Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella

by Jefferson Bass

  Brockton

  PEERING OUT THE GRIMY windows of my office on the second floor of Stadium Hall, gazing through the thicket of steel girders and concrete ramps, I glimpsed the emerald waters of the Tennessee River spooling past downtown Knoxville and the university. Most of the hundred-yard distance between the stadium and the river was covered in asphalt—parking lots and the four lanes of Neyland Drive—and the pavement shimmered in the late-summer afternoon, creating the illusion that the river itself might begin to boil at any moment. The Anthropology Annex, where I needed to go, was a small, freestanding building fifty sweltering yards away.

  When I opened the door and stepped outside, exchanging the stadium’s cool, dark corridors for the sun-soaked outdoors, I felt as if I’d entered a blast furnace. Behind me, bricks radiated the pent-up heat like an oven; ahead, the asphalt lay like a sea of lava, and as I swam across through the heat and humidity, my clothes grew wet with sweat, my shirt plastering itself to my back.

  A half-dozen rusting air conditioners jutted from the corrugated metal walls of the Annex, their compressors chugging full blast—full steam, I caught myself thinking ironically as I tugged open the balky steel door and stepped inside. The air conditioners did manage to lower the humidity a few notches, but they hadn’t made much headway against the heat, and none at all against the smell.

  The Anthropology Department’s main quarters—built by bricking in the wedge of space beneath Neyland Stadium’s grandstands, decades before—weren’t exactly prime real estate; far from it. But Stadium Hall was palatial compared with the Annex. In winter the Annex was an icebox, rattling in the wind; in summer, it was a solar oven, its metal panels creaking and popping in the heat. And no matter the season, it stank inside, for the Annex was where we did the dirty work of processing human remains: simmering and scrubbing; separating flesh from bone; removing life’s lingering vestiges.

  One corner of the processing room was taken up by an industrial-sized sink, which was flanked on one side by an immense steam-jacketed kettle—a cauldron big enough to simmer an entire skeleton—and on the other by a wide counter that ran the length of the wall. The counter was covered with blue surgical pads to absorb moisture from damp, freshly scrubbed bones, and when I entered, Tyler was laying out the last of the bones we’d brought back from the strip mine, neatly arranging them in anatomical order.

  Normally I began my forensic examinations at the skull, but in this case—a case where the questions of age and sex seemed to converge, to entwine, in a pivotal way—I found my eyes drawn first to the pelvis, which confirmed what I’d thought in the field: female, beyond a doubt. The hip bones flared widely, giving them the distinctive shape that always reminded me of elephant ears; the sciatic notches—openings at the base of the sit bones where major nerves emerged from the lower spine—were broad, unlike the narrow notch of a male pelvis; and the pubic bone curved outward and down to create a concavity in her belly and birth canal, making room for babies that this particular female would never have.

  But if her pelvis said “woman,” her mouth whispered a different, sadder word to me: “child.” If she had lived to be my age, the ripe old age of thirty-seven, her maxillary sutures—the seams in the roof of her mouth—would have begun smoothing out and filling in, eventually becoming nearly invisible. But the maxillary sutures in the skull I cradled upside down in my hand were rough and bumpy, the bones barely beginning to fuse. In fact, if I hadn’t known from years of study that the bones were slowly joining, I might have concluded that something had struck the hard palate at its center, creating a cruciform pattern of cracks. But it was her life, not her palate, that had shattered.

  Tyler studied my face as I studied the dead girl’s skull. “How old you think she is?”

  “Not old enough,” I said. “Fourteen; fifteen, tops. But maybe only twelve or thirteen.”

  He frowned and shook his head—not in disagreement, but in dismay. “That’s what I figured, too, but I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

  “Any skeletal trauma?”

  “A couple healed fractures in the arms,” he said. “One in the left humerus, the other in the right radius, about three inches above the wrist. But nothing perimortem. Nothing I could see, anyhow. Maybe you’ll spot something I’ve missed.”

