Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella (3 page)

As I crept forward, I noticed a patrol car leave the prison’s gate and head in my direction. Then—imagining the scene that might ensue if I were stopped and the back of my truck searched—I made a hasty U-turn and headed back toward the highway, and the comforts of UT.

By most measures, Stadium Hall was a shithole. But compared to Brushy Mountain, it was the lap of luxury. A lavish, lustrous ivory tower.

5

“NO WAY. I CAN’T
bring that inside,” said Dr. Kimbrough, wrinkling his nose as he peered down at the body bag. My truck was backed up to the loading dock at UT Medical Center, and I’d slid the body bag onto the dock and unzipped it just enough to show the skull to Kimbrough, the young radiology resident unlucky enough to be spending Saturday evening on call. “No way,” he repeated. “The attending would have my head on a platter.”

“He won’t even know,” I pleaded. “It’s the weekend, the E.R.’s quiet right now—the drunk-driving accidents and bar fights don’t rev up till midnight—and I really, really need to know if there’s a bullet somewhere in her.”

“Won’t even
know
? Are you kidding?” He gave a barkish laugh. “We’d have patients and hospital staff running for the exits, puking as they ran.” I had to admit, he might have a point there. “Isn’t there some other way to tell if there’s a bullet in her?”

There was a way, actually—sift through all the liquid and goo I’d get when I simmered the soft tissue off the bones—but I didn’t want to wait that long or work that hard, so I hedged. “Look, this is life-and-death stuff. Somebody’s killed this woman, and I’m desperately trying to figure out who, and how. I’ve got a county sheriff and a TBI agent breathing down my neck so hard my wife’s starting to get jealous.”

He smiled, but the smile was followed by a head shake. “We cannot take that inside. Not negotiable. What I
can
do, though, is bring the portable X-ray machine down here and shoot some films here on the dock. We don’t even have to take her out of the bag.”

“How’s the quality?”

“Not great. Best you’re gonna get, though—from me at least—so take it or leave it.” He saw the doubt on my face. “Look, if there’s a lump of lead in there, it’ll light up that film like a full moon at midnight.”

I
t was a dark and moonless night, figuratively and forensically speaking: The woman’s corpse did not contain a bright round bullet, I saw when I reviewed the films with Kimbrough. That didn’t surprise me, as I’d noticed no entry or exit wound in the intact regions of the body.

What
did
surprise me—what stunned me, in fact, when I saw the X ray of the head—was the brilliant latticework of metal in the woman’s skull: four flat, L-shaped brackets of metal, screwed to the upper jaw. At some point the woman’s face had been bolted back together. “Holy crap,” I said to the radiologist. “She must’ve taken one hell of a blow to the teeth.”

He nodded. “That’s a classic LeFort fracture,” he said. “Car wreck? She take a steering wheel in the face?”

“I have no idea. All I know is, that’s not what killed her.”

“Type One,” he went on, as if we were making medical rounds. “Horizontal fracture plane in the maxilla, just below the nose, detaching the teeth and palate. Could’ve been worse,” he added, his index finger tracing an arc above the woman’s nose. “A LeFort Type Two breaks off the entire maxilla and the nasal bone—wiggle the teeth, and the whole nose wiggles. A Type Three breaks off the zygomatic bones, too, so the whole face hangs down. This lady was lucky.”

“Tell her, not me,” I said. “Oh, you can’t—she’s dead.” He flushed, and I felt bad for him. But not as bad as I felt for her. “Sorry. Thanks for the help—I do appreciate it.” I tugged the bag off the loading dock and into the truck, then headed back toward the stadium. Crossing the river, I glanced upstream at the black, cold waters of the Tennessee spooling past Knoxville and the university, wondering what dark currents had swept this woman to her fate. I still didn’t know who she was or how she’d died, but I now felt confident of identifying her. Whoever had done the dental and facial surgery would surely remember it. All I had to do was find that person.

I parked a hundred yards from Stadium Hall, the truck backed up to a corrugated metal building labeled
ANTHROPOLOGY ANNEX
. The Annex, like the sow barn, had been conferred on me by the dean in the wake of what was now widely known as “the Shower Incident,” when the janitor had found the rotting corpse I’d stashed overnight. On a scale of one to ten, the Annex rated a minus three; the uninsulated metal structure was an oven in summer and in icebox in winter. Still, it had plumbing and electricity. More to the point, it had no other tenants . . . and it had a steam-jacketed kettle, an immense cauldron that—over the course of twenty-four simmering hours—could transform a decomposing body into a clean skeleton.

