Part I

Chapter 1

I held the last of the dead man’s bones in my left hand. It was his skull, which I cradled upside down in my palm, as comfortably and naturally as an NBA player might hold a basketball. As I searched for a place to hide it, I felt the tip of my index finger absentmindedly tracing the edges of a hole in the right temple. It was a square-cornered opening, about the size of a small postage stamp, and it had been punched by a murder weapon — a weapon I’d tucked into a tangle of honeysuckle vines a few moments before. The honeysuckle was in bloom, and its fragrance was an odd contrast to the underlying odor of death. Funny thing, I thought, how something that smells so good can grow in a place that smells so bad.

Chattering voices floated up the hillside, growing louder as the people came closer. If I didn’t hurry, I’d be caught with the skull in my hand. Still I hesitated, turning the cranium right side up for one last look into the vacant eye orbits. What did I hope to see there — what meaning did I think I might find — in those empty sockets? Maybe nothing. Maybe only the emptiness itself.

As the voices drew nearer, I finally forced myself to act, to choose. I tucked the skull under the edge of a fallen oak tree, piling dead leaves against the trunk as camouflage. Then a worry popped into my head: Is the pile of leaves too obvious, a giveaway? But it was too late to second-guess myself; I’d run out of time, and the makeshift hiding place would have to do.

Stepping over the tree, I strolled downhill toward the cluster of people approaching. I feigned nonchalance, resisting the urge to glance back and check for visible bones. A woman at the front of the group — a thirtysomething blonde with the energetic, outdoorsy look of a runner or a cyclist — stopped in her tracks and looked at me. Her eyes bored into mine, and I wondered what she saw there. I tried to make my face as blank and unenlightening as the skull’s had been.

She shifted her gaze to the wooded slope behind me. Her eyes scanned the forest floor, then settled on the fallen tree. Walking slowly toward it, she leaned down, studied both sides, and then brushed at the leaves I’d piled on the uphill side. “There’s a skull beside this log,” she announced to the group. She said it as coolly as if it were an everyday occurrence, finding a skull in the woods.

“Wow,” said a young red-haired woman in a black jumpsuit. “Police, one; Brockton, zero. If Dr. B decides to turn killer, he’d better steer clear of Florida.”

The redheaded smart aleck was Miranda Lovelady, my graduate assistant. The blonde who’d found the skull so swiftly was Angie St. Claire, a forensic analyst from the Florida state crime lab. Angie, along with the twenty-three other people in the group Miranda had brought up the trail, had spent the past ten weeks as a student at the National Forensic Academy, a joint venture of the University of Tennessee and the Knoxville Police Department. Taught by experts in ballistics, fingerprinting, trace evidence, DNA, anthropology, and other forensic specialties, the NFA training culminated in the two death scenes Miranda and I had staged here at the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility: the Body Farm.

The Body Farm was perched on a hillside high above the Tennessee River. Here, a mile downstream from the heart of Knoxville, more than a hundred corpses in various states of disrepair were dispersed across the facility’s three fenced-in acres. Most of the bodies lay above ground, though some were buried. And in a far corner of the facility, looking like eerie sentinels standing at attention, were three nude men: not standing, actually, but hanging, suspended by the neck from wooden scaffolds. With some misgivings, we had carried out three postmortem lynchings so we could observe the difference in the decomposition rate when bodies decayed off the ground, where they were less accessible to insects. We’d hung the three in the most isolated part of the facility, because important though the experiment was — the research data would help us determine time since death when a hanged body wasn’t discovered for weeks or even months — the dangling corpses were a shocking sight. I’d seen them dozens of times by now, yet I still found it unnerving to round the bend in the trail and suddenly encounter the trio. Their necks were stretched a few inches, their faces downcast, their arms and legs angled outward, as if accepting their grim fate with a mixture of resignation and shame. The NFA class included four African-American men, and if I, a privileged white man, felt disturbed by the hanging bodies, I could scarcely imagine the complicated response the black men might feel at the sight of dangling corpses in the woods of Dixie.

Maybe I needn’t have worried. Everyone in the class was a seasoned forensic professional, after all; cumulatively, the two dozen students had worked hundreds of death scenes, and some of those had probably included suicide by hanging. The students had competed fiercely to get into the NFA course, and several had told me how thrilled they were to train at the Body Farm — probably the only place on earth, after all, where cinching a noose around a neck was an act of scientific inquiry rather than of suicidal despair or racist hatred or — very rarely — state-administered execution. Here at the Body Farm, as nowhere else on earth, we could replicate death scenes with utter authenticity, even lynchings or mass murders. This particular NFA class — one of two groups that would rotate through the course this year — included crime-scene and crime-lab specialists from as far away as the United Kingdom. They’d spend the morning recovering scattered skeletal remains and other evidence Miranda and I had planted in this part of the woods. After a quick picnic lunch on a strip of grass outside the fence, they’d spend the afternoon locating and excavating a shallow, unmarked grave where Miranda and I had buried three fresh corpses, simulating a gang-style execution by drug traffickers.

She and I had spent the prior afternoon digging the grave and then refilling it once we’d laid the bodies in it. We’d clawed into the clearing’s rocky, red-clay dirt with a Bobcat — a pint-sized bulldozer — that a local building contractor had recently donated to the Anthropology Department. The Bobcat was a useful tool; it was also — for me, a guy who’d grown up driving dump trucks at my stepdad’s quarry — a fun toy.

Excavating the buried bodies in the afternoon heat was going to be sweaty, smelly work for the NFA class. Already, by midmorning, the temperature was above eighty degrees, and the humidity had topped 90 percent; by late afternoon, East Tennessee would feel like the tropics. Divide the year’s 365 days by the number of seasons, and you might think there’d be four seasons of 91.25 days apiece, each season serenely easing its way into the next. Not this year in Knoxville; not on this steamy, smelly day in mid-May.

My own body was doubtless contributing a bit to the scent wafting across the hillside, and not as pleasantly as the honeysuckle was. Like Miranda, I wore an official-looking black jumpsuit, the shoulders trimmed with the skull-adorned patches of the Forensic Anthropology Center. The jumpsuits looked cool, as in stylish, but they were woven of Nomex, a flameproof fiber that, ironically, made them hotter than hell. Despite the heat, Miranda and I had suited up to give the training exercise a more authentic look — and to let the trainees know we took them seriously.

The forensic techs weren’t exactly dressed for cool comfort, either. Over their clothes they’d donned white biohazard coveralls made of Tyvek, the slippery, indestructible stuff of FedEx envelopes. Tyvek was featherlight, but I knew from experience that it didn’t breathe worth a damn. As the techs knelt, stooped, squatted, and crawled their way up the hillside, setting numbered evidence markers beside the bones and artifacts they found, I could hear, or at least imagined I could hear, the steady patter of droplets on dry leaves: droplets not of rain, but of sweat. If this were an actual crime scene, they’d need to be concerned about contaminating the bones with their own sweaty DNA. I made a mental note to mention that to them once they’d rounded up all the bones. Did the glamorous stars of CSI and Bones ever shed buckets of perspiration, ever rain monsoons of sweat?

* * *

After an hour of searching, the hillside bristled with numbered evidence markers — eighty-seven of them — flagging the sundry bones, beer bottles, cigarette butts, and gum wrappers Miranda and I had strewn in the woods. The markers resembled the four-inch sandwich-sign numbers restaurants sometimes put on customers’ tables to tell the servers which order goes to what table, and I smiled as I imagined a macabre spin on that image: “Number eighty-seven? Half rack of ribs, easy on the bugs? Enjoy!”

I’d laid all the vertebrae of the spinal column close together, in anatomical order, as they might be found at an actual death scene, so those required only a single marker. Other bones, though, were dispersed more widely, simulating the way dogs or coyotes or raccoons would tend to scatter them over time. My last-minute hiding spot for the skull had actually been a logical place for it. Skulls on a slope tend to tumble or wash downhill once the mandible comes loose; that’s exactly what had happened to the skull of former congressional aide Chandra Levy, who’d been murdered in the woods of a Washington, D.C., park in 2001. In the case of my “victim,” the fallen tree where I’d tucked his skull was lower, I now noticed, than the area where I’d scattered most of the bones. After years of death-scene searches of my own, I’d intuitively picked a natural place for the skull to end up.

The one thing the students hadn’t yet found was the murder weapon. I took a sort of perverse pride in that, as I’d been careful to tuck it deep into the honeysuckle. But lunchtime was coming up fast, and they’d need the whole afternoon to excavate the mass grave. Finally, just as I was about to start offering helpful hints—“you’re cold”; “getting warmer”; “really, really hot”—I noticed Angie in scan mode again, her gaze ranging just beyond the ragged circle of evidence markers. Her eyes swept past the honeysuckle thicket, then returned, and she headed toward it, like a dog on a scent. Getting warmer, I thought, but I kept quiet as she knelt at the edge of the vines and began parting the leaves carefully. “Got something here,” she said, and then she laughed. “Looks like somebody takes his golf game really seriously.” With that, she extricated the murder weapon. It was a broken golf club — a putter — and the cross section of the club’s head matched the hole in the skull perfectly: a square peg in a square hole.

The flurry of interest in Angie’s find was accompanied by a series of groan-inducing golf-club murder jokes—“fore… head!”; “keep your eye on the skull”; “I told you not to cheat”; and the worst of all, “say, old chap, mind if I slay through?” The chatter was interrupted by a series of urgent beeps from Angie’s direction. “Oh, crap,” she said, laying the putter on the ground. She peeled off a glove and fished a cell phone from inside her coveralls. Frowning at what she read on the display, she stepped away from the group and answered the call. At first her words were too low to make out, but the tension in her voice was unmistakable, and it was rising. As the tension ratcheted up, the volume did, too. “Wait. Say that again. Kate what?… What are you talking about?… When?… How?… A shotgun?… Bullshit. That’s not possible. That is just not possible.” Her eyes darted back and forth, tracking something I suspected was hundreds of miles away, at the other end of the call, and she began to pace the hillside. “Please tell me you’re making this up, Ned. Please tell me this is some really, really mean joke you’re playing on me… Please tell me you’re not telling me this.”

By now everyone in the group was listening, though most were careful not to look directly at Angie. Some people exchanged worried glances; others studied the ground intently, as if the particular twig or bone in front of them held the key to all meaning in the universe. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Jesus God… Have you looked at flights?… No, I’ll just drive. It’ll be just as fast… Okay, I’m leaving now.” She took a few steps down the hillside, returning to where she’d found and flagged the skull. She bent and picked it up, staring into the eye orbits, exactly as I had just before hiding it. “I have to go by the hotel to grab my stuff… I’ll be there by midnight. I’ll call you from the road.” She was walking toward us now, head down, still talking. “God damn that son of a bitch… Look, I have to go.” She snapped the phone shut, shaking her head, a look of bleak dismay on her face as she walked toward Miranda and me. She didn’t slow down when she reached us; she simply handed me the skull and kept walking. As she passed, she rubbed her ungloved hand across her dripping face, and I realized she was wiping away tears, not sweat. “I have to go,” she said again, not looking back. Her voice sounded hollow and haunted. “I have to go.”

She broke into a jog, ran out the gate of the Body Farm, and was gone.

Chapter 2

I’d spent all morning avoiding the task at hand — grading the last student’s final exam from Human Origins, the undergraduate course I’d taught this spring — when the intercom in my office beeped. “Dr. B?”

I felt a rush of guilt. I’d been procrastinating for days, and now I’d been caught. “I know, I know,” I groveled into the speakerphone. “The grades were due yesterday. The NFA class ran really long. Apparently, Miranda and I buried the bodies better than we meant to. Took the trainees hours to find ’em.”

Peggy Wilhoit, my secretary, was calling from a football field away, literally. The Anthropology Department’s administrative offices, including my own spacious and ceremonial office as head of the department, were nestled under Neyland Stadium’s south end-zone stands. But my private sanctuary — the small, dingy room where I retreated when I needed to concentrate on a forensic case or a journal article or a stack of overdue exam papers — was tucked beneath the grimy girders of the north end zone. “I’m finishing the last exam right now,” I fibbed. “I’ll bring you the scores in five minutes.” Across the hundred yards of curving corridor that separated us, I imagined Peggy’s bullshit detector flashing and beeping. “Okay, that was a lie,” I admitted. “I haven’t started grading the last one, but I’ll do it now, I promise. So it’ll be more like twenty minutes.”

“I’m not calling to nag you about the grades,” she said. “Although, now that you mention it…”

“Forget I mentioned it,” I said. “Grades? Who said anything about grades? What can I do for you?”

“Someone’s on the phone for you. An Angie St. Claire, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. She says she was in the NFA class that ended yesterday.”

I was suddenly alert. “She says right; she was. Put her on.” The phone beeped once when Peggy put me on hold, then beeped again as the call was transferred to me. “Angie? Hello, it’s Bill Brockton. How are you?” There was silence on the other end. “Angie? Are you there?”

“Yes, sir, I’m here; sorry. I’m fine.” She didn’t sound fine. She sounded formal, as law enforcement people often do, but she also sounded distracted. No, not distracted; distraught was what she sounded.

“We worried about you when you had to leave so suddenly,” I said. “I hope everything’s okay.”

“Not really, Dr. Brockton. That’s why I’m calling. I’m sorry to impose, but I… I was wondering…” Her breath got deep and ragged, and then I heard the sound of sniffling.

“Angie, what’s wrong? How can I help you?”

There was another, longer pause; I heard the rustling, scratching sound of fabric covering the handset and then the muffled noise of a nose being blown vigorously once, twice, three times. “Dammit, I wasn’t going to cry,” she sighed when she came back on the line. “Oh well.”

“What can I do for you, Angie?”

“It’s my sister, Dr. Brockton. She… um… she’s dead.” Silence. I waited. “That call I got yesterday morning — the call that made me leave — it was from my husband, Ned, telling me.”

“I figured you’d gotten some really bad news. I gather it was unexpected. I’m so sorry.” I hesitated, reluctant to pry. Still, she’d called me. “Was it an accident?”

“No,” she said with sudden vehemence, and then she laughed — a short, bitter bark of a laugh that startled me. “It was definitely not an accident. That’s the one thing we can all agree on.” I resisted the urge to fire off questions. “She died from a shotgun blast to the head.” The air in my office suddenly turned electric. “The local coroner says it was suicide. I say it was murder.”

I couldn’t resist any longer. “Tell me about it. Why does the coroner think it was suicide?”

“Because her fingerprints were on the gun. And because her jerk of a husband says it was suicide. He, Don — Don Nicely, how’s that for an ironic name? — says she’d been depressed for months, which I believe, and that she’d threatened to kill herself twice before, which I don’t believe.”

“Why don’t you believe it? And why do you think it was murder?”

“Lots of reasons. For one thing, I think — I hope—she’d have told me if she felt suicidal. For another, women don’t shoot themselves. A woman takes pills or cuts her wrists. She doesn’t put a shotgun in her mouth and blow her head off. Only men are stupid enough to do that.”

She had a point there. Sixty percent of men who commit suicide use a gun — I knew this because I’d done a lot of reading about suicide — but only 30 percent of women. And a shotgun? Rare for a woman, I was sure, and difficult. Ernest Hemingway had turned a shotgun on himself — he’d fired both barrels of a twelve-gauge, in fact, a feat that required not just long arms but also quite a lot of desperation and determination and coordination — but Hemingway was a six-footer. I tried to recall Angie’s height, but without much success. “Was your sister tall? Did the coroner measure her arms to see if she could’ve reached the trigger?”

Angie sighed. “She was only five three. But it was a short-barreled shotgun. Eighteen inches. She could have done it, but she didn’t. He did.”

The conversation was difficult for me. Clearly Angie was devastated by her sister’s death, and I wanted to help her, but I doubted I could corroborate her theory. “Why do you think her husband killed her?”

“Because he’s an asshole. Because he’s controlling and manipulative and aggressive. Because he fits the profile of an abusive domestic partner. Because they had a fight the night she died.”

“An argument fight, or a physical fight?”

“Borderline,” she answered. “They were out at a nightclub, and he got mad because she was talking to some other guy. He dragged her out of the bar and shoved her into the truck and laid down a bunch of rubber in the parking lot. There are witnesses to that part. Next morning, he claims, he found her body on the sofa.”

“He didn’t hear the shotgun go off in the night?”

“He says he dropped her at the house and went back out. ‘To think,’ he says. Yeah, right. And supposedly, when he came home a couple hours later, he walked straight through the living room without seeing the bloody mess on the sofa, and went to bed. Thought she’d gone somewhere, he says. Thought maybe she’d come down to see me. Didn’t find her in the living room till he got up a few hours later. So he says. Bullshit, I say.”

“His story sounds weak,” I admitted. “But the fingerprints on the gun — hard to argue with those, unless you’ve got some evidence to refute them. Some way to show that he put her hands on the gun.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s driving me crazy that I didn’t have a chance to work the scene.”

“Is that because it would have been a conflict of interest for you?”

“It’s because she lived a half hour north of Tallahassee, in Georgia. The Cheatham County Sheriff’s Office worked the scene, if you could call it ‘working.’ The investigator didn’t exactly go over things with a fine-tooth comb — I’ve talked to him, and trust me, he’s no Sherlock Holmes. And the coroner swallowed her husband’s story hook, line, and sinker. So they released the scene only a few hours after the 911 call. There are photos, but only a few, and they’re not great. I’d’ve taken dozens, but the guy who worked it took seven. Seven pictures of my sister’s death.” She sighed again.

“Was there an autopsy?”

“No. Apparently the coroner took one look at her body and ruled it suicide.”

“Any chance you can persuade him to let a good Florida M.E. take a look?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve got a better shot at winning the Florida lottery… and I don’t even buy tickets. You think a Georgia coroner would take a chance on a Tallahassee M.E. coming into his county and revealing him to be an incompetent idiot? Not bloody likely. Besides, it’s too late. The body’s already at the funeral home. She’s being buried tomorrow.”

My mind was racing — a condition I found pleasing, fascinating, and slightly — very, very slightly — worrisome. Before Angie had phoned, I’d felt sluggish and depressed. I was behind schedule in grading the Human Origins exams, not because I’d been stupendously busy, but because I knew that once the grades were posted, I’d be finished until fall, and things would get quiet — unbearably quiet — on campus. I’d told myself that I would use the summer lull to begin writing a journal article recounting an experiment I’d conducted, using sonar to find submerged bodies. But the truth was, I was having difficulty generating any enthusiasm for the task; in fact, so far, all I had to show for hours at the computer keyboard was a blank screen. I’d written a hundred or more opening sentences, but I’d deleted each one after rereading it. In my mind’s eye, I saw the summer opening up before me, and frankly, the opening looked a lot like a yawn. I’d probably end up spending most of the summer pretending to write, all the while casting guilty glances at the phone — the damnably silent phone.

Now, though, the phone had rung, bringing me a forensic case, and I felt like a new man: energetic, engaged, and alive with a sense of purpose. I was sorry that the case was the death of Angie’s sister. But I was glad that there was a case.

“Angie, I have an idea,” I said. “Do you know any good lawyers in Georgia?”

“No, but I know a lot of bad ones in Florida,” she answered. “Does that help any?”

“Probably not. Let me call somebody who might be better connected. Maybe he could help us get a court order authorizing a forensic examination.”

One phone call and ten minutes later, I bundled up the exam booklets and dashed the hundred yards to Peggy’s office, clutching the bundle against my rib cage like a football. As I crossed the goal line of her doorway, I imagined a hundred thousand people leaping to their feet and cheering wildly.

Peggy glanced briefly and balefully over the lenses of her reading glasses. “It’s about time,” she said, and turned her attention back to her computer screen. The chorus of congratulatory cheers in my head evaporated, replaced by the solo buzz of a weed trimmer outside the Anthropology Department’s grimy windows on the world.

But. But: two hours after that, the buzz of the weed trimmer gave way to the song of jet engines, spooling up to take me to Tallahassee.

Later, as the plane descended toward the pines of the Florida panhandle, I looked out the window and saw dozens of plumes of smoke. Florida was on fire.

Chapter 3

Angie St. Claire was waiting for me at the security checkpoint when I got off the plane at the Tallahassee airport — an airport that made Knoxville’s modest terminal look vast and sleek by comparison. I knew Tallahassee was smaller than Knoxville, but I’d assumed that as Florida’s capital, Tallahassee would bustle with air traffic. Apparently I’d assumed wrong.

Angie shook my hand as I emerged, squeezing so hard I nearly winced. “Wow,” she said, “when you pull a string, you don’t mess around. Who’d you call, the governor?”

“Better.” I grinned. “I’m friends with a lawyer who’s in league with the devil. Well, sort of.”

“Sort of in league with the devil? How does that work?” She started toward the terminal’s main exit.

“Actually, I meant that I’m sort of friends with him. But come to think of it, maybe he is sort of in league with the devil.” I smiled. “Seems to be a good partnership, too, judging by his millions. The guy’s name is Burt DeVriess — the police call him ‘Grease’—and he’s a slick, smart attorney. He’s flayed me alive on the witness stand a few times, but lately we’ve worked together on a couple of things.” I didn’t mention that one of the “things” was a case in which I’d been framed for a murder, and that Burt had saved my hide; that, I figured, was a story for another, distant day, perhaps — or perhaps not. “I called Grease right after I talked to you. He got in touch with a colleague in Atlanta whose law partner or wife or sister — hell, in Georgia, she could be his partner and his wife and his sister — anyhow, somebody who has connections in that neck of Georgia. So there should be a couple of pieces of paperwork waiting for us at the Cheatham County courthouse. One’s an injunction to delay your sister’s burial by twenty-four hours. The other’s a court order authorizing us to examine the body in the meantime.” The glass door slid open, and we stepped out into sunshine and steam.

As we crossed the parking lot, I caught the smell of smoke in the air. “From the plane, it looked like half your state’s burning.”

“It is.” She made a face. “Most of the panhandle is owned by timber and paper companies. They’ve got huge tracts of gangly cultivated pines — slash pines, I think — planted in rows like crops. They burn the underbrush every spring so nothing competes with the trees for water and nutrients. It’s destroying the natural ecosystem. The longleaf pine, the slow-growing native species, is headed for extinction, and so are a lot of the plants and animals that used to live in the longleaf pine forests. Don’t get me started.” She clicked her remote key, and a blue Chevy Blazer a few rows back beeped at us. I was expecting an FDLE vehicle, but judging by the QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper sticker, this was Angie’s own car. Suddenly she stopped. “Dr. Brockton, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”

I smiled. “You don’t have time to tell me — not till we’re in the car, anyhow. The courthouse closes in an hour, and we’re, what, fifty-nine minutes away?”

“You’ve obviously never ridden with me.”

* * *

Thirty minutes later, we crossed the state line, and ten minutes after that, the Blazer skidded to a stop in front of the Cheatham County courthouse in downtown Mocksville. The papers were waiting for us at the office of the court clerk, who handed them over to Angie only after she’d carefully examined our identification and our faces. “Shame,” the woman said, reminding me that we were in a small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business — and generally had strong opinions about it. “She was your sister, wasn’t she?” Angie nodded. “It just don’t seem right.”

Angie nodded. “Thank you,” she said, managing a small smile.

The woman drew herself up and stared at Angie across the counter. “What I mean is, it don’t seem right messing with her now. Seems like she ought to have a quiet, decent burial, so she can rest in peace, instead of being poked and prodded at by people like you.”

Angie’s head snapped back as if she’d been slapped. Then her eyes got fierce, and I thought for a moment she was going to vault the counter and punch the woman. Instead, she spun and strode out of the courthouse, her heels clacking like gunshots on the black-and-white checkerboard of the marble hallway.

By the time I caught up with her, she was already in the car, slamming the door. I got into the passenger seat just as she clutched the steering wheel and began to weep — deep, racking sobs that made the car tremble like some frightened animal with wheels instead of legs.

“People… like… you,” she gasped. “How dare she? People like me are the only ones who give a damn about what really happened to Kate.” She took a few heaving breaths, then the crying shifted from angry to mournful. “People like me didn’t do enough to save her.” She leaned her head on the steering wheel. I squeezed her shoulder awkwardly, just once, and then we sat in silence for a few moments before heading to the funeral home.

* * *

Morningside Funeral Home occupied a small, tidy brick building on the edge of Mocksville, alongside a memorial garden adorned with brass urns and plastic flowers. The receptionist—Lily, said her name tag — seemed flustered by our arrival, but she got a lot more flustered when Angie explained who we were and why we were there. She bloomed a splotchy crimson and looked from Angie’s face to mine, and back to Angie’s again. Angie finished by saying, “So could we see the body now, please?”

The flustered woman stood up from her desk. “You need to speak with Mr. Montgomery,” she said. She held up both hands, as if warding off evil, and backed through a doorway into an inner office. The door closed behind her, and I heard voices speaking in hushed, urgent tones.

Eventually the door reopened, and a tall, pale man with a wispy gray comb-over emerged. His upper body didn’t move or sway in any way that corresponded to his footsteps; it simply glided forward, as if he were on casters. “Hello, I’m Samuel Montgomery,” he said. The name seemed to ooze out of his mouth in a way that made my ears feel greasy. He held out a hand for me to shake, so I took it. It was as cool and flaccid as the hand of a dead man after rigor mortis has come and gone. Angie also shook his hand, and I saw the surprise and distaste flit across her face as she did. “What can I do for you?”

