Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone (21 page)

I PULLED THE RENTAL car into the driveway at Jeff’s house, after checking my rearview mirror to make sure no one had followed me here. The double-width garage door was open, and inside, I saw both Jeff ’s Camry and Jenny’s Honda minivan.

The front door was open, and through the glass storm door I saw Tyler and Walker in front of the television. I rapped on the door, then opened it and stuck my head inside. “Hey there,” I called to the boys, “look who’s here!”

Both boys turned in my direction. Walker was the first to scream, but a split second later Tyler joined him. Jenny came rushing out of the kitchen, an onion in one hand, a big knife in the other. When she took in the scene, the knife and the onion fell to the carpet. Jenny hurried over to the boys and knelt down, wrapping an arm around each. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she soothed. “Come in the kitchen with Mommy. Come on. Everything’s okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

A moment later Jeff emerged from the kitchen, looking embarrassed but angry. “God, Dad, I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish you had called before you came.”

Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that…that I needed to.”

Jeff made a face. “Some of the kids at school…You know how mean kids can be. I guess some of the parents let their kids watch the news. We don’t, but not everybody is as picky as we are about what their kids see. Anyhow. Obviously. They’re…confused about you right now.”

“Terrified of me, I’d say.” He winced, but nodded in acknowledgment. “I guess this is not such a great place for me to take refuge from the media, then, is it?” He blanched, and looked nearly as terrified as the boys had. “I should be going, then.” I turned and went out the front door.

He followed me out. “Dad, wait. Come on, don’t just run away. What do you need? What can I do to help?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Jeff. I don’t know a whole hell of a lot right now. Everything I thought I knew—everything that seemed stable and reliable about my life—has imploded in the past few days. A woman I was starting to fall in love with has been killed, I’m on the verge of being charged with her murder, the university is suddenly treating me like a pariah, and my grandsons think I’m a villain out of some horror movie. I don’t know what I need, or what anybody can do to help. It’s like I’ve stumbled into the Twilight Zone, or some negative-polarity universe where every good thing I had and stood for has gotten twisted into its polar opposite.”

“Tyler and Walker are little kids,” he said. “They don’t understand; they can’t understand. But I can. And I’d like to help. Let’s think about this for a minute. Do you need a lawyer?”

I shook my head. “I’ve already hired one.”

“Who is it? Somebody good?”

I shrugged. “Yes and no. Burt DeVriess.” He groaned. “I know, I know—he’s the best of lawyers and the worst of lawyers. Believe me, I’m painfully aware what a Faustian bargain I’m making. But somebody has done a damn good job of making me look guilty. Now’s not the time to be squeamish about Grease.”

“Okay, I understand. You need a place to stay?”

“Yeah. I imagine KPD’s forensics unit has moved into my house. And a small fleet of TV trucks has taken up residence in the street.”

“Damn,” he said, “I’m sorry. I know how painful this must be.”

“Oh, I doubt it,” I said. “Even I can’t quite comprehend how awful this is.”

He looked frustrated, and I saw him biting back something, and I felt bad for snapping at him in self-pity. “You’re right, I don’t,” he said, “but I’d like to help. Let’s figure out someplace quiet you could go, someplace off the grid.” He thought for a moment. “You don’t really need computer access or television, do you?”

“No,” I said. “In fact, I’d prefer to be as far from TVs as possible.”

“Here’s an idea,” he said. “What about a cabin up at Norris Dam State Park? Remember that week you and Mom and I spent up there, back when I was about ten? Paddling a canoe around the lake, hiking the trails in the woods? That was great.”

“It was,” I agreed. “Cheapest vacation we ever took. Maybe the best, too.”

“Jenny and I took the boys up there one weekend last fall. I don’t think they’ve done a thing to those cabins since I was ten.”

“Still lit by kerosene lanterns? Nothing but grills to cook on?” He smiled and nodded. “Sounds nice,” I said. “But I probably need to be someplace with a phone. And I can’t use my cellphone—I switched it off after the hundredth media call.”

“That’s easy,” he said. “I’ve got an extra cell at the office; the seasonal tax accountants use it when they’re working off-site at clients’ locations. We can run by and get it, make sure there’s a car charger for it. I’ll go to the grocery store with you, if you want, help you load up a cooler with milk and cereal and sandwich fixings and stuff you can grill.” He seemed to be building genuine enthusiasm for the idea, and I felt at least a bit of that energy flowing into me.

“I like it,” I said. “Do me some good to get out of Knoxville and walk in the woods. Let’s go.”

