The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  I wanted to scream. Instead, through clenched teeth, I said, “And when is the next flight to L.A. that I can be on?”

  More furious keyboarding. “Four P.M. Arriving 4:48.”

  “And when could I get the hell out of Los Angeles for Knoxville?”

  By now she, too, had given up all pretense of cheery politeness. “There’s an eleven P.M. to Detroit, with connections to Atlanta.”

  “Come on, there has to be something earlier than that.”

  “Yes, sir. There’s a 1:45 flight from LAX to Atlanta. But obviously you can’t take that. Then there’s nothing eastbound until eleven o’clock tonight.”

  “Christ,” I muttered. “And what time would I get to Knoxville? If nothing went wrong in Detroit?”

  “At 10:31 tomorrow morning.”

  I no longer wanted to scream. Now I wanted to weep. Feeling more defeated than I had in ages, I fished out my wallet and sighed, “I’ll take it.”

  EXITING THE TERMINAL AT MCGHEE TYSON AIRPORT the next morning—after spending what felt like an eternity shoehorned in the last row of seats to Detroit and then again to Knoxville, directly in front of lavatories that seemed not to have been cleaned in weeks—I was stunned when I stepped into the swelter of Tennessee’s summer. On the sauna-dry slopes of Otay Mountain, my sweat had evaporated almost instantly; here, it was as if I had swum into a steam bath. Or a sweat bath. How soon we forget, I thought, hunching a shoulder to mop my brow. But how fast we’re reminded.

  Heading toward the parking deck, I suddenly stopped, muttering, “Well, crap.” My truck wasn’t in the parking deck, I’d just remembered; it was parked a half mile away, at Cherokee Aviation, the charter air terminal where the FBI’s Gulfstream had swooped down to fetch me. Looking to my left, across a long ribbon of hot asphalt, I could just make out the truck, shimmering in the distance like a mirage. Slinging the strap of my boxy bag over my sleep-deprived shoulder, I began the trudge.

  Ten sweaty minutes later, my sodden shirt plastered to my skin, I unlocked and opened my truck—the rubber weather stripping made a ripping sound as it pulled away from the hot metal of the door frame—and tucked the bag behind the front seat, then cranked the engine and put the air-conditioning on high. Leaving the truck idling, I stepped inside Cherokee to mop off and use the courtesy phone to call Kathleen, as my cell phone’s battery had died somewhere between California and Tennessee. But the courtesy phone appeared to be surgically grafted to the ear of a commercial pilot, a glossy-haired, pretty-boy Casanova type in a pseudomilitary uniform. I tried hovering, hoping he’d take the hint and finish his conversation; instead, he turned his back and cupped a hand around the mouthpiece. Judging by his quiet murmuring and occasional chuckles, the pilot wasn’t filing a flight plan; he appeared to be cooing to a woman he had just bedded or, more likely, hoped to bed, as soon as his next flight was over. Too weary to wait, I returned to my truck and headed toward campus. I would check in at my office, then go surprise Kathleen at hers.

  I passed the medical center and crossed the Tennessee River, flowing green and welcoming beneath the high span of the Buck Karnes Bridge. Looking to my right—upstream, between the hospital and a condominium complex—I saw the three-acre patch of woods housing the Body Farm. Across the river, a bit farther upstream, loomed the towering oval of Neyland Stadium, which housed the dingy offices and classrooms and labs of the Anthropology Department.

  The river separating these two odd offices of mine was, for reasons I didn’t entirely fathom, a powerful touchstone for me. As I crossed the channel on the high span of concrete, I filled my lungs and exhaled loudly—the sound somewhere between a sigh and a hum—feeling myself only now to have truly landed. Home, I thought. Smiling, I turned onto Neyland Drive and headed upriver, as reflexively and instinctively as some four-wheeled salmon. Making my way to the stadium, I threaded along the one-lane service road at the base of the grandstands and stopped beside the service tunnel that led to the field’s north end zone.