Angie repeated the explanation she’d given to the receptionist, then handed him the twenty-four-hour injunction and the court order authorizing us to examine the body. He studied the documents somberly. Gravely, even. Finally he looked up, handing the pages back to Angie. “I’m sorry to say that we have, ah, a bit of a problem, Ms. St. Claire.”

Angie took a long, slow breath. “What sort of problem?”

“I received a phone call earlier today from Mr. Nicely — the, ah, husband of the deceased — saying he wished to make a slight change in the arrangements. He asked that we proceed quite, ah, expeditiously.” He looked down, brushed a few flakes of dandruff from the lapel of his pinstripe suit, then looked up again, but not quite all the way up, so his eyes stopped just short of meeting Angie’s and my own. “I’ve just returned from the cemetery. The, ah, deceased — Mrs. Nicely — was buried an hour ago.”

* * *

Angie and her husband — Ned, an ornithologist for a Tallahassee environmental education center — dropped me at a hotel in downtown Tallahassee. Our new plan, which I hoped Burt DeVriess’s colleague could help with, was to obtain an exhumation order allowing Kate Nicely’s body to be dug up and examined. I wasn’t terribly optimistic about the chances — it’s one thing to delay a burial, but another, bigger deal to dig up a corpse. But between Grease’s high-wattage connections and Angie’s law enforcement credentials, it might work.

I’d suggested staying at the Hampton Inn, a chain I’d always found clean, comfortable, and affordable. Instead, they booked me at the Hotel Duval, a stylish and recently renovated hotel whose lobby was an Art Deco study in green glass, black granite floors, and — overhead — thousands of luminous soap bubbles. The bubbles, I realized upon closer inspection, weren’t actually soap; they were spheres of thin blown glass, suspended from the ceiling on spider-thin threads of clear nylon. The illusion was remarkably convincing.

After I’d rubbernecked sufficiently, I ambled to the front desk, where the clerk greeted me with an obliging smile and began checking me in. “Do you have a room preference, Mr. Brockton?”

“Nonsmoking, please.”

“Of course. And do you have a color preference?”

“Excuse me?”

“A color preference. Our rooms feature six different color themes. We have refreshing blues, uplifting yellows, energizing citrus, exhilarating reds, peaceful neutrals, and serene greens. What are you in the mood for?”

What was I in the mood for? A juicy hamburger and a hot shower were the only things I was truly in the mood for. I felt overwhelmed by the pressure to choose. “I’m so used to boring beige,” I told her. “So the rooms are all basically the same? Only the wallpaper’s different?”

“Oh, it’s not just the wallpaper,” she chirped. “The entire color palette is coordinated — the walls, the art, the bedding, the flowers.”

I asked her to repeat the colors. “Okay,” I said, “since I’m in Florida, I’ll try energizing citrus.”

“Good choice.” She smiled approvingly, her fingers clattering across the keyboard energetically. Then her smile faded. “Oh, I’m so sorry; we don’t have anything available tonight in citrus.”

I shrugged. “Okay, how about green? What was it — serene green? If I can’t have energy, I’ll take serenity.”

Again her fingers clattered; again she looked disappointed. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid there’s nothing in our serene greens, either.”

“So, what is there?”

She did a search. “I can put you in peaceful neutrals.”

“I’m feeling ambivalent about the neutrals,” I joked. Her brow furrowed; either she didn’t get the joke or she thought it was lame. “Peaceful neutrals will be just fine,” I assured her. She brightened and made me a key card.

Peaceful neutrals, I learned when I opened the door, were variations on a theme of boring beige.

Angie and Ned had offered to take me to dinner, but I’d declined; Angie was upset — she’d lost her sister, she suspected her brother-in-law of murder, and now she and her family had been denied even the chance to bury Kate. The last thing Angie needed to spend her evening doing was making small talk with me. I was getting hungry, though, so I called the front desk to ask about nearby restaurants. The Duval, it turned out, had both a steakhouse restaurant and a rooftop bar. The sun was going down and the temperature was dropping by the time I settled peacefully and neutrally into the room, so I decided to take in the view from on high and hope that the rooftop bar’s menu included variations on a theme of burger. The bar was on the eighth floor — not exactly the Empire State Building, but then again, Tallahassee wasn’t exactly New York, so maybe eight stories high was high enough.

In Tallahassee, eight stories proved to be plenty. The Duval inhabited a slight rise, and the rooftop terrace offered a pleasant view of downtown Tallahassee, the stately old and ugly new capitol buildings, the campus of Florida State University, and the lush, woodsy neighborhoods to the city’s west and north. It couldn’t compete with the vistas from Knoxville’s highest buildings, which offered sweeping panoramas of the Tennessee River, Neyland Stadium, and the Great Smoky Mountains. But the Duval bar offered other scenery, I soon noticed, as a series of strikingly beautiful waitresses paraded past: lovely, leggy young women, possibly FSU students, though they might well have been models. They wore stretchy black dresses that fitted so snugly, it appeared each dress had been custom-knitted onto a waitress at the beginning of her shift. A textiles engineer and an anatomist must have collaborated on the design; the high hemlines managed to show every available inch of leg, but nothing more, even when the women bent over to deliver drinks or food. I tried not to stare at these remarkable fusions of form and function, but I didn’t entirely succeed.

And even though the desk clerk hadn’t been able to put me in a citrus room, I felt energized.

It must have been the cheeseburger my waitress had brought me — thick and juicy, topped with crisp, smoky bacon — that restored my flagging energy.

* * *

The bedside phone rang early the next morning. It was 7:18, according to the clock on the nightstand; normally I’d have been up for a couple of hours by this time, but despite the peaceful neutrals adorning my room, I’d had trouble falling asleep. I’d channel-surfed until midnight, then gotten caught up in a PBS documentary about the “lost boys of Sudan,” the many thousands of boys whose families were killed and whose lives were destroyed by a genocidal civil war in Darfur. As I watched, I tried to imagine my young grandsons, Walker and Tyler, in similar circumstances. What if my son and his wife were hacked to death by machetes in front of their sons? What if the boys were taken captive and forced to fight — forced, at ages eight and ten, mind you, to murder other children’s families — in the service of the very men who’d killed their own parents?

In bleary-eyed hindsight, it hadn’t been wise to watch such a disturbing show so late at night. But I wasn’t sorry I’d seen it. It was easy, all too easy, to ignore the inhumane treatment inflicted on millions of vulnerable people around the world. The United States and the United Nations had stood by while nearly a million people were massacred in Rwanda, and had dragged their feet while tens of thousands were raped and murdered in the Balkans. After watching the Sudan documentary, I still didn’t know what to do, but I decided I wanted to do something to make a difference, however small, for people who didn’t have the rights and freedoms I’d enjoyed all my life. During the night, as I’d tossed and turned, I’d resolved to donate regularly to Human Rights Watch.

Now, still groggy from troubled sleep and violent dreams, I took a while to answer the phone. It was Angie; no surprise there, since she and her husband were the only people who knew where I was staying. “Good morning,” she said. “How are you?”

“Uh, great,” I mumbled.

“You don’t sound great. You sound comatose.”

“No, I’m fine,” I insisted. “That’s just the serenity talking. Any news?”

“Only that there’s no news.” She sighed. “My lawyer says he might not hear anything till late in the day. Maybe your devilish buddy Grease will get faster results. Meanwhile, I was calling to see if you might want to take a look around the crime lab while we’re waiting. Scope out the competition, long as you’re here.” She hesitated. “Oh, and if you’d be game to look at something that’s just come in — a skull that a guy’s dog dragged in from the woods. .”

In fifteen minutes I was showered and shaved and dressed, waiting for Angie down in the lobby, beneath the fragile, illusory canopy of glowing glass bubbles.

* * *

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement occupied three square buildings, three stories apiece, a couple of miles east of downtown Tallahassee. Actually, although it looked like three buildings, it was technically only one building, composed of three identical squares, joined — just barely — at diagonally opposite corners of the middle square. I’d Googled “FDLE” while I was waiting in the Duval’s lobby for Angie to pick me up, and one of the hits took me to a satellite photo. Zooming in on the complex from low orbit, I’d gotten the feeling I was gazing down on three diagonal tic-tac-toe squares, each of them measuring two hundred feet across. In the middle of each square, the satellite photo showed a large garden courtyard, whose grass and trees looked inviting even from hundreds of miles overhead.

Angie turned off a winding, tree-lined street into a parking lot that fronted the complex. Even though I’d seen the satellite photo, I was unprepared for how big it looked at ground level. FDLE had nearly two thousand employees, and the headquarters complex looked large enough to hold most of them. “This is quite a place you’ve got here. I’m envious.”

“Envious? Isn’t your ivory tower fancier than this?”

I snorted. “Obviously you didn’t visit the Anthropology Department when you were in Knoxville.” She shook her head. “We’re housed in the bowels of the football stadium, underneath the stands.” She looked at me skeptically, as if she thought I was pulling her leg. “I’m serious. They bricked in the space under the stands. In the 1940s and ’50s, Stadium Hall was the football players’ dormitory. When it got too run-down for the jocks, UT built a new athletic dorm and put nonathletes in the stadium. When it got too dilapidated for the regular students, the university gave it to the anthropologists. But hey, I’m not bitter.”

“I’ll never complain again.”

She swooped past the main entrance — a glassy lobby in the center building — and bore right, to the southeastern corner of the complex, in the direction of a sign that read EVIDENCE. Unlike the glassy main entrance, the evidence-intake door was inconspicuous, tucked in the corner of the southeastern square. Even with the help of the sign, I’d have had trouble locating this entrance.

Angie signed me in and handed me a visitor badge, then unlocked a steel door that led to a glass-walled hallway, flanked on one side by the garden courtyard and on the other by a series of specialized labs: DNA. Firearms. Toxicology. Chemistry. Latent Prints. Photography. Documents. Computer Forensics. The chemistry lab had large windows along the hallway—“the aquarium,” Angie called it, and the chemist swimming behind the glass looked mildly annoyed by my presence. Then he saw I was with Angie, and his frown gave way to a smile and a nod.

The crime lab occupied the entire second floor of the square. Halfway around, at the corner where the laboratory square joined the complex’s central square — administration and agents’ offices, according to Angie — was the facility’s main entrance, which opened into an area that was half lobby, half museum. The walls were lined with plaques and displays, including several glass cabinets highlighting the case of serial killer Ted Bundy, who was caught and eventually executed after a 1978 rampage in Tallahassee. In addition to photos of Bundy and the Florida State University sorority where he killed two young women and seriously injured two others, the display cases included plaster casts of Bundy’s teeth, which helped convict him of the FSU murders: during his assault on one of the victims, he bit her left buttock, and the distinctive bite mark was used as evidence at his trial. “Maybe it’s just because I know what he did,” I remarked to Angie, “but even his teeth look sinister. Almost vampirelike.”

“I totally see that,” she agreed. “I guess it’s good he didn’t have braces as a kid. Might’ve been harder to get a conviction.”

The display was a sobering reminder of the high stakes involved in forensic investigations. If Bundy had been caught and convicted after his first murder, dozens of young women — more than thirty by Bundy’s own admission, and as many as one hundred according to some estimates — would have escaped terrible fates. “Okay,” I said, “let’s hope the skull you want me to look at isn’t the work of a serial killer.”

“Amen to that,” she agreed grimly. “Speaking of the skull…” She led me along one more stretch of hall, which closed the square and brought us back to where we’d begun, at the southeastern corner of the complex. “Hang on just a second.” She signed herself into the evidence room and emerged, moments later, holding a jawless skull in gloved hands. “I told the medical examiner you were going to be here, and he sent this over. I think he was glad to hand it off to a bone guy.” She nodded at a steel door just across from the evidence room. “You mind getting that for me?” I opened it, and she led me into a simply furnished room that was a combination office and lab; a computer workstation occupied the interior wall, a countertop lined the windowed wall, and a large table filled the center. The room was well lit and was even better cooled; the windows were dewy with condensation from the chill.

“Wow, no danger of getting heatstroke in here.”

“The lab is always cold. Other parts of the place are always too hot. Go figure.” She shrugged. “The thermostat’s in another building, downtown. Miles away.” She checked her watch. “The case agent assigned to this should have been here by now. Stu — Stuart Vickery. Great agent, but bad with a watch. If he offers to take you to the airport this evening, say no — you’ll miss your flight for sure. But we can go ahead and get started, and catch him up when he gets here.” She set the skull on the table, resting it on a beanbag cushion to protect and stabilize it. She pointed to a big box of blue gloves on the counter. “You want gloves?”

I did want gloves. The skull had been given a cursory cleaning by time and, presumably, the M.E.’s office, but it remained slightly greasy, and despite the rapid whoosh of the cooling system, the aroma of decomposition was already noticeable.

I took a pair of gloves from the box and tugged them on. “I wear gloves a lot more often than I used to. Back in my younger days, I didn’t glove up if I was handling clean, dry bones. Now I’ve gotten a lot more careful. A couple months ago I had a case where a woman died from a contaminated bone transplant. She got toxic shock syndrome from a bacterium called Clostridium sordellii. It’s pretty common in soil, and generally harmless, but it got into her body and started multiplying like crazy. By the time they realized how sick she was, she was a goner.”

“They tried antibiotics?”

“Yeah, something powerful — like, the H-bomb of antibiotics. The antibiotics killed the bacteria, but by then the bacteria had produced lethal levels of toxins. Nasty stuff. A bad way to die.” I shuddered at the memory. “Hell, it’s made me kinda skittish about working in the yard. Get a cut or a scrape, a germ like that gets in, and if the conditions are just right — or just wrong — you’re done for.”

“Life’s iffy,” she said drily. “It’s a wonder any of us make it out alive.” She was trying to joke — she was trying desperately to hang on to work and routines and normal ways of living life — but it came out sounding bitter. She must have heard the bitterness, because she apologized.

“No need,” I assured her. “Sorry I got gloomy on you. Let’s see what we can figure out about this particular mortal.” I started by leaning over and simply looking. The skull wasn’t complete; the mandible was missing, so the upper teeth rested directly on the beanbag, creating the effect of a big, almost comical overbite. After a moment I picked it up from the cushion and turned it upside down, studying the teeth and the roof of the mouth.

“First of all, can you tell if this person’s been dead for more than seventy-five years? If so, the skull goes to the state archaeologist.”

“I’d say less. For one thing, it’s in pretty good shape — not a lot of erosion or crumbling — which suggests that it’s not too old.” I gave a sniff. “So does the fact that there’s still a little tissue on it.” I held it toward her so she could sniff it, and she made a face. “But that’s not all. See that filling? Twentieth century, for sure; hard to be a lot more precise than that, unless we do a radioisotope study to find out if the person died before or after the cold war heated up.”

“What do you mean?”

“People born after the bomb — after all those H-bomb tests spread fallout all over the planet — have higher levels of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, in their teeth and bones. It’s called bomb-spike carbon.”

That’s scary.”

I agreed. After a closer look at the top of the cranial vault, I handed the skull back to Angie. “How about you tell me what you can figure out about this person.”

She flushed. “Gee, I don’t know. I mean, you’re the expert.”

“Best way to become an expert is to learn. Best way to learn is by testing your knowledge.” I gave her an encouraging smile. “Come on; I can’t exactly flunk you if you get a thing or two wrong.”

“Okay.” She drew a deep breath. “It looks small, so I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s a woman. The nasal opening is narrow, so that would make her a white woman.” She turned it upside down. “No wisdom teeth, so maybe she’s still a teenager. But then again, my wisdom teeth still haven’t come in, and I’m thirty-four, so I know not to put much weight on that.” She flipped it again, studying the dark zigzag seams where the plates of the cranial vault knitted together. “The skull sutures are prominent, so she can’t be very old.” She rotated the skull slowly, scrutinizing it from all angles. “No bullet wound that I can see. Looks like the dog crunched on both cheekbones before his owner took it away from him.” She gave the skull a final inspection, then shrugged. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” She handed it back to me. “So, how’d I do? Pass or fail?”

I smiled. “Pretty well. You’re right about the race. White. And the age — it’s a young person. You get points for noticing that the third molars hadn’t erupted, and more points for realizing that the skull sutures haven’t started to fill in yet. Those don’t fully fuse and start obliterating until the thirties and forties.”

“Okay, so what’d I lose points for? Did I get the sex wrong?”

“Maybe. So yes.”

“Huh?”

“It might be female, might be male. Can’t tell — it’s too young.”

She frowned. “You’re saying it’s a dead kid?” I nodded. “Crap. Tell me what I should have looked for, to know it was a big kid rather than a little woman.”

“Well, it’s not just the size, but the proportion. Ever seen a baby’s skull?” She nodded. “So you probably remember, the cranial vault looks huge compared to the rest of the face, almost like it’s been inflated like a balloon.” She nodded again. “This cranial vault isn’t that disproportionate, but it’s still large for the facial structure, relatively speaking.” She peered at the skull again, then at my head, and then, in a mirror on the wall, at her own. “Another thing.” I pointed at the supraorbital ridge, the shelf above the eyes. “If this were an adult woman, the edge of this ridge would be sharp. Here, take off a glove and feel the difference between mine and yours.” She hesitated. “Go ahead.” She peeled off her right glove and pressed the tips of her fingers to her eyebrows, then to mine.

“Yours feel like a Neanderthal’s.”

“Well, back in the days of cavemen, guys who could shrug off a whack in the head were more likely to survive and reproduce than guys who had skulls like eggshells,” I explained. “In females, thickheadedness wasn’t as crucial to survival as prettiness was. Women’s skulls evolved to be more delicate, with thinner brows and smaller muscle markings—‘gracile’ is the nerdy anthropologist’s word for it. Looks kinda like ‘graceful’ but rhymes with ‘hassle,’ which is what women’s lives are filled with.” She smiled. “Want me to tell you more about the age?”

“Sure. How much can you narrow it down, and how do you do that?”

I cradled the skull in the palm of my left hand. “Let me show you something in the upper jaw, the maxilla.” A prominent line ran along its midline, starting just behind the incisors. I traced the line with my right pinky finger. “See this seam?” She nodded. “This is the intermaxillary suture.” Running crosswise were two others. “This one, just behind the front teeth, is the incisive suture, and back here at the molars is the palatomaxillary suture.” She nodded again. “So, in the same way the cranial sutures fuse and fade over time — obliterate — so do the maxillary sutures. My maxillary sutures are fused solid by now, like they’ve been welded shut. Yours probably are, too. How would you describe these?”

She bent down and took a close look. “It looks like the roof of the mouth is cracked.”

“It looks cracked,” I agreed, “but it’s not; it just hasn’t finished growing together. That tells us we’re looking at a subadult. A teenager, maybe even preteen. That’s consistent with the smaller size of the skull, too. Be a big help if we can find the rest of the bones.”

“From your lips to God’s ear,” said Angie. “We did a grid search across a pretty big area around the cabin. A quarter mile in every direction. That’s almost forty acres. Nothing so far.”

Just then the door opened and a fiftysomething man walked in, nodding at Angie. His clothes were rumpled, his white shirt bore a coffee stain, and he held an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. If he’d been wearing an old raincoat, I’d have taken him for Columbo, the bumblingly brilliant television detective from the 1970s. He took out the cigar, shifted it to his left hand, and held out his right. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Slow line at Starbucks. Stu Vickery. Good to meet you. Angie came back from Tennessee raving about the Body Farm.” He shook my hand, then shifted the cigar from his left hand to his right before clamping it back between his teeth. I wondered how many times in his life he’d repeated that sequence of movements: remove cigar with right hand, shift cigar to left hand, do something with right hand, shift cigar back from left hand, put cigar back into mouth. I wondered, too, how long an unlit cigar would last before it got totally soggy and crumbled in his mouth.

“Angie and I were just taking a look at the skull,” I said. “Angie, you want to tell him what we know so far about the sex, race, and age?”

“Me?”

“You. It’s a pop quiz, to see if you were paying attention.” She took the skull from my hand and drew a deep breath, then succinctly recapped everything I’d said about the cranial sutures, the muscle markings, the maxillary sutures, and the ambiguous gender. “Good job,” I commended. “You made a hundred.” She smiled slightly and flushed a faint shade of pink.

Vickery removed the cigar, studying the damp, bitten end as if it might contain some guidance. “So we’ve got a Johnny or a Janie Doe, teenager or less. What more can you tell from the skull? Any idea how this kid died?”

“We were just about to get to that,” I said. I took the skull back from Angie and pointed to the left cheek. “You can see that the zygomatic arch, which connects the cheekbone to the temporal bone, has been gnawed off. There are fresh chew marks at both ends of the arch.” Angie and Vickery both leaned in to peer at the damage. “Now look at the right cheek. What do you see?”

“The arch is missing there, too,” said Vickery. “But it doesn’t look like Fido’s to blame for that.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The right zygomatic arch wasn’t chewed. It was snapped.”

“And it’s darker than the chew marks,” Angie observed.

“And what do you suppose that means?”

“It happened a while back?” I nodded but kept quiet, to encourage her to finish the thought. “At the time of death?”

“Yes. Probably. More or less,” I said. “It’s stained the same color as the rest of the skull. That means the bone was already broken when the soft tissue began decomposing. But see how the edges of this break are a little less jagged than the edges of the other zygomatic arch, the one the dog snapped? It’s possible that this break was already beginning to heal before the kid died.”

Vickery frowned, causing his cigar to twitch in his mouth. “What does that tell you about the timing of the injury? Can you be any more specific?”

“Not much more specific,” I answered. “Antemortem or perimortem — before death, or right around the time of death.”

Vickery nibbled on his cigar. “Couldn’t it have happened sometime afterward? Like, when the body was buried or dumped out of a car or whatever?”

“Never say never,” I answered. “But I’m pretty sure this fracture occurred days or even weeks before death. And I’m pretty sure the other fracture was the fatal one.”

Angie and Vickery both looked down at the skull, then up at me. Angie spoke first. “What other fracture?”

“This one,” I said, tracing a thin line that angled up the skull from just above the left ear, up through the temporal bone and into the parietal, which formed the top of the cranial vault. I’d rubbed a thumbnail over the line; the break in the surface was so subtle I could barely feel it, but it was there, and it showed no signs of healing, so I knew that it had occurred at or near the time of death.

Vickery spoke through cigar-clamping teeth. “So it’s likely, or at least possible, that this kid was murdered?” I nodded. “May I?”

“Sure.” Before I had a chance to add “but you might want gloves,” he took the skull from me and raised it close to his face, his eyes ranging up and down the fine, dark crack. He rotated it, scrutinizing the crack from all angles; he tried peering through the eye orbits to see the inner surface of the cranial vault, but the openings were too small.

He handed the skull back to me, and took his cigar out of his mouth. “Eww,” said Angie. Vickery gave her a puzzled look, then followed her gaze down to the cigar he now held between contaminated fingers.

“Eww,” he echoed. “I hate it when I do that.” He tossed the cigar into a trash can, then washed his hands with sanitizer from a pump dispenser mounted on the wall beside the door. “No offense, Doc,” he began, pointing at the fracture, “but this doesn’t look all that bad to me. I mean, it’s not like the skull’s bashed in. You certain this would be enough to kill him?”

I shrugged. “Certain, no; confident, yes. A defense lawyer could probably hire another anthropologist or a pathologist to disagree in court. But on the inside of the skull, right about here”—with my pinky, I traced a line that crossed the fracture at its midpoint—“runs the middle meningeal artery. The fracture could have ruptured that artery, causing a cerebral hemorrhage. Obviously something killed this kid, and my money’s on this fracture.”

Vickery fished a tan leather case from an inside coat pocket and extracted a fresh cigar. “Okay, I’ll buy it. For now. Until we find bullet-riddled bones or a knife in the ribs.” He unwrapped the cigar, tossed the cellophane in the trash, and began gnawing on the end of the replacement.

“Mind if I ask you something, Agent Vickery?”

“I do if you call me ‘Agent Vickery.’ I don’t if you call me ‘Stu.’ ”

“Okay, Stu. Do you ever light ’em? The cigars?”

“Never. And it’s not just because every place has banned smoking. Truth is, I hate the smell of cigar smoke. But I like the smell of cured tobacco. Like the flavor, too, in small doses.” He gave the cigar an appreciative chomp. “But chewing tobacco — doing dip — that is one nasty habit.”

“You’ll get no argument from me about that,” I said, thinking back to my close Copenhagen encounter of the nausea-inducing kind. I chose not to point out that Stu had a thin line of brownish drool trickling from the corner of his mouth.

It’s possible he noticed me looking at it, or maybe he simply felt a tickle on his chin; in any event, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed. “So,” he said to Angie, “did you ask him yet?”

Angie turned red. Silence hung like a soap bubble in the air, so I popped it. “Ask me what?”

“Um…” She hesitated. “Ask if you’d consult with us on this case.”

“Which case? This case?” I raised the skull into the center of the triangular space defined by the three of us. Angie nodded. “Do you mean in a bigger way? More than a take-a-quick-look sort of way?” She nodded again. “Don’t you have forensic anthropologists in Florida who can help you with this?”