He went inside to confer with Jenny. Five minutes later Jeff and I pulled our cars into the parking lot of his office, and in another ten we were cruising the aisles of Kroger, arguing the relative merits of hot dogs versus hamburgers, mesquite chicken versus honey ham, whole wheat bread versus seven-grain, and Honey Nut Cheerios versus plain. A hundred fifty bucks after that, we loaded the trunk of the Taurus with a cooler laden with sandwich meat, milk, mayo, mustard, and pickles; bread and cereal; fruits and berries; and various members of the crunchy, salty food group. I thanked Jeff for the idea and the cellphone, and left the suburban McMansions of Farragut for the rustic cabins of Norris.

Jeff had called Norris Dam State Park on the way to the grocery store, and by great good fortune had snagged the only cabin available, which had just come open because of a last-minute cancellation. As I left Knoxville behind, I felt a bit of the weight drop from my heart. I found myself looking forward to a quiet week in a cabin where I could divide my time between revising my book and wandering trails beneath towering oaks.

Between Chattanooga and Knoxville, I-75 angled northeast; beyond Knoxville, though, it veered northwest, forsaking the Tennessee Valley for the Cumberland Plateau. And just at the edge of the plateau where the green waters of the Clinch River threaded deep wooded valleys, TVA had built the first of its network of hydroelectric dams in the 1930s, bringing electricity and industrial jobs to a region of rural subsistence farmers. Norris Dam State Park straddled the slopes on either side of the dam; the south side boasted modern chalets and a swimming pool; the north side, which I greatly preferred, had a rustic tearoom and primitive cabins. Mine, it turned out, was at the back of the loop road, right at the base of a trail leading up the hill into a huge, pristine watershed. I unloaded my groceries, brought in my bulging briefcase, and set off up the hill. By the time I returned two hours later, darkness was falling, my legs were spent, and I crawled into bed without eating a bite.

Next morning at six, I awakened to birdsong, and by seven I was immersed in my revisions. Papers sprawled across the entire top of a picnic table, anchored against the breeze by rocks that sparkled with quartz and glossy black streaks of coal.

DeVriess called at ten; I’d phoned him on the drive up the evening before and left the cellphone number on his voice mail. “I’m heading into court on a bank fraud case,” he said, “so I only have a minute. But I wanted to pass along what I just heard by way of the grapevine. I was wrong about your friend Bob Roper, the DA.”

“You mean when you said he’d prosecute me even if I were innocent, long as he thought he could win.”

“Something like that. I underestimated Roper. He’s recusing himself and his staff from your case—says it represents an irreconcilable conflict of interests and loyalties for the entire office.”

“That’s good news,” I said. “Mighty decent of Bob.”

“Maybe,” said Grease. “Or maybe, next time he’s up for reelection, he just doesn’t want the voters of Knox County to remember him as the guy who nailed Dr. Brockton to the cross.”

“Burt, you’re too cynical.”

“I defend the scum of the earth. Present company excepted, of course. Not a job for an optimist.”

“Point taken. Practically speaking, what does this mean?”

“For starters,” he said, “it means the Tennessee Conference of District Attorneys General has got to scout around and find some other DA to handle the case. Preferably somebody who hasn’t worked with you.”

“They might have to go to Middle Tennessee or even West Tennessee for that,” I said. “I think I’ve testified for all the DAs here in East Tennessee.”

“So depending on how long it takes to find somebody, we could be in limbo for a while. Weeks, maybe months.”

“Ah. Then that’s not such good news after all,” I said. “I hate limbo. I’m suspended from my teaching job, I’m holed up in a state park, my grandkids think I’m a monster, and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“I’ll press the court for a speedy trial, Bill, but I don’t know that I have any influence.”

“Well, do your best.”

“Okay. I’ll call you whenever there’s news.”

I forced myself to refocus on my revisions, and soon I was immersed again. I spent the rest of the morning combing through five years’ worth of research papers on the pubic symphysis—the joint at the midline of the pelvis, where the left and right pubic bones meet—and updating my textbook’s discussion of how features and changes in the bone at that junction could be used to estimate the age of a female skeleton with remarkable accuracy. After lunch, I switched to cranial fractures; one of the department’s graduate students had just completed a fascinating thesis describing a series of experiments with skulls and a “drop tower” in the Engineering Department: a platform attached to a vertical slide which allowed her to subject the skulls to measurable, precisely controlled impacts and compare the results. It was doubtful that a living person would ever be strapped to the drop tower and smashed to death—unless intradepartmental rivalries were far worse in engineering than in anthropology—but the data from the thesis could prove extremely useful in helping determine whether the force inflicted by, say, a baseball bat or a fall down a staircase was sufficient to cause a fatal fracture.

