JEFFERSON BASS - THE DEVILS BONES (BODY FARM THRILLER 3)

THE LAST DROP OF DAYLIGHT WAS FADING FROM THE western

MY PHONE RANG FOR WHAT SEEMED THE EIGHTY-SEVENTH time of

THREE HOURS AFTER MY EXCHANGE WITH UTS TOP legal eagle,

AFTER MY VISIT TO JESSS MARKER, I WASNT READY to

DR. BROKTON? THIS IS LYNETTE WILKINS, AT THE Regional Forensic Center.

I STARED AT THE CONTENTS OF THE PACKAGE AGAIN, then

FROM THE STADIUM I HEADED DOWNSTREAM ALONG Neyland Drive, past

ART GRABBED ONE OF MY ARMS AND MIRANDA grabbed the

THE PHONE RANG AND I GRABBED FOR IT, HOPING IT

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, AS THE SUN STRUGGLED to burn

I BOUNDED INTO THE BONE LAB JUST BEFORE LUNCH-TIME, eager

THE STREET SIGN WAS HALF HIDDEN BY AN OVERHANGING tree

I STILL FELT CAUGHT IN THE SAME UNDERTOW OF feelings

FRIDAY MORNING DAWNED HOT AND BRIGHT, AND BY the time

I THINK HIS BARK IS WORSE THAN HIS BITE, ART

GOOD MORNING, CHIRPED THE VOICE AT THE OTHER end of

DOWN IN GEORGIA ID STUMBLED UPON A BUNCH OF bodies

THE PHONE RANG THE NEXT MORNING, JUST AS I WAS

WHEN I DIALED SEAN RICHTER, I GOT HIS PAGER, which

AFTER CALLING DEVRIESS, I HEADED TO CAMPUS. IT was early

IT WAS RARE FOR ME TO STAY UP LATE ENOUGH

AIM FOR THE HEAD, I REMINDED MYSELF AS I LINED

BURT DEVRIESS HAD BEEN RIGHT. HIS PHONE HAD started ringing

ON THE WAY BACK FROM THE CREMATORIUM, I STOPPED at

DARREN CASH APPEARED AT MY OFFICE DOOR MONDAY morning. A

I WAS PICKING AT A HEALTHY CHOICE ENTREA TRAY of

IN THE LAST RAYS OF DAYLIGHT, WE STOOD IN A

MIRANDA AND I WERE DOWN IN THE BONE LABOUR home

I REACHED ART JUST AS HE WAS FINISHING LUNCH, judging

I TUGGED OPEN THE DOOR OF THE OSTEOLOGY LAB and

EVER SINCE BURT DEVRIESS HAD FILED HIS CLASS-ACTION lawsuit against

THE HEAT HAD BEEN BUILDING FOR DAYS: NINETY-FIVE degrees, ninety-seven,

THE ANTHROPOLOGY DEPARTMENT WAS LOCKED AND dark when I arrivednot

THE TRUCKS REAR TIRES ISSUED A SERIES OF STEADY screams

YOU PIECE OF HUMAN SHIT, GROWLED A VOICE THAT resembled

THE FACES WERE BLURRY, HALOED IN HAZE. I BLINKED and

THE LAST DROP OF DAYLIGHT WAS FADING FROM THE western skya 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 riversabove the headwaters of the TennesseeI 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 runways perimeter in white and the taxiway in cobalt blue. The main landmarks of downtown Knoxville shimmered a few miles farther downstreamtwo 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 stadiums 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 stadiuman upper deck and skyboxeshad taken the structure higher and higher into the sky; another expansion or two and Neyland Stadium would be the citys 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 couldnt 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 UTs Anthropology Department, which Id spent twenty-five years building from a small undergraduate major to one of the worlds leading Ph.D. programs. A quarter mile long and one room wide, Anthropology occupied the outer side of the stadiums 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 bracesthe 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 Facilitythe Body Farma 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 conditionsnude bodies, clothed bodies, buried bodies, submerged bodies, fat bodies, thin bodies, bodies in cars and in sheds and in rolls of scrap carpetingmy graduate students and colleagues and I had bootstrapped the Body Farm into the worlds 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 policepolice anywhereasked 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 metwo of its inhabitants anyhowto this isolated pasture. I couldnt conduct tonights 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 citys 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-TRUCK driver who had brought the vehicles out to the UT Ag farm a few hours beforeminus their cadaverous driversclearly thought I was crazy. Most times, hed said, Im hauling cars like this to the junkyard, not from the junkyard.

I smiled. Its an agricultural experiment, Id said. Were transplanting wrecks to see if a new junkyard takes root.

Oh, itll take root all right, he said. I guaran-damn-tee you. Word gets out theres a new dump here, youll 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 its not agricultural, its forensic. Were 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, youre that bone-detective guy, aint you? Dr. Bodkin?