The Devil's Bones

CHAPTER 3

THREE HOURS AFTER MY EXCHANGE WITH UT’S TOP legal eagle, a hawkish young prosecutor-Constance Creed was her name-looked up from a yellow notepad, adjusted her glasses, and took a step toward the witness box where I sat. “Isn’t it true, Dr. Brockton, that there had been conflict between yourself and Dr. Hamilton for quite some time?”

“I’m not sure I would characterize it as conflict,” I said.

“How would you characterize it, then?”

“I disagreed with the conclusions of one of his autopsy reports,” I said. She waited, seeming to expect me to say something more, so I did. “And I expressed those disagreements.”

She closed the distance between us and leaned forward, her face no more than two feet from mine. I shifted in the straight-backed chair and wished I could not smell the onions she’d eaten at lunch. She wore Coke-bottle glasses, the lenses round and a quarter inch thick at the edges; instead of magnifying her eyes, the concave lenses made them appear small and beady. “You ‘expressed’ those disagreements?” She removed the glasses and glared at me. As nearsighted as she must be, I knew that the gesture was purely for effect, and I wondered how blurry my features appeared to her. I briefly considered making a face at her, to see if she’d even notice, but decided that the outcome of the experiment could get unpleasant if she did notice. Creed’s eyes were an icy blue, and even without the distortion of the lenses her pupils were barely the size of buckshot. “Wouldn’t it be more accurate, sir, to say you destroyed Dr. Hamilton’s reputation as a medical examiner?”

“No, I don’t think-”

“Did you or did you not testify against Dr. Hamilton in the case of Billy Ray Ledbetter?”

“No, I didn’t testify against Dr. Hamilton.”

“No? I have a copy of the hearing transcript, and it quotes you at length. Was that another forensic anthropologist named Dr. William Brockton?”

“No, that was me testifying,” I said, resisting the urge to mirror her sarcasm. “But I wasn’t testifying against Dr. Hamilton; I was describing an experiment. I tried to reproduce what Dr. Hamilton had described as a stab wound that killed Billy Ray Ledbetter. It wasn’t possible to reproduce it-a rigid knife blade couldn’t make the wound he described.” As I spoke, I used one hand to demonstrate the zigs and zags that Hamilton’s theory would have required. “My testimony disproved Dr. Hamilton’s theory, but I wasn’t attacking him. I was just reporting my research results.”

“Just ‘reporting your research results,’” she said sarcastically.

“And were you also just ‘reporting your research results’ when you told the state board of medical examiners that Dr. Hamilton’s conclusions ‘violated the laws of physics and metallurgy’? Would you call that objective, scientific reporting?”

“I probably wouldn’t use that phrase in a peer-reviewed journal article, but the fact remains-”

“The fact I’m interested in,” she interrupted, “is who initiated the contact between you and the board of medical examiners-the board or you?”

I felt myself redden. “I think maybe I did.”

“You think? Maybe? Do you consider it a trivial matter to call a physician’s competence into question? A matter not even worth remembering?”

“No, I-”

“I’ll ask you once more, then. Who initiated the contact, the board or you?”

“I did.”

“So you could ‘report your research results’ to them, too? Are all anthropologists so eager to report their research results?”

Something in me snapped then. “Damn it,” I said, “Dr. Hamilton nearly sent a man to prison for a murder the guy didn’t commit. A murder no one committed, because it wasn’t a murder. That-that-is not a trivial matter, Ms. Creed. And I am not the one on trial for killing Jess Carter.”

She leveled a finger at me, almost as if she were aiming a gun. “But you nearly were, weren’t you, Doctor?”

“Okay, stop right there,” I said.

“You were the prime suspect, weren’t you, Doctor? In fact, initially you were charged with killing her, weren’t you?”

“I said stop!”

“How did it feel, Doctor, to get off the hook for the murder and be able to point the finger at Dr. Hamilton?”

“Enough!” I shouted, leaping to my feet. “I loved Jess Carter, and I will not…How dare you…” My voice failed me, and I put a hand over my eyes.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, warm and steady. “I’m sorry, Dr. Brockton,” I heard her say, suddenly sounding human and pained. “I hate to put you through the wringer. But believe me, this is gentle compared to what Hamilton’s attorney will do next week during the trial. When he gets up to cross-examine you, he will go for your throat like an attack dog. You’re our key witness, so the defense will do everything they can to undermine you, throw you off balance, make you mad.”

I looked up, and she met my gaze steadily, compassionately. Her eyes didn’t look beady now; they just looked tired, from years spent straining to see the world through a wall of glass and the darkness of crime. “God, this is hard,” I said. I fished out my handkerchief, wiped my face, and blew my nose.

“I know,” she said, “and I wish I could tell you it’ll get easier. But it won’t.”

Great, I thought, nothing like an encouraging word.

“Think of this as a scrimmage, or maybe war games, so you’re mentally prepared for the real thing. You were doing great till right there at the end. It’s okay to get sad on the stand. Just don’t get mad. If you get mad, you’re playing their game. They’ll make you look vindictive, and they’ll make him look like a victim.”

