Jordan's Stormy Banks

5

“No way. I can’t bring that inside,” said Dr. Kimbrough, wrinkling his nose as he peered down at the body bag. My truck was backed up to the loading dock at UT Medical Center, and I’d slid the body bag onto the dock and unzipped it just enough to show the skull to Kimbrough, the young radiology resident unlucky enough to be spending Saturday evening on call. “No way,” he repeated. “The attending would have my head on a platter.”

“He won’t even know,” I pleaded. “It’s the weekend, the E.R.’s quiet right now — the drunk-driving accidents and bar fights don’t rev up till midnight — and I really, really need to know if there’s a bullet somewhere in her.”

“Won’t even know? Are you kidding?” He gave a barkish laugh. “We’d have patients and hospital staff running for the exits, puking as they ran.” I had to admit, he might have a point there. “Isn’t there some other way to tell if there’s a bullet in her?”

There was a way, actually — sift through all the liquid and goo I’d get when I simmered the soft tissue off the bones — but I didn’t want to wait that long or work that hard, so I hedged. “Look, this is life-and-death stuff. Somebody’s killed this woman, and I’m desperately trying to figure out who, and how. I’ve got a county sheriff and a TBI agent breathing down my neck so hard my wife’s starting to get jealous.”

He smiled, but the smile was followed by a head shake. “We cannot take that inside. Not negotiable. What I can do, though, is bring the portable X-ray machine down here and shoot some films here on the dock. We don’t even have to take her out of the bag.”

“How’s the quality?”

“Not great. Best you’re gonna get, though — from me at least — so take it or leave it.” He saw the doubt on my face. “Look, if there’s a lump of lead in there, it’ll light up that film like a full moon at midnight.”

It was a dark and moonless night, figuratively and forensically speaking: The woman’s corpse did not contain a bright round bullet, I saw when I reviewed the films with Kimbrough. That didn’t surprise me, as I’d noticed no entry or exit wound in the intact regions of the body.

What did surprise me — what stunned me, in fact, when I saw the X ray of the head — was the brilliant latticework of metal in the woman’s skull: four flat, L-shaped brackets of metal, screwed to the upper jaw. At some point the woman’s face had been bolted back together. “Holy crap,” I said to the radiologist. “She must’ve taken one hell of a blow to the teeth.”

He nodded. “That’s a classic LeFort fracture,” he said. “Car wreck? She take a steering wheel in the face?”

“I have no idea. All I know is, that’s not what killed her.”

“Type One,” he went on, as if we were making medical rounds. “Horizontal fracture plane in the maxilla, just below the nose, detaching the teeth and palate. Could’ve been worse,” he added, his index finger tracing an arc above the woman’s nose. “A LeFort Type Two breaks off the entire maxilla and the nasal bone — wiggle the teeth, and the whole nose wiggles. A Type Three breaks off the zygomatic bones, too, so the whole face hangs down. This lady was lucky.”

“Tell her, not me,” I said. “Oh, you can’t — she’s dead.” He flushed, and I felt bad for him. But not as bad as I felt for her. “Sorry. Thanks for the help — I do appreciate it.” I tugged the bag off the loading dock and into the truck, then headed back toward the stadium. Crossing the river, I glanced upstream at the black, cold waters of the Tennessee spooling past Knoxville and the university, wondering what dark currents had swept this woman to her fate. I still didn’t know who she was or how she’d died, but I now felt confident of identifying her. Whoever had done the dental and facial surgery would surely remember it. All I had to do was find that person.

I parked a hundred yards from Stadium Hall, the truck backed up to a corrugated metal building labeled ANTHROPOLOGY ANNEX. The Annex, like the sow barn, had been conferred on me by the dean in the wake of what was now widely known as “the Shower Incident,” when the janitor had found the rotting corpse I’d stashed overnight. On a scale of one to ten, the Annex rated a minus three; the uninsulated metal structure was an oven in summer and in icebox in winter. Still, it had plumbing and electricity. More to the point, it had no other tenants… and it had a steam-jacketed kettle, an immense cauldron that — over the course of twenty-four simmering hours — could transform a decomposing body into a clean skeleton.

