The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a research facility, not a tourist attraction. The work we do there is sensitive. And it’s certainly not fodder for tabloid television.”

  She flushed, and I could tell that she, too, felt nettled now. “This is not tabloid television,” she practically hissed. “This is journalism in the public interest. We are investigating a major news story here—the disrespect being shown here to the bodies of American servicemen. I will go to the university’s president or board of trustees if that’s what it takes to get your cooperation.”

  “I am cooperating,” I insisted. “I’ve checked our files, I’ve confirmed what you asked me to confirm, and I’ve explained—or tried to explain—what we do, and why. But I can’t let you go roaming around in there with your camera, looking for lurid footage. Because turning you loose in there with a camera and a big chip on your shoulder? That would be treating the dead with disrespect.”

  She stood up so suddenly her chair scraped the floor and nearly toppled backward. If looks could kill, the glare Athena Demopoulos shot in my direction would have laid me out like a lightning bolt, and I’d have joined the ranks of the dead—veterans and civilians alike, indistinguishable in death—who were mustered out, and falling apart, behind the fence of the Body Farm. “Cut,” she snapped at the cameraman. “We’re out of here.” Then, to me: “But we will be back.”

  Of that I felt sure. Awfully and dreadfully sure.

  PRESSING THE HEELS OF MY HANDS INTO MY TEMPLES, I worked my scalp in slow circles, first in one direction, then in the other, trying—but failing—to release the tension. Next I closed my aching eyes and rubbed them with the thumb and fingers of my right hand.

  The Nashville reporter had the basic facts correct: We did have the remains of four veterans at the Body Farm. All four had come from Nashville. All four had died, during the prior eighteen months, at the VA Hospital there, and when no next of kin had claimed their remains, Nashville’s M.E. had sent the bodies to me for research. Nothing underhanded or sinister had been done; the men had simply died alone and unloved. In that regard, those four—the Nashville Four—were like too many other veterans, especially Vietnam War veterans.

  Vietnam: I myself had been lucky enough—young enough—to stay out of the war. I turned eighteen during the war’s final year; the draft hadn’t yet ended, but I had a high lottery number—high enough that I didn’t get drafted. By that time most Americans seemed to agree that Vietnam had been a foreign-policy failure: an unwinnable fight, and a terrible waste of lives. As a result, our conflicted feelings—our national shame, it might even be called—had created an unwritten but undeniably tragic domestic policy: a policy of pretending that Vietnam had never happened, and of turning a blind, indifferent eye to Vietnam vets and their postwar troubles.

  The College of Social Work at UT was large and well regarded. One of the faculty there—a friend of mine—had made a long-term study of Vietnam vets. What he’d found had shocked me. Twenty or more years after returning from Southeast Asia, four out of five Vietnam vets still suffered from chronic symptoms of PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder. Compared to nonveterans, they also had higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide. And unlike veterans of World War II, who were widely celebrated as national heroes, Vietnam vets tended to be unappreciated, unacknowledged, sometimes even scorned. It was almost as if we were all avoiding eye contact with a homeless beggar—a beggar who might, come to think of it, be a Vietnam veteran.

  I didn’t know the specific stories or circumstances of the four veterans who had ended up at the Body Farm. All I knew was that in the end, no one had cared enough to claim them, to arrange for the honor guard and the folded flag and the well-kept grave their service should have earned them.

  Who had contacted Channel 4 about the story, and why—and why now, at this particular time? Initially, I’d assumed that the reporter was pursuing the Janus story, and when she’d started talking about veterans, I’d wondered if she was working some sort of angle related to Janus’s Air America stint in Southeast Asia. But her barrage of questions and accusations had quickly made it clear that this was a Tennessee story—a Body Farm story—and a veteran story. For all I knew, we might’ve had dozens of veterans’ corpses at the Body Farm over the past dozen years. Was it really high-minded concern about the treatment of dead soldiers that was behind this, or was there some unspoken subtext—some power play or hidden agenda? The reporter had dodged my question about who her source was. If I pressed the point, I felt sure that she’d bristle and bluster and begin waving the freedom-of-the-press flag as if she were its lone standard-bearer and staunchest defender.