“But there’s a recording of him admitting he killed Jess. A recording of him bragging about killing Jess.”

“They’ll try to suppress that. Or undermine it any way they can. Besides, it’s a recording, and a pretty scratchy one to boot. Your testimony will carry a lot more weight with the jurors than that. So roll with the punches and hang on to your temper, for God’s sake. For Dr. Carter’s sake.”

We sparred a few more rounds, the prosecutor and I. Finally, after two hours of rolling with the punches of her mock cross-examination, I was allowed to step down from the witness stand she’d set up in the practice courtroom. I left the City-County Building and headed along Neyland Drive feeling jangled and unsettled. It wasn’t until I found myself taking the Cherokee Trail exit off Alcoa Highway that I realized I wasn’t heading back to my office but to the Body Farm. Even after I realized that, it took a moment longer to grasp why I was headed there.

There were no other cars in the distant corner of the hospital employees’ parking lot that bordered the research facility. The chain-link gate was locked, as was the high wooden gate within. Even so, after letting myself in, I called out to make sure I had the place to myself. When I was certain of that, I locked the gate behind me and walked up the hill into the woods.

It was the first time I’d had the nerve to visit the spot in the three months since I’d dug the recess in the rocky dirt and laid the slab at the base of the big pine. The black granite was dull with dust, so I knelt down and took a handkerchief to it. The grime proved more stubborn than I expected, so I wiped my face and neck with the cloth to moisten it-one pass got it plenty damp-then set to work on the marker again. “Sorry about the sweat, Jess,” I said. “You never were the squeamish sort, so I’m thinking you wouldn’t mind.”

The moisture loosened the dirt, and after I’d turned and folded the handkerchief several times to expose clean fabric to scrub with, the black granite gleamed again, silver flecks of mica shimmering within its depths. Closing my eyes, I ran my fingers across the surface. The chiseled edges of the inscription tugged at my fingertips and clutched at my heart. IN MEMORY OF DR. JESS CARTER, WHO WORKED FOR JUSTICE, the words read. WORK IS LOVE MADE VISIBLE. I laid my palm on the warm stone, flat and steady, the same way Constance Creed had laid hers on my shoulder not long before. I thought back to the period when Jess and I had been mere colleagues-she a rising star among the state’s medical examiners, me an odd-duck anthropologist who conferred with corpses as they turned to goo or bare bones. It seemed several lifetimes ago, though in fact we had collaborated platonically scarcely six months before. Then I flashed ahead to the night everything had changed.

“God, Jess, I miss you,” I said. We had spent just one night together, but that night seemed to encapsulate years’ worth of meaning. And it had cost Jess her life. Garland Hamilton had followed me to Jess’s house, had lurked outside, listening, as we made love, and then-just days later-had abducted Jess from a restaurant parking lot, taken her to his basement, and shot her. In a final, perverse twist, he’d staged her body in a gruesome tableau here at the Body Farm-here at this very tree-and had nearly succeeded in framing me for the murder.

It haunted me to realize that, given a chance, Jess and I might have built a remarkable life together, a rare partnership of like minds and kindred spirits. “I guess we’ll never know,” I said aloud, but even as I spoke the words, I knew they were false: I did know, all the way down to my core. Only three things in my life had ever rung true enough to redefine everything else. The first was the life I’d built with Kathleen, my late wife, and our son, Jeff. The second was the bizarre career path I had half followed, half created. The third, I was realizing only in hindsight, was the love I’d begun to feel for Jess.

Kathleen and I had shared a solid, steady love, and it carried us through three decades of partnership and parenthood, until cancer claimed her three years earlier. I’d spent two years grieving for Kathleen. Then, to my surprise, I was ready for love again; ready for Jess.

Back when I was in college, I’d taken a class in Greek mythology, and we’d read Homer’s Odyssey. Since Jess, an image from Homer kept coming back to me: the marriage bed of Ulysses and Penelope. Ulysses had carved their bed from a mammoth tree trunk, still rooted in the earth, and then built their home around it. It was a secret known only to them-the secret by which she would recognize him when he returned from his years of warfare and wandering. The love Jess and I were starting to discover could have been like that, I sometimes thought-something rooted in earth and bedrock, a mystery understood only by us-if we’d had the chance to build around it. If Garland Hamilton hadn’t uprooted it, driven by jealousy of Jess and hatred of me.

Hamilton had been enraged to learn that Jess was about to become the state’s chief M.E. But he had murdered her not just out of a misplaced sense of rivalry. He’d done it mainly to hurt me-to break my heart before killing me as well. The second part of his plan had failed, and Hamilton was now facing a possible death sentence for killing Jess. But Jess’s death was a wound I’d carry far longer than if he’d killed me. Yet I’d also be carrying the memory of Jess, and though I’d always mourn the loss, I’d never regret the love.

“I miss you, Jess,” I said. “And I’m so sorry.”

The only answer was the dull thud of helicopter rotors as a LifeStar air ambulance skimmed low above the Body Farm, inbound to UT Hospital with a patient hanging between life and death.