Jefferson Bass - Cut to the Bone - A Body Farm Novel

Jenny beamed at Kathleen and Janelle, then looked at me. “Dr. B, the other one’s for you.”

“Me? Why’d you waste a perfectly good piece of paper drawing me?”

“It’s not of you,” she said. “It’s for you.” She handed me the drawing, facedown. I hesitated, then turned it up.

It was like nothing I’d ever seen: A girl’s face—the unidentified strip-mine girl’s face—turned upward, toward the sky. Her features were serene, almost beatific; underneath them, the skull shone through, faintly but distinctly, in a way that somehow did not diminish or detract from the beauty of the face. She was shown in profile, one eye open wide, the other hidden by the bridge of the nose. But from that other, unseen eye grew a tree: a miniature but fully formed tree, its crown luxuriant with leaves and blossoms and songbirds. In the background, and on all sides, other trees grew, from ground that had once been scarred and barren, but had long since softened and gone to green. Beneath the ground, the trees were linked by a web of roots—roots that entwined delicately, seamlessly, with the girl’s golden hair; roots that somehow were the girl’s golden hair. Amid death, the image seemed to suggest—in spite of death, or perhaps even because of death, in some mysterious way I did not yet understand—there was life.

Even life abundant.

Author’s Note: On Fact and Fiction

Those of you who are astute at arithmetic may have noted that Dr. Bill Brockton, our fictional hero, is slightly younger—by some thirty years—than Dr. Bill Bass, who turned a remarkably youthful eighty-five in August 2013. Making Brockton so much younger has much to recommend it, fictionally speaking, as it allows Brockton (and us!) to be still employed, rather than retired.

But all choices have consequences, and in this book’s case—specifically, the case of the Body Farm’s genesis—Brockton’s relative youth has required us to fudge the birth year of the real-life research facility. In Cut to the Bone , we give that year as 1992. In real life, it’s considerably earlier, as well as more complex. The sow barn described in the book is quite real, but it was back in 1971 that it became the location for the Body Farm’s first incarnation: a distant, smelly place where decomposing bodies could be stashed before they were processed into clean skeletal remains.

The Body Farm’s second incarnation—its metamorphosis, to borrow an entomological term from the realm of blowflies and maggots—didn’t occur until a decade later. In the spring of 1981, the first research project began in a new sixteen-by-sixteen-foot chain-link cube at the facility’s current location, behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center, on the south shore of the Tennessee River. That project, which commenced with donated body 1-81, was a pioneering study of insect activity in human corpses. Corpse 1-81 and its successors (2-81, 3-81, and 4-81) served as the research subjects for a master’s degree thesis by Dr. Bass’s student William Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s pioneering research, documenting the relationship between the insects’ activity and the cadavers’ decay rates, remains a classic—one of the most frequently cited studies in both forensic anthropology and forensic entomology.

There are, of course, more stories behind those stories. Readers who are interested in the factual history of the Body Farm might enjoy our first book, the nonfiction memoir Death’s Acre . That book also contains a chapter on the “Zoo Man” case, a series of murders that electrified and terrified Knoxville in the early 1990s. Our fictional story here borrows freely from the factual case, in which Knoxville prostitutes were taken into the woods off Cahaba Lane and then murdered. We feel entitled to borrow, as both Dr. Bill Bass and KPD fingerprint expert Art Bohanan played key roles in the prosecution of Thomas “Zoo Man” Huskey for the Cahaba Lane murders.

We’ve endeavored to be accurate in our depiction of KPD’s SWAT team, which was relatively new at the time of our story. We have, however, taken one large liberty in our depiction of KPD’s bomb squad, which did not yet have a bomb-sniffing dog in 1992.

The book’s central premises were true then, and, sadly, remain true now: Women—especially young, poor women driven by desperation to prostitution—are among the most vulnerable members of our society; they’re often preyed upon, largely scorned, and easily overlooked if they go missing. And sadistic sexual predators—embodiments of cunning and evil, created by a tangled, terrible confluence of nature and “nurture”—still coil unseen among and around us. As ever, there are serpents in the garden in which we dwell. Even so, it is a lush and lovely garden.

Acknowledgments

Solving crimes requires the intelligence and cooperation of many people. So does creating crime novels. Luckily, many smart people have been kind enough to help us with that latter task.

Art Bohanan—the real one, not the fictional one—was, as always, a good sport and a great source of insight into crime-scene and crime-lab work. So was forensic ace Amy George. Dawn Coppock and James Rochelle—smart, good-hearted people who love the mountains of east Tennessee—offered helpful information on strip mining and its environmental effects, especially the severe and lasting effects of mountaintop removal. Precision blaster John Koehler—a man who can topple a smokestack like a tree, or collapse a building into its own basement—provided a fascinating glimpse into the world of explosives.

Lt. Keith Debow, commander of the Knoxville Police Department’s SWAT team, was remarkably informative, patient, and good-humored in answering a fusillade of questions about the book’s SWAT-team scenario; so was Lt. Doug Stiles, the team’s previous commander. We appreciate their gracious help; we also appreciate their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way—in serious harm’s way—to protect the lives of others. Thanks also to Ed Buice and Special Agent Mike Keleher, at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who offered insights and suggestions about how a sailor who came unhinged might be investigated.

No book about a recent serial killer would be complete or credible without drawing on the work of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, whose “profilers” are justly renowned for their insights into the darkest of criminal minds. Supervisory Special Agent James J. McNamara (retired), who headed the BSU’s serial-killer division for years, was generous with his time and helpful with his advice about what might motivate a sexual killer to add Dr. Bill Brockton to his list of potential victims. Sincere thanks to Jim McNamara, as well as to special agents Ann Todd and Angela Bell for making the connection with him possible. Tallahassee psychologist and researcher Thomas Joiner—author of The Perversion of Virtue: Understanding Murder-Suicide —also helped illuminate the dark corners and crevices of the soul.

To switch from serial murder to a slightly less frightening arena—the arena of publishing—we express our continuing gratitude to our agent, Giles Anderson, for keeping us gainfully and happily employed for the past decade (time does fly when you’re having fun!). Editorial consultant Heather Whitaker read an early draft of this novel and offered suggestions that made the book far more coherent and far more suspenseful, and the eagle-eyed Casey Whitworth proofread the galley pages and made them far more corrct. Er, correct .

We’re deeply grateful to a whole host of people at William Morrow and HarperCollins who make these books possible, especially our editor, Lyssa Keusch, and her associates, Amanda Bergeron and Rebecca Lucash; our publisher, Liate Stehlik, and deputy publisher, Lynn Grady; publicity wizard Danielle Bartlett; marketing director Kathy Gordon; online marketing guru Shawn Nicholls; the seldom-sung heroes in art and production, who turn computer files into actual books (and e-books)—production editor Julia Meltzer; designer Richard Aquan ( great cover art for the dust jacket!); paperback art director Thomas Egner; and—of course—the sales staffers who actually persuade people to part with their hard-earned money to purchase our books, led by Doug Jones and Brian Grogan.