  Still rubbing my temples and eyes with one hand, I used the other hand to call Kathleen. “I’m back,” I told her glumly. “I need you to feel sorry for me for just a minute.”

  “I didn’t realize it was such a hardship to come home,” she said, her tone hovering somewhere between teasing and defensive.

  “I didn’t either,” I said. “I was really looking forward to it. But then I had the trip from hell. And then things got even worse.”

  “Poor baby. What’s wrong? Tell me about it.”

  So I did, skipping the trip and going straight to the ambush interview by the TV reporter.

  “Sweeps week,” she said scornfully.

  “What?”

  “Sweeps week. It’s when the networks pull out all the stops. They measure their ratings—their viewers—during sweeps week. The higher their ratings, the more they can charge for ads. So they show blockbuster movies, sensational stories, anything they think’ll get viewers. Don’t take it personally, hon. It’s all about money, not about you.”

  “It sure feels like it’s about me,” I squawked. “It’s my work—my facility; my reputation—in the crosshairs of that . . . that . . .”

  “Language, Bill. Language.”

  “That reporter. That mudslinging, muckraking, holier-than-thou reporter. Am I allowed to call her that?”

  “Of course, sweetheart—to me. I wouldn’t say it to her, though. Not unless you want every television viewer in Nashville to think you’re a grumpy old man.”

  “Grumpy? Me? Hmmph,” I said. “I’ll be nice as pie. She’ll be eating out of my hand.”

  “If I catch her lips anywhere near any part of you, her next story can be about her colonoscopy. The one I administer with her own video camera.”

  I laughed, in spite of myself. “I should’ve come to your office instead of my office,” I said. “I’m thinking I might have gotten a warmer welcome.”

  “I’d’ve been nice as pie,” she cooed. “You’d’ve been eating out of my hand.”

  “Hold that thought for a few hours,” I told her. My spousal flirting was cut short by the buzz of my intercom. “Rats,” I said. “Peggy’s buzzing me. Probably more bad news. See you at home.” I pressed the intercom button. “Tell me you’ve good news, Peggy.”

  “Can’t,” she answered. “You’ve told me never to lie to you. Do you want door number one, or door number two?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You have two callers on hold. The dean’s on line one, and the general counsel’s on line two.”

  “The general counsel? As in Amanda Whiting, UT’s top legal eagle?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Jeez,” I said. “If line three rings, don’t answer—it’ll be the Angel of Death calling.”

  “No, he’s coming to see you in person,” she cracked. “He’ll be here in ten minutes.”

  “Swell,” I said. “I’ll tell the dean to talk slow—that way maybe I can skip the lawyer altogether.” The truth was, I rather liked the general counsel, but given that the Channel 4 reporter was probably already badgering her, I doubted that she was calling with good news. The dean, on the other hand, had long been a reliable, agreeable ally, from the moment I’d first pitched my unorthodox research program to him, years ago. How many years? Ten? No, twelve, I realized as I pressed
the blinking button. That was 1992. Where does the time go?

  “Hello,” I said to the dean. “Are you calling to fire me?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “You’ve got tenure. Good thing, too, because you’ve stirred up a hell of a hornet’s nest.”

  “I didn’t stir it up,” I protested. “I just happened to be standing near the tree. Somebody else took a whack at the hornet’s nest. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why.”

  “Actually, I’m calling to make sure you know I’m in your corner,” he said. “You do good work. You’re a credit to the university. Let me know if I can help.”

  “You good with a pair of tweezers?”

  “How’s that?”

  “It might take you and me both to pull all the stingers out of my hide.”

  He chuckled. “You’ll be all right. Good luck, Bill.”

  “I need it. Amanda Whiting’s on the other line.”

  “Ah. You do need it,” he agreed, and for once I wished he weren’t quite so agreeable.