  Reaching behind the seat, I unzipped my bag and removed the bin of teeth and bones, then entered the dim, echoing concrete stairwell and headed up one flight of steps: up to my private office, my sanctuary, my hideaway; the place where I holed up when I needed to focus on science and forensics, not bureaucracy. I set the bin on the hallway floor and turned the key in the lock of my door, tugging gently as I twisted, to loosen the deadbolt from the grip of the warped door frame. When the bolt rasped and thunked free, I turned the knob and hipped the door open, then bent down, picked up the bin, and set it on my desk. Then I dialed Peggy, my secretary, who kept watch over the Anthropology Department’s main office, a hundred yards away—all the way at the opposite end of the stadium, beneath the south end zone’s grandstands. Peggy answered halfway through the first ring. “Anthropology,” she said, her voice sounding strange and strained.

  “Hi, honey, I’m home,” I joked, hoping to ease the tension I heard in her voice.

  “Good God, where have you been?” Over the past dozen years, I’d heard Peggy sound testy many times. But this was beyond testy—miles beyond it; light-years beyond it.

  “San Diego, remember?” I was starting to feel some anxiety myself. “You don’t sound too happy to hear from me.”

  “Three hours ago I would have been happy to hear from you,” she snapped. “Yesterday you told me you’d be in first thing this morning. I’ve been trying to call you for hours.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “There was a problem with my flight. And my phone died. I just got in. What’s wrong? Should I come up?”

  “You mean to tell me you’re on campus?” It sounded more like an accusation than a question.

  “Well, I am now,” I hedged. “My flight landed twenty minutes ago. I drove straight here. Came in the back door. Just now. Literally this minute. I’m down in my other office.”

  “Would you please come to this office instead? Quickly?” The sarcasm would have dripped from her voice if the iciness of her tone hadn’t flash-frozen it first.

  “You’ve got me feeling kinda gun-shy,” I said. “Want to tell me what this is about?”

  “There is a television news crew here from Channel Four in Nashville. They have been camped in my office for the past three hours. Please come immediately. If not sooner.”

  AS I WALKED IN THE DOOR OF THE DEPARTMENTAL office, Peggy glowered at me from behind her desk as an attractive young woman—of Italian ancestry? no, Greek, I guessed—stood up and turned toward me. I put on what I hoped would pass for a courteous smile. “Hello, I’m Dr. Bill Brockton,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  She held out her hand. “Dr. Brockton, I’m Athena Demopoulos, Eyewitness Four News.” Her handshake was firm—aggressively firm, as if she were trying to prove something. She nodded slightly toward a pale young man behind her; his frumpy clothes were a stark contrast to her chic, tailored suit. “This is Rick Walters, my cameraman.” His handshake, like his clothes, was much more relaxed than hers.

  “Ms. Demopoulos, I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting,” I said. “My flight was delayed, and my phone was dead.” Pulling out my pocket calendar, I flipped it open and scanned the current day’s empty page. “Did we have an appointment that I failed to write down?”

  “No, we didn’t. We’re investigating a news story that’s breaking now. It has come to our attention that you’re conducting experiments with human bodies.”

  “We are indeed,” I said cheerily. “I’m not sure I’d call that ‘breaking news’—we’ve been doing it for more than a decade. I guess news travels slowly from here in the hinterlands.” I smiled again. “You might have gotten wind of my research a little sooner if the prevailing winds blew from east to west instead of west to east.” I winked to make sure she got the joke.

  She frowned; I couldn’t tell whether she was confused or upset. “I don’t think you understand the gravity of the story,” she said. “If you’ll let me finish, I can make it clear to you. It has come to our attention that
you’re conducting experiments on the bodies of military veterans. Men who put their lives on the line to defend our American way of life. Do you deny that?”

  Her question took me totally off guard. “No, I don’t deny it, but I can’t confirm it, either,” I said.

  “Don’t be coy, Dr. Brockton.”

  “I’m not being coy,” I said. “I’m being blindsided. I have zero information on this. If you’ve got any information at all, you’ve got more than I do. How about you start by telling me what you’ve heard, and where you heard it? How did the story come to you, and why?”

