Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone (16 page)

THE UNIFORMED POLICE OFFICER led me down the path to the main clearing, just inside the gate of the Body Farm. A warped, weathered picnic table sat askew under a tree at one edge of the clearing; the patrolman took me there and set me on one of its benches. “Do you mind waiting here while we secure the scene and get some more people here?” I shook my head. “Are you all right?”

“Not really. But I’ll manage. You do what ever you need to do.”

I heard a series of sirens approaching, at least half a dozen in all. Someone had already stretched crime scene tape across the open gate; through the opening, I saw a fast-growing throng of officers—city police, UT campus police, and Medical Center security guards—as well as EMS personnel and firefighters. Heads leaned in through the gate, over the tape, peering at the facility. Peering at me.

After a while, a stylishly dressed man in a lavender dress shirt and yellow tie ducked under the tape and walked toward me. “Dr. Brockton?” I nodded. “I’m Sergeant John Evers,” he said. “I’m an investigator in Major Crimes. Including homicides.” He held out a suntanned hand and shook mine firmly, then handed me a business card. I pulled out my wallet and tucked it inside. “Can I get a brief statement from you here while things are fresh?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll want to talk to you in more detail downtown, since you’re the one who found the body. But for now, just some basic information.” He pulled out a pen and a small note pad, which he centered on one of the cupped boards of the tabletop. He took down my name, address, phone number, where I worked, and other data, then got to the particulars of where we were, and why. “What time did you arrive here this morning?”

“I think about eight,” I said. “I was listening to the news on the radio, so it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes after that.”

He nodded. “And what were you doing here?”

“I work here,” I said. “This is my research facility. The Anthropology Department’s research facility, I should say.”

“Yes, sir, of course. I meant, specifically, why had you come out this morning?”

“I came out to check on some research. To see what condition the body—the male body up there tied to the tree—was in by now.” I explained how we had staged the research subject, and why. “I was doing the research for the Chattanooga medical examiner,” I said. “Jess—Dr. Jessamine—Carter. I found her body when I went up there to check on my research subject.”

“So you recognized the victim?” I nodded. “You knew Dr. Carter personally?”

“Yes. We had worked together on several cases over the past few years. And we were collaborating on a current case, involving a murder victim whose body was found tied to a tree down near Chattanooga. That’s the death scene we were replicating here, so we could pinpoint the time since death more accurately for Dr. Carter.”

“Did you see anybody else out here this morning when you arrived, either inside the fence or out in the parking lot?” I shook my head. “Driving away from the parking lot?” Again I shook my head.

“Was the gate open or closed when you got here?”

I had to think for a moment; my arrival seemed a lifetime ago. “It was open,” I said. “That was the first thing out of the ordinary.”

“It’s normally locked?”

“Yes, with two locks—one on the chain-link gate, one on the wooden gate.”

“What else was unusual?”

“There was a note for me on the inner gate.” I suddenly remembered it was in my pocket. I reached for it, then caught myself before I touched it. “I’ll let one of your evidence technicians get it out of my pocket and bag it. It’s a note from Dr. Carter. Or at least, supposedly from Dr. Carter. Saying, ‘I’m inside. Come find me.’ It’ll have my fingerprints on it, from when I pulled it off the gate and read it. But maybe it’ll have the prints of whoever put it there, too.”

He nodded, and drew a box around the word NOTE, with arrows pointing at each corner of the box, for extra emphasis.

“So when you found the note, what did you do?”

“I came inside and looked around, called Dr. Carter’s name. I went down that way first”—I pointed to the lower area, where Jess sometimes put bodies to skeletonize—“and then I walked up that path leading to the research project. And that’s when I found her. Her corpse. Tied to the other one.”

“What did you do when you saw her?”

“Nothing, at first. I just stared. I couldn’t process it; I couldn’t think. Finally—I mean, it was probably only a minute or two, but it felt like forever—I called 911.”

“And after you made the call, what did you do? Did you approach the body? Did you ever touch the body?”

I shook my head. “No. I know better than to disturb a death scene.”

“How close were you?”

“Six feet. Maybe eight or ten.”

“So how did you know she was dead?”

I looked up at him; met his gaze for the first time, really. “Detective, I’ve spent the past twenty-five years studying the dead. I’ve seen corpses by the hundreds. I recognize the vacant, clouded eyes. I know the difference between shallow breath and no breath; between an unconscious person and a lifeless body.” I could feel my voice starting to rise, but it seemed to be someone else’s voice, not my own; a voice that was beyond my control. “I know that when blowflies are swarming around a woman’s bloody corpse, crawling in and out of her open mouth, I don’t need to feel for a pulse to tell me that woman is dead.”

