Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone - A Body Farm Novel

She glared, then laughed. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Truce. I’m not still jealous of her.” She paused for half a beat. “Smart, cute little bitch.” She laughed again. So did I. Miranda had a way of tipping me off-balance, then catching me just before I went sprawling. “Actually, I didn’t come by just to stomp on your feet of clay,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I was so enjoying it. What other delights await me?”

“Our research subject, oh-five thirty-one?” I was instantly alert; 05–31 was the case number we’d assigned to the corpse tied to the tree at the Farm, because he was the thirty-first forensic case of 2005.

“What about him?”

“He’s getting pretty interesting. You might want to come out and take a look.”

“I was planning to head that way after I finished grading these papers and eating lunch,” I said, “but somehow those seem less compelling now. Let’s go.”

The department’s pickup truck was parked a flight of stairs away, near the tunnel that penetrated the stadium at field level, at the north end zone-the tunnel the UT football team ran through to the cheers of a hundred thousand people on game days. The truck was angled nose-first between two of the columns holding up the stadium’s upper deck. I backed around, tucking its rear bumper between two other columns, and threaded the one-lane ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, weaving a path around several students and an oncoming maintenance truck.

Turning right onto Neyland Drive, we paralleled the river, driving downstream. The morning was sunny and unseasonably warm for mid-March-at least, what used to pass for unseasonably warm-and there were already a fair number of cyclists and runners on the greenway that bordered Neyland. The School of Agriculture’s trial gardens-a couple of carefully landscaped acres radiating from a large circular arbor-were already ablaze with daffodils, forsythia, and tulips. I slowed to admire the view, which was just as well, because a hundred yards ahead, a truck hauling a long horse trailer was making a leisurely right turn into the entrance of the veterinary school.

“Hey, speaking of horses, what ever happened to Mike Henderson?” asked Miranda. “He was doing research on the effects of fire on bone a while back. Worked at the vet school part-time, and used to burn horse and cow bones to study the fracture patterns, didn’t he? Laying the groundwork for a big project with human bone.”

“Well, that was his plan,” I said. “His M.A. thesis had some problems. He burned a lot of bones, and he got some nice pictures showing the difference between how dry bone and green bone fracture in a fire. But I’m not sure he added much in the way of interpretation or analysis.”

“I saw some of those pictures at a poster session at the forensic conference a year or two ago,” she said. “Really interesting. The dry bones he burned fractured in a sort of rectilinear pattern, like logs in a campfire. But the green bones fractured in a sort of spiraling pattern, right?” I nodded. “How come?”

“Not sure,” I said. “Nobody is. You wanna know my personal theory?”

“Oh yes, please, Doctor,” Miranda whispered huskily. “I love it when you share your personal theories with me.” I’d laid myself wide open to that brickbat of sarcasm.

“Okay, smart-ass, I think it has to do with the collagen,” I said. “There’s still a lot of collagen in fresh bone. I don’t think anybody’s done research that supports this yet, but my theory is, the collagen matrix has a little twist to it. That would make the bone stronger. Sort of like those twisted pine trees you see growing on windy cliff-tops, you know? The spiral grain makes them a lot tougher than the tall, straight trees that grow where the wind doesn’t blow so hard.”

“Nature’s a pretty good structural engineer,” she agreed.

I turned onto the entrance ramp that would carry us up to Alcoa Highway, which spanned the river and led to the medical complex and the Body Farm. “It’s not too late to change your dissertation topic,” I said. “I bet if you took comparative X-rays and MRIs of bones when they were fresh and then after they’d dried, you could shed some light on the structure of the collagen.”

“Sure,” she said. “Just flush all my data on osteoporosis down the toilet and start over.” I nodded. “So when I hit the seven-year mark as a graduate student, can you get me tenure?”

“If it means I get to keep you as a colleague,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “You’d feel threatened by me if I were a colleague.”

“Ha,” I said. “I feel threatened by you already.” I laughed. “I guess that means I’m either brave or foolish.”

“Guess so,” she said. She didn’t indicate which one her money was on.

As we crossed the bridge over the river, I noticed the water level had risen during the night. Every winter, the Tennessee Valley Authority lowers the levels in its chain of reservoirs so that there’s room to accommodate plenty of runoff during the rainy season. By mid-March, though, the rains tend to taper off, so TVA begins refilling the pools to their normal summertime highs. Some of the lakes up in the mountains-Norris and Fontana, especially-dropped ten or twenty feet in the winter, exposing high layers of red clay banks ringing the green waters. Fort Loudoun, though-as a mainline reservoir that had to be kept open to barge traffic-only dropped about three feet. It was enough to expose shoreline for arrowhead-hunters, but not enough to strand boats on the mud like beached whales.

The redbuds and dogwoods along Alcoa Highway were starting to bloom. Normally the redbuds came first, then-just as they were winding down-the dogwoods burst out. Some years, though, when the botanical planets aligned in some magical way, the two species bloomed in unison, and this was shaping up as one of those glorious years. Maybe it was just because I was finally getting clear of my two-year grieving spell over Kathleen’s death, or maybe because I felt the stirrings of desire for Jess-encouraged by what I took to be flirting on her part-but this spring seemed to reek of wanton, shameless fertility. The air was almost indecent with the scent of blossoms and pollen. It was the sort of spring that had inspired pagan festivals in other cultures, other centuries.

UT’s College of Agriculture had a dairy farm beside the hospital, bounded by a big bend in the river; on a morning like this, with the trees in full flower and the black-and-white Holsteins arranged on the emerald grass, the view was like something out of a painting: Tennessee Pastoral, it might be titled. Tuck the Body Farm into one corner, and it would be like one of those seventeenth-century memento mori paintings featuring a skull or bludgeoned animal nestled among the dewy fruits and vegetables to remind us of our mortality. Sort of like the role I played at UT faculty meetings, I supposed.

I parked beside the entrance and unlocked the padlocks on the chain-link fence and the inner wooden gate. We didn’t have any redbuds or dogwoods inside the Body Farm, but we did have dandelions galore in the clearing, bright splashes of yellow amid the new grass and old bones.

As Miranda and I trudged up the path toward the upper end of the facility, I noticed a new body bag a few feet off the trail, with one hand and one foot exposed. “Is that the highway fatality?”

“Yes,” she said. “We brought him out from the morgue yesterday morning.”

I knelt down beside the body and folded the bag back. As I did, a small squadron of blowflies swarmed up from around and beneath the black plastic. “And he was walking on I-40?”

“Yeah, wandering along that elevated stretch downtown where there’s no shoulder. Stumbled into the traffic lane, and some high school student smacked right into him. I feel sorry for the kid-apparently he’s pretty torn up about it.”