The Devil's Bones

Lord with all thy heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding; in all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths”-and then proceeded to expound on it. Maxine herself had been homeless once, Roger told me. Her brief sermon made it clear she believed that her divinely guided path had led to precisely this place, precisely this program of providing food and clothing under the interstate. Not everyone shared Maxine’s vision, according to Roger-some social workers saw Lost Sheep and other mission-type programs as “enablers,” crutches that made it easier for people to avoid getting jobs and becoming self-supporting. But what jobs, I wondered, could some of these lost and broken souls do?

Maxine handed over the microphone to a young man who-by his own account-had been one of Knoxville’s biggest drug dealers before finding God and cleaning up his life. He was followed by a singer-a pretty young woman with long brown hair, an acoustic guitar, and the sweet, simple voice of a folksinger. “When the music fades,” she sang, “I simply come longing to bring something that’s of worth, that will bless your heart.” I wasn’t sure how many people were following the lyrics-most seemed more intent on what awaited them at the food tables or the tables of men’s and women’s clothing and over-the-counter medications-but perhaps the words weren’t the most important part of the message. I remembered the inscription on Jess’s plaque at the Body Farm-WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE-and I admired the compassion of this army of volunteers, more than a hundred strong, even if they were treating symptoms rather than curing the root causes of homelessness.

Almost as swiftly as it had begun, the service-and the services-came to an end. Even as the final stragglers received their rations of stew and shoes and aspirin, the furniture brigade began folding and storing the chairs and tables. The plates of food had been picked clean by the five hundred people who had converged on them, and the throng dispersed toward the shelters and the bridges and the creek-side camps where they would lay their heads on this particular night. One of the last to wander off, I noticed, was the twitching, mumbling man I’d seen near the head of the food line. As he shuffled toward the trees flanking the railroad tracks, a man fell in beside him and took his arm, stopping him for a brief conversation at the edge of the darkness.

It was one of the Lost Sheep volunteers, I realized, probably concerned for the man’s well-being. But it could just as easily have been Garland Hamilton waylaying him-offering money to a down-at-the-heels alcoholic, who might literally die for a drink.

THE SURREAL scene beneath I-40 was still vivid in my mind the next morning as I studied skull fragments in the bone lab. When the phone rang, I ignored it, intent on the oval of pieced-together temporal bone cradled in one hand and the jagged shard clasped in a pair of tweezers. After half a dozen rings, the phone fell silent, then began clamoring again. Glancing at the display, I saw that it was Peggy, the one caller I couldn’t ignore. I sighed, laying the larger segment in the sand of the cake pan and the single piece back in the tray with countless other bits.

“Hello, Peggy,” I grumbled.

“Are we a tad grumpy this morning?”

“We are,” I said. “Sorry.”

“There’s a Lisa Wells on line one for you,” said Peggy.

“Wells?” That name didn’t ring any bells. “Could you take a message? I’ve got my hands full at the moment.”

A moment later the phone jangled again; Peggy again. I cursed under my breath as I reached for it. “Now what?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. B., but Ms. Wells says it’s important. She says she might know a homeless man you’re looking for.”

“Oh, put her on,” I said. A moment later the quiet background sounds of Peggy’s office were replaced by a cacophony of street noise in my left ear-cars whizzing past, wheels thumping into potholes, a jackhammer off in the telephonic distance somewhere. “Hello,” I said, “is this Lisa with the dimples?”

“Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure whether she was taken aback or simply hadn’t heard me over the noise.

“Hello, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said, a bit louder and more formally. “It sounds busy there at the dayroom.”

“I stepped outside to call,” she said. “There’s not a lot of privacy inside. Dr. Brockton, I’ve been thinking a lot about what you asked me yesterday.”

“Thinking is good,” I said.

“I’m in an awkward position,” she said. “I have to protect the confidentiality of our clients, but you’ve got me worried about one. A regular, a man named Freddie. He’s been here nearly every day for the past six months, but I haven’t seen him in over a week now.” She hesitated. “He does drink, but he’d been doing better lately. When he stopped showing up, I worried he’d gone on a binge. Now I’m afraid it’s something worse.”

“Can you describe Freddie for me-white, black, short, tall, young, old?”

“White,” she said. “Middle-aged-forty-five going on sixty. Homeless people tend to age fast-life on the street takes a toll. Probably about five-ten, fairly thin. A hundred fifty pounds, maybe.”

“Remember anything about his teeth?”

“You mean, did he have some?”

I laughed. “Well, that would be a start.”

She laughed, too. “Some of them don’t,” she said. “Beyond that, no, I don’t remember anything about his teeth.”

“Then I don’t suppose you’d know where we might get hold of his dental records?”

“Dental records? No,” she said. “The people we work with are barely hanging on, Dr. Brockton. We’ve got a dentist who volunteers one day a month, to provide very basic care, but dental records? Not on the radar screen of our clients.”

“That’s what I figured,” I said, “but I had to ask. It’d be a lot easier to identify this burned skeleton if we had dental X-rays.”

“X-rays?” Even over the street noise, I heard something in her voice shift. “Do they have to be dental?”

“Dental’s usually best. An arm or leg X-ray might work, if it showed something we could compare to-a healed fracture or an orthopedic plate or some such.”

“How about a head?”

“A head?”

“An X-ray of the head. The skull?”

I heard something in my own voice shift. “Do you have an X-ray of Freddie’s skull?”

“I don’t, but UT Hospital might. Not long after he started coming around here, he slipped in the lunchroom and hit his head hard-knocked him out cold. We called an ambulance, and they took him to the ER at UT.”

I got Freddie’s last name from Lisa, then phoned the Radiology Department.

“Hi, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said to Theresa, the Radiology receptionist. “A guy from one of the homeless missions might have come through the ER for a cranial X-ray about four months ago. Name was Freddie Darnell, D-A-R-N-E-L–L. We’re trying to ID a murder victim, and we think there’s a chance it’s Darnell. Would you be willing to check and see if you’ve got a record for him? We can get a court order if you need us to.”

“Hang on just a second, Dr. Brockton,” she said. She put me on hold. A minute passed, then three, then five. I was watching the bars on my cell phone, which I’d forgotten to charge overnight. Now I was down to one battery bar, and I worried the phone might die before she came back.

“I couldn’t find anything filed under Darnell,” she said. My heart sank. “But we did have a guy named Parnell, with a P,” she said. “Could that be it? Maybe somebody at the mission got it wrong-or maybe the ER intake clerk misunderstood.”

My pulse started to race. “First name Freddie-Fred or Frederick, maybe? White male, forty-five, give or take a few years?”

She hesitated. ”I don’t suppose you have a HIPAA release from him, do you?”

“I don’t,” I said, “and I’m afraid he’s too dead to sign one for me. Would you need a subpoena to let me look at his X-rays?”

“Hang on one more minute, Doc.”

I hung on. My cell phone’s low-battery indicator started to beep-draining the battery all the faster.

Finally she came back on the line. “This is such a coincidence, Dr. B.,” she said. “Dr. Shepherd was just