Absorbed in the science, I was blessedly oblivious for hours. Just as the light was fading and I was gathering up my papers for the night, the phone rang again. It was DeVriess once more. “There’s good news and bad news,” he said.

“What’s the good news?”

“The good news is, you’re out of limbo. They found a DA who can take the case. New guy down in Polk County. Doesn’t know you from Adam. The Tennessee Highway Patrol actually picked him up in a chopper and set him down on the roof of the City County Building at noon today.”

“I’m afraid to ask, but what’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is, the other shoe has already dropped. The DA pro tem and Evers went to the grand jury this afternoon. I just got a courtesy call from Evers. Bill, the grand jury has issued a warrant for your arrest.”

IT WAS STILL EARLY April, but the midday sun hit me like a slap in the face from a mean streak of late August as I locked the front door of my house and pushed through the driveway’s shimmer to the Taurus. Thirty-six hours after settling into a shady cabin at Norris Dam State Park, I’d been summoned back to Knoxville, back to the world of suits and ties and surveillance cameras and arrest warrants.

In the sweltering heat that engulfed me, the rental car’s vanilla paint looked brilliant rather than boring. The American president might remain unconvinced about global warming, but I was a devout believer. Spring came earlier and earlier to East Tennessee, and fall hung on longer and longer before anything remotely approaching winter weather set in—for what seemed like only a few weeks—and then things began heating up again. By the time I got the car started and the air conditioner blasting, my T-shirt was glued to my skin, my dress shirt was beginning to stick to my T-shirt, and my suit coat was bunched and wrinkled.

Of course, global warming might not have been entirely to blame for the sweat. I was headed to Burt DeVriess’s office, and from there, Burt was driving me to the Knox County Detention Center. I was turning myself in: surrendering voluntarily on charges of first-degree murder and—a charge I hadn’t even thought to worry about—desecrating a corpse. Of course, if I got the death penalty for first-degree murder, there wasn’t much way for the state to up the penalty for the second charge, so maybe it was just as well I hadn’t sweated that one.

Burt had had to explain the proceedings to me three times before I retained all the details. Detective Evers and Michael Donner, the Polk County DA who’d agreed to fill in for Bob Roper, had spent a brisk twenty minutes summarizing the evidence against me for the grand jury. On the basis of the surveillance video, the bloody sheets, and hair and fibers linking me to Jess Carter’s body, the grand jury had signed a “presentment,” which prompted the Knox County Criminal Court clerk to issue a capias for me. “What’s a capias?” I asked.

“Legalese for arrest warrant,” he said. “You’ve heard the Latin phrase carpe diem, ‘seize the day’? Capias is a noun form, but it means ‘grab that sumbitch,’ bottom line.”

“But they’re not coming after me with blue lights and handcuffs?”

“They will,” he said, “if you make them. But I negotiated to drive you out to the booking facility in my car so you can turn yourself in with some semblance of dignity.”

He had negotiated for more than that, as it turned out. DeVriess didn’t want me to have to walk in the front door of the detention center, as he figured there was a fair chance someone might leak the news to the media. Instead, he worked out a deal that would allow him to drive me into the booking facility’s “sally port,” a lower-level entrance with a big garage door, used by police cruisers and paddy wagons transporting prisoners to court and back. Normally only official vehicles were allowed in the sally port, but Grease persuaded Evers to let him drive me inside in his own car. Evers would meet us there and accompany us into the sally port in his unmarked Crown Vic, where I would be frisked, then taken inside and fingerprinted and booked. “Jesus,” I said, “fingerprinted like a common criminal.”

“Trust me, Doc,” DeVriess had responded, “you’re being treated like a very uncommon criminal. This is what they call a high-profile booking, which means you’re getting the kid-glove treatment normally reserved for elected officials and old-money millionaires.” He’d paused. “Speaking of money, Doc, we need to arrange for your bond.” My bail had been set at $500,000, a sum that had made me gasp.

“Hell, I don’t have that kind of money,” I’d said. “If I sold my house and my truck and what little stock I own, I’m not sure I’d have it.”

“It’s okay. That’s why God created bail bondsmen.” For the low, low price of $50,000—a sum that would drain all my reserves and still tap my credit to its limits—a bail bondsman would post the required 10 percent of the bail. “The bondsman will need to put a lien on your property,” DeVriess had added, “just in case you skip town and leave him on the hook for the other $450,000.”

