Carved in Bone

interactions of nocturnal predators and human corpses, so one of my grad students had set up the wildlife surveillance as a thesis project. Judging by the first night’s photos of raccoons and rodents, we had the makings of a season’s worth of Animal Planet documentaries. Kneeling down beside the corpse, I checked his ankle tag. It identified him as 68-05: the sixty-eighth corpse donated to the Body Farm in 2005.
    His face was beginning to wrinkle. Laugh lines around the eyes suggested frequent happiness in his life, but they were tempered by worries etched into his forehead. I thought of the lines by Gibran—“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Had he been loved? Probably, judging by the laugh lines. Had he suffered loss? Hard not to, in half a century or so of living. His bones, eventually, would shed some slantwise light on his life, revealing whether he’d labored hard, building strong bones with prominent muscle attachment points, or had lived a life of sedentary ease; whether he’d escaped serious injury for five decades or had crashed through life breaking arms, legs, ribs, ankles, clavicles. His file, across the river in my office beneath the stadium, would give me basic details—cause of death, next of kin, and so on—but it would shed little light on the Big Questions: Who had this man really been, deep down, and what kind of life had he lived?
    For that matter, I wasn’t sure I could answer those questions about myself. Who was I, deep down, and what kind of life was I living? Teacher, researcher, forensic consultant. Widower, father, son. Sedentary academician, unscathed—skeletally speaking, at least—by life’s rough-and-tumble. The descriptors didn’t seem to add up to much.
    My inward inventory was interrupted by the crunch of tires on the gravel at the entrance. A Jeep Cherokee, bearing the familiar insignia of the Cooke County Sheriff’s Department, eased to a stop in the clearing. The front doors opened, and two khaki-clad officers emerged. “Your secretary told me you’d be out here,” said a familiar voice. “Couldn’t pass up a chance to see the place at last.”
    I rose and shook hands with Jim O’Conner. “Hey, Sheriff. I heard about the special election; congratulations. You look good in that uniform. So do you, Waylon.” The burly mountain man had traded in his camo for a deputy’s uniform, the largest I’d ever seen. Waylon flashed me a tobacco-flecked grin. Some things never change, I thought.
    O’Conner adjusted his gun belt and struck a tough-cop pose, then laughed. “Feels kinda funny still—I’m tempted to arrest myself for impersonating an officer. Been a long time since I wore a uniform; back when I got out of the military, I swore never again. Just goes to show: never say never.”
    “I never do,” I said. “By the way, I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the service, but I thought it was nice, considering. It was generous of you to pay for the three Kitchings funerals, in light of your history with the family. Sweet of you to put up a headstone for Leena next to her parents, too.” The TBI had never found Leena’s postcranial skeleton, despite turning the sheriff’s offices and every Kitchings residence inside out. What little we had of her—the skull, hyoid, and sternum—had been buried in a small ceramic urn that Jim O’Conner had made from clay he dug from one of his mountains.
    “You think we’ll ever find the rest of her?” O’Conner asked.
    “I don’t know, Jim. At first I thought Tom or Orbin took her, then I figured it was part of Williams’s scheme to implicate the sheriff for obstruction.” He nodded; either scenario would have been credible. “Now, though, I suspect they were stolen by Knox County’s medical examiner— former medical examiner—along with another skeleton. Maybe he took Leena as a red herring. Or maybe just to get even with me. I haven’t heard the last of him, he says, and I’m afraid he’s right. But if we ever recover Leena’s missing bones, you’ll be the first to know.”
    “I’ve bought the cemetery plot on the other side of hers,” he said. “I hope I don’t need it for a while, but Cooke County sheriffs do seem to die prematurely and violently.”
    “I’m betting you’ll be the exception to that rule, Jim.”
    “Hang onto that thought. Listen, I wanted you to hear this from me face to face. Leon Williams and his lawyer—some slick