I opened the back of the truck, then wheeled a gurney from the Annex and slid the body bag onto it. I rolled it across the concrete floor and into the processing room, which contained a long counter, a bathtub-sized sink, and the steam-jacketed kettle. Opening a tap, I began filling the kettle with hot water; as it filled, I dumped in a half cup of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer and a cup of Biz laundry powder—my secret ingredients, to help soften the tissue and sweeten the smell. Once the kettle was full and the tap was off, I noticed a faint noise coming from direction of the body bag.
Crap
, I thought, warily unzipping the bag to reveal teeming masses of maggots, which had emerged from the torso’s interior during the long, dark ride back from Morgan County. In the quiet of the Annex, I could hear them, and the sound of their moist wriggling and chewing bore a striking, unsettling similarity to the
snap crackle pop
of Rice Krispies—a breakfast I vowed, then and there, never to eat again.

I glanced up at the clock on the wall: 6:43
P.M.
Crap
, I thought again,
I’m late for supper, and where the hell is Bohanan?
Art Bohanan was a forensic specialist with the Knoxville Police Department, and his area of particular expertise was fingerprints. I’d worked on a case with Art several months before, and I’d watched, astonished, as he took a shriveled husk of skin that had sloughed off from a dead man’s hand, moistened it, and then lifted a perfect set of prints. The Morgan County sheriff had scoffed at my suggestion that we try to get prints from the Jordan Branch corpse, and even the TBI agent, Meffert, had shaken his head dismissively. But I wasn’t willing to give up without trying, so on the way back to Knoxville I’d stopped at a gas station and phoned Art to ask for help. He’d agreed to meet me at six-thirty. So why wasn’t he here?

Just as I was headed for the phone to send a nagging page, the building’s corrugated wall boomed like thunder, and then the door screeched open. “Shoo-
eee
,” came Art’s folksy drawl. “Either there’s a really ripe one in here, or you are wearing the world’s nastiest aftershave.”

I grinned. “I don’t particularly care for it, but it’s my wife’s favorite, and I do try to please her.”

“She’s one lucky woman.”

“Thanks for coming. You’re my only hope for fingerprints. Even the TBI agent threw up his hands.”

“But why was a TBI agent eatin’ his hands in the first place?”

“Man,” I groaned, “and people say
my
puns are bad.” I folded back the flap of the body bag to expose both arms, then lifted the left one by the wrist, palm up. “What do you think—can you get usable prints?”

“I believe so,” he said, leaning down to study the fingers. “Can you give me a hand?”

“Sure. How can I help?”

“Give. Me. A hand.” I stared at him, puzzled; he stared back with an expression of weary patience on his face, as if waiting for a slow-witted child to grasp the simplest of instructions. Finally he rolled his eyes and, with the blade of his hand, pantomimed a sawing motion in the air above the woman’s wrist. “Give me a hand. Be easier to work with if I can take it back to the KPD lab with me.”

“Ah” was the only syllable that came out of my startled mouth. This was a first for me, but Art was the expert, so—taking a scalpel from a tray of tools on the long counter, I cut through the tendons and ligaments of the left wrist, taking care not to nick any of the bones. I wrapped the severed hand in a paper towel and then zipped it into a plastic bag.

Art tucked it into the outside pocket of his jacket as casually as he might have deposited his car keys or a candy bar. “I’ll let you know what I get,” he said. “You about to start cooking?” I nodded. “Want me to help you get her into the pot?” I shook my head. “Darn,” he said. “You never let me have any fun.” With that and a wave, he was gone.

Ten minutes later so was I, leaving the corpse curled up in the kettle and the thermostat set at 150 degrees.

“G
ag,” squawked Kathleen when I dashed up the basement stairs and into the kitchen. “You
reek
.” I headed toward her, my arms opened wide, as if to enfold her in a bear hug. “
Away
, vile one,” she squealed, swatting at me with a dish towel. “Go back downstairs and take a long shower. Then take another one.” I nodded obediently. “But first, go out to the garage and take off those clothes.”

“Oh, baby,” I said. “I do love it when you tell me to take off my clothes.”

“In your dreams, stinky. Put them in the washing machine on
hot
.” As I started down the stairs, I heard her calling after me, “The
old
machine. Don’t you
dare
put those in the new one.”

