The Devil's Bones

CHAPTER 2

MY PHONE RANG FOR WHAT SEEMED THE EIGHTY-SEVENTH time of the morning, and I was hardening my heart to the plea of the ringer-resisting the reflex to answer-when I noticed that the caller was my secretary, Peggy.

It wasn’t as if Peggy could just roll back from her desk and lean her head through my doorway. My office-my working office, as opposed to my administrative, ceremonial office-was a couple hundred yards from hers, clear on the other side of the stadium. Years ago I had laid claim to the last office at the end of the long, curving hallway that ran beneath the grandstands. I was as far off the beaten track as it was possible to get, at least within the shabby quarters inhabited by the Anthropology Department. The isolation allowed me to get five times as much work done as I would if my desk were situated along the daily path of every undergraduate, grad student, and faculty member in the department. But the deal I’d made with Peggy, when I latched on to this distant sanctuary, was that any time she called, I’d answer. I could ignore the rest of the world, but not her.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Incoming,” was all she said.

I was just about to ask for clarification when I heard a sharp rap on my doorframe. “Gee, thanks for the warning,” I said. I hung up just as Amanda Whiting strode in, all pinstripes and power pumps.

“Do you have any idea how many local, state, and federal ordinances you violated last night with your little bonfire of the vanities?”

Amanda was UT’s general counsel, and she took both her job and herself quite seriously.

“From the way you phrase the question,” I said, “I suspect that ‘zero’ is not the answer you’re looking for.”

“It’s the answer I wish I had,” she said, “but it’s not the answer I’ve got.”

“Okay, I give up,” I said. “How many?”

“I don’t even know yet,” she said. “For one, you didn’t have a burn permit-hell, Bill, there’s been a moratorium on open burning for the past month because everything’s dry as tinder. For another, you destroyed state property.”

“What state property-the circle of grass we burned?”

“The Ag farm’s water truck.”

Ooh. I had hoped she didn’t know about the truck. “Come on, Amanda,” I said. “I’ve seen university presidents throw out thousands of dollars’ worth of perfectly good carpeting just because the office hadn’t been redecorated lately. You’re busting my chops about breaking the windshield and denting the hood of a twenty-year- old farm truck?”

She glared. “And the Federal Aviation Administration says you’re a menace to air traffic.”

I couldn’t help it; I laughed. “That’s like saying the candle is a menace to the moth,” I said. “That plane went out of its way to come down and circle those burning cars. If anybody’s a menace, it’s that idiot of a pilot. Miranda and I could have been killed. Hacked to bits by the propeller. Aren’t pilots supposed to keep at least five feet away from innocent bystanders and enormous fires?”

“You think this is all a joke,” she said, “but it’s not. What if the truck had caught fire? What if the house on the adjoining property had burned down? What if the plane had crashed or your graduate student had been hit by that wheel? Any of those things could have happened if something had gone just a little more wrong. And then the university would be held accountable. And I’d be the one who had to clean up behind you.”

“But none of them did happen, Amanda,” I said gently, trying to soothe her now.

“But they could have.”

I was tempted to reply, But they didn’t, only I didn’t see much to be gained by it. Amanda and I could contradict each other all day long, like two bickering dogs, but we wouldn’t have anything to show for it except sore throats and ragged nerves. “Can I show you something, Amanda?” She eyed me suspiciously, as if I were about to unfasten my pants and flash her, then acquiesced with a shrug. Twisting around to the table behind my desk, I picked up a left femur-a thighbone, burned to a grayish white-and held it under the lamp on my desk. “This is from one of the bodies we burned last night,” I said. “You see these fractures? This rectangular, rectilinear pattern?” I pointed with the tip of a pencil, and she leaned in, curiosity gradually outweighing her indignation. “This body was partially skeletonized when we put it in the car, and the bone was already drying. Now look at this one.” I took another femur from a second tray of bones and held it alongside the first. “This was green bone,” I said, “from a fresh body. Lots of moisture still in the bones-just like green wood with lots of sap in it. See the difference in the fractures?” She gave it a perfunctory glance, but then her gaze sharpened and took hold of something, and her eyes darted from one bone to the other.

“The fractures in the green bone aren’t as regular,” she said.

“They’re more random.” She peered closer. “They kind of spiral or corkscrew around the shaft, don’t they? Almost like the bone is splintering apart instead of just cracking.”

“Very good,” I said. I debated whether to play her the video clip showing the scalp peeling off the skull but decided that might be too graphic. “You’d have made a good forensic anthropologist.”

Her guard went back up-she guessed I was herding her somewhere that she didn’t want to go. “So why are you showing me this? What’s your point?”

“This difference in the fracture pattern of dry bone and green bone could be important in a murder case,” I said. “Actually, not ‘could be’-is important in a murder case. That’s why I needed to do the experiment. The difference tells us whether the victim was burned alive or whether she’d been dead awhile.” She frowned. “The police and the district attorney are trying to decide, right now, whether to charge someone with murder in this case.” I was pushing my luck, but I decided to press a point. “Tell me the truth, Amanda,” I said. “If I’d come to you and described this experiment-setting fire to two cars at night, with bodies and amputated limbs in them-how long would it have taken to get the approvals you’d need? Weeks? Months? Forever?”

She shrugged and held out her hands, palms up, unable or unwilling to guess.

“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “You’ve been here, what, five or six years now?”

“Seven,” she said.

“The Body Farm was already a fixture here when you came. If it hadn’t been-if I came to you today and said, ‘Listen, I think we need to set aside a piece of land where we put dead bodies and study what happens to them as they decay,’ what would you say?”

“Frankly, I’d say you were nuts,” she snapped. And then something shifted in her expression, and she laughed. “And I’m pretty sure I’d be right.”

I laughed, too. “Maybe so,” I said. “But the police and the FBI and the TBI don’t think so. Or maybe they do, but they also appreciate the research we do. It helps them solve crimes. Isn’t that worth a broken windshield or an FAA reprimand every now and then?”

She gave me a stern look, but it seemed at least partly for show. “Are you asking me for permission to break the rules? I can’t give you that.”

“No,” I said. “Not permission. A little understanding. And maybe occasional forgiveness.”

She took a deep breath and puffed it out between pursed lips. “I’m going to the beach next week for vacation,” she said. “Would you promise to try-really, really hard-not to stir up any more trouble the rest of this week?”

I held up the first three fingers of my right hand, my pinkie folded down and tucked beneath the tip of my thumb. “Scout’s honor,” I said.

“Fair enough,” she said, then hesitated. “There’s one other thing,” she said awkwardly.

“I’ve done something else wrong?”

“No,” she said, “you haven’t. Actually, I have. When Dr. Carter was killed…” I froze, and she faltered, possibly because of what she saw in my face when she mentioned Jess’s murder. “I was too quick…. I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

“You mean when you exiled me? Told me I wasn’t allowed on campus?” I hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but I did. Jess was a smart and capable medical examiner; she was also a lovely and spirited woman, and I was just beginning to fall in love with her when she was killed. Her death had devastated me, being suspected of her murder had stunned me, and being treated as a pariah by the university had just about knocked the last prop out from