Evers’s eyes were locked on mine in horror and fascination. In my peripheral vision, I became aware of other eyes staring at me as well. I glanced toward the gate and saw a dozen people looking in my direction, their expressions all registering various degrees of shock. I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes and forehead. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is very upsetting.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Evers. “No need to apologize. Listen, I need to go up the hill to the scene. And we’ll probably be tied up here most of the day. But I’d like to talk to you in more detail tomorrow, if you wouldn’t mind. Get more background on Dr. Carter, her colleagues, her activities. Okay?”

“Of course,” I said. “Anything I can do to help. What time do you want me there?”

“Ten o’clock?” I nodded. “All right. Thank you, Dr. Brockton. Take it easy today. You’ve had quite a shock.”

“Yes, I have. Thank you. Do your best on this one.”

He smiled broadly, flashing me a band of teeth so white they’d have made a great ad for Crest. “I always do, Doc. I always do. Oh, one last thing. Sit tight for just another minute and let me find a forensic tech to get that note out of your pocket.”

I stayed put, and he returned in a few minutes, accompanied by a forensic technician clad in a white Tyvek biohazard suit from head to toe. The technician used tweezers to pluck the note from my shirt pocket, then sealed it in a ziplock evidence bag and labeled it. “You know where to go tomorrow, right?” asked Evers. I nodded. “Meantime, we’ll try to keep a pretty tight lid on this. We’d appreciate it if you’d help us with that. If you get media calls, which you probably will, just refer them to us.”

“I will.”

Evers stood up, which I took to be my cue to do likewise. He walked me to the gate and raised the yellow and black tape for me so I didn’t have to duck so far. He turned to a uniformed officer who was posted just outside the gate, holding a clipboard. “I’m not leaving,” he said, “but he is. This is Dr. Bill Brockton of UT. Dr. Brockton was already inside when the scene was secured, so he’s not on your log yet. You need to add his name; put ‘N/A’ as his sign-in time; and sign him out at”—he checked his watch—“nine thirty-eight.” The officer nodded and obliged.

Twenty or more emergency vehicles, many with lights still strobing, jammed the northeast corner of the parking lot. Some were tucked into parking spaces amid the cars of hospital employees; others jammed the aisles between rows and filled the strip of grass along the east edge of the lot. A hundred yards away, in a taped-off area at the southeast corner, I noticed a gaggle of media vehicles—news crew SUVs, mostly, but also a couple of broadcast trucks, their antenna masts aloft. Crowding the yellow tape were half a dozen tripods topped by half a dozen cameras, their lenses all trained on me. I turned and walked around the back of my truck, opened the driver’s door, and backed out of my parking space.

As I eased down the hill toward the exit of the parking lot, a black Chevy Tahoe emerged from the direction of the morgue and sped toward the Body Farm. As it passed, I caught a glimpse of the driver. It was Garland Hamilton: one medical examiner racing to a death scene where the body of another medical examiner awaited him.

LIKE A SLEEPWALKER, I shuffled through my forensic anthropology class, which met less than an hour after I left the scene of Jess’s murder. I considered canceling class, but if I canceled class, what was I to do for that hour instead? So I taught. Or went through the motions of teaching. At the end of class, I couldn’t have said what topic I’d just spent an hour lecturing on. The only thing I noticed was that Jason Lane, my creationist student, was conspicuously absent.

After class, my autopilot carried me back to my office; luckily, the sidewalks and ramps from McClung Museum to the base of the stadium all ran downhill; otherwise, I might not have had the energy or will to make it. The two flights of stairs up to my sanctuary nearly overwhelmed me. Once inside, I closed the door—a rare gesture for me, and a sign of serious trouble. Slumping in my chair, I stared out the grimy windows, through the crisscrossed girders, at—what? Not at the river, although it continued to flow through downtown and alongside the campus. Not at the hills above the far shore, though they remained green and solid. Not at the sky or the sun, though they remained inexplicably, unfeelingly bright.