She looked sheepish. “We’re a little shorthanded right now.”

“What about Tony Falsetti,” I said, “over in Gainesville? Doesn’t he do a lot of work for FDLE?” Tony, who was a Knoxville native and a fine forensic anthropologist, had been hired some years ago to teach at the University of Florida. My impression was that his lab at UF worked with Florida investigators in the same way my own lab consulted with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and other agencies.

“He’s gone,” she said. “To Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia. I sent him an e-mail, and he wrote me back from Sarajevo. He’s working on a huge project to identify people killed in the Balkan civil war. They’re searching for his replacement, but they haven’t filled the position yet.”

I named another former student, now teaching in Tampa, at the University of South Florida. “Did you try her? I think she consults on forensic cases.”

“She’s in Africa all month,” said Angie. “Teaching Nigerian medical students about skeletal trauma.”

“Nigeria? Well, good for her. Sounds like I need to keep better tabs on our graduates, though. Maybe I should put tracking collars on them.”

“Ha,” said Vickery. “While you’re at it, could you put shock collars on a few of my colleagues?”

I laughed, and Angie laughed, too, which did my heart good. “So,” she said, “any chance we could beg, borrow, or steal an hour or so more of your expertise before I put you on your flight back to Knoxville?”

I pulled out my pocket calendar and took a look. I’d blocked out the next two weeks to write a journal article — an account of an experiment in which we’d tested the ability of side-scan sonar to image a body we’d submerged in the Tennessee River — but my heart wasn’t in the project.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll make you a better offer. If you can sign this skull over to me for a few days, I’ll take it back to Tennessee, finish cleaning it, and write a forensic report on it. Then I’ll see if I can get you a facial reconstruction. There’s a forensic artist who works in the bone lab, and she does great work. If Joanna can put a face on this skull for us, somebody might recognize it.” I paused. “And if you can find me a cheaper place to stay, I’ll come back for a week and help you look into your sister’s death.”

* * *

Angie, not Stu, nearly caused me to miss my flight back to Knoxville. The reason was not that she was bad with a watch; the reason was that she took us on a three-hour detour to Associated Services.

Associated Services — was there ever a vaguer name? — cleaned up messes. If your house got flooded by a broken pipe or a monsoon — as hundreds of homes did in 2008, when Tropical Storm Fay dumped twenty inches of water on Tallahassee — Associated Services would pump out the water, remove the sodden carpet, replace the soggy, moldy drywall. If you bought a run-down house that was jammed with junk and filth, they’d shovel it out and scrub and disinfect it for you. And if your sister’s brains got spattered all over her living-room sofa and carpet and subflooring, the strong-stomached employees of Associated Services would don their biohazard suits and their respirators, clean up the bloody mess, and dispose of it safely.

Joe Walsh, whose father had started Associated Services thirty-five years before, met Angie and me at the company’s warehouselike facility near the campus of Florida State University. The building — brick and corrugated metal — had offices in the front half, a warehouse in the back. At one end of the building was a large gravel parking lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. Five company vans were parked in the lot, as was a pair of black enclosed trailers emblazoned with two-foot-high biohazard warning emblems.

Walsh emerged from the front door and led us into a simply furnished office, motioning us onto a sofa. “I’d offer you coffee, but it’s from this morning, so I wouldn’t be doing you a favor by letting you drink it.”

He’d sounded hesitant, even suspicious, when Angie had called him — she’d phoned as she was driving me back to the Duval to check out — but as she’d talked about her sister’s death, and about why she and I hoped to sift through the shattered, spattered debris the company had removed from Kate’s living room, he’d lowered his guard, at least enough to agree to meet with us.

“I Googled you after I got off the phone,” he said to me. “I’d heard of the Body Farm, but I didn’t really know much about it. That’s interesting work you do there.” I thanked him; then there was a brief, awkward pause before he went on. “I’m sorry if I seemed rude on the phone,” he said. “You get all sorts of calls in a business like this, you know? I had a guy call me once, asking questions about what we’d do to clean up a scene where somebody’d died this way or that way, and it sounded like he was planning ahead, you know? Trying to make some choices on the front end. I told him the first thing we’d do is make sure law enforcement had investigated thoroughly and released the scene. He hung up pretty quick then. So next thing I did, I called the sheriff’s office and gave them his number off my caller ID and suggested they check him out.”

“It wasn’t by any chance a Georgia number,” asked Angie, “sometime in the past couple weeks?”

“No, ma’am,” he said sympathetically. “That call came from Sopchoppy, and it was two, three years ago.”

“Too bad,” she said. “Be great if your caller ID could point an incriminating finger at my scumbag brother-in-law.”

He shrugged apologetically. “Wish I could help you there, but I can’t.”

“But you can help us by letting us look through the debris you took out of my sister’s house.”

He winced and sighed. “Here’s the thing, Ms. St. Claire. I’m more than happy to cooperate with law enforcement. If FDLE wants to examine this material, all you need to do is bring me a court order, and I’ll be glad for you to take it over to the crime lab and go through it with a fine-tooth comb. But I can’t let you go through it here. It’s a biohazard, and I can’t take a chance on the liability.”

“Angie and I work with biohazardous materials all the time,” I pointed out.

“But not on my property, you don’t,” he said. “If you got sick and sued, it could ruin me. My family, too.”

“No offense,” I said, “but it seems to me that even the dumbest lawyer in Tallahassee could create reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind about the source of any nasty bugs Angie and I might happen to come down with.”

Walsh smiled, but he shook his head. “Maybe so, but I don’t have enough time or money to take that chance.”

“How about this,” I suggested. “How about if Angie and I sign liability releases, in blood, promising not to hold you or your company liable for anything that might happen?”

“It’s not just that,” he said. “If we go opening up biohazard bags, our neighbors — businesses and residents right around here — are going to smell it and get upset. I can’t afford to risk the ill will.”

“I understand your concern,” I said. “The Body Farm is only a few hundred yards downhill from a condominium development in Knoxville — fancy condos up on a bluff over the river — and on hot summer days when the air is just sitting still, our neighbors sometimes aren’t too happy.” I gestured out the window behind me. “But look out there. You really think anybody’s going to catch a whiff of anything right now?”

He looked; a storm was blowing up, and across Madison Street trees were swaying in the wind — a wind that would have whisked away the odor from a hundred corpses, let alone from some bloody cushions and carpeting.

Ten minutes later, he swiveled in his chair and took two hastily drafted liability releases from a computer printer on a table behind him. Angie and I glanced at what we were promising not to hold the company liable for: illness or injury, emotional trauma, even old age and eventual death, or so it seemed. We scrawled our signatures, and Walsh unlocked the chain-link gate so we could pull into the back lot alongside the biohazard storage trailers.

I’d somehow imagined that the cleanup crew had hauled away the sofa and flooring materials intact, more or less, except for the damage from the gun blast. When I saw what we’d be sifting through — how thoroughly everything had been disassembled — my heart sank. The frame of the sleeper sofa had been stripped down to the bare metal of the folding mechanism, and all the porous materials — the heavy batting of the cushions and the mattress, the blood-soaked carpeting, the rubber carpet pad, and the waferboard subflooring — had been cut apart and sealed into plastic biohazard bags inside cardboard boxes measuring two feet square. Before we could search the scene, we’d have to reconstruct it.

On our way over, Angie and I had made a quick stop at Home Depot to procure the makings of a bare-bones crime-scene kit, since she wasn’t allowed to use FDLE resources for an outside case. We’d bought Tyvek painter’s coveralls; rubber gloves; dust masks; curved needle-nose pliers; wooden dowel rods; tape measures and yardsticks; quarter-inch wire screening; a staple gun; and a large plastic tarp. After suiting up, Angie and I spread the tarp on the concrete floor of the warehouse, then began opening boxes and reassembling the scene, like some bloody, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. We started with the four pieces of waferboard that had been cut and pried from the floor joists. Pieced back together, the chunks of subflooring formed a roughly thirty-inch square, with a bloody six-inch hole at its center, and with assorted drips and runs at irregular intervals around it. Next we unpacked the padding and carpet and put those in position; they, too, had been cut, rather than folded, to fit into the boxes. Then we set the sofa frame in place, using a wooden dowel to center the holes one atop the other. Next, unfolding the bed’s metal frame, we pieced the cut mattress back together and refolded it, and finally wedged the sections of cushions into position. Once everything was in place and we’d rechecked and adjusted the alignment of the holes, Angie took dozens of photos with her camera — wide, medium, and tight shots — from every conceivable angle, with and without the scale provided by the yardsticks and tape measures. Finally satisfied that she’d documented the assemblage thoroughly, she allowed me to begin searching it — which meant disassembling the scene we’d just spent an hour painstakingly reassembling.

The couch was a sobering testament to the destructive force of a twelve-gauge at close range. The shot had blown a ragged hole through the seat cushion, up near one arm of the sofa. The hole was about three inches in diameter at the top of the cushion, where Kate’s head had lain; it was twice that diameter at the bottom of the cushion, as the force of the blast — not just from the slug itself, but also from the column of air forced out of the barrel ahead of the accelerating slug, as well as the hot gases from the exploding gunpowder behind the slug, pushing it — had widened in the shape of a cone. By the time it tore through the mattress and out the underside of the sofa, the shock wave had grown to a foot in diameter, though much of its force was then dispersed and absorbed by the carpet and padding.

While Angie took more photographs, I used a flashlight and the forcepslike pliers — whose long, slender jaws I covered with the fingers from a rubber glove, to avoid damaging bone fragments or lead — to pick through the ragged walls of the blasted tunnel. The cushion and mattress were covered with a reddish-brown spray of blood, mixed with bits of tissue and short strands of hair; embedded here and there within the walls of the tunnel were shards of bone — plenty of them, but none large enough to be readily identifiable. “Not much to go on here,” I remarked, “except for the angle of the shot itself.” Angie lowered the camera and looked with her eyes rather than the lens. “If it were me,” I went on, thinking out loud, “I’d’ve sat on the sofa and leaned over, bracing the butt of the gun on the floor. That would’ve put spatter all over the walls and the ceiling.”

“I know,” she agreed grimly. “Everywhere.”

“But if,” I went on, “for some reason I decided to lie down instead, I think I’d probably prop my head up on the arm of the sofa. But see how vertical the hole is?” She nodded. “That means her head was lying flat on the sofa, and the gun was straight up and down. That’s a lot of weight to hold at an odd angle. Seems strange. Wrong.”

She nodded grimly. “Everything about it seems strange and wrong.”

But apart from the nagging sense that the angle of the shot was unusual, what did we have, really? Nothing, I was forced to admit as we reboxed the sofa cushions and sections of mattress, refolded the bed frame, and set the sofa aside so we could pack the ravaged layers of flooring once again. With the sofa removed, the circle of blue tarp showed through the hole in the carpet and pad and waferboard. The plastic was bright and clean, cheerful and mocking. I stared at it in frustration, and then with curiosity and the glimmer of an idea. “So your sister’s house,” I said, looking at the splintered edges of the subflooring, “it must not have been on a concrete slab.”

“No. Crawl space.”

I turned to Joe. “Did y’all by any chance do any cleaning under the house?”

“Sure,” he said. “If you leave contaminated dirt in the crawl space, it smells like somebody died under there. Makes the whole house stink, and that just traumatizes the family all over again.” Suddenly he smacked himself in the forehead. “Duh, I’m sorry — I got so interested in watching you work, I forgot to bring you the dirt. There’s two boxes of it in the other trailer; I’ll bring ’em right over.”

I asked him to bring me a clean, empty box, too, and I stretched the wire screen across the top of this one, then folded the edges of the screen over the edges of the box and stapled them to hold the screen taut. As Angie slowly dumped dirt onto it, I jiggled the box and brushed the dirt across and through the mesh, sifting the soil, prospecting for nuggets of bone. There was nothing in the first box except screws, nails, bottle caps, and old fragments of broken bottles. I was nearly through screening the second box of dirt when two small objects danced into view on the shimmying mesh. The first, about an inch long and half an inch in diameter, was the lead slug from a shotgun shell. I was glad we’d found it, because if we hadn’t, I’d worry that we’d failed to search thoroughly, but I wasn’t sure the slug would shed all that much light on things: there was no question that Kate had been shot, nor any question about what gun had fired the shot; the only question was who had pulled the trigger, and I knew the slug couldn’t answer that for us.

The second object was a piece of bone about the size and shape of a pencil eraser. “Now, that’s interesting,” I said to Angie.

“What is it?”

I plucked it from the dirt with my gloved fingers. “It’s the dens epistrophei.”

“Um… refresh my memory?”

“The dens epistrophei is a little peg of bone that sticks up from the top of the second cervical vertebra, the vertebra called the axis. This peg fits into a notch on the atlas, the first cervical vertebra, to form a pivot point.” I rotated my head to the right, to the left. “When I do that, my atlas is pivoting on the axis, rotating around the dens epistrophei.”

“And what does finding it tell us?”

“I think it tells us more about the angle of the gun. Hang on a second.” I sifted the last of the dirt, and sure enough, I found a second shard, one whose concave surface nested perfectly with the convex curve of the dens. “This is the back of the atlas. It’s not as hard as the dens epistrophei, but it was shielded by it.” I showed Angie and Joe how the pieces fit together. “Normally a shotgun suicide blows off the parietal and occipital bones — the top and the back of the head,” I explained. “I’ve never seen one where the neck got blasted, too.” I squinted at the bones. “Hard to say for sure, but it looks like there might be a wipe of lead on the dens. See that dark streak?”

Walsh leaned in to take a look and asked, “And would that tell you something important?”

“Maybe,” I answered. “It would tell us that the neck was destroyed by the projectile itself, not by the shock wave around it. It helps you figure out the angle of the gun, and whether the angle is consistent with a self-inflicted wound. If we were doing this at the Regional Forensic Center in Knoxville, I’d X-ray these bone fragments to see if that streak really is lead. But anyhow, I suppose we should turn this over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as is, and let them do the test for lead.”

“Maybe. If they’re willing.” Angie sighed. “Thing is, the evidentiary chain is all shot to hell already. I mean, you know and I know that nobody’s messed with this stuff since it got hauled away from the scene. But legally, in terms of admissible evidence, that wouldn’t count for jack.”

“We sealed those boxes right there at the house,” Walsh protested, “and they’ve been locked in the trailer ever since.”

“But in court,” she pointed out, “that wouldn’t carry any real weight, would it?” I shrugged, but she had a valid point. “For instance, what would your devilish lawyer pal — Grease? — what would he do about this, if he were defending Kate’s husband?”

“He’d rip you and me and Joe here to shreds,” I conceded. “In fact, by the time he was done, he’d probably have the jury believing that the three of us had killed your sister, so we could frame your saintly brother-in-law.” I hesitated before asking the question that had suddenly reared its ugly, demoralizing head. “But if what we’re doing isn’t going to be admissible anyhow, why are we doing it?”

“Well, at the risk of contradicting myself, I think that even if it’s not admissible, it might be persuasive,” she argued. “Might persuade the judge to sign an exhumation order. Might persuade the GBI to investigate, and maybe they’d find evidence that would be admissible. So that’s one reason we’re doing it. The other reason is, I need to know what happened to Kate. If I’m wrong in thinking Don killed her, I need to let go of that idea and face the fact that she shot herself. But if I’m right — and I’m pretty sure I’m right — I want to know for damn sure.”

“It might never be possible to know for damn sure,” I pointed out.

“Maybe not. But I’m not ready to give up on that possibility yet. Not ready to give up on Kate yet.”

I admired her loyalty and bravery. “Me neither. Let’s see if this is enough to get us an exhumation order, and maybe a nibble of interest from the GBI. Now let’s get out of these bunny suits and get me to the airport.”

Chapter 4

“Holy shit.” The Tallahassee airport security screener looked like he’d seen a ghost when my bag went through the X-ray machine. I’d tried to warn him—“You’re going to see a human skull in that bag,” I’d said — but instead of taking in my meaning, he’d simply looked annoyed and told me to please step through the metal detector. By the time I stepped through, he was frantically summoning his supervisor. The pair huddled briefly over the screen, then the supervisor radioed for his boss. While awaiting the arrival of higher authority, he motioned me forward with his left hand — and laid his right hand on his weapon.

“Sir, we’ll need to open your bag,” he said. I was amused by the contrast between his mundane words and his panicky tone, but I figured it would be unwise to laugh at a man who had one hand on a gun.

“Be my guest,” I said, in what I hoped was a soothing, I’m-not-a-serial-killer voice. “I’m a forensic anthropologist — a bone detective — and I’m a consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. That skull is from an FDLE case I’m working on.” I paused to see if the wind had shifted any; he still looked suspicious, but no longer openly hostile. “There’s a TBI badge and an FDLE evidence receipt in the side pocket of my bag. I’m taking the skull up to Tennessee to get some help identifying it.” At the rate this was going, though, I wasn’t feeling confident about making my flight and getting to Knoxville, at least not on the flight that was scheduled to leave in forty minutes.

The supervisor eyed me with continuing suspicion, but his hand moved away from his gun. “I’ll still need to open the bag.”

“Of course. The skull is old and fragile, so if you unwrap it, please be really careful. You might want gloves, too.” They looked back and forth from the bag to my face. Behind him, I noticed another uniformed TSA official hustling toward us. It didn’t take a lot of brainpower to deduce that this guy was in charge. “I think your boss is here,” I said, nodding toward the fast-approaching newcomer. The two supervisors conferred briefly in hushed voices, then the higher-level manager gestured toward my bag. His underling tugged the zipper hesitantly, as if the bag might contain a live snake, and gingerly removed the cardboard box from inside and raised the lid. Within the box, the skull was swaddled in a layer of bubble wrap and surrounded by foam packing peanuts. They leaned down and peered in, shooing peanuts aside with gloved fingers. “It’s very fragile,” I pleaded. “Please be careful. If it gets broken, it’ll be harder to identify the victim and catch the killer.”

My words finally seemed to sink in. The boss looked up. “You say you’ve got some sort of documentation about this?”

“I’ve got an evidence receipt from FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. I’ve also got my consultant’s badge from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” He pondered this, then unzipped the side pocket I was pointing toward. He fished out the papers and the leather wallet that held my TBI shield.

“So you’re Dr. William Brockton, PhD?” It was clear, from the incisive questioning, why this one was in charge.

“I am. I teach anthropology at the University of Tennessee. When I’m not causing trouble for the TSA.”

The joke seemed to cut some of the tension. “Tennessee,” mused the midlevel guy. “What kind of football team is Tennessee gonna have this year?”

“Probably pretty good. But probably not as good as Florida’s.”

“Probably not,” agreed the big boss. He gave me a smile that combined smugness, superiority, and pity. And in the pitying part of that smile, I saw that after enduring a few more barbs about football, the loser unlucky enough to live in Tennessee would make his flight after all.

* * *

The rusty venetian blinds in the windows of the bone lab were shut — at least, as shut as their fraying cords and tattered tapes allowed them to be — but the morning sun still poured through gaps where slats had been broken or bent during the past forty years. On hot mornings, even early in May, the stadium’s steel girders and masonry foundations worked together like an immense solar oven, collecting the sun’s heat and radiating it through the south-facing wall of windows in the bone lab. During pleasant months of the year, the bank of tables lining those windows offered plenty of daylight for studying bones, but during summer and winter, the extremes of heat and cold along the expanse of glass tended to drive students as far away from the windows as possible.

Miranda Lovelady was putting bones — the bones of the golf-club victim, I noticed — in a long cardboard box as I entered the lab. The box was three feet in length, with a one-foot-square cross section. We had thousands of such boxes stacked on shelves beneath the stands of the stadium. Each box contained the bones of a human skeleton, cleaned and neatly arranged. Several thousand of the skeletons were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Native American skeletons from the Great Plains, which I’d excavated decades before, early in my career. Another thousand were modern skeletons from bodies donated to the Body Farm over the past twenty years. And a few hundred contained the broken, burned, shot, or stabbed skeletal remains of murder victims.

A small, separate compartment at one end of each box held the skull — in the case of the box Miranda was repacking, the putter-punched skull — while the main compartment housed all other bones (and, in this box, the broken putter). The long bones of the legs and arms lay parallel, the ribs spooned up together, and the vertebrae clumped, strung together on cord like bony beads on a warrior’s necklace. As the door closed behind me, Miranda looked up and asked, “How was your weekend?” Then she looked down at the box in my hand and added, “Whatcha got?”

“Fine,” I answered. “And a skull from Florida.”

“Florida? Who sent you a skull from Florida?”

“Nobody. I went and got it.” Her eyebrows shot up in an interrogatory manner. “I made a quick trip to Tallahassee. Got there Thursday. Came back Friday night. Spent the weekend cleaning this.”

“Do tell.”

“Angie St. Claire — the forensic tech from the state crime lab — called Friday and asked me to help look into her sister’s death. That’s why Angie left here so suddenly on Wednesday.” Miranda nodded and opened her mouth to speak, but I didn’t give her a chance. “Anyhow, while I was down there for that, a sheriff’s deputy brought in this kid’s skull from one of the rural counties outside Tallahassee. I thought I’d ask Joanna to do a reconstruction.”

Miranda clearly wanted to ask more, but I excused myself to talk to Joanna, and Miranda left with the bone box, presumably to reshelve it in the collection room.

Joanna Hughes was working at a small table—“her” table — on the opposite side of the room. Joanna’s table was unlike any other in the lab. Most of them were covered with trays of bones or skeletal fragments: bits of skull on one, for instance; gnawed ribs on another; a jumble of vertebrae on a third. Joanna’s table, by contrast, held beautiful human heads or, more precisely, beautiful clay sculptures of heads. Joanna was an artist who restored faces to the skulls of the unknown dead.

As I crossed the lab, Joanna leaned back from her current project, frowned, and then grabbed the nose and twisted it completely off the face.

“Ouch,” I said. “That’s gotta hurt.”

Joanna turned and smiled, waving at me with the wad of clay she’d just amputated. “He was getting too nosy for his own good,” she cracked.

Unlike the handful of other people in the lab, Joanna wasn’t a student; she had an undergraduate degree in forensic art — a degree program she’d created herself, through persistent and articulate pleas to the Art and Anthropology departments. She’d taken courses in anatomy, anthropology, and art, with one goal in mind: to restore faces to the dead. Somehow she’d known, even as a child, that this was the work she felt called to do. Joanna’s reconstructions were a last-ditch effort to identify someone once all other avenues had been exhausted. If her combination of art and skill allowed her to re-create the face of someone who’d gone missing or been killed years before, there was a chance — a slim chance, but better than none at all — that someone might see a picture of her work, in a newspaper or on television, and call the police to say, “Hey, I know who that was.” So far, she’d done twelve reconstructions, and five of those had led to identifications. In some fields that success rate would seem dismally low, but in the real world of cold-case investigations, it was remarkably high. She was batting over .400, and the work was a lot more meaningful than swatting a ball over a center-field fence. The woman was good. Very, very good.

I wished the department could put Joanna on salary, because her work was important and her skills were rare. The sad reality, though, was that we just didn’t have the money. So she worked for peanuts, charging law enforcement agencies a pittance for the time it took to do their reconstructions. Tight as law enforcement budgets were, I suspected that Joanna occasionally did reconstructions for free, if the investigator — or the skull itself — told her a particularly moving tale.

Joanna had made a believer out of me two years earlier. I’d been contacted by a family whose matriarch had gone missing twenty-five years before. The woman had disappeared one fall, and when a female skeleton was found the following spring, it seemed logical for investigators to think that the skeleton was hers. The medical examiner had concluded that the bones were indeed hers, and she’d been buried in the family plot. The identification wasn’t conclusive, though, because the case happened before the advent of DNA testing. So, a quarter of a century later — after the O. J. Simpson trial and the show CSI had made DNA a household word — the family had asked to have the bones exhumed and DNA samples taken. After examining the bones — which showed me nothing that contradicted the medical examiner’s identification — I pulled a couple teeth and cut two cross sections of bone, which the family planned to send to a DNA lab, along with cheek swabs from one of the woman’s daughters and one of her granddaughters. After taking the samples, I put the bones back in the coffin and — within hours after it was unearthed — it was reburied. Several months later, startling news arrived: the DNA lab said that the skeletal woman in the coffin was not, in fact, the woman the M.E. and the headstone proclaimed her to be. The daughters and granddaughters of the missing woman were not, the lab reported, genetically related to the woman buried in the family cemetery. The district attorney reopened the case of the missing woman, as well as a second case: the case of the mysterious, unidentified woman in the coffin.

That’s when Joanna had entered the picture. We exhumed the coffin a second time, and this time I brought the mystery woman’s skull back to UT. Joanna studied its shape, then spent two weeks sculpting the face she thought had once resided on the skull. When I walked into the lab and saw her finished handiwork, I was stunned. Guided by nothing more than the shape of the skull and the information that it was a middle-aged white female, Joanna had sculpted a face that bore an astonishing resemblance to one of the missing woman’s daughters. Could the resemblance really be purely coincidental? Or was it possible the DNA lab had erred? Eventually — many months and many complications later — we learned that the DNA lab had botched the analysis… and that the M.E. and the headstone had been right all along. If not for Joanna’s remarkable reconstruction, though, the investigation would surely have continued down the wrong path, and we’d never have learned the truth.