I opened the back of the truck, then wheeled a gurney from the Annex and slid the body bag onto it. I rolled it across the concrete floor and into the processing room, which contained a long counter, a bathtub-sized sink, and the steam-jacketed kettle. Opening a tap, I began filling the kettle with hot water; as it filled, I dumped in a half cup of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer and a cup of Biz laundry powder — my secret ingredients, to help soften the tissue and sweeten the smell. Once the kettle was full and the tap was off, I noticed a faint noise coming from direction of the body bag. Crap, I thought, warily unzipping the bag to reveal teeming masses of maggots, which had emerged from the torso’s interior during the long, dark ride back from Morgan County. In the quiet of the Annex, I could hear them, and the sound of their moist wriggling and chewing bore a striking, unsettling similarity to the snap crackle pop of Rice Krispies — a breakfast I vowed, then and there, never to eat again.

I glanced up at the clock on the wall: 6:43 P.M. Crap, I thought again, I’m late for supper, and where the hell is Bohanan? Art Bohanan was a forensic specialist with the Knoxville Police Department, and his area of particular expertise was fingerprints. I’d worked on a case with Art several months before, and I’d watched, astonished, as he took a shriveled husk of skin that had sloughed off from a dead man’s hand, moistened it, and then lifted a perfect set of prints. The Morgan County sheriff had scoffed at my suggestion that we try to get prints from the Jordan Branch corpse, and even the TBI agent, Meffert, had shaken his head dismissively. But I wasn’t willing to give up without trying, so on the way back to Knoxville I’d stopped at a gas station and phoned Art to ask for help. He’d agreed to meet me at six-thirty. So why wasn’t he here?

Just as I was headed for the phone to send a nagging page, the building’s corrugated wall boomed like thunder, and then the door screeched open. “Shoo-eee,” came Art’s folksy drawl. “Either there’s a really ripe one in here, or you are wearing the world’s nastiest aftershave.”

I grinned. “I don’t particularly care for it, but it’s my wife’s favorite, and I do try to please her.”

“She’s one lucky woman.”

“Thanks for coming. You’re my only hope for fingerprints. Even the TBI agent threw up his hands.”

“But why was a TBI agent eatin’ his hands in the first place?”

“Man,” I groaned, “and people say my puns are bad.” I folded back the flap of the body bag to expose both arms, then lifted the left one by the wrist, palm up. “What do you think — can you get usable prints?”

“I believe so,” he said, leaning down to study the fingers. “Can you give me a hand?”

“Sure. How can I help?”

“Give. Me. A hand.” I stared at him, puzzled; he stared back with an expression of weary patience on his face, as if waiting for a slow-witted child to grasp the simplest of instructions. Finally he rolled his eyes and, with the blade of his hand, pantomimed a sawing motion in the air above the woman’s wrist. “Give me a hand. Be easier to work with if I can take it back to the KPD lab with me.”

“Ah” was the only syllable that came out of my startled mouth. This was a first for me, but Art was the expert, so — taking a scalpel from a tray of tools on the long counter, I cut through the tendons and ligaments of the left wrist, taking care not to nick any of the bones. I wrapped the severed hand in a paper towel and then zipped it into a plastic bag.

Art tucked it into the outside pocket of his jacket as casually as he might have deposited his car keys or a candy bar. “I’ll let you know what I get,” he said. “You about to start cooking?” I nodded. “Want me to help you get her into the pot?” I shook my head. “Darn,” he said. “You never let me have any fun.” With that and a wave, he was gone.

Ten minutes later so was I, leaving the corpse curled up in the kettle and the thermostat set at 150 degrees.

“Gag,” squawked Kathleen when I dashed up the basement stairs and into the kitchen. “You reek.” I headed toward her, my arms opened wide, as if to enfold her in a bear hug. “Away, vile one,” she squealed, swatting at me with a dish towel. “Go back downstairs and take a long shower. Then take another one.” I nodded obediently. “But first, go out to the garage and take off those clothes.”

“Oh, baby,” I said. “I do love it when you tell me to take off my clothes.”

“In your dreams, stinky. Put them in the washing machine on hot.” As I started down the stairs, I heard her calling after me, “The old machine. Don’t you dare put those in the new one.”