Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel
Jefferson Bass
Dedication
To our loyal and encouraging readers, who’ve made these last ten years—and these first ten books—such a pleasure
Epigraph
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo—that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
—JOYCE CAROL OATES
PROLOGUE
SOME WOUNDS HEAL QUICKLY, the scars vanishing, or at least fading to thin white lines over the years. Some assaults are too grave, though; some things can never be set right, never be made whole or healthy again, no matter how many seasons pass.
In this regard, wounded mountains are like wounded beings. Cut them deeply—slice off their tops or carve open their flanks—and the disfigurement is beyond healing.
So it was with Frozen Head Mountain, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. In the early 1960s, Frozen Head’s northern slope—thickly forested with hardwoods and hemlocks—was blasted and bulldozed away by wildcat strip miners to expose a thick vein of soft, sulfurous coal. Geologists called it the Big Mary vein, and for three years, Big Mary was illegally carved up, carted away, and fed into the insatiable maw of Bull Run Steam Plant, forty mountainous miles south. Then Big Mary’s vein ran dry, and the miners and their machines—their dredges and draglines and stubby, hulking haul trucks—departed as abruptly as they’d appeared.
They left behind a mutilated mountainside, naked and exposed, its rocky bones battered by the sun and the rain, the heat and the cold. After every rain, a witch’s brew of acids and heavy metals seeped from the ravaged slope, blighting the soil and streams in its path.
And yet; and yet. Nature is persistent and insistent. Years after the wildcatters moved on, kudzu vines began slithering into the shale, latching onto bits of windblown soil and leaves. Scrubby trees—black locust and Virginia pine—slowly followed, clawing tenuous toeholds in the rubble. A stunted sham of a forest returned, one instinctively shunned by birds and deer and even humans of right spirit.
And so it was the perfect place to conceal a body.
Like the mountain, the corpse was partially reclaimed by the persistence and insistence of Nature. A year passed, or perhaps two or three or five. One spring afternoon, a seedpod on a nearby black locust tree split open, and half a dozen dark, papery seeds wafted away on a warm mountain breeze. Five of the six seeds drifted and sifted into deep crevices in the shale. The sixth spun and swirled and settled into a neat oval recess: the vacant eye orbit of a now-bare skull. By summer the seed had germinated, sending pale tendrils of root threading down through fissures in bone and rock. One day a female paper wasp—a queen with no court yet—lighted on the skull, tiptoed inside, and began to build her small papery palace. And so was formed an odd ecosystem, an improbable peaceable kingdom: wasp colony, flowering tree, crumbling corpse.
The world contains a multitude of postmortem microcosms. Many remain forever undiscovered. But all leave some mark, some indelible stain, upon the world; upon the collective soul of mankind.
Some—a handful—give rise to reclamation or redemption.
PART 1
In the Beginning
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
—GENESIS 1:2
Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.
—GENESIS 3:1
SEPTEMBER 1992
CHAPTER 1
Brockton
TUGGING THE BATTERED STEEL door of the office tight against the frame—the only way to align the lock—I gave the key a quick, wiggling twist. Just as the dead bolt thunked into place, the phone on the other side of the door began to ring. Shaking my head, I removed the key and turned toward the stairwell. “It’s Labor Day,” I called over my shoulder, as if the caller could hear me. “It’s a holiday. I’m not here.”