Jefferson Bass - The Devil's Bones

THE LAST DROP OF DAYLIGHT WAS FADING FROM THEwestern sky-a draining that seemed more a suffocation than a sunset, a final faint gasp as the day died of heatstroke. To the east, a dull copper moon, just on the downhill side of full, struggled above the crest of the Great Smoky Mountains. From where I stood, in a ridgetop pasture above the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers-above the headwaters of the Tennessee-I had a ringside view of the demise of the day and the wavering birth of the night.

Just below the ridge, across the river on Dickinson Island, the lights of the Island Home Airport winked on, etching the runway’s perimeter in white and the taxiway in cobalt blue. The main landmarks of downtown Knoxville shimmered a few miles farther downstream-two tall office towers, a wedge-shaped Mayan-looking Marriott, the high bridges spanning the river, and the looming waterfront complex of Baptist Hospital. A mile beyond those, as the fish swims, lay the University of Tennessee campus and Neyland Stadium, where the UT Volunteers packed in a hundred thousand football fans every game. Football season would kick off with a night game in three weeks, and the stadium’s lights were ablaze tonight, in some sort of preseason scrimmage against the darkness. The lights loomed high above the field; a series of additions to the stadium-an upper deck and skyboxes-had taken the structure higher and higher into the sky; another expansion or two and Neyland Stadium would be the city’s tallest skyscraper. The lights themselves were almost blinding, even at this distance, but the water softened their reflection to quicksilver, turning the Tennessee into a dazzling, incandescent version of Moon River. It was stunning, and I couldn’t help thinking that even on an off-season night Neyland Stadium was still the tail that wagged Knoxville.

Tucked beneath the stadium, along a curving corridor that echoed its ellipse, was UT’s Anthropology Department, which I’d spent twenty-five years building from a small undergraduate major to one of the world’s leading Ph.D. programs. A quarter mile long and one room wide, Anthropology occupied the outer side of the stadium’s dim, windowless second-floor hallway. Mercifully, the classrooms and labs and graduate-student offices did possess windows, though the view was a bizarre and grimy one, consisting mainly of girders and cross braces-the framework supporting those hundred thousand foot-stomping football fans in the bleachers, keeping them from crashing down amid the countless human bones shelved beneath them.

Many of the bones catalogued in the bowels of Neyland Stadium had arrived by way of the Anthropology Research Facility-the Body Farm-a three-acre patch of wooded hillside behind UT Medical Center. At any given moment, a hundred human corpses were progressing from fresh body to bare bones there, helped along by legions of bacteria and bugs, plus the occasional marauding raccoon or possum or skunk. By studying the events and the timing as bodies decomposed under a multitude of experimental conditions-nude bodies, clothed bodies, buried bodies, submerged bodies, fat bodies, thin bodies, bodies in cars and in sheds and in rolls of scrap carpeting-my graduate students and colleagues and I had bootstrapped the Body Farm into the world’s leading source of experimental data on both what happens to bodies after death and when it happens. Our body of research, so to speak, allowed us to pinpoint time since death with increasing precision. As a result, any time police-police anywhere-asked for help solving a real-world murder, we could check the weather data, assess the degree of decomposition, and give an accurate estimate of when the person had been killed.

Tonight would yield a bit more data to the scientific literature and a few hundred more bones to the collection. We were conducting this experiment miles from the Body Farm, but I had brought the Farm with me-two of its inhabitants anyhow-to this isolated pasture. I couldn’t conduct tonight’s research so close to downtown, the UT campus, and the hospital. I needed distance, darkness, and privacy for what I was about to do.

I turned my gaze from the city’s glow and studied the two cars nestled in the high grass nearby. In the faint light, it was hard to tell they were rusted-out hulks. It was also difficult to discern that the two figures behind the steering wheels were corpses: wrecked bodies driving wrecked cars, on what was about to become a road trip to hell.

THE TOW-TRUCKdriver who had brought the vehicles out to the UT Ag farm a few hours before-minus their cadaverous drivers-clearly thought I was crazy. “Most times,” he’d said, “I’m hauling cars like this to the junkyard, not from the junkyard.”

I smiled. “It’s an agricultural experiment,” I’d said. “We’re transplanting wrecks to see if a new junkyard takes root.”

“Oh, it’ll take root all right,” he said. “I guaran-damn-tee you. Word gets out there’s a new dump here, you’ll have you a bumper crop of cars and trucks and warshin’ machines before you know it.” He spit a ropy stream of tobacco juice, which rolled across the dirt at his feet and then quivered dustily for a moment. “Shit, I know all kinds of folks be glad to help with that experiment.”

I laughed. “Thanks anyhow,” I said. “Actually, I lied. We are doing an experiment, but it’s not agricultural, it’s forensic. We’re going to cremate a couple of bodies in these cars and study the burned bones.”

He eyed me suspiciously, as if I might be about to enlist him forcibly as one of the research subjects, but then his face broke into a leathery grin. “Aw, hell, you’re that bone-detective guy, ain’t you? Dr. Bodkin?”

“Brockton”-I smiled again-“but that’s close enough.”

“I knew you looked familiar. My wife’s a big fan of all them forensic shows on TV. She talks about donating her body to you’uns. But I don’t think I could hardly handle that.”

“Well, no pressure,” I said. “We can use all the bodies we can get, but we’re getting plenty. Nearly a hundred and fifty a year now. We’ll put her to good use if she winds up with us, but we’ll be fine if she doesn’t.”

He eyed the bed of my pickup truck, which was covered by a fiberglass cover. “You got them bodies yonder in the back of your truck?”

I shook my head. “If I did,” I said, “you’d see a huge swarm of flies around it. Hot as it is, you’d be smelling something, too. We’ll wait till the last minute to bring them out here. And we’ll use a UT truck, not mine.”

He nodded approvingly-I might be crazy, I could see him thinking, but at least I wasn’t dumb enough to stink up my own truck. After unloading the cars from the bed of the wrecker, he’d given me a big wave and a couple of toots of the horn as he drove away. If he told the tale well to his forensic-fan wife over dinner, I suspected, he might be able to persuade her to donate her body to him tonight.

“I’M STILLshocked we’re replicating something that happened at the Latham farm.” Miranda Lovelady, my research assistant of the past four years, edged up beside me in the twilight. “I’ve been in that barn a dozen times and been in the house two or three. I always liked Mary Latham. Hard to believe she died in a car fire.”

“Apparently the D.A. has a hard time believing it, too,” I said,

“since he personally called both me and Art to look into it. You never told me how you knew the Lathams.”

“It was during my brief career as a veterinary student,” she said. “Mary was friends with some of the vet-school faculty, and she liked to throw parties out at the farm. I got on her guest list somehow. Or her husband’s.” Her voice took on a slight edge when she mentioned the husband-now the widower.