Free Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella by Jefferson Bass Page A

sure.”
    Meffert grinned. So did I, my teeth clenched behind drawn lips.
    W e rode in silence down the winding mountain blacktop road toward Wartburg. Tyler was absorbed in the fossil he’d brought back, his fingers tracing the intricate diamond patterning as if he were blind, examining it by touch alone.
    For my part, I was brooding about the parting shots by the TBI agent and the sheriff. They’d been joking, good-naturedly, no doubt, but the conversation had stung, even worse than the wasp, and the sting took me back, in my mind, to the event they were dredging up. Just after my move to Knoxville, I’d been called to a rural county in Middle Tennessee, where a decomposing body had been found in a shallow grave behind a house. The remains were in fairly good shape, as rotting bodies go—pink tissue still clung to the bones—and I’d estimated that the man had died about a year before. In fact, we later learned, the dead man was Col. William Shy, a Civil War soldier killed in the Battle of Nashville in 1864.
    In hindsight, there were logical reasons I’d missed the time-since-death mark so widely. Colonel Shy had been embalmed, and until modern-day grave robbers had looted the grave—looking for relics—the body had been sealed in an airtight cast-iron coffin, which had kept bugs and bacteria at bay. But those explanations sounded more like excuses than I liked. They also provided precious little comfort in court, I’d learned, again and again: Hostile defense attorneys in contemporary criminal cases took great delight in bringing up Colonel Shy, rubbing my nose in my blunder as a way of undermining my testimony against their clients.
    Colonel Shy wasn’t the only case where I’d been derailed by difficulty in determining time since death. Another murder case—a case I’d consulted on shortly before my move to Knoxville—still haunted me. A suspect in the case had been seen with the victim two weeks before the body had been found—the last known sighting of the victim—and the investigator and prosecutor pressed me hard: Could I testify, with certainty, that the murder had occurred then? “No,” I’d been forced to admit, “not with any scientific confidence.” As a result, the suspect had gone free.
    Hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge—determined to avoid such frustrations and humiliations in the future—I had combed through stacks of scientific journals, seeking data on decomposition. But apart from a few musty articles about insect carcasses—dead bugs found in bodies exhumed from old cemeteries—I’d found virtually nothing. Nothing recent, at any rate, though I had come across a fascinating handbook written by a death investigator in China centuries before, in 1247 AD —a research gap of more than seven centuries. The good news was, I wasn’t the only forensic anthropologist who was flying by the seat of his pants when estimating time since death. The bad news was, every forensic anthropologist was flying by the seat of his pants.
    The interesting news, I realized now, as Tyler and I reached the base of the mountain, and the road’s hairpin curves gave way to a long, flat straightaway, was that the field was wide open. Time since death—understanding the processes and the timing of postmortem decomposition—was fertile ground for research.
    The sun was low in the sky, a quarter moon high overhead, when Tyler and I passed through Wartburg’s town square on our way back to Knoxville. As I glanced up at the courthouse belfry, still pondering ways to unlock the secrets of time since death, I found myself surrounded by markers and measures of time: A frozen clock. A fossilized town. An ancient fern. The bones of a girl who would never reach adulthood.
    A girl for whom time had stopped sometime after wildcat miners had ravaged a mountainside; sometime before a papery seed had wafted from a tree and a wasp queen had begun building her papery palace in the dark.

 
    Brockton
    PEERING OUT