attention on RE/MAX, if you'll let us help. Maybe our guys can unearth something. Who knows? Maybe this guy Purdy put in an ad a month ago in search of a secluded place, or perhaps he saw one in the realty section of the Post.”
Jessica sighed in response, and saying nothing but saying everything with her body language, she went to Lew Clemmens, who had gone to a computer and was furiously keying in a search of RE/MAX listings in remote areas around D.C. Meanwhile, all the others, including O'Brien, had taken to the phones, talking to every realtor and realty expert in town.
“ Lew,” Jessica said in her friend's ear, “what about the check on any violence done to anyone in the real estate business the past seventy-two hours?”
“ Our guys at Quantico are running it. Promise to get back pronto.”
She nodded, breathed heavily, and collapsed in the seat next to Lew, waiting for a hit. “Just on the off chance, have them search for anyone in the realty business who has turned up as Missing Persons, as well.”
“ Gotcha, boss.” Lew gave her a teddy bear smile.
Some things no one wanted to ever contemplate, such as the process of decay in one's own body, and so it was with Jessica, but she had to face it if she were to help Judge DeCampe and Kim Desinor. She called on an expert on decay, a forensic anthropologist who stood at the top of the profession, also on the FBI payroll.
The man was the head of the most bizarre scientific research facility on the face of the earth, a one-of-a-kind place officially called the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, but unofficially known as the Body Farm. And while they did not grow bodies there, they did grow maggots and decay. Everyone in the forensic community knew of the gruesomely genuine “back to nature” open air laboratory created by Dr. Will Bass, who at seventy-two still showed up for work to oversee training of young forensic scientists in the art and science of discovery through time of rot. A lot of jokes abounded about the farm and its creator, who at an early age had felt so incompetent at the task of determining time of death when faced with a corpse that he determined instead to devote his life to the question of how to read decaying bodies for clues. In a case that had embarrassed him, he'd been off time of death by 113 years, when it was determined the body was that of a Civil War veteran whose coffin had been disturbed in error during a disinterment.
Jessica telephoned the facility only to learn that Bass was in Zurich, lecturing; not surprised by this, she asked for whoever had been left in charge of the farm. Syd Fielding replied that she was talking to the right man. Fielding was one of Bass's disciples. There were some sixty forensic anthropologists who specialized in human degeneration, and Bass had trained two-thirds of them.
Jessica got right to the point, telling Dr. Fielding what they were faced with in the DeCampe kidnapping. He was appalled at the idea of someone being strapped to “one of those bodies we have in the field in advanced stage of decay.”
“ We fear the worst for good reason, sir. I need to know what kind of time we have left. If I bring you everything we have on when she disappeared and where we suspect she is, and the distances, times for both her and the body she's strapped to, maybe we can have some idea how much time she has left.”
“ Of course, we'll do all that we can here. You know if it has to do with decay, this is the place to ask your questions. How soon can you be here?”
“ I have a helicopter standing ready and have been cleared for the trip ASAP.”
“ We'll keep the facility open late then; you'll want to come to the main building. The pilot will know where to land.”
They hung up, and Jessica rushed to the waiting helicopter atop FBI headquarters. She'd hugged and kissed Richard good-bye, asking him, “Please, keep me abreast of any new developments, Richard. Don't hesitate to call.”
She then waved to Keyes and J. T., who had walked up with them. The trio stood on the shoulder of the helipad and waved her off.
An hour and a half later, Jessica heard the pilot's voice break into her sleep; having had no sleep for twenty- four hours, she'd nodded off to the hum of the rotors. “We're on approach for the Body Farm. Thought you'd want to be awake now,” he told her. “There.”
She shook off the drowsiness and saw that Pilot Marks was pointing ahead of them. She followed his gesture down to die ground, to a two-acre patch of dense woods-mostly thick oak, maple, and sycamore-the canopy thick and impenetrable. It was all one big swelling or hillside, bracketed on all sides by a stockade-style fence, large even from here, likely ten feet high. Overlaying the spikes of this stockade, a razor wire mesh meant to keep the dead in and the living out.
Jessica had read a great deal about Bass and his extensive research into decay and time-of-death assessment. She knew from her reading how many cases had been won by prosecutors across the country as a result of this facility, and that the information gleaned here had become textbook commonality among medical examiners, forensic scientists, and pathologists alike. Nowhere on the planet did corruption of the flesh do so much to help so many than here in the controversial Tennessee facility. The place was, in fact, extremely controversial from the day Bass had set up shop on university grounds, with public opinion-as usual-running high at the thought that such a place existed. People demanded to know where the bodies were harvested from, and it outraged people to learn that the bodies were placed in various staged scenarios: held below stagnated black water by chains, held in shallow sunlit water by weights, placed in deep burial pits, shallow graves, or merely half buried. Other “donor” bodies had been left entirely to the elements, and wild animals were left to their own devices to feed. Still other rancid bodies were placed inside burned-out Chevys, and in the trunks of Fords, all to advance the science of understanding rotting flesh-putrefaction.
Now the helicopter passed over the city, and Jessica felt a jolt of surprise at how close the Body Farm was to downtown Knoxville; in fact, it stood just across the Tennessee River from downtown. On a badly sultry day, she wondered what the wind would carry into the city. She knew that at any given time, at least forty bodies lay decomposing in their various poses beneath the canopy of trees, behind the stockade. There was even one pit called the mass grave, wherein slept a tangle of bodies. All to further science, so that when such sites occur in Albacore, Mississippi; Peoria, Illinois; Bonfire, New Mexico; Salem, Oregon; Worcester, Massachusetts; Senegal; or Bangladesh, then doctors on the scene might make some intelligent decisions on how and when the victims of murder met their end.
In 1977, Will Bass realized a need for the farm, when he determined scientists simply did not know enough about normal and abnormal decay in human flesh. Bass was a visionary, a pioneer. He had turned the attitude and the tools of anthropology toward forensics long before anyone else connected the two fields. He made the tools of excavation and skeletal examination into one of the major modem weapons against crime.
All of Bass's best people were now sought after, and Syd Fielding was among the most sought after. Although Bass remained the paterfamilias of the Body Farm at age seventy- two, still held onto a set of keys, and kept close tabs on all the goings on, especially with the residents, Fielding had become the day-to-day manager of the facility. Aside from his duties here, Fielding was in demand on the lecture circuit, addressing M.E.'s and morticians, as well as consulting widely with law enforcement agencies, insurance investigators, and attorneys.
The farm had taught untold lessons to untold people in the field, lessons about whether or not larvae remained on the body, or whether or not empty pupae cases were left behind by maggots as they matured into flies. Such empty insect casings told a savvy forensics person whether or not at least one generation of flies had hatched and matured in the body or bodies, a cycle requiring two weeks or more.
Such information, along with milk labels, meat labels, the mold on the bread, the accumulated mail, all helped to point to a probable time of death, sometimes so accurate as to put a killer away.
On the ground now, the helicopter blades whining and winding down, Jessica was greeted behind the University of Tennessee Medical Center by a surprisingly young-looking Fielding, who had been sitting on the tailgate of a Dodge pickup. After introductions and handshakes, he led her to a large gate posted with Keep Out and No Trespassing signs. The stockade fence had not replaced an earlier chain-link fence but rather reinforced the interior chain-link fence, and it had the added feature of hiding from view what was going on inside. This Syd Fielding explained, adding, “We've had some attempts at sabotage; the new fence cost mightily, but it became necessary after the press got hold of our using bodies here that-in the local opinion-don't deserve our desecrating
