Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  “What a shame,” said O’Conner. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, this would be awful at any age, but twenty’s just a kid. Unbelievable.”

  “It might be unbelievable,” I told him, “but I’m afraid it’s all too true.”

  I put the sheriff, the deputy, and the TBI agent to work, helping Miranda and me inventory and bag the bones. I’d brought a diagram of the skeleton, the bones drawn as outlines. As I picked up each bone and handed it off to the lawmen to bag, I called out its name, and Miranda filled in the bone’s outline on the diagram. “Cervical vertebrae,” I said. “C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7.” That was the biggest collection of adjacent elements. Below the neck, the remaining bones were few, far between, and badly chewed—especially the long bones of the arms and legs. Given how many of the skeletal elements were missing, it didn’t take long to collect them all. At the end, though, we got lucky: Two of the long bones—the right humerus and right femur—bore recently healed fractures. Comminuted fractures, in which the bones had been broken into several pieces. And those pieces had been fastened back together with metal plates and screws. “Look at this,” I said, holding up the two shafts. “This could help a lot with identification.”

  Waylon gave a low whistle. “Them parts can be tracked, right, Doc? Like the serial number on a gun or a car?”

  I shook my head. “I wish. But no. If we can find x-rays that match these, we’ll have a positive I.D. But first we have to find a missing-person report that seems to fit, then see if we can get the medical records.”

  “Huh,” Waylon grunted, clearly disappointed.

  Once the bones were all charted and bagged, I put everyone else to work gathering up the bags, cans, and other debris. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I told them. They probably assumed I needed to step behind a tree and pee. Instead I ambled away, wandering the site, alternating between scanning the ground for anything that might happen to lie outside the circular path and, especially, examining the trunks of surrounding trees. After a while, I sensed that I was being watched.

  “Dr. B?” I’d been so intent on my search that I hadn’t heard Miranda come up behind me. “You look like you’re looking for something. I mean, something specific.”

  “I am,” I said, stepping closer to a medium-sized tulip poplar and running my fingers over the bark. “And I just found it. Y’all come take a look.”

  The others laid down their trash bags and approached. Waylon was the first to spot what I was looking at. “God a’mighty,” he said. “I was afraid we was gonna find something like that.”

  “Me, too,” said O’Conner, “though I didn’t want to say so.”

  “What?” demanded Miranda, looking from their faces to mine. “Somebody want to let me in on the secret?”

  I reached up and tapped the tree trunk, slightly above my head. “Claw marks,” I said. “From a bear. A big one, judging by the height of the marks.”

  Miranda blanched. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

  I nodded. “You mentioned coyote scavenging, but I figured it for bear,” I told her.

  “Why? You could tell from the tooth marks?”

  I shook my head. “Hard to tell from the tooth marks themselves, though there was a mighty big puncture in a scapula. What tipped me off wasn’t what was there, but what wasn’t.” All three of them looked puzzled. “Canids—dogs and coyotes—tend to go for the extremities. A dog’ll gnaw off a hand or a foot, or even an arm or a leg, and drag it off to a safe place. Bears, though, love the torso: the ribs, the sternum, even the spine. Stuff that’s too tough for dogs and coyotes. Remind me, when we get back to campus, to dig out an article for you. It was in the Journal of Forensic Sciences a while back. Described some cases of bear scavenging in the mountains of New Mexico. The bears ate the ribs and the sternum every single time.”

  “Beg pardon, Doc,” said Waylon. “I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but you reckon maybe the barbecue folks are missing out on a good bet?”

  I blinked and stared at him. “You mean by not putting humans in the smoker?”

  “Lord, no!” The big man blushed and grimaced. “I mean the sternum. From pigs, not people. Smoked sternum—might taste even better’n pulled pork shoulder or baby back ribs.”

  “Waylon,” I said, “you are one of a kind.” He blushed again. “But I don’t think it would work. The ribs have a fair amount of meat on them. Between them, actually. The intercostal muscles. But the sternum?” I poked around on my own chest, to underscore the point. “Lots of cartilage, to connect it to the ribs. But no real muscle to speak of. All you’d get is gristle and bone.”