  “I can’t reveal my sources,” she said, her voice a mixture of self-importance and smugness. “But they’re quite credible, I assure you. I have the names of at least four veterans whose bodies were sent to you.” She rattled off the names. “Are they here? Yes or no? If they are, please tell our viewers—and the families of these four men—what kind of experiments you’re doing on them, and why?”

  Somehow a microphone had materialized in Athena Demopoulos’s hand and had positioned itself directly in front of my face. Meanwhile, the cameraman had hoisted a video camera to his shoulder, and the blinking red light above the lens led me to believe that he was filming. Filming me. I shrugged, shaking my head. “I don’t know if they’re here.”

  She gave me a look of disgusted disbelief. “You’re saying you don’t even keep track of whose bodies you’re experimenting on?”

  I winced at the phrase experimenting on—it made me sound like Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor. “No, I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that we don’t refer to our research subjects by name. When bodies come in, we give them case numbers—to protect their privacy—and we always refer to them by those numbers.” She looked puzzled, so I explained. “For example, suppose a funeral home brings over a donated body this afternoon—a TV reporter, let’s say, whose story on the joys of skydiving didn’t turn out quite the way she’d planned.” She looked startled by the scenario, which was okay by me. “She’d be the thirty-eighth body donated to us in 2004. That means we—my graduate students and I—would refer to her, and would think of her, as ‘38-04,’ not as Melissa or Carissa or Athena or whatever her name was.” She no longer looked startled; now she looked angry. “My point,” I said, “is that we do keep track of the bodies we have—very careful track—but we also keep their names confidential. So if you’ll write down the names, I’ll go check our master file.” She eyed me suspiciously, as if I were trying to pull a fast one on her, but then pulled out a small notepad and began scrawling names. “By the way,” I added, “did your secret source give you the dates these bodies supposedly arrived?” She looked up from the notepad, scowling. “Because if you can narrow down the time, it won’t take me as long to check the files. Which means I can answer your question sooner.” She added a year beside each name, then ripped the page from the pad.

  Before handing me the paper, she held the microphone in my face again. “You haven’t answered my other question yet,” she said. “Why are you experimenting on these bodies? Have you no respect for the dead?”

  “Ms. Stephanopolus—”

  “Demopoulos,” she corrected sharply.

  “Ms. Demopoulos,” I resumed, “I assure you, I have enormous respect for the dead.”

  “You toss them on the ground and let them rot,” she shot back. “You call that respect?”

  “I call it research. We don’t ‘toss’ them; we lay them. Carefully. Respectfully. We conduct scientific research on human decomposition during the extended postmortem interval. It’s never been done before.”

  “Maybe there’s a good reason for that,” she countered.

  “Nobody ever flew before,” I shot back, “until the Wright brothers did. Were they wrong to study flight?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Instead, she looked down, her gaze traveling down to my left hand. Then she locked eyes with me again, her expression now smug. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring, Dr. Brockton,” she said. “If your wife died, would you take her to your Body Farm? Would you throw her in the woods, for the bugs and the buzzards to eat?”

  If she’d been a man, I might have clenched my fist and hit her. Instead I clenched my jaw and silently counted to ten. Then I asked, in as neutral a tone as I could muster, “Are you married, Ms. Demopoulos?”

  Her eyes hardened. “That’s a personal question. I don’t discuss my personal life on camera.”

  “Neither do I,” I said coolly. I reached out and took the names from her. “Now, if you’ll have a seat, I’ll go check the files.”

  I hurried down the long, curving corridor beneath the stadium to my other office, at the far end. The walk did me good—partly because it got me away from the reporter, and partly because it allowed me to let off a bit of steam in a way that was more constructive than taking a swing at a TV reporter. I thought back to the way the Fox 5 reporter in San Diego had ambushed Prescott, and I envied the FBI agent his coolness under fire.

