Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  I glanced up at Miranda. Tears were running down her cheeks and soaking her mask. I touched her arm. “Maybe you should take a break,” I suggested. She jerked away, shaking her head, and I saw rage flashing through the tears. It was not anger at me, I realized, but at whoever had snuffed out these two lives. “Thanks, I need the help. Let’s put these in anatomical order beside the mother’s body, head down.” She nodded, then grimly set about reassembling the tiny skeleton as I handed her the bits of bone.

  Six hours after we began, we finished. The waxy-looking mummy we’d brought in was now a skeleton, still slightly greasy and smelly, but merely a fading echo of a strong young woman. Beside her was something even fainter: the fading whisper of a baby who never drew breath.

  Our knowledge, like the specimens on our counter, was skeletal: we knew this was a young white female of unusual height. We knew that she was pregnant, and that halfway through her pregnancy, possibly around the time she began to show, she’d been murdered—strangled, with no other signs of trauma, at least nothing visible so far. We still didn’t know her name, but the examination had told us other things that would help us seek her name. The echoes and whispers from these bones might help us understand why she’d been killed…and if we listened carefully enough, they might even suggest whose hands had encircled her throat and squeezed without mercy, leaving a record of violence for us to find.

  I looked at Miranda. Her face was drawn; her eyes, which had danced and shone when she’d delivered the X-rays triumphantly, now looked drained and bleak.

  “I know,” I said, “this one’s tough.”

  She nodded.

  “And Miranda?” I waited until her eyes met mine. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for a while.”

  CHAPTER 8

  ART BOHANAN WAS GLUED to his microscope. Literally, and unhappily.

  The fingerprint lab was in the basement of the Knoxville Police Department—a grim beige fortress in a grim black section of the city, surrounded by acres of asphalt and low-income housing projects. The uniformed officer on guard at the front had buzzed me into the elevator and pointed toward the floor. “He’s down there. Like always.”

  The acrid scent of superglue bit my nostrils as I entered the lab in the basement. Art looked up as I walked in. “Hey, you wanna give me a hand here? Squirt some of that acetone on my fingers, would you?” His left thumb and index finger were fastened to the focus knob of a stereo microscope; his right hand gripped the light source. An open tube of superglue lay on the counter.

  “So you’re really stuck?”

  “Last ten times I checked. You wanna tug for yourself, or you gonna help?”

  “Hold on—oh, wait, that’s what you’re doing already,” I teased. “When’s the last time you got pantsed? You got a camera somewhere?”

  “Great, now I’m supposed to help you humiliate me even further? Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Come on, Bill, this light’s hot. Durn it, I’m not kidding.”

  I picked up a small can of acetone and dribbled a bit over the edges of Art’s fingers, starting with the ones gripping the metal housing of the light source. “So what’s the flash point of acetone? And what’s the temp of that light?” As the solvent soaked in, Art’s taut skin slowly peeled free. The fingers were an angry red. He rubbed them with a rag, then some hand lotion.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I owe you.” I wasn’t sure whether he was thanking me for setting him free or threatening me for dragging my feet about it. Both, knowing Art. I made a mental note to sniff my steering wheel in future before grabbing hold of it.

  “Next time you really oughta read the label. That stuff sticks to your fingers.”

  “Ha-ha. Very funny.”

  If anybody knew about superglue and fingers, it was Art. Not only was he KPD’s senior criminalist, he was one of the nation’s leading fingerprint experts. In crime labs all over the country, technicians were using superglue-fuming gizmos to coat objects with sticky fumes that could pick up latent prints. And the gizmos they were using had been designed and patented by my buddy Art. Even the FBI had taken a shine to Art’s superglue gizmo, which in forensics is like Michael Jordan taking a shine to your basketball shoe.

