? What extra skeleton?”
“The one up there,” Kyle said, pointing up the hill. “Up by the corner of the fence.” He exchanged uncertain, sidelong glances with his comrades.
Miranda was looking at the map with such laser-like intensity, I half-expected the paper to burst into flames. “There isn’t one up by the corner of the fence.”
I was looking at the faces of the students. “Isn’t supposed to be one up there,” I corrected.
• • •
“So tell me again why you dragged me out of bed at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning?” Art Bohanan, the Knoxville Police Department’s senior criminalist, was peering down at the bones near the corner of the fence. Sunday morning had dawned cool and foggy, but by now—by nine—the fog was lifting.
“Well, I didn’t see any point in calling you out last night,” I said. “This guy wasn’t gonna get any deader.”
“Not what I meant,” he said. “I wasn’t criticizing the timing. I was questioning the logic. This is a body…we’re at the Body Farm. What’s wrong with this picture? Not a thing, far as I can tell.”
“But it’s not our body,” I told him. Again.
“How can you be sure? You’ve had, what, a thousand bodies come through here over the past ten or twelve years?”
“Fifteen-hundred,” said Miranda.
“Twenty years,” I added.
Art heaved a dramatic sigh. “My point, hair-splitters, is that: that’s a bunch of bodies, over a bunch of years. Be surprising if one didn’t slip through the cracks every now and then.”
“Art,” I said, “we’re talking corpses, not paperclips.” He shrugged, unconvinced. “Come on, you’ve spent a lot of time out here,” I reminded him. “Hell, you’ve come along when we’ve brought bodies here from crime scenes. What’s the first thing we do when we bring a corpse through that gate?”
“Lemme think. Hold your nose?”
“Ha ha,” Miranda said sarcastically. “Before we hold our noses, we put I.D. tags on the body.”
“Not one, but two,” I added. “Wrist and ankle. Case number on both.” I pointed at the skeleton at our feet. “This guy’s not tagged.”
“And you don’t think it’s possible, barely possible,” Art persisted, “that just this once, some hungover, sleep-deprived graduate student didn’t do it?”
Now it was my turn to sigh. “And that Miranda didn’t notice that we had more bodies than case numbers? And that I didn’t see that our numbering was out of sync?”
“Hey, no slam,” he said. “I’m just asking. What if the tags came off? Washed away in a heavy rain? Got chewed off by critters?”
“They’re zip-tied, tight, on the narrowest parts of the arm and leg. They don’t slip off. And a critter’s not gonna go for a plastic zip tie when there are all these tasty tidbits of carrion to be had.” I was trying not to get defensive, but I was having a tough time. “Look, pretend we’re not at the Body Farm,” I suggested. “Pretend I’m not Bill Brockton, forensic anthropologist, but John Q. Public, Ordinary Citizen. Pretend I’ve called you because I’ve found bones on my property. If you look at it that way, what do you notice?”
“I notice your property stinks to high heaven, John Q,” he cracked. “I notice you’ve got a fence the Border Patrol would envy. I notice you’re probably up to no good in here.” Art’s sense of humor was one of the things that made working with him a pleasure. Another was his forensic expertise: Art was considered one of the nation’s top fingerprint experts and had even patented a superglue-fuming device, the “Bohanan Apparatus,” for revealing latent prints on weapons and other pieces of evidence.
Art peered down at the skeleton, then up at the fence corner that bracketed the bones on two sides. Next he pivoted in a complete circle, surveying the woods surrounding us. “Let’s walk back down the hill partway, then come up again. Let me try refreshing my screen.”
We retreated downhill fifty feet or so, then returned to the scene. This time Miranda and I lagged slightly behind Art, so as not to obstruct his view or distract his thoughts. “Well, John Q,” he said as we got close, “looks like maybe somebody was trying to break in and fell off the top of your fence. See how he’s lying there? On his back, but with his head twisted and his arms and legs at those unnatural angles?”
“I do see,” I said. “We wouldn’t have laid him out like that.” Miranda and I had already di
scussed the body’s unnatural positioning, but I hadn’t wanted to influence Art’s interpretation. “We also wouldn’t’ve snagged a piece of his shirt up there in the barbed wire.”
Art spotted the shred of faded flannel and laughed. “Okay, okay, maybe y’all didn’t put him here. Any reason some fool might be trying to break into the world’s nastiest patch of woods?”
