Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella by Jefferson Bass

you will be cuffed and transported to arraignment in a United States criminal court. Make your choice, and make it fast. The man in that jail is not an innocent man, but he didn’t kill that woman. Anybody wants to go to prison for trying to lynch him, step right up—your future beckons.”
    The crowd had fallen back, but it had not scattered. Meffert made a show of checking his watch. “Y’all got one minute,” he called, then added, as if it were an afterthought, “Now, I don’t know from personal experience, but I hear there’s a lot of big black men in federal prison be glad to add a little white meat to their diet, if you catch my drift. Variety bein’ the spice of life and all. Who wants to be first in line for that? Step right up, step right up, you cowardly sons of bitches. I’ll drive you there myself. I’ll even hand you the soap and point you toward the showers. Come on, by God!”
    As his challenge hung in the air, the flaming cross flickered and went dark, the fire went out of the mob’s eyes, and the men slunk away, by twos and threes and tens, their tails tucked between their legs.
    When the square stood empty—except for the law enforcement officers and the cuffed men and the undercover agent who’d pointed out the ringleaders—Meffert turned to Cotterell and me. “Well that was fun,” he said, shaking his head. “Jim, you interested in running for sheriff again? I’m thinking you might win this time around.”
    “I’ll give it some thought,” muttered Cotterell. “First, though, I got to go change my britches.”
    Meffert smiled, then clapped me on the shoulder. “Welcome to the Volunteer State, Doc. How you likin’ it so far?”
    I stared at him, then heard myself chuckle. Within moments the three of us were howling with laughter—laughter of relief and disbelief and, above all, gratitude for our unlikely deliverance—there on the courthouse steps.

 
    Murder is as old as the human species, but the forensic work of the Body Farm is a modern weapon in the war on crime. Back in 1992, Dr. Bill Brockton—the promising young chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee—wages a baffling, deadly battle of wits with a sadistic serial killer, one who seems to be circling ever closer to Brockton himself. In the next Body Farm novel, Brockton finds his lifelong research mission . . . but risks losing everything he holds dear.
    Enjoy a sneak preview of
    CUT TO THE BONE
    Available September 2013
    From William Morrow
    An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

 
    Prologue
    SOME WOUNDS HEAL QUICKLY, the scars vanishing or at least fading to thin white lines over the years. Some assaults are too grave, though; some things can never be set right, never be made whole or healthy again, no matter how many seasons pass.
    In this regard, wounded mountains are like wounded beings. Cut them deeply—slice off their tops or carve open their flanks—and the disfigurement is beyond healing.
    So it was with Frozen Head Mountain, in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. In the early 1960s, Frozen Head’s northern slope—thickly forested with hardwoods and hemlocks—was blasted and bulldozed away by wildcat strip miners to expose a thick vein of soft, sulfurous coal. Geologists called it the Big Mary vein, and for three years, Big Mary was illegally carved up, carted away, and fed into the insatiable maw of Bull Run Steam Plant, forty mountainous miles south. Then Big Mary’s vein ran dry, and the miners and their machines—their dredges and draglines and stubby, hulking haul trucks—departed as abruptly as they’d appeared.
    They left behind a mutilated mountainside, naked and exposed, its rocky bones battered by the sun and the rain, the heat and the cold. After every rain, a witch’s brew of acids and heavy metals seeped from the ravaged slope, blighting the soil and streams in its path.
    And yet; and yet. Nature is persistent and insistent. Years