The Devil's Bones

CHAPTER 7

FROM THE STADIUM I HEADED DOWNSTREAM ALONG Neyland Drive, past the veterinary school and under the Alcoa Highway bridge. The bridge pilings were marked with horizontal lines at one-foot intervals, showing towboat pilots how much clearance they had between the waterline and the bottom of the bridge. Why are they called towboats, I wondered, when they move the barges by pushing, not pulling? Between the heat and the drought, the river was down as low as I’d ever seen it in summer. That meant there was plenty of clearance overhead-fifty-seven feet, according to the markings, which was two feet more than usual. But two feet more clearance overhead also meant two feet less water underneath. That wasn’t a worry here, where the river was narrow and the channel deep, but a few miles downstream the river spread into broad shallows, where even a fishing boat risked a mangled prop if it strayed from the center of the navigation channel. We need rain, I thought, and a hell of a cold front.

At the intersection of Neyland and Kingston Pike, I turned right, then also took the next right, onto the ramp for Alcoa Highway southbound. Crossing the high concrete bridge that I’d passed beneath only a moment before, I looked downriver, where the mansions of Sequoyah Hills lined the right-hand bank. I lived in Sequoyah, but my house-tucked into an incongruously modest little block of bungalows and ranchers-was probably worth one-tenth the price of these riverfront villas. I’d had the chance, when I first started teaching at UT, to buy one of the big houses, but the price-fifty-five thousand dollars-seemed astronomical at the time, at least on a professor’s salary. Twenty years later that house was worth at least a million, maybe more. The ones lining the waterfront were even more expensive. “Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about barge traffic washing away my yard,” I said out loud, then laughed at myself. “Okay, Brockton, not only are you talking to yourself, but what you’re saying is a total crock.”

UT Hospital and the hills behind the Body Farm reared up on my left. On my right a UT cattle farm-green pastures dotted with black-and-white Holsteins-nestled in the big bend of the river. It was the place where the Tennessee first curved southward, starting its serpentine slide toward the Gulf of Mexico, sixteen hundred meandering miles away.

Acting on a sudden impulse, I veered off at the Cherokee Trail exit-the exit for the medical center-and threaded under the highway and around to the back corner of the hospital employees’ parking lot. We’d received a donated body several weeks before, and I remembered a note in the chart indicating that the donor-a man in his seventies-had undergone double knee replacement within the past two years. That made his knees newer than any I’d dug out of the boxes in the skeletal collection, and I had a sudden hankering to see them.

I found him just off the main trail curving up into the woods and toward the river. He lay on his back near a fallen tree trunk, his skull detached and slightly downhill from his postcranial skeleton. A camera tripod stood nearby, with a black plastic mailbox fastened incongruously to the top. The mailbox was an improvised housing for a night-vision camera; the camera, sheltered by the weatherproof plastic, was connected to a motion sensor, so that when nocturnal carnivores-raccoons and opossums, mainly-came foraging, we could capture their feeding habits. The project was a Ph.D. candidate’s dissertation research, and I’d marveled over some of the photos, which showed cuddly raccoons reaching deep into body cavities to pluck out special delicacies. In the cold, clear light of dawn-actually the scorching, hazy light of high noon-I could see gnaw marks on the cheekbones, the hands, and the feet. But I was more interested at the moment in the hingelike hardware installed where the knees had once been.

I’d had the opportunity during my teaching career to witness two orthopedic surgeries-a hip replacement and a cervical-spine fusion-and I’d come away from both procedures marveling at the combination of precise control and bloody brute force. The neck surgery in particular was an astonishingly choreographed performance by a neurosurgeon and an orthopedist. First they yanked and gouged out three crumbling disks from the patient’s neck, at times reaming within a millimeter of the spinal cord; next they tapped pegs of precisely machined cadaver bone into place between the sagging vertebrae; finally they screwed an arched titanium bracket onto the front of the neck, to buttress the spine while the bones knitted together. As the pair of surgeons drilled and tapped and bolted, I couldn’t help comparing them to cabinetmakers. The hip replacement by comparison was heavy carpentry-sawing off the proximal end of the femur, drilling a hole down into the shaft, and then pounding the stem of the metal prosthesis into the opening.

The body on the hillside-body 67–07, the sixty-seventh donated body of the year 2007-was almost entirely skeletonized after three weeks of decomposition. The metallic knees gleamed dully; faint saw marks were still visible where the arthritic joints had been cut away and removed from his legs. Remarkable, I thought, that people can walk again after having their knees chopped out. “Chopped” was probably not how this man’s surgeon had described the procedure, but as I studied the trauma that had been dealt to the bones, the drastic verb seemed to fit.

My reverie was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter buzzing low over the treetops. The air ambulances of LifeStar often passed directly over the Body Farm on their way to and from the hospital’s helipad, but this chopper, I realized, wasn’t flying a typical approach. The pitch of the rotor blades seemed steep and urgent, and the aircraft wheeled and banked abruptly, repeatedly. A siren-then two, then more-screamed toward the hospital, and a second helicopter joined the cacophony.

Over the rising din I suddenly heard my name. “Dr. Brockton! Dr. B., where are you?” It was Miranda, and as she called me, I heard something I’d never expected to hear from Miranda Lovelady: I heard fear.

“Bill!” shouted a man’s voice, and I saw Art Bohanan running toward me, Miranda two steps behind. Art’s face was flushed, his eyes were as focused as lasers, and his weapon was drawn.

“What on earth?!”

Art said only a few words, but when I heard the fourth one, I felt my knees go weak.

“Garland Hamilton just escaped,” he said.