Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 (3 page)

I had never driven an all-terrain vehicle before, but I’d seen kids tearing along highway shoulders and across fields on them, so I figured there couldn’t be much to it. There wasn’t, at least on flat ground. The throttle was a lever on the right handgrip that you pushed with your thumb, just like the Honda jet ski I rode once at a colleague’s lake house on Fort Nasty.

The sheriff’s ATV had a hand brake for the front wheels and a foot brake for the rear—just like the English three-speed bike I pedaled to campus back during my own graduate student days. So far, so good. The gearshift was an oddly placed pair of buttons on the left handgrip—my first few shifts lurched comically—but after a few uneventful laps of the courthouse parking lot, the sheriff seemed satisfied that I’d make it back in one piece from wherever it was we were headed.

The serpentine road we’d taken into Jonesport was a superhighway compared to the track we followed out of it. It started out as a lane of gravel, turning off the highway a half-mile south of town. The first time we crossed the river, we did so on a sagging wooden bridge. The next four times—or was it five?—that we forded it, the current piled up against the balloon tires of the ATVs. Before long the single lane of gravel gave way to a pair of parallel ruts, and soon those turned into a single muddy gully. Our progress, as we lurched and fishtailed upward, was excruciatingly slow—which was the only thing that kept me from getting sick again. The ATV had seemed simple to handle on the road. On the trail, it was a whole different beast. Keeping my balance and maintaining control required half-sitting, half-crouching, in a posture that I could tell was going to send my academician’s thighs and buttocks into fits of agony. But every time Kitchings and Williams looked back to see how I was faring, I gave a quick thumbs-up, trying not to look completely clumsy and panic-stricken as I made my grab for the handlebars again.

Gradually a limestone cliff reared out of the mountainside, and the trail, such as it was, edged close to its base, at times running beneath overhangs framed by towering hemlocks and glossy rhododendrons. At one such overhang the officers slowed, turned toward a cleft in the rock face…and then plunged into the bowels of the earth. I sucked in my breath, gritted my teeth, and plunged in after them. Okay, I didn’t actually plunge—crept, more like it—but I fol lowed. The key point is, I followed, finding the switch for the headlamp just as the last glimmer of daylight dwindled behind me.

The floor was surprisingly smooth and level—dry sand in some places, packed mud in others. The headlights of the ATVs fell away into nothingness, which told me we were in a huge subterranean chamber, the blackness so thick you could almost touch it. Then, after a distance that I had no way of estimating, glistening walls began closing in upon us, and we entered the bed of a subterranean stream. It was a foot deep, perhaps six feet wide, and straight as an arrow, following some precise crease in the layers of bedrock. When the passage widened again, Kitchings and Williams turned the vehicles up out of the streambed and stopped. They killed their engines and cut the lights, so I did the same, and we sat in utter darkness.

No one said a word. The water gurgled softly past. My ears adjusted to the quiet, as my eyes might have adjusted to dim light, had there been a single photon to latch on to. Gradually I began to hear another sound underneath the stream’s noise, a sound that was musical, haunting, and human: unmistakably, I heard the laughter of small children.

“Do you hear…?” I began, but I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the question.

“The kids. Yeah.” It was Kitchings. “Spooky, huh? I’ve been told two different things by people who know this cave. One is that it’s just some weird echo from the stream. The other is that it’s the spirits of Indian children.”

He must have sensed my confusion, because he continued, “This cave is on land that was sacred to five separate tribes. Even when they were at war, they could mingle here in peace. Powerful magic, they say. When I’m out in the daylight, I believe in the science. When I’m in here in the dark, I believe in the spirits.”

He flipped on a flashlight, and when he did, the laughter died in midnote. Opening a cargo box bolted to the rear of the ATV, he fished out three powerful lanterns and a jacket that read “D.E.A.” in big letters across the back. “Here, you better put on this heirloom drug-bust jacket, Doc; you’re liable to catch pneumonia in here.” I waved it off, but he handed it to me anyhow. “I’d hate to be remembered as the sheriff who killed Dr. Brockton,” he said. As I put it on, I realized I was already shivering.

