The Remains of Christmas

Chapter 1

Chris

I DIDN’T CARE WHAT was so fascinating about this case—no skull was worth the agony of scrotal frostbite.

I’d regretted answering Decca’s text as soon as I’d arrived at the site to “lend a hand.” A hand which they clearly didn’t need, since the place was crawling with deputies and investigators from the ME’s office.

As if this situation wasn't bad enough, my system was now utter lacking in caffeine. I’d finished my first four-shot flat white in the car on the way here. I’d finished my second four-shot flat white thirty minutes after the first.

I didn’t have a third.

That was hours ago. We’d been out here in the scrub brush next to the railroad tracks since dawn, bouncing on our toes to keep from freezing our balls off—well, my balls—while police assured us that any minute now, they’d be finished securing a perimeter around a partial set of human remains.

A cut-and-dried case. Nothing to identify. Nothing to solve. A waste of our time in the bone-chilling cold.

December in Nashville was never this cold.

December was supposed to be mildly cold. Pleasantly cold. The kind of cold where you could get away with a wool coat, a scarf, and gloves if you wanted to look chic in a Christmas tree lot, but you could just as easily wear a hoodie.

This morning, I was bundled for the Christmas tree lot and it still wasn’t enough. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, it was also a terrible idea to wear boxers in below-freezing temperatures. Yet, here I was.

I fished my phone out of my coat pocket and checked the temperature: nineteen.

Nineteen, for fuck’s sake. This was why I didn’t do fieldwork anymore.

My colleague and best friend, Dr. Decca Crowley, huddled close to my left, using me as a windbreak. Even without testicles, she was worse off than I was. She’d had to borrow a beanie from one of the cops. Her hand-knit mittens had holes.

She breathed into her cupped hands.

I snapped an extra hand warmer to life. In the decade or so I’d known her, Decca had never come to a scene fully prepared. “Put this in your pocket. At least you’ll be able to move your fingers when we finally get to work.”

“Th-thank you,” her voice shook. “I’ll be fine as soon as I get moving. Why is it t-taking them so long? Why did the ME call us out so early?”

“I’m still trying to figure out why you called me out here at all—”

“You had nothing better to do.”

“—for an alleged skull—”

“Confirmed skull.”

“Confirmed calvarium.” I argued. “Do you know if there are any facial bones? Dentition?”

“No clue.” She shrugged.

A train whistle blew from somewhere not so far away, haunting in the cold, gray, just-past-dawn morning.

In the sparse woods ahead, below a railroad bridge that spanned a gully, a dull, beige-brown parietal bone peeked out from under the leaves, dirt, and decades of trash the wind had collected down there.

It was law enforcement’s job to secure the area and figure out the best way for us to descend.

It was our job to posit the age of the alleged skull/confirmed calvarium once we got down there.

The remains were most likely historic—more than a century old. A bone lab would determine the details once homicide officially passed the case to Decca, the state forensic anthropologist, or to me and my team at the University of Tennessee’s renowned Forensic Anthropology Center, colloquially known as The Body Farm.

“Oh, my God.” A white blur floated into my periphery. I pushed my glasses higher on my nose, surprised to find a pretty blonde elf in a cracked black leather motorcycle jacket—a jacket I intuitively knew had no lining and, therefore, offered minimal protection against these nineteen meager degrees. And I’d just given away my last hand warmer.

“Nice car. Yours?” she asked, directing her question to me.

“Yes. Thanks,” I smiled and followed her eyes to where they were trained behind me—to my brand-new pride and joy, a satin black AMG Mercedes coupe. Besides my B?sendorfer Grand, it was the only thing I’d ever truly splurged on.

“It’s eight days old,” I bragged to the newcomer. At least there was someone around here I could impress with my fancy new vehicle.

“That’s the new GT, right? I’ve been following the redesign. Custom?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“The composite brake discs were the giveaway. AMG discs are usually yellow. Yours are as black as the car. Nice. Sleek.”

I’d seen plenty of women go gaga over a car before, but not quite like this, like a gearhead. I wasn’t even a gearhead and I owned the damn thing. I was just sick of the old Volvo I’d been driving since undergrad. I’d done my duty. I’d been committed to carbon emissions-consciousness for long enough. Puttering around in a boxy car for over a decade had been slowly destroying my soul. Now, I was a new man—with a very fast, German-engineered supercar.

