Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  “You’d file a claim for missing teeth? In Tennessee? You’d be laughed out of the state,” I said.

  She flashed me a big, sarcastic smile—Miranda had one of the best smiles I’d ever seen—and then began gnawing at one corner of the Snickers with her right molars, the immense bar clenched in her fist. “You stay here and work on that,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I found what I was looking for in the garage—an oblong case made of bright orange plastic—and stowed it in the rear of the pickup. As I got back in the cab, Miranda’s eyebrows shot up quizzically. I smiled, backed out of the driveway, and headed for Oak Ridge. Miranda’s jaws were working hard—evidently she had sheared off a huge hunk of the candy bar. Finally she mumbled, “Ih at wuh I ink ih ih?”

  “What? I can’t understand a word you’re saying when you mumble like that.”

  “Ih AT wuh I INK ih ih?!”

  “The problem here,” I said, “is not that I’m deaf. The problem here is that you’re talking with your mouth full.”

  She rolled her eyes but swallowed hard, and I could see her running her tongue along the front and sides of her teeth to swab off the chocolate and caramel and peanuts. She swallowed again. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Is what what you think it is?” She popped me one on the shoulder, hard. “Youch,” I said. “Oh, you mean that thing I put in the back? It is if you think it’s a Stihl ‘Farm Boss’ chainsaw, model 290.” I liked the name, Stihl—German, originally, I guessed—and the fact that it was pronounced “steel.” A manly name for a manly power tool.

  “Why on earth are you bringing a chainsaw to a death scene? You planning to dismember the body, just to make the case more interesting?”

  “I used to be a Boy Scout,” I said. “It’s always a good idea to be prepared.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s always a good idea to be sane, too,” she said, “but I don’t see you taking giant steps in that direction at the moment.”

  “Watch and learn, grasshopper,” I said. “Watch and learn.”

  We drove the twenty-five miles to Oak Ridge in silence. Near-silence, actually, broken only by the grinding, smacking sounds of Miranda’s molars steadily dismantling the rest of the Snickers bar.

  As we topped the last rise before dropping down the four-lane into Oak Ridge, Miranda pointed at the Cumberlands, ten miles to the north. High atop Buffalo Mountain, a serpentine line of white wind turbines reared against the azure sky. The three-bladed rotors—they looked like the world’s largest airplane propellers—flashed as their tips caught the sun’s rays and whirled them back again. Judging by how far the turbines towered above nearby trees, they must have stretched nearly four hundred feet into the sky.

  “Man, this place is like Energy USA,” Miranda said. “Talk about your microcosm of kilowatt production.”

  She was right. The ridges around the wind farm had been carved into the sharp, right-angle benches and shelves of mountaintop strip mines. To the east, the smokestack of Bull Run Steam Plant soared eight hundred feet into the sky. Alongside the power plant, the Clinch River—still twitching from its spin through the hydroelectric turbines of Norris Dam—traced the boundaries of the city in swirls of emerald green. And then there was Oak Ridge itself, the Atomic City: birthplace of the bomb, cradle of nuclear power.

  “I wonder if these Oak Ridge brainiacs will ever figure out how to harness nuclear fusion,” Miranda said. “The power of the stars. Run your car for a year on a teaspoon of water, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “I think that’s next on the list, as soon as they invent the transporter beam and figure out how to turn lead into gold.”

  “It’s been done,” she said.

  “Done? The transporter beam?”

  “No-o-o-o,” she groaned. “Lead to gold.”

  “Lead to gold? Done?”

  “Done,” she said. “Tiny amounts, mind you—nanograms or angiograms or some such. They can probably do it right here in Oak Ridge, with one of their particle accelerators or research reactors. All you do is smash a jillion protons or neutrons or quarks or what-have-you against an atom of lead, and presto-chango: you’ve got an atom of gold. Oh, and a boatload of deadly radioactive contamination.”

  “Damn,” I said, “there’s just no such thing as a free lunch, is there? By the way, you owe me a Snickers.”

