The Bone Yard BY Jefferson Bass
Part I
Chapter 1
I held the last of the dead man’s bones in my left hand. It was his skull, which I cradled upside down in my palm, as comfortably and naturally as an NBA player might hold a basketball. As I searched for a place to hide it, I felt the tip of my index finger absentmindedly tracing the edges of a hole in the right temple. It was a square-cornered opening, about the size of a small postage stamp, and it had been punched by a murder weapon—a weapon I’d tucked into a tangle of honeysuckle vines a few moments before. The honeysuckle was in bloom, and its fragrance was an odd contrast to the underlying odor of death. Funny thing, I thought, how something that smells so good can grow in a place that smells so bad.
Chattering voices floated up the hillside, growing louder as the people came closer. If I didn’t hurry, I’d be caught with the skull in my hand. Still I hesitated, turning the cranium right side up for one last look into the vacant eye orbits. What did I hope to see there—what meaning did I think I might find—in those empty sockets? Maybe nothing. Maybe only the emptiness itself.
As the voices drew nearer, I finally forced myself to act, to choose. I tucked the skull under the edge of a fallen oak tree, piling dead leaves against the trunk as camouflage. Then a worry popped into my head: Is the pile of leaves too obvious, a giveaway? But it was too late to second-guess myself; I’d run out of time, and the makeshift hiding place would have to do.
Stepping over the tree, I strolled downhill toward the cluster of people approaching. I feigned nonchalance, resisting the urge to glance back and check for visible bones. A woman at the front of the group—a thirtysomething blonde with the energetic, outdoorsy look of a runner or a cyclist—stopped in her tracks and looked at me. Her eyes bored into mine, and I wondered what she saw there. I tried to make my face as blank and unenlightening as the skull’s had been.
She shifted her gaze to the wooded slope behind me. Her eyes scanned the forest floor, then settled on the fallen tree. Walking slowly toward it, she leaned down, studied both sides, and then brushed at the leaves I’d piled on the uphill side. “There’s a skull beside this log,” she announced to the group. She said it as coolly as if it were an everyday occurrence, finding a skull in the woods.
“Wow,” said a young red-haired woman in a black jumpsuit. “Police, one; Brockton, zero. If Dr. B decides to turn killer, he’d better steer clear of Florida.”
The redheaded smart aleck was Miranda Lovelady, my graduate assistant. The blonde who’d found the skull so swiftly was Angie St. Claire, a forensic analyst from the Florida state crime lab. Angie, along with the twenty-three other people in the group Miranda had brought up the trail, had spent the past ten weeks as a student at the National Forensic Academy, a joint venture of the University of Tennessee and the Knoxville Police Department. Taught by experts in ballistics, fingerprinting, trace evidence, DNA, anthropology, and other forensic specialties, the NFA training culminated in the two death scenes Miranda and I had staged here at the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility: the Body Farm.