  Spread on the counter beside the scope was a batch of photos. Most looked to be crime scene photos showing the interior of a car, a battered blue Impala. One, though, was a school portrait of a girl, maybe eight years old. Little girl, big smile. I recognized the photo: I’d seen it in the paper half a dozen times in the past two weeks, which is how long Stacy Beaman had been missing. She was last seen getting into a rusty blue car. The one in the photos belonged to a registered sex offender who’d been seen near the girl’s school three times in the days before her disappearance.

  I looked at Art’s scope. There was a car window crank clamped to the specimen stage. It didn’t take a forensic genius to figure out that the crank had come from the passenger door of that rusted Impala.

  “You getting anything?”

  “Hell, no. Not even a partial. Not from her, anyhow. His, they’re all over the place. Not surprising—it’s his car—but it’s killing me that we missed hers.”

  “Missed ’em? Sounds like you think they’re in there somewhere.”

  “Were in there; aren’t anymore. Hell, she was in there—three witnesses saw her. We just didn’t move fast enough. By the time we got the warrant and got the car, the prints were gone. Vanished into thin air.”

  He wasn’t speaking figuratively. It was a phenomenon he had told me about before, one that had baffled investigators in child abductions for many years: why were children’s fingerprints so elusive, so fleeting? It had baffled Art, too, but the second or third time he found himself coming up empty-handed, he had vowed to figure it out. He’d enlisted the brain trust over at Oak Ridge National Lab—he pulled together a team of organic and analytical chemists—plus some parents and kids from a local elementary school. This cobbled-together team had done a research project to ferret out the differences between adult fingerprints and children’s prints. Once Art had gotten the ball rolling, it didn’t take the chemists long to figure out what was going on. Adult prints are oil-based, they found; kids’ prints, on the other hand—before puberty kicks in and activates all those acne-producing oil glands—are water-based. And water evaporates, taking the prints with it. The explanation was simple; the ramifications could be simply heartbreaking.

  “How long did it take y’all to get the car?”

  “Two days. Which was one day too many. Twenty-four hours sooner, her prints would’ve been there. Her prints were there.”

  “Witnesses slow to come forward?”

  “No. Lawyer quick to tie our hands. Claimed we were harassing his client.”

  I had a bad feeling inside. I didn’t want to ask, but something in his face dared me to. “Who’s the lawyer?”

  “Three guesses.”

  I didn’t need three. “DeVriess.”

  “Good ol’ Grease. Your new buddy.” He shot me a black look.

  “Look, Art, I hate what he does, and I hate how he does it, as much as you do. Most of the time. If he’s helping a child predator, he’ll burn for that someday. But this stabbing case he’s got me working on, it’s different. The ME screwed it up, plain and simple, and the DA’s covering for him. And if you don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I think you are.” I glared at him, furious that he would tar me with the same brush as DeVriess.

  He glared back, then looked away and sighed. “I know. You’re right. I understand what you’re doing. I respect it. I respect you—hell, you know that. It’s this little girl—it’s tearing me up. I want to kill the son of a bitch that snatched her, and I want to dismember the son of a bitch that kept us from dusting that car until the kid’s prints had evaporated.”

  “I don’t blame you for that.”

  “Sorry I jumped on you.”

  “Forget it.”

  He took a deep b
reath and closed his eyes, then blew it out loudly. As if from another life, the phrase “deep cleansing breath” popped into my head, unbidden and unwelcome. Art rubbed his raw fingertips. “So, aside from the pleasure of my cheery conversation, Bill, what brings you here?”

  I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out a ziplock plastic bag and handed it to him. “This.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “It was around the neck of a corpse. Is it what I think it is?”

  He squeezed the outline gently in every direction: the narrow side, the long side, and the thin edge. “Probably. Was he a veteran?”

  “Not a he. A she. And no, I don’t think so.”

  “What’s she doing wearing a military dog tag?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering.”

  “And whose is it?”

  “That, too.”

  “And you brought it to me because you can’t read?”

  “Exactly. Also, I’m hoping there might be a print somewhere under that gack.”

