reward for providing a bit of entertainment. Either way, I smiled bigger and returned the wink.
Then I saw Garland Hamilton looking at me. I met his gaze, and he gave me a brief nod. It wasn’t as friendly as his greeting had been, but it was fairly cordial, considering that his professional life was on the line here and I was part of the effort to terminate it.
The state’s lawyer led me out of the hearing room. In the marbled hallway, seated on a bench outside the double doors, was Jess Carter. If I’d given the matter any thought, I’d have realized Jess would be testifying as well, since she had reautopsied the body of Billy Ray Ledbetter before I examined the bones. But I’d been too preoccupied with the Chattanooga case, and with my heavy-handed treatment of my creationist student, to think about it.
“Hey, stranger,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here. You free by any chance to night?”
This was the second question today that had caught me off-balance.
“Well, I could be,” I said, my thoughts lagging half a beat behind my words. “I mean, I am. I think. Are you?”
She laughed at my clumsiness. “Ah. Sorry, no. Some guy in the hospital for routine foot surgery died the night he checked in, and the family’s screaming lawsuit. I gotta get back and do his autopsy this afternoon.”
“Oh. Right. Me too, now that I think about it. I mean, not an autopsy. I have some test papers to grade, so I can give them back tomorrow morning.”
“I thought UT was out on spring break this week?” She raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. Underneath both brows, her eyes were dancing.
Damn. Why did her processor always seem to work so much faster than mine? I was glad it hadn’t been Jess cross-examining me in there just now. “Don’t let me keep you from your testimony,” I said, nodding at the state’s attorney, who was looking anxious.
“Oh, what I have to say won’t take long,” she said. “I’ll just tell them how I took one look at those rotting remains and handed them straight over to the eminent Dr. Brockton.”
She winked, turned, and disappeared through the doorway. In her wake she left a swirl of hair, perfume, and female pheromones. Also an unmistakable aura of wit, intelligence, and professional competence.
CHAPTER 10
I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH a stack of a hundred test papers, and already my stomach was paging me. I checked my watch; it said ten-thirty, which was too early for lunch even by my standards, though not by much. Besides, the nearest cafeteria, in the athletic building across the street, didn’t start serving lunch until eleven. If I stayed focused, I could grade the remaining fifty papers-it was a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank test-and still be the first person through the lunch line.
There was a knock at my door. I always kept the door ajar when I was in, and most students just barged right in. Not this time. “Come in,” I said. Miranda leaned her head around the door and scanned the room. “Since when do you knock?” I asked.
“Since I walked in on you
“Ah,” I said, regretting the question. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime lapse. I was overcome with grief at the time. She was just trying to comfort me.” Unfortunately-mortifyingly-“she” was an undergraduate student who had asked a question that had released a flood of sadness over my wife’s death. In trying to console me, the young woman had given me a kiss that began as compassion but swiftly turned to passion. It was probably fortunate that Miranda had appeared in my doorway when she had; otherwise, I might have crossed even farther over the line.
“Comfort, huh,” Miranda snorted. “Hmm. Sort of like that jailer I read about in the
“No,” I said, “not like that. There was no nakedness involved in this comforting.”
“Might’ve been if I’d walked in five minutes later,” she said. “Speaking of the capable and comforting Miss Carmichael, how is she? Still at the top of her class?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s taking two cultural anthropology classes this semester. I hope she hasn’t gone over to the Dark Side.”
“Hmm. I suspect she’ll circle back to physical anthropology. She just seems the physical type, you know?” Miranda smiled sweetly as she said this, to let me know she was joking. Sort of.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said with an answering smile. “I was getting worried about her. You’ve given me such…comfort.”
She glared, then laughed. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Truce. I’m not still jealous of her.” She paused for half a beat. “Smart, cute little bitch.” She laughed again. So did I. Miranda had a way of tipping me off-balance, then catching me just before I went sprawling. “Actually, I didn’t come by just to stomp on your feet of clay,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I was so enjoying it. What other delights await me?”
“Our research subject, oh-five thirty-one?” I was instantly alert; 05–31 was the case number we’d assigned to the corpse tied to the tree at the Farm, because he was the thirty-first forensic case of 2005.
“What about him?”
“He’s getting pretty interesting. You might want to come out and take a look.”
“I was planning to head that way after I finished grading these papers and eating lunch,” I said, “but somehow those seem less compelling now. Let’s go.”
The department’s pickup truck was parked a flight of stairs away, near the tunnel that penetrated the stadium at field level, at the north end zone-the tunnel the UT football team ran through to the cheers of a hundred thousand people on game days. The truck was angled nose-first between two of the columns holding up the stadium’s upper deck. I backed around, tucking its rear bumper between two other columns, and threaded the one- lane ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, weaving a path around several students and an oncoming maintenance truck.
Turning right onto Neyland Drive, we paralleled the river, driving downstream. The morning was sunny and unseasonably warm for mid-March-at least, what used to pass for unseasonably warm-and there were already a fair number of cyclists and runners on the greenway that bordered Neyland. The School of Agriculture’s trial gardens-a couple of carefully landscaped acres radiating from a large circular arbor-were already ablaze with daffodils, forsythia, and tulips. I slowed to admire the view, which was just as well, because a hundred yards ahead, a truck hauling a long horse trailer was making a leisurely right turn into the entrance of the veterinary school.
“Hey, speaking of horses, what ever happened to Mike Henderson?” asked Miranda. “He was doing research on the effects of fire on bone a while back. Worked at the vet school part-time, and used to burn horse and cow bones to study the fracture patterns, didn’t he? Laying the groundwork for a big project with human bone.”
“Well, that was his plan,” I said. “His M.A. thesis had some problems. He burned a lot of bones, and he got some nice pictures showing the difference between how dry bone and green bone fracture in a fire. But I’m not sure he added much in the way of interpretation or analysis.”
“I saw some of those pictures at a poster session at the forensic conference a year or two ago,” she said. “Really interesting. The dry bones he burned fractured in a sort of rectilinear pattern, like logs in a campfire. But the green bones fractured in a sort of spiraling pattern, right?” I nodded. “How come?”
“Not sure,” I said. “Nobody is. You wanna know my personal theory?”
“Oh yes, please, Doctor,” Miranda whispered huskily. “I love it when you share your personal theories with me.” I’d laid myself wide open to that brickbat of sarcasm.
“Okay, smart-ass, I think it has to do with the collagen,” I said. “There’s still a lot of collagen in fresh bone. I don’t think anybody’s done research that supports this yet, but my theory is, the collagen matrix has a little twist to it. That would make the bone stronger. Sort of like those twisted pine trees you see growing on windy cliff-tops, you know? The spiral grain makes them a lot tougher than the tall, straight trees that grow where the wind doesn’t blow so hard.”
“Nature’s a pretty good structural engineer,” she agreed.
