“I agree,” he said, and I knew it had to be very hard for him when he added! “Truth is, we really can’t have Marino working this case any longer. At the very least, he’s personally involved with a potential suspect. He may be sleeping with the killer.”
“Just like the last investigator was,” I reminded him. He did not respond. Our shared fear for Marino’s safety did not need to be said. Max Ferguson had died, and Denesa Steiner’s fingerprint was on an article of clothing he was wearing at the time. It would have been so simple to lure him into unusual sex play and then kick the stool out from under him.
“I really hate for you to get more deeply into this, Kay,” Wesley said.
“One of the complications of our knowing each other so well,” I said.
“I hate it, too. I wish you weren’t, either.”
“It’s different. You’re a woman and a doctor. If what you’re thinking is right, you’ll push her buttons. She’s going to want to draw you into her game.”
“She’s already drawn me into it.”
“She’ll draw you in deeper.”
“I hope she does.” I felt the rage again. He whispered, “I want to see you.”
“You will,” I said.
“Soon.”
18
The University of Tennessee’s Decay Research Facility was simply known as The Body Farm, and had gone by that name for as long as I could remember. People like me intended no irreverence when we called it that, for no one respects the dead more than those of us who work with them and hear their silent stories. The purpose is to help the living.
That was the point when The Body Farm came into being more than twenty years before, when scientists got determined to learn more about time of death. On any given day its several wooded acres held dozens of bodies in varying stages of decomposition. Research projects had brought me here periodically over the years, and though I would never be perfect in determining time of death, I had gotten better.
The Farm was owned and run by the university’s Anthropology Department, headed by Dr. Lyall Shade and oddly located in the basement of the football stadium. At 8:15, Katz and I went downstairs, passing the zoo archaeology mollusk and neotropical primates labs, and the tamarin and mar muses collection and strange projects named with roman numerals. Many of the doors were plastered with Far Side cartoons and pithy quotations that made me smile. We found Dr. Shade at his desk looking over fragments of charred human bone.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning, Kay,” he said with a distracted smile. Dr. Shade was well served by his name for more reasons than the apparent ironical one. It was true he communed with the ghosts of people past through their flesh and bones and what they revealed as they lay for months on the ground. But he was unassuming and introverted, a very gentle spirit much older than his sixty years. His hair was short and gray, his face pleasant and preoccupied. Tall, he was hard bodied and weathered like a farmer, which was yet another irony, for Farmer Shade was one of his nicknames. His mother lived in a nursing home and made skull rings for him from fabric remnants.
The ones he had sent to me looked like calico doughnuts, but they functioned very well when I was working with a skull, which is unwieldy and tends to roll no matter whose brain it once held.
“What have we got here?” I moved closer to bits of bone reminiscent of burned wood chips.
“A murdered woman. Her husband tried to burn her after he killed her, and did amazingly well. Better than any crematorium, really. But it was rather stupid. He built the fire in his own backyard.”
“Yes, I would say that was rather stupid. But then so are rapists who drop their wallets as they leave the scene.”
“I had a case like that once,” said Katz.
“Got a fingerprint from her car and was so proud until I was told the guy left his wallet in the backseat. The print wasn’t needed much after that.”