Kathy Reichs - Cross bones

“Grosset’s scroll was supposedly written by someone named Jesus, son of James.”

“Exactly. But the tooth could also be from a nephew of Jesus. According to Bergeron, the tooth man died at the age of thirty-five to forty. If one of Jesus’ sisters had married a man named James and had a son, that child would have shared her mitochondrial DNA. If these events took place around the time of the crucifixion, the age would fit. The tooth could have belonged to a Jesus, son of James. Hell, Ryan. Any male in that jumble could have gone by that name. We’ll never know.”

“Who was the Cave 2001 septuagenarian in Yadin’s report and book?”

“Same answer. It wasn’t Max, it wasn’t the tooth man, but it could have been any male in that heap.”

Ryan’s next comment went right to the heart of it.

“The kicker is, whoever that tooth belonged to, if Jake’s right about the James ossuary, and by corollary the Kidron tomb and the Holy Family, the tooth’s presence in the cave places Nazarenes on Masada at the time of the siege. A fact inconsistent with Israel’s accounts of Masada.”

“Very much. Israeli theologians in particular would view a Nazarene connection to Masada as sacrilege. Consider their reluctance to discuss the cave skeletons or do further testing.”

I turned and gestured toward the northern end of the summit.

“There’s a small monument off the western side, at the tip of the Roman camp, where all the Masada remains were reinterred in sixty-nine. The Cave 2001 bones could be exhumed, but the Israelis won’t do it.”

“And the shroud bones?”

“We’ll never know. If Jake had been able to get DNA or pursue other testing, maybe scanning electron microscopy of the calcaneus lesion, we might have learned more. As it stands, all we have are the few lousy photos I took in the loculus.”

“What about the hair and bone samples Getz recovered?”

“The hair could yield something someday. The bone particles are barely more than dust. I’m amazed Getz spotted them.”

“Jake hadn’t set some of the shroud bones aside?”

“Never had a chance.”

“Is he planning to ask for DNA testing on the James ossuary bones?”

“He submitted a request. The Israelis turned him down and they have the bones. Knowing Jake, he’ll keep at it.”

“The James ossuary may be fake.”

“It may,” I agreed.

“Jake’s theory may be wrong.”

“It may.”

Ryan pulled me tight. He knew I was hiding feelings of guilt and disappointment. Max was gone, interred for all time in an anonymous grave. The Cave 2001 bones were gone, interred under one of Israel’s most sacred monuments. The shroud bones were gone, destroyed in a holocaust of fuel and fire.

For a moment we stood gazing out at that melancholy rim of the universe. Empty. Dead.

For years I’d read and heard about this conflicted piece of our planet. It was impossible not to.

The book of Psalms called Jerusalem the City of God. Zachariah called it the City of Truth. Whose God? Whose Truth?

“LaManche phoned today.” I switched back to a world in which some control over my life seemed possible.

“How is the old bird?”

“Pleased that I’ll be back on Monday.”

“You’ve only been gone a week and a half.”

“He had news. There was an exhumation. Sylvain Morissonneau suffered from congestive heart failure.”

“The priest at the abbey?”

I nodded. “He died of a massive coronary.”

“No wild-eyed jihadists?”

“Just bad heart muscle, probably coupled with an elevated stress level brought on by the reemergence of the skeleton issue.”

“Reminds me. Friedman has breaking news. He ran the maid’s note past Mrs. Hanani and finally got the story on the B-and-E of your room. There was no B. Hossam al-Ahmed is a hotel cook who’s been tomcatting around on his girl, one of the hotel maids. The lady-done-wrong decided to set the cad up. Trash a room, point a finger. Your door was unlocked.”

“It’s ironic. All our mega-theories to explain Ferris’s murder and the theft of Max. Ultra-Orthodox Jews did it. Zealot Christians did it. Islamic fundamentalists did it.

“In the end, it was revenge and greed. Two of the old reliables. No state secret. No holy war. No sweeping question of doctrine or creed. We unraveled the methodology of a murder and we identified a killer. I should be elated, but somehow in the context of the last two weeks the murder seems mundane, almost like Charles Bellemare.”

“The stoned-out cowboy stuck in the chimney?”

“Yes. In pursuing our small players over the large stage, I got overwhelmed by the larger context. The murder seemed almost insignificant.”

“We both got caught up.”

“I read something called the Gallup International Millennium Survey. Researchers sampled populations in sixty countries representing one point two billion souls worldwide, trying to learn how people feel about God. Eighty-seven percent of the respondents considered themselves part of some religion. Thirty-one percent believed theirs was the only true faith.”

Ryan started to speak. I wasn’t done.

“But they’re wrong, Ryan. Despite the rituals, the rhetoric, and even the bombs, every religion is saying mostly the same thing. Buddhism. Taoism. Zoroastrianism. Sikhism. Shamanism. It doesn’t matter. Take your pick.”

“You’ve lost me, cupcake.”

“The Torah, the Bible, the Koran. Each offers a recipe for spiritual contentment, for hope, for love, and for controlling basic human passions, and each claims to have gotten the recipe straight from God, but via a different messenger. They’re all just trying to provide a formula for orderly, spiritual living, but somehow the message gets twisted, like cells in a body turning cancerous. Self-appointed spokesmen declare the boundaries of correct belief, outsiders are labeled heretics, and the faithful are called upon to attack them. I don’t think it was meant to be that way.”

“I know you’re right, cupcake, but this working cop long ago abandoned any hope of ridding La Belle Province of crime. I don’t think I’m up to reconciling the world’s religions. Back home there are bodies in the morgue that deserve our attention. We do what we can. And you know what? We’re pretty good at it.”

One last look over the plain. So breathtakingly beautiful, so filled with strife. Then, reluctantly, I allowed Ryan to lead me from the wall.

Adieu, Israel. I wish you peace.

Most Temperance Brennan novels spring from a mixture of my real forensic cases. I start with a child’s skeleton unearthed in a farmer’s field, stir in a body part found in a high-rise basement, then blend. This story began with yellowed press clippings, a black-and-white glossy, a lot of bad photocopies, and a very strange tale.

Dr. James Tabor, a colleague at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, wears two hats. He is both a biblical archaeologist and scholar, and an expert on modern apocalyptic religious movements. Wearing the latter headgear, he counseled the FBI on the Branch Davidian conflict at Waco, Texas, and advised me during the writing ofDeath du Jour. Wearing the hat of biblical scholar, he has worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and dug at Qumran, where they were found, excavated at the “John the Baptist” cave west of Jerusalem, and carried out investigative research on Masada, Israel’s most famous archaeological site.

Monday Mourningwas behind me in the autumn of 2003, and I was beginning the mental triage that would eventually culminate in my eighth book. Tabor phoned one morning, and spoke of looted tombs and purloined skeletons. He was writing a nonfiction work, The Jesus Dynasty, in which he intended to present the historical facts about Jesus’ family, based on the latest archaeological research and discoveries. Would I like to hear the story for a possible Temperance Brennan plot?