The Body Farm ks-5

by Patricia Cornwell

  "She's already drawn me into it."

  "She'll draw you in deeper."

  "I hope she does." I felt the rage again. He whispered, "I want to see you."

  "You will," I said.

  "Soon."

  18

  The University of Tennessee's Decay Research Facility was simply known as The Body Farm, and had gone by that name for as long as I could remember. People like me intended no irreverence when we called it that, for no one respects the dead more than those of us who work with them and hear their silent stories. The purpose is to help the living.

  That was the point when The Body Farm came into being more than twenty years before, when scientists got determined to learn more about time of death. On any given day its several wooded acres held dozens of bodies in varying stages of decomposition. Research projects had brought me here periodically over the years, and though I would never be perfect in determining time of death, I had gotten better.

  The Farm was owned and run by the university's Anthropology Department, headed by Dr. Lyall Shade and oddly located in the basement of the football stadium. At 8:15, Katz and I went downstairs, passing the zoo archaeology mollusk and neotropical primates labs, and the tamarin and mar muses collection and strange projects named with roman numerals. Many of the doors were plastered with Far Side cartoons and pithy quotations that made me smile. We found Dr. Shade at his desk looking over fragments of charred human bone.

  "Good morning," I said.

  "Good morning, Kay," he said with a distracted smile. Dr. Shade was well served by his name for more reasons than the apparent ironical one. It was true he communed with the ghosts of people past through their flesh and bones and what they revealed as they lay for months on the ground. But he was unassuming and introverted, a very gentle spirit much older than his sixty years. His hair was short and gray, his face pleasant and preoccupied. Tall, he was hard bodied and weathered like a farmer, which was yet another irony, for Farmer Shade was one of his nicknames. His mother lived in a nursing home and made skull rings for him from fabric remnants.

  The ones he had sent to me looked like calico doughnuts, but they functioned very well when I was working with a skull, which is unwieldy and tends to roll no matter whose brain it once held.

  "What have we got here?" I moved closer to bits of bone reminiscent of burned wood chips.

  "A murdered woman. Her husband tried to burn her after he killed her, and did amazingly well. Better than any crematorium, really. But it was rather stupid. He built the fire in his own backyard."

  "Yes, I would say that was rather stupid. But then so are rapists who drop their wallets as they leave the scene."

  "I had a case like that once," said Katz.

  "Got a fingerprint from her car and was so proud until I was told the guy left his wallet in the backseat. The print wasn't needed much after that."

  "How's your contraption doing?" Dr. Shade asked Katz.

  "I won't get rich from it."

  "He got a great latent from a pair of panties," I said.

  "He was a latent, all right. Any man who'd dress like that." Katz smiled. He could be corny now and then.

  "Your experiment's ready, and I'm eager to take a look." Shade got up from his chair.

  "You haven't looked yet?" I asked.

  "No, not today. We wanted you here for the final unveiling."

  "Of course, you always do that," I said.

  "And I always will unless you don't want to be present. Some people don't."

  "I will always want to be present. And if I don't, I think I should change careers," I said.

  "The weather really cooperated," Katz added.

  "It was perfect." Dr. Shade was pleased to announce.

  "It was exactly what it must have been during the interval between when the girl vanished and her body was found. And we got lucky with the bodies because I needed two and thought that was never going to happen at the last minute. You know how it goes. "

  I did.

  "Sometimes we get more than we can handle. Then we don't get any," Dr. Shade went on.

  "The two we got are a sad story," Katz said, and we were going up the stairs now.

  "They're all a sad story," I said.

  "So true. So true. He had cancer and called to see if he could donate his body to science. We said yes, so he filled out the paperwork. Then he went into the woods and shot himself in the head. The next morning, his wife, who wasn't well, either, took a bottle of Nembutal."

  "And they're the ones?" My heart seemed to lose its rhythm for a moment the way it often did when I heard stories like this.

  "It happened right after you told me what you wanted to do," Dr. Shade said.

  "It was interesting timing, because I had no fresh bodies. And then the poor man calls. Well. The two of them have done some real good."

  "Yes, they have." I wished I could somehow thank those poor sick people who had wanted to die because life was leaving in a way that was unbearably painful.

  Outside we climbed into the big white truck with university seals and camper shell that Katz and Dr. Shade used to pick up donated or unclaimed bodies and bring them to where we were about to go. It was a clear, crisp morning, and had Calhoun's not taught me a lesson about the fierce loyalty of football fans, I would have called the sky Carolina blue.

  Foothills rolled into the distant Smoky Mountains, trees around us blazed, and I thought of the shacks I had seen on that unpaved road near the Montreal gate. I thought of Deborah with her crossed eyes. I thought of Creed. At moments I could be overwhelmed by a world that was both so splendid and so horrible. Creed Lindsey would go to prison if I did not stop it from happening soon. I was afraid Marino would die, and I did not want my last vision of him to be like the one of Ferguson.

  We chatted as we drove and soon passed farms for the veterinary school, and corn and wheat fields used for agricultural research. I wondered about Lucy at Edgehill and was afraid for her, too. I seemed to be afraid for anyone I loved. Yet I was so reserved, so logical. Perhaps my greatest shame was that I could not show what I should, and I worried no one would ever know how much I cared. Crows picked at the roadside, and sunlight breaking through the windshield made me blind.