“I drive an ’87 Firebird. She’s rough, but I do all the work on her myself. Well, I used to, anyway. I’m Daphne, by the way. Decca’s assistant.”

“Daphne,” I repeated. My thoughts were unable to move beyond her name, her lilting, lightly smoky voice, and her smile that unveiled a slight diastema and a rotated cuspid I wouldn’t straighten if she paid me.

Waves of heat rippled through my body, like I was suddenly standing in front of a roaring fire instead of a clearing in these frozen woods.

She lifted her brows and her pink cheeks grew pinker.

Decca elbowed me in the side and looked up at me with a big, silly grin.

“Daphne, this is Dr. Christopher Carter, the forensic odontologist I’ve been telling you about. He thinks that fancy car will make me forget he’s bringing the remains back to the lab. His lab,” she said pointedly, “since I have no time. Not if you want to eat or drink anything at the party tonight.”

Like hell was I putting human remains in the trunk of my eight-day-old Mercedes.

“Chris.” I removed my glove and stretched out my hand.

“Oh.” Her face changed. Her smile dropped. “Oh, wow. You’re the teeth guy?” She stared at our joined hands. It was too cold to feel much, but I still hadn’t let go. I couldn’t seem to remember how.

“I’m just a dentist,” I said. Definitely not worthy of an Oh, wow, unless it was Oh, wow, your glasses are really thick.

“You’re more than a dentist. I read your last paper on current trends of bite mark analysis. And the one about facial depth thickness indicators determining masseter tissue strength and their impact on bite mark depth. And... pretty much all your other first-author papers.”

I stared at her mouth—at her pointed canines, the slight overbite (God, that was sexy), and the lightly glossed, rose-tinged lower lip she tugged between her teeth as she recited damn-near direct quotes from my papers.

She’d read my papers. Memorized them.

I could imagine her doing it, too.

Her body flung sideways into an overstuffed chair; legs draped over the arm, bare feet swinging. A pen dangling from twisting fingers until she reaches up, absentmindedly, to grip the barrel between her teeth, steadying it with her tongue when she got to Fig. 3c, showing the closeup of an abnormal composite filling that had allowed me to identify a body pulled from the Gulf of Mexico.

“Sorry to be such a fangirl. I think I just made it weird. Did I make it weird?”

“Nope. He’s making it weird,” Decca said. “Besides, that’s the appropriate response. We’re all fangirls of Chris’s work here. Especially Chris.”

Daphne looked nervous the way she rocked back on her heels in those beat-up combat boots.

And cold. She looked very, very cold in whatever she called that scrap of fabric that barely covered the tops of her long, lean thighs in these nineteen-degree temps.

“Um, want me to check in with the Sheriff, Boss? See if we can get an ETA?”

Decca’s shit-eating grin stretched wide as she tracked my eyes. “That would be so helpful, Daph. Thanks.”

Daphne jogged away, her short skirt swishing back and forth, just under her ass. I seriously doubted those tights were doing anything to keep her warm.

“So. Daphne.”

“She have anything to do with why you texted me this morning?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Decca said. “This skull’s just too much for my current caseload. I need you to take it.”

I didn’t buy that for a second. Nothing was too much for Decca’s caseload. She lived for this. Besides, if these were historic bones, they added virtually no work.

I tore my eyes away from Daphne and the cops who’d suddenly sprung to life as she came toward them.

“You told her about me?” I raised my eyebrow. Decca was a meddler. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d thrown the skull into the gully just to orchestrate this whole encounter.

She held up her hands in surrender. “All I did was give her some journals I had lying around the office. I didn’t tell her to go to JSTOR and look up everything you’ve ever written. And I swear I had nothing to do with that.” She pointed to where Daphne had just been standing. “You can’t fake that kind of chemistry.”

I looked sharply at Decca.

“It wasn’t just you, Chris. And that was way more than fangirling on her end. We just saw her internet crush become her real-life crush. You’re welcome. I want an invitation to the wedding.”

I’d be lying if Decca’s words didn’t do something to me, but this was getting a bit ridiculous. “I’m not her internet crush. I’m not even on social media.”

“Doesn’t matter. Your courtroom appearances are basically glamour shots in our world. Remember the Cosgrove trial where you were doing something stupid with your mouth, but you looked really handsome anyway?”

