“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 they’ve made. Very popular with young people. Like MySpace.”
“Your space? You have a Web site that’s popular with kids?”
He laughed, then typed an address into his computer’s browser and called up a page filled with flashing ads and thumbnail pictures of faces and pets. “Not my space,” he said. “MySpace.com.”
After a few seconds, he clicked it back to the tango break dancing. “At first all the videos on YouTube were very clumsy and silly,” he said, “but a lot of them these days look like something straight out of Hollywood.” He studied my expression again. “But I think you didn’t stop to talk about cinema or the Internet.”
“No, I stopped for advice,” I said. “Do you have any tips on dealing with a Latino physician who seems to have a chip on his shoulder?”
“You mean Eddie Garcia?”
Eddie? I smiled. It was better than Ethelbert. Or Ethel. “How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess.” He smiled back. “What you need to remember is that he’s not just Hispanic, Dr. B., he’s Mexican, so you might need to cut him some slack.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “If you weren’t Hispanic yourself, I’d think that was more than a little patronizing.”
“If I were a gringo, it would be patronizing. But I’m Latino, so it’s not.” Confusion was written all over my face, and he speed-read it and smiled. “All Latinos may be created equal,” he said,
“but we’re not all treated equally, even by one another. East Tennessee has Latinos from just about every country in Central and South America, and some of them look down on the Mexicans as harshly as any Tennessee redneck or Georgia cracker ever did.”
“How come?”
“Part of it’s just snobbery-there are so many Mexicans in the States that they’re not exotic, the way Venezuelans or Chileans are. It’s like a lawn or a garden-if one strange plant bursts into bloom, it’s a wildflower; if a bunch of them spring up, they’re considered weeds.”
“Not by the other plants,” I pointed out.
“True,” he conceded, “so the analogy’s not perfect. But you get the point?”
I nodded.
“Then there’s the pecking order of the workplace. Mexicans often take the shit jobs. They mow yards and lay brick and wash dishes and change linens-anything to get their foot in the door-while people like me get visas to study engineering or anthropology or medicine. So the white-collar Latinos look down on the blue-collar Latinos, and the Mexicans are mostly blue-collar.”
“But Garcia’s not,” I pointed out. “He’s a board-certified M.D., a forensic pathologist.”
“But that’s recent. He’s been Mexican all his life. And his parents were working class, so he knows what it’s like to be looked down on. He comes by that chip on his shoulder honestly.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of that,” I said. “So you know Garcia?”
“A little. Eddie’s okay. Yeah, he’s a little touchy. But cut him some slack, talk some shop, and things should be fine. He’s a forensic guy, you’re a forensic guy. Bond over the bones, Dr. B.”
“Jorge” I said over my shoulder, “you could have had a brilliant career in psychology. You’re pretty damn smart, for a Latino.”
He laughed. “Bastardo!” he called after me. I decided that was Spanish for “Amen, brother!”
GARCIA STOOD and nodded slightly when I entered his office at the Forensic Center, but he didn’t offer a hand, so I simply returned the nod. “Please, have a seat,” he said.
“It might be a little easier if we laid these bones out on a lab table,” I said.
“Very well,” he said again. Swell, I thought. Mr. Personality. I followed him down the hallway to the main lab and set my box on a countertop. The counter was covered with a large, absorbent blue pad, which helped cushion the fragile bones. I had brought three femora-femurs; thighbones-which I laid side by side. Garcia leaned down toward the closest, which was from the body that had been fully fleshed when it burned. The bone exhibited a range of colors, from ashy white at the distal end, near the knee, to a deep reddish brown at the proximal end, where it had joined the hip.
I chose my words carefully, as I didn’t want to appear to be lecturing him, even though I was. “We used two gallons of gasoline in each car, so it was a very hot fire,” I said. “It peaked at around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit-about eleven hundred Celsius. It burned away all the soft tissue, except for some on the central region of the torso.” I pointed to the femur from the fresh cadaver. “Down here at the distal end, the bone is obviously completely calcined, since the lower legs and knees get more oxygen and burn away before the thighs and torso do. Up here, where the thicker muscle tissue provided some protection for a while, the bone started to char, but it’s not calcined.”
He studied the bone closely.
“There’s still some organic material in there,” I went on. “You could probably get DNA-at least mitochondrial DNA, if not nuclear DNA-from a cross section of the bone up in this region.”
He nodded.
“What’s really interesting to me,” I went on, “is the fracture pattern here. It’s very irregular. Notice how the fractures seem to corkscrew around the bone in a sort of helical pattern. There’s also some fracturing between layers of the bone.”
“Yes, very interesting,” he said, sounding more animated. He reached up and swung a magnifying lamp into position, switching on the light that encircled the back side of the round lens. “It’s almost as if the bone is peeling apart. From the moisture inside turning to steam?”
“Probably,” I said. “Now compare that to the dry, defleshed bone. It’s completely calcined, not surprisingly, since there was no muscle to shield it. Notice how regular and rectangular the fracture pattern is, almost like crosshatching.”
He repositioned the magnifying glass over the uniformly burned femur.
“This reminds me of a big log,” I said, “that’s been burned very slowly in a bonfire.”
“Or a dead tree lying in the desert,” he said. “After years in the sun, they get that same burned look.”
“Here’s another one for you,” I said. “I was over in Memphis a few summers ago, when they had the worst drought in a century. The Mississippi River dropped fifteen or twenty feet. It exposed huge sandbars, a half mile wide and miles long. Walking on them was like walking along the beach at the ocean. And the river shrank from a mile wide to a narrow channel, a few hundred yards across-I could have skipped a rock to the other side.”
