AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What a shame,” said O’Conner. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, this would be awful at any age, but twenty’s just a kid. Unbelievable.”
“It might be unbelievable,” I told him, “but I’m afraid it’s all too true.”
I put the sheriff, the deputy, and the TBI agent to work, helping Miranda and me inventory and bag the bones. I’d brought a diagram of the skeleton, the bones drawn as outlines. As I picked up each bone and handed it off to the lawmen to bag, I called out its name, and Miranda filled in the bone’s outline on the diagram. “Cervical vertebrae,” I said. “C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7.” That was the biggest collection of adjacent elements. Below the neck, the remaining bones were few, far between, and badly chewed—especially the long bones of the arms and legs. Given how many of the skeletal elements were missing, it didn’t take long to collect them all. At the end, though, we got lucky: Two of the long bones—the right humerus and right femur—bore recently healed fractures. Comminuted fractures, in which the bones had been broken into several pieces. And those pieces had been fastened back together with metal plates and screws. “Look at this,” I said, holding up the two shafts. “This could help a lot with identification.”
Waylon gave a low whistle. “Them parts can be tracked, right, Doc? Like the serial number on a gun or a car?”
I shook my head. “I wish. But no. If we can find x-rays that match these, we’ll have a positive I.D. But first we have to find a missing-person report that seems to fit, then see if we can get the medical records.”
“Huh,” Waylon grunted, clearly disappointed.
Once the bones were all charted and bagged, I put everyone else to work gathering up the bags, cans, and other debris. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I told them. They probably assumed I needed to step behind a tree and pee. Instead I ambled away, wandering the site, alternating between scanning the ground for anything that might happen to lie outside the circular path and, especially, examining the trunks of surrounding trees. After a while, I sensed that I was being watched.
“Dr. B?” I’d been so intent on my search that I hadn’t heard Miranda come up behind me. “You look like you’re looking for something. I mean, something specific.”
“I am,” I said, stepping closer to a medium-sized tulip poplar and running my fingers over the bark. “And I just found it. Y’all come take a look.”
The others laid down their trash bags and approached. Waylon was the first to spot what I was looking at. “God a’mighty,” he said. “I was afraid we was gonna find something like that.”
“Me, too,” said O’Conner, “though I didn’t want to say so.”
“What?” demanded Miranda, looking from their faces to mine. “Somebody want to let me in on the secret?”
I reached up and tapped the tree trunk, slightly above my head. “Claw marks,” I said. “From a bear. A big one, judging by the height of the marks.”
Miranda blanched. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
I nodded. “You mentioned coyote scavenging, but I figured it for bear,” I told her.
“Why? You could tell from the tooth marks?”
I shook my head. “Hard to tell from the tooth marks themselves, though there was a mighty big puncture in a scapula. What tipped me off wasn’t what was there, but what wasn’t.” All three of them looked puzzled. “Canids—dogs and coyotes—tend to go for the extremities. A dog’ll gnaw off a hand or a foot, or even an arm or a leg, and drag it off to a safe place. Bears, though, love the torso: the ribs, the sternum, even the spine. Stuff that’s too tough for dogs and coyotes. Remind me, when we get back to campus, to dig out an article for you. It was in the Journal of Forensic Sciences a while back. Described some cases of bear scavenging in the mountains of New Mexico. The bears ate the ribs and the sternum every single time.”
“Beg pardon, Doc,” said Waylon. “I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but you reckon maybe the barbecue folks are missing out on a good bet?”
I blinked and stared at him. “You mean by not putting humans in the smoker?”
“Lord, no!” The big man blushed and grimaced. “I mean the sternum. From pigs, not people. Smoked sternum—might taste even better’n pulled pork shoulder or baby back ribs.”
“Waylon,” I said, “you are one of a kind.” He blushed again. “But I don’t think it would work. The ribs have a fair amount of meat on them. Between them, actually. The intercostal muscles. But the sternum?” I poked around on my own chest, to underscore the point. “Lots of cartilage, to connect it to the ribs. But no real muscle to speak of. All you’d get is gristle and bone.”
Waylon gave his own mammoth chest a few exploratory prods, then nodded, looking mildly disappointed. “I reckon bears ain’t as picky as us.”
