The Devil's Bones

“I’m okay,” I said. “Mostly.”

“I think about you all the time,” she said. “I’d give anything if I could undo all the things that went wrong last spring.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Sometimes I feel lonelier than I did before Jess-or maybe I just notice the loneliness more now. The trial starts next week, and I figure that’ll be hard. But maybe once it’s done, I’ll feel some closure. I want to hear sentence pronounced on him. And I want it to be a harsh one.”

“Would you like us to be there when you testify?”

I didn’t trust my voice to answer the question, so I just nodded.

“Then we will,” she said. “You tell us when, and we’ll be there. And if there’s anything else you need, you call Jeff or you call me.”

I nodded again.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

CHAPTER 5

“Dr. Brockton? This is Lynette Wilkins, at the Regional Forensic Center.”

Lynette didn’t need to tell me who she was or where she worked; I’d heard her voice a thousand times or more-every time I dialed the morgue or popped in for a visit. The Regional Forensic Center and the Knox County Medical Examiner’s Office shared space in the morgue of UT Medical Center, located across the river and downstream from the stadium. There was also a custom-designed processing room-complete with steam-jacketed kettles and industrial-grade garbage disposals-where my graduate students and I could remove the last traces of tissue from skeletons after they’d been picked relatively clean by the bugs at the Body Farm. From fresh, warm gunshot victims to sun-bleached bones, the basement complex in the hospital dealt with them all.

“Good morning, Lynette,” I said. “And how are you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said, although she didn’t actually sound fine. She sounded extremely nervous and formal-an odd combination, I thought, in a woman who had once, at a Christmas party, planted a memorable kiss on my mouth. Spiked punch could be blamed for most of that lapse in office decorum; still, our frequent conversations-in person and by phone-had been marked by the ease and casualness of comrades- in-arms, fellow soldiers in the trenches of gruesome accidents and grisly murders.

“Dr. Garcia, the medical examiner, would like to speak with you,” she said, and as I pictured an unfamiliar M.E. sitting a few feet away from her, I understood why she didn’t sound like her usual self. “Could you hold on for just a moment?”

“Sure, Lynette,” I said. “Have a nice day.”

The line clicked, and I waited. Nothing. I waited some more. Still nothing. Then I heard a man’s voice say, “Ms. Wilkins, are you sure he’s there?” A pause followed, then, “I don’t think so.”

“Hello,” I said.

Another pause.

“Mr. Brockton?”

Now it was my turn to pause. “This is Bill Brockton,” I said.

“Dr. Bill Brockton. How can I help you?”

“This is Dr. Edelberto Garcia,” said a cool voice, whose careful emphasis was meant to let me know that not all doctors are created equal. His first name sounded elegant and aristocratic the way he pronounced it-“ay-del-BARE-toe”-but then I remembered a bit about Spanish pronunciations, and I realized that the English version of his name would be “Ethelbert,” and I nearly laughed. “I’ve been appointed by the commissioner of health to serve as director of the Regional Forensic Center.”

“Sure,” I said, resisting the urge to add “Ethelbert” to my answer. “I had lunch with Jerry last week. He told me he’d hired you. Welcome to Knoxville.”

“Thank you,” he said. If he noticed my first-name reference to Gerald Freeman, the health commissioner, he didn’t let on. I considered adding that six weeks earlier Jerry had shown me the files on the three finalists for the job, and had asked for my opinion. Garcia had been my second choice-and Jerry’s, too-but the strongest of the finalists had taken a job at a far higher salary in the M.E.’s office in New York City.

“We’re currently investigating the death of a Knoxville woman whose burned body was found last week in her car,” he said. Again I nearly laughed out loud.

“Why, yes,” I said, “I believe I heard something about that. Can I be of some assistance?”

“I’m told by a police investigator, a Sergeant Evers, that you’ve done some-shall we say research? — that might be relevant.”

“Ah, Sergeant Evers,” I said. “Good man, Evers. Dogged investigator. Fearsome interrogator.” I didn’t add that Evers had fearsomely interrogated me only a few months before and had arrested me on suspicion of homicide, in the death of Jess Carter, who had served a brief stint as acting M.E. here in Knoxville. Maybe Garcia already knew that; if he didn’t, he was the only person in a hundred-mile radius who didn’t. “If Sergeant Evers thinks my research might be relevant, far be it from me to disagree.” I could hear him weighing my words and my tone for the sarcasm I’d added to them, and I suspected he was about to respond by turning even more stuffy and condescending. No point getting into a pissing match with the new M.E., I decided. “Actually, Dr. Garcia, that research is pretty interesting. What we’ve done is compare fire-induced fractures in green bone-fleshed bone-with fractures in dry bone. We burned two cars containing cadavers and limbs from the immediate postmortem interval, as well as from one week and two weeks postmortem. No point going past two weeks in the summer-by then you’re down to bare, dry bone already.”

He mulled this over briefly. “And have you documented your research results? Do you have something you could messenger over?”

“Nothing in writing,” I said. “Got some burned bones I could messenger over.”

“Thank you, but without some methodological context, I’m not sure-”

“Hell, I’ll be the messenger, and I’ll give you the context,” I said. “I’m coming over that direction anyhow. I’ll bring a few of the bones and show you what it is I’ll be writing up, soon as I get around to it. You can ask questions, and I can try to answer them. If any of it’s relevant, great. If it’s not, neither one of us has lost more than a few minutes. You want to take a look?”

“Very well,” he said.

Very well? I thought. Who says “Very well” anymore? And why does this guy have such a big broomstick up his ass? “Swell,” I said, then thought, Who the hell says “Swell” anymore, Brockton? Then I thought, Apparently I do. “I’ll be over there in about ten minutes. Looking forward to meeting you.”

“I’ll see you then,” was all he said before hanging up.

I selected half a dozen bones from the fiery nighttime experiment, then wrapped them in bubble wrap and laid them in one of the long boxes we used to store the specimens in the skeletal collection. As I headed down the hall that traced the curve of the stadium’s end zone, I passed the open door of Jorge Jimenez, a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology from Buenos Aires. Jorge’s name sounded anything but aristocratic, I realized, since the first syllable was pronounced like “whore.” I tapped on Jorge’s door with one knuckle. “Come in,” he said, not looking up from his computer screen. The screen showed a young couple doing what appeared to be the tango, but suddenly they spun apart and began break-dancing.

“That’s an interesting dance,” I said. “I don’t believe I know that one.”

“Ah, Dr. Brockton,” he said, looking up. “Sorry to be rude. This is actually research. Did you know that in Buenos Aires, where this dance video was shot, one out of every twenty teenagers has posted a video on YouTube?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “What’s U-2?” It didn’t sound like he was talking about a Cold War spy plane or a rock band.

“Not U-2. YouTube.” He scrawled it on a piece of paper for me. “An Internet site where people post videos