So now, as I unwrapped the skull that had caused such a furor at the Tallahassee airport, I handed it to Joanna with a powerful mixture of hope and pessimism. “It’s Caucasian,” I said, “somewhere around age twelve, plus or minus a year or two. Beyond that, I can’t give you much to go on. Might be male, might be female.”

She took the skull from me and cradled it in both hands, turning it this way and that to inspect it from multiple angles. “Where’d it come from?”

“Florida. Somewhere in the woods. A dog brought it home.”

“And the sex is a complete coin toss? You’re not leaning one way or the other?”

I shook my head. “I wish I were. Can you split the difference? Do an androgynous face?”

“Sure, why not? Kids are androgynous, till they’re not. Main difference is how they wear their hair. If I make it vague, a relative should be able to fill in the gender blank.” She looked at the skull again. “I’ve never done a reconstruction on a skull that was missing the mandible. Any suggestions?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, you could just take an educated guess and freehand it, based on what you know about anatomy. But it might be easier if you could borrow a mandible from somebody of the same race and age.” I searched my mental memory banks. “Seems like we have a couple of skeletons in the collection that might be in the right zone. Miranda can search the database by age; I’d try ages ten to thirteen, see what pops up, and use whichever one fits best. Just don’t forget where you got it, and be sure you put it back in the box, once we’ve taken plenty of photos and you’re ready to take the clay back off.”

“Okay. I’ll try to get started on it this afternoon. Assuming I can get this guy’s nose fixed this morning.”

“Great. Any idea when you might be done?”

“Pushy, pushy. Well, usually it takes me two weeks, but I don’t have two weeks this time.”

“Because I’m so pushy?”

“No, because I’m nine months pregnant, in case you hadn’t noticed, and my due date is in six days.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “I knew that.” That was mostly true; I did know she was pregnant, of course — she was as big as a barge, and she waddled when she walked — but I’d lost track of how far along she was. “You look terrific. I hope the birth goes really well.”

“Ha. What you mean is, you hope the baby doesn’t come till after I’ve finished this reconstruction for you.”

I laughed. “That, too.”

As I was dashing up the flight of steps from the bone lab to the departmental office, I bumped into Miranda on her way back from the collection room. “So tell me more,” she said. “How was Florida?”

“Interesting. Frustrating. I’m actually going back.”

She blinked. “Going back? When?”

“Now.”

“Now?”

“Well, soon. As soon as I do a little research, and as soon as Joanna finishes the reconstruction.”

“How come?”

“Well, for one thing, I promised to do a report on the skull.”

She frowned and eyed me suspiciously. “So, let me see if I understand this right. You have to go back to Florida to write about a skull that’s here in the bone lab?”

It sounded absurd when she put it that way. “Well, they’re looking for the rest of the bones now, and I’d like to be there when they’re found. Besides, I told Angie St. Claire I’d help her look into her sister’s death. Burt DeVriess has an attorney friend in Georgia who’s helping us get an exhumation order, so I can look at the body. The local coroner says it was suicide, but Angie feels pretty sure the husband did it.”

“So Angie’s freelancing, and you’re freelancing with her?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Are you doing anything else with Angie?”

“How do you mean?”

“Are you falling in love with her?”

“In love? With Angie? Heavens no.” Miranda looked startled by the force with which I said it. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Angie. She’s great. I like Angie — she’s smart, she’s good at her job, and she’s fighting an uphill battle to find out if her sister was murdered. I’d like to help her, that’s all.” Miranda still looked skeptical — and I realized she had reason to doubt my candor. It hadn’t been long, after all, since I’d kept her totally in the dark about my role in an undercover FBI sting, one aimed at shutting down an unscrupulous tissue bank. Miranda had believed I was selling corpses from the Body Farm to the tissue bank, and by the time the truth came out, her faith in me had been shattered. Viewed in the light of that recent history, her current skepticism was understandable. “Okay, there is one other thing,” I said. Her eyes narrowed, and she drew back, on guard now. “The other thing is, it’s… too quiet around here at the moment. UT’s on break, my son and his family have gone to the beach, and unless somebody finds a dismembered body or a mass grave in the next hour or so, I’ll go stir-crazy. I’m going back to Florida because there’s something to do there. Something besides writing this damn sonar article I’ve been avoiding for months.”

Her expression softened, and she let out a big breath. “Okay, I can believe that. But what if all hell breaks loose up here while you’re down there?”

“If you need to work a death scene while I’m gone, call Hugh Berryman or Rick Snow.” Hugh and Rick were former students of mine who were now board-certified as forensic anthropologists. “I called them during my layover in Atlanta. They’ve offered to cover for me the next couple weeks.”

Miranda nodded. “Okay. But if you end up moving to Florida before I finish my PhD, I am going to be so pissed at you.”

I smiled. “Then you’d better start writing that dissertation. And I’d better get going on the experiment I need to do for Angie.” I started up the stairs, but Miranda grabbed me by the arm.

“What experiment?”

I was caught. “You’re not going to like it.”

“If you tell me I’m not going to like it, that means I’m going to hate it.” She’d put on her interrogator face, her inquisitor face. “What experiment?”

“Thing is,” I began, trying to ease into it, “Angie’s sister’s death was ruled a suicide. But suicide by shotgun is rare, especially among women. Angie and I sifted through everything the cleanup crew took out of the house, and in the dirt from the crawl space, I found the dens epistrophei and a piece of the axis. Which makes me think there’s something funny about the angle of the shotgun.”

Miranda’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, no. You wouldn’t. Dr. B, tell me you wouldn’t.”

“We’re trying to get an exhumation order to dig up the body. The stronger we can make the case, the more likely a judge is to let us do it.”

“You mean you plan to take one of our bodies and just blow the head off?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“I mean not exactly one.” Her eyes narrowed to slits.

“Christ. How many?”

“At least two.” She groaned. “Actually, three. To do it right, I need three.” She groaned again, louder.

“Jesus, you’re going to destroy three donated bodies — wreck three specimens that were supposed to go into the teaching collection — on the off chance that some Georgia cracker of a judge will be swayed by that?”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Why not? Because these bodies have been donated to us, entrusted to us. We’re supposed to study them, learn from them, treat them with respect. We’re not supposed to abuse and mutilate them.”

“There are no restrictions on how we use donated bodies,” I said. “You know the language of the donation form by heart. Legally, we’re entitled to do whatever we want to them.”

“I’m not talking about what we can do legally,” she countered. “I’m talking about what we can do ethically. Morally.”

“Why is shooting them worse than letting bugs and raccoons and buzzards feed on them?”

“Because that’s the cycle of nature,” she protested. “Because that’s what happens to bodies.”

“So does this,” I pointed out. “Not as often, but sometimes. Don’t we have a right, even a responsibility, to study this cycle, the cycle of violence? To understand more about how it affects bodies?” She made a face of distaste and shook her head slowly. “Am I remembering wrong, Miranda? Weren’t you the research assistant who helped me put two bodies in cars and set them on fire a couple of years ago? And at this very moment,” I reminded her, “don’t we have three bodies dangling from nooses?” She scowled, annoyed that I was boxing her in. I decided to stop bludgeoning her and appeal to her sense of justice, which ran strong and deep. “Look, I know it’s disturbing. But remember the experiment I did for Burt DeVriess in that murder case a couple years ago? I stabbed a body, trying to re-create the path of what a medical examiner called the fatal wound. But I couldn’t do it; it was physically impossible to make a knife zigzag around the spine and the rib cage the way the M.E. said it had. Remember that?” She nodded. “If I hadn’t taken a knife to that donated body, Grease’s client — an innocent man — would’ve been convicted of murder.” Her scowl eased slightly, and her shoulders — which had cinched up toward her ears — dropped back to horizontal. “You’ve got a younger sister, Miranda. What’s her name? Cordelia?”

“Not fair,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she really meant it. “Ophelia.”

“What if Ophelia’s partner murdered her, and was getting away with it? Wouldn’t you want to do everything possible to bring the truth to light? Wouldn’t you want other people to do that, too?”

She sighed. “We’ve got two bodies in the cooler at the morgue — they came in over the weekend — and another on the way down from Oncology this morning, probably still warm. Do you want to use those, or use the three we buried for the NFA class last week?”

“Any of the fresh ones women?”

“One. The cancer patient. Forty-two. Ovarian cancer.”

I winced. “I hate to put her through anything more.”

“She won’t feel it. And she’s a better stand-in for Angie’s sister than some eighty-year-old guy would be.”

“You’re right. Okay, let’s use her and whichever others are youngest and slightest.”

“Okay, I’ll let the morgue know we’re coming.” She started past me down the stairs.

“Oh, and Miranda?” She stopped, on the same stair where I was standing. “Thanks.”

She smiled slightly. “I live to serve. Anything else?”

“Well, long as you’re asking, have you got a twelve-gauge?”

She reared back and punched me in the shoulder, hard. Almost as hard as I deserved.

Chapter 5

The woman’s body jerked, her arms and legs flopping, as the shotgun blast slammed her head backward and the slug punched through the base of her skull, through the sofa, and into the earth below. Her limbs twitched in brief aftershocks, then grew still. Even through the protective earplugs, the roar of the gun was almost deafening, and it took a few moments before the dull rush in my ears subsided and was replaced by the normal background sounds of the Body Farm: the rotor blades of a Lifestar helicopter making its final approach along the Tennessee River to UT Medical Center; a police siren wailing out on Alcoa Highway, a half mile beyond the hospital; the chittering of an indignant squirrel overhead and the metallic thuds of a jackhammer chipping away at an unwanted piece of concrete somewhere across the river; the whir of the autofocus mechanism on the camera with which Miranda was photographing every aspect of the violent experiment and its effects.

“I’ve been in police work for a lot of years, and I never shot anybody before,” said Art. “Now I’ve shot three, in the space of twenty minutes. I sure hope this isn’t the start of a trend.” Art Bohanan — a longtime colleague and friend, and a senior criminalist with the Knoxville Police Department — stepped back from the blasted body and wiped the bloody barrel of the shotgun with a rag. The rag was already smeared with blood and tissue from the prior two shots, into the prior two bodies. His white Tyvek biohazard suit looked like something a slaughterhouse worker had worn for a double shift on the killing floor. Art surveyed the blood spatter on the suit. “And the sheriff’s office down in Georgia didn’t find a mess of bloody clothes in the husband’s laundry hamper? Wasn’t there a husband-shaped clean spot on the floor or the wall, where his body blocked the spatter?”

I shrugged. “The photos didn’t show much. He didn’t call it in until eight or ten hours after it happened. He had plenty of time to get rid of his clothes and do some cleaning. I don’t know about the spatter pattern; maybe he wiped some things down with bleach; hell, maybe he used a sheet or a shower curtain or something to contain the spatter. I figure we’ll never know, since the scene was worked so poorly and cleaned up right away. I’m just hoping we learn something useful by wrecking three perfectly good skeletons.”

Miranda and I had laid our three research subjects side by side on a trio of secondhand sofas, procured from Goodwill for twenty bucks apiece and positioned atop waferboard and pads of dirt I’d bulldozed into place with the Bobcat, our miniature bulldozer. The pad of dirt was a foot deep; I’d put big road signs — SCHOOL CROSSING, SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY, and DEER CROSSING, with the image of the deer already riddled with bullet holes — under the dirt as a secondary backstop. Judging by the test shot Art had fired through one end of a sofa, just before we placed the bodies, the dirt itself was thick enough to stop the slug and collect all the debris. But it couldn’t hurt — it could never hurt, I figured, although I’d forgotten this lesson in my life from time to time — to have contingencies and backups and backstops.

The first shot Art had fired, into the body of a small sixty-two-year-old white male, had been angled the way I’d expect in a shotgun suicide: the trigger down around waist level, the barrel pressed against the underside of the chin, rather than in the mouth. That shot, as I’d expected, had taken off the top of the cranium and some of the occipital, but had left the cervical spine unscathed. His second shot, into a medium-sized, twenty-eight-year-old black male, had been fired into the mouth, angled closer to straight on, though still slightly upward. That shot had blown off the back of the head and the base of the skull; the concussion had also fractured the first two vertebrae, but it had not destroyed them.

Art had fired the third shot into the mouth of the female cancer victim straight on, at a ninety-degree angle to the body. This shot, I saw with grim satisfaction, had obliterated the occipital and shattered the top of the spinal column, sending fragments of vertebrae splintering into the dirt. As I sifted the soil from beneath the mangled corpse, I found myself growing surprisingly nervous. What if I’d misinterpreted the bone trauma? What if I’d told Art the wrong trajectory? What if I’d ruined three perfectly good skeletal specimens for nothing?

Then, as I sifted the dirt from beneath the woman’s body, I saw bone fragments — familiar-looking fragments — shimmy into view as I shook the coarse wire screen. “Bingo,” said Miranda, zooming in with the lens as I paused to look closer. “There’s the dens epistrophei, and that looks like the back of the atlas. Good geometry, Dr. B.” Whir, click. Whir, click click click. “Good shooting, Art.”

“Not exactly sporting,” said Art ruefully, “but if it persuades GBI to open a case, maybe it’s done some good.”

Looking at the three ravaged bodies, I hoped he was right about that. I also hoped that the shattered skulls and spine might shed light on other, similar cases. I felt a debt, an obligation, to these three donors, and I realized I could repay the debt by sharing what I’d learned in forensic lectures and scientific articles. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said silently to each of the bodies. And again, aloud this time, to Art and Miranda: “Thank you.”

* * *

Joanna finished the facial reconstruction on Thursday afternoon — only four days after she’d started, which was a speed record for her. She was urged on by occasional contractions, which, luckily, turned out to be false labor.

She wasn’t thrilled with the reconstruction, but then again, being a perfectionist, Joanna was almost never thrilled with her reconstructions. She’d had to make some compromises, for the sake of the sexual ambiguity. As a result, the youthful face she’d sculpted could have been either a long-haired boy’s or a short-haired girl’s; it could also, without much of a stretch, have belonged to a mannequin in the children’s section of Target. In the absence of well-defined male or female characteristics, the face had an unavoidable, unsatisfying blankness. Still, if a photograph of the reconstruction were seen by the right person — by someone who’d once known this child — that person’s memory might well fill in the blankness, and perhaps more easily than if Joanna had done a more detailed face. The goal in reconstructing a face wasn’t to nail the victim’s likeness with magical pinpoint accuracy; the goal was to hint, to suggest: to get close enough to the mark to prompt someone, somewhere, to call and say, “That looks like so-and-so, who went missing years ago…”

But the vagueness made me uneasy, as vagueness generally did, in any arena in my life.

The clay-covered skull stared up at me from a hatbox in the passenger floorboard of my truck. I was taking a chance, carrying it that way; I probably should have put the lid on and tucked the box securely behind the driver’s seat, but — vague and unsatisfying though the face was — I wanted to be able to glance at it from time to time during the eight-hour drive to Tallahassee. Maybe, just maybe, something in the face would trigger some insight that had been swimming unseen beneath the surface of my mind for the past few days.

The blank face in the box wasn’t the only ambiguity accompanying me on the drive south. Several months before, I’d made love to a librarian who’d been helping me research the history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee — the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and the location of the recent murder of an atomic scientist. Just days after sleeping with the librarian — Isabella — I’d been stunned to learn that it was she who’d killed the scientist, in a bizarre act of vengeance for the suffering that the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, had caused her family. Some weeks after that, as the FBI tried to follow Isabella’s trail, I’d been even more stunned to learn that she might be pregnant. I’d received a cryptic message from her that seemed to confirm her pregnancy: from San Francisco, she’d mailed me an origami bird — a paper crane, symbol of peace — that contained, within its folds, a much smaller crane. Two months had passed since I’d received the origami message: two months in which I’d twisted in the wind, wondering where Isabella might be; wondering if she were indeed pregnant with my child; wondering whether she’d be caught; half hoping she would be; half hoping she wouldn’t. A psychologist I’d consulted, as I’d sorted through my conflicting feelings, had summed up my dilemma. “You’re at a crossroads,” he’d said, “a place of not-knowing. And you need to pitch your tent there for a while.”

So even as I steered my GMC pickup south on I-75 toward Atlanta and Tallahassee, I was pitched in my karmic tent, camped at an intersection from which fog-shrouded roads diverged toward unseen, unknowable futures. I was not an especially happy camper.

Chapter 6

Angie met me the next morning at the FDLE evidence- intake door. “Welcome back. How was your drive?”

“Not bad. Atlanta was slow, but that gave me a chance to check out the skyline. I came through right at dusk, when the buildings were starting to light up. Looks like the architects there are running a ‘Fanciest Roof’ contest — spires and arches and flying buttresses everywhere up there, glowing like Christmas.”

Vickery greeted me with a nod that included a slight additional wag of the cigar. Then he removed the cigar and used it to point at the box under my arm. “I see you brought along a friend. Glad you had some company.”

“Not much of a conversationalist,” I joked, then got serious. “So. A missing kid; maybe a murdered kid. How do you plan to get the pictures out to the public?” As soon as Joanna had finished the reconstruction, I’d e-mailed a batch of photographs of it, along with a draft of my forensic report on the skull. But Joanna’s work would pay off only if it were seen by someone who recognized the child’s face.

“We’ve posted the pictures and a summary of your report on CJNet,” she said. I must have looked blank, because she added, “Criminal Justice Network. Our statewide intelligence Web site for law enforcement.” I nodded. “Our public information officer already sent a press release to all the news outlets in the state,” Angie went on. “Here’s one for you.” She handed me a printed copy. Underneath the FDLE logo was a headline, contact information, and three thumbnail-size images of the reconstruction. I skimmed the copy.

FDLE SEEKS TO IDENTIFY CHILD’S SKULL FOUND IN APALACHEE COUNTY

On May 17, a citizen contacted the Apalachee County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) to report finding a skull on his property. After responding to the scene and determining that the skull appeared to be human, an ACSO deputy contacted the Apalachee County Medical Examiner, who in turn contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for forensic assistance.

A forensic examination at the central FDLE crime laboratory in Tallahassee confirmed that the skull was of human origin, and that the individual had been deceased for a substantial period of time — months or years, perhaps even many years. Further examination by a forensic anthropologist indicated that the skull was that of a white juvenile, approximately ten to twelve years of age, of unknown gender. A fracture in the skull indicates that the child died from blunt-force trauma to the left side of the head. FDLE and ACSO are investigating the case as a homicide.

Anyone with information on this case, including the identity of a missing boy or girl approximately ten to twelve years of age, is encouraged to call FDLE or the Apalachee County Sheriff’s Office.

The press release ended with contact phone numbers and e-mail addresses for FDLE and the sheriff’s office. Attached were three additional pages bearing eight-by-ten enlargements of frontal, profile, and half-profile photos of the reconstruction. “Looks good,” I said. “Any decent leads yet?”

“It’s a little early yet.” Vickery shrugged. “We’ve had a few calls, including one from a guy who says that he’s the missing child.”

I laughed. “Did he say how he manages without his skull?”

“No,” Vickery deadpanned, “but I’m guessing the lack of a skull makes it a lot easier to go through life with his head up his ass.”

Any additional jokes were cut off by the whoop of a police siren, which turned out to be Vickery’s cell phone ringing. He scanned the number on the display and raised his eyebrows. “Vickery speaking” he said. “You must have radar or ESP, Deputy. I’m in the lab right now with the forensic anthropologist, who just brought the skull back with the clay facial reconstruction… What? Slow down, I can’t understand you… Hold on, I’m gonna put you on speaker.” He flipped open the phone. “You still there?”

“I’m here,” came an agitated male voice. The sound was distorted — loud but muffled, the way it might sound if the deputy was shouting into the phone. “I’m out here at the Pettis place. The damn dog’s done it again.”

“Done what?”

“Brought in another one.”

“Another bone? Well, that’s a start,” said Vickery. “Now, if he’ll just bring us another couple hundred — is that about right, Doc? Aren’t there two-hundred-something bones in the body?” I nodded. “If he’ll just bring us another couple hundred, we can put this kid back together.”

“Not another bone,” yelled the deputy. “Another kid. A different kid.”

“Deputy, this is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I interrupted. “I’m the forensic anthropologist. What makes you think it’s somebody different?”

“Because unless that first kid had two heads, it has to be somebody different. Pettis’s dog just dragged in another skull.”

Chapter 7

Highway 90 shimmered and melted in the afternoon heat. Just ahead, it was a straight, flat ribbon of asphalt that became a straight, rippling river in the middle distance, then seemed to flow directly into the sky as it neared the western horizon. I half expected the pavement to evaporate beneath our wheels, molten and miragey as it appeared, but somehow the margins between asphalt and liquid, between liquid and sky, skittered ahead of us at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, the same speed the Chevy Suburban was traveling.

Angie, Vickery, and I were in the crime lab’s Suburban, headed from Tallahassee to the boondocks of Apalachee County, an hour west and a world away from the hum of the state capital and the forensic labs of FDLE. The deputy who’d called in the skull had arranged to rendezvous with us in McNary, the county seat of Apalachee County, and caravan with us to the property where the dog, the owner, and a second skull awaited us.

Eventually a small town shimmered into view, as if it were being conjured out of the waves of heat; as if the buildings and cars and even people took a few minutes to coalesce. McNary, Florida — population “nary too many,” according to Vickery — solidified into a sleepy, pretty little town, its central square occupied by a century-old, cupola-capped courthouse that was surrounded by live oaks and flowering azaleas. The streets bordering the courthouse square were fronted by an array of small, local businesses: a three-chair barbershop, still sporting a spinning pole of spiraling red and blue stripes; the Stitch ’N Sew, whose display window proclaimed CHURCH HATS SOLD HERE and offered beribboned, bespangled evidence to back up the claim; Miss Lillian’s Diner, where a sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk listed the day’s specials as meat loaf, mac and cheese, green beans, and four varieties of pie; the Casa de Adoración, a storefront Hispanic church whose members Vickery described as “a cross between Catholics and snake handlers”; two bail bonding companies, AAA Bail and Free As a Bird Bonds; a pawnshop offering DIAMONDS, GUNS, AND PAWN; and a hardware store whose sidewalk frontage abounded with lawn mowers, wheelbarrows, racks of gardening tools, and a handful of olive-drab hunting blinds perched on fifteen-foot stilts. As we passed the hunting blinds, I looked up, half expecting to see rifle barrels aimed at our passing vehicle.

A few blocks west of the courthouse, we passed a huge column of gray nylon fabric, a cylinder a hundred feet tall and thirty feet in diameter, glowing in the sun and rippling in the breeze. I pointed it out to Vickery. “What on earth?”

“Dunno. Looks like one of those weird artworks by that foreign guy — what’s his name? Crystal? Cristoff? The dude that wraps buildings and islands and small countries in fabric?”

“Christo,” said Angie. “But I don’t think this is art.”

“Looks like art to me,” said Vickery. “Prettier than a lot of paintings I’ve seen.”

“Didn’t say it wasn’t pretty,” she said crossly. “But I think if we peeked behind that curtain, we’d find a water tower and a crew of guys with sandblasters or paint sprayers.”

On the outskirts of McNary — which were no more than a quarter mile from the inskirts of McNary — Angie pulled into a McDonald’s. An Apalachee County sheriff’s cruiser idled in the grass beneath the shade of a maple tree at the back corner of the parking lot. As she eased the Suburban to a stop at the edge of the pavement, a lanky deputy emerged from the cruiser, wiping his fingers with the tatters of a napkin. The three of us climbed out — it felt like stepping into a blast furnace — and swapped greasy, salty handshakes with the deputy, Will Sutton. “Sorry,” he said, “I should’ve gotten more napkins. Y’all want something to eat? Last chance for a while.” We declined, and in another minute we were headed westward again into the liquid shimmer of Highway 90.

Turning left off 90, we took a state highway south for a few miles, then turned west onto a county road for a few more. Then, at a sagging wooden gate that looked permanently open, we eased onto a small dirt road. The road, barely more than a pair of sandy tracks, wound through stands of pines and moss-draped live oaks; every now and then, small branches and beards of Spanish moss slapped and slid across the windshield. Where the ground was dry and the sand was loose, the Suburban spun and slewed in the slight curves; occasionally, we dropped into water-filled depressions that were axle-deep, flinging great sheets of sandy water high and wide, cascading over the already-spattered vegetation encroaching on the road. The Suburban seemed to need its four-wheel-drive and high ground clearance, yet fifty yards ahead of us, Deputy Sutton’s Ford sedan managed just fine, aside from a thick layer of mud and sand accumulating as it rooted through the wallows.

A mile back in the woods, the deputy’s cruiser turned out of the tracks and parked in a small clearing beneath towering pines. We pulled in beside him, and I noticed a tiny, tin-roofed cottage tucked at one edge of the clearing. The clapboard siding was painted forest green, and the structure looked like it had escaped from a gang of state park cabins fifty years before and had holed up in this remote hideout ever since. A battered Ford Escort station wagon sat rusting in the yard, its wheels up to the hubs in weeds.