  "What did you think of the photographs I sent?" I asked.

  "I've got them with me," said Dr. Shade.

  "We put a number of things under his body to see what would happen."

  "Nails and an iron drain," said Katz.

  "A bottle cap. Coins and other metal things."

  "Why metal?"

  "I'm pretty sure of that."

  "Did you have an opinion before your experiments?"

  "Yes," said Dr. Shade.

  "She lay on something that began to oxidize. Her body did. After she was dead. "

  "Like what? What could have made that mark?"

  "I really don't know. We'll know a lot more in a few minutes. But the discoloration that caused the strange mark on the little girl's buttock is from something oxidizing as she lay on top of it. That's what I think."

  "I hope the press isn't here," said Katz.

  "I have a real hard time with that. Especially this time of year."

  "Because of Halloween," I said.

  "You can imagine. I've had them hung up in the razor wire before and end up in the hospital. Last time it was law school students." We pulled into a parking lot that in warm months could be quite unpleasant for hospital employees assigned there. A tall unpainted wooden fence topped with coiled razor wire began where pavement ended, and beyond was The Farm.

  A trace of a foul odor seemed to darken the sun as we got out, and no matter how often I had smelled that smell, I never really got used to it. I had learned to block it without ignoring it, and I never diminished it with cigars, perfume, or Vicks. Odors were as much a part of the language of the dead as scars and tattoos were.

  "How many residents today?" I asked as Dr. Shade dialed the combination of a large padlock securing the gate.
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  "Forty-four," he said.

  "They've all been here for a while, except for yours," Katz added.

  "We've had the two of them exactly six days."

  I followed the men inside their bizarre but necessary kingdom. The smell was not too bad because the air was refrigerator cold and most of the clients had been here long enough to have gone through their worst stages. Even so, the sights were abnormal enough that they always gave me pause. I saw a parked body sled, a gurney, and piles of red clay, and there were plastic-lined pits where bodies tethered to cinder blocks were submerged in water. Old rusting cars held foul surprises in their trunks or behind the wheel. A white Cadillac, for example, was being driven by a man's bare bones.

  Of course, there were plenty of people on the ground, and they blended so well with their surroundings that I might have missed some of them were it not for a gold tooth glinting or mandibles gaping. Bones looked like sticks and stones, and words would never hurt anyone here again except for amputated limbs, whose donors, I hoped, were still among the living.

  A skull grinned at me from beneath a mulberry tree, and the bullet hole between its orbits looked like a third eye. I saw a perfect case of pink teeth (probably caused by hemolysis, and still argued about at almost every forensic meeting). Walnuts were all around, but I would not have eaten one of them because death saturated the soil and body fluids streaked the hills. Death was in the water and the wind, and rose to the clouds. It rained death on the Farm, and the insects and animals were fed up with it. They did not always finish what they started, because the supply was too vast.

  What Katz and Dr. Shade had done for me was to create two scenes. One was to simulate a body in a basement by monitoring the postmortem changes that take place in dark, refrigerated conditions. The other was to place a body outside in similar conditions for the same length of time.

  The basement scene had been staged in the only building on the Farm, which was nothing more than a cinder-block shed. Our helper, the husband with cancer, had been placed on a cement slab inside, and a plyboard box had been built around him to protect him from predators and changes in the weather. Photographs had been taken daily, and Dr. Shade was showing them to me now. The first few days revealed virtually no change to the body. Then I began to note that the eyes and fingers were drying.

  "Are you ready to do this?" Dr. Shade asked.

  I returned the photographs to their envelope. "Let's take a look."

  They lifted off the crate, and I squatted near the body to study it carefully. The husband was a small, thin man who had died with white stubble on his chin and a perfect Popeye tattoo of an anchor on an arm. After six days in his plyboard crypt, his eyes were sunken, his skin doughy, and there was discoloration of his left lower quadrant.

  His wife, on the other hand, had not fared nearly so well, even though the weather conditions outside the hut were very similar to those inside. But it had rained once or twice, my colleagues said. At times she had been in the sun, and buzzard feathers nearby helped explain some of the damage I saw. The discoloration of her body was much more marked, the skin slipping badly and not the least bit doughy.

  I silently observed her for a while in a wooded area not far from the shed, where she lay on her back, naked, on leaves from surrounding locust, hickory, and ironwood trees. She looked older than her husband and was so stooped and wizened by age that her body had reverted to a childlike androgynous state. Her nails were painted pink, and she had dentures and pierced ears.

  "We've got him turned over if you want to look," Katz called out.

  I went back to the shed and squatted by the husband again while Dr. Shade directed a flashlight at the marks on the back. The pattern left by an iron drain was easy to recognize, but those left by nails were straight red streaks that looked more like burns. It was the marks left by coins that fascinated us the most, especially one left by a quarter. Upon close scrutiny, I could barely make out the partial outline of an eagle left on the man's skin, and I got out Emily's photographs and made comparisons.