  I pored over every bone twice—with my eyes and with my fingertips—in search of a fresh, unhealed fracture, or the ragged nick of a knife blade, or a telltale smear of lead from a passing bullet—but there was nothing to be found. Finally, circling back to the skull once more, I shone a flashlight through the foramen magnum and peered inside the cranial vault, in case there was a fracture on the inner surface that might have ruptured one of the meningeal arteries, the arteries carrying blood to the brain. “I’m not seeing anything, either,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t killed. Just means that any injuries she had were soft-tissue trauma.” I took a final look into the cranial vault. “Oh, hey, did you find a wasp nest in here?”

  He reached up and plucked a small gray object from the narrow shelf above the counter, then dropped it into my palm. A dozen or so hollow, hexagonal cells made of dry, papery pulp, it weighed almost nothing. “It’s a little crunched on the sides, from the forceps,” he said. “Getting it out through the foramen magnum was like trying to pull a ship out of a bottle.”

  “Any more wasps on board?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, I think ol’ Bubba Ray Peckerwood done got ’em all.”

  “Careful,” I cautioned. “If you slip up and call him Peckerwood to his face, Special Agent Meffert might just feel obliged to open up a can of whup-ass on you.”

  “Ha—let him try,” said Tyler. “I’ll lay some yoga on him. He’ll never even know what hit him.”

  “What,” I scoffed, “you’re gonna meditate him into submission?” Tyler was a recent and enthusiastic convert to yoga, for reasons I didn’t fully grasp. “Weren’t you an athlete—a real athlete—once upon a time? Weight lifting or shot putting or some such? One of those manly sports dominated by hulking women from East Germany?”

  “Hammer throw,” he said. “The ultimate test of strength and coordination. But by the way, there is no East Germany. The wall came down three years ago, in ’89, remember? ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall?’ Ronald Reagan’s finest moment. You’re showing your age, Dr. B.”

  Summoning up my reediest old-man voice, I piped, “Back when I was a boy . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Save it for the undergrads, Gramps.”

  Was he just kidding, or was there a slight edge in his voice? Worse, was there a kernel of truth in his jab? Was I fossilizing even before I turned forty?

  Time was much on my mind these days. Time since death was foremost in my thoughts. But time before death—my time; my sense of urgency about creating a research program to fill the gaps in my knowledge—that, too, was tugging at the sleeve of my mind.

  “Hang on a second, Doc, I’m fixin’ to put you on speakerphone,” drawled Sheriff Cotterell. I had swum back across the sweltering sea of asphalt to the stadium just in time to catch the call. “Bubba Hardknot’s a-settin’ right here with me, and I know he’ll want to hear whatever you got to say.”

  I heard a click, then a hollow, echoing sound, as if the phone had been lowered down a well. “Hey, Doc,” Meffert’s voice boomed, from deep in the depths. “Whatcha got for us?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “I’ll send you both a written report in the next couple days, but here’s the bottom line. No skeletal trauma, so the bones can’t tell us how she died. All they can tell us is a little about who she was. White female; stature between five foot one and five foot three; age thirteen to fifteen. I estimated the age by looking at the pelvis, the teeth, the epiphyses of the long bones and clavicles, the—“

  “Excuse me, Doc,” Meffert interrupted, “the what-ih-sees?”

  “Epi
physes,” I repeated. “The ends of the bones. In subadults—children and adolescents—the ends of the long bones haven’t yet fused to the shafts; they’re connected by cartilage, at what’s called the growth plates. That’s how the arms and legs can grow so much when kids hit puberty. Toward the end of puberty, the epiphyses fuse, and the long bones don’t get any longer; you don’t get any taller. This girl’s epiphyses weren’t fully fused yet, so she hadn’t quite finished growing. She had her second molars—her twelve-year molars—so she was probably at least that old. And her pelvic structure had started getting wider, so we know she’d entered puberty. But her hips were still getting wider, so she wasn’t out of it yet.”

  “How can you tell that?” asked Cotterell.

  “Good question, Sheriff. There’s actually an epiphysis on the outer edge of each hip bone, too—it’s called the iliac crest, and all through puberty, the iliac crest is connected to the ilium—the wide bone of the hip—by cartilage. It’s another growth plate. Somewhere around age sixteen or eighteen, the iliac crest fuses. After that, the hips don’t get any wider.”