  We crossed a set of railroad tracks and threaded through a series of shopping centers, then turned east on Oak Ridge Turnpike—the city’s main thoroughfare—and passed still more shopping centers and strip malls. Oak Ridge was a town without a downtown—many towns these days were, including some of Knoxville’s bedroom communities. But Oak Ridge had a better excuse for its lack of center. The city had been flung up practically overnight by the U.S. Army during World War II, and even though six decades had brought changes, the place still had a provisional, makeshift feel. Strung along the floor of a wide valley that angled from southwest to northeast, Oak Ridge’s main business district was one block wide and five miles long.

  Sprinkled amid the modern banks and medical buildings and engineering firms, a few sagging clapboard buildings still showed their origins as army barracks and offices. Their quiet dilapidation seemed at odds with the urgent role they had once played in a desperate wartime gamble. Here, in a top secret military installation—so secret the town was not shown on maps until after 1945—eighty thousand production workers and scientists had raced night and day for two years to produce the material for the first atomic bombs. Those awesome, awful clouds that roiled up from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were created, in great measure, here in this sleepy town in East Tennessee.

  Following the map on the truck’s GPS screen, we made a left off the main street and meandered partway up a hillside, through a handful more buildings that dated back to the wartime years. A steepled white chapel, which could have been transported from New England, perched atop a grassy hill. Beneath it, a sprawling, white-columned hotel—the same vintage as the church, but not in the same pristine condition—lurked behind boarded-up windows, sloughing scales of chalky paint. Fading letters above the wide veranda told us the hotel was THE ALEXANDER INN; four Oak Ridge police cars—engines idling and exhausts steaming—told us this was the right place.

  I parked beside the cars and we got out. The sun was brilliant but the day was still bitterly cold: barely twenty degrees, and windy enough to feel like minus five. Worse, this was the warmest day we’d had in a week, and the nighttime temperatures had hovered down in the single digits. As the wind bit my cheeks, I winced and wondered, Where’s global warming when you actually want it?

  One uniformed officer huddled miserably inside the waist-high fence that surrounded the hotel’s swimming pool. As Miranda and I approached the gate, the doors on the police cars opened and two more uniformed officers emerged reluctantly, followed by two plainclothes officers. One was Lieutenant Dewar, the head of Major Crimes; the other, Detective Emert, would be the lead officer on the case.

  We shook gloved hands all around, then Dewar and Emert led us through the gate and up to the edge of the pool. Although the hotel dated from the 1940s, the pool itself—modest in size, a kidney in shape—looked more like an afterthought from the sixties. Moreover, it appeared not to have been drained or cleaned since the sixties; it was nearly full, and the cold snap had turned the greenish black water into greenish black ice.

  Entombed in the filthy ice near the deep end of the pool was a human corpse, frozen facedown, its arms and legs splayed wide. Although the shape of the body was masked by layers of winter clothing, the head was bare and the scalp was bald, so I assumed the corpse was male.

  “Whoa,” said Miranda. “I’ve seen plenty of bodies on ice, but never one in ice. How we gonna…” She paused, and I could see a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. “Ah, master,” she said, “grasshopper is beginning to learn.” She excused herself and went back to the truck, then returned bearing the orange case.

  The policemen l
ooked as puzzled at the sight of the chainsaw as Miranda had at first, but gradually I saw the light dawn in their eyes as well. “They call me the Man of Stihl,” I said, grinning at the pun. I fired up the chainsaw—cold as it was, it took a few pulls on the starter rope—and stepped carefully onto the ice. Glancing back, I saw the six cops nervously eyeing me, the chainsaw, and the ice. Miranda’s face, in contrast, expressed pure amusement.

  I squeezed the throttle a bit and eased the tip of the saw down onto the ice near one of the body’s outstretched hands. In an instant my face and glasses were covered with a layer of shaved ice. Sputtering, I let off the gas, set the saw down, and wiped my cheeks and lenses. For my second attempt, I cocked my head to one side as I lowered the snarling teeth into the ice. This time, the shower of ice crystals streamed onto my arm and shoulder, but my face remained clear. The chain bit into the ice easily, and before long I felt the saw break through the underside. Now the saw sprayed both ice and water onto me, and I could feel my coat beginning to get soaked and cold. I squeezed the throttle trigger all the way, which churned more water but also sped the saw’s progress through the ice. It took less than a minute to cut an arc stretching from just beyond one of the corpse’s outstretched hands, up and over the head, and down to the other hand. I stopped, knelt near the waist, and began cutting through the ice along the right side of the body. My plan was to work my way down to the feet, which would put me safely back on the pool’s deck when I made the final cuts to free the slab from the surrounding ice.