His mouth twitched, but I wasn’t sure if he was suppressing a smile or stifling a yawn. Either way, I was caught up in the memory.
“It was the most remarkable thing,” I said. “The sand was golden and clean-not what I’d expected, since the river is as murky as day-old coffee. Right beside the channel, the sand sloped down like this.” I angled my hand at forty-five degrees.
“If you took a running jump, you’d go flying over the edge, drop ten feet or so, then sink halfway to your knees near the bottom of the embankment.” I had leapt off that slope of sand a dozen times that day, and a hundred more since, in my memory. “There was a beautiful woman sunbathing, topless, in the middle of this vast expanse of sand,” I said. “But what really caught my eye were the tree trunks, four or five feet in diameter”-I made an arc with my arms, wide as I could stretch them-“down on a narrow shelf, right at the edge of the river channel. They had that same charred look, and it fascinated me, how being underwater for a hundred years made those trees look burned.”
He laughed, a soft, musical laugh from deep in his chest, and it was the first sound I’d heard him make that wasn’t tightly reined in. “Are you always doing research, even when a beautiful woman is stretched out on the sand?”
“Pretty much,” I said sheepishly. But I could see the absurdity of it, and I laughed along with him.
Garcia’s face got serious again, but his gaze and his voice stayed open. “Would you like to see this burn case?” he asked. “No, wait, that’s not exactly what I want to ask you. Would you please take a look at this burn case, Dr. Brockton? I would be very interested in your opinion.”
“Very well,” I said with a smile and a slight bow. “I would be honored, Dr. Garcia.”
He motioned me into the main autopsy suite, then disappeared into the morgue’s cooler and emerged a moment later wheeling a stainless-steel autopsy table. As he folded back the drape, I felt my adrenaline spiking, the way it always did when I confronted a forensic puzzle. Garcia began talking, almost as if he were dictating notes. “The subject is a deceased white female, positively identified from dental records as Mary Louise Latham, age forty-seven.” According to what I’d learned from Art and Miranda and the newspaper stories, Latham had lived in Knoxville all her life. She and her husband, Stuart, lived on a farm along Middlebrook Pike, in northwest Knoxville. I was fairly sure I knew the property. Middlebrook Pike had been transformed in recent decades into a corridor of warehouses, petroleum tanks, and trucking depots; there was only one farm, as far as I knew, along Middlebrook, and the prettiness of it was underscored by its uniqueness. The land was a mix of rolling pastures and wooded ridges, with a graceful old farmhouse and a well-kept white barn. It wasn’t really a working farm these days, more like a hobby farm, with a couple of milk cows, a handful of chickens, and a half-acre vegetable garden. The Lathams had no children, but Mrs. Latham often invited elementary-school groups to visit and learn about farming.
In less than an hour, a burning car had reduced her to charred remnants. Some of the small bones of the hands and feet were missing-probably fragmented and embedded in a layer of ash and debris in the car’s floor pan. The blackened bones of the arms and the lower legs were devoid of soft tissue, even burned soft tissue; they were calcined at their distal ends but not at the proximal ends, where they’d joined the torso and had gotten less oxygen. The pelvis and torso still had tissue on them-if you could call the scorched, crusty material clinging to the bones “tissue.” What had once been the cranial vault had been reduced to shards of bone, resembling small, burned bits of shell, none of them more than a couple inches across.
Garcia switched on the surgical light above the autopsy station and trained it on the bones. Then he offered me a pair of purple nitrile gloves, which I tugged on, as he did likewise with another pair. He touched a purple finger to the right leg, just below the knee. “This is interesting,” he said. “Up here near the proximal end of the tibia, the fractures look like the ones you just showed me in green bone.” Leaning in, I saw the spiraling, splintered pattern left behind after flesh has burned away, and I nodded in agreement. “But down here at the distal end”-he pointed-“the fractures are more regular.” Sure enough, just above the ankle, the bone was neatly crosshatched with cracks.
“Huh,” I said. “Looks almost like two different cases-one involving green bone, the other involving defleshed bone-rolled into one tibia.” Studying the rest of the body, I noticed a similar trend in the other limbs.
“What do you make of that?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t ignoring him; I was just distracted. Something lodged in the skull-deep within a shattered eye orbit-had caught my attention. Reaching to the counter along the wall, I selected a pair of long tweezers and eased their tips down into the recess, trying to tease out the tiny object. “Do you know,” I asked, “whether the car’s windows were up or down?”
“Three of them were up, but the driver’s window was down a few inches,” he said. “There were several cigarette butts on the ground underneath it. Why do you ask?”
“I was wondering what sort of access the blowflies might have had to the body.”
“All the car windows shattered in the fire. So the flies had plenty of access but not much time. When I arrived, the car was still too hot to touch. I don’t remember seeing any flies.”
“I don’t mean after the fire. I mean before.”
Garcia looked puzzled.
“Unless her brain was infested while she was still alive,” I said, extricating the tweezers from the eye orbit, “the bugs had been working on her for days before that car burned.” I held the tweezers over my left hand and deposited my prize in the palm. There on the drum-tight purple surface was an immature maggot, about the size and shape of a Rice Krispie. A Rice Krispie that had been thoroughly charred.
She hadn’t been burned alive; she’d been burned dead. Dead and already decomposing.