Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella (7 page)

Fifty yards ahead, I saw yellow-and-black crime-scene tape draped around an oval of scrubby foliage and rugged shale. “Did somebody actually stay out here overnight to secure the scene?” I asked.

Cotterell made a guttural, grunting sound, which I gradually realized was a laugh. “
Secure
the
scene?
Secure it from
who,
Doc?”

M
effert was right about the fossils. Just outside the uneven perimeter of crime-scene tape lay a flagstone-sized slab of black shale, imprinted with a lacelike tracery of ancient leaves. Beside it, angling through the rubble, was a stone rod the length of a baseball bat. Its shape and symmetry made it stand out against the random raggedness of the other rocks, and I stooped for a closer look. Diamond-shaped dimples, thousands of them, dotted the entire surface of the shaft. “I’ll be damned,” I said to Tyler. “Look at that. A lepidodendron.”

“A what?” Tyler set down the bin and squatted beside me. “Butterfly fossil?”

I nudged it with my toe, and it shifted slightly. “Close, but no cigar. Your Latin’s rusty.”

He laughed. “My Latin’s nonexistent.”

“Butterflies are Lepidoptera—‘scaly wings.’ This is a lepidodendron—‘scaly tree’—a stalk from a giant tree fern. Ferns a hundred feet tall. Carboniferous period. That plant is three hundred million years old if it’s a day.”

Tyler grasped the exposed end of the fossil and gently tugged and twisted, extricating it in a succession of rasping clinks. He sighted along its length, studying the intricate geometry of the diamond-shaped pattern. “You sure this is a scaly stem? Not a scaly snake?”

“Those scales are leaf scars,” I said. “Also called leaf cushions. But they do look like reptile scales, for sure. Actually, circus sideshows used to exhibit these as fossilized snakes. You’re a born huckster, Tyler.” I stood up, scanning the ground ahead and catching a telltale flash of grayish white: weathered bone. “But enough with the paleo lesson. We’ve got work to do. Let’s start with pictures.” Tyler laid the fossil aside and opened the equipment bin.

A few years before—when I’d first started working with the police on murder cases—a detective at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had taught me a crucial forensic lesson: You can never have too many crime-scene photos, because working a crime scene requires dismantling it;
destroying
it. The KBI agent’s approach to crime-scene photography sounded like something straight from Bonnie and Clyde’s bank-robbery playbook: “Shoot your way in, and shoot your way out”—start with wide shots, then get closer and closer, eventually reversing the process as you’re finishing up and leaving the scene. Tyler had been quick to master the technique, and even before we stepped across the tape at the strip mine, he had the camera up and the shutter clicking. It wasn’t unusual for Tyler or me—sometimes both of us—to come home with a hundred 35-millimeter slides from a death scene, ranging from curbside shots of a house to frame-filling close-ups of a .45-caliber exit wound.

As Tyler shot his way in, so did I, though I was shooting with my eyes and my brain rather than a camera. The pelvis:
female,
I could tell at a glance;
subadult; probably adolescent.
The size:
small—five feet, plus or minus.
As I zoomed in on the skull, I reached out to pluck a seedling that was growing beside it and obscuring my view. As I tugged, though, the skull shifted—bone grating against rock—and I froze. “I’ll be damned,” I said, for the second time in minutes. The seedling, I realized, wasn’t growing
beside
the skull; it was growing
from
the skull—from the left eye orbit, in fact—something I’d never seen before. Wriggling my fingers gently beneath the skull, I cradled it, then lifted and twisted, tugging tendrils of root from the rocky crevices below. The seedling was a foot tall, the fronds of tiny oval leaves reminding me of a fern. As I held it up, with Tyler snapping photographs and the sheriff and TBI agent looking on, I felt as if I were displaying a bizarrely potted houseplant. “Bubba,” I said, nodding toward the bin, “would you mind opening one of those evidence bags for me?” Meffert scrambled to comply, unfolding the paper bag and setting it on the most level patch of rubble he could find.

Leaning down, I set the skull inside the bag. “You gonna just leave that tree in it?” asked Meffert.

“For now,” I said, bending the seedling so I could tuck it completely into the bag. “When we get back to UT, I’ll take it over to a botanist—a guy I know in the Forestry Department—and get him to slice it open, count the growth rings. However many rings he finds, we’ll know she’s been here at least that many years.”

“Huh,” Meffert grunted, nodding. Suddenly he added, “
Watch
it!”

Just as he spoke, I felt a sharp pain on my wrist. I looked down in time to see a wasp pumping the last of its venom into the narrow band of skin between the top of my glove and the bottom of my sleeve. “Dam
na
tion,” I muttered, flattening the wasp with a hard slap. “Where the hell did
that
come from?”