Our arrival was heralded by the baying of a gangly black-and-white hound that bounded off the front porch and galloped toward us. As the Suburban stopped he reared up, putting his paws on Angie’s windowsill and thrusting a snuffling muzzle through the open window. “Nice doggie,” Angie said, her tone somewhere between sarcasm and hope. She held a tentative hand toward him, close enough to sniff but not close enough to bite. After a quick whiff, the dog gave the hand a sloppy lick with a long, deceptively swift tongue. “Nice.” She grimaced, reaching for a container of wipes in the console.

“At least he’s friendly.” I got out, and the dog loped around to my side of the car to check me out. After sniffing me briefly, he shifted his attention to the right front tire, which he marked with a liberal sprinkling of pee. “Well mannered, too.” Sutton got out of the cruiser, and the dog gave him a perfunctory sniff and marked one of his tires, too, though with only a few token drops. Clearly he’d sized up the group and found the FDLE contingent to be the alpha dogs.

The screen door of the cottage groaned open on a rusty spring. “Don’t mind Jasper,” called a stringy man who bore a vague resemblance to his dog. “He never did meet a stranger.” The screen whacked shut as the man descended the two porch steps and shambled toward us. He wore loose, faded jeans, cinched above bony hips with a belt of cracked black leather. On both thighs the denim was worn through to the layer of horizontal white threads; between gaps in the threads of one leg I glimpsed a scrawny thigh that was nearly as white — and nearly as thin — as the threads themselves. The man’s T-shirt looked as if it had been used for years as a painter’s drop cloth; I couldn’t tell if it was white under all the layers of color, or dark with numerous smears of white amid the other colors. Is a zebra white with black stripes, I found myself trying to remember, or black with white stripes?

Angie stretched out a hand for him to shake. “Good to see you again, Mr. Pettis. How you doing today?”

“Gettin’ by, Miss Angie,” he said, shaking his head doubtfully. “Battery on my damn car’s gone dead, and I need to patch a couple holes in my damn roof, but I can’t complain.”

“There’s always something, isn’t there,” said Angie, who had a much bigger cause to complain, but who refrained. “You remember Special Agent Vickery and Officer Sutton,” she told him, and Pettis nodded. “And this is Dr. Brockton. He’s a forensic anthropologist — a bone detective — who’s helping us out on this case.”

“Bone detective,” he mused. “Like that gal on television? That one they call Bones?”

“Like her,” I said. “Except she’s got fancier equipment than I’ve got.”

“Fancier looks, too.” He grinned.

I laughed. “Yeah, and she’s probably a lot smarter than I am. I just do the best I can with what I’ve got to work with.”

“That’s all a man can do,” he said agreeably. “You want to see Jasper’s latest find?” I nodded. “It’s up here with the rest of the stuff he’s dragged in.” He led us up the steps and onto the screened-in porch. The screen was rusted, with several dog-sized rips in it; I suspected it did as good a job of keeping mosquitoes out as it did of keeping Jasper in. A wooden shelf, shoulder-high, ran nearly the width of the porch, mounted to the side of the house with triangular wooden braces. Perched on the shelf were a half-dozen skulls: three deer, an alligator, a cow, and a human, which — like the first one — lacked a mandible.

“That’s quite a collection,” I said. “I’ve seen anthropology departments with smaller collections than Jasper’s building here.” I donned a pair of gloves from my back pocket and lifted the human skull from the shelf. The light on the covered porch was dim, so I headed back into the daylight. Even in the dimness, though, I could tell that this skull had a grim story to recount.

The other four people gathered around as I studied the skull, turning it slowly to inspect it from all angles. Pettis leaned in close as I flipped it to inspect the mouth. “So what-all can you tell from this?”

“Quite a bit,” I said. “None of it very cheerful. Let’s start with the teeth, since we’re looking at them right now.” Two of them, the central incisors, had been snapped off at the gum line. “These were probably broken by a blow of some sort,” I said. “Maybe he just tripped and fell on the sidewalk, but more likely, somebody knocked them out. Maybe with a baseball bat or a piece of pipe. If we can find the lower jaw, I’ll bet the central incisors are missing from it, too.” I studied the remaining teeth. “One of his twelve-year molars is gone, and the jawbone’s already starting to resorb, to fill the empty socket. Four of the other teeth have unfilled cavities.” I pointed with my pinky to one of the six-year molars. “This cavity goes deep enough to reach the root. That had to be painful. So this was a poor boy; he probably never even went to the dentist.”

“So it is a male,” said Angie. “I thought so; this skull’s a good bit bigger than the other.”

“He’s bigger, several years older,” I said. “Still a subadult, though.” I pointed to the roof of the mouth. “Remember how open the sutures in the palate looked in the other skull? These are nearly fused, but not quite. So this boy — young man, really — could be sixteen, seventeen. Judging by how that socket’s already filling in, he probably lost that missing molar not too long after he got it. I’d say he started out poor, and things went downhill from there.”

Vickery used his cigar to point to a jagged gap behind the left ear opening, at the base of the temporal bone. “Looks like a fair-sized chunk of bone is missing.”

I nodded. “The left mastoid process — the heavy piece that’s almost like a corner of the skull — has been knocked clean off. That’s a pretty stout piece of bone, so something hit him hard. Again, maybe something like a baseball bat. A two-by-four. A rifle butt.”

There was a sober pause while they took this in.

“What about time since death?” asked Angie. “Was this kid killed around the same time as the other?”

“Hard to say.” I shrugged. “There’s a little bit of tissue on this one, too, so they could be from the same time period. But the range of uncertainty’s big. They might’ve died the same day; they might have died years apart.”

“But we know we have two adolescents,” Vickery mused, “at least one of them male, maybe both of them male.” I nodded. “Both killed by blunt-force trauma, both found in the same general area. So we’re probably looking for a serial killer?” Angie drew a long, grim breath.

“Hmm,” I said doubtfully.

Angie’s eyes swiveled up to mine. “Hmm? What do you mean, ‘hmm’?”

“Well,” I hedged, “on the one hand, we’ve got two young victims, who were found near one another.”

“On the other hand?” asked Vickery.

“I don’t know a lot about serial killers,” I began, “but don’t they often choose similar-looking victims? Take Ted Bundy, for instance. Didn’t he target women who looked like his ex-girlfriend?”

“Bundy said the cops had made too much of that,” Vickery answered, “but then again, Bundy was a monster and a liar, so how much stock can you put in what he said? I actually thought all his victims did resemble one another.” He studied me. “Are you saying these two kids didn’t look similar? How can you tell?”

All eyes were on me. “Well, ‘similar’ is in the eye of the beholder, right? But if you asked me to pick out two similar-looking boys from a crowd, I probably wouldn’t pick a young white boy and an older black boy.”

“This one’s black?” Pettis was the one who asked. “How can you tell that?”

“Couple ways,” I said. “First, look at the teeth again.” I turned the skull upside down again. “See how bumpy the tops of these teeth are?” I pointed to the numerous, irregular cusps of the molars. “We call teeth like that ‘crenulated,’ and they’re a distinctive feature of Negroid skulls. If you run your tongue over the surfaces of your molars, you’ll find that they’re smoother than that.” I paused to give them a chance to do the experiment, and through the flesh of their cheeks, I saw their tongues probing their teeth.

I turned the skull, cupping the damaged back of the head in my left palm, pointing the broken incisors skyward. “The jaw structure here is classically Negroid. See how the jaw juts forward? It’d be easier to see if the incisors weren’t broken, but the teeth angle also. And the lower jaw, if we had it, would jut forward, too. It’s called ‘prognathism.’ Our white faces are flatter — the shape’s called ‘orthognathous’—and the jaws don’t slant forward like this. There’s an easy test you can do with a pencil. Or a cigar. Stu, can you demonstrate for us? Take your cigar and hold it straight up and down, and lay it across your mouth and chin.” He did. “See how it touches the teeth, the chin, and the base of the nose?” Heads nodded. “If Stu were black, it wouldn’t lay flat like that. It would angle out from the nose, or from the chin, because of the way the teeth and jaws slope. Another thing”—I felt myself warming to my mini-lecture—“is the nasal opening. See how wide it is? And see these grooves in the bone underneath it? They’re called nasal gutters. They help funnel air into the nostrils. Caucasians don’t have nasal guttering; we’ve got a nasal sill that limits how fast air can flow. That’s because Caucasians evolved in colder climates, breathing colder air. In Africa, on the other hand—”

Suddenly Stu smacked his forehead with his left hand, causing all of us to jump. “Son of a bitch,” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.”

“Think of what?” asked Angie.

“We’ve got two dead boys, right?”

“We know this one’s a boy,” I said. “Hard to be sure about the first one.”

“There used to be a boys’ school — a reform school — somewhere in this neck of the woods. A long time ago. Maybe not in Apalachee County, though. Over in Miccosukee County? Or maybe Bremerton.” He looked at the deputy. “Any idea how far we are from the county lines?”

“Probably not more’n a couple miles from either one,” said Sutton. “We’re kind of in a corner here.” He pointed to the northwest. “Moccasin Creek’s the boundary with Miccosukee. Bremerton’s close, too; due west, maybe. But I never heard of a reform school anywhere around here.”

“Hell, it probably closed ten years before you were born,” Vickery told him. “Burned down sometime in the sixties or seventies, I forget when. Terrible fire. A bunch of the boys died. They never rebuilt the school. Just sent the survivors to other places.” He looked at the skull again. “Doc, any chance these two kids died in the fire?”

I studied it again. “Maybe. Smoke inhalation, possibly, but there’s no way to tell that without soft tissue, and the soft tissue’s long gone. But these skulls both had fractures.”

Vickery frowned. “But don’t skulls fracture in a fire?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “Not like this. When a body burns, the skull breaks into small pieces, about the size of a quarter.”

“How about if a wall or a roof collapsed,” he persisted, “and hit the kids on the head?”

“It’s possible,” I acknowledged. “But if the bodies weren’t burned beyond recognition, seems like they’d have been sent home to be buried.”

“If they had homes,” Angie observed.

“Good point,” I conceded. “Probably be worth finding out more about the fire — pictures, news accounts, official reports. Be interesting to take a look at the site, too.”

“I’d be up for that,” seconded Angie. “Any idea who owns the property now?”

“No,” Vickery said, “but it shouldn’t be hard to find out. If it’s still owned by the state or the county, we might not even need a search warrant.”

Pettis cleared his throat. “Not to cause trouble, but does that mean you-all needed a warrant to search my property?”

Vickery laughed. “We’d be in trouble at this point if we did, huh? But nah, we’re like vampires — if you invite us in, you’re stuck with us. If you don’t invite us in, we have to stay out.”

“Well,” interjected the deputy, “unless there’s an active crime scene. For instance, if a human skull turns up, we can do at least an initial search even if you don’t want to cooperate.”

Pettis frowned. “But I called you. If I didn’t want to cooperate, why would I call you?” I smiled; the man had a point.

“And we sure do appreciate your cooperation,” Angie threw in quickly.

Pettis’s frown turned into a smile. “Well hell, I’m glad to help. Seems like the right thing to do. Couple kids dead; be good to figure out who they were and how they died. Besides, truth is, me and Jasper kinda like the excitement. It’s pretty quiet out here most of the time. Ain’t it, Jasper? Huh, Jasper? Jasper, what do you say?” The dog, hearing his name three times in quick succession — the pitch rising each time — capered and spun, and gave a yodeling version of a bark.

“Speaking of Jasper,” I said, “did you happen to see what direction he came from when he brought either skull home?”

“Nope. Wish I had. Like I told Miss Angie here, way it happened was, I was sleeping in the bed. It was right about daybreak.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “was that the first time, or this time?”

“It was both times. Jasper, he’s kind of a night owl. Likes to roam around while I’m asleep. So there I am, sleeping like a baby, and Jasper jumps up in the bed with me. He mostly just does that if there’s a thunderstorm, ’cause he’s scared of thunder. But sometimes he does it if he’s real pleased with himself. So anyhow, there I am, dreaming about something or other, and I feel Jasper curl up beside me, and he’s slurping and gnawing on something that keeps bumping me in the leg. First time it happened, I ’bout jumped out of my skin when I saw what it was. Second time, I just said, ‘dammit, dog’—’scuse my language, ma’am—‘you have got to quit doing this.’ ”

* * *

Where should we begin? What were we searching for, and how hard should we search? Did the two skulls come from the grounds of the school? If so, were they victims of the fire that destroyed the place in the 1960s? Or was there another, darker story?

Those and a hundred other questions spun through my mind as the black Suburban hummed northwest toward Bremerton County, taking Angie, Vickery, and me toward what had once been the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.

U.S. 90 almost, but not quite, managed to dodge Bremerton County altogether. As it was, the highway cut through such a small corner of it that even as I passed a faded sign announcing BREMERTON COUNTY, I glimpsed another, a hundred yards ahead, reading MICCOSUKEE COUNTY. Midway between the two signs, a two-lane county highway intersected 90, and Angie slowed the Suburban.

“Turn left,” Vickery instructed.

Angie made the turn. A mile down the empty road, she glanced at Vickery. “You’re sure that was it?”

“Pretty sure. Unless our Bremerton County agent is having some fun with us. I asked him how to get to the old reform school from Highway 90 in Apalachee County. He had no idea — he’s only been assigned here about six months — but he checked with the sheriff’s dispatcher, and she said to turn right there where we just turned.”

“Wait.” Angie took her foot off the gas. “We were supposed to turn right there?”

“No. Left there. Right there. Exactly there.”

I laughed. “Are you two secretly married?”

“Good God, no,” exclaimed Angie.

“Hey,” Vickery squawked, “you don’t have to sound so horrified. Some women have actually liked the idea of being married to me. You know. Briefly.”

Angie chortled. “Stu’s left a string of broken hearts and wealthy divorce lawyers in his wake.”

“Only three,” he said. “So far. But I’m starting to look for future ex-wife number four.”

A few miles farther, we came up behind a sheriff’s cruiser, its blue lights flashing, tucked on the shoulder behind a black Ford pickup. “That’s Stevenson in the F-150,” said Vickery. “I’ll tell him we’re here.” He sent a quick text from his cell phone, and the truck began easing forward. The cruiser whipped around it, then turned right. The truck followed, and Angie fell in behind them. The pavement was cracked and buckled, knee-high with weeds in places. Fifty yards off the highway, a rusted chain was stretched across the road between rusted steel posts. We stopped, and a big-bellied deputy got out and inspected the chain and the padlock. He leaned back into his car and took out the radio microphone; after a brief exchange, he got off the radio and popped the trunk of the cruiser. Leaning in, he rummaged around, emerging with a bolt cutter whose handles were as long as my arm. He spread them wide and nibbled at the lock with the jaws; the chain clanked to the weedy pavement.

A half mile farther in the pavement ended in a loop, and we eased to a stop in front of four tall, widely spaced columns of Virginia creeper. At the tops of the four tangles of vines, I glimpsed a few crumbling courses of chimney bricks and — perched on one of these — a glossy crow, who cawed indignantly and flapped to a nearby pine tree as the five humans emerged from the vehicles.

Vickery introduced Angie and me to Stevenson, the young FDLE agent; Stevenson, in turn, introduced the Bremerton County deputy, Officer Raiford, who studied me as if I were an unusual zoological specimen. “Tennessee,” said Raiford, after he’d completed his examination. “Well, how in the world’d you end up out here in Bremerton County? Musta pissed somebody off pretty bad.” He laughed at his joke, then turned his head and shot a stream of brown tobacco juice a few feet to his right. “Y’all’s football program’s been having some troubles the last few years.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, fervently hoping he wouldn’t.

Luckily, Stevenson intervened. “I printed out some aerials and a topo map of the site. If you want, we can spread ’em out on the hood of the car.”

“Trunk’d be cooler,” pointed out Vickery. Stevenson nodded and laid a folder of printouts on the back of the cruiser. The topmost image was a satellite photo off Google, zoomed in close enough to show the entry road and the turnaround loop where we were parked. The four vine-clad chimneys were reduced to pairs of small specks in the photo, but they cast long, parallel shadows across the dirt and scrubby grass.

Next were two aerials taken in the 1960s, according to Stevenson. One aerial showed a small but tidy complex of a half-dozen buildings in a large, mostly open lawn. I recognized the four chimneys, which were divided between two main buildings: a dormitory, which held beds for a hundred boys, and a multipurpose building, which Stevenson said housed the classrooms, dining hall, kitchen, and administrative offices. The four remaining buildings, he said, were an infirmary, a chapel, and two equipment sheds.

Underneath this first aerial was a second aerial showing three buildings crammed into a small clearing in the woods. “What’re those?” asked Vickery.

“Ah, those,” said Stevenson. “Very interesting. Those were the colored buildings, for the Negro boys. This was a segregated institution. The Florida legislature required the facilities to be a quarter mile apart.”

“Wow,” Angie said sarcastically, “so much progress in the century since the Civil War. Sad thing is, there are still folks around here who miss those days.”

Stevenson pulled out additional pictures of the segregated facilities — the phrase black-and-white photo took on an added shade of meaning — and spread them on the trunk. The two main buildings and the chapel for the white boys were simple but appeared well constructed, neat, and carefully maintained. Their many-paned windows were large and occupied much of the walls; the interiors would have been flooded with light, and I imagined the windows offering the boys pleasant views of oaks, pines, and magnolias. The buildings for the black boys, by contrast, looked flimsy, unkempt, and virtually without windows — rickety barns, essentially, for human animals.

“Jesus”—Angie marveled—“widely separate and hugely unequal. Even the cages had a double standard.”

“Yeah, the colored buildings were an afterthought,” Stevenson commented, unnecessarily. “The main part was originally built as a CCC camp — Civilian Conservation Corps — in the 1930s. During World War II, it housed conscientious objectors — mostly Quakers who didn’t believe in war. They dug ditches and paved roads and fought forest fires; some of them worked in the state mental hospital over in Chattahoochee. Some served as guinea pigs for medical experiments—that’s a weird parallel with the Nazis, huh? After the war, when the conscientious objectors left, that’s when it became the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.”

“So it was a reform school from the mid-1940s,” I said, “until when?”

“Burned to the ground in August of 1967,” he said. Looking at his youthful face, I suspected that the fire had occurred at least a decade before either he or the sheriff’s deputy was born. “Terrible fire. Undetermined cause. Nine boys died, and one of the guards.”

“Good heavens,” said Angie. “Nine boys died? That’s nearly ten percent. Must’ve been a really fast-spreading fire.”

“Apparently,” Stevenson answered. “Not surprising — look at those old buildings. Firetraps. Late August, the days hot as hell, the wooden siding and cedar shakes like tinder waiting for a match. When I buy firewood, I pay extra for fatwood lighter that looks a lot like those shakes. Lightning strikes, a guard drops a cigarette butt in the pine straw, whatever, and whoomph. Anyhow, after the fire, the rest of the boys were transferred to other correctional facilities.”

“Was everybody accounted for,” I asked, “or were some missing and presumed dead?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “We’ve got some people doing research on the history of the place. Looking for records, first-person accounts. If we’re lucky, we might find a sixty-year-old who was doing time there and lived to tell the tale.”

As we walked the site, I noticed rectangular depressions in the ground — low spots where I could see traces of foundations, barely discernible amid the bushes and vines that had been swallowing them for the past four decades.

I wasn’t convinced that searching the ruins would tell us much — I’d not noticed signs of recent disturbance here, at least not yet — but the site was complex, and I didn’t want to rush to pull the plug.

I was poking around the ruins of the dormitory when I heard the call of nature, so I headed for the nearest line of trees. As I neared the tree line, I stepped on an old flagstone, a two-foot-square island of flat sandstone in a sea of weeds. The stone wobbled slightly beneath me as my weight shifted. I took my next step, then stopped and turned back to the flagstone. I put an exploratory foot on it and bore down gently. It did not move. I put my full weight on it and leaned forward, and when I did, it rocked again, barely perceptibly.

I trampled the weeds along one side of the stone and knelt. Using the triangular tip of my trowel, I dug two small handholds beneath the edge, then wiggled my fingers into the dirt and lifted. The stone was heavier than I’d expected — it was a couple of inches thick, and must have weighed a hundred pounds or more — so I was unable to budge it from my kneeling position. Getting to my feet, I bent down, then reminded myself, Lift with your legs, not your back. Crouching, I did my best imitation of an Olympic weight lifter, grunting with the strain. The stone came up slowly at first, but the higher it tipped, the less effort it required. By the time I had it on edge, I could balance it with one hand.

I could also see, within the hole that had been covered by the flagstone, a large metal can — a paint can, perhaps? — its top thinned and perforated by years of rust, transformed into metallic lacework. I called Angie over and showed her my find. She photographed the can, its hiding place, the flagstone covering, and the surroundings. Then she carefully eased the can out of the ground and set it atop the stone. As she did, water sluiced through the perforations in the lid. She tried peering inside, but it was too dark and murky to make out anything. She eyed my trowel. “You think you could get that lid off without maiming yourself?”

“I’ll try.” I slid the tip through the biggest of the perforations in the lid, wiggling it gently to widen the opening. Once it was several inches in, I pried gently upward. The trowel tore the crumbling metal easily, and it took only a minute to sever the lid completely.

“The forensic can opener,” Angie cracked. “First time I’ve seen one of those in action.”

Using the blade like a spatula, I lifted the lid — a small, rusty pancake — until it cleared the rim. Inside the can, barely visible above the murky water, was the edge of a small, soggy book.

Angie plucked it from its watery grave. It was a hardcover black book, bearing no title or label. It appeared to be a journal or ledger book, but its pages were stuck tight, so its meaning remained as effectively concealed, at least for now, as it had been in its hiding place. Angie carefully bundled it in a double layer of Ziploc bags and labeled a seal on the outer bag with a black Sharpie. “I’d like to get this to the lab pretty quick,” she said. “Maybe air-dry it overnight so it doesn’t start to mold. If our documents examiner’s still there by the time we get back, I’ll hand it straight off to her.”

“You’re the boss,” I said. “And my ride back to civilization. Whenever you want to go, just say the word.”

Five minutes later we were on the road to Tallahassee, with a camera full of photos of ruins and one lone piece of evidence. Potential evidence. For all we knew, the book’s pages — its fused, soggy pages — were as blank as the empty eye orbits of a skull.

Chapter 8

I spent a few hours the next morning catching up, by phone, with Knoxville. First I made sure that Miranda wasn’t fighting any serious brushfires—“No, things are pretty quiet here,” she assured me. “No forensic cases, just a couple of donated bodies that can stay in the cooler till you get back. Between the boys’ skulls and Angie’s sister’s case, sounds like you’ve cornered the market on all the interesting action. I’m envious.”

I laughed. “Come on down; we’ll put you to work. The pay’s great. Even better than the slave wages UT pays you.”

“So that means I’d actually have to fork over money to come work my butt off?”

“Just about. The pay stinks. So does the work. But hey, the hours are long, the air’s like a steam bath, and the mosquitoes hunt in packs.”

“Who could resist?”

Next I spent a while on the phone with my son, Jeff, making sure that my grandsons had not, through some series of unfortunate events, been shipped off to a perilous reform school during my absence. “Gosh, Dad, thanks for the vote of parental confidence,” said Jeff.

“Hey, no offense,” I said. “This case down here just reminds me how fortunate we are, and how vulnerable kids can be. Give ’em a big hug from Grandpa Bill.”

I met Angie at the crime lab at eleven. I was picking her up for an early lunch, at a place she described as “one of Tallahassee’s national treasures.” She wouldn’t tell me what delights the menu held, but she’d sounded so sure I’d like it that I’d skipped my free breakfast in anticipation.

First, though, she signed me into the lab and led me down the hall past the photo lab, to a door marked DOCUMENTS SECTION. She rapped briefly on the door, then led me in without waiting for an answer.

Inside, a gray-haired, bespectacled woman sat hunched over a table, peering through the magnifying lens of a desk lamp. It was exactly the type of lamp and magnifier I had on the desk in my office under the stadium for examining bones. I half expected to see some bone fragment in the circle of light, but the woman was peering — and frowning mightily — at the muddy book I’d fished from the ground the prior afternoon. “Hey, Flo,” said Angie. “This is Dr. Brockton, the forensic anthropologist who found the book. Dr. Brockton, this is Florence Winters, our documents examiner.”

“Nice to meet you, Florence,” I said. Her frown twitched. “You don’t look too happy. Is the book not telling you anything helpful?”

“Call me Flo,” she said, without glancing up. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid it’s telling me I’ve made a mistake. I put it under an exhaust hood overnight to dry out, and now the pages are fused together. So instead of a book, what we’ve got is a brick. A brick of old, brittle paper.” To prove her point, she tugged gingerly at the covers, which refused to part.

On the table beside the lamp was a tray of tools. Two of them resembled miniature kayak paddles made of stainless steel. They sported thin, flat blades at each end, joined by a slender round shaft. One of them was smaller than the other — its blades were about an inch long, and the shaft connecting them measured perhaps six inches in length; I vaguely remembered using something similar in chemistry lab, thirty years before, to scoop bits of powder onto a balance-beam scale. The tray also held an ordinary-looking butcher knife and an implement that appeared to be an oversize letter opener made of white plastic. “I’ve tried prying the pages apart with the microspatula, the regular spatula, the knife, and the Teflon spatula,” said Flo. “The metal spatula blades are so small they just tend to break the paper apart. The Teflon spatula’s too blunt; if I forced that in, it’d turn some of the pages to mush.”