  GENERAL COUNSEL AMANDA WHITING WAS LESS agreeable than the dean had been. “We’ve got one hell of a mess on our hands,” she said. Her words were muddled, and for a bizarre moment I wondered if she was drinking. Then I heard the clatter of a knife on a plate, and I realized she was eating. “How do we clean this up and make sure it never happens again?”

  “I’ve offered to give the bodies back,” I told her. “If anybody takes me up on it, I’ll gladly deliver the bodies myself. As to how to make sure it doesn’t happen again, I suppose we can check with the Veterans Administration every time we get a body. But what a pain. We screen bodies for AIDS and hepatitis; I didn’t realize we needed to screen them for prior occupation.”

  “We live in litigious times, Bill. We can’t afford to risk lawsuits—million-dollar claims for pain and suffering—filed by relatives of those science-project guinea pigs you’ve got rotting on the ground.”

  “What an eloquent description,” I snapped. “Mind if I borrow that? It would give that Nashville reporter a much better grasp of the merit and dignity of our research. ‘Science-project guinea pigs, rotting on the ground’: Have I got that right?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “That was out of line. You know that’s not what I really think. I’m looking at it as a lawyer; putting it in the worst possible way—the way a plaintiff’s attorney would, if somebody slapped us with a lawsuit. It could happen.”

  “Someone could claim my research caused pain and suffering? Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “What about the pain and suffering of dying alone? Where were these sensitive, caring relatives when these poor guys were staring death in the face, with no one to hold their hand or say how much they’d meant?”

  “It stinks,” she agreed. “No pun intended. But we need to tread carefully here. I know you have respect for the dead. We just need to make sure that others know that, too.” She paused, then cleared her throat. “The reporter’s pushing hard to get in.”

  “No surprise there.” I sighed. “Look, I think it’s a bad, bad idea. We turn her loose in there with a camera, she’ll crucify us. You’ve never been out to the research facility. It’s not pretty, Amanda, what the body goes through after death. That’s why the funeral industry is so huge—that’s why we spend billions of dollars a year to make the dead look like the living. Because we don’t want to confront the ugly reality of our mortality. The buggy, bloated, putrefying reality.”

  “Bill, I’m eating lunch here. Or was.”

  “If there’s rice on your plate, make sure it’s not wiggling,” I said. She groaned, and I laughed. “But seriously, we don’t want her in there with a camera. She’s got an ax to grind. And she wants to put our necks—my neck—on the chopping block. Tell her no.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. “We’re in a bit of a bind here, Bill,” she said finally. “We’re a publicly funded institution. We’re responsible—we’re accountable—to the taxpayers of Tennessee. We don’t have the option of concealing what we’re doing with their money.”

  “I’m not trying to conceal it,” I said. “I’m just trying not to rub their noses in it. Because frankly, even though this work is important, it’s not real pleasant. You remember that old TV commercial—for shampoo or hair color?—that showed a gorgeous woman running toward a guy? Slow motion, her long blond hair bounding up and down, up and down, with every stride?”

  “Yeah, that rings a bell. Vaguely. Your point being . . . ?”

  “Remember the tag line? ‘The closer he gets, the better you look’? The Body Farm’s not like that, Amanda. We’re the opposite. The closer you get, the worse we look. And the worse we smell.”

  “I get it, I get it,” she said. “But we have to find some way to accommodate this journalist. It’s a legitimate news story. It might be slanted, it might be unfair, it might be unfavorable—”

  “No ‘might be’ about it,” I snapped. “It’s a total hatchet job. I wish I knew who put her onto this, and why.”

  “I’ve done some asking around,” she said. “Sounds like it was a disgruntled employee at the VA Hospital. They weren’t even going after you—they wanted the hospital to do better by dead and dying vets. It was the reporter who made the story about us.”

  “So why do we even have to cooperate?”

  “Because now it is about us, Bill. And even if it’s bad news, it’s news, and we’ve got to make a good-faith effort to cooperate. Otherwise, the story snowballs—it’s no longer just about these four dead veterans, it’s about us, about our secrecy and skullduggery. What other dark deeds might be going on behind that fence? We need a solution. How can we meet her halfway—give her something, but not give away the store?”

