Carved in Bone

Heimliched right there on the witness stand.
    The bailiff rattled off what I assume was the routine swearing-in question—I wondered if he dabbled in auctioneering on the side, such was his speed—and I assented. Then Burt DeVriess stood to question me, and I felt my hackles rise.
    I reminded myself that I was here as a witness for DeVriess and his client, but it wasn’t easy to suppress years of animosity. In almost every East Tennessee murder trial in which I’d testified for the prosecution, DeVriess—nicknamed “Da Grease” by local cops—had served as defense counsel. The guiltier you were, and the more heinous your crime, the more you needed Grease. At least, that’s the way things seemed. Serial rapists, child molesters, drug kingpins, stone-cold killers: the dregs of humanity—or inhumanity—were Burt DeVriess’s bread and butter. I had faced him from the witness chair a dozen times before, and his cross-examinations had never failed to enrage me. Some of that anger was a natural response to the legal system’s adversarial structure, which I didn’t much like. It was maddening to do a meticulous forensic exam, then hear it challenged and undermined by the sort of careerist witnesses widely known as “defense whores”: Yes, theoretically, I suppose it’s possible, as Dr. Brockton claims, that the skull fracture might have been caused by the bloody baseball bat found beside the body. However, in my expert opinion, the fracture more likely resulted from the impact of a large, anomalous hailstone…
    Although I resented that sort of far-fetched second-guessing, I wrote it off as a necessary evil. But what I couldn’t forgive or forget was the way DeVriess would skillfully impugn my professional and personal integrity in the slyest, most underhanded of ways. His favorite tactic was to pose an outrageous question that would be struck down immediately…right after it had been etched indelibly in the jurors’ minds. “MISTER Brockton, did you slant your findings to fit the prosecution’s theory, the same way you did in the such-and-such trial three years ago?” (“Objection!” “Sustained.” “Withdraw.”) Every time I squared off against DeVriess I knew an exchange like that was coming, but every time it did, I still got sputtering mad. Which was, of course, was exactly what he wanted.
    So given how thoroughly I despised the man and his tactics, why on earth was I about to testify for his team at a murder hearing? Because he had played me like a fish yet again, this time reeling me over to his side of the courtroom. It had happened a few weeks before, when he invited me to lunch—“to bury the hatchet,” he said—and sure enough, throughout the meal he was gracious and conciliatory, praising my research, praising my students, apologizing for his aggressive defense tactics. Then, during dessert, he cast the bait. He had a case he’d appreciate my advice about, he said, because it involved the most baffling forensic mystery he’d ever seen. He posed a series of innocent-sounding hypothetical questions about skeletal structure and sharp trauma—“When a person is stabbed, the knife blade can leave marks on the bones it contacts, can’t it? Can it leave metal particles from the blade, or residue from a sharpening stone? How much variation is there in the shape of the spine? What about such-and-such?” He paid rapt attention to my answers, then posed incisive follow-up questions. “Yes, but if the knife had a thin, flexible blade? If the victim had curvature of the spine?” After it was too late—as I lay flopping in his creel—I realized that he’d been setting the hook during that entire chocolate-fueled dialogue. Da Grease, clever bastard that he was, had appealed to both my scientific curiosity and my sense of justice. As he settled the tab, he concluded with a litany of troubling allegations about the autopsy Billy Ray Ledbetter had received at the hands of Dr. Garland Hamilton, the Knox County medical examiner. I, DeVriess had insisted, was the only hope for saving poor, innocent Eddie Meacham.
    He was putting me in a delicate position. As an anthropologist, I’m not technically qualified to determine cause of death; in Tennessee that’s a call that can be made only by a physician with a specialty in forensic pathology—and, what’s more, by a pathologist who has been officially appointed as a medical examiner, a position that marries medical expertise with law