  “Gack—is that one of those technical anthropology terms you Ph.D.s throw around to impress and intimidate us common folks?” I nodded. Art fingered the tag, frowning. “A print. Sheesh—you don’t ask much, do you?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Well, for starters, we’ve got to figure out how to remove the gack without removing the print. If there’s even a print under there. Which I very much doubt.”

  “How come?”

  “The metal may have corroded or oxidized, though dog tags are supposed to be corrosionproof. If the metal did corrode, it’s undergone both chemical and physical changes that could destroy or distort the print. And if it didn’t corrode, the gack—adipocere, we lowly criminalists call it—will have either absorbed or smeared any prints that might have been there once upon a time.”

  I nodded glumly. “So what you’re saying is…”

  “…not a snowball’s chance.” I’d pretty much expected him to say something like that—he was a criminalist, after all, not a wizard—but until he actually said it, I’d held out some hope. “But still, let’s see what we can see.”

  He laid the bag on a lab table and donned a pair of latex gloves, then slid the ziplock open and extricated the waxy tag. After studying it awhile, he leaned toward a tray of tools and selected a pair of tongs, then rummaged under a counter and hauled up a small torch, the sort a chef might use to caramelize the sugar atop a dish of crème brûlée. Holding the tag by the slightly curved end—where the chain once threaded through—he began playing the torch gently over the adipocere. As it began to melt, the reek of decomp rapidly replaced the acrid fumes of superglue. “Dang, Bill, you might’ve warned me. Switch on that fan, will you?”

  I reached for the switch he’d nodded toward as he moved the fragrant object under an exhaust hood. Then I brought over some paper towels, which I folded and positioned underneath to catch the foul fluid beginning to drip from the lower end.

  “Art?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Couldn’t you have just put it in an autoclave, wrapped in some paper towels?”

  “Sure. But where’s the fun in that? It’s not every guy who gets to play with fire on the job.”

  “Are you never going to grow up?”

  “I sure hope not. My childlike immaturity’s the only thing standing between me and a major midlife crisis.”

  Art extinguished the torch and set it down, then withdrew the rectangle from under the hood. It was discolored and slightly bent, but it was a dog tag, all right, its stamped-in lettering still crisp. Art moved to a lab table with an illuminated magnifying glass, just like the one in my decomp room, and studied both sides. “Well, shoot.”

  “What?”

  “As usual, I was right. Unfortunately, in this case. Sometimes fingerprint oils will etch metals, so even after the print itself is gone, there’s still an image of it left behind. Not here, though—this tag really is corrosionproof. Wish they made cars out of this stuff.”

  “So there’s nothing there you can work with?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that. We’ve got somebody’s name, rank, and serial number here, which might—just possibly—be considered a clue. It’s not your corpse’s name, unless she was called ‘Thomas,’ but—”

  “Wait. Did you say Thomas? First name or last?”

  “First.”

  “Here, let me see.” I scanned the tag, half-expecting to read the last name Kitchings—and feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment when I didn’t. That would have been straight out of the Twilight Zone. Even the coincidence of the first names seemed odd, somehow: a backwoods sheriff named Tom finds a corpse wearing the dog tags of another guy named Tom. I pointed it out to Art—who had already noticed it on his own, of course. “You think there’s any connection?”

  “With the sheriff?” Art shrugged. “Still, we know this is somebody who was connected to her somehow, and he’ll have a pretty good paper trail, at least while he was in Uncle Sam’s army.” It wasn’t the dramatic revelation I’d been hoping for, but it was a start. “I’ve got a old pal in Army Records,” Art said. “Want me to see what he can find out for us?”

  “Sure. Thanks. You need to hang onto the tag?”

  “Naw, just get the guy at the front desk to make me a big photocopy on your way out. You keep it with the rest of the evidence. I’d hate to have Da Grease come after me for evidence tampering in a case that’s completely outside my jurisdiction.”

  “So I shouldn’t tell him how you tried to destroy this thing with a blowtorch.”

  “If he gets wind of it, send him over. I’ll demonstrate my torch technique on his testicles.”

