Read Online Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 by Jefferson Bass - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jefferson Bass
Tags: Fiction, General, detective, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, Mystery, Mystery Fiction, Fiction - Mystery, Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective - Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective - General, Forensic anthropologists, American First Novelists, Brockton; Bill (Fictitious character), Crime laboratories, Human body, Tennessee; East, Identification, Body; Human, Caves, Body; Human - Identification, Human body - Identification
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pathologists in Budapest back in the 1970s. They studied and measured one hundred and fifty fetal skeletons, from every stage of development. I don’t know why they started, but I guess they bore it the same way we’re bearing this right now: bone by bone, for the sake of something more important.” We fell silent, and I found myself thinking back to the other fetal skeletons I’d examined.
I’d seen skeletons in the womb only three times before. Two were in Arikira Indian graves in South Dakota. Their village, I knew, had been decimated by smallpox, which was deliberately spread by white fur traders—an early case of biological warfare. In the third case, a pregnant woman’s remains were found in some brush beside a rural stretch of Kentucky interstate; the woman, as best the police and I could determine, had been hitchhiking and climbed into the wrong vehicle. In those cases, though, both the mother and the fetus had already skeletonized by the time they were found. Here, the baby’s remains were hidden away inside an intact corpse—until I burrowed in to expose them. I felt a brief flush of shame at my intrusion, and then a pang at the reminder of just what a risky venture life can be: a race in which some people never even make it out of the starting gate.
I glanced up at Miranda. Tears were running down her cheeks and soaking her mask. I touched her arm. “Maybe you should take a break,” I suggested. She jerked away, shaking her head, and I saw rage flashing through the tears. It was not anger at me, I realized, but at whoever had snuffed out these two lives.
“Thanks, I need the help. Let’s put these in anatomical order beside the mother’s body, head down.” She nodded, then grimly set about reassembling the tiny skeleton as I handed her the bits of bone.
Six hours after we began, we finished. The waxy-looking mummy we’d brought in was now a skeleton, still slightly greasy and smelly, but merely a fading echo of a strong young woman. Beside her was something even fainter: the fading whisper of a baby who never drew breath.
Our knowledge, like the specimens on our counter, was skeletal: we knew this was a young white female of unusual height. We knew that she was pregnant, and that halfway through her pregnancy, possibly around the time she began to show, she’d been murdered—strangled, with no other signs of trauma, at least nothing visible so far. We still didn’t know her name, but the examination had told us other things that would help us seek her name. The echoes and whispers from these bones might help us understand why she’d been killed…and if we listened carefully enough, they might even suggest whose hands had encircled her throat and squeezed without mercy, leaving a record of violence for us to find.
I looked at Miranda. Her face was drawn; her eyes, which had danced and shone when she’d delivered the X-rays triumphantly, now looked drained and bleak.
“I know,” I said, “this one’s tough.”
She nodded.
“And Miranda?” I waited until her eyes met mine. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for a while.”
CHAPTER 8
ART BOHANAN WAS GLUED to his microscope. Literally, and unhappily. The fingerprint lab was in the basement of the Knoxville Police Department—a grim beige fortress in a grim black section of the city, surrounded by acres of asphalt and low-income housing projects. The uniformed officer on guard at the front had buzzed me into the elevator and pointed toward the floor. “He’s down there. Like always.”
The acrid scent of superglue bit my nostrils as I entered the lab in the basement. Art looked up as I walked in. “Hey, you wanna give me a hand here? Squirt some of that acetone on my fingers, would you?” His left thumb and index finger were fastened to the focus knob of a stereo microscope; his right hand gripped the light source. An open tube of superglue lay on the counter.
“So you’re really stuck?”
“Last ten times I checked. You
I’d seen skeletons in the womb only three times before. Two were in Arikira Indian graves in South Dakota. Their village, I knew, had been decimated by smallpox, which was deliberately spread by white fur traders—an early case of biological warfare. In the third case, a pregnant woman’s remains were found in some brush beside a rural stretch of Kentucky interstate; the woman, as best the police and I could determine, had been hitchhiking and climbed into the wrong vehicle. In those cases, though, both the mother and the fetus had already skeletonized by the time they were found. Here, the baby’s remains were hidden away inside an intact corpse—until I burrowed in to expose them. I felt a brief flush of shame at my intrusion, and then a pang at the reminder of just what a risky venture life can be: a race in which some people never even make it out of the starting gate.
I glanced up at Miranda. Tears were running down her cheeks and soaking her mask. I touched her arm. “Maybe you should take a break,” I suggested. She jerked away, shaking her head, and I saw rage flashing through the tears. It was not anger at me, I realized, but at whoever had snuffed out these two lives.
“Thanks, I need the help. Let’s put these in anatomical order beside the mother’s body, head down.” She nodded, then grimly set about reassembling the tiny skeleton as I handed her the bits of bone.
Six hours after we began, we finished. The waxy-looking mummy we’d brought in was now a skeleton, still slightly greasy and smelly, but merely a fading echo of a strong young woman. Beside her was something even fainter: the fading whisper of a baby who never drew breath.
Our knowledge, like the specimens on our counter, was skeletal: we knew this was a young white female of unusual height. We knew that she was pregnant, and that halfway through her pregnancy, possibly around the time she began to show, she’d been murdered—strangled, with no other signs of trauma, at least nothing visible so far. We still didn’t know her name, but the examination had told us other things that would help us seek her name. The echoes and whispers from these bones might help us understand why she’d been killed…and if we listened carefully enough, they might even suggest whose hands had encircled her throat and squeezed without mercy, leaving a record of violence for us to find.
I looked at Miranda. Her face was drawn; her eyes, which had danced and shone when she’d delivered the X-rays triumphantly, now looked drained and bleak.
“I know,” I said, “this one’s tough.”
She nodded.
“And Miranda?” I waited until her eyes met mine. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for a while.”
CHAPTER 8
ART BOHANAN WAS GLUED to his microscope. Literally, and unhappily. The fingerprint lab was in the basement of the Knoxville Police Department—a grim beige fortress in a grim black section of the city, surrounded by acres of asphalt and low-income housing projects. The uniformed officer on guard at the front had buzzed me into the elevator and pointed toward the floor. “He’s down there. Like always.”
The acrid scent of superglue bit my nostrils as I entered the lab in the basement. Art looked up as I walked in. “Hey, you wanna give me a hand here? Squirt some of that acetone on my fingers, would you?” His left thumb and index finger were fastened to the focus knob of a stereo microscope; his right hand gripped the light source. An open tube of superglue lay on the counter.
“So you’re really stuck?”
“Last ten times I checked. You
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