HEADLIGHTS DANCED ACROSS THE mangled JetRanger as a vehicle bumped across the field toward the wreckage. I wondered which group was arriving first: the TBI agents or my forensic assistants. I had reached Miranda on the satellite phone Jim O’Conner left with me. Today was a tough time to be rounding up a forensic team. Not only was it Saturday, it was the Saturday that fell smack in the middle of UT’s four-day fall break. Normally, even on weekends, the hallways and offices beneath the stadium were crawling with Anthropology students; today, apparently, they were as scarce as virgins at a fraternity party. Miranda had called back after a halfhour to say she’d completely struck out in her efforts to round up two more grad students. “Call Art Bohanan,” I told her. “He doesn’t know bones, but he’s good at bagging evidence and taking crime scene photos. And try Sarah Carmichael.”
“Who’s that? Don’t know her.”
I squirmed at the question. “She’s in one of my classes. The campus operator should have a listing for her.”
“Sarah Carmichael. Is she a master’s or Ph.D. student?”
“She…she’s an undergraduate, actually.”
There was a long pause. “Has she taken Osteology?”
“Not exactly. No. But she’s practically memorized the field handbook on her own.”
Another pause, even longer. “Is she who I think she is?”
“Probably. Yes. Look, it’s the student you saw me kissing, okay? I’m sorry; I know it’s awkward, and I hate to drag her into this, but if you can’t find anybody else, she might be the best we can do. She’s smart, she knows the basics, and she’ll do fine recording data and filling in the inventory of skeletal elements.” The inventory of skeletal elements was a fancy name for an outline drawing of the human skeleton. In fieldwork like this, I always assigned one student to color in, with a pencil or pen, the outline of each bone as it was found. Basically, it was like a page from a Halloween coloring book, and the only places where staying within the lines was difficult were the hands, feet, and skull. Besides being faster and easier than writing down the names of bones, the diagram showed me, at a glance, what we’d found—and what was missing. I was confident that Sarah would have absolutely no problem filling it in accurately.
“We don’t need her help,” said Miranda. “We can do this without her.”
“No we can’t, Miranda. Your right arm’s in a cast, remember? You can’t ID
bones and write things down and bag evidence with a broken arm. Call Sarah.”
Despite the thousands of miles up to the communications satellite and back down, I could hear Miranda’s angry breathing; in my mind’s eye, I even saw her nostrils flaring. “Damnit,” she finally said, “you ask one hell of a lot, you know that?”
“I do know, and I am sorry. But I’m not asking for me. I’m asking for the dead guy in the helicopter here, and his brother the sheriff, who just left in an air ambulance, and their mother and father, who don’t even know yet that one of their sons has just been killed. It’s a complicated death scene, Miranda, and I need help. Especially yours. Please.”
Two hours after that angry exchange, the department’s pickup came jouncing across the valley floor, with Miranda at the wheel, Art riding shotgun as navigator, and Sarah folded into the jump seat behind them. I motioned them around to the front of the helicopter,d so the headlights illuminated the smashed interior. “Wow,” Miranda said as she hopped out, her orange cast practically glowing in the dark. “That kudzu tunnel is incredible. So Tuscany—the whole grape arbor effect—with a big ol’ East Tennessee twist.” She seemed relaxed and happy. Was it the adrenaline rush of a field case, or had she somehow bonded with Sarah on the drive up? Either way, I was relieved. “Three years and fifty death scenes, and this is the coolest.” She unlatched the window on the cap that covered the bed of the truck and began unloading gear one-handed. Art waved hello and gave a big wink, which must have been code for something, but I had neither the time nor the privacy to ask him what it meant. Then Sarah extricated herself from the cramped jump seat. The smile she gave me still looked awkward, but the embarrassment in her smile couldn’t hold a candle to the excitement in her eyes. Perhaps I hadn’t bungled things forever after all.
The two hours it took them to reach the scene had seemed like an eternity. The fact was, though, even if they’d arrived sooner, we couldn’t have started excavating the chopper until the wreckage had cooled, and it still felt almost too warm to touch.