“Yonder comes another one,” Meffert said, “right out of the evidence bag.” Sure enough, at that moment a second wasp emerged from the open bag and made a beeline for my wrist, drawn by the “danger” pheromones the first one had given off. Meffert’s hand darted downward, and by the time I realized what he was doing, he had caught and crushed the wasp in midair, barehanded. “Sumbitches must be nesting in that skull,” he said. I was dubious, but not for long; two more wasps emerged from the bag, both of them deftly dispatched by Meffert. We watched and waited, but the attack seemed to be over.

“You’re quick, Bubba,” I said, rubbing my wrist. “You that fast on the draw with a gun?”

He smiled. “Nobody’s ever give me a reason to find out.”

“Well, watch my back, if you don’t mind.”

I resumed my inspection of the postcranial skeleton, scanning the bones from neck to feet. “Y’all were right about the size,” I said. “Just guessing, I’d say right around five feet. And female,” I added, bending low over the flare of the hip bones. “And young.”

“How young?” asked Cotterell.

I hedged. “Be easier to tell once we get the bones back to the lab and finish cleaning ’em up. But I’m guessing teenager.”

“Any chance this is just some old Indian skeleton?” the sheriff asked hopefully. “Make our job a hell of a lot easier if she was.”

“Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “She’s definitely modern.”

Meffert chuckled. “Isn’t that what you said about that dead guy over near Nashville a couple years ago? The one turned out to be a Civil War soldier?”

“Well, she’s lying on top of all this shale,” I pointed out. “If she’s not modern, this must be the world’s oldest strip mine.” I said it with a smile, but the smile was forced, and it was contradicted by the deep crimson my face had turned at the reminder of the Civil War soldier.

“Don’t take it so hard, Doc,” Meffert added. “You only missed it by a hunnerd-something years.”

“Too bad that soldier didn’t have a tree growing outta
his
head,” the sheriff added. “Big ol’ pecan tree, with a historical marker on it? You’da got it right for sure.”

Meffert grinned. So did I, my teeth clenched behind drawn lips.

W
e rode in silence down the winding mountain blacktop road toward Wartburg. Tyler was absorbed in the fossil he’d brought back, his fingers tracing the intricate diamond patterning as if he were blind, examining it by touch alone.

For my part, I was brooding about the parting shots by the TBI agent and the sheriff. They’d been joking, good-naturedly, no doubt, but the conversation had stung, even worse than the wasp, and the sting took me back, in my mind, to the event they were dredging up. Just after my move to Knoxville, I’d been called to a rural county in Middle Tennessee, where a decomposing body had been found in a shallow grave behind a house. The remains were in fairly good shape, as rotting bodies go—pink tissue still clung to the bones—and I’d estimated that the man had died about a year before. In fact, we later learned, the dead man was Col. William Shy, a Civil War soldier killed in the Battle of Nashville in 1864.

In hindsight, there were logical reasons I’d missed the time-since-death mark so widely. Colonel Shy had been embalmed, and until modern-day grave robbers had looted the grave—looking for relics—the body had been sealed in an airtight cast-iron coffin, which had kept bugs and bacteria at bay. But those explanations sounded more like excuses than I liked. They also provided precious little comfort in court, I’d learned, again and again: Hostile defense attorneys in contemporary criminal cases took great delight in bringing up Colonel Shy, rubbing my nose in my blunder as a way of undermining my testimony against their clients.

Colonel Shy wasn’t the only case where I’d been derailed by difficulty in determining time since death. Another murder case—a case I’d consulted on shortly before my move to Knoxville—still haunted me. A suspect in the case had been seen with the victim two weeks before the body had been found—the last known sighting of the victim—and the investigator and prosecutor pressed me hard: Could I testify, with certainty, that the murder had occurred then? “No,” I’d been forced to admit, “not with any scientific confidence.” As a result, the suspect had gone free.

Hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge—determined to avoid such frustrations and humiliations in the future—I had combed through stacks of scientific journals, seeking data on decomposition. But apart from a few musty articles about insect carcasses—dead bugs found in bodies exhumed from old cemeteries—I’d found virtually nothing. Nothing recent, at any rate, though I had come across a fascinating handbook written by a death investigator in China centuries before, in 1247
AD
—a research gap of more than seven centuries. The good news was, I wasn’t the only forensic anthropologist who was flying by the seat of his pants when estimating time since death. The bad news was,
every
forensic anthropologist was flying by the seat of his pants.

The
interesting
news, I realized now, as Tyler and I reached the base of the mountain, and the road’s hairpin curves gave way to a long, flat straightaway, was that the field was wide open. Time since death—understanding the processes and the timing of postmortem decomposition—was fertile ground for research.