  Once I’d cut through the ice on the right side down to the knee, I switched sides and began cutting down the left side, not stopping until I was alongside the left foot. Then I shifted back to the right side. By this point, the slab containing the body was barely connected to the main sheet of ice; only a few inches of ice beside either foot held the slab in place. With one foot, I gave an exploratory tap on the slab. It did not move. I tapped harder. Nothing. I stomped, and suddenly, with a sound like a rifle shot, the ice cracked—not just the small tabs of ice holding the slab in place, but the larger sheet on which I stood. The surface buckled beneath my feet, and I felt myself begin to fall. Instinctively I flung up my arms to regain my balance, and the chainsaw flew from my grasp. My arms were seized by two pairs of strong hands, and two of the uniformed officers hauled me up onto the deck of the pool. As they did, my prize chainsaw thudded onto the slab of ice, which had now been set free. As the slab bobbed, the saw slid back and forth a time or two, and then slithered past the corpse’s head and plunged into the pool. The deep end of the pool. There was a moment of collective silence, broken by a soft “oops” from one of the officers. Then I heard a snort that I recognized as Miranda’s, followed by a giggle—also Miranda’s—and then rising gales of laughter, not just from Miranda but from the six cops, too.

  AN HOUR LATER, BACK AT UT, I eased the truck into the garage bay of the Regional Forensic Center. Miranda fetched a gurney and we carefully slid the icebound corpse onto the gurney, faceup, and wheeled it toward the autopsy suite. Detective Emert, who was also authorized to serve as a coroner, had gravely pronounced the iceman to be dead, once he’d stopped laughing about my chainsaw.

  Miranda and I stopped in the hallway outside the autopsy suite long enough to weigh the corpse on the scales that were built into the floor. The scales, which automatically subtracted the weight of the gurney, gave the weight as 162 pounds. I knew that fifteen or twenty pounds of that total was ice, though, and I made a mental note to weigh the body again once the ice had thawed and dripped off.

  As we wheeled the gurney into the suite, the medical examiner, Dr. Edelberto Garcia—an elegant Hispanic man in his late thirties—looked up from the corpse he was autopsying, a young black male. One of Garcia’s purple-gloved hands cradled the top of the man’s skull; the other hand held a Stryker autopsy saw, with which he had just opened the cranium. Sixty seconds from now, he’d be removing and weighing the brain. Garcia nodded at us, glanced at the body we’d just wheeled in, and looked a question at me. I nodded back at him and said, “Okay if we park this guy by the sink for a couple days, Eddie?”

  Garcia’s eyes looked mildly surprised through the blood-spattered shield he wore. “Don’t leave him in here,” he said. “He’ll smell to high heaven. Put him in the cooler. I’ll try to get to him tomorrow.”

  “He’s frozen solid,” I said. “If I put him in the cooler, it’ll take him a week to thaw out. Even in here, at room temperature, it’ll take a day or two.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Sure, right there is fine.” He looked more closely at the body, noticing the ice that formed a rectangular frame around it. “You fish this guy out of a frozen pond?”

  “Frozen swimming pool,” Miranda said. “Dirtier than any pond I ever saw. Ask Dr. B. how he got the guy out of the ice.” She snorted, just as she had in the momentary silence that had followed the splash at the pool. “Ask him about being prepared.”

  “Watch it, smarty-pants,” I warned. “You are skating—” I stopped, one word too late.

  “On thin ice?” She finished my sentence gleefully, then proceeded to recount my chainsaw misadventure to Garcia. As she pantomimed my whirling arms, the chainsaw’s slow-motion arc through the air, its slithering to-and-fro across the bobbing ice, and its plunge into the murky depths, they laughed until tears streamed from their eyes.