Angie pointed to the butcher knife. “What about that? Can’t you slide that in and give it a twist?”

“That’s what I was hoping,” Flo said, “but the pages aren’t actually flat — see how they ripple? — and the paper’s really fragile. I tried going in at that corner, but instead of separating the pages, the knife was slicing through them.”

I leaned down and studied the corner and saw a small, straight incision cutting through the crinkled layers. “So there’s no way to open it up without destroying it? It might be the Rosetta stone, or might just be a bunch of blank pages, but we’ll never know which?”

Flo smiled slightly. “Never say never. Just before you got here, I was talking with a documents conservator at the National Archives, in Washington. She’s been working on a similar problem — some waterlogged codebooks from World War Two.”

“Codebooks?” I’d not spent a lot of time pondering the work of the National Archives; I knew they had a bombproof vault that contained an original copy of the Declaration of Independence, but aside from that, I suppose that if I imagined anything about the archives, it would be warehouses filled with boring bureaucratic file cabinets. This secret-code project, though, cast a new, moodier, and sexier light on the Archives. “Whose codebooks?”

“The U.S. Navy’s.”

I was puzzled. “But doesn’t the U.S. Navy already know its own codes from World War Two?”

“Probably,” she answered, “but all they could tell from the book’s cover was that it contained classified information. So they needed to see what was on the pages to know what sort of classified information, and whether they could declassify it.”

I’d always had an interest in World War II history, so even though it was a complete digression, I stayed with it. “And where’d they find this soggy codebook?”

“Originally it was on a navy destroyer, the USS Peary, sunk by the Japanese in a surprise attack.”

“The Peary was at Pearl Harbor?”

“No, Australia. Two months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked U.S. and British ships in Darwin. It’s sometimes called ‘the Australian Pearl Harbor’—they actually dropped more bombs on Darwin than they did on Hawaii — but the attack wasn’t so crippling. This destroyer, the Peary, was one of eight ships they sank.”

“Fascinating though the history and cryptology lesson is,” Angie began.

“Cryptography,” I corrected.

“Cryptography. Right. Whatever. How does the Seventh Fleet’s secret code for ‘soggy pages’ help us with this?”

“I was just getting to that,” said Flo, sounding peeved. I wondered if she was peeved at Angie for interrupting, or peeved at me for digressing. She might also, I realized, have been peeved at me for finding such a problematic project for her. “She — Lisa, the woman at the National Archives — suggested a couple of things to try. First thing, which might or might not work, is to soak the book in methanol, then dry it out again.”

“Hmm,” Angie commented. “I’m not sure ‘might or might not work’ inspires a huge amount of confidence. That’s the best the National Archives can offer? Aren’t they the brain trust for this sort of thing?”

“They are. But every project’s different,” Flo countered. “At least, that’s what she said. The methanol might make the pages a little stiffer. And that might make them easier to pop apart with a knife or a spatula.”

“But it might not,” I said.

“It might not,” she confirmed. “If not, we go to Plan C.”

“I’m afraid to ask,” said Angie. “What’s Plan C?”

“Wet the book again.”

“At the risk of sounding dumb,” I asked, “isn’t Plan C the same as Plan A?”

“Actually, this was Plan A,” Flo observed, rapping a knuckle on the dry book of fused pages.

“But he’s got a point,” said Angie. “What do we gain by going back to where we were?”

“We get another chance. Like Thomas Edison, when he was trying out different materials for lightbulb filaments.”

Angie looked doubtful. “Didn’t it take him, like, a hundred tries?”

“More like a thousand,” Flo said.

“A thousand?” Angie’s face fell. “You think it’s worth it? I’m not sure the results are going to be all that illuminating.”

I smiled at the bad pun — there were few things I liked better than bad puns, except worse puns — but Flo looked peeved again. “Never know unless we try.”

“Maybe not even then,” Angie replied.

“Maybe not even then,” Flo agreed. “But somebody went to some trouble to hide this. If I can, I’d like to find out why.”

Peevish or not, I decided, Flo was good people. “Angie and I are about to grab some lunch,” I said on the spur of the moment. “You want to go? Stu — Agent Vickery — is meeting us there. Bringing a criminologist friend, too. Why don’t you join us? Angie says the place is really special.”

“Can’t,” she said. “Got two forgeries to work on after this. Thanks, though. Where you going?”

“Shell’s,” said Angie, smiling, then raising a shushing, “top secret” finger to her lips.

“Ah, Shell’s,” said Flo. “That is someplace special.”

Chapter 9

What I held in my hand was halfway between bone and flower: cold and hard as stone, but scalloped, sinuous, and lustrous. It was beautiful, in a rough-hewn way, but at the moment my fear was trumping my aesthetic appreciation.

Angie and I were lunching at the Shell Oyster Bar — better known to the locals as “Shell’s”—and it was indeed special, in its own sort of way. Shell’s was a ramshackle little café on Tallahassee’s south side, just across the proverbial tracks. The parking lot was small, which was just as well, since the restaurant itself could seat only about thirty people. I glanced around the interior. The linoleum on the floor and the beige paneling on the walls looked forty years old, and half a dozen of the acoustic ceiling tiles were stained and sagging from roof leaks. “You picked this place for the ambience, right?”

“I picked this place because it’s the real deal. Great oysters, reasonable prices, and no fancy airs.” She was right about the lack of airs: the customers who jammed the place were eating directly off cafeteria trays, drinking beer straight from the can, and wielding flimsy plastic forks. I didn’t actually mind the ambience, despite my sniping comment. What I minded was the oysters. I felt moderate concern about the eleven raw ones glistening on the plate the waitress had set on the table between Angie and me, and I felt high anxiety about the twelfth oyster, the runt of the litter, which I had slowly lifted toward my mouth as Angie watched.

“I don’t know about this,” I said.

“Oh, come on. You spend half your time up to your elbows in bodies and gack, and you’re scared to eat an oyster?” She looked simultaneously amused and appalled.

“The difference is, I don’t put the gack in my mouth,” I pointed out. “I ate a raw oyster once a long time ago, and all I can say is, I haven’t felt moved to eat another one. Chewy and slimy, that’s what I remember — like a cross between gristle and a loogey.”

“Eww, that’s disgusting.” She grimaced. “Clearly that was not an Apalachicola Bay oyster you had. Probably some inferior product from the Chesapeake or the Pacific Northwest.” She spooned a dollop of horseradish from a tiny paper cup onto the largest of the oysters, squeezed a lemon wedge over it, and then plucked the shell from the plastic tray and waved it in my direction. “Look, this is a thing of beauty.” The oyster quivered moistly beneath the fluorescent lights. Angie raised the shell to her lips and tipped it up, slurping slightly as the oyster slid into her mouth. She chewed a few times and then swallowed. “Yum.” She beamed. “You better move fast, or you’ll lose your chance. There’s only ten more on the plate.”

“And this is it? This is all we’re having for lunch? A dozen raw oysters?”

“Maybe not.” She shrugged. “We might need two dozen. I’m kinda hungry.”

As Angie reached for another oyster, I noticed a thin, faint line on the side of her index finger. “How’d you get that scar? Mind my asking?”

She looked puzzled until she saw where I was looking; then, in the space of a few seconds, her face shifted through half a dozen expressions: amusement, wistfulness, sorrow, anger, confusion, peace. “I nearly chopped off my finger when I was ten,” she said. “My sister Kate — she was seven at the time — was trying to cut down a tree. She was flailing away at it with a hatchet, but not really doing much beyond bruising the bark. So I took the hatchet from her and said, ‘Here, let me show you how to do it.’ I put one hand on the tree, for balance, I guess, and reared back and took a whack. Lucky for me I just caught the edge of my finger with the blade. An inch higher, and my coworkers would be calling me ‘Stumpy.’ As it was, I got off with just a few stitches.” She traced the scar with her other index finger, smiling slightly. “God, I haven’t thought about that in years. ‘Here, let me show you how to do it.’ Famous last words, huh?” She shook her head. “We were so close when we were kids. I was so protective of her. How the hell did I let her down so badly? How’d I let her get in so far over her head?” She jabbed at her eyes with the flimsy paper napkin. “Dammit.” She set the empty shell down on the tray.

I set mine down, too. “I’m sorry, Angie.” Mortified by my clumsiness, I stared down at the oysters pooled in their brine. “I didn’t mean to remind you of it all over again.”

She shook her head. “It’s okay. How were you supposed to know? Besides, I don’t want people tiptoeing around, walking on eggshells for fear they’ll say something — who knows what—that might remind me of Kate. I’d hate that.” She fingered the scar again. “This is my reminder of an adventure, a story we shared. It’s a souvenir I’ll carry on my skin for the rest of my life. Like a tattoo, carved by a hatchet. How cool is that? But it gets invisible to me, and I forget it’s there. So thanks for reminding me. I’m glad you asked.”

“Me, too, then.” I looked up at her, no longer mortified. “I won’t tiptoe.” An unexpected wave of memory and emotion washed over me suddenly — a rogue wave that hit me almost hard enough to capsize me — and I turned away.

“What? I thought you promised not to tiptoe.”

“I did. I won’t.” I turned back toward her. “I know what it’s like when people tiptoe around you. Makes you feel invisible but also hugely conspicuous at the same time.” She waited. “My father killed himself when I was three.”

Her eyes widened, and she nodded once, very slowly. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t actually know much about it. He’d invested heavily in the commodities market — soybean futures or pork bellies or something; I don’t know what. Not just his own money, but a lot of money for other people, too — friends who wanted in on what was starting to look like a sure thing. And then the price went into free fall and he lost everything. He went into his office and shot himself.” I shrugged. “That’s about all I know. We never talked about it. That was the one unspoken rule at my house growing up: don’t talk about it; tiptoe around it. ”

“Did your mother remarry?”

“She did. Actually, she married my dad’s brother, my uncle Charlie.” I smiled. “Charlie was a fine man. Treated me like a son. I thought of him as my dad; I called him Dad. Although…” I hesitated again. “The older I get, the more I miss my father; the more I wonder what kind of relationship I could have had with him. It makes me feel a little disloyal to Charlie, but I miss my father.”

“Nothing disloyal about that,” she said. “There’s room in a heart for a lot of people. I’ve got another sister, Genevieve — the oldest — who’s still alive. Would I have more love to give Genevieve if I didn’t still feel love for Kate? I don’t think it works that way. I think it works the other way around — I think I’ve got a bigger heart for Gen because of Kate. And I bet you’ve got a bigger heart for Charlie because it’s growing to take in more of your father. Loss can make you smaller, or it can make you bigger. Just depends on what you do after it.” She dabbed at her eyes, then looked at the ruins of her napkin and laughed. “God, they really do need better napkins at this place.”

I lifted my paper cup of iced tea. “Here’s to getting bigger, not smaller.”

She reached for her cup, but didn’t lift it. “You mean that?” There was a mischievous gleam in her eye.

“I do.”

“Let’s see about that.” Letting go of the cup, she lifted another oyster from the tray and held it toward me. “To getting bigger, not smaller.”

“Uh-oh,” I said. “There’s no graceful way out of this for me, is there?”

“The best way out is all the way in.” She grinned.

I studied the remaining oysters. My inclination was to reach again for the smallest. Instead, I forced myself to take a big one. I spooned on a dab of horseradish and squeezed a lemon wedge over it, as I’d seen Angie do, and then — for good measure — sprinkled a dollop of cocktail sauce on top. I lifted it by the edges, careful not to slosh the brine. “To bigger, not smaller,” I said, clicking my oyster shell against hers. I brought the shell to my lips, feeling the roughness of its outside against my lower lip and the pearly smoothness of the inner shell against my top lip. The shell was cold from the bed of crushed ice in the platter. As I tipped the shell slowly, the brine — salty, lemony, and tangy — trickled into my mouth.

“Don’t think about it,” Angie coached from across the table. “Just do it.” I tipped the shell higher, and the oyster slithered into my mouth. “Chew three times, then swallow.” The memory of my one prior oyster tasting came rushing back, and I nearly gagged, but then I bit down, and my distaste and fear were swept away by a wave of flavor and texture that somehow seemed to embody the ocean itself: salty, clean, and — to my amazement — light and slightly crisp. How could an oyster — a mollusk, for heaven’s sake — be light and crisp and clean?

I laid the shell down slowly. “So,” she said, “what do you think?”

“I think maybe you’re right,” I said. “I think we might need two dozen.”

We were just polishing off the first dozen when Angie’s phone rang. “Hi, Stu. Yeah, we’re still here. Y’all come on. But you better hurry. I’m not sure how well stocked Shell’s is, and our friend here has decided he likes oysters.”

* * *

Vickery brought with him a patrician-looking man who could have been either a well-used sixty or a youthful seventy. He wore silver hair, black suspenders, a red bow tie, and alert, sparkling eyes. He extended a hand as Vickery made a no-nonsense introduction. “Dr. Bill Brockton; Dr. Albert Goldman.” I wiped the oyster brine from my hand and shook. “Dr. Goldman teaches law and criminology at FSU’s Center for the Advancement of Human Rights,” Vickery told me, although Angie had already briefed me on his credentials while we were waiting, “and one of his specialties is juvenile justice. If anybody can give you the skinny on reform schools in the 1950s and ’60s, it’s Al.”

Goldman shook my hand, then eyed the last two oysters on our plate hungrily. “I hope you told them to save a few dozen of those for me.”

“I can’t promise it,” I said. “You’ve been welcome to my share up to now, but we might be competing from here on out.”

He grinned. “I’ve been a regular here for thirty years. I might have a slight edge if the supply runs short.”

Goldman and Vickery squeezed into chairs alongside Angie and me at the cramped table. Goldman craned his head in search of our waitress, but she was busy with another table at the moment. “Stu’s been guest-lecturing in my criminology classes for the last, what, ten years or so?”

“Hmm. I’d say more like thirteen,” Vickery mused. “Divorce number one. I remember because I got served with the papers as I was getting into my car to head over to your class for the first time.” He half smiled to himself. “I was feeling all sorry for myself, then I got to campus and there were all these gorgeous students — way too young for me, but still, seeing them reminded me that there might be life after divorce.” He laughed. “But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”

I smiled. “It might be more entertaining, though.” I looked at the FSU professor. “I’m a physical anthropologist, Dr. Goldman, so I don’t have as much perspective on institutions like prisons and reforms schools as a cultural anthropologist might. I’m trying to wrap my mind about the notion that these two kids — one of them only ten or twelve — might have been killed while they were in protective custody. Is that really a possibility?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Protective custody? Protective of whom? Whatever gave you the idea that a reform school is in any way protective of kids? Reform school is all about protecting the rest of us from kids.”

I felt embarrassed, like a student who’s given a dumb answer in class. “Well, I probably misused the term, but if you’re trying to reform kids, don’t you — the state, I mean, or society — don’t you have a responsibility to keep them safe while they’re in custody?”

“Oh, naive one,” he said kindly. “Let me remove a few of the scales from your innocent eyes.” He handed me a photocopy of a newspaper story, which I saw had been printed in a Miami paper in 1961. “Go ahead, read it,” he encouraged. “But it might make you lose your lunch.”

BOYS FLOGGED FOR BAD GRADES

Students Beaten Bloody at North Florida Boys’ Reformatory

This is not a story for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.

This is a story about troubled boys, hard men, and the brutal extremes to which “spare the rod, spoil the child” can be taken in the name of discipline.

Twenty miles outside the north Florida hamlet of McNary sits a cluster of white wooden buildings that has the spare appearance of a small army outpost. The structures were built in the 1930s as a Civilian Conservation Corps work camp, but since 1946 they have housed the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory. The institution’s bland and hopeful name belies the violence that is one of its regular routines.

Every Saturday morning boys are lined up and taken into a shed beside the school’s dining hall. Two by two the boys walk in, but often they must be dragged out, because they cannot walk. Their buttocks and thighs have been reduced to raw, bloody pulp by what can only be described as floggings.

School officials say the punishments meted out to boys are strict but fair. “We have to maintain discipline,” said the school’s superintendent, Marvin Hatfield. “We have to be firm. Remember, these are not choir boys we’re working with. These are boys with a history of getting into trouble. We only punish a boy if he gives us a good reason, and we try not to go overboard.”

But boys and men who have endured or witnessed the punishments paint a different picture, one in which children as young as 11 years of age are beaten savagely with a heavy strap. This reporter spoke with four former students who had spent time at the school within the past five years. None of the four was willing to have his name printed, for fear of reprisals. One young man reported receiving 100 lashes with the strap as a punishment for fighting. The other three said they had received anywhere from 20 to 40 lashes for infractions such as smoking, cursing, or simply making bad grades. “I made a C in math,” said one, “and I got 40 licks for that.”

Pressed about the practice of administering beatings for bad grades, Superintendent Hatfield explained and defended the policy. “We expect boys to apply themselves to their studies and make good grades. If they don’t, they receive demerits. If they get too many demerits, they stay here longer. So if a boy is eager to finish up his time and go home, he can volunteer to take a paddling instead of demerits.”

One former school employee offered this description of what Supt. Hatfield calls a paddling. “They take the boys into the shed two at a time,” said the man, who — like the boys interviewed for this story — was unwilling for his name to be printed. “There’s two guards and two boys. There’s a wooden bench and an iron bed in the shed. One boy sits on the bench and waits his turn while the other one is taken to the bed. They make him lie facedown on the mattress and grab hold of the bar at the head of the bed. If he doesn’t lie still and quiet the whole time, they start all over again.”

The strap used to administer the beatings is designed to inflict serious pain, according to the man. “The strap is five feet long and four inches wide, with a wooden handle at one end. It looks like the leather strop that a barber uses to sharpen a straight razor, but it’s thicker and heavier than that. It’s two layers of leather with a thin layer of metal sewn in between the layers.

“Swinging the strap is a well-honed skill,” he added. “The guard takes a big windup, like a baseball pitcher or a tennis player. He swings his arm up over his head and then brings it down. The end of the strap whips across the ceiling and down the wall before it hits the boy. You can tell the boy hears it coming, because he’ll stiffen up and try to brace for it when he hears it hit the ceiling. There are strap marks all over the ceiling and all down the wall.”

The young man who said he’d received 100 lashes for fighting said it was the worst pain he could imagine. “I thought I would die,” he said. “I wished I would die. They had to carry me to the infirmary. I couldn’t walk for a week, and I had scabs for a month. I still have the scars. I guess I always will.”

Critics of corporal punishment have repeatedly called for a ban on the practice at the school, but those calls have gone unheeded for years.

And so, year after year, the floggings continue.

“There’s blood all over that shed,” said the former school employee. “There’s blood on the floor, blood on the walls, blood on the ceiling. There’s blood on people’s hands.”

I looked up, and Goldman raised his eyebrows in a question. I handed the article back to him. “Terrible,” I said. “Like something out of the Inquisition. Or antebellum slavery.”

“Or Abu Ghraib,” he said. “Or Gitmo.”

I didn’t want to argue the politics. “But these were kids. Wasn’t it illegal?”

“Funny how that worked,” he said. “Beatings aren’t allowed — and weren’t allowed back then — in adult prisons. But corporal punishment was permissible for juveniles. The rule was — the trick was — it had to be the sort of punishment a ‘loving parent’ would give.”

I tried to reconcile the contradictions, but they were like magnets whose poles couldn’t be forced together. “A loving parent? Beating a twelve-year-old boy a hundred times with a five-foot strap?” I imagined children who were only slightly older than my own grandsons — ages eight and ten — being beaten until they couldn’t walk. Goldman was right: the idea nearly made me sick. “It was torture. How did they keep getting away with it?”

He shrugged. “Nobody really gave a damn about those kids. Some were orphans, some had parents that were glad to have the state take the kids off their hands for a while, or forever.” He made a face of distaste. “You know the best way to create career criminals?” He didn’t give me much time to consider the question before he supplied the answer himself. “Bring them into the juvenile justice system to ‘reform’ them.”

“Oh, surely that’s too cynical a view,” I argued. “If they’ve come to the attention of the juvenile justice system, they’re already in trouble, aren’t they? It doesn’t seem fair to call the system itself part of the problem.”

Part of the problem? The system might be the whole problem. America’s criminal justice system is like a self-replicating computer virus. There are more than two million people behind bars in this country. We have the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on earth.” I’d heard that before, so it wasn’t a total surprise, but what Goldman went on to say was a different perspective than I’d heard before. “By their mid-thirties, one-third of black male high school graduates have spent time behind bars; more than sixty percent of black high school dropouts have. You know when that trend began?” I shook my head; I didn’t. “In the 1960s, right around the time the civil rights movement started making headway.” Put in that context, the statistics seemed especially troubling. “And most of it starts with kids. Train up a child in the way he should go, the proverb says, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” I’d never heard that repeated with such irony. “The one thing our juvenile justice system excels at is creating career criminals. That’s the biggest predictor for becoming a career criminal: being incarcerated as a juvenile. And the cost of incarcerating juveniles is huge, not just for food and guards and barbed wire, but for all those adult prisons we have to build to house them once they’re grown-up criminals. We could save a couple of million bucks for every career criminal we didn’t create, if we’d stop creating them.”

“What about counseling and drug treatment and other services that kids get once they’re part of the system? Don’t those make a difference?”

“Interesting question.” He caught the eye of the waitress and beckoned, and she nodded in an I’ll-be-right-there sort of way. “There was a really ambitious and well-funded project in Massachusetts back in the 1930s and ’40s — the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study, it was called. It was designed to identify kids who were at high risk of becoming criminals, and to provide them with all sorts of educational and medical and social services to steer them toward solid, productive lives.” I searched my memory banks for any scrap of knowledge I might have about it, and I came up dry. “Kids and parents and social-worker types loved it,” he went on. “It became the gold standard, the holy grail, for juvenile services. Kids who completed the program were tracked and interviewed, and years later, they were still saying glowing things about it. Things like, ‘That program saved my life,’ and ‘Without that program, I’d have ended up in prison.’ Impressive, huh?”

“Sounds great,” I said.

“But here’s the kicker. So here’s this legendary model program, right? But another twenty years down the road, when the kids were now middle-aged, some new researchers did a follow-up study, and guess what? The kids who’d gotten all that great help actually turned out worse than similar kids who didn’t get the help. The Cambridge-Somerville kids were more likely to have committed serious crimes, or turned alcoholic, or gone crazy, or died, compared to the control group — a group of other high-risk kids who’d gotten nothing. Leaving kids the hell alone turned out to be better for them than this gold-plated program, which actually proved harmful.”

“So you’re saying the answer is to do nothing? The best way to keep them from drifting into crime is to look the other way?”

He shrugged. “You know the biggest single factor that steers boys away from crime? Getting a girlfriend.”

Angie gave a brief laugh. “So instead of sending them to juvie, we should sign them up for Match.com?”

He smiled. “Maybe. Delinquency is something kids outgrow — unless we confirm them as ‘delinquents’ and lock them up with other, older delinquents, who teach them worse things; who teach them to be better, badder criminals.”

What he was saying had a certain logic to it, but it seemed to dodge the bigger question of social responsibility. “But what’s the chicken, and what’s the egg? How do you separate cause from effect? I mean, kids don’t just get randomly snatched up and sent to lockup for no reason. A kid has to do something to get pulled into the system in the first place, right? Steal a car, rob a store, vandalize a school, or something?”

“Something,” he conceded. “But that ‘something’ can be as simple as being defiant at home. Or playing hooky a few times. Or living with a single mother who gets arrested, so the kid gets sent to a foster home, where maybe he gets abused and starts doing drugs and it all goes to hell from there. Tiny, tiny things can start kids spiraling down the rabbit hole, especially if all the kid has done is pick the wrong parents or the wrong color skin or the wrong socioeconomic class.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I’d lived long enough to recognize that random luck — good luck and bad luck — could play a big role in shaping a kid’s life; after all, what if my grandsons had been born in black skin instead of white skin? Had been born in Darfur or Rwanda instead of in Tennessee? But I wanted an answer, a solution, so I pressed him. “So what would you do if you ran the circus? Just open the cages and let out all the animals?” I’d intended for the second question to be a witty riff on the old cliché, but it came out harsh and judgmental. “Sorry. I didn’t really mean that the way it sounded.” At least, I hoped I didn’t. He waved off the apology, though I thought I saw a flicker of disappointment in his eyes. “But seriously, what would you do?”

“I’d light a single candle, and I’d keep cursing the darkness. I’d try to bring evildoers to justice, especially the evildoers who hide behind uniforms.” He took a breath, gearing up. “I’d redistribute wealth. I’d do away with poverty and disease. I’d close the prisons, and spend all those billions of dollars on schools and health care and jobs instead.” The waitress appeared at our table, and he beamed at her. “And I’d love a dozen oysters, with extra horseradish and lemon.” She scurried toward the kitchen with the order. “Sorry to get on my soapbox, but I’m appalled by how much money and how much human potential we squander locking people up. What if society renounced the right to use violence against kids — what if we just said, ‘We don’t do that’?”

