Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone - A Body Farm Novel

“Bill? Garland Hamilton. Listen, I wanted you to hear this from me. The Board of Medical Examiners voted to put me in the stocks for ninety days, but they gave me credit for time served. So I’ll be back in the office a week from today.”

“Well, I know that must come as good news to you,” I said carefully.

“Oh, I’m dying to get back to work,” he said. “Listen, Bill, I meant what I said the other day. I know we didn’t see eye to eye in that Ledbetter case”-I almost laughed at the understatement; it was like saying George Bush and Al Gore didn’t see eye to eye-“but I hope we can put that behind us and start with a clean page.”

I hesitated. Again I sought refuge in ambiguity. “A clean page would be nice.”

“Great,” he said. “What’d I miss? Any interesting cases come through while I was out?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to brief him on Jess’s work. “Well, I’ve been working on a homicide, but it’s from Chattanooga, so it’s in Jess’s jurisdiction anyhow,” I said. “Other than that, it’s been pretty quiet lately.”

“Glad to hear it. Listen, I won’t keep you. Just wanted to touch base, and let you know I’ll be seeing you next week.”

“Right. Next week. Thanks.”

As I hung up the phone, I felt my heart sink. I wasn’t sure how much of the heaviness was because Garland Hamilton would be coming back soon, and how much was because Jess Carter wouldn’t be.

Oh, buck up, I scolded myself. You haven’t seen the last of her yet. You’re going out with her tomorrow night. Another inner voice butted in. Yeah, but it’s work. And you better wear your bulletproof underwear. The first voice squawked, I really didn’t need to know that.

THE DRIVE FROM KNOXVILLEto Chattanooga passed in a hundred-mile blur of white and fuchsia blossoms. Dogwoods and redbuds both loved sunlight and limestone, so wherever I-75 cut through layers of rock, the highway was lined with enough flowering trees to make Home amp; Garden Television-which was based in Knoxville-and HGTV’s entire army of landscapers and gardeners hang their heads in shame.

As I crested East Ridge and started the swooping S-curve that led down into the valley floor cradling Chattanooga, I replayed the morning’s conversation with Jess, who had called to finalize the arrangements for our research outing.

“I booked you a room at the Marriott downtown,” she had said.

“A hotel room? I need a hotel room?”

“Trust me,” she said, “you won’t want to think about driving back to Knoxville by the time things wind down at this nightclub.”

But driving back to Knoxville had not been what I’d been thinking about. What I’d been thinking about, and hoping for, was an invitation to spend the night at Jess’s. I tried not to show my disappointment. After all, so far we had exchanged only one kiss. It was a memorable kiss, and I hoped it wouldn’t be the last. Still, it was only one-a pretty meager foundation for a sleepover invitation.

“Ten o’clock seems like a pretty late starting time,” I said.

“Trust me, the party doesn’t really get going until midnight at this place.”

And so it was that I now found myself checking into the Marriott, a sleek tower of black glass, hours before Jess and I were scheduled to visit the nightclub where she hoped we might pick up the trail of her drag-queen murder victim.

I parked in the garage beneath the hotel, checked into my room, and decided to wander down toward the Tennessee Aquarium, one of Chattanooga’s main tourist attractions. I’d brought Jeff ’s boys to the aquarium during their last Christmas break, and the facility’s design had struck me as ingenious. I welcomed the chance for a return visit.

The main building’s exhibits began five or six stories above the entrance level. There, beneath a huge glass pyramid, was a convincing re-creation of a Tennessee mountain rain forest. Technically, the Great Smoky Mountains were classed as a temperate rain forest, which explained the lush vegetation and rushing streams; in the aquarium’s topmost exhibit, mist swirled and water dripped convincingly from trees into streams and pools. Within those streams and pools, brook trout and salamanders and otters darted behind glass walls.

Descending through the aquarium’s series of exhibits, level by level, was like journeying down a river to the sea, through a succession of realistic habitats. Within them dwelled hundreds of species, not just aquatic life but birds and reptiles as well, including one monstrous eastern diamondback rattlesnake, whose body was as thick as my forearm and whose tail sported fifteen rattles, which I counted twice in disbelief. In one tank, two scuba divers were feeding fish by hand; one of the fish-clearly well fed-was a five-foot-long catfish that probably weighed as much as I did. When the fish opened its mouth to feed, its maw looked nearly big enough to engulf the diver’s entire head.

After completing my journey downriver, through the delta, and out into the ocean, I swam outdoors into a steamy southern afternoon-a spring day that felt like high summer. Running along one side of the aquarium’s exterior, from the entrance plaza down the hillside to the Tennessee River, was a cascade of water designed as a tribute to the Cherokee Indians, the first human inhabitants of eastern Tennessee. The cascade originated as trickles of water representing the Trail of Tears, the brutal march that evicted the Cherokees from Tennessee and forced them onto a reservation in Oklahoma. As the water coursed down the hill, it grew in volume, fed by hidden spigots, into a respectable-sized stream, dropping over ledges into shallow pools. Children in shorts and bathing suits and rolled-up jeans waded in these; alongside, parents and older siblings and babysitters lounged on the concrete terraces, a few brave souls sunbathing in bikinis amid scores of little sneakers and flipflops.

When I reached the bottom of the cascade, I crossed the street to Ross’s Landing on the river itself and found myself wandering upriver along a wooden boardwalk, the beginning of the long ribbon of park that stretched for miles up to Chickamauga Dam. A paddle-wheeled riverboat moored at the landing gave a blast on its whistle, and a handful of tourists responded by scurrying toward it. A runner passed, sheathed in sweat, and I remembered Jess saying that somewhere along here, a man and his dog had died a gruesome death. I began walking faster, with more purpose now, until suddenly I stopped. Perhaps a quarter mile upstream from the aquarium and Ross’s Landing, the riverwalk passed beneath a pair of bridges, then zigzagged up a steep hillside toward a striking contemporary building-the new wing of the art museum-cantilevered daringly off the edge of the river bluff. Here beneath the bridges, an odd little amphitheater had been terraced into the hillside, and on one of the lower terraces, yellow and black fragments of crime scene tape clung to bridge supports, and the tan pea gravel still bore traces of blood. I studied the low space beneath the bridges as I would any other death scene, trying to decipher patterns in the bloodstains, but the gravel had been rinsed and raked and scuffed too much to tell me anything. I pictured this place at dusk, rather than in the bright light of mid afternoon, imagining what it must have felt like to be set upon by malevolent young men for no other reason than that I was a handy target for years of anger and despair.

My gloomy reverie was interrupted by the hum of rubber tires on the riverwalk. A brightly clad cyclist pedaled past on a mountain bike. When he reached the sharp switchbacks angling up the bluff, I expected him to dismount; instead, in a display of balance and precision I would not have thought possible on two wheels, he made one hairpin turn after another-at least twenty in all-before topping out near the museum and speeding off. I laughed in amazement and delight and ascended the hill myself, huffing and sweating by the time I zigged and zagged clear to the top. Once there, I wandered the neighborhood-an assortment of galleries, cafés, and inns clustered near the art museum-and ate dinner in the courtyard of a restaurant. By the time I ambled back to the Marriott, my legs were tired, my feet were sore, and I had just enough time to shower and change before meeting Jess in the lobby for our research excursion.