Carved in Bone

to the cave where the woman’s body was found?”
    I described the route east from Knoxville on I-40, directing him to the Jonesport exit and then taking him along the winding river road. “Okay, about six or eight miles upriver, look for a right-hand turn that heads up into the mountains,” I said.
    There was a pause. “Okay, got it. Now what?”
    “Go three or four miles up that, then look for a road to the left. Cave Springs is another mile up that road.”
    “Hang on. Let me make sure I’ve got this. Yes, I see it.” I could hear the excitement rising in his voice. “Bingo,” he said.
    “What is it?”
    “The law giveth, and the law taketh away. If a crime is committed on federal land, it can be prosecuted in federal court. Doesn’t make the crime federal—your Cooke County murder is a state crime, and always will be. But if it happened on U.S. land, we can make a federal case out of it.”
    Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that. Years before, some of my students were arrested for consuming alcohol in Great Smoky Mountains National Park—four of them shared a bottle of wine at a picnic beside Abrams Falls—and the entire Anthropology Department had shown up in federal court to lend moral support. I was vaguely familiar with the legal framework he was erecting here, so I hated to bring it crashing down. “Listen, I’m not sure I gave the directions quite right,” I said, hoping to let him down easy. “The body was found eight or ten miles north of I-40. The national park is all way to the south side of the interstate. I hate to say it, but it looks like we’re stuck with Plan B.”
    “Your directions were fine, Dr. Brockton,” he said cheerily. “Cave Springs Church is shown on this map. And it’s just inside a beautiful green strip of federal land.”
    “But the national park—”
    “I’m not talking about the park, Dr. Brockton. Your victim’s body was found a mile inside the boundary of Cherokee National Forest.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “I’d stake my orienteering merit badge on it.”
    “Hot damn,” I said. I could already hear the hoofbeats of the federal cavalry. “Hello, Plan A.”
    “Hello, Plan A,” he echoed. “There is one thing you need to understand, though, Dr. Brockton.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Plan A: it won’t happen overnight.”
    “Oh, I understand. These things can take weeks, even months, can’t they?”
    He didn’t say anything for a long time. “Dr. Brockton, you’re not going to want to hear this. The average duration of an interagency task force involving undercover agents is two years, start to finish.”
    “Two years? ”
    “Two years.”
    I thanked Welton for his interest, wished him happy hunting, and laid the receiver to rest, along with my hopes for Plan A.
    My hand had scarcely left the receiver when the phone rang again. It was Peggy, the Anthropology Department secretary. She sounded upset. “Did you take my spare keys again?”
    “No, why?”
    “They’re not in my desk drawer.”
    “They’ll turn up,” I said.
    “You’re the only one who ever takes them.”
    “When did you notice they were gone?”
    “Last week,” she said. “It was the same day someone broke into your office. You don’t think…?”
    I did think, and I got a very bad feeling.
    I hung up the phone and unlocked the door to the skeletal collection room. Accessible only through my office, the collection room housed all our forensic specimens—row upon row of metal shelves filled with cardboard boxes like the one stolen off my desk last week. Flipping on the fluorescent lights, I began scanning the shelves. The foot-square ends of the boxes presented themselves like books in a library—a library of murder mysteries, all of them carved in bone.
    Whoever had pried open my office had not broken into the collection room—of this I was certain, for a TBI technician, the university police officer, and I had all checked the door, finding it undamaged and securely locked. Or maybe carefully re locked, I now realized.
    As I reached the section of shelves containing the most recent years’ cases, my knees went weak. There was a one-foot-square gap in the boxes, and I knew without even checking which box should have been there.
    Billy Ray Ledbetter’s bones were gone.
    With a heavy heart, I called Steve Morgan’s TBI pager and reported the additional theft to him. “This complicates the picture,” he said, echoing my own thoughts exactly. It might