“Maybe they don’t have the luxury,” I pointed out. “They’re mostly eating bugs and berries and acorns, right? Not often they get a feast like this.” I felt a stab of guilt when I heard myself refer to the victim that way. “I don’t mean to sound callous. I just mean that if you’re a big black bear in these mountains, it might be tough to find enough to eat, you know?”
“Soooo . . .” Miranda trailed off. All three of us turned to her, leaving her little choice but to finish what she’d started. “I hate to ask—I’m not sure I want to know the answer—but was the victim already dead when the bear came along, or did the bear kill him?”
I looked at Waylon and the sheriff, but they both shrugged—possibly because they didn’t know, but possibly because they hated to say. “Hard to tell,” I answered. “It’s rare for a black bear to kill a human. Far as I know, there’s only ever been one person killed by a bear in the Smokies. That was a woman back in 2000, if I remember right.”
“Killed by a mama bear and a cub, lessen I disremember,” offered Waylon. “The mama mighta been protectin’ the cub, or thinkin’ she was.”
I nodded. “But this situation? A human chained in the wilderness for days or weeks, with food wrappers and maybe even scraps lying around, giving off scent? The smell would be pretty appealing to a hungry bear, and once he was here, who knows?”
“Another thing we don’t know,” O’Conner added, “is whether the killer kept bringing food and water, or whether he stopped at some point. The victim could’ve died of thirst or hunger.”
“Or maybe the guy come back and shot him after a while,” said Waylon. “Reckon I should bring me a metal detector up here, see if they’s a bullet on the ground somewheres.”
“Good idea,” I agreed. “Once we’re back at UT, we can x-ray the remains and see if there’s a lead wipe on any of the bones.”
“A which?” said Waylon.
“A lead wipe,” I repeated. “A smear of lead, left by a bullet grazing the bone. A lead wipe shows up on an x-ray like a streak of white paint, much brighter than bone. I’ll let you know if we find anything. How soon do you think you can get back here with the metal detector?”
“Tomorrow mornin’, I reckon. I’d go get it now, ’cept it’s about to get dark on us.”
He was right. I hadn’t noticed, but the sun was beginning to drop behind the adjoining ridge. Late-afternoon light—already golden from the low angle—was incandescent through the yellow leaves of the tulip poplars. I paused to take it in, the astounding beauty that surrounded us, even here at the scene of a terrible death. “Guess we’d better wrap this up,” I said. “If we’re here after dark in a vehicle with a state plate, no telling what’s liable to happen to us.”
Waylon chuckled. “Hellfire, Doc, I’ll be behind you all the way to I-40. Ain’t nobody’ll mess with you, lessen they go through me first. And I don’t see that happenin’.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Not unless they’ve got a death wish. Or a huge pain wish, at the very least.”
HAPPILY, NO ONE IN COOKE COUNTY HAD A DEATH wish, nor a Waylon-sized pain wish. Aside from the deputy’s monster truck, I saw no vehicles trailing us back to Jonesport, nor on the twisting drive ba
ck to the interstate.
As we turned off River Road and onto the westbound ramp of I-40, I rolled down my window and waved. Behind us, I saw the headlights of the mammoth truck flash once, twice, three times, and the notes of the truck’s aftermarket horn—tooting the opening bars of “Dixie”—came wafting through the twilight, growing fainter as we picked up speed and merged with the stream of cars meandering out of the mountains and flowing, a ceaseless river of humanity, toward the distant confluence of Knoxville.
The drive was quiet. Perhaps Miranda was preoccupied with her own thoughts—possibly thoughts of the young man whose fragmentary skeleton rode behind us in the truck’s cargo bed—or perhaps she was simply giving me room to think my own thoughts. At any rate, we rode in silence.
As we neared the outskirts of the city, I overtook a slow-moving semi. Flicking my turn signal, I checked my outside mirror to be sure the left lane was clear.
It was, but in the mirror, I caught a glimpse of a lighted billboard on the other side of the median. COMFORT INN, it read. AARP. AAA. HBO. ESPN. THIS EXIT & EXIT 407.
