Carved in Bone

the tip of the flame close to his forearm, a look of curiosity on his face. Wisps of smoke began to curl up from the hair on his arm, then suddenly he yelped and jerked the torch back with a rueful, goofy grin. Then his gaze lit on the crime scene photos strewn across the counter. Reaching over, he plucked one from the stack. It was a mug shot of the man suspected of abducting young Stacy Beaman. Holding the photo by one corner, Art brought the torch close. Wisps of smoke curled up, and the man’s face burst into flame.

CHAPTER 9
    THE PHONE RANG JUST as I was contemplating the structure of the female pelvis, and I jumped, then hissed a curse before putting on my telephone manners.
    “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton.”
    “It’s Sheriff Kitchings.”
    “Hey, Sheriff, I’ve spent some time going over these remains, and I’ve got some mighty interesting things to tell you. First of all—”
    He cut me off. “Hang on, Doc. I’m not sure we should discuss this on the phone. This could turn out to be a pretty sensitive case.”
    This was a first. I always wrote up my findings in a formal report, but I’d never yet encountered a lawman who didn’t want to know what I’d found out as soon as possible. “Well, shall I just write up what I found and mail it to you?”
    “No, sir, I believe we should move a little faster than that. Could I send Williams to get you again? And could you bring the, uh, the material with you? The material you’ve got there in Knoxville?”
    I sighed but decided to play along. “Well, it’s possible for me to come see you, if you think it’s urgent, but I can’t bring the, uh, material just yet. I need to simmer on that for another day or two, if you catch my drift.” After a moment, he allowed as how he caught my drift. “Look,” I suggested, “I’ve got a class to teach in a few minutes, but I’ll be through at noon if you want to send your deputy sometime after that.”
    “Any chance you could skip that class? Maybe get somebody to fill in for you?”
    “Sorry, Sheriff. I don’t cut my own class. Besides, it’s at least an hour’s drive down here.”
    “Thing is, Williams is already in Knoxville.” They must think I had nothing to do but wait to be summoned to Cooke County.
    “Well, I can find something to keep him busy for an hour or so,” I said. “We’ve got a few skeletons that need digging up, if he wants to lend us a hand out at the Body Farm. He knows how to find it now.”
    The sheriff laughed mirthlessly. “I expect he’d just as soon pass on that, but thanks anyhow. I’ll holler at him and tell him to get you at noon.”
    I told him how to find my private office. It was tucked deep beneath the east stands of the stadium, down near the level of the football field. Pretty close to the east end zone, in fact, but separated by layers of concrete and steel and spectators. I’d lost count of the times I’d looked up from a skull or femur to feel the entire structure shaking—another UT touchdown, I knew. Visiting teams didn’t score very often at Neyland Stadium, and when they did, there weren’t enough fans to rattle the girders. Ten, twenty thousand people couldn’t cause much vibration. Ninety thousand hometown fans at a grudge match against Georgia or Florida or ’Bama, though, could set off seismographs clear over in Nashville.
    I hung up, pushed back from my battered desk, and walked through a doorway into an adjoining room filled with cardboard boxes, each measuring one foot square by three feet long. Each box contained a cleaned, disarticulated human skeleton.
    There was only one way into our skeletal collection, and that was through my office. I didn’t want just anyone to have access to the skeletons—it was easy to envision drunken fraternity pranks, macabre Halloween decorations, and countless other student hijinks if word got out that there were hundreds of boxes of bones just lying around for the taking. So while we made no bones, so to speak, about having the collection—took great pride in it, in fact, since it was the world’s largest collection of modern skeletons whose age, race, and sex were known—I was careful to keep the collection room locked and to issue keys only to the forensic faculty and graduate assistants.
    Threading my way among the gray metal shelves stacked with oblong boxes, I felt like a bookworm browsing in the Library of Congress. There were hundreds of stories recorded in these skeletons—tales of