We trudged up the side of a sloping basin, ducked into a side tunnel, and soon emerged into another chamber. The rest of the cavern had been a dull grayishbrown, but these walls sparkled—practically blazed—with the fire of millions of crystals. Quartz, I guessed, though they seemed as brilliant as diamonds. A mammoth stalagmite, also sheathed in crystals, filled one side of the chamber. A narrow cleft separated the stalagmite from the wall. Kitchings nodded toward the crevice and played his light over the opening in a go-here sort of way. I edged my way in. It was a tight fit—I wondered how the sheriff had wrangled his beer belly through it—but then it opened up into a small, glittering grotto. Laid out on a rock shelf along one side was a body—the most remarkable human corpse I’d ever seen. I stared, and blinked, and stared again. The sheriff had been right. A day—or a month, or even a year—would have wrought little change in the striking corpse laid out on a rock shelf in that glittering grotto.

I had seen adipocere many times before. The term is Latin; it translates literally as “grave wax,” and that pretty much sums up what it is and where it’s found: a greasy, tallowlike material that forms when fatty flesh decomposes in a damp environment. Bodies buried in damp basements or crawl spaces under houses often have adipocere on them; so do floaters—bodies found in Tennessee’s abundant lakes and rivers—with most of the adipocere centered along the floater’s waterline. But the dozens of basement bodies and floaters I’d seen bore scant resemblance to the specimen laid out on the stone ledge before me. At first glance the corpse had appeared shrouded in adipocere, but as I studied it, I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t a surface coating, but something much rarer. The body’s soft tissues had been completely transformed into adipocere—

almost as if Madame Tussaud had placed a waxen mummy here as a private exhibit for me alone. The clothing had apparently crumbled away, its residue incorporated into a dark layer that began at the corpse’s neck and continued all the way down to the rotting leather at the soles of the feet. The Smithsonian possessed a similar corpse, that of Wilhelm von Ellenbogen, who had been dug up in the course of moving a cemetery more than a century ago. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia—home to some of the most bizarre medical and forensic oddities on the planet—had his female counterpart, whom they nicknamed “the Soap Lady” because of adipocere’s chemical kinship to soap. But those were misshapen and repulsive compared to the eerily preserved corpse before me. It was not an image of repose, mind you—the eyes stared blindly and the mouth gaped in an eternal scream—and yet despite the grotesque expression, there was something oddly beautiful about it. I started forward, then caught myself and called out, “Have you all been in here?”

“Just far enough to see the body. Didn’t want to disturb the scene before you got a chance to look at it.”

“Good man. I wish more of your colleagues would be so careful.”

I took out the 35-millimeter camera I’d brought with me from Knoxville. Early in my career, one of the smartest cops I ever worked with gave me a piece of advice that sounded equally apt for crime scene photographers and ruthless bank robbers: “Shoot your way in and shoot your way out,” he said, and I’d been doing it ever since. Standing in the opening to the crystalline grotto, I started with wide shots from eye level, to establish the scene as a whole. Then I squatted down and shot across the floor of the cave at a low angle—another photography trick he’d taught me—to cast shadows that would throw footprints into sharper relief.

The flash was too quick and bright for me to see what it was getting, so I played the flashlight beam across the floor. The unevenness made it hard to tell for sure, but I thought I saw prints leading toward the body. I zoomed in on what seemed to be the best ones and fired off shots from several angles. Then I turned my attention and my lens toward the body.

I approached, slowly and circuitously, taking photographs every time I moved more than a few feet. I’d started with a fresh roll of 36 exposures—slides, as always, because a carousel tray was easy to carry into a classroom or a courtroom, and the film’s resolution was still far better than any digital image. You could project a good slide on a movie theater screen and it’d still look crisp; try that with a digital image and it would turn into some murky Impressionist rendering of a crime scene shrouded in fog. Besides, the one occasion when I’d tried using a digital camera, every picture I snapped erased the one before, so I left that crime scene with just one photo, a close-up of a stab wound. But I had read that the last Kodak carousel slide projector had rolled off the assembly line a year or so back, so I knew my nondigital days were numbered. “Progress, hell,” I muttered.

“What’s that, Doc?”

“Sorry, just talking to myself in here. Y’all come on back.”

