Flesh and Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  Trouble was, it turned out that the “stab wound” was inflicted by a big shard from a glass-topped coffee table, which Billy Ray had shattered when he collapsed onto it. I had the dubious plea sure of getting involved when I did an experiment at the Body Farm that showed it would have been impossible for a knife blade—even if there had been a knife wound, which there wasn’t—to puncture the back on the left side, cross the spine, and then veer ninety degrees into the right lung. The real cause of the lung hemorrhage, it turned out, was a bar fight a couple of weeks before Billy Ray’s death, when he got severely boot-stomped, breaking multiple ribs and puncturing the lung with a sharp piece of bone. My testimony had served the dual purpose of clearing Billy Ray’s friend of an unjustified murder charge—which pleased me—and of spotlighting Dr. Hamilton’s incompetence—which displeased me on two counts: first, that he was incompetent, and second, that I was now part of the effort to strip a longtime colleague of his license to practice medicine.

  Hamilton had confronted me furiously after the trial, so I was prepared for the worst when I entered the hearing room. He stood up and stepped toward me; I braced for an assault, verbal or even physical. Instead, he stretched out his right hand. Startled, I took it and shook. “No hard feelings, Bill,” he said with a smile and a squeeze of my hand.

  Surprised at his change of tone, all I could come up with was, “I hope not, Garland.”

  Up at the front of the room, which was just a large conference room in one of the state office buildings in downtown Knoxville, a panel of three physicians—members of the Board of Medical Examiners—sat behind a long table. To one side, a stenographer perched at a much smaller table, her fingers poised over the odd little machine she used to transcribe words. I was fascinated by the technology. Her machine, a stenograph, looked more like an old-fashioned adding machine than a computer or typewriter; as she typed, though, she would often press two or three keys at once, like playing a chord on a piano. I had once asked a court reporter to explain and demonstrate the technique to me. “I’m transcribing sounds, not words,” she’d said, and she had me speak a few words at a time. She showed me what combinations of keys she used to transcribe the various sounds I had uttered—sometimes a “chord” represented a syllable; sometimes an entire word; in one case, even an entire phrase. It beat the hell out of anything I’d ever seen: as if she’d had to master a new language and a musical instrument all at the same time. Ever since, I’d had great admiration for court reporters’ abilities.

  “Dr. Brockton, are you ready?” The state’s lawyer brought my mind back to the business at hand. He had already briefed me on the charge against Hamilton: “significant professional incompetence, with actual or risk of immediate harm,” the most serious charge possible. In this case, the harm was not to the patient, since Billy Ray was long since dead by the time Hamilton got to him; the harm was to the friend who faced life in prison for an unjust charge of murder. Pretty harmful, all right. If the examiners upheld the complaint, Hamilton’s license could just be suspended temporarily, but it was more likely to be revoked for good. And it would be good, judging by some other shoddy autopsy reports I’d seen.

  I’d brought diagrams of the spine, rib cage, and lungs, showing the impossible “wound path” Hamilton had described the knife taking; I had also requested that a teaching skeleton be on hand so I could further illustrate the impossibility in three dimensions. The state’s lawyer led me swiftly through a recap of the experiment I’d done, in which I had been unable even to approximate the path Hamilton had described. He ended by having me describe finding the shard of bone, from Billy Ray’s own splintered ribs, that had pierced the right lung. The examiners on the panel asked a few questions: Might a thinner blade have been able to make the requisite turns? Was there any sign of a knife mark on the detached bone shard? Was there any possibility the shard had punctured the lung during postmortem handling of the body?—but they seemed satisfied with my answers.

  Then Hamilton’s lawyer got his turn. I had been cross-examined by the Knox County district attorney about this same case, so I felt reasonably confident, well prepared, but his first question threw me off-balance. “Dr. Brockton, did you examine the decedent, Mr. Ledbetter, for evidence of scoliosis? Curvature of the spine?”

