Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone by Jefferson Bass Page B

sadness over my wife’s death. In trying to console me, the young woman had given me a kiss that began as compassion but swiftly turned to passion. It was probably fortunate that Miranda had appeared in my doorway when she had; otherwise, I might have crossed even farther over the line.
    “Comfort, huh,” Miranda snorted. “Hmm. Sort of like that jailer I read about in the News Sentinel last week? The guy caught comforting one of the female prisoners? She was grief-stricken over being arrested for prostitution, if I remember the story right.”
    “No,” I said, “not like that. There was no nakedness involved in this comforting.”
    “Might’ve been if I’d walked in five minutes later,” she said. “Speaking of the capable and comforting Miss Carmichael, how is she? Still at the top of her class?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s taking two cultural anthropology classes this semester. I hope she hasn’t gone over to the Dark Side.”
    “Hmm. I suspect she’ll circle back to physical anthropology. She just seems the physical type, you know?” Miranda smiled sweetly as she said this, to let me know she was joking. Sort of.
    “I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said with an answering smile. “I was getting worried about her. You’ve given me such…comfort.”
    She glared, then laughed. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Truce. I’m not still jealous of her.” She paused for half a beat. “Smart, cute little bitch.” She laughed again. So did I. Miranda had a way of tipping me off-balance, then catching me just before I went sprawling. “Actually, I didn’t come by just to stomp on your feet of clay,” she said.
    “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I was so enjoying it. What other delights await me?”
    “Our research subject, oh-five thirty-one?” I was instantly alert; 05–31 was the case number we’d assigned to the corpse tied to the tree at the Farm, because he was the thirty-first forensic case of 2005.
    “What about him?”
    “He’s getting pretty interesting. You might want to come out and take a look.”
    “I was planning to head that way after I finished grading these papers and eating lunch,” I said, “but somehow those seem less compelling now. Let’s go.”
    The department’s pickup truck was parked a flight of stairs away, near the tunnel that penetrated the stadium at field level, at the north end zone—the tunnel the UT football team ran through to the cheers of a hundred thousand people on game days. The truck was angled nose-first between two of the columns holding up the stadium’s upper deck. I backed around, tucking its rear bumper between two other columns, and threaded the one-lane ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, weaving a path around several students and an oncoming maintenance truck.
    Turning right onto Neyland Drive, we paralleled the river, driving downstream. The morning was sunny and unseasonably warm for mid-March—at least, what used to pass for unseasonably warm—and there were already a fair number of cyclists and runners on the greenway that bordered Neyland. The School of Agriculture’s trial gardens—a couple of carefully landscaped acres radiating from a large circular arbor—were already ablaze with daffodils, forsythia, and tulips. I slowed to admire the view, which was just as well, because a hundred yards ahead, a truck hauling a long horse trailer was making a leisurely right turn into the entrance of the veterinary school.
    “Hey, speaking of horses, what ever happened to Mike Henderson?” asked Miranda. “He was doing research on the effects of fire on bone a while back. Worked at the vet school part-time, and used to burn horse and cow bones to study the fracture patterns, didn’t he? Laying the groundwork for a big project with human bone.”
    “Well, that was his plan,” I said. “His M.A. thesis had some problems. He burned a lot of bones, and he got some nice pictures showing the difference between how dry