  "What I've figured out," Dr. Shade said, "is the impurities in the metal cause the coin to oxidize unevenly while the body's on top of it. So you get blank spots, an irregular imprint, very much like a shoe print, which usually isn't complete, either, unless the weight is distributed uniformly and you're standing on a perfectly flat surface."

  "Have they done image enhancement with the Steiner photographs?" Katz asked.

  "The FBI labs are working on it," I said.

  "Well, they can really be slow," Katz said.

  "They're so backed up, and it just gets worse all the time because there are so many more cases."

  "And you know how it goes with budgets."

  "Ours is already bare bones."

  "Thomas, Thomas, that's a terrible pun."

  In fact, I had personally paid for the plyboard in this experiment. I had offered to furnish an air conditioner, too, but because of the weather, that had not been needed.

  "It's hard as hell to get politicians excited about what we do out here. Or about what you do, Kay."

  "The problem is, the dead don't vote," I said.

  "I've heard of cases where they did." We drove back along Neyland Drive, and I followed the river with my eyes. At a bend in it I could see the top of the Farm's back fence peeking above trees, and I thought of the River Styx. I thought of crossing the water and ending up in that place as the husband and wife from our work had done. I thanked them in my mind, for the dead were silent armies I mustered to save us all.

  "Too bad you couldn't have gotten here earlier," said Katz, who was always so kind.

  "You missed quite a game yesterday," Dr. Shade added.

  "I feel like I saw it," I said.

  19

  I did not follow Wesley's advice but returned to my same room at the Hyatt. I did not want to spend the rest of the day moving into someplace new when I had many calls to make and a plane to catch.

  But I was very alert as I walked through the lobby and got on the elevator. I looked at every woman, and then remembered I should pay attention to men, too, for Denesa Steiner was very clever. She had spent most of her life in deceptions and incredible schemes, and I knew how intelligent evil could be.

  I saw no one who caught my eye as I walked briskly to my room. But I got my revolver out of the briefcase I had checked in baggage. I had it next to me on the bed as I got on the phone. First, I called Green Top, and Jon, who answered, was very nice. He had waited on me many times, and I did not hesitate to ask pointed questions about my niece.

  "I can't tell you how sorry I am," he said again.

  "I just couldn't believe it when I read the papers."

  "She is doing well," I said.

  "Her guardian angel was with her that night."

  "She's a special young lady. You must be proud of her." It occurred to me that I was no longer sure, and the thought made me feel terrible.

  "Jon, I need to know several important details. Were you working when she came in that night and bought the Sig?"

  "Sure. I'm the one who sold it to her."

  "Did she get anything else?"

  "An extra magazine, several boxes of hollow points. Uhhhh. I think they were Federal Hydra-Shok. Yup, pretty sure of that. Let's see. I also sold her an Uncle Mike's paddle holster, and the same ankle holster I sold to you last spring. A top-of-the-line Bianchi in leather."

  "How did she pay?"

  "Cash, and that surprised me a little, to be honest. Her bill was pretty high, as you might imagine." Lucy had been good about saving money over the years, and I had given her a substantial check when she turned twenty-one. But she had charge cards, so I assumed she didn't use them because she didn't want a record of her purchase, and that didn't necessarily surprise me. She was afraid and very paranoid, as are most people who have been intensely exposed to law enforcement. For people like us, everybody is a suspect. We tend to overreact, look over our shoulders, and cover our tracks when we f
eel the slightest bit threatened.

  "Did Lucy have an appointment with you or did she just stop in?" I asked.

  "She had called first and said exactly when she would be here. In fact, she even called again to confirm."

  "Did she talk to you both times?"

  "No, just the first time. The second time Rick answered the phone."

  "Can you tell me exactly what she said to you when she called the first time?"

  "Not much. She said she'd been talking to Captain Marino, who had recommended the Sig P230 and he had also recommended that she deal with me. As you may know, the captain and I fish together. Anyway, she asked if I would still be here around eight p.m. on Wednesday."

  "Do you remember what day she called?"

  "Well, it was just a day or two before she wanted to come in. I think it was the Monday before. And by the way, I asked her early on if she was twenty-one."

  "Did she tell you she is my niece?"

  "Yes, she did, and she sure reminded me a lot of you-even your voices sound alike. You both have sort of deep, quiet voices. But she really was very impressive on the phone. Extremely intelligent and polite. She seemed familiar with guns and clearly had done a fair amount of shooting. In fact, she told me that the captain's given her lessons. "

  I was relieved Lucy had identified herself as my niece. It told me she wasn't terribly concerned about my finding out she had purchased a gun. I supposed Marino eventually would have told me, too.

  I was sad only because she had not talked to me first.

  "Jon," I went on, "you said she called a second time. Can you tell me about that? First of all, when was it?"

  "That same Monday. Maybe a couple hours later."

  "And she talked to Rick?"

  "Very briefly. I remember I was waiting on a customer and Rick had answered the phone. He said it was Scarpetta and she couldn't remember when she told me we would meet. I said Wednesday at eight, which he relayed to her. And that was the end of it."

  "Excuse me," I said.

  "She said what?"