  “Well, no,” I said, “but I think I would have noticed—”

  “I’m not asking what you think you would have noticed, Doctor; I’m asking whether you took measurements or X-rays or conducted any other sort of investigation that would have yielded an objective indication of scoliosis?”

  “Then I’d have to say no,” I said.

  “And did you examine your research subject, the one you stabbed in the back, for evidence of scoliosis?”

  I felt my cheeks flush. “No,” I said. “He appeared to be a normal individual. He was a marathon runner. I don’t imagine someone with scoliosis would have an easy time running marathons.”

  “You ever see photos or news stories about amputees, wearing artificial limbs, running marathons?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you imagine they have an easy time doing it?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, though.”

  “What I’m getting at, Dr. Brockton, is this: You don’t actually know for a fact that Billy Ray Ledbetter’s spine was normal, and you don’t know for a fact that your research subject’s spine was identical in shape to Mr. Ledbetter’s. What I’m getting at is the fact that a knife could have followed a different path in Mr. Ledbetter’s body than in the body of your experimental cadaver if their spines were curved differently. Couldn’t it, Dr. Brockton?”

  I was not willing to back down completely. “Slightly,” I said. “If one of them had severe curvature and the other did not. But neither of them had severe curvature.”

  “You’ve just said you didn’t measure or X-ray either spine for scoliosis,” he shot back.

  “I haven’t measured or X-rayed your spine, either,” I said, “but that doesn’t keep me from noticing that you probably have some anterior deterioration and compression in your cervical disks. That’s why your head juts slightly forward of your shoulders. Do you have neck pain? You might be a good candidate for cervical fusion.”

  “We are not here to talk about my spine, sir,” he all but shouted at me.

  “No, sir, we’re not,” I said levelly. “What we’re here to talk about is truth and competence, and what I’m getting at is that after studying thousands of skeletons, I don’t have to take X-rays and measure angles to notice a deformed spine. Neither of these two individuals had a deformed spine.”

  He sputtered a bit, and tried to regain his advantage, but he had clearly played his one trump card, and it wasn’t quite the ace he’d hoped it would be. After a little more sparring, the physician who was leading the hearing called a halt, thanked me, and pronounced me free to go.

  As I left the hearing room, I noticed Hamilton’s attorney rubbing his neck; the sight made me smile. Then I caught the stenographer looking from me to the attorney and back again. She gave me a wink and a smile; she crossed her legs at the same time. I wasn’t sure if that was just a happy coincidence, or if it was some sort of reward for providing a bit of entertainment. Either way, I smiled bigger and returned the wink.

  Then I saw Garland Hamilton looking at me. I met his gaze, and he gave me a brief nod. It wasn’t as friendly as his greeting had been, but it was fairly cordial, considering that his professional life was on the line here and I was part of the effort to terminate it.

  The state’s lawyer led me out of the hearing room. In the marbled hallway, seated on a bench outside the double doors, was Jess Carter. If I’d given the matter any thought, I’d have realized Jess would be testifying as well, since she had reautopsied the body of Billy Ray Ledbetter before I examined the bones. But I’d been too preoccupied with the Chattanooga case, and with my heavy-handed treatment of my creationist student, to think about it.
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  “Hey, stranger,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here. You free by any chance to night?”

  This was the second question today that had caught me off-balance.

  “Well, I could be,” I said, my thoughts lagging half a beat behind my words. “I mean, I am. I think. Are you?”

  She laughed at my clumsiness. “Ah. Sorry, no. Some guy in the hospital for routine foot surgery died the night he checked in, and the family’s screaming lawsuit. I gotta get back and do his autopsy this afternoon.”

  “Oh. Right. Me too, now that I think about it. I mean, not an autopsy. I have some test papers to grade, so I can give them back tomorrow morning.”

  “I thought UT was out on spring break this week?” She raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. Underneath both brows, her eyes were dancing.