“I had no idea being a criminal was so damn expensive,” I said. “You need to be rich to be a murderer.”

“Not to be a murderer,” he corrected. “Just to beat the rap.”

When I reached DeVriess’s office, his receptionist, Chloe, greeted me with a sunny smile, as if I were here to set up educational trust funds for my grandsons. “Hello, Dr. Brockton. Nice to see you again,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. DeVriess you’re here. Can I get you some coffee or tea, or a soft drink?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I have to sign some ruinous paperwork, but then I think we’re gonna saddle up and move out.”

Chloe smiled. “One for the road?” I shook my head, and she pressed an intercom button on her phone. “Mr. DeVriess? Dr. Brockton is here…I did, but he turned me down.” She looked up at me and winked. “He seems itchy to saddle up and move out…All right, I’ll bring him.”

Chloe led me back to DeVriess’s office. “Thanks, Chloe,” he said, coming around the glass desk to shake my hand. Twenty grand bought a lot of courtesy, it seemed. “Bill, have a seat.” I sat. “Let me go over the bonding agreement, and tell you what to expect out at the detention facility,” he said. I found it hard to focus on the details of my financial destruction and impending arrest, but when he slid papers across the desk at me, I signed on the lines indicated by the cheerily colored tabs labeled SIGN HERE. After I had signed over all my assets, and perhaps my immortal soul, DeVriess said, “Okay, unless there’s something I haven’t covered, we should probably saddle up now.” He smiled to make sure I noticed the echo of my words. I tried to smile back, to show him I appreciated the effort, but a grimace was as close as I could get. He dialed a number on his phone and said, “Detective? Burt DeVriess. We’re heading out now. We’ll see you out at the detention center.”

We descended in silence to his car, which was parked directly beside the elevator. “I’ll bet I’m the first Knox County prisoner ever delivered in a Bentley,” I said as I opened the door. We left downtown on the James White Parkway, then bore east on I-40 to the 640 bypass, where we backtracked north and west a couple of miles. We got off 640 onto Washington Pike and angled northeast for maybe five miles. This corner of Knox County had been farm country for most of my twenty-five years in Knoxville, but I noticed that even here, condos and subdivisions were sprouting like fungus amid the weathered farm houses.

DeVriess slowed and signaled a left, and we turned onto Maloneyville Road and threaded a small pocket of ranch houses. Then we came to an S-curve, and the road wound down into a wide valley. On the right, behind a fence of chain link and barbed wire, stood the old Knox County Penal Farm, a barracks of ancient concrete with a rusting tin roof and a square brick smokestack. Ahead—below and to our left—sprawled a new golf course and, just beyond it, a huge, multiwing complex. There were no guard towers, and there wasn’t a perimeter of high razor wire, yet it was unmistakably a correctional facility. Confronted with the grim, tangible reality of it, I felt my stomach clench. “Jesus, I had no idea it was so big,” I said. “How many prisoners are in there?”

“Right now? No idea,” said DeVriess. “The capacity is 667. Any more than that, they’re violating a federal cap. See that new cell block they’re building right beside the golf course? That’ll bring the maximum to nearly a thousand.” He sounded sad as he said it. I glanced at him and he looked thoughtful, a word I had never associated with Burt DeVriess. “Did you know, Doc, that two million Americans are behind bars right now? Biggest prison population on earth.” I did not know that. “We also have the highest incarceration rate of any nation. Six times higher than China, a place we like to believe is far more oppressive than we are.”

“You sure about that statistic, Burt?”

“I study this stuff the way you study teeth and bones, Doc. The US of A is home to only five percent of the world’s population, but one-quarter of the world’s prisoners. Something’s wrong with that.”

He was right, though I didn’t know precisely how. “Well, let’s hope you can keep me from becoming prisoner number two million and one.”

The main entrance was a large driveway to our left, marked by a seven-pointed star on a grassy embankment. The star was eight or ten feet across, labeled KNOX COUNTY SHERIFF. DeVriess continued past the driveway, past the main building, and turned behind a smaller building, a two-story barracks set inside a high fence. A basketball court was tucked into the angle formed by the L-shaped building. Just beyond this building, we bore left onto a one-lane driveway which circled back toward the central complex. The building’s main entrance was actually at the front of the second floor; we were heading for a large garage door notched into the ground floor, almost like a basement garage. An unmarked Crown Victoria sat idling to one side. When DeVriess approached in the Bentley, the Crown Vic pulled up to a speaker and John Evers leaned out and spoke as if he were ordering fast food in a drive-through lane. With a thunk and a whir, the big garage door began rolling upward. Evers edged forward, into the dark opening, and DeVriess followed, practically on his bumper. When both cars were inside, the door whirred and clunked down again.

