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

He took a step to his right. The hoes had heavier-duty handles: hickory, by the look of it, and nearly twice as thick as the rake handles. Satterfield opened the handles wide and worked the jaws around one of the handles. The blade cut easily at first, but the going got tougher fast, the steel handles of the lopper bending under the strain as he bore down. Just as Satterfield feared the handles might buckle, the hoe’s shaft snapped. The cut piece clattered on the concrete floor with a resonant, musical note, like the ring of a baseball bat colliding with a fastball. Satterfield bent and picked up the severed piece, studying the cross section closely. The cut was clean, but when he held the wood so that the ceiling lights raked across the end at a low angle, he could discern the cut marks, a myriad of ridges and valleys etched in the wood as the jaws had bitten through it. The marks were steeply curved, approximating “the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.”

Pocketing the piece of wood, Satterfield headed for the front of the store to check out. On the way home, he’d stop at Kroger, whose meat department sold big beef bones for soup, or for dogs. More tests were needed, but so far he had a good feeling about the bypass lopper.

He found a checkout lane with no line, and slid the tool across the stainless-steel counter. The young man working the register said, “Is that it for you today?”

“Only thing I need,” said Satterfield, but then he added, “Whoa, wait, I take that back. One more thing.” He backtracked two steps, to the end cap at the entrance to the checkout lane, and snagged a fat, striated roll of shrink-wrapped silver-gray tape. He stood it on edge and rolled it toward the scanner as if it were a thick slice from a bowling ball. With a broad smile and a worldly wink, Satterfield said, “A man can never have too much duct tape, can he, now?”

CHAPTER 5

Brockton

TYLER SHOOK SWEAT FROMhis face, like a wet dog, spattering the ashen ankles of the corpse he and I were carrying toward the pig barn. “Hang on a second,” he said.

I stopped. “You need to set him down, Mr. Yoga Super-Athlete?”

“Naw. I just need to get the sweat and sunscreen out of my eyes.” He shrugged his shoulders and craned his head from side to side, rubbing his face on the sleeves of his T-shirt—like a dog pawing at itchy eyes. The movement made the sagging body sway from side to side, like a guy sleeping in a hammock, except there was no hammock. And the sleeping guy wasn’t ever going to wake up. “Okay, that’s better.”

As we resumed walking, I heard a familiar buzzing. A small squadron of blowflies materialized and began circling the corpse.

“Amazing,” said Tyler. “Those guys can smell death a mile away. Hell, you don’t even have to kick the bucket—just swing your toe toward the bucket—and bzzt, they’re all over you.” He grimaced and sputtered, spitting out a fly that had strayed into his mouth. “ Hey, you little bugger, get out of there. I’m not quite dead yet.”

“Maybe your personal hygiene isn’t what it ought to be,” I said. I mostly meant it as a joke, but at the moment, Tyler was trailing a fairly pungent cloud of aroma. For that matter, I probably was, too. “Speaking of flies, though, we need to talk about your thesis project.” I’d been poring through the Chinese forensic handbook the night before—it had been my bedtime reading, much to the dismay of Kathleen, to whom I’d read several graphic passages aloud—and during my sleep, something in the thirteenth-century book had clicked, connecting somehow with the wasp nest and tree seedling we’d found in the skull from the strip mine.

“What do flies have to do with my thesis? I’m making good progress, by the way. Honest. That’s why I was in the bone lab on Labor Day—looking at a bunch more pubic bones.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw the tray of bones. But I’ve been thinking.”

“Crap,” he muttered. “I hate it when you think.”

“What? Why?”

“Because whenever you start thinking, I end up with more work,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as he backpedaled toward the barn. Wafting toward us through the open door came the unmistakable smell of death, mingled with another powerful stench. Tyler disappeared as he backed into the darkness. “ Christ, this place stinks,” came his voice from within, floating on the fumes.

I suspected Tyler was stalling, trying to distract me from the thesis discussion. But he was right about the stench; in fact, if anything, he was understating things. Over the course of several decades, countless litters of pigs had been farrowed and nursed in this barn, and every pig—sows and piglets alike—had left a legacy of stink. As the state’s only land-grant university, UT still had a strong agricultural college, but in recent decades the school’s working farms had been scaled back in favor of a more academic orientation for Ag majors. By 1992, the university was largely out of the farming business, with the exception of a few cornfields along the river and a small dairy farm adjoining the hospital.

We laid the body down in one of the empty stalls, the ground soft and slippery underfoot from decades of pig droppings and a half-dozen decomposing corpses donated to me by medical examiners so that I could begin building a teaching collection of modern, known skeletons.

The barn was windowless, but shafts of sunlight angled through gaps in the plank siding. Dust motes drifted and danced in the shafts of light. The blowflies—a dozen or more by now—appeared and disappeared in strobing succession as they traversed the slivers of light.

“Funny thing,” Tyler mused. “I don’t mind the smell of the decomp so much; it’s the pig shit I can’t stand.”

“Anyhow,” I resumed, “I’ve been thinking about your thesis, and I think you need a different research project.”

“What? I’ve spent weeks—months—looking at pubic bones. I’ve looked at hundreds of pubic bones. Maybe a thousand pubic bones.”

“But wouldn’t you rather do something important?”

“You said the pubic-bone study was important, Dr. B.”

“It is. But not as important as this.”

“As what? Never mind—I don’t want to know.”

“Everybody studies pubic bones,” I said. “I’m talking about seminal research, Tyler.”

“You want me to research semen ? I’m supposed to write a thesis about spunk?”

“Don’t be so literal. Or so argumentative. This research will be unique. Original. A pioneering contribution.”

“Dammit!” He swatted the back of his neck.

“You need to quit killing the flies, Tyler,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because they’re your new best friends. The stars of your new thesis project.”

“What new thesis project? You keep dropping these veiled hints,” he grumbled. “Veiled threats. Just spit it out, Dr. B.”

“The first detailed study of insect activity in human corpses,” I said. “Our first step toward basing time-since-death estimates on scientific data. One blowfly at a time.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying you want me to spend even more quality time out here, crawling around in pig shit?”

“Gathering data,” I said. “Advancing the cause of science.”

“And in your new vision, how much more time do I spend out here advancing the cause of science? How many data trips a day? This is a long damn way from the bone lab.” He had a point there, I had to admit. “Any chance you could get me a transporter beam, so I don’t spend four hours a day shuttling back and forth from campus?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said, hoping it would prove true. My flash of nocturnal inspiration hadn’t extended to anything so mundane as transportation logistics.