I groaned. “Demonstrating how malocclusion can be ascertained even after soft tissue maceration.”

“Whatever. Your blindingly white teeth make an audible little ping when you click on that image.”

“Shut up.” I said, laughing.

“Seriously though, Chris.” She took a deep breath. “Maybe... go out on a limb this time. Open up. And don’t let that one get away. Because she’s amazing. You both are.”

I swallowed hard. Opening up wasn’t my problem; timing was. Timing had always ruined everything in the past.

After a quick squeeze of my forearm, Decca left me to go hang out with the cool kids: the investigators from the ME’s office and the Davidson County deputies. Swirls of steam rose from their Styrofoam cups. Twangy Christmas music blared out from one of the patrol cars. A few of the deputies were tossing around a Santa hat, until the Sheriff caught it and shoved it down onto his own head.

Despite the season, I wasn't in a festive mood. I’d always been more of an observer, hanging back quietly and getting my kicks by watching others. Part of the crowd, but drifting closer and closer to the fringes each year.

It was a matter of pragmatism. It was harder to keep up with friends when their conversations revolved around their kids’ picky eating and travel ball schedules.

It sucked being the man who sobered the room when eyes turned to me, and I had only the same boring career updates. Yes, the conference in Stockholm went fine. No, I didn’t hook up with any hot Swedish girls. Yes, you probably qualify for Invisalign. No, it didn’t work out with the girl from the app.

I’d missed the milestones of marriage and kids. There was no one important in my life. But no matter how much I longed for it all—the wife, the kids, the chaos—I wasn’t the settling type.

I needed to feel things. And I hadn’t felt anything for anyone in a long time.

The wind picked up again, and I shuddered as an icy breeze whipped against my cheek. This was stupid. I could be sitting in my car, cranking the heat if they weren’t ready for us. I could thaw my hands and regain feeling in my frozen testicles. Just as I reached into my pocket for the keys, Daphne caught my eye and started to jog toward me. She slowed to walk again when the contents of one of her to-go cups sloshed over the rim.

She hissed and raised the cup to her face before licking her knuckles. It was fucking adorable.

“It’s not very good, but it’s hot.” She offered me one of the cups.

“For me?”

She laughed. “Who else?”

I took the cup and sipped. The cocoa was watery and nowhere near hot enough—it was never hot enough—but she’d thought of me, and that made it all the sweeter.

“So..." she huffed out a vapor cloud. “Something tells me you’ve never even lifted up the hood of that thing.” Daphne nodded to my car.

“If you’re trying to insult me, it’s not going to work. I admit I know nothing about cars—besides how to drive them.”

“How’d you choose the customizations? There are a lot of technical specs.”

“I clicked all the boxes.”

She smiled like she wanted me to kiss her. Or maybe I just wanted to kiss her.

“I should probably warn you. I don’t try to insult anyone, but it does sort of leak out of my pores. I’ll say something to make you cringe before the day’s over. Just watch. I have a talent for sticking my foot in my mouth and not even realizing it.”

“There’s no conceivable way that’s true.”

She shrugged. “Sadly. Spend an hour with me and you’ll be ready to choke me.”

“Right.” Only if she let me.

Her face was so vulnerable, so sincere. Like she had no idea what she’d just said—or that her words went straight to my cock, and all that hot blood didn’t feel particularly pleasant rushing into ice-cold, spongy tissue.

I made a mental note not to wear boxers and loose trousers next time I had to stand around in nineteen-degree temps.

Shit. These were feelings I wasn’t at all prepared for. Not today. Not out here in the weak morning light and the gray haze of the woods. Definitely not in situ, where human remains had been found.

I ripped my gaze away from where her teeth had been, once again, biting into the pillowy softness of her bottom lip. I exhaled and took my time about it.

Decca’s assistant. That made her a coworker of sorts. I probably shouldn’t be wondering what it would feel like if those teeth were biting into my lip instead. Even if the flirting and the feelings were sanctioned by her boss, and ours was only the most marginal of working relationships, it was still wrong. Right?

“You look cold,” I said unnecessarily.

“We’re getting an ice storm.” Her voice rose several notes in her excitement.

“You want to get in and warm up?”

“Really?” Her eyebrows shot up to her hairline. She bobbed up on her toes, then deflated again. “Ugh, no. I mean, yeah, I do. I’m dying to see the interior. But... I’m acclimated now. I don’t want to get all warm and toasty then have to get out again when they’re ready for us.”