  Waylon gave his own mammoth chest a few exploratory prods, then nodded, looking mildly disappointed. “I reckon bears ain’t as picky as us.”

  “Maybe they don’t have the luxury,” I pointed out. “They’re mostly eating bugs and berries and acorns, right? Not often they get a feast like this.” I felt a stab of guilt when I heard myself refer to the victim that way. “I don’t mean to sound callous. I just mean that if you’re a big black bear in these mountains, it might be tough to find enough to eat, you know?”

  “Soooo . . .” Miranda trailed off. All three of us turned to her, leaving her little choice but to finish what she’d started. “I hate to ask—I’m not sure I want to know the answer—but was the victim already dead when the bear came along, or did the bear kill him?”

  I looked at Waylon and the sheriff, but they both shrugged—possibly because they didn’t know, but possibly because they hated to say. “Hard to tell,” I answered. “It’s rare for a black bear to kill a human. Far as I know, there’s only ever been one person killed by a bear in the Smokies. That was a woman back in 2000, if I remember right.”

  “Killed by a mama bear and a cub, lessen I disremember,” offered Waylon. “The mama mighta been protectin’ the cub, or thinkin’ she was.”

  I nodded. “But this situation? A human chained in the wilderness for days or weeks, with food wrappers and maybe even scraps lying around, giving off scent? The smell would be pretty appealing to a hungry bear, and once he was here, who knows?”

  “Another thing we don’t know,” O’Conner added, “is whether the killer kept bringing food and water, or whether he stopped at some point. The victim could’ve died of thirst or hunger.”

  “Or maybe the guy come back and shot him after a while,” said Waylon. “Reckon I should bring me a metal detector up here, see if they’s a bullet on the ground somewheres.”

  “Good idea,” I agreed. “Once we’re back at UT, we can x-ray the remains and see if there’s a lead wipe on any of the bones.”

  “A which?” said Waylon.

  “A lead wipe,” I repeated. “A smear of lead, left by a bullet grazing the bone. A lead wipe shows up on an x-ray like a streak of white paint, much brighter than bone. I’ll let you know if we find anything. How soon do you think you can get back here with the metal detector?”

  “Tomorrow mornin’, I reckon. I’d go get it now, ’cept it’s about to get dark on us.”

  He was right. I hadn’t noticed, but the sun was beginning to drop behind the adjoining ridge. Late-afternoon light—already golden from the low angle—was incandescent through the yellow leaves of the tulip poplars. I paused to take it in, the astounding beauty that surrounded us, even here at the scene of a terrible death. “Guess we’d better wrap this up,” I said. “If we’re here after dark in a vehicle with a state plate, no telling what’s liable to happen to us.”

  Waylon chuckled. “Hellfire, Doc, I’ll be behind you all the way to I-40. Ain’t nobody’ll mess with you, lessen they go through me first. And I don’t see that happenin’.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “Not unless they’ve got a death wish. Or a huge pain wish, at the very least.”

  HAPPILY, NO ONE IN COOKE COUNTY HAD A DEATH wish, nor a Waylon-sized pain wish. Aside from the deputy’s monster truck, I saw no vehicles trailing us back to Jonesport, nor on the twisting drive ba
ck to the interstate.

  As we turned off River Road and onto the westbound ramp of I-40, I rolled down my window and waved. Behind us, I saw the headlights of the mammoth truck flash once, twice, three times, and the notes of the truck’s aftermarket horn—tooting the opening bars of “Dixie”—came wafting through the twilight, growing fainter as we picked up speed and merged with the stream of cars meandering out of the mountains and flowing, a ceaseless river of humanity, toward the distant confluence of Knoxville.

  The drive was quiet. Perhaps Miranda was preoccupied with her own thoughts—possibly thoughts of the young man whose fragmentary skeleton rode behind us in the truck’s cargo bed—or perhaps she was simply giving me room to think my own thoughts. At any rate, we rode in silence.

  As we neared the outskirts of the city, I overtook a slow-moving semi. Flicking my turn signal, I checked my outside mirror to be sure the left lane was clear.

