The Regional Forensic Center, which shared space with the hospital’s morgue, was one of five forensic centers in the state. The others were in Nashville, Johnson City, Chattanooga, and Memphis, the cities that anchored the state’s midpoint and its northeast, southeast, and southwest corners. Although Knoxville wasn’t nearly the size of Memphis or Nashville, our forensic center was the newest and the best of the bunch. The forensic center in Memphis—a city with five times as many residents and fifteen times as many murder victims—was half the size of this one and consisted of little more than one large, dingy autopsy room and an undersized cooler. Ours, on the other hand, had a walk-in cooler the size of a three-car garage, two clean, well-lighted autopsy stations, and a third station in its own room, dedicated to cleaning the ripest of human remains. The decomp room, as everyone called this room, owed its existence to me and the Body Farm. It was outfitted with electric burners and steam-jacketed kettles for simmering bones; laundry-sized sinks for scraping and scrubbing them clean; and industrial-strength garbage disposals for grinding up whatever came loose from my parade of decayed murder victims and rotted research corpses. The only amenity that was lacking was an underground conveyor to ferry my bodies out to the Farm and back.
A video camera at the loading dock tracked our arrival, and as Williams backed toward the building, the garage door rolled upward to let the Jeep enter the loading bay. As I clambered out into the bay, an interior door opened and Miranda Lovelady emerged, rolling a gurney to the back of the Cherokee. Miranda was a graduate assistant in the Anthropology Department’s forensic program. Instead of grading sophomore exams and checking for plagiarized papers, like a typical graduate assistant, we had put Miranda to work defleshing corpses and cataloguing bones. She couldn’t have been happier. Miranda helped me wrestle the body bag out of the SUV and onto the gurney. Williams watched warily from the far end of the garage bay. As I latched the vehicle’s back door, he practically leapt into the driver’s seat. “Reckon I’d better head on back,” he said. “We’ll be in touch. Thanks, Doc.”
“Glad to help,” I said. “You drive careful, now.”
“Always.”
As he idled out of the garage bay, his brake lights added a rosy overtone to the floodlights illuminating the concrete, the corpse, and Miranda. I paused to admire the effect. On most people, I’d noticed, a scrub suit hung like a tent. Miranda’s scrubs, on the other hand, somehow accentuated her curves. How she managed to look so shapely in such a shapeless garment was a mystery I found endlessly fascinating.
She interrupted my reverie. “Whatcha got here, Dr. B.?”
I reminded myself why we were here. “You’re gonna like this case, Miranda. A body from a cave in Cooke County. Most extensive adipocere formation I’ve ever seen.”
She nodded appreciatively. “Cool. You ready to bring it in, or you wanna take some pictures first?”
“Let’s take some pictures.”
She ducked back inside, then reemerged a moment later wheeling a portable Xray machine, which inhabited a small office just down the hall. I had learned, from years of experience, that X-rays could reveal remarkable things hidden in burned or decaying flesh: a bullet lodged in a skull or chest cavity; a cut in a rib or vertebra; a pacemaker or orthopedic device that could be traced back to a manufacturer, a surgeon, or even a patient. But I had also learned, from a memorable chewing-out, never to show up in the hospital’s radiology unit with a reeking corpse in tow. I suspected that even if the Forensic Center’s budget hadn’t covered the cost of a portable unit, the radiologists themselves might have gladly dug into their own pockets to keep me and my rotting friends at arm’s length.
“This is case number twenty-three for the year,” I reminded Miranda, though clearly she already knew, because she handed me a radiographically opaque tag she’d prepared for the X-rays. The tag included the last two digits of the year, followed by the case number. In my first few years as state forensic anthropologist, I’d never gotten out of single digits—it was probably 1990
before I needed a number as high as 90–10. During the past decade, though, I’d gradually edged up through the twenties and into the thirties. We started at the head and worked our way down. We would try to match the cranial X-rays with antemortem dental X-rays from missing persons—if we could find any missing folks who fit the description of our body. In addition, we’d search the films for any signs of skeletal trauma, such as fractures or cut marks, or radiographically opaque material such as lead. Even if a bullet has passed completely through a body, it often leaves a telltale smear or splatter inside the skull or on a rib.
I worked the film cassette under the body bag in the region of the head, and Miranda snapped the exposure. As I slid the cassette out and held it up for her, she took it in her left hand, swapping it for an unexposed cassette that she handed me with her right. We worked wordlessly; having done this dozens of times before, we could have performed this macabre dance in our sleep. After Xraying the head, we took films of the chest, the abdomen, and finally the pelvis. Besides showing us the bones, the pelvic X-rays would also reveal any metallic objects that had been in the pockets of the clothing. Although the clothes themselves had rotted—a hint that they were all cotton, and therefore pretty old—the adipocere in the region of the hips and thighs might well contain small objects that had been in the pockets.
While Miranda stashed away the X-ray machine, I wheeled the gurney into the cooler. Miranda called out, “Aren’t we processing this one tonight?”