Flesh and Bone by Jefferson Bass

Author:Jefferson Bass
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 0060759836
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2007-01-23T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

THREE DAYS HAD PASSED since Jess and I had parted. Three days with no call, no e-mail, no note in my in-box.

The gates to the Body Farm were slightly ajar, which probably meant that one of the graduate students was inside checking on a research subject. I parked in the slot closest to the gate—the Body Farm being the only place I could think of where the closest parking space was actually the least desirable, at least in terms of ambience—and swung the chain-link gate outward. As I stepped toward the inner wooden gate, something suddenly registered as odd, and I stepped back into the parking lot and did a quick scan. Mine was the only vehicle, I saw, anywhere near the gate, and that puzzled me. It was unlikely that a student would have arrived on foot: the research facility was three miles from the Anthropology Department by road, and road was the only way to get from one to the other unless you wanted to swim the Tennessee River, thereby shortening the distance to a mile. Someone could have walked over from the morgue or forensic center, but a half mile of access roads and parking lots separated the facility from the hospital. It wasn’t inconceivable that someone had walked over from the morgue, but I had never known a student to do it.

As I reached the gate, I noticed a note wedged between two of the wooden planks. “Bill—I’m inside. Come find me. Jess.” I scanned the parking lot again, more widely this time, but there was no sign of a fire-engine red Porsche.

I walked into the main clearing, half expecting to see Jess chatting with some graduate student she’d roped into letting her in. It was empty. “Hello?” I called. “Jess?” No answer. I took a short stroll downhill, along what remained of an old gravel roadbed where we generally set bodies that were brought here simply to skeletonize. Jess had sent a dozen or more up from Chattanooga over the past two years. She was building a skeletal collection for the ME’s office down there, not to compete with ours, but simply for reference purposes and teaching material. I seemed to recall that we had two or three Chattanooga bodies skeletonizing at the moment, so it was possible she was checking on their progress.

The Chattanooga bodies were there, two of them, but Jess wasn’t. One was down to bare bone, except for a few patches of mummified skin over the rib cage; the other had passed through the bloat and active decay stages and on to the dry stage, so it would soon be ready to process and send back as well. The cleaner one had been autopsied, I noticed; the top of his cranium, which had been neatly sliced off—by Jess, no doubt—sat on the ground to one side of the rest of his skull, looking a bit like an unusually smooth turtle shell. Judging from the prominence of the brow ridge and

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