  It was, but in the mirror, I caught a glimpse of a lighted billboard on the other side of the median. COMFORT INN, it read. AARP. AAA. HBO. ESPN. THIS EXIT & EXIT 407.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as it fell farther and farther behind, shrinking and dwindling until finally it disappeared altogether, and I felt my chest loosen and lighten.

  Almost as if something in the air around us had shifted, Miranda now spoke.

  “At least Hugh Glass had a fighting chance,” she said sadly.

  “Who Glass?”

  “No, Hugh Glass,” she said, and I was reminded of the old “Who’s on first?” joke.

  “Who’s Hugh, and what are you talking about?”

  “Hugh Glass, the mountain man. In The Revenant. You’re kidding, right?” Despite the darkness in the cab, I could tell she was staring at me. “Oscar-winning performance by Leonardo DiCaprio? In a movie that won two other Academy Awards this year, too?”

  I shrugged, feeling sheepish. “I don’t see a lot of movies,” I said. “Kinda depressing to go by yourself.”

  “Duh,” she said. “Tell me something I don’t know. But you should totally see this one.”

  “Because?”

  “Well, for one thing, the guy—this mountain man, Glass, played by DiCaprio—he’s torn to pieces by a bear, a big grizzly, and gets buried alive by the guys who are supposed to be taking care of him. So there’s a connection to our case, sort of. For another thing, the movie’s full of Arikara Indians.”

  Now she had my full attention. “Arikara? But they’re all gone. Died out, mostly, and assimilated with the Mandans and Hidatsu.”

  She made an impatient, clucking sound. “The film’s historical. Set in the 1820s. Along the Missouri River.”

  I grinned. “Why didn’t you say so? That’s where all my skeletal remains come from!”

  “Duh,” she repeated. “I know. That’s why I mentioned it. But the movie’s set farther north—up in North Dakota or Montana, looks like. Serious mountains.”

  I turned off I-40 onto James White Parkway, to loop along the riverfront to Neyland Stadium. Across the Tennessee, streetlights and houselights on the south shore smeared and danced in the black, rippling river. I was puzzling over the plot of the movie Miranda was describing, worrying at it, like a dog with a bone. “What are Plains Indians doing up in the Rocky Mountains?”

  “Good grief, Dr. B. Don’t pick it apart before you even see it. So this guy Glass is a guide for a bunch of fur trappers. The trappers get attacked by a band of Arikara Indians. The Indians are looking for an Arikara woman who’s been abducted by a white man. Maybe that’s what brought them to the mountains—the search for the woman. Anyhow, Glass spends a lot of time getting chased by them.”

  “I thought you said he got killed by the bear?”

  She sighed. “Just see it,” she said. “You’ll love it. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll thank me.” By now we had arrived back at UT. As I turned off Neyland Drive, Miranda said, “Don’t you want to take this stuff out to the facility? Put the bones in to simmer?”

  I shook my head. “It’s late. Just do it in the morning, how ’bout?” Glancing over, I saw her shrug and nod.

  I pulled in front of her pale green Prius, which was tucked beneath the stadium just outside the bone lab, and switched off the truck’s engine. “So, this mountain man, Glass—is he the one who abducted the Arikara woman?”

  “Quit asking annoying questions. I’ve already told you too much.” She paused, then added, “You know what? Forget I mentioned it. Don’t see it. You’d probably hate it.”

  Now, of course, wild horses couldn’t keep me from watching it.

  As Miranda jolly well knew.

  CHAPTER 4

  OLD HABITS DIE HARD, I REALIZED AS I SETTLED into bed. Harder, alas, than people do.

  Kathleen had been dead for a decade—more than a decade, in fact—but I still slept on “my” side of the bed. Actually, for the thirty years of our marriage, “my” side had also been “our” side: no matter where she started out (usually in the middle), Kathleen had always ended up crossing the midline, and I had always ended up on the edge of the mattress, sometimes hanging partway off.

  For years I had grumbled about her Territorial Imperative. Now I would have given anything—everything—to feel her crowding me, nestling me, spooning me in her sleep. “Don’t it always seem to go,” I serenaded myself, pulling up the covers, “that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Truth was, though, I had known what I’d had with Kathleen. I’d felt lucky beyond all deserving to be with her, and bereft beyond all reckoning when I lost her.