“It’s a complicated problem,” I acknowledged. “And except for the oysters, those things you’re talking about aren’t quick fixes. They’d require fundamental changes in our whole society.”

“God, I sure hope so.”

I nodded at the newspaper article he’d brought me. “May I keep this?”

“Of course.”

I folded the page and tucked it into my pocket. “At least this school isn’t still in business. Let’s hope that sort of brutality is a thing of the past.”

He gave me an ironic smile. “Martin Lee Anderson.”

“Excuse me?”

“Martin Lee Anderson. Look him up. You won’t have any trouble finding him.”

* * *

Thirty minutes after I’d happily polished off seven Apalachicola Bay oysters, I settled myself in front of a computer at the Leon County Public Library, in downtown Tallahassee, and typed “Martin Lee Anderson” into the Google search bar. In a fraction of a second — thirteen one-hundredths of a second, the screen informed me — the search engine found 7,600,000 hits. I clicked on the first one, a Wikipedia entry ominously titled “Martin Anderson death controversy,” and began to read: “Martin Lee Anderson (c. January 15, 1991–January 6, 2006) was a 14-year-old from Florida who died while incarcerated at a boot-camp-style youth detention center, the Bay County Boot Camp, located in Panama City, Florida, and operated by the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. Anderson collapsed while performing required physical training at the camp. While running track, he stopped and complained of fatigue. The guards coerced him to continue his run, but then he collapsed and died.”

It sounded like a sad accident, but hardly the same sort of abuse as the reform school beatings detailed by the article Goldman had brought me. Over the years, I’d read many stories of teenage athletes — usually high school football players — who died of heatstroke or heart failure during hot summer practices.

But the more I read about Anderson’s death, the less it seemed to be simply a sad accident. A YouTube video, taken from a surveillance camera, had recorded how the guards “coerced” Anderson. The image was grainy, and the view was often obscured by the cluster of guards, but the clip seemed to show the black boy being knocked to the ground, dragged around, and subjected to punches and choke holds by a group of seven guards. During most of the “coercion”—which continued for half an hour — a nurse stood by and watched; eventually, she knelt down and used a stethoscope to listen for a heartbeat, and after she did, two guards jogged away to summon emergency medics. But by then it was too late.

What I saw on the video was disturbing, but what I read was even more disturbing. The local medical examiner initially ruled that Martin Anderson’s death was an accident caused by sickle-cell trait, a blood disorder in African Americans that sometimes distorts red blood cells, limiting their capacity to carry oxygen. But the boy’s family and the NAACP challenged the M.E.’s findings and demanded a further investigation. The U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation, the original medical examiner was fired, and the boy’s body was exhumed for a second autopsy by a different M.E. The investigation revealed that Anderson’s mouth had been covered by guards while ammonia capsules were held beneath his nostrils. The second M.E. reached a far different conclusion from the first one. With his mouth clamped shut and ammonia fumes repeatedly forced up his nose, Martin Lee Anderson, age fourteen, died of suffocation.

The end of the video clip showed the boy’s limp body being hoisted onto a gurney and wheeled away — barely two hours after he’d gotten off the bus for his first day of boot camp.

The more things change, I thought, the more things stay the same. No wonder Goldman had given me that sad, ironic smile when I’d said that brutality to kids was a thing of the past.

Chapter 10

We’d arranged for Kate Nicely’s body to be brought into the embalming room of Morningside Funeral home, figuring it would be equipped with an exhaust fan to remove odors and a floor drain to remove fluids. Thanks to Burton “Grease” DeVriess and his two degrees of separation from a Georgia judge, the coffin had been freshly exhumed, though I knew that fresh would not be a word likely to describe the corpse sealed inside.

When Angie and I arrived, we presented ourselves once again to the receptionist, Lily — whose name, I realized, was perfect for a woman who made her living from the dead. As before, Lily looked flustered by our arrival, or possibly by our mere existence; again, she fled swiftly into the inner sanctum of her boss’s office to announce us. Once more, the lugubrious Samuel Montgomery emerged, and I asked if everything was ready for us.

“We have a slight, ah, problem,” Montgomery breathed, causing me to have a powerful sense of déjà vu, a sensation that only intensified when Angie asked what sort of problem we had. “Well…” He hesitated. “I don’t know if you were aware of this, but we were not able to embalm the, ah, deceased.”

“My sister, you mean,” said Angie sharply. “You weren’t able to embalm my sister. Because her head was blown off?” Montgomery drew back. “Or because her husband hustled her into the ground so fast?”

“Both the, ah, nature of her injuries and the timing of the arrangements made embalming impossible,” he said. “As a result, we’re unable to bring the body inside. The, ah, odor is quite strong.” From the look of distress on his face, he might almost have been experiencing the odor at this very moment. He looked from Angie, whose face was a stony mask, to me. “Surely you can understand? When people come here to pay their last respects, they don’t want…” He trailed off.

Angie finished the sentence for him. “They don’t want it to smell like somebody’s died?”

Montgomery sighed. “Well, yes, if you insist. The entire building would smell.”

I could understand Angie’s edginess, but I could also appreciate his dilemma. “So what do you suggest?”

“We have a maintenance building for the cemetery,” he said. “A garage and shop area. It’s not fancy, but there’s electrical power. Fluorescent lights. Water. No air-conditioning,” he added apologetically, “but fans, which would help keep the air moving through.”

“That’s fine with me,” I said. “Angie?”

She started to say something, then bit it back and simply nodded.

* * *

The bad news was, Morningside’s maintenance shop was a corrugated metal building that soaked up the midday sun, creaking and popping as it expanded in the heat. The good news was, the ceiling was high, and the thick concrete slab under our feet still retained a trace of the spring’s coolness. The better news was, the building had a garage door in the front and another directly opposite it, in back, and the fans Montgomery had mentioned — a pair of industrial-sized blowers with blade assemblies that might have come off a small aircraft — transformed the funeral home’s shop into a cross between a landscaper’s shed and a NASA wind tunnel. Montgomery had placed the coffin on a wooden workbench, which was about waist-high. As he unscrewed the lid and tilted it off, I caught a strong whiff of decomposition, but the smell swirled away swiftly, sucked out of the building and mixing with the scent of the longleaf pines and honeysuckle vines and road-killed deer and armadillos of south Georgia and north Florida.

The coffin was a bottom-of-the-line model, made of cloth-covered particleboard. It had not been sealed in a watertight burial vault, so the fabric was caked with mud and the particleboard was already becoming waterlogged. My work had trained me not to sentimentalize death or the trappings of funerals, but I couldn’t help thinking how little this woman must have mattered to her husband, so swiftly and so cheaply had he put her in the ground.

We’d been joined by a Cheatham County deputy — a hangdog-looking fellow named Chumley — and a grizzled death investigator named Maddox from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A former police detective who’d retired after thirty years of interrogating homicide suspects, Maddox had recently embarked on a new career of observing victims’ autopsies. Assigned to the medical examiner at the GBI’s central-region lab in Dry Branch, Georgia — a small town just east of Macon — Maddox had driven south three hours to join us, and he wasn’t happy about it. “Hell,” he said, “this would’ve been only thirty minutes from the southwestern lab, in Moultrie.”

I asked the obvious question. “Then why didn’t Moultrie send somebody?”

“Nobody in Moultrie to send anymore,” he grumbled. “We closed that lab last spring. Budget cuts. The main lab and the other regional labs are swamped, and there’s a big backlog of evidence from local law enforcement agencies. Penny wise, pound foolish, if you ask me. But nobody did.” He smiled ruefully. “Including you. Sorry to spout off.”

“It’s okay,” I said, turning my attention to Kate’s body.

Her face was beginning to droop, but it was largely intact. Her front teeth were snapped, as I’d expected, from the abrupt kick of the shotgun barrel, but the skin of her face was unbroken. The undertaker who’d arranged the body in the casket — Montgomery himself, he confirmed when I asked — had propped the head in an approximation of a normal resting position. To do that, he’d used a small cylindrical pillow to fill the space formerly occupied by the base of the skull and the back of the neck. That pillow, like the bigger, rectangular one beneath it, was damp with blood and body fluids. I leaned down and turned the head gently to one side with my gloved hands. It flopped easily; the base of the skull and much of the cervical spine had been blasted away, and what remained of the head was attached to the body only by the soft tissue of the throat.

The only sounds were the groans of the building and the whoosh of the fans, but I was acutely conscious of Angie beside me, as motionless but as tense as a bear trap primed to snap with bone-crushing force. I stepped aside to give her a moment. I’d expected her to be overwhelmed with grief, but instead she seemed to draw strength from the sight of her sister’s body. It seemed as if she grew taller and stronger, somehow; her eyes glittered with anger, and her mouth twitched with what I’d have sworn was a grim smile. “I’d thought it’d be hard to see Kate’s body,” she said, “but this isn’t my sister anymore. This is just evidence now.”

After a moment she nodded, and then she, Montgomery, Maddox, and I lifted the body out of the casket — Chumley begged off helping, citing a bad back — and shifted it onto a metal gurney. Next I retrieved the soggy pillows and repositioned them beneath the head and neck.

Angie had brought a camera, and she began taking photos — wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, dozens of them — documenting the damage done by the blast. Carefully I tilted and rotated the head, then rolled the body onto its stomach so Angie could capture the wound from all angles. I’d found streaks of lead on a few of the bone fragments I’d recovered from the cleanup company’s biohazard boxes, but the exposed edges of the bones of the skull and neck — portions of the third cervical vertebra and the top of the fourth vertebra — showed no signs of lead. That didn’t surprise me; I knew from other gunshot deaths I’d worked that the shotgun slug itself would punch straight through, but the force of the air pressure and burning gases would create a wider cone of destruction. After Angie had thoroughly photographed the wound from every possible distance and direction, I placed the body faceup again, replicating how she’d lain on her sofa the night she died. Maddox kept quiet, but he watched closely; Chumley, meanwhile, had excused himself to “check in with the dispatcher”; evidently checking in was a detailed procedure, because the deputy never reappeared.

We had brought with us a wooden dowel, three feet long by an inch in diameter, as a stand-in for the shotgun. Angie had suggested bringing an actual gun, but I managed to dissuade her, on the grounds that it would be physically harder to handle than the dowel. I’d stopped short of adding “emotionally harder, too”; that, I felt sure, went without saying. I threaded the dowel through the jaws and out the back of the head, positioning the end — the “muzzle” of the dowel, so to speak — on the pillow directly at the center of the circle of missing flesh and shattered bone. Assuming the slug and explosive gases had emerged from the gun barrel in a symmetrical pattern, centering the end of the dowel would show us the angle of the gun when it was fired.

I checked and rechecked the position, and turned to Angie, who was taking more photos. “Does that look centered to you?” She lowered the camera, crouched to study the dowel’s position on the pillow, and adjusted the angle by a fraction of a degree. Then she frowned and put it back exactly where I’d had it.

During the past twenty years, I’d examined three shotgun suicides. In all three cases, the barrel had been angled upward, at roughly a forty-five-degree angle, with the butt of the stock down around waist level. But unless I’d badly misjudged the geometry, in this case the gun had intersected Kate’s body at a ninety-degree angle, and the shot had been fired from straight on: an unnatural and awkward angle.

Suddenly one of the death-scene photos — the ones taken by the sheriff’s deputy the day Kate had died — sprang unbidden to my mind. I turned to Angie. “You brought in the folder you’ve been keeping on your sister, didn’t you?”

She nodded at the end of the workbench. “Got it right here. Why?”

“Let’s take another look at the photos the deputy took.” She set down the camera, opened the file, and slowly flipped through the handful of pictures. I looked over her left shoulder; Maddox looked over her right. “That one,” I said, when she reached the next-to-last photo. It was a close-up of the business end of the shotgun. I laid the dowel on the gurney and peered at the picture, wishing I had a magnifying glass. “There,” I said, pointing a purple-gloved pinky at a small metal peg jutting up from the gun barrel. “What’s that?”

“That? That’s the gun sight.”

“No, I mean what’s that on the gun sight?” Snagged on the peg was what appeared to be a shred of pink lint. But it wasn’t lint; it was human tissue. That in itself wasn’t surprising, since the blast had spattered a lot of blood and tissue. Still, something about the way it hung from the sight nagged at me; it appeared not so much spattered as torn. I took a final squint at the photo, then turned and inspected Kate’s mouth. On the inner surface of the left cheek I found it: a horizontal laceration about half an inch long, extending to the corner of the mouth. It was exactly the sort of laceration the sight might make as the gun barrel kicked. I showed the laceration to Angie, then gave Maddox a chance to look. “Anything about this strike you as odd?”

Angie bit her lip to concentrate, and her eyes darted back and forth from the photo to the corpse as she tried to work it out. I’m sure she would have, given another minute, but I couldn’t wait. “You’d think the gun sight might gouge the roof of her mouth, or knock an extra chip from one of her top teeth, or maybe gash her upper lip, right?” She nodded, frowning. “But the corner of her mouth?” I picked up the dowel and reinserted it. “That means the gun was twisted in her mouth, like so.” I rotated the dowel a quarter turn counterclockwise. “Which would have made it even harder to hold at that angle. You see what that means? It means that the gun wasn’t fired by the person lying on the sofa.”

“It means,” she said as Maddox reached for his phone, “that the gun was fired by a person standing beside the sofa.”

An hour later, Kate Nicely was sealed once more in her cheap coffin. Maddox had arranged for her to be taken, in the back of a Morningside hearse, to Dry Branch, Georgia.

Me, I would be headed for Washington, D.C., early the next morning. While Kate was headed for the GBI lab, I was bound for the Smithsonian Institution, and I was taking with me the second skull, that of the African-American boy whose left mastoid process had been shattered.

Chapter 11

The computer mouse scrolled down a list of files, and a click later, the screen filled with the life-sized likeness of a skull: the likeness of the second skull Winston Pettis’s dog had dragged home from the Florida woods. Joseph Mullins, a forensic-imaging specialist, wiggled his mouse, and the skull’s intricate image rotated on the screen as if spinning in space. I’d seen many CT scans of skulls in the past few years, but I never ceased to marvel at their detail.

I had hoped to coax another swift facial reconstruction out of Joanna Hughes before she started her maternity leave, but Joanna’s baby had other ideas: the day after she finished the androgynous face I’d taken back to Tallahassee, she’d gone into labor, and had given birth to a beautiful daughter. So instead of sending the second skull to Knoxville, I’d brought it instead to Alexandria, Virginia, home of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. My presence here at Mullins’s elbow wasn’t necessary; in fact, it was probably a time-wasting distraction for him. For me, though, it was a fascinating and eye-opening experience. I’d spent fifty thousand frequent-flier miles for my plane ticket from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C. — a foolish waste of miles, by any rational measure. But by my reckoning, time was short, the miles had been gathering dust anyhow, and the chance to watch Mullins work was well worth the hasty trip.

I’d started the morning, bright and early, by renewing my acquaintance with the TSA screeners at the Tallahassee airport. I knew to ask for the supervisor by name as soon as I approached the checkpoint, and, perhaps not surprisingly, he remembered me from my prior trip. I’d tried to get a laugh from him by asking, “Do you want to search my carrion bag?”—I all but dug my elbow into his ribs as I said “carrion”—but he obviously didn’t catch the pun.

From Tallahassee I’d flown — through Atlanta, of course — to D.C.’s National Airport. I’d spent a pleasant, productive lunchtime with Ed Ulrich, a former student of mine, who was now a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution. Borrowing from the Smithsonian’s vast collection of skulls, Ed had found a mandible that articulated nicely with the cranial vault of the black Florida teenager. Once we’d cobbled the pieces together, one of the Smithsonian’s radiology technicians had run the skull through the museum’s CT scanner. After that, Ed had steered me here, to the high-tech office of Joe Mullins.

Mullins, like Joanna Hughes, was skilled at re-creating human faces on bare skulls, guided by the architecture of the bone itself and by my insights about the boy’s age, race, and sex. Over the years, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — whose initials, NCMEC, were pronounced “NICK-meck”—had gained renown for its “age progressions” of missing children’s photos. Starting with the last or best photos of a missing child, NCMEC’s age-progression artists created images showing how that child might look two years later, and four years later, and so on, up to early adulthood. Their results spoke for themselves: their age-progression photos had made it possible for people to recognize and identify hundreds of missing children, sometimes many years after they’d disappeared.

But facial reconstruction was a newer and smaller niche at NCMEC, and Mullins was the only artist on staff who filled it. His method was a fascinating combination of old-school artistry and gee-whiz technology. He had a degree in fine art, but his workstation was straight out of Star Trek. To the right of his monitor stood a gizmo that looked like a small robotic arm — an arm with two elbows instead of just one, and a penlike stylus on the end where a hand ought to go. My assistant, Miranda, frequently used a similar-looking device, a 3-D digitizing probe, in the UT bone lab. Miranda used it to take measurements of skulls: all she had to do was touch the tip of the probe to prominent points, or landmarks, on the skull — the bridge of the nose, the tip of the chin, the cheekbones, the brow ridge, the crown of the head, and so on — and the digitizing probe would capture the spatial coordinates. Once she’d touched all the landmarks, the skull’s key dimensions would be recorded in our forensic data bank, which contained measurements from thousands of other skeletons. If the skull was an unknown — a John or Jane Doe, rather than a Body Farm donor whose identity was already known to us — our ForDisc software could then tell us the likely race and the sex of the unknown skull by comparing it to measurements from known skulls. ForDisc gave us a computerized way of doing, in a matter of minutes, what it had taken me decades to learn to do. I still made my own judgments, and I tended to make them faster than Miranda could digitize the measurements and run the software. ForDisc was a useful backup, though… and once, when the software and I had disagreed about the race of an unknown skull (I’d said “white” and ForDisc had said “black”), I’d been wrong and ForDisc had been right.

But NCMEC’s digital arm had a very different use than ours did. As I watched, Mullins gripped the stylus and used it to move the computer’s cursor — a tiny icon shaped like the stylus — to a drop-down menu on one side of the screen. There, he latched onto a small cylindrical shape representing a tissue-depth marker and dragged it over to the CT image of the skull, then stuck it onto the bridge of the nose. He swiftly repeated the process with more markers, which he attached to other landmarks along the midline of the skull: the top of the head, the center of the forehead, the brow ridge, the end of the nasal bone, the tip of the chin, and the indentation between the base of the nose and the top teeth. He moved the stylus swiftly and fluidly, with no wasted movements, but I found myself wondering how he knew exactly when to click the button that seemed to transfer the markers from the stylus to the skull. “Do you just hover over the right spot? How do you let go of the marker and get it to stick to the skull?”

“I’m just pressing it on,” he said. “I feel it when I bump up against the bone.” He saw me puzzling to take this in. “Here, try it.” He rolled his chair to the side and allowed me to take his place at the computer and grip the stylus. I moved it tentatively back and forth, up and down, in and out, and then in a series of spirals. It moved freely, almost weightlessly, in all directions, with virtually no friction, as the tiny icon flitted and spiraled across the computer screen, floating around and above the image of the skull.

“That’s cool,” I said, “but I still don’t quite get how you transfer the depth markers onto the skull.”

“Move it in closer, all the way onto the skull.”

“But how will I know when I’m there?”

He smiled. “You’ll know.” I centered the stylus over the forehead and eased it forward, as the icon on the screen mimicked the movement. “Just shove it,” he urged. “Don’t worry; you can’t hurt it.” I pushed the stylus forward; the arm swung freely… and then stopped as abruptly and firmly as if it had hit a wall. I pulled it back toward me, then moved it forward again. Again it jolted to a stop when the small icon bumped the forehead. Intrigued, I slid it downward, feeling both friction and undulations as it moved over the contours of the forehead and the brow ridge. Suddenly, as I dragged the stylus across the lower edge of the brow ridge, the arm slid forward and the stylus icon plunged into the right eye orbit. As I watched, astonished, it careened through the opening at the back of the orbit — the opening through which the optic nerve had once connected with the brain — and disappeared from view. I tried pulling it back out, but it resisted my efforts.

“Help,” I squawked. “What have I done?”

Mullins laughed. “You’re trapped inside the cranial vault now. You can come out where you went in, or out the nasal opening, or even out the foramen magnum at the base of the skull, where the spinal cord comes out. I’m guessing you know all the emergency exits from a skull.”

I moved the invisible stylus in various directions, but didn’t manage to free it from the cavity where I’d trapped it. As I struggled to free it, I found myself growing nervous, verging on panic. What if I’d broken the system, trapped the stylus in some permanent, irretrievable way? Finally it occurred to me to close my eyes and move the stylus by feel, exploring the inner contours of the cranial vault. In my mind’s eye, I replaced the stylus with a tiny version of myself — a miniature spelunker within the cavern of a cranium — sliding my hands around the rough-surfaced perimeter, reaching overhead to feel the top of the vault, bending down to probe the gaping pit of the foramen magnum that opened at my tiny feet. My brief panic gave way to delight. The contours fascinated me; as I retraced the right side of the cranial vault, I felt the zigzag seam of the cranial suture where the frontal bone joined the parietal, then, just behind that, the grooves where the middle meningeal artery had once run, bringing blood to the brain. If this had been the first skull Pettis’s dog had found, I might have been able to feel the subtle fracture line that intersected the groove. But this was the second, more damaged skull, so I felt my way to the left side of the parietal bone, where the mastoid process had been broken off by a powerful blow. Sure enough, the stylus snagged on the ragged edges of the break, and I winced as I imagined a slow-motion version of the bone’s shattering.

“This skull was brought home by a dog,” I told Mullins. “We’re still looking for the rest of the bones.”

He nodded. “One of the first reconstructions I did was a case like that,” he said. “A dog in Vermont found a skull somewhere in the woods. The sheriff’s office looked and looked, but they couldn’t find anything else. Finally they put a tracking collar on the dog, hoping he’d go back for more.”

“And did he?”

“Nope. They never found anything more than the skull. But we got an identification from the reconstruction. Turns out it was a severely retarded boy who’d been killed by his dad. People thought the boy had been put in an institution somewhere, but he’d been murdered and dumped in the woods instead.”

“It’s possible that this boy, our boy here, was institutionalized and then murdered,” I said. “A reform school. A mighty grim one, by all accounts.” I continued feeling my way around the interior of the cranial vault. “This is amazing.” I’d spent thirty years examining skulls — usually their exteriors, though sometimes their interiors as well — but never before had I explored one in this way, as if I were a spelunker in a cave. The experience was mesmerizing and moving: an intensely intimate encounter with the skull of this unknown young man. Finally, after what must have been several minutes, I realized I was holding up progress on the reconstruction. I imagined the location of the foramen magnum and then imagined myself as a cliff diver, diving down into a small pool of deep water, swimming downward and out to the side. I opened my eyes just as the stylus reappeared on the left side of the skull, hovering roughly where the ear had once been.

“Amazing,” I said again. “I could spend hours doing that.”

“It’s addictive,” he agreed. “Like a video game, only real.”

“Ever see that sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage?”

“Sure, I have it on DVD.” He grinned. “A submarine full of scientists gets shrunk down to the size of a molecule and injected into a guy’s bloodstream.”

“Right. What is it they need to do? Blast a brain tumor with a laser beam?”

“Close; a blood clot,” he corrected, “in the brain of a Russian defector. Cool movie. The wonders and perils of the human body. Wouldn’t that be cool, if we could actually take that trip?” I liked this kid.

Reluctantly I scooted my chair aside and turned the computer back over to him. “Okay, it’s all yours. How long will it take you to do the reconstruction?”

“Depends. A week, best case. Two weeks, if you hang around and help.” He laughed.

“Never fear,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to Tallahassee. But if you can pretend I’m not here right now, I’d love to look over your shoulder for a few minutes while you work on this.”

“Be my guest. I’ll get the rest of these depth markers on pretty quickly, then start sculpting the muscles of the face.”

In a matter of minutes — or so it seemed, though maybe it was longer and I just lost track of time — the skull bristled with rodlike depth markers projecting from its landmarks. Thin-skinned areas, such as the forehead, nasal bridge, and chin, sported nubby little markers, less than an eighth of an inch thick; in the fleshier regions of the cheeks and lower jaw, the markers jutted out nearly an inch. Ten markers were positioned along the skull’s midline, and another eleven were arrayed on each side. Mullins rotated the skull to make sure he’d not omitted any, slowly at first, then faster, like a gruesome version of a spinning top.

After a few moments the skull slowed and stopped, facing forward. Then, using the stylus in click-and-drag mode again, Mullins began grabbing strands of virtual clay from the left side of the screen and pressing them onto the skull’s right cheek. As more and more strands angled downward from the cheekbone toward the corners of the mouth, I realized that they represented bundles of muscle fibers. “So you sculpt every muscle, one by one? You can’t just put on a layer of clay and contour it to the thickness of the depth markers?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Well, you can — I’ve tried that, and yeah, it’s a lot faster — but it doesn’t look right. You just can’t fake the contours of the face. You’ve got to lay the foundation of muscles underneath the skin. No easy shortcuts.”

Fiber by fiber, as I stood and watched, Mullins continued sculpting in virtual clay. Finally I eased away silently so as not to distract him again. The muscle he was creating as I left was the zygomaticus: the muscle that had once tugged this murdered black boy’s mouth into a smile.