  “Very funny,” I said. “Except to the guy whose chainsaw is rusting at the bottom of the pool.”

  “Fear not, master,” she said. “All will be well. Because you are the Man of Stihl.”

  CHAPTER 3

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AFTER I PARKED THE GURNEY in the autopsy suite, the body was still half frozen, but the clothing had thawed. Water dripped slowly through the drain at the foot of the gurney and into the sink, to which I had latched the lower end of the gurney. I had taken the precaution of fitting a fine wire screen over the gurney’s drain to catch any hairs or fibers or other debris that came off the clothing as it thawed. Glancing at the screen, I saw only a few small, rotting bits of leaves, which I assumed had been floating in the pool before it froze.

  Detective Emert had asked if Miranda and I would be willing to take the clothing off the corpse and hang it up in the morgue. “I need it to be dry so I can go over it with evidence tape,” he said, though I already knew that was the reason.

  “Sure,” I said. “No point your making a trip just for that.” It wasn’t easy to undress the frozen body, but we managed it. As we removed the pants, I noticed that the underpants were soiled. The man appeared to have had diarrhea, and it looked reddish brown, possibly bloody. I made a note to point it out to Garcia the next day, when he did the autopsy.

  As Miranda and I were driving back to the Anthropology Department, I called Emert. “Hello, Detective, it’s Dr. Brockton.”

  “Hi, Doc,” he said. “Call me Jim, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. The clothing’s off and should be dry by tomorrow. Your man’s still half frozen, though. Reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Emert laughed. “How so?”

  “Well, my wife—my late wife; she died several years ago—she always bought frozen turkeys, and she never seemed to remember that it takes a couple of days in the fridge to thaw one of those. So every Thanksgiving morning, she’d panic when she realized the turkey was still frozen solid. Every year I’d end up putting the damn thing in the bathtub in warm water to thaw it.”

  “Hmm,” said Emert. “And you never remembered to put it in the fridge ahead of time, either?”

  “Truth is,” I laughed, “I kinda got a kick out of it. After the first couple of times, it seemed like part of the tradition. For all I know, Kathleen might have been pretending to forget, just to amuse me. Or just to make me feel useful.”

  “Some women are smart that way,” he said. “My wife has me cooking the turkeys at Thanksgiving and Christmas now. I deep-fry ’em. You ever done that?”

  “No, but I’ve heard it’s good.
True?”

  “Once you’ve done it, you’ll never go back to baked turkey.”

  “But it’s not like fried chicken, is it? You’re not dipping it in batter?”

  “No, no,” he said. “You inject it with a marinade—my favorite’s a Cajun marinade, which has some kick to it—and when you put it down in the oil, the oil browns the skin really fast, seals in all the juices. Makes an oven-roasted turkey seem dry as shoe leather.”

  “Sounds tasty,” I said. “Wish it weren’t ten months till Thanksgiving.”

  “Tell you what,” he offered. “When we close this case, I’ll do a turkey-fry to celebrate.”

  “Deal,” I said. “Dr. Garcia scheduled the autopsy for one o’clock tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”

  “This is the only homicide I’m working,” he said. “Of course it’s okay. How about if I show up at twelve-thirty, so I can go over the clothing?”

  “I’ll meet you at the loading dock behind the hospital,” I said.

  HEY,” I CALLED AS HE opened the trunk of the white Crown Victoria the next day. “You got my chainsaw in there?”

  “Sorry,” he said, removing an evidence kit and closing the lid. “We haven’t been able to empty the pool yet. Drainpipe’s frozen solid; so is the valve mechanism. We’ll need a few days above freezing to thaw it out enough to drain.”

  “Can’t you just put in a sump pump and pump it out from the top?”

  “We could, but then there’s that thick layer of frozen ice hanging up near the top of the pool. If we pump all the water out from underneath, a ton of ice could come crashing down on your chainsaw and bust it up. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “Busted or rusted,” I sighed. “Not sure which is the greater of two evils.”