6

December 24

I CHECKED A THIRD
time, and for the third time I came up one bone short. Actually, technically, I was forty-five bones short; the adult human skeleton contains 206 bones, and the skeleton I’d laid out on the counter had just 161. But the feet and ankles accounted for forty-four of the absent forty-five bones, so I’d already mentally subtracted those from the total. The unexpectedly missing bone—the maddeningly missing bone—was the one I’d been banking on to tell me how the woman was killed. “Where the hell’s the hyoid?” I muttered.

As soon as I’d seen the woman’s body in the woods, I suspected severe trauma to her neck—a slashed throat or, more likely, strangulation. When blowflies find a corpse, they seek moist orifices in which to lay their eggs: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, genitals, and, above all, bloody wounds. In this case, the soft tissues of the woman’s neck had been completely consumed, exposing the cervical vertebrae. That told me her neck was particularly attractive to the flies—evidence that it had been bleeding or badly bruised. I’d seen no blood on the ground—and no knife marks on the vertebrae as I’d fished them from the steam kettle just now and laid them on the counter—so I felt fairly sure she’d been strangled rather than slashed. Trouble was, to confirm my hypothesis, I needed a hyoid—specifically, a hyoid crushed by a killer’s lethal grip. And the hyoid was not to be found, no matter how carefully I sifted and squeezed the gooey residue remaining in the bottom of the kettle.

“Damned dogs,” I muttered. The ends of the woman’s legs were covered with gnaw marks, which indicated that her feet had been chewed off by canids—wild dogs or, more likely, coyotes roaming the hills of Morgan County. Had they also gnawed at the woman’s neck? I studied the vertebrae again, this time looking for tooth marks rather than cut marks. There were none. Was it possible that some especially dexterous dog or coyote—seeking a particular delicacy—had managed to pluck the hyoid from the throat without doing damage to any of the adjacent bones?
No way
, I thought, then said again, “So where the hell is the hyoid?” Had I been so sloppy and careless, in my haste to get the corpse into the body bag, that I’d failed to notice a stray bone lying on the ground, right beside the exposed cervical vertebrae?

Frowning, I laid down the last of the vertebrae, shucked off my gloves, and opened the large envelope resting on the counter. I’d picked up the envelope at Thompson Photo on my way to campus. Inside, tucked snugly into slots in a sheet of clear plastic, were the thirty-six color slides I’d shot two days before, at the death scene in the mountains. As I’d spiraled in toward the corpse, I took half a dozen close-ups of the neck, including two from each side. Now, as I laid the slides on a light box and picked up a magnifying glass, I both hoped and feared what those close-ups might reveal: the woman’s hyoid, and my carelessness.

In fact, the close-ups revealed nothing except what I remembered seeing: exposed cervical vertebrae, resting on a layer of dead, dry leaves. “Where the hell is the
hyoid
?” I was sounding like a broken record. I snapped off the light box, then, an instant later, I snapped it back on, realizing that something in one of the other slides seemed odd. It was the first photo I’d taken—the one with my zoom lens at its widest setting—and it was the last photo I’d have expected to reveal an important forensic detail. I stared at it, and as I realized what I was seeing, my understanding of the crime scene—and even the crime—was transformed.

In the upper corner of the photo, barely within the frame, was something I’d completely overlooked two days before: a dark, greasy-looking circle, a foot or so in diameter, located eight or ten feet up the slope from where the woman’s body lay splayed against the tree. I heard myself say once more, “Damned dogs!” This time I said it with a laugh.

The body, I now realized, had not been posed by the killer in a shocking sexual display; the body hadn’t been posed at all, in fact. The dark, circular stain marked the spot where the body had originally lain, the spot where it first began to decompose. The stain was a slick layer of volatile fatty acids, released as the body had begun to decay. The body’s final resting place, against the tree—although perhaps “resting” was the wrong word—marked the spot where the dogs or coyotes had dragged it, en route to their den or some other sheltered spot, before the legs parted around the tree and the trunk stopped her downward slide. Picturing the scene in my mind, I imagined the confusion and frustration of the two coyotes on either side of the sapling as the corpse yanked to a halt; I imagined their disappointment as they were forced to settle for only the feet, their meager consolation prizes. “Poor doggies,” I said, snatching up a small paper evidence bag and tucking it into my shirt pocket. Snapping off the light box again, I headed for the door of the Annex.

I stepped out into the cold, gray light of the late December morning, the sky swirling with low, ominous clouds. Then, on an impulse, I stepped back inside. As long as I was making the drive to Morgan County, I might as well get as much mileage from the trip as possible. No point showing up empty-handed.