  Damn. Why did her processor always seem to work so much faster than mine? I was glad it hadn’t been Jess cross-examining me in there just now. “Don’t let me keep you from your testimony,” I said, nodding at the state’s attorney, who was looking anxious.

  “Oh, what I have to say won’t take long,” she said. “I’ll just tell them how I took one look at those rotting remains and handed them straight over to the eminent Dr. Brockton.”

  She winked, turned, and disappeared through the doorway. In her wake she left a swirl of hair, perfume, and female pheromones. Also an unmistakable aura of wit, intelligence, and professional competence.

  CHAPTER 10

  I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH a stack of a hundred test papers, and already my stomach was paging me. I checked my watch; it said ten-thirty, which was too early for lunch even by my standards, though not by much. Besides, the nearest cafeteria, in the athletic building across the street, didn’t start serving lunch until eleven. If I stayed focused, I could grade the remaining fifty papers—it was a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank test—and still be the first person through the lunch line.

  There was a knock at my door. I always kept the door ajar when I was in, and most students just barged right in. Not this time. “Come in,” I said. Miranda leaned her head around the door and scanned the room. “Since when do you knock?” I asked.

  “Since I walked in on you kissing someone,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “Ah,” I said, regretting the question. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime lapse. I was overcome with grief at the time. She was just trying to comfort me.” Unfortunately—mortifyingly—“she” was an undergraduate student who had asked a question that had released a flood of sadness over my wife’s death. In trying to console me, the young woman had given me a kiss that began as compassion but swiftly turned to passion. It was probably fortunate that Miranda had appeared in my doorway when she had; otherwise, I might have crossed even farther over the line.

  “Comfort, huh,” Miranda snorted. “Hmm. Sort of like that jailer I read about in the News Sentinel last week? The guy caught comforting one of the female prisoners? She was grief-stricken over being arrested for prostitution, if I remember the story right.”

  “No,” I said, “not like that. There was no nakedness involved in this comforting.”

  “Might’ve been if I’d walked in five minutes later,” she said. “Speaking of the capable and comforting Miss Carmichael, how is she? Still at the top of her class?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s taking two cultural anthropology classes this semester. I hope she hasn’t gone over to the Dark Side.”

  “Hmm. I suspect she’ll circle back to physical anthropology. She just seems the physical type, you know?” Miranda smiled sweetly as she said this, to let me know she was joking. Sort of.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said with an answering smile. “I was getting worried about her. You’ve given me such…comfort.”

  She glared, then laughed. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Truce. I’m not still jealous of her.” She paused for half a beat. “Smart, cute little bitch.” She laughed again. So did I. Miranda had a way of tipping me off-balance, then catching me just before I went sprawling. “Actually, I didn’t come by just to stomp on your feet of clay,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I was so enjoying it. What other delights await me?”

  “Our research subject, oh-five thirty-one?” I was instantly alert; 05–31 was the case number we’d assigned to the corpse tied to the tree at the Farm, because he was the thirty-first forensic case of 2005.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s getting pretty interesting. You might want to come out and take a look.”

  “I was planning to head that way after I finished grading these papers and eating lunch,” I said, “but somehow those seem less compelling now. Let’s go.”

  The department’s pickup truck was parked a flight of stairs away, near the tunnel that penetrated the stadium at field level, at the north end zone—the tunnel the UT football team ran through to the cheers of a hundred thousand people on game days. The truck was angled nose-first between two of the columns holding up the stadium’s upper deck. I backed around, tucking its rear bumper between two other columns, and threaded the one-lane ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, weaving a path around several students and an oncoming maintenance truck.

  Turning right onto Neyland Drive, we paralleled the river, driving downstream. The morning was sunny and unseasonably warm for mid-March—at least, what used to pass for unseasonably warm—and there were already a fair number of cyclists and runners on the greenway that bordered Neyland. The School of Agriculture’s trial gardens—a couple of carefully landscaped acres radiating from a large circular arbor—were already ablaze with daffodils, forsythia, and tulips. I slowed to admire the view, which was just as well, because a hundred yards ahead, a truck hauling a long horse trailer was making a leisurely right turn into the entrance of the veterinary school.

