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

programmed,” I deadpanned. “It puts VIP callers straight through to the boss. What can I do for you, Sheriff?”
    “We got another live one for you, Doc. I mean, another dead one.” He chuckled at the joke, one I’d heard a hundred times in a decade of forensic fieldwork. “Some fella was up on Frozen Head Mountain yesterday, fossil hunting—that’s what he says, leastwise—and he found some bones at a ol’ strip mine up there.”
    I felt a familiar surge of adrenaline—it happened every time a new forensic case came in—and I was glad I’d turned back to answer the phone. “Are the bones still where he found them?”
    “Still there. I reckon he knew better’n to mess with ’em—that, or he didn’t want to stink up his jeep. And you’ve got me and my deputies trained to leave things alone till you show up and do your thing.”
    “I wish my students paid me as much mind, Sheriff. Have you seen the bones? You sure they’re human?”
    “I ain’t seen ’em myself. They’re kindly hard to get to. But my chief deputy seen ’em yesterday evening. Him and Meffert—you remember Meffert? TBI agent?—both says it’s human. Small, maybe a woman or a kid, but human for sure.”
    “Meffert? You mean Bubba Hardknot?” Just saying the man’s name—his two names, rather—made me smile. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent assigned to Morgan County had a mouthful of a name—Wellington Harrison Meffert II—that made him sound like a member of Parliament. His nickname, on the other hand—“Bubba Hardknot”—sounded like something from a hillbilly comic strip. The names spanned a wide spectrum, and Meffert himself seemed to, also: I’d found him to be intelligent and quick-witted, but affable and respectful among good old boys like Sheriff Cotterell. “Bubba’s a good man,” I said. “If he says it’s human, I reckon it is.”
    “Me and Bubba, we figured there weren’t no point calling you out last night,” Cotterell drawled on. “Tough to find your way up that mountain in the damn daylight, let alone pitch dark. Besides, whoever it is, they ain’t any deader today’n what they was last night.”
    “Good point, Sheriff.” I smiled, tucking away his observation for my own possible future use. “Couldn’t’ve said it better myself.” I checked my watch. “It’s eight fifteen now. How’s about we—my assistant and I—meet you at the courthouse around nine forty-five?”
    “Bubba and me’ll be right here waitin’, Doc. ’Preciate you.”
    T yler Wainwright, my graduate student, was deep in thought—figuratively and subterraneanly deep—and didn’t even glance up when I burst through the basement door and into the bone lab.
    Most of the Anthropology Department’s quarters—our classrooms, faculty offices, and graduate-student cubbyholes—were strung along one side of a long, curving hallway, which ran beneath the grandstands of Neyland Stadium, the University of Tennessee’s massive temple to Southeastern Conference football. The osteology laboratory lay two flights below, deep beneath the stadium’s lowest stands. The department’s running joke was that if Anthropology was housed in the stadium’s bowels, the bone lab was in the descending colon. The lab’s left side—where a row of windows was tucked just above a retaining wall, offering a scenic view of steel girders and concrete footers—was occupied by rows of gray, government-surplus metal tables, their tops cluttered with trays of bones. A dozen gooseneck magnifying lamps peered down at the bones, their saucer-sized lenses encircled by halo-sized fluorescent tubes. The lab’s cavelike right side was crammed with shelving units—row upon row of racks marching back into the sloping darkness, laden with thousands of cardboard boxes, containing nearly a million bones. The skeletons were those of Arikara Indians who had lived and died two centuries before; my students and I had rescued them from rising river