  I sighed, although I’d guessed she might say something of the sort. “Okay,” I said. “There’s a guy in the public relations office. Name’s Buck. He’s done a few press releases about us. About our research, about forensic cases we’ve helped the police solve. Buck used to work for WBIR, and he’s asked me a couple times about shooting footage at the Body Farm. Wants to make a science documentary, for the Learning Channel or National Geographic or some such. How ’bout I take Buck over, let him get some shots, and give the footage to the Channel Four folks?”

  “Good idea. Nothing too graphic, though.”

  “Lord no,” I assured her. “Very . . . tasteful.”

  “Eating,” she reminded me.

  “Sorry. Very discreet. I’m thinking a fresh body—freshest we’ve got, anyhow—and some bare bones. A nice white skeleton.”

  “I don’t think we should muddy the water with race,” she said.

  “Huh? With what?”

  “Race. You said ‘a nice white skeleton.’ I wouldn’t bring up race.”

  I laughed. “The bones,” I said, “not the donor. White bones. Bare bones. Sun-bleached bones.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right. I knew that.”

  AN HOUR AFTER MY PHONE CALLS WITH THE DEAN and the legal eagle, I crossed the river, looped past the medical center, and threaded through the hospital employees’ parking lot. The lot was nearly full; the only unclaimed spaces were in the farthest corner, beside the high wooden fence surrounding the Body Farm. Those spots were almost never taken; they were the last resorts of hospital workers too late to be choosy—especially on hot summer days like this one, when the research facility gave new meaning—literal, eye-watering meaning—to the phrase “body odor.”

  A single vehicle was parked in the normally vacant spots. But it was not parked between the lines, nose to the fence. Instead, it was parked parallel to the fence, straddling three parking places. It was a white Chevy Blazer labeled EYEWITNESS 4 NEWS, and on top of the Blazer was a tripod, and on top of the tripod was a video camera, and peering through the viewfinder was the cameraman from Channel 4. Perched beside him, looking almost comically incongruous in her tailored suit and power pumps, was my nemesis, Athena Demopoulos.

  I stop
ped fifty yards away. Taking out my phone, I scrolled through my contacts to the number of the medical center police and pressed “call.” “Dis-patch,” answered a woman with an East Tennessee twang.

  “This is Dr. Brockton,” I said. “There’s a television news crew parked outside the Body Farm. They’re up on top of their car with a video camera.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the dispatcher, and to my surprise, she chuckled. “Emmett said he’d be sleeping on the sofa for a week if his wife saw him helping that gal get up there.”

  “Emmett? Who’s Emmett? What are you talking about?”

  “Emmett. Officer Edmonds. He had to boost that lady reporter up. It took a push to the tush, if you know what I mean.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re telling me that one of your officers has already seen them? And helped them?”

  “Well, yes, sir,” she said, suddenly sounding nervous. “She—the lady—she said you were on your way. Told them to meet you here. She told him you’d got snagged on a phone call with the chancellor or some other muckety-muck, but you said to go ahead and get started, and you’d be right there.” She paused. “Are you . . . not there?”

  “I am here,” I said. “Would you please radio Officer Friendly and ask him to come right back?”

  “Sir?”

  “I need Emmett to escort his new girlfriend off the premises.”

  “But she said—”

  “I don’t give a damn what she said,” I snapped. “It’s not true. I didn’t tell them to meet me here, and I certainly don’t want them looking over my fence with a TV camera.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I’ll send him right away.”

  “Thank you.”

  I hung up and pulled forward, tucking in behind the Blazer. Athena Demopoulos glanced my way, then muttered to her cameraman, who kept his eye glued to the viewfinder. As I was getting out, I heard the wail of a siren, and a police cruiser lurched to a screeching stop beside the Blazer. The door opened and a stocky young officer got out, his face flaming, his brow beaded with sweat. “Dr. Brockton, I’m so sorry,” he said. “She told me—”