The sun was low in the sky, a quarter moon high overhead, when Tyler and I passed through Wartburg’s town square on our way back to Knoxville. As I glanced up at the courthouse belfry, still pondering ways to unlock the secrets of time since death, I found myself surrounded by markers and measures of time: A frozen clock. A fossilized town. An ancient fern. The bones of a girl who would never reach adulthood.

A girl for whom time had stopped sometime after wildcat miners had ravaged a mountainside; sometime before a papery seed had wafted from a tree and a wasp queen had begun building her papery palace in the dark.

Brockton

PEERING OUT THE GRIMY
windows of my office on the second floor of Stadium Hall, gazing through the thicket of steel girders and concrete ramps, I glimpsed the emerald waters of the Tennessee River spooling past downtown Knoxville and the university. Most of the hundred-yard distance between the stadium and the river was covered in asphalt—parking lots and the four lanes of Neyland Drive—and the pavement shimmered in the late-summer afternoon, creating the illusion that the river itself might begin to boil at any moment. The Anthropology Annex, where I needed to go, was a small, freestanding building fifty sweltering yards away.

When I opened the door and stepped outside, exchanging the stadium’s cool, dark corridors for the sun-soaked outdoors, I felt as if I’d entered a blast furnace. Behind me, bricks radiated the pent-up heat like an oven; ahead, the asphalt lay like a sea of lava, and as I swam across through the heat and humidity, my clothes grew wet with sweat, my shirt plastering itself to my back.

A half-dozen rusting air conditioners jutted from the corrugated metal walls of the Annex, their compressors chugging full blast—
full steam,
I caught myself thinking ironically as I tugged open the balky steel door and stepped inside. The air conditioners did manage to lower the humidity a few notches, but they hadn’t made much headway against the heat, and none at all against the smell.

The Anthropology Department’s main quarters—built by bricking in the wedge of space beneath Neyland Stadium’s grandstands, decades before—weren’t exactly prime real estate; far from it. But Stadium Hall was palatial compared with the Annex. In winter the Annex was an icebox, rattling in the wind; in summer, it was a solar oven, its metal panels creaking and popping in the heat. And no matter the season, it stank inside, for the Annex was where we did the dirty work of processing human remains: simmering and scrubbing; separating flesh from bone; removing life’s lingering vestiges.

One corner of the processing room was taken up by an industrial-sized sink, which was flanked on one side by an immense steam-jacketed kettle—a cauldron big enough to simmer an entire skeleton—and on the other by a wide counter that ran the length of the wall. The counter was covered with blue surgical pads to absorb moisture from damp, freshly scrubbed bones, and when I entered, Tyler was laying out the last of the bones we’d brought back from the strip mine, neatly arranging them in anatomical order.

Normally I began my forensic examinations at the skull, but in this case—a case where the questions of age and sex seemed to converge, to entwine, in a pivotal way—I found my eyes drawn first to the pelvis, which confirmed what I’d thought in the field: female, beyond a doubt. The hip bones flared widely, giving them the distinctive shape that always reminded me of elephant ears; the sciatic notches—openings at the base of the sit bones where major nerves emerged from the lower spine—were broad, unlike the narrow notch of a male pelvis; and the pubic bone curved outward and down to create a concavity in her belly and birth canal, making room for babies that this particular female would never have.

But if her pelvis said “woman,” her mouth whispered a different, sadder word to me: “child.” If she had lived to be my age, the ripe old age of thirty-seven, her maxillary sutures—the seams in the roof of her mouth—would have begun smoothing out and filling in, eventually becoming nearly invisible. But the maxillary sutures in the skull I cradled upside down in my hand were rough and bumpy, the bones barely beginning to fuse. In fact, if I hadn’t known from years of study that the bones were slowly joining, I might have concluded that something had struck the hard palate at its center, creating a cruciform pattern of cracks. But it was her life, not her palate, that had shattered.

Tyler studied my face as I studied the dead girl’s skull. “How old you think she is?”

“Not old enough,” I said. “Fourteen; fifteen, tops. But maybe only twelve or thirteen.”

He frowned and shook his head—not in disagreement, but in dismay. “That’s what I figured, too, but I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

“Any skeletal trauma?”

“A couple healed fractures in the arms,” he said. “One in the left humerus, the other in the right radius, about three inches above the wrist. But nothing perimortem. Nothing
I
could see, anyhow. Maybe you’ll spot something I’ve missed.”

I pored over every bone twice—with my eyes and with my fingertips—in search of a fresh, unhealed fracture, or the ragged nick of a knife blade, or a telltale smear of lead from a passing bullet—but there was nothing to be found. Finally, circling back to the skull once more, I shone a flashlight through the foramen magnum and peered inside the cranial vault, in case there was a fracture on the inner surface that might have ruptured one of the meningeal arteries, the arteries carrying blood to the brain. “I’m not seeing anything, either,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t killed. Just means that any injuries she had were soft-tissue trauma.” I took a final look into the cranial vault. “Oh, hey, did you find a wasp nest in here?”