  Ten minutes after leaving the news crew cooling their heels in Peggy’s office, I returned and handed the list back to Athena Demopoulos. I had put a check mark beside each of the names, confirming that all four bodies had indeed been sent to us. “Your sources did get the names right,” I told her, “but not the context.” I motioned toward the open door of my office. “Please. Come in, and let me explain a little more about what we do.” She and the cameraman followed me in. He set up a tripod, latched the camera onto it, and gave her a “ready” nod.

  She laid a microphone on the desk. “You admit that you’re experimenting on the bodies of military veterans,” she began. “How do you justify that?”

  “Let me back up and give you a little background first,” I began. “So you’ll have some context. We get bodies in two ways. From two different sources. About half are donated—in a person’s will, or by their next of kin—in exactly the same way bodies are donated to Vanderbilt Medical School, there in Nashville.” She seemed on the verge of interrupting, but I held up a finger and kept talking. “Others—and this is the category that includes the four veterans you’ve asked me about—are bodies that are unclaimed after death. These come to us from medical examiners all over the state.” As she processed this piece of information, I hurried on. “If a body goes unclaimed—maybe the person is an unidentified John or Jane Doe; maybe they’ve got no relatives; maybe their relatives are estranged—whatever the reason, if a body’s unclaimed, the cost of burying that body falls on the county where the death occurred. Now, bear with me just a minute more. It costs about a thousand dollars to bury a body, and a lot of Tennessee counties don’t have that kind of money to spare. If they send the body to me, it’s a win-win: They save money, and our research program grows. And the more research we do—the better we understand how bodies decay after death—the more help we can give police in solving murder cases.”

  “How? How does letting veterans’ bodies rot in the woods help solve murders?”

  She wasn’t making this easy. I took a breath to collect myself before going on. “By giving us more data on which to base our estimates of time since death. Our research lets us tell the police, with a high degree of scientific certainty, how long ago someone was killed. By comparing the decomposition of the victim’s body with what we’ve observed in our research—and by taking variables like temperature, humidity, and so forth into account—we can help the police narrow down the time of the murder, to within a matter of days or even hours. Earlier, you sounded distressed when you mentioned bugs. Even the bugs are an important part of our research. By knowing what bugs come to feed on a body—and when, and how fast they grow—we can be even more precise.”

  Her cameraman, I noticed, looked interested in this, but her face registered nothing but disgust. “You still haven’t explained why you’re conducting these experiments on the bodies of U.S. military veterans.”

  “It’s not like I’m seeking the bodies of veterans. Look,
when a funeral home or a medical examiner sends me a body, I don’t do a background check. I don’t investigate whether the deceased was a veteran, just like I don’t investigate whether he was a priest, or a prisoner, or a teacher, or a TV reporter. I say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and I assign a case number and a research question, and I try to learn something from that body.”

  “But why don’t you think veterans deserve a dignified burial?”

  “I do.” I turned my palms up. “I think everybody deserves a dignified burial. The last thing I’m trying to do is keep a veteran—or anyone else, for that matter—from getting a decent, dignified burial. The thing is, Ms. Demopoulos, when these four men died, no one claimed them. No one tried to arrange a dignified burial for them. If you’ve come across relatives who want these bodies, I’m happy to give them the bodies. They’ll be a little the worse for wear now, but unfortunately, I can’t help that.” I shrugged, trying to read her expression. “Does that answer your questions?”

  “It’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “But we also need to see your facility. The Body Farm, that’s what you call it, right?”

  I felt myself getting testy again. “That’s what a lot of people call it.”

  “And you think that name shows respect for the dead?”

  This woman had a knack for nettling me. “I’m not the one who came up with it,” I snapped. “An FBI agent coined the name, and it stuck. So that’s what it’s usually called—by police, by medical examiners, and by reporters. Reporters who—up until now—have been able to understand that our research helps the good guys catch the bad guys.” I shouldn’t have needled her that way, but she’d gotten under my skin, and I was mad. What was it Mark Twain said about journalists—“never argue with people who buy ink by the barrel”? I was battling a person who bought videotape by the truckload, but it was too late to back out now. “As for taking you out there and showing you around—letting you shoot footage—I can’t do that.”