  Since Kathleen’s death I had slept with only two women—just one time apiece—and both those women were dead now, too. It wasn’t as if I were responsible for their deaths, any more than I’d been responsible for Kathleen’s, but all the same, I sometimes wondered if I might carry some sort of jinx, or bad karma. Could it be that immersing myself, day after day, year after year, in death, dismemberment, and decay, had somehow tainted me? That I had steadily absorbed, and now subtly emanated, mortality—and not just its faint odor of it, but its essence as well? That I was a carrier, like Typhoid Mary? Mortality Bill, I thought.

  The absurdity of it almost made me smile. Almost, but not quite.

  As I reached for the switch on the bedside lamp, my eye happened to light on a card that lay on the nightstand. It had arrived in the previous day’s mail, sent by a California woman whose father’s remains I had identified a few weeks before. His skull had recently turned up on a riverbank a few miles downstream from Knoxville, years after he’d gone missing. The man had long struggled with depression, and the general consensus, once we’d identified him, was that he had probably committed suicide by jumping from the Gay Street Bridge, Knoxville’s favorite suicide spot. “Thank you for giving me closure at last,” she had written. “It saddens me to know, once and for all, that he’s dead, but it helps me, too. Not knowing was worse. I know I speak for others when I say how much I appreciate the work you do. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “No, thank you,” I whispered as I snapped off the light, grateful for something—anything—that could counter my sense of being a jinx. “And good night.”

  I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I WAS WALKING, slowly and heavily, as if I were wading in waist-deep water or weighted down. After a while, I realized that indeed I was weighted down. A heavy chain wrapped around my neck and trailed behind me. Despite the difficulty, I kept walking, but soon I realized that I was walking in a circle, covering the same ground again and again. So I stopped.

  As I rested, uncertain what to do next, I became aware of someone nearby. It was a young man—a boy, really—and like me, he was wearing a chain and walking in a circle. After he had made several turns around the tree to which he was chained, I noticed that he was being followed by an immense black bear. I opened my mouth to warn the boy, but I found myself unable to speak.

  I tried to reach him, so I could turn him around, show him the bear, but my chain was too short
, and he remained just out of reach. He kept walking, faster and faster, and then he began to run, as if he sensed danger even though he had not seen the bear. And then, as he ran, he began to scream, louder and louder, until his shrieking woke me.

  As I lay in my bed, my heart pounding, the sheets soaked with sweat, I realized I could still hear the boy shrieking.

  But the shrieking was not from the boy in my dream; the shrieking, I finally understood, was from a fire truck—a rare sound in my quiet neighborhood—and as the pounding of my heart subsided, so, too, did the wail of the siren, and I was left, awake and alone, on my side of a bed that felt as empty as a black hole in space: a void so vast and dense, not even light could escape.

  CHAPTER 5

  GROGGY AND OFF KILTER FROM MY RESTLESS, NIGHTMARISH night, I drove on autopilot, winding behind UT Medical Center and through the staff parking lot, then parking beside the twin gates of the Body Farm: an outer, chain-link gate, topped with razor wire, and an inner, wooden gate. The chain-link fence that surrounded our three wooded acres was there to keep out trespassers, and it worked well, although not perfectly. Occasionally fraternity boys—either as an initiation rite or as a show of bravado—tried to break in, but being drunk, they usually got snagged in the barbed wire. More seriously, we’d had one damaging robbery: someone had made off with half a dozen skulls, though the police eventually recovered three of them when the thief, who was a drug addict, tried to sell them. The inner wooden fence—eight feet high, made of pine boards butted tightly together—was there to shield the corpses from prying eyes . . . and to protect squeamish hospital employees (if there were in fact any of those) from the sight of my dead and decomposing research subjects.

  I unlocked the metal gate and took a step inward to the wooden gate. The padlock’s shackle clasped both ends of a loop of chain, which was threaded through a hole bored in each half of the gate. As I lifted the lock and felt the heft of the chain, I couldn’t help thinking of the Cooke County victim, his neck encircled by hard, cold links, dragging that fifty-pound length of chain around and around that tree. The Tree of Death.