“Sure,” I said. “Happens every couple years or so. Usually it’s a fraternity prank—make the new pledges sneak into the Body Farm and bring back pictures.” I shook my head. “Thing is, if this were a student who’d gone missing, we’d’ve all heard about it. It’d be all over the news.”
“Good point,” he conceded.
“We did have a more serious break-in about a year ago,” Miranda noted. “Somebody stole six skulls.”
“I remember that. Anybody ever caught?”
I shook my head glumly.
“And you never got ’em back?”
“We got back two,” I said. “Police found them in a crack house. Pentagrams painted on the walls. Couple of dead cats on a makeshift altar, their throats cut. Some kind of drug-fueled cult crap.”
“Well, you’re still down by a few skulls,” Art said, studying the bones, “but you’re gaining. You know, this could be your thief. Coming back for more skulls? Maybe he’s high on something, takes a tumble?”
“The Case of the Karmic Payback,” Miranda quipped.
Art smiled, then looked up and studied the fence again. “Other possibility here,” he mused, “is that this guy—it is a guy, right?”
I nodded. “We haven’t touched him yet—didn’t want to disturb the scene—but yeah, definitely a guy. White male. Young adult, looks like.”
He nodded. “Other possibility here,” he resumed, “is that this guy didn’t die coming over the fence. Other possibility is, he died first, came over the fence second.”
“Meaning maybe he had some help?” I said. “Not just with the fence-climbing, but with the dying, too?”
“Maybe. Probably. If he didn’t break his neck scaling the fence, then somebody went to a lot of trouble to get him over it. Why do that, if it’s not a homicide?”
I knelt and reached for the skull, looking a question at Art. “Sure, go ahead,” he said, and I picked up the skull for the first time. The left side, which had been turned upward, was clean, dry bone. The right side, which had lain on the ground, was dark, greasy, and dirty. As I brushed off a few leaves clinging to the cranial vault, Miranda let out a low whistle. In the center of the thin, oval temporal bone was a neatly punched hole—a perfect rectangle, a slot measuring a half-inch wide and a quarter-inch high. Beside it was a second, smaller puncture. This one was triangular; two of its sides formed a 90-degree angle; the third side served as a slightly crooked hypotenuse.
“Well, I guess that eliminates ‘fall from fence’ as the cause of death,” Art noted.
“Chilling with the corpses at the Body Farm,” said Miranda. “Talk about hiding in plain sight.”
• • •
Carrying an aluminum extension ladder up a steep, wooded slope isn’t easy. Carrying two of them is even harder. “You sure you don’t want to wait and let the junior forensic techs do this?” I huffed at Art.
“What, and let them have all the fun?” he puffed back. “Besides, they’re still working another scene right now. Won’t be here for a couple more hours. Might as well do something useful while we wait.”
“I can think of a dozen useful things to be doing that would be a lot easier than this.” The morning’s foggy coolness was long since gone, replaced by sweltering heat more suited to July than April.
“Easier and cooler,” he conceded, guiding his end of the ladders into the corner of the fence. “But not as interesting.”
I grunted in grudging agreement.
We set the ladders down on edge. They balanced there for an instant, then toppled sideways with the hollow metallic clatter that aluminum ladders—and only aluminum ladders—invariably make.
We propped the first ladder against the inside of the fence, then—when Art was halfway up the rungs, bracing against the fence’s inner corner—we hoisted the second ladder up and over. It teetered briefly on the topmost strand of barbed wire, then Art eased it past the tipping point and lowered it to the ground on the outside, giving us a way to climb out now—and a way to climb back in later.
Once outside the fence, we headed uphill, following what appeared to be a faint game trail. The animals that used it must have been only knee-high, though, for Art and I soon found ourselves forced to wriggle through deadfall pines, honeysuckle vines, and clawing briars.
“Ouch!” Art yelped. “My kingdom for a machete.”
We emerged, sweating and bleeding, onto a neatly manicured lawn atop Cherokee Bluff. We were only a hundred yards or so from the Body Farm, as the crow flies…but Art and I weren’t crows, and we’d crawled and clawed our way uphill, not flown.
Twenty feet away and slightly above us, the crown of the hill had been flattened, and a convex curve of chainlink fence stood silhouetted against blue sky. We ascended the final rise and stopped at the fence, our fingers instinctively gripping the mesh as we stood and stared. Arrayed before us were half-a-dozen stunning young women in bikinis, sunbathing beside an oval swimming pool.