“Here, let me..." I loosened the tight knot of my scarf and handed it to her.

Her brows pinched together in confusion.

“I thought it might—” I held the rim of the Styrofoam cup between my teeth, looped the scarf over her head, and wound it around her neck. “It might help a little.” My breath fluttered one of the tendrils of hair at her temple.

“But you don’t—”

“I’m warm enough.”

She bit her lip and reached up to adjust the fabric, her bare hand brushing my glove and sending fizzles of electricity straight to my solar plexus. “I can be really dense sometimes.” Her smile faded into something quieter. She was dropping her guard and trusting me to see something real about her. “Thanks, Chris. This might be the warmest thing I’m wearing.”

How long had it been since I’d felt anything like this? Had I ever?

For me, desire usually built over time, after months or even years of mutual respect that was earned working side-by-side. It had never felt this instantaneous.

But this was something more than desire.

I finished the rest of my cocoa and dropped the cup on the ground to retrieve later. She did the same.

“What got you interested in cars?” I popped the hood so she could take a look. She jumped into action, propping it open. Her face turned serious, analyzing the engine and hoses—or whatever was under there—the way I’d analyze an underdeveloped maxillary arch.

“What? Sorry, I got distracted by this beauty,” she said, searching for something in the engine. “Uh… my dad, at first. He made me learn how to change the oil, tires, brakes, spark plugs. He never drove anything fancy that required computer diagnostics or controls. They were all hoopties, so it was a lot easier to learn on them. When I was young, I thought him teaching me was all about bonding.” Her face had become a mask of indifference. “Then I realized we were just too poor to take our cars to a shop and it was all a ploy. But I ended up really liking engines. Her smile widened and her eyes danced. “And then I saw the Fast and the Furious. I was obsessed with your car as soon as I saw it. Your car in the movie, anyway.”

“The Fast and the Furious?” I adjusted my glasses, surprised they hadn’t frosted over.

“You’re kidding? You drive a movie car and don’t know it’s from a movie? That’s like driving an Aston Martin and asking who James Bond is?”

I was in big trouble if I found her this interesting this fast.

“Your car is actually from The Fate of the Furious; the 2016 model,” she flowed on, her head still under the hood. “But it was so sleek. It looked like driving it would feel like being inside a bullet shot from a gun. Is that what it’s like?”

“Uh, yeah. Kind of. Not that I get many opportunities to pull the trigger.”

“I’d give anything to drive your car. I didn’t get to work on a lot of German cars.”

“Work on?”

She gently dropped the hood and crossed her arms, warding off the cold. I did the same.

“I’m a mechanic. It’s how I put myself through undergrad. I was kind of a peon. Most of what I did was just lube tech stuff, and we mostly serviced domestic cars at my garage, but every so often we’d get something fun.”

God, this woman. “That’s... really cool.”

“Really?” She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t strike me as the type to be impressed by a blue-collar girl.”

“That’s a reductive way of referring to yourself.”

“Trust me, that’s not the way I think. It’s just what gets thrown in my face.”

“Competence should be celebrated, no matter what arena it’s displayed in. Besides, it’s...” I shook my head.

“It’s what?” Her eyes lit up with hope.

“Being good at something like that—it’s, ah...” I blew out an audible breath. Don’t say it, don’t say it. “Sexy as hell. A major turn-on.” Fuck.

She smiled wide. I hadn’t realized how close we’d been standing, or that I was still facing her, the tips of our shoes practically touching. I could pick out the striations of icy grays in her irises. “I actually had a race car bed when I was a kid.” We were so close, her vapor cloud of breath hit me in the chin. “It wasn’t one of those official plastic ones. It was painted wood. Blue, not red. My dad built it for me. Before he got… sick.”

“Maybe we can—”

“Finally!” Decca cut in. I hadn’t noticed her walking back. “They’re ready for us.”

“Hell yeah!” Daphne said. “I’m excited to see what this teeth guy does with the remains.” She bit her lip again, still staring at at my mouth.

Shit, this was big.

I straightened my spine and steeled my mind, preparing myself to enter the sacred space of a disinterment. This wasn’t the time to be thinking about my love life. I was here to perform my job.

I was good at my job.

The fact that I wanted to show Daphne just how good was inconsequential.