Chapter 38 #2
I finally got my license in 1999, and to this day still fly with Whit three or four times a year.
Piloting requires me to be present. I can’t think about anything else while I’m doing it.
Usually, I have my NASA friend Ken Dudley with me.
He’s also a chopper pilot. I figure with NASA and Whit on board I’m about as safe as anyone could be.
With each new Scarpetta story, I’ve always wanted to introduce my audience to aspects of forensics and crimefighting that are new and exciting.
The journalist in me needs to know what I’m writing about, and my mantra is to show up.
If you look, you never know what will find you.
In late July 1993, I visited the research facility the Body Farm for the first time.
My commercial flight to Knoxville, Tennessee, had an eventful start.
I’d clipped my mobile phone on my belt, and a worker on the ramp at Washington National Airport (as it was called then) thought I had a gun on my hip.
As I buckled up in my seat waiting for takeoff, two air marshals boarded and I could tell by their faces that something was wrong.
I sensed they were looking for someone. I decided a fugitive must be on the plane and I calculated what to do.
I would trip the person as he tried to resist. Maybe I could help catch the bad guy.
It was a terrifying moment when one of the marshals stopped next to my seat and flicked open the snap on his holster, his hand ready to draw down on me.
He told me to stand up slowly and let him see my hands. Then he looked disgusted, realizing it was a phone on my belt and not a gun.
“Sorry about the delay, folks,” the chief pilot said over the intercom. “One of the passengers was armed with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic phone.”
Everybody laughed except me. In Knoxville, my cab driver introduced himself as “Cowboy” and said he wrote songs and played the piano.
He dropped me off at the Hyatt, and that night I took another cab to Calhoun’s on the Tennessee River.
It was common for me to eat out alone, looking around, making notes about what I saw and heard.
One of the ways I learned to write dialogue was to eavesdrop.
I’d sit in a restaurant and write down verbatim what I overheard from the nearby tables.
People don’t talk in complete sentences.
They use non sequiturs and mangle words.
Snooping as a kid and working as a journalist were excellent training for fiction.
I learned to pay attention to what people really say. The best example of an author who does this masterfully is Ernest Hemingway. When I read his dialogue, I know he was a listener. I recommend to other writers that they carry a small notebook everywhere they go.
Taking pictures or recordings with a phone is easy and has utility.
I do it all the time on research trips. But writing down what I hear and see causes my brain to encode the information.
My attention can’t wander and the poet in me awakens.
Often, I don’t need to refer to my notes later.
I remember because I was paying attention.
My first night in Knoxville at the restaurant Calhoun’s, I sat at a table covered in red-checked cloth, faux Tiffany lamps glowing, antlers and deer heads on the walls, ceiling fans spinning.
A boxing match played on the TV over the bar as I feasted on barbecue, fried onions, biscuits drenched in butter, and Jack Daniel’s pie.
The next morning, I got a tour of the Knoxville Police Department, spending time with Art Bohanan, the skeleton in his office missing a few pieces.
A senior forensic investigator, Art had invented a superglue cabinet he called a Cyanoacrylate Blowing Contraption.
In my novel The Body Farm, the character Dr. Shade was inspired by him.
Art explained that fuming with superglue “fixes” latent fingerprints.
He emphasized the importance of using a vapor that doesn’t overcoat the ridge detail.
He demonstrated that his contraption could lift prints from nylon running shorts or a windbreaker.
Once he superglued the outline of a hand left on the ankle of a murdered sex worker found in a dumpster.
That afternoon, he drove me to the Body Farm behind the University of Tennessee’s hospital.
Inside the fifteen-foot-high unpainted wooden fence were two wooded acres scattered with decomposing bodies donated to forensic science.
The point of studying decomposition is to learn more about determining time of death.
We were met by Bill Bass, the anthropologist who started the place.
It was a hot muggy day, and I could smell the stench as we got out of the car, putting on gloves but no other PPE, including surgical masks.
I braced myself for what I knew would be most unpleasant.
I can’t stand the foul odors of decomposition and burned flesh.
It was an incredible act of will when I’d scribe for Marcella while she autopsied a floater, or someone charred in a fire.