  I heard a rumbling growl, which even over the speakerphone I recognized as Sheriff Cotterell’s laugh. “Doc,” he chuckled, “you ain’t never seen my wife.”

  “Let me rephrase that,” I said. “After that, the bones of the hips don’t get any wider.”

  “What else you got?” said Meffert. “You hear back from your buddy in Forestry?”

  “I did. That little black locust seedling was two years old. So she’s been dead at least that long.”

  “And no more’n how long?” asked the sheriff.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Nothing in the bones to tell us. When did that wildcat mine shut down?”

  “Twenty-two years ago,” said Meffert, “in 1970.”

  “Then she died somewhere between two years ago and twenty-two years ago,” I said.

  “Twenty years? That’s as close as we can nail it?” The frustration in the sheriff’s voice was crystal clear, even though he was forty miles away.

  “I’m afraid so, Sheriff. I wish I had more for you, but I don’t. We need better tools and techniques for determining time since death.”

  “Got that right,” he said. I was glad he and Meffert weren’t there to see my face redden once more.

  Satterfield

  HE PICKED UP THE sheaf of pages and tamped their bottom edges on the kitchen table to align them, then turned the stack sideways and repeated the maneuver to even up the sides. Once the sheets were in perfect alignment, he inserted them into the three-hole punch and swung the lever down slowly. Closing his eyes to concentrate, he savored the slight variations in resistance as the steel posts punched through the five single-spaced pages, sheet by sheet by sheet.

  A loose-leaf binder, already half filled, lay open on the table in front of Satterfield. Popping open the gleaming chrome rings, he threaded the freshly punched pages onto the stack, then clicked the rings shut and began rereading the text, twirling a pink Hi-Liter with the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his left hand as he read. When he came to the description of the cut marks, he uncapped the marker and highlighted the passage: “The bones were severed with a curved tool of unknown type, the cutting edge having a curved shape approximated by the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.”

  A yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil lay beside the binder. Setting down the marker, Satterfield picked up the pencil and drew a curved line on the pad, then—doubting the accuracy of the drawing—he pushed back from the table and went to one of the kitchen drawers. Rummaging in the drawer, he found a metal tape measure and extended the tape to 3.5 inches. Next he opened the cabinet containing glassware and held the tape across the mouths of various vessels until he found one—a coffee mug—whose diameter fit the description in the forensic report. Setting the mug on the legal pad, he ran the mechanical pencil one-third of the way around the base, then set the mug aside and inspected the neat arc he had traced. The shape puzzled him. Trying to imagine the head of an ax or a hatchet behind the curve he’d traced, he frowned; the arc was too steep to fit either of those tools. Besides, he suspected that both of those implements—certainly a hatchet—lacked the weight required to cut cleanly through bone in a single stroke. Rereading the highlighted passage, he concluded that he’d interpreted the text correctly and had drawn the curve accurately. That meant he simply needed to do more research. Tearing the perforated page from the yellow pad, he folded and tucked it into his pocket. Then, closing the binder, he returned it to its hiding place—the cold-air return of the ventilation ductwork—along with the box of stolen files, the mother lode of material he’d begun to build his plans around. Fitting the slotted grille neatly over the mouth of the duct, he flipped the latches to lock it into place.

  He checked his watch. Home Depot would be closing in an hour, but Satterfield figured an hour was plenty of time. It wouldn’t take him long to find just the right tool for the job, if Home Depot had it. Satterfield was a man who believed in having the right tool for the job, whether the job was cutting up a corpse or eviscerating an adversary.

  Frowning, he hung the ax back on its pegs—the blade was too tall, the arc of the edge too shallow—and continued down the aisle. Next he picked up a maul, a wood-splitting tool whose wedge-shaped head was like a cross between an ax and a sledgehammer. The tool’s heft was good, promising to strike with tremendous force, but again, the cutting edge lacked the curvature he was seeking. Satterfield took the sketch from his pocket and compared it with the edge of the maul. Could I file it down? he wondered. Reshape it? Probably not, he decided. It’d take forever, even with a bench grinder. He was mildly disappointed, but he was also intrigued; the puzzle—the quest—was challenging and invigorating, and solving it would be hugely satisfying: it would redouble his adversary’s frustration, and underscore Satterfield’s superior intellect.