It had been a long, long time since he’d used that muscle.

Chapter 12

The high-powered, high-tech worlds of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children seemed far away as Angie and I bumped and slewed down the dirt road to Winston Pettis’s north Florida cabin for the third time. I hoped this time would prove to be a charm. I’d retrieved my truck from the Tallahassee airport at ten the night before — had it really been only fifteen hours since I’d boarded the flight to D.C.? — and had staggered into bed at the Hampton Inn, which I’d persuaded Angie was more comfortable (and more affordable) than the posh Duval. She’d fetched me at midmorning and — after a quick errand at a sporting-goods store — we’d headed to Pettis’s neck of the Florida woods.

As we rolled west again on the long, straight stretches of Highway 90, Angie handed me photocopied pages, covered with an uneven, barely legible scrawl. I felt a rush of adrenaline. “Is this what I think it is?”

She nodded.

The soggy book had not, she told me, responded well to the methanol soak the documents examiner had tried. After Flo had soaked it in the alcohol and redried it, it had become an even more brittle brick of fused paper. So she’d begun a laborious deconstruction process, one that would require reinforcing and then peeling off the sheets of paper one at a time.

After carefully teasing off the fiberboard cover, she’d pasted a sheet of Japanese tissue onto the first page in the book — a blank one — by brushing a thin layer of wheat-starch paste onto the tissue. The tissue itself was as thin and transparent as gossamer, yet it was remarkably strong, according to Flo. It was handmade in Japan from the inner bark of the kozo, or paper mulberry, whose fibers were pounded with boards to break them into individual strands. Pasted to a weak, pulpy page of the diary, the Japanese tissue provided a near-invisible web of reinforcement, allowing her to peel off a sheet without tearing it. Thus it was, page by page, a few painstaking sheets a day — paste, dry, peel; paste, dry, peel — that Flo hoped to crack whatever secrets were coded within the buried book.

As I read the words scrawled on the pages, I felt my heart begin to pound.

I cant write much. If they catch me at it Ill get a whipping for sure.

I found this notebook behind the nurses desk when I was sweeping up. It had fell between the desk and the wall and it look like it had been there a long time because there was spiderwebs and dead bugs on it. so I think she forgot about it a long time ago and will not miss it. there was a pencil stub in her trash can. and this Prince Albert tobacco can in the dump. I don’t know why somebody would throw away this can. It has a picture of Prince Albert in a fancy coat and hat, and the lid fits tight, just like on a paint can, but there’s a little metal key like a bottle opener that slides clear around the top of the can so you can pry the lid open whenever you want to. The can still smells good when I open it. Theres a few bits of tobacco down in the bottom. I thought about cleaning them out when I first found the can but I’m glad I didn’t because I like the way it smells.

Papaw use to smoke Prince Albert and his cloths and his car always smelled like this. One time when I was little I asked him could I take a puff on his pipe. He laughed at me and said lord no, boy, youd be sick as a dog. I didnt believe him so I kept asking and asking until finely he let me. The smoke made me cough and get dizzy and then I threw up. Papaw laughed when I was coughing but when I threw up he felt bad for me. then my ma heard me and came outside. she got mad at me for smoking and got mad at Papaw for him letting me smoke. A 7 year old child should not be smoking she said, and a old man with no teeth should know better than to let him. you both need a good thrashing to beat some sense into you. Papaw said go right ahead but she had better start with him first, and he reckoned even if he was a old man with no teeth, he bet he could still turn her over his knee like he used to when she was just a little shit-tail. she looked even madder when he told her that, but she never whipped me then. she waited till the next day, when he was gone, and then she whipped me twice as hard.

I can smoke without coughing now. Even cigarets, but I dont smoke much. For one thing its hard to get cigarets here, you have to steal them from one of the guards or staff, and if you get caught stealing it might be the last thing you ever do. Stealing or trying to run away, those are the surest ways to wind up in the bone yard. Thats what Jared Mcwhorter told me, and hes been here almost a year. So he should know. Besides I dont even like the taste of the smoke. its just something to do.

We got a new boy yesterday, Buck. He is from over at Perry, which is east of Tallahassee, he said. He got caught throwing rocks through some church windows, which is worse than what I done, which was only playing hookie. But it still dont seem worth sending him to this place for. so he mustve got in trouble before. or maybe hes a orphan and they didn’t want him at the orphanage no more. I will find out when I can. but I have to be careful about talking to him. You can get the shit beat out of you for talking. Talking dont get you in as much trouble as smoking, and for sure not as much as stealing or running. But talking is not worth a beating.

there is nigger boys here, but not in our building. they are in some other buildings just down the road. I wonder if they get treated as bad as what we do.

I have to stop now or Ill be in trouble for taking me so long to take the trash to the dump. Writing is not worth a beating. But I will write again when I can.

“Amazing,” I said. “Scary. What do you suppose he means by ‘bone yard’?”

“Whatever he means, I’m sure it’s not good.” Angie shook her head. “Poor kid.”

“Kids,” I said. “Plural. He’s just the one who’s writing it down.”

We turned off the highway for the blacktop county road, then turned down the dirt lane to Pettis’s cabin.

Jasper bayed and bounded out to greet us, rearing up and resting his paws on the sill of Angie’s open window. Winston Pettis shambled down the steps and leaned his elbows on my window. “Howdy, Doc; Miss Angie,” he drawled through the opening. “What brings you out this way today? Jasper call y’all to say he’d found anything new?”

“Not exactly,” Angie began as we got out and Jasper inspected her more thoroughly and personally, “but we’re hoping maybe he will soon. We sure would like to find where those skulls came from.”

“Well, I know Jasper’d be glad to tell you where he found it, if he could. I wish he could talk.”

“That’d make our job a lot easier,” she agreed. “But since he can’t tell us, we’re wondering if he might be able to show us.”

“Show you?” Pettis looked puzzled. “I reckon he’d be glad to, but how you gonna get him to do it?”

She smiled. “That’s where we’d like to ask a favor of you, Mr. Pettis. Would you be willing for us to put a tracking collar on him, see where he goes for a few days? Maybe he’ll bring back another bone, and we can backtrack. See where he got it.” She’d latched onto the idea when I mentioned the Vermont case that Joe Mullins had told me about. Vickery had endorsed giving the technology a try, given that there seemed to be nothing to lose. So while Vickery had headed off to interview local old-timers about the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory, Angie and I had returned to Pettis’s cabin in hope of conducting a field study of canine carrion foraging.

Pettis rubbed the back of his neck, then rubbed the stubble on his chin. “You’re not talking about one of them shock collars, are you? I wouldn’t feel right about putting a shock collar on Jasper.”

“No, sir,” Angie assured him. “I’m talking about a GPS tracking collar. Hunters use ’em to keep track of where their bird dogs or coonhounds are. I’ve got one right here in the truck, if you’d like to see it.” Without waiting for an answer, she returned to the truck and grabbed the collar and receiver from the backseat. The collar itself was a black nylon band, about an inch wide, with the word Garmin in white letters on one side. A black plastic housing, about twice the thickness of a shotgun shell, was attached to the lower part of the collar, and a six-inch flexible black antenna stuck up from the top. Pettis eyed the rig doubtfully. “See, there’s a GPS receiver in the collar,” Angie explained. “It pinpoints the dog’s position by comparing signals from a network of satellites up in the sky.” She paused, giving him a chance to ask questions, but he didn’t. “There’s also a transmitter in the collar that sends us a signal every few seconds, telling us where he is,” she went on. She showed Pettis the handheld receiver, which was about twice the size of my cell phone. “This display screen shows us where he is.” She held out the screen for his inspection. “The black triangle in the middle of the map is the location of this receiver. See that little picture of the dog, beside it? That shows us he’s right here.”

Pettis looked at her dubiously. “I know he’s right here, Miss Angie. I’m lookin’ at him. And I know that receiver’s right here. I’m lookin’ at it, too.”

Angie laughed good-naturedly. “Okay, this isn’t a very good demonstration. You willing for us to put it on Jasper, so you can get a better idea how it works?” Pettis frowned. “It’ll just take a minute,” she cajoled.

“And you’re sure it won’t hurt him?”

“It won’t hurt him a bit. I promise.”

“Well. All right, then. If he’s willing. Jasper, you willing to try that thing on?”

Angie handed the collar to Pettis. “Jasper, set on down,” he said. The dog sat, and Pettis strapped it on, frowning and shaking his head. “I sure wouldn’t want to wear it,” he said. “Jasper, you sure about this?” The dog cocked his head, and Pettis laughed. “Well, if you don’t care, I reckon I shouldn’t care.”

Angie said, “So, does he like to chase sticks?”

“Who, Jasper?” Pettis guffawed. “Jasper likes to take naps. You want to track him takin’ a nap?”

She smiled. “You particular about what he eats?”

“Well, I don’t much like it when he brings skulls into the bed,” Pettis said. “Besides that, I don’t much care. He’s a dog, you know?”

Angie opened the back door of the truck again and leaned in. When she emerged, she had a hamburger patty in her hand, which we’d procured at McDonald’s on our way. “Hey, Jasper,” she cooed, waving the burger near him. The dog’s head snapped around and his nostrils flared. “Want a treat?” She made another quick pass with the burger near his nose, too quick for him to make a grab. “Want it? Huh, Jasper, you want it?” She waved the burger back and forth as she said it. The dog’s eyes were locked on the burger like a fighter plane’s targeting radar, and his head swiveled in perfect sync with the movement of the patty. “You ready, Jasper?” She cocked her arm back. “Go get it, Jasper!” With that, she flung the burger across the clearing and into the brush. The dog tore after it. “See,” she said, pointing to the screen. She’d zoomed it in as close as it would go. The small dog icon, which had been superimposed on the triangle, suddenly flashed to a new position, halfway across the screen. As Jasper snuffled his way through the bushes, the icon moved every five seconds. Then, after a brief pause that was punctuated by loud smacking noises in the underbrush, the icon made its way back to the triangle, arriving shortly after Jasper did.

“Okay,” Pettis conceded, “looks like it works, close up, anyhow. How far away can that thing see him?”

“Seven miles, says the company that makes it,” said Angie. “That’s if the terrain’s flat and there’s nothing in the way between the collar and the receiver.” She scanned the flat terrain around the cabin. “We might need to find a piece of higher ground to get better line-of-sight reception. Anyplace nearby that’s higher up?”

“Hell, yeah,” he said. “How about a hunnerd fifty feet higher up? There’s a old fire tower right over yonder.” He pointed. “I’d check the stairs and the floorboards pretty careful before I trusted it, but it looks to be in pretty fair shape, at least from the ground.”

Angie cocked her head, much as the dog had done a few minutes before. “So you’re willing for us to track Jasper for a few days, see where he goes, see if he brings another bone back from one of those places?”

“Sure, why not,” he said. “On one condition.”

“What condition?”

“If he shows you where the rest of them bones are, you’ve got to give him another hamburger. Sound reasonable?”

“You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Pettis.” Angie laughed, and they shook hands. “We’ll get somebody out here to check the tower later today. Oh, we’ll need to change the battery in the collar every couple days. Is that okay?”

Pettis scratched his stubble again. “That might require some additional compensation,” he said. Angie looked worried. “Better make it a cheeseburger.”

“You and Jasper drive a hard bargain, Mr. Pettis. But you’ve got me over a barrel. A cheeseburger it is.”

He grinned. “Pleasure doing business with you, Miss Angie.”

* * *

Breakfast anytime, promised the marquee of the Waffle Iron, a glass-fronted cinder-block diner on the main street of Sinking Springs, the tiny county seat of Bremerton County. The sign appeared to date from the 1950s or early ’60s; the diner’s name was outlined in script by glowing tubes of neon, and so was the profile of a cartoonish chef, who wore a puffy white hat and served up a golden neon waffle. Underneath the sign’s offer of breakfast were two alternatives: Lunch Specials and Fried Cat. It was only when I did a double take that I noticed the word Fish tucked on a separate line underneath. The fried cat must have been pretty tasty, because the parking lot was packed fender to fender with pickups and SUVs.

After our errand at Pettis’s, Angie and I had returned to explore the ruins of the school further while Vickery mined the courthouse records for information about the reform school, or old-timers who might still remember it. We rendezvoused with him shortly after dark in the Waffle Iron’s parking lot.

Every head in the diner swiveled in our direction when we entered, sizing us up frankly and reminding us clearly that we were outsiders. Angie and I ignored the stares; Vickery took the opposite tack, nodding and waving amiably at various patrons, as though they’d greeted him in a friendly way. We ran this visual gauntlet to a back corner of the diner, where a booth had just opened up. As we slid onto the plastic benches, Angie and Vickery with their backs to the wall, the clatter of silverware and chatter of conversation gradually resumed.

The waitress who came to take our order was young, slightly plump, and pretty. I saw her taking the measure of the three of us — glancing at our ring fingers, considering whether Angie was married to either Vickery or me. She must have decided Vickery was fair game, because when she asked for his order, she flashed him a dimpled smile that was orders of magnitude brighter than the token one she’d given me. She held the pen a few inches above the order pad and tilted her head slightly to one side, raptly waiting his decision. “And what would you like, sir?”

Vickery slowly removed the cigar from the corner of his mouth. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said. “What would you say is the tastiest thing on the menu?”

The waitress reddened slightly, but her smile broadened. “I’d say it depends on what you’re in the mood for.”

I saw Angie’s eyes roll in disgust. She turned to Vickery and laid a hand on his arm. “Do tell us, darling, what you’re in the mood for.”

Vickery glared at her. “I’m not sure, sweetheart,” he said, “but weren’t you planning on having a little humble pie for dessert?” Angie laughed, and the waitress — undone by the exchange — dialed down her demeanor from flirtatious to businesslike. Angie ordered the chicken-salad plate, Vickery got fried eggs and bacon, and I decided to try the fried cat.

As the waitress scurried away to put in our order, Vickery nibbled his cigar briefly, then took it out and frowned at it. The tip was crumbling, and flecks of soggy tobacco clung to his lips and tongue. He laid the cigar across the ashtray, pulled a few napkins from the black-and-chrome dispenser, and swabbed his mouth. “So tell me, Doc,” he said, “what put the ‘forensic’ in anthropology for you? How come you’re hanging out with cops instead of fossil hunters or museum donors?”

“One thing led to another,” I said. “Early in my career — while I was still working on my PhD dissertation — I spent summers in South Dakota, excavating old Indian graves for the Smithsonian. It was pretty quiet out there; big ranches, not many people. Not much excitement for the police, either. DUIs, mostly; occasionally a burglary or barroom fight or some cattle rustling. So we got a fair number of visits from the sheriff’s deputies and the state police. They’d come by almost every day — just to make sure we were okay, they said, but mostly they were bored, and we were the most reliable entertainment around. So whenever they’d come by, we’d show them what we were excavating that day, or bring out something interesting we’d found a day or two before — scalping marks, bashed-in skulls, whatever.”

“So instead of the bookmobile,” Angie cracked, “y’all were the bonemobile.”

“I guess we were.” I laughed. “One of the skeletons became kinda famous, and we had cops coming to see him from half the state. It was an adult male in his forties — no spring chicken, by Plains Indian standards. He had an arrowhead embedded deep in his right femur, about halfway between his hip and his knee. Right about where his thigh would’ve been gripping the ribs of a horse, riding bareback.”

“Cool,” said Vickery. “You think he bled to death? Or died of infection?”

“Neither.” I grinned. “That was what was so interesting about it. The bone had healed and smoothed around the arrowhead — remodeled, we call it — which meant that he’d lived for years after being shot with the arrow. It was so deep they couldn’t get it out, so they just cut off the arrow, and he carried the point around in his leg for years. Probably hurt like hell for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. Then, five or ten or twenty years later, he got clubbed to death — back of his skull was completely crushed — maybe because he couldn’t run fast enough when some Sioux came after him with a battle-ax.”

“Wow,” said Angie. “That’s a great show-and-tell exhibit. Beats the pants off our plaster casts of Ted Bundy’s teeth. I’d sure come out and take a look, if I were a South Dakota deputy. It’s like the History Channel meets CSI.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Listening to the bones, hearing the story they can tell, even if the story’s two centuries old. Anyhow, one day, a South Dakota state trooper who’d seen the arrowhead skeleton came back out to the site. This was back before cell phones were everywhere, mind you, and there was no way to get ahold of us except to come out there in person. We were way off the grid.” Vickery nodded. “So this state trooper comes out. Corporal Gustafson, I think his name was. No, wait; that’s almost it, but not quite. Gunterson. Yeah, Gunterson.” I gave my head a shake. “Funny how I can dredge up that guy’s name after thirty years, but can’t remember where I left my pocketknife this morning. Anyhow, Gunterson asks if I’d be willing to take a look at a skeleton that a cattle rancher’d just found.”

“What kind of skeleton? Old or new? Indian or white or what?”

“That’s exactly what the trooper wanted to know. I said I’d be glad to take a look.”

“And?”

“Exposed bones in a dry wash. Not Indian.”

“How’d you know?”

“Indians have shovel-shaped incisors — their front teeth are scooped out on the back side. So do Asians. Caucasian incisors are pretty much flat across the back.”

Angie rubbed her teeth, then asked, “Old bones, or new?”

“Old enough to be bare and sun-bleached. New enough to have an amalgam filling, though that could have been anytime in the twentieth century. She — it was a woman in her twenties — had only two cavities, so she was probably born sometime after the 1950s.”

“How do you figure that?”

“That’s when America’s cities and towns started adding fluoride to their drinking water.”

“A dastardly commie plot,” teased Vickery.

“Indeed,” I said. “Those Communists wanted our kids to have strong teeth. So this woman was all set for the commie takeover, dentally speaking. Although it’s possible that she grew up earlier, before fluoridation, in an area where the groundwater’s naturally high in minerals.”

“Interesting,” he mused. “You can tell all that just from the teeth?”

“You can tell a lot more than that just from the teeth,” I said. “You can also tell that she had good dental care as a kid, because the one filling she had was in a second molar — a ‘twelve-year molar.’ But then something happened, her life changed for the worse. She had a big unfilled cavity in one of her third molars — her wisdom teeth — which means that she wasn’t going to the dentist anymore. Maybe she’d run away from home; maybe she was on her own and not making enough money to afford dental care. I’ve seen this a lot over the years, and often far worse, in murdered prostitutes — they leave home, lose touch with their families, fall on hard times, can’t afford a dentist. So their teeth start to go. Which makes them less attractive, and makes it even harder for them to earn money. Vicious downward spiral.”

Angie picked at the chicken salad with her fork. “So this dead woman in South Dakota — she was a hooker?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “Unfortunately, she was never identified. Maybe a hooker, maybe a hitchhiker; maybe both. The body was dumped in a draw near Interstate 90, not far from an exit. I’m guessing a trucker picked her up, had sex with her, then killed her and dumped her body hundreds of miles from where she’d gotten into the truck.”

“And how do you know she was killed?”

“Because her hyoid bone — the U-shaped bone in the throat — had been crushed. Means she was strangled.”

Vickery nodded. “I’ll buy it,” he said. “It all fits together. Too bad. Young women without money are very vulnerable. Not many options, and plenty of people ready to prey on them.” He inspected his cigar again, frowned at it, and laid it on his plate, alongside his knife and fork and one uneaten bite of mashed potatoes. “So that was the case that got you going on modern forensics?”

“I guess it was,” I said. “After that, word got around South Dakota that I was willing to look at modern bones and bodies. At the end of the summer, when I went back to the University of Kansas, a KBI agent called me up. Turned out that he was the brother of a South Dakota sheriff I’d helped. Pretty soon I was looking at bones from all over Kansas. And by the time I moved to Tennessee, the TBI and the Tennessee state medical examiner knew about me, and asked me to consult on cases.” I sopped up the last of my coleslaw sauce with the last bit of hush puppy. “So. Like I said, one thing led to another. South Dakota led me to north Florida. And raw oysters. And fried cat.”

I left the Waffle Iron full and happy. The diner’s food was good, and I’d enjoyed reminiscing about my summer excavations in South Dakota. We’d parked the Suburban in the back corner of the parking lot, which had largely emptied out by now. As we neared the vehicle, I noticed a folded paper underneath the left windshield wiper — a sale circular or political flyer, I figured. “Uh-oh,” I joked over my shoulder to Angie and Vickery. “Looks like we’ve gotten a parking ticket. These Sinking Springs folks sure keep an eye out for foreigners.” I plucked the paper from beneath the wiper blade and unfolded it. It was not a circular or flyer; it was a hand-lettered note on plain white paper. It read, “Find the Bone Yard.”

I stared at the note; it was the second time I’d read the words bone yard today, but this note, I felt certain, had been written half a century after the diary entry. I shifted my fingers to a corner of the paper and showed the message to Angie and Vickery. Angie whistled softly. “I guess I shouldn’t have handled this,” I said. “Sorry. I might have just contaminated some evidence.”

Vickery shrugged, then took out a clean handkerchief and carefully wrapped the note in it, then handed it to Angie. “Hell, everything’s evidence of something, Doc,” he said. “This whole world’s one big crime scene. The trick’s figuring out what to send to the lab. And where to stop stringing the tape.”

As Angie and I followed Vickery’s taillights back to Tallahassee, I phoned my son, who was at Myrtle Beach with his wife and two boys. “Hi, Dad,” said Jeff when he answered. “How are you? What’s up?”

“I’m fine. Still in Florida. I just wanted to talk to Walker and Tyler.”

“So, what am I, chopped liver?”

“No, of course not.” I laughed. “I just wanted to talk to the boys. Just wanted to tell them…” Tell them what? Tell them how lucky they were? Tell them not to become orphans, not to be abused, not to get sent to reform school, not to get murdered and dumped somewhere in the woods?

Yes. Those things, and more.

Jeff put the speakerphone on and handed the phone to the boys.

“Grandpa Bill,” said Walker. “I caught a fish today.”

“I went body surfing,” Tyler shouted.

“Wonderful, boys,” I said. But what I meant was “what wonderful boys.”

Chapter 13

My shovel scraped across a chunk of timber a few inches beneath the ground, near one of the chimneys. The timber was black and crumbling; as I leaned down to inspect it more closely, I saw that it was rotted but also charred. It was embedded in earth that was undisturbed — that is, as I dug deeper, I saw that there were no other artifacts beneath it — so I guessed that the wood had been a floor joist rather than a ceiling joist or rafter.

Angie and I had returned to the ruins of the reform school; Vickery had spun off to start interviewing people about the school’s grim life and fiery end.

I wondered if Angie and I might find charred bones amid the ruins — Stevenson’s initial research hadn’t ruled out the possibility that one or more bodies hadn’t been recovered after the fire — but it was a big job: the ruins were a whole bunch of haystacks, and whatever skeletal needles lay hidden in them might well have crumbled to rust or to dust by now.

I’d spent the morning skimming vegetation and the top layer of burned material from the center of the dormitory area. My clothes were soggy and grimy and my back was grumbling, so I was relieved when Vickery’s Jeep pulled up and emitted a brief chirp of the siren. He rolled down the window and waved Angie and me over.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Let’s take a ride,” he said.

“In air-conditioned comfort? Sure thing. Where we going?”

“To see some reform school alumni.”

I looked down at my sweat-soaked clothes and took a quick sniff under one arm. The news from there wasn’t good. “I’m pretty rank. Maybe I should stay here.”

“Nah, jump in, Doc. I don’t think any of these folks will object.”

The air was cranked all the way up, and the blast of cold on my wet skin gave me goose bumps. Glancing at the console between the front seats, I noticed a hand-drawn map. It appeared to be a drawing of the school site; the buildings had been crudely outlined, and a dotted line led northward from the site to a sketch of what appeared to be a tree, with an X beside it. Vickery studied the map briefly, then put the Jeep into gear and continued around the drive. Just beyond the remnants of the buildings, he slowed to a crawl, then cut the wheel to the left and jounced us off the road. As the vehicle swayed and lurched along, I realized we were following what was left of a dirt road, although high weeds and small bushes swished and screeched against the underside of the vehicle, and occasionally we had to swerve around trees that had grown up in the roadbed. Scattered amid the oaks and pines were magnolias, their dark, glossy leaves dotted with cupped white blossoms. Rolling down the window, I drank in their sweet, heady perfume.

After perhaps a quarter mile, the track meandered up a slight rise and around an immense live oak. The trunk was a good eight feet thick, and the lower branches — some of them nearly two feet in diameter — curved down to rest on the ground before turning skyward. The effect was of a small grove of trees, rather than one single tree. The branches themselves were thickly carpeted with ferns, as if the forest floor were actually a living thing consisting of many layers and levels… which it was, I realized. “Amazing,” I said, “the way the ferns are colonizing the trees.”

“Those are resurrection ferns,” Angie replied, and I thought, live oaks, dead boys, resurrection ferns.

As we rounded the far side of the tree, Vickery slowed the Jeep, and Angie gasped, “Oh my God.”

Just ahead, in a patch of ground between two huge branches of the live oak, stood three rows of knee-high crosses — four crosses in two of the rows, three in the other; eleven crosses in all.

Vickery eased the Jeep to a stop alongside the nearest row of crosses. “Welcome to the Bone Yard,” he announced.

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