  “You really could have kept that little fantasy all to yourself.”

  “Hey, I’m a generous guy. I like to share.”

  “I’ll remember that. Thanks for the warning. And thanks for the help.”

  “Anytime.”

  As I left, I glanced back just in time to see Art relight the torch. I paused to watch him. First he eased the tip of the flame close to his forearm, a look of curiosity on his face. Wisps of smoke began to curl up from the hair on his arm, then suddenly he yelped and jerked the torch back with a rueful, goofy grin. Then his gaze lit on the crime scene photos strewn across the counter. Reaching over, he plucked one from the stack. It was a mug shot of the man suspected of abducting young Stacy Beaman. Holding the photo by one corner, Art brought the torch close. Wisps of smoke curled up, and the man’s face burst into flame.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE PHONE RANG JUST as I was contemplating the structure of the female pelvis, and I jumped, then hissed a curse before putting on my telephone manners.

  “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton.”

  “It’s Sheriff Kitchings.”

  “Hey, Sheriff, I’ve spent some time going over these remains, and I’ve got some mighty interesting things to tell you. First of all—”

  He cut me off. “Hang on, Doc. I’m not sure we should discuss this on the phone. This could turn out to be a pretty sensitive case.”

  This was a first. I always wrote up my findings in a formal report, but I’d never yet encountered a lawman who didn’t want to know what I’d found out as soon as possible. “Well, shall I just write up what I found and mail it to you?”

  “No, sir, I believe we should move a little faster than that. Could I send Williams to get you again? And could you bring the, uh, the material with you? The material you’ve got there in Knoxville?”

  I sighed but decided to play along. “Well, it’s possible for me to come see you, if you think it’s urgent, but I can’t bring the, uh, material just yet. I need to simmer on that for another day or two, if you catch my drift.” After a moment, he allowed as how he caught my drift. “Look,” I suggested, “I’ve got a class to teach in a few minutes, but I’ll be through at noon if you want to send your deputy sometime after that.”

  “Any chance you could skip that class? Maybe ge
t somebody to fill in for you?”

  “Sorry, Sheriff. I don’t cut my own class. Besides, it’s at least an hour’s drive down here.”

  “Thing is, Williams is already in Knoxville.” They must think I had nothing to do but wait to be summoned to Cooke County.

  “Well, I can find something to keep him busy for an hour or so,” I said. “We’ve got a few skeletons that need digging up, if he wants to lend us a hand out at the Body Farm. He knows how to find it now.”

  The sheriff laughed mirthlessly. “I expect he’d just as soon pass on that, but thanks anyhow. I’ll holler at him and tell him to get you at noon.”

  I told him how to find my private office. It was tucked deep beneath the east stands of the stadium, down near the level of the football field. Pretty close to the east end zone, in fact, but separated by layers of concrete and steel and spectators. I’d lost count of the times I’d looked up from a skull or femur to feel the entire structure shaking—another UT touchdown, I knew. Visiting teams didn’t score very often at Neyland Stadium, and when they did, there weren’t enough fans to rattle the girders. Ten, twenty thousand people couldn’t cause much vibration. Ninety thousand hometown fans at a grudge match against Georgia or Florida or ’Bama, though, could set off seismographs clear over in Nashville.

  I hung up, pushed back from my battered desk, and walked through a doorway into an adjoining room filled with cardboard boxes, each measuring one foot square by three feet long. Each box contained a cleaned, disarticulated human skeleton.

  There was only one way into our skeletal collection, and that was through my office. I didn’t want just anyone to have access to the skeletons—it was easy to envision drunken fraternity pranks, macabre Halloween decorations, and countless other student hijinks if word got out that there were hundreds of boxes of bones just lying around for the taking. So while we made no bones, so to speak, about having the collection—took great pride in it, in fact, since it was the world’s largest collection of modern skeletons whose age, race, and sex were known—I was careful to keep the collection room locked and to issue keys only to the forensic faculty and graduate assistants.