  “Help you, hon?” The question caught Satterfield by surprise. He looked over his shoulder at the questioner, a middle-aged woman in an orange Home Depot apron. Stoop-shouldered and beaten-down looking, she fell somewhere on the spectrum between mousy and hard-bitten. She clearly had never been pretty, and now her face was drooping and folding in on itself, as if she were already losing teeth. He caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke coming from her, which explained her leathery skin and ashen hue. Satterfield found her not merely unappealing but actively repellent, not that he was shopping for anything but a tool here anyhow.

  “No thanks. Just looking.” He turned back toward the display, folding the sketch and replacing it in his pocket, then drifted back toward the axes.

  “Gotcha some trees need cuttin’?” she persisted. Christ, he thought, is she working on commission? Trying for Employee of the Month? “We got chain saws, too, next aisle over.”

  “No trees,” he said flatly. He glanced over his shoulder again—she was still there—and then he slowly turned to face her. “No trees,” he repeated, cocking his head slightly, as if something about the word itself suddenly struck him. With a slight smile he added, “Just . . . limbs.”

  “Oh, you’re prunin’. How thick are the limbs?”

  “Not very,” he said. His eyes drifted from her face to her shoulder and then down her arm, and he reached out and took hold of her left wrist, encircling it completely with his thumb and middle finger. Startled, she yanked her arm, but he had a firm grip. She opened her mouth to protest—maybe even to yell—but he bore down hard, pressing his thumb into the bony side of her wrist, and all she could do was gasp now, her eyes darting in panic, the way the rabbit’s had. “Not thick at all,” he said, smiling, raising her arm for a closer look. “Probably about like this. Maybe not quite so skinny.” He turned her forearm this way and that, examining it from various angles, still bearing down on the bone. Finally he let off, though her wrist remained firmly in his grip. “What do you recommend?”

&nb
sp; She cleared her throat. “Well, if you’re just cutting branches,” she said, her voice strained and trembling, “a lopper might be what you want.” She pointed her free hand toward the wall at the end of the aisle. Satterfield noticed that the hand was quaking; he liked that. He raised his eyes to study her face—her eyes downcast, her posture cringing, like a chained dog about to be beaten—and then he glanced in the direction she was pointing. When he saw the assortment of long-handled pruning tools there, he released her and walked wordlessly to the wall. The woman scuttled away, rubbing her wrist, keeping a wary watch over her shoulder.

  Satterfield took one of the tools from the wall and spread the handles, causing the metal jaws to gape; then, as he squeezed the handles, the jaws clamped shut. The cutting blade looked powerful and wickedly sharp, but the edge was all wrong—straight as a ruler—and he frowned and hung the tool back on the wall. He was turning to go when he noticed that the there was more than one type of lopper. The one he’d inspected and rejected was an “anvil lopper,” according to the shelf tag. Satterfield puzzled over the name for moment, then noticed that the cutting blade—the straight, sharp-edged blade that wouldn’t serve his purpose—closed against a lower jaw that was broad and flat, like a small steel chopping block. Like a little anvil, he realized. Hanging beside the anvil lopper, though, was another lopper—with a different name, a different design, and a different cutting action. This one was a “bypass lopper,” and it cut scissor fashion—the edges of the two blades sliding past one another as the handles were squeezed together. The blades weren’t straight, like scissor blades, he noticed, with growing excitement. The tool’s lower jaw was blunt edged and concave, to encircle and support a branch from beneath as the upper jaw—the sharp-edged, steeply curved, convex upper jaw—sliced into the limb from above.

  The bypass lopper came in three sizes. The biggest had handles as long as Satterfield’s arm; in addition, the jaws incorporated a cam to compound the handles’ leverage, multiply their force. Satterfield took the tool down from its pegs and opened and closed the handles a few times. He nodded approvingly at the metallic friction he felt; at the precision and power with which the edges slid past one another.