Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella Read Online Free PDF Page A

screeched open. “Shoo- eee ,” came Art’s folksy drawl. “Either there’s a really ripe one in here, or you are wearing the world’s nastiest aftershave.”
    I grinned. “I don’t particularly care for it, but it’s my wife’s favorite, and I do try to please her.”
    “She’s one lucky woman.”
    “Thanks for coming. You’re my only hope for fingerprints. Even the TBI agent threw up his hands.”
    “But why was a TBI agent eatin’ his hands in the first place?”
    “Man,” I groaned, “and people say my puns are bad.” I folded back the flap of the body bag to expose both arms, then lifted the left one by the wrist, palm up. “What do you think—can you get usable prints?”
    “I believe so,” he said, leaning down to study the fingers. “Can you give me a hand?”
    “Sure. How can I help?”
    “Give. Me. A hand.” I stared at him, puzzled; he stared back with an expression of weary patience on his face, as if waiting for a slow-witted child to grasp the simplest of instructions. Finally he rolled his eyes and, with the blade of his hand, pantomimed a sawing motion in the air above the woman’s wrist. “Give me a hand. Be easier to work with if I can take it back to the KPD lab with me.”
    “Ah” was the only syllable that came out of my startled mouth. This was a first for me, but Art was the expert, so—taking a scalpel from a tray of tools on the long counter, I cut through the tendons and ligaments of the left wrist, taking care not to nick any of the bones. I wrapped the severed hand in a paper towel and then zipped it into a plastic bag.
    Art tucked it into the outside pocket of his jacket as casually as he might have deposited his car keys or a candy bar. “I’ll let you know what I get,” he said. “You about to start cooking?” I nodded. “Want me to help you get her into the pot?” I shook my head. “Darn,” he said. “You never let me have any fun.” With that and a wave, he was gone.
    Ten minutes later so was I, leaving the corpse curled up in the kettle and the thermostat set at 150 degrees.
    “G ag,” squawked Kathleen when I dashed up the basement stairs and into the kitchen. “You reek .” I headed toward her, my arms opened wide, as if to enfold her in a bear hug. “ Away , vile one,” she squealed, swatting at me with a dish towel. “Go back downstairs and take a long shower. Then take another one.” I nodded obediently. “But first, go out to the garage and take off those clothes.”
    “Oh, baby,” I said. “I do love it when you tell me to take off my clothes.”
    “In your dreams, stinky. Put them in the washing machine on hot .” As I started down the stairs, I heard her calling after me, “The old machine. Don’t you dare put those in the new one.”

 
    6
    December 24
    I CHECKED A THIRD time, and for the third time I came up one bone short. Actually, technically, I was forty-five bones short; the adult human skeleton contains 206 bones, and the skeleton I’d laid out on the counter had just 161. But the feet and ankles accounted for forty-four of the absent forty-five bones, so I’d already mentally subtracted those from the total. The unexpectedly missing bone—the maddeningly missing bone—was the one I’d been banking on to tell me how the woman was killed. “Where the hell’s the hyoid?” I muttered.
    As soon as I’d seen the woman’s body in the woods, I suspected severe trauma to her neck—a slashed throat or, more likely, strangulation. When blowflies find a corpse, they seek moist orifices in which to lay their eggs: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, genitals, and, above all, bloody wounds. In this case, the soft tissues of the woman’s neck had been completely consumed, exposing the cervical vertebrae. That told me her neck was particularly attractive to the flies—evidence that it had been bleeding or badly bruised. I’d seen no blood on the ground—and no knife marks on the vertebrae as I’d fished them from the steam