One morning her patient was a man who’d fallen off his boat in the James River while fishing with his young son.
The body wasn’t recovered for a week during hot weather.
The stench bristled in the air as Marcella and I descended in the elevator.
“Sometimes I don’t know how you do this,” I said to her.
“I try to envision people the way they were before ending up here,” she answered.
The dead man was a horror, but as she autopsied him and I scribed, I imagined him vital and smiling. I saw the sun shining on the river as he fished with his little boy. Marcella determined that the man didn’t drown. He’d had a heart attack and that’s why he went overboard.
As I prepared to tour the Body Farm, I remembered the purpose of what I was about to see.
The dead volunteers once had lives, careers, hopes, dreams, loved ones.
They selflessly had wanted to help further science.
Bill Bass unlocked the fence’s front gate, and we stepped inside what looked like a battlefield, the bodies placed about in various poses and situations, some clothed, some not, cattle tags in the ears.
One body was behind the wheel of a rusting white Cadillac, another in an open body bag, the ribs showing.
Some bodies were covered by sheets. A body bound with nylon rope was in a hole filled with water.
Tiny yellow flags marked skeletonized remains that needed to be collected and cleaned for examination.
Old bones were almost indistinguishable from the earth.
They look like sticks, stones, and debris as the body is reclaimed by nature.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Amputated limbs from the hospital were strewn about.
A man who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer was on top of the dirt.
He’d filled out the paperwork to donate his body before putting a gun to his head.
I could tell that an elderly man hadn’t been out there long.
He was dressed in maroon polyester pants, a white shirt, a skinny silk maroon tie, and black socks.
I was told he’d overdosed on drugs in a hotel room.
I squatted to get a good look, noticing he had no teeth.
Surveying the muck around me, I found his dentures bright pink, the stainless steel shining.
A body sled leaned against the fence, gurneys parked here and there.
Near the gate was a mailbox. When the red flag was up, it meant a message was waiting.
That was how the anthropologists left notes for each other.
Cameras were mounted in trees, and at night they recorded fat opossums and rats helping themselves.
I noticed buzzard feathers everywhere. Leathery skin and exposed bones teemed with maggots that are tattletales.
They can tell us when the decedent died and if the person was on drugs.
More than forty decomposing bodies were there that day, and a few had sutured incisions from autopsies. Some had been embalmed and others not.
Bill Bass told me about a Civil War soldier who still “had red meat” when his body was found.
“I thought he’d been dead only a year,” Bill said. “I missed it by a hundred and twelve years. That’s what got all this started. They say you should learn from your mistakes.”
We walked around, many of the dead mostly skeletonized, their jaws gaping as if startled.
I told Art and Bill that I’d like to fund an experiment if they were willing.
I wanted an unclothed body to be placed on a concrete slab that was enclosed in a plyboard structure and left for a month at this time of year.
“I’d like to see what happens if you place a quarter under the buttocks,” I explained.
I was curious whether the coin would leave a pattern on the skin and suspected it might.
Art and Bill agreed it was an interesting question and told me to come back at the appointed time to see the results.
A month later I returned, and we entered the plyboard enclosure.
They turned the body over for the unveiling.
The quarter had oxidized unevenly, leaving a pattern on the desiccated skin.
That was the basis for evidence relating to the young girl murdered in my novel The Body Farm.
In the story, Scarpetta notices a strangely shaped discoloration on the victim’s skin and matches it to a quarter found in the suspect’s basement.
What Bill, Art, and I saw was the incomplete outline of the quarter and the eagle on the back of it.
Had my experiment failed, I wouldn’t have used that scenario in my plot.
I can’t bring myself to write about something I know isn’t true.
Whatever I say must be within the realm of possibility.
If I don’t believe it, neither will my audience.
My mission at the Body Farm had been successful.
I was ecstatic despite my surroundings. It was fall now, the afternoon overcast, the Tennessee River the brownish color of tarnished copper.
UT’s Vols were playing the South Carolina Gamecocks, and the home team football fans were decked out in blaze orange.
Art, Bill, and I went to Calhoun’s for lunch. Unfazed by our morning at the Farm, they chowed down on baby back ribs served with white rice. I didn’t eat a thing.