Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone - A Body Farm Novel

“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.

I WOULD NOT HAVEbelieved a single day could creep by so slowly. But then again, I would not have believed the nightmarish turn events had taken ten hours before at the Body Farm, either. What I found believable clearly had no relation to reality any longer.

Miranda was scrubbing the femur as if her life-or even her Ph.D.-depended on removing every molecule of soft tissue before putting it in the steam kettle to simmer. We had been working in the morgue’s decomp room for an hour now, cleaning the bulk of the tissue off the bones of the research body that had been tied to the pine tree. The research body that Jess’s body had been obscenely embracing.

Garland Hamilton had brought Jess’s body over around noon, and KPD had released the scene at four-thirty. By five, all the cops and emergency vehicles were gone, and so, therefore, were the camera crews. As soon as the parking lot had cleared out, Miranda and I drove up to the gate in the department’s truck, collected the remains of the research body, and brought it into the decomp room to process. I blamed this research project, in some vague way, for Jess’s death, and I wanted to rid myself and the facility of all traces of it. Besides, Jess was gone, and we had already pinned down Craig Willis’s time since death to roughly one week before the hiker found the battered body on the bluff outside Chattanooga.

Neither Miranda nor I had spoken a word as we worked. For me, the shock and grief I felt over Jess’s murder were overwhelming. I felt myself immersed, close to going under; the simplest acts-opening a door, flipping a light switch, speaking a sentence-seemed foreign, baffling, exhausting. Miranda had not known Jess nearly as well as I had; she might have been keeping silent out of deference to the pain radiating off me, although she, too, might have been too upset herself to feel like talking. A close brush with death seems to turn people into exaggerated versions of themselves, the same way a few drinks do: the mean get meaner, the sad get weepy, the talkative just will not shut up. So it wasn’t surprising that two introverted scientists would fall silent when a colleague of both, and a love of one, had been murdered.

But there was another explanation for the tense silence that occupied the room, almost as palpably as if it were a third person: Jess Carter’s body was being autopsied across the hall, in the main autopsy suite, by Garland Hamilton. He’d started two hours before, according to a morgue technician who greeted me with a stricken face upon my arrival. My guess was that unless Garland found something unusual, he would be finishing soon.

It added insult to injury to know that Jess’s maimed body was being examined by a medical examiner I knew to be sloppy and incompetent. He might overlook or misread evidence, which could compromise the police department’s effort to understand the crime and pinpoint the killer; conversely, he might imagine evidence where none actually existed, as he had in Billy Ray Ledbetter’s autopsy, when he saw an accidental cut in the flesh of the back and interpreted it-or, rather, misinterpreted it-as a deep, lethal stab wound that zigzagged across the spine and threaded the rib cage before burrowing into a lung.

As I scraped a bit of tissue from the foramen magnum-the large opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord emerged-the scalpel slipped from my right hand; I made a fruitless grab for it, and the skull rolled from my left hand and thudded into the stainless steel sink, upside down. I stared down at it-the top of the cranium had nested into the drain, and the water pouring from the faucet was beginning to back up in the sink-and I could not think what to do. I stood transfixed by the rising water: Now it was filling the eye orbits; now the nasal cavity; now lapping at the teeth of the upper jaw. Miranda came and stood beside me; she laid one hand gently on my back; with the other, she leaned across the sink and shut off the water. “It’s okay,” she said gently. “You don’t have to do this. Why don’t you go home?”

“I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I know I won’t like it there.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Not really. But I don’t hate it as much as I’ll hate being home.”

“Then stay,” she said. “Just try not to break anything. How about you clean the rest of the long bones and let me do the skull?” Without waiting for an answer, she lifted the skull from the sink and took it to the other sink, where she had been working.

“I slept with her,” I said, still staring into the now-empty sink. “With Jess. Last week, when I went down to Chattanooga to look at Craig Willis’s body and go out to the crime scene. She invited me to her house that night, and we went to bed.” I turned to look at Miranda and saw that she had reddened slightly. She bent over the skull and began scrubbing bits of tissue from its recesses with a toothbrush.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know. Because it was important to me. It was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. It felt like the beginning of something. And now it’s gone. She’s gone.”

She looked at me now, and her embarrassment had given way to compassion. “It’s not your fault, you know.”

“No I don’t,” I said, “and neither do you. You’re trying to make me feel better, and I appreciate that, but I can’t shake the thought that there might be some connection with me.”

“Like what?”

“Like…I don’t know. Maybe if she hadn’t gotten involved with me, her ex-husband might not have flown into a murderous rage. Maybe if she hadn’t been in my office that day when Craig Willis’s mother showed up, that crazy woman would never have seen her and decided Jess was evil.”

“Maybe if she hadn’t gotten involved with you, Jess would have gone off her rocker and shot up a kindergarten. Maybe if she’d driven away from your office five minutes sooner that day, she’d have triggered a five-car pileup on I-75 that would have killed the medical researcher who’s on the verge of curing cancer.”

“What medical researcher? What are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is this,” she said. “If you’re going to play what-if-which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism-you have to play it both ways. If you’re going to imagine yourself as an accidental villain, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero. As somebody who prevented God-knows-what dire disaster simply by doing exactly the things you did. And who knows,” she added, “maybe the physicists are right; maybe there really are zillions of parallel universes. And maybe in those parallel universes, all the improbable scenarios we imagine really do happen, and all the wild conspiracy theories we imagine really are true.”