  “Hey, speaking of horses, what ever happened to Mike Henderson?” asked Miranda. “He was doing research on the effects of fire on bone a while back. Worked at the vet school part-time, and used to burn horse and cow bones to study the fracture patterns, didn’t he? Laying the groundwork for a big project with human bone.”

  “Well, that was his plan,” I said. “His M.A. thesis had some problems. He burned a lot of bones, and he got some nice pictures showing the difference between how dry bone and green bone fracture in a fire. But I’m not sure he added much in the way of interpretation or analysis.”

  “I saw some of those pictures at a poster session at the forensic conference a year or two ago,” she said. “Really interesting. The dry bones he burned fractured in a sort of rectilinear pattern, like logs in a campfire. But the green bones fractured in a sort of spiraling pattern, right?” I nodded. “How come?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “Nobody is. You wanna know my personal theory?”

  “Oh yes, please, Doctor,” Miranda whispered huskily. “I love it when you share your personal theories with me.” I’d laid myself wide open to that brickbat of sarcasm.

  “Okay, smart-ass, I think it has to do with the collagen,” I said. “There’s still a lot of collagen in fresh bone. I don’t think anybody’s done research that supports this yet, but my theory is, the collagen matrix has a little twist to it. That would make the bone stronger. Sort of like those twisted pine trees you see growing on windy cliff-tops, you know? The spiral grain makes them a lot tougher than the tall, straight trees that grow where the wind doesn’t blow so hard.”

  “Nature’s a pretty good structural engineer,” she agreed.

  I turned onto the entrance ramp that would carry us up to Alcoa Highway, which spanned the river and led to the medical complex and the Body Farm. “It’s not too late to change your dissertation topic,” I said. “I bet if you took comparative X-rays and MRIs of bones when they were fresh and then after they’d dried, you could shed some light on the structure of the collagen.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Just flush all my data on osteoporosis down the toilet and start over.” I
nodded. “So when I hit the seven-year mark as a graduate student, can you get me tenure?”

  “If it means I get to keep you as a colleague,” I said.

  “Ha,” she said. “You’d feel threatened by me if I were a colleague.”

  “Ha,” I said. “I feel threatened by you already.” I laughed. “I guess that means I’m either brave or foolish.”

  “Guess so,” she said. She didn’t indicate which one her money was on.

  As we crossed the bridge over the river, I noticed the water level had risen during the night. Every winter, the Tennessee Valley Authority lowers the levels in its chain of reservoirs so that there’s room to accommodate plenty of runoff during the rainy season. By mid-March, though, the rains tend to taper off, so TVA begins refilling the pools to their normal summertime highs. Some of the lakes up in the mountains—Norris and Fontana, especially—dropped ten or twenty feet in the winter, exposing high layers of red clay banks ringing the green waters. Fort Loudoun, though—as a mainline reservoir that had to be kept open to barge traffic—only dropped about three feet. It was enough to expose shoreline for arrowhead-hunters, but not enough to strand boats on the mud like beached whales.

  The redbuds and dogwoods along Alcoa Highway were starting to bloom. Normally the redbuds came first, then—just as they were winding down—the dogwoods burst out. Some years, though, when the botanical planets aligned in some magical way, the two species bloomed in unison, and this was shaping up as one of those glorious years. Maybe it was just because I was finally getting clear of my two-year grieving spell over Kathleen’s death, or maybe because I felt the stirrings of desire for Jess—encouraged by what I took to be flirting on her part—but this spring seemed to reek of wanton, shameless fertility. The air was almost indecent with the scent of blossoms and pollen. It was the sort of spring that had inspired pagan festivals in other cultures, other centuries.