GROGGY AND OFF KILTER FROM MY RESTLESS, NIGHTMARISH night, I drove on autopilot, winding behind UT Medical Center and through the staff parking lot, then parking beside the twin gates of the Body Farm: an outer, chain-link gate, topped with razor wire, and an inner, wooden gate. The chain-link fence that surrounded our three wooded acres was there to keep out trespassers, and it worked well, although not perfectly. Occasionally fraternity boys—either as an initiation rite or as a show of bravado—tried to break in, but being drunk, they usually got snagged in the barbed wire. More seriously, we’d had one damaging robbery: someone had made off with half a dozen skulls, though the police eventually recovered three of them when the thief, who was a drug addict, tried to sell them. The inner wooden fence—eight feet high, made of pine boards butted tightly together—was there to shield the corpses from prying eyes . . . and to protect squeamish hospital employees (if there were in fact any of those) from the sight of my dead and decomposing research subjects.
I unlocked the metal gate and took a step inward to the wooden gate. The padlock’s shackle clasped both ends of a loop of chain, which was threaded through a hole bored in each half of the gate. As I lifted the lock and felt the heft of the chain, I couldn’t help thinking of the Cooke County victim, his neck encircled by hard, cold links, dragging that fifty-pound length of chain around and around that tree. The Tree of Death.
Just as the lock sprang open in my hand, I realized my mistake. “Dammit, Brockton, think,” I scolded myself aloud. Clicking the lock shut once more, I fastened the outer gate, got back into my truck, and threaded my way down to the parking lot exit. A hundred yards beyond the exit was a small, recently paved driveway, which I turned up and followed to a new brick building, so new that its “landscaping” consisted mainly of raw, red clay. I had been here dozens of times, but now, distraught and distracted by my nightmare, I’d reverted to autopilot, following the route I’d taken thousands of times over the course of some twenty years.
The building—a combination morgue, laboratory, and classroom facility—was the culmination of years of need, hope, planning, and pleading. For more than twenty years, my decomposition research program had operated on a shoestring, my “laboratory” consisting of trees and dirt, bacteria and insects. The first version of the Body Farm had been born, so to speak, in an abandoned barn on a UT pig farm, located miles outside of town. A few years later, the facility had moved to a small fenced enclosure on what had once been a trash-burning pit for the UT hospital. But gradually the Body Farm’s footprint—or was it plural: footprints?—had spread over three wooded acres. The infrastructure, though, had remained quite primitive, limited to one electrical power outlet and one water spigot.
Until now; until our new building, which was a remarkable upgrade. Inside the brick walls, beneath the green metal roof, was virtually everything I’d ever wished for: A cooler big enough to hold a dozen bodies, if need be. Two electric-jacketed kettles, each one big enough for me to curl up inside, for simmering bodies and skeletons: for separating flesh from bone. A pair of industrial-sized sinks, overhung by exhaust hoods whose whooshing fans could whisk away the last lingering odors as final bits of tissue were scrubbed and removed. Computerized workstations, complete with 3-D digitizing probes for taking skeletal measurements and plugging the data into ForDisc, our software program for determining—for “estimating,” to be pedantically precise—the race or ancestry of an unknown skeleton.
In the case of our Cooke County victim, whose long bones were chewed up and whose skull was MIA, ForDisc was probably useless, our 3-D digitizing probes reduced to expensive, high-tech paperweights. Lacking more bones—especially, but not only, the skull—we had very little data for ForDisc to plug into its predictive models of race or ancestry, and that was a loss. ForDisc had shown me how well its models worked, in memorably humbling fashion, in its first forensic outing: the soggy skeleton from Polecat Creek.