Jefferson Bass - The Bone Yard: A Body Farm Novel

The Bone Yard

Jefferson Bass

Dedication

To the White House Boys, and to othersyoung and oldwho have been abused by the people and institutions charged with their safekeeping. May we learn from the mistakes whose painful price you have paid.

Contents

I held the last of the dead mans bones in my left hand. It was his skull, which I cradled upside down in my palm, as comfortably and naturally as an NBA player might hold a basketball. As I searched for a place to hide it, I felt the tip of my index finger absentmindedly tracing the edges of a hole in the right temple. It was a square-cornered opening, about the size of a small postage stamp, and it had been punched by a murder weapona weapon Id tucked into a tangle of honeysuckle vines a few moments before. The honeysuckle was in bloom, and its fragrance was an odd contrast to the underlying odor of death. Funny thing , I thought, how something that smells so good can grow in a place that smells so bad .

Chattering voices floated up the hillside, growing louder as the people came closer. If I didnt hurry, Id be caught with the skull in my hand. Still I hesitated, turning the cranium right side up for one last look into the vacant eye orbits. What did I hope to see therewhat meaning did I think I might findin those empty sockets? Maybe nothing. Maybe only the emptiness itself.

As the voices drew nearer, I finally forced myself to act, to choose. I tucked the skull under the edge of a fallen oak tree, piling dead leaves against the trunk as camouflage. Then a worry popped into my head: Is the pile of leaves too obvious, a giveaway? But it was too late to second-guess myself; Id run out of time, and the makeshift hiding place would have to do.

Stepping over the tree, I strolled downhill toward the cluster of people approaching. I feigned nonchalance, resisting the urge to glance back and check for visible bones. A woman at the front of the groupa thirtysomething blonde with the energetic, outdoorsy look of a runner or a cycliststopped in her tracks and looked at me. Her eyes bored into mine, and I wondered what she saw there. I tried to make my face as blank and unenlightening as the skulls had been.

She shifted her gaze to the wooded slope behind me. Her eyes scanned the forest floor, then settled on the fallen tree. Walking slowly toward it, she leaned down, studied both sides, and then brushed at the leaves Id piled on the uphill side. Theres a skull beside this log, she announced to the group. She said it as coolly as if it were an everyday occurrence, finding a skull in the woods.

Wow, said a young red-haired woman in a black jumpsuit. Police, one; Brockton, zero. If Dr. B decides to turn killer, hed better steer clear of Florida.

The redheaded smart aleck was Miranda Lovelady, my graduate assistant. The blonde whod found the skull so swiftly was Angie St. Claire, a forensic analyst from the Florida state crime lab. Angie, along with the twenty-three other people in the group Miranda had brought up the trail, had spent the past ten weeks as a student at the National Forensic Academy, a joint venture of the University of Tennessee and the Knoxville Police Department. Taught by experts in ballistics, fingerprinting, trace evidence, DNA, anthropology, and other forensic specialties, the NFA training culminated in the two death scenes Miranda and I had staged here at the University of Tennessees Anthropological Research Facility: the Body Farm.

The Body Farm was perched on a hillside high above the Tennessee River. Here, a mile downstream from the heart of Knoxville, more than a hundred corpses in various states of disrepair were dispersed across the facilitys three fenced-in acres. Most of the bodies lay above ground, though some were buried. And in a far corner of the facility, looking like eerie sentinels standing at attention, were three nude men: not standing, actually, but hanging, suspended by the neck from wooden scaffolds. With some misgivings, we had carried out three postmortem lynchings so we could observe the difference in the decomposition rate when bodies decayed off the ground, where they were less accessible to insects. Wed hung the three in the most isolated part of the facility, because important though the experiment wasthe research data would help us determine time since death when a hanged body wasnt discovered for weeks or even monthsthe dangling corpses were a shocking sight. Id seen them dozens of times by now, yet I still found it unnerving to round the bend in the trail and suddenly encounter the trio. Their necks were stretched a few inches, their faces downcast, their arms and legs angled outward, as if accepting their grim fate with a mixture of resignation and shame. The NFA class included four African-American men, and if I, a privileged white man, felt disturbed by the hanging bodies, I could scarcely imagine the complicated response the black men might feel at the sight of dangling corpses in the woods of Dixie.

Maybe I neednt have worried. Everyone in the class was a seasoned forensic professional, after all; cumulatively, the two dozen students had worked hundreds of death scenes, and some of those had probably included suicide by hanging. The students had competed fiercely to get into the NFA course, and several had told me how thrilled they were to train at the Body Farmprobably the only place on earth, after all, where cinching a noose around a neck was an act of scientific inquiry rather than of suicidal despair or racist hatred orvery rarelystate-administered execution. Here at the Body Farm, as nowhere else on earth, we could replicate death scenes with utter authenticity, even lynchings or mass murders. This particular NFA classone of two groups that would rotate through the course this yearincluded crime-scene and crime-lab specialists from as far away as the United Kingdom. Theyd spend the morning recovering scattered skeletal remains and other evidence Miranda and I had planted in this part of the woods. After a quick picnic lunch on a strip of grass outside the fence, theyd spend the afternoon locating and excavating a shallow, unmarked grave where Miranda and I had buried three fresh corpses, simulating a gang-style execution by drug traffickers.

She and I had spent the prior afternoon digging the grave and then refilling it once wed laid the bodies in it. Wed clawed into the clearings rocky, red-clay dirt with a Bobcata pint-sized bulldozerthat a local building contractor had recently donated to the Anthropology Department. The Bobcat was a useful tool; it was alsofor me, a guy whod grown up driving dump trucks at my stepdads quarrya fun toy.

Excavating the buried bodies in the afternoon heat was going to be sweaty, smelly work for the NFA class. Already, by midmorning, the temperature was above eighty degrees, and the humidity had topped 90 percent; by late afternoon, East Tennessee would feel like the tropics. Divide the years 365 days by the number of seasons, and you might think thered be four seasons of 91.25 days apiece, each season serenely easing its way into the next. Not this year in Knoxville; not on this steamy, smelly day in mid-May.

My own body was doubtless contributing a bit to the scent wafting across the hillside, and not as pleasantly as the honeysuckle was. Like Miranda, I wore an official-looking black jumpsuit, the shoulders trimmed with the skull-adorned patches of the Forensic Anthropology Center. The jumpsuits looked cool, as in stylish, but they were woven of Nomex, a flameproof fiber that, ironically, made them hotter than hell. Despite the heat, Miranda and I had suited up to give the training exercise a more authentic lookand to let the trainees know we took them seriously.