They squeezed through the crevice into the grotto. Williams, who was skinny as a stray dog, slipped through easily. Kitchings required considerable time and effort. He turned sideways, his arms raised, for the first part. Then, when he reached the narrowest part of the passage—“Fat Man’s Squeeze,” the gap would be called if this were a commercial cave tour—he reached down, cupped his hands under his belly, and squished it upward like some gargantuan breast in a cyclopean Miracle Bra. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist: I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.

He yelped when the flash seared his eyes. “God
damn
! What the hell?”

I grinned. “Just making sure I document everything at the scene.”

“Document my ass. Looka here, Doc, forensic legend or not, you show that picture to a soul, and I figure any jury in Cooke County would call your death justifiable homicide.”

Williams piped up, “Could be, Tom, but to beat the rap, you’d have to show the picture to all twelve of ’em.” He chuckled at the notion.

“Well, shit. That complicates my damn plan, don’t it? I reckon maybe I better just confiscate the doc’s film.”

“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, Sheriff,” I said. “I think I had the lens cap on anyhow.”

When they were both standing beside me, I asked, “Mind if I take a picture of your feet?”

They looked puzzled for a moment, then the light dawned. Kitchings held Williams’s shoulder to steady himself, then raised one boot sole toward me for a photo, followed by the other. Next, Williams braced on Kitchings and I photographed his feet, too. Finally, I handed the camera to Kitchings and had him snap mine. It was unlikely to come up in court, but I didn’t want some defense lawyer claiming that what the prosecution presented as a ruthless killer’s footprints were actually an inept anthropologist’s. The only things I’d brought from Knoxville besides my camera were a pair of latex gloves, a small tape measure, and a pocketknife. I opened the pocketknife and set it on the rock shelf, then donned the gloves and picked it back up. Using the tip of the blade, I gently picked at the adipocere in the region of the cheek. As I suspected, underneath was nothing but bone. “Can’t tell the race from the skin,” I said, “because there’s no skin left.”

Williams spoke up. “Got to be white. We don’t have black folks up here. Not after sundown, anyhow.” He snickered. “Not if a black man values his life.”

I leveled a look at the deputy. “Then again, if a black man was to have car trouble or get lost up here when the sun went down, this might be just the sort of spot he’d wind up in, mightn’t it?”

“Leon, you dumbass hillbilly redneck,” Kitchings spat.

Williams blinked and looked away, his jaw muscles twitching hard.

“You’re probably right, I’m pretty sure it’s a Caucasian,” I went on. “The hair looks straight and blond, and the mouth structure is textbook Caucasoid—see how vertical the teeth are?” I touched the tip of the knife blade to what was once the upper lip, just below where the nose had collapsed, then swung the flat side of the blade down across the lips, resting it on the greasy chin. “If this individual were Negroid, the teeth and jawbones would angle forward, and this straight edge wouldn’t touch the chin.”

I pulled out the tape. With Williams holding one end gingerly, I measured the corpse. “About five feet eight,” I read. “Allowing for postmortem shrinkage of the cartilage, could’ve been another two or three inches taller than that in life. Just from the stature, I’d have guessed male, but from the facial features, the small skull, and the wide pelvis, I’m thinking female. Any guesses? Any women—tall women—missing in Cooke County?”

They thought awhile before Kitchings broke the silence. “Not that I know of. How long you reckon she’s been here, Doc?”

“Between the cave and the adipocere, it’s hard to say. Caves are cool, and it doesn’t look like the flies and maggots ever got to her. So it could have been a long time—I’d say years rather than months, maybe even be a whole lot of years.”

“Well, that’s gonna mean going back through the files quite a ways, then,”

Kitchings said. “Might take awhile. Some of the files aren’t too good, either. The ones since I took office are okay, but the older ones are a mess.”

“Well, see what you can find,” I said. “There might be some folks who’d remember right off. Didn’t I see some old-timers whittling on a bench outside the courthouse? You’d be amazed what guys like that can tell you.”

“Well, I’m not sure I’d put too much stock in the memories of those guys, but I’ll ask. What else can you tell me about her?”

“Not much right here, right now. I need to get the body back to the Forensic Center at UT Medical Center and process the remains,” I said. “Clean off the tissue, study the bones closely. Then I can tell you how old she was, how tall, what race. We’ll take X-rays, look for healed injuries that might show up in somebody’s medical chart, try to find dental records. If we get lucky, we’ll find out who she was and maybe even how she died.”