He reached up and plucked a small gray object from the narrow shelf above the counter, then dropped it into my palm. A dozen or so hollow, hexagonal cells made of dry, papery pulp, it weighed almost nothing. “It’s a little crunched on the sides, from the forceps,” he said. “Getting it out through the foramen magnum was like trying to pull a ship out of a bottle.”

“Any more wasps on board?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I think ol’ Bubba Ray Peckerwood done got ’em all.”

“Careful,” I cautioned. “If you slip up and call him Peckerwood to his face, Special Agent Meffert might just feel obliged to open up a can of whup-ass on you.”

“Ha—let him try,” said Tyler. “I’ll lay some yoga on him. He’ll never even know what hit him.”

“What,” I scoffed, “you’re gonna meditate him into submission?” Tyler was a recent and enthusiastic convert to yoga, for reasons I didn’t fully grasp. “Weren’t you an athlete—a real athlete—once upon a time? Weight lifting or shot putting or some such? One of those manly sports dominated by hulking women from East Germany?”

“Hammer throw,” he said. “The ultimate test of strength and coordination. But by the way, there
is
no East Germany. The wall came down three years ago, in ’89, remember? ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall?’ Ronald Reagan’s finest moment. You’re showing your age, Dr. B.”

Summoning up my reediest old-man voice, I piped, “Back when I was a boy . . .”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Save it for the undergrads, Gramps.”

Was he just kidding, or was there a slight edge in his voice? Worse, was there a kernel of truth in his jab? Was I fossilizing even before I turned forty?

Time was much on my mind these days. Time since death was foremost in my thoughts. But time
before
death—my time; my sense of urgency about creating a research program to fill the gaps in my knowledge—that, too, was tugging at the sleeve of my mind.

“H
ang on a second, Doc, I’m fixin’ to put you on speakerphone,” drawled Sheriff Cotterell. I had swum back across the sweltering sea of asphalt to the stadium just in time to catch the call. “Bubba Hardknot’s a-settin’ right here with me, and I know he’ll want to hear whatever you got to say.”

I heard a click, then a hollow, echoing sound, as if the phone had been lowered down a well. “Hey, Doc,” Meffert’s voice boomed, from deep in the depths. “Whatcha got for us?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “I’ll send you both a written report in the next couple days, but here’s the bottom line. No skeletal trauma, so the bones can’t tell us how she died. All they can tell us is a little about who she was. White female; stature between five foot one and five foot three; age thirteen to fifteen. I estimated the age by looking at the pelvis, the teeth, the epiphyses of the long bones and clavicles, the—“

“Excuse me, Doc,” Meffert interrupted, “the
what
-ih-sees?”

“Epiphyses,” I repeated. “The ends of the bones. In subadults—children and adolescents—the ends of the long bones haven’t yet fused to the shafts; they’re connected by cartilage, at what’s called the growth plates. That’s how the arms and legs can grow so much when kids hit puberty. Toward the end of puberty, the epiphyses fuse, and the long bones don’t get any longer; you don’t get any taller. This girl’s epiphyses weren’t fully fused yet, so she hadn’t quite finished growing. She had her second molars—her twelve-year molars—so she was probably at least that old. And her pelvic structure had started getting wider, so we know she’d entered puberty. But her hips were still getting wider, so she wasn’t out of it yet.”

“How can you tell
that
?” asked Cotterell.

“Good question, Sheriff. There’s actually an epiphysis on the outer edge of each hip bone, too—it’s called the iliac crest, and all through puberty, the iliac crest is connected to the ilium—the wide bone of the hip—by cartilage. It’s another growth plate. Somewhere around age sixteen or eighteen, the iliac crest fuses. After that, the hips don’t get any wider.”

I heard a rumbling growl, which even over the speakerphone I recognized as Sheriff Cotterell’s laugh. “Doc,” he chuckled, “you ain’t never seen my wife.”

“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “After that, the
bones
of the hips don’t get any wider.”

“What else you got?” said Meffert. “You hear back from your buddy in Forestry?”

“I did. That little black locust seedling was two years old. So she’s been dead at least that long.”

“And no more’n how long?” asked the sheriff.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Nothing in the bones to tell us. When did that wildcat mine shut down?”

“Twenty-two years ago,” said Meffert, “in 1970.”

“Then she died somewhere between two years ago and twenty-two years ago,” I said.

“Twenty years? That’s as close as we can nail it?” The frustration in the sheriff’s voice was crystal clear, even though he was forty miles away.

“I’m afraid so, Sheriff. I wish I had more for you, but I don’t. We need better tools and techniques for determining time since death.”

“Got
that
right,” he said. I was glad he and Meffert weren’t there to see my face redden once more.