“Cherokee Bluff Condominiums,” I said after a long, appreciative pause. “I knew this property bordered the Body Farm, but I didn’t realize we were such close neighbors.” In the distance, beyond the pool and clubhouse, I noticed the long roofline of a row of condos.
“I’m guessing when the wind’s just right, it can get kinda fragrant out here by the pool,” said Art eventually.
“The deputy medical examiner, Melinda Kaufman, used to live up here,” I said. “She said that whenever we’d get temperature inversions in the summertime, the smell of decomp would blanket this whole hilltop for days.”
“Location, location, location,” Art quipped.
The woman closest to the fence—a honeyed blonde with oiled skin the color of mahogany—lifted her head languidly and looked at us. Art smiled and waved. She raised her sunglasses so we could see her eyes. The message they were telegraphing read, “Dirty old men. Stop.”
I gave Art a let’s-get-out-of-here nudge. He tore his eyes away from the sunbathers and glanced at me.
“What?” he said, his tone one of wounded innocence, before turning toward the pool again. The blonde’s frosty stare turned even icier. Art shrugged, then waved again, and we made our way along the fence.
Off to one side of the pool and clubhouse, we came to a corrugated metal shed. A garage door occupied half of one wall, and an assortment of landscaping gear was arrayed outside: two riding mowers, a small utility trailer, and a collection of shovels, rakes, and clippers hanging from hooks on the wall. Suspended from a stout pair of metal brackets, chest-high, hung an aluminum extension ladder. A tendril of dried honeysuckle vine hung from one of its feet.
• • •
“Come on in, Art,” I said when I heard his distinctive rat-a-tat-tat knock on my door. I was holed up in my office—not my sunny, spacious administrative office, but my small, cave-like private lair, tucked beneath Neyland Stadium’s north end zone stands. The top of my desk was filled with bones—the bones of the John Doe we’d retrieved from the uphill corner of the Body Farm the day before, after a forensic team and a homicide investigator had arrived.
Art wasn’t alone; an investigator, Detective John Evers, accompanied him. Evers, a forty-something-year-old who carried himself like a Marine, sported a fresh crew cut, a deep tan, a pink necktie, and a starched blue shirt that strained to contain his shoulders and arms.
“Hello, Doc.” He reached across the desk to shake my hand. His grip was crushing, and I thought I heard faint popping sounds from my metacarpals. He looked down at the bones. “Is this our guy?”
I nodded, rubbing my hand. “He cleans up pretty well. How’s it going, Detective? Yo
u find some suspects up at the condos? Vengeful neighbor, driven to murder by a blaring stereo? Maintenance man who lost his temper with a toilet-clogging tenant? One of the sunbathing beauties, tired of the lecher always lurking by the pool?”
Evers shook his head. “Everybody we’ve talked to so far makes it sound like the Garden of Eden up there. Except on days when the breeze from the west gets a little stinky.”
I smiled. “Keep looking,” I said. “Even in Eden, there’s a snake in the grass.”
“How ’bout you? What can you tell us from the bones?”
“I can tell you he was a white male, age twenty-five to thirty. Lower socioeconomic class. Right-handed. His stature…”
“’Scuse me, Doc,” Evers interrupted. “How do you know that?”
“The stature?” He shook his head. “Oh, you mean the handedness? Because the muscle markings—where the tendons insert into the bones—are more prominent on the right arm.”
“No, I meant the socioeconomic status.”
“Oh. The teeth.”
“Come again?”
“The teeth.”
“He’s bullish on teeth,” Art told Evers. “What’s that old saying? ‘If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’? To our friend here, every tooth looks like a clue.”
Something about what Art said distracted me—tugged at the sleeve of my mind—but I couldn’t quite latch hold of it, so I pressed on. “Look at the mandible,” I said, picking up the lower jaw and holding it under the light of my desk lamp. “See how crooked the teeth are? These days, only poor kids don’t get their teeth straightened. Also, he’s got lots of unfilled cavities. Too bad, because he’s harder to I.D. if there aren’t any dental records.” Evers nodded. “Most interesting thing, though, is this.” I turned the jaw so the roots of the teeth were prominently displayed.
Evers grimaced in disgust. “Nasty,” he said. “They look like dock pilings after the gribble worms have been chomping on ’em awhile.”
Killer Nashville Noir Page 2