Three uniformed officers stepped from a curb to our right. One walked around to meet Detective Evers as he emerged from his car; the other two positioned themselves beside my door. Evers handed over a form—the capias, I guessed—to the officer I assumed was in charge, and then motioned to me to get out. As DeVriess and I opened our doors and got out of the Bentley, the two deputies stepped to either side of me, each grasping an arm. DeVriess started around the front of the car, saying, “Hey, hey, that is not called for. You take your hands off of my client.” The two officers responded by tightening their grips.

Their supervisor hustled around and laid his palm on Burt’s chest none too gently. “You listen up,” he barked, “this is our facility. Our rules. We are extending every possible courtesy to Dr. Brockton, but he has been charged with murder, and we will not risk the safety of our officers. If he does not cooperate fully—if you do not cooperate fully—all deals are off, we put him in restraints and stripes, and we treat him exactly like every other prisoner. Is that clear?”

“Burt, it’s okay,” I said. “They’re doing their job, and they’re doing it right. This isn’t a battle we need to fight.” DeVriess looked unhappy, but he nodded and kept quiet, and the officers relaxed their grips a bit.

“Thank you, Dr. Brockton,” said the officer in charge. “I’m Sergeant Andrews, by the way, the shift supervisor. We need you to step over here to this wall, please, so we can pat you down.” The deputies steered me toward the spot he had indicated. “Please place your hands against this blue safety pad, shoulder height, far apart.” I assumed the position I’d seen on television many times, and the deputies’ four hands gave me a thorough going-over. One of them removed the small leather case clipped to my belt; he looked surprised and a little sad when he saw what was inside. It was my consultant’s badge from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I’d worn it partly as a gesture of vain pride, partly as a not-so-subtle message to the people booking me, and partly as a desperate effort to hang on to my sense of who I was and what I stood for in this world.

Once they were sure I wasn’t carry ing any concealed weapons, Andrews told me to empty my pockets, remove my watch and belt, and take off my dress shirt, leaving me in my T-shirt. On a clear plastic bag labeled INMATE PROPERTY BAG, he wrote my name, date of birth, Social Security number, and the date and time. Then he listed every item, including my TBI badge, and sealed them in the bag with a self-adhesive strip along the bag’s top flap. Then he had me sign the bag to indicate that the inventory was right. Down below, I noticed another line where I would sign—presumably within an hour—when they gave me back my property and released me. In this part of the machine, at least, the wheels of justice appeared to be well-oiled cogs.

I heard Andrews telling Evers and DeVriess to pull forward when the garage door ahead of Evers’s car was raised. But before that happened, I was escorted from the sally port and into the building’s interior through a glass door labeled INTAKE.

The room was large, clean, and brightly lit by fluorescents. It was also equipped with at least three video cameras that I could see. I’d already noticed several on the roof of the facility as we approached—they swiveled, tracking our trajectory—another camera outside the sally port, and a couple inside the port. “Y’all sure have a lot of cameras,” I said to my escorts. “Must be quite a command post if you’ve got a monitor for every camera.”

The deputies glanced at each other in surprise. Most prisoners didn’t engage in such conversation, I gathered. “Yes, sir,” said one, “it’s a pretty advanced system. Made by a company called Black Creek. We’ve got over two hundred cameras, so there’s no way to have separate monitors.” He pointed at the three cameras suspended from the ceiling of the main intake room. “Central Command has a touch-screen computer system that shows the position of every camera on every floor. All you do is touch the icon for the camera you want, and the video feed from that camera pops up on the screen.”

I nodded. “Sounds smart. You archive the images on videotape, or on a big hard drive?”

“A monster hard drive,” he said. “We brought this system online a month ago. We’ve saved every image from every camera since, and we’ve only used a fraction of the storage capacity so far.”

“Well,” I said, “if I’d known I would be on so many cameras and archived for posterity, I’d have gotten a haircut this morning.”

He laughed, but suddenly he seemed embarrassed, as if by joking about my arrest, I had reminded him why I had been arrested. “We need to go in here and take your picture and get your fingerprints,” he said, pointing to a small room off one corner of the intake area.

Two technicians occupied the room. One instructed me to stand with my back to one wall—“Put your back against the X,” he said, “and look at that X on the opposite wall.” That X was fastened to the top of a camera which snapped a photo that soon appeared on a computer screen.