Carved in Bone

sheriff’s deputy (and K9 trainer extraordinaire) Art Wolff; District Attorney General Al Schmutzer; Assistant District Attorney Marsha Mitchell; Assistant U.S. Attorney Guy Blackwell; DEA agent Tim Wilson; TBI agent Greg Monroe; and half a dozen members of the FBI’s Knoxville district office—Special Agent in Charge Joe Clark, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tim Cox, Special Agents Gary Kidder, Beth O’Brien, and Robert Gibson III, and Chief District Counsel James Van Pelt.
    Thanks also to my stepsons (and firearms consultants), Adam and Lee Robinson; to our energetic and capable literary agent, Giles Anderson; and to our intrepid editor at William Morrow, Sarah Durand.
    As ever, working with Dr. Bill Bass remains a great pleasure, an amazing education, and a high honor.
—JWJ

About the Author
    JEFFERSON BASS is the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility—the Body Farm—a quarter-century ago. He is the author or coauthor of more than two hundred scientific publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career, Death’s Acre. Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His writings have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and Popular Science and broadcast on National Public Radio. The coauthor of Death’s Acre , he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm.
    www.jeffersonbass.com
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Credits
    Jacket design by Tom Lau
    Jacket photograph by John Chard/Getty Images

Copyright
    This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
    The Bone Yard. Copyright © 2011 by Jefferson Bass. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
    Hardcover Edition 2011 ISBN 978-0-06-180678-0
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Dr. Bill Brockton discovers the dark side of the Sunshine state: When bones begin turning up amid the pines and live oaks of the Florida panhandle, Brockton teams up with investigators from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Two adolescent skulls–ravaged by time and animals, but bearing the telltale signs of lethal trauma–lead Brockton, forensic analyst Angie St. Claire, and Special Agent Stu Vickery to the ruins of the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory, a notorious juvenile detention facility that met a fiery end more than forty years ago. As the three close in on the truth, they learn that unearthing the ghosts of the past can stir up present-day perils.

    Chapter 7
    Highway 90 shimmered and melted in the afternoon heat. Just ahead, it was a straight, flat ribbon of asphalt that became a straight, rippling river in the middle distance, then seemed to flow directly into the sky as it neared the western horizon. I half expected the pavement to evaporate beneath our wheels, molten and miragy as it appeared, but somehow the margins between asphalt and liquid, between liquid and sky, skittered ahead of us at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, the same speed the Chevy Suburban was traveling.
    Angie, Vickery, and I were in the crime lab’s Suburban, headed from Tallahassee to the boondocks of Apalachee County, an hour west and a world away from the hum of the state capital and the forensic labs of FDLE. The deputy who’d called in the skull had arranged to rendezvous with us in McNary, the county seat of Apalachee County, and caravan with us to the property where the dog, the owner, and a second skull awaited us.
    Eventually a