I could not recall ever before sitting in my office idly, doing nothing. It wasn’t that I had nothing to do—I had a stack of tests to grade, I had at least a dozen articles to review for the three anthropology and forensic journals on whose editorial boards I served. Then there was the textbook revision I’d agreed to do nearly a year ago, a chore that always seemed to take a backseat to forensic cases. Cases like my forensic examination of Craig Willis’s battered skull. Trouble was, I couldn’t get past the fact that I’d been asked to conduct that exam and write that report by Jess Carter. And now Jess was dead.

Craig Willis’s murder still needed to be solved; Jess’s death might slow the investigation down, but it wouldn’t stop it. In fact, my e-mail in-box already contained a memo indicating that Garland Hamilton would step in temporarily to fill Jess’s shoes in Chattanooga, just as Jess had filled in for Hamilton here in Knoxville while his medical license was under review. But knowing that the wheels of justice would keep turning, however slowly, did not give me the strength to put my own shoulder to the wheel right now.

I opened the cardboard box that contained Willis’s skull and lifted it out, along with the top of the cranial vault. Setting the skull on a doughnut-shaped cushion, I stared at its shattered visage as if some clue to Jess’s murder might be encoded in the fracture lines etched in Willis’s bones. A connection of some sort existed, I felt sure, but what, precisely, was the link? Or who?

Jess’s body had been bound to the research corpse we’d used as a stand-in for Willis at the Body Farm. The research was meant to narrow down Willis’s time since death. Did that mean that whoever had killed Willis also killed Jess? If so, why? Because he considered Jess a threat; because she was getting too close to the truth? But what was that truth? I had no idea who had killed Willis, and as far as I knew, neither Jess nor the Chattanooga police had any better insight into his murder than I did.

But if Willis’s killer hadn’t murdered Jess, then who had? Who else might have wanted her dead? As a medical examiner, of course, Jess had worked scores of homicides; in theory, any one of those cases might have prompted someone to seek vengeance—a relative of someone whom Jess’s autopsy and testimony had helped send to prison, for instance. But the timing mattered, surely: Why now? Who lately?

My mind flashed back to Willis’s mother, and the irrational fury with which she had attacked Jess. She had accused Jess of destroying her son’s reputation by releasing the information about his being dressed in drag, and—if indeed Jess had been the unnamed source—by speculating that the murder might have been a homophobic hate crime. Could the rage she displayed in my office have intensified after she fled, escalating to the point of murder? She had parted with a vague threat directed at Jess, but in the heat of the moment, people often made threats they never carried out. Besides, if she were the one who killed Jess, why would she have posed Jess’s body in that obscene position, bound to the corpse that was serving as a stand-in for her own son’s body? That didn’t seem to fit. Unless, I thought, by staging Jess’s body that way, she meant to repudiate the theory Jess had mentioned—unless by killing Jess and tying her to the research corpse, she was saying, “Fuck you and fuck your demeaning theory about my son’s death.”

But what if there were no connection? What if whoever had left the threatening messages on Jess’s voicemail had acted on them? In the dim, shifting light that had engulfed me in the hours since I found Jess’s body, I could see things equally well—or equally poorly—from either angle.

Gradually I became aware of my telephone ringing. It had not even occurred to me that, rather than sitting and brooding alone, I could have been talking through what had happened with Jeff or Miranda or somebody else who cared about me. Fortunately, one of those people was now calling me. “It’s Art,” he said. “I just heard about Jess Carter. I am so sorry, Bill. I know you liked her and respected her.”

“I did. More than that, too. We had—hell, I don’t know what to call it, Art—we had started to get involved, I guess you could say.”

“Romantically involved?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” he said. “Well, damn. I bet that would’ve been a good thing for both of you.”

“I think so. Started off mighty nice, though I’m not sure she was completely over her divorce yet. Might’ve gotten bumpy. But might’ve smoothed out again pretty quick. Guess we’ll never know.”

“Man,” he said, “I thought I was sorry to hear the news before. Now I’m a lot more sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Nothing I can think of. I’ve got to go into KPD tomorrow morning for an interview.”

“Why are they having you come in, instead of talking to you at your office?”

“I guess because I found her body.”

“You?”

“Yeah. Lucky me. It was bad, Art. She was nude, and she was tied to that research corpse we had lashed to a tree. Like she was having sex with the corpse.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Son of a bitch. Listen, Art, I’m gonna go now. Thanks for calling.”

“You need anything, you page me. Even if it’s the middle of the night. Especially if it’s the middle of the night. It’s liable to hit you hardest long about then.”

A powerful sense of foreboding told me he was probably right.