The Bone Yard by Jefferson Bass Read Free Book Online Page A

property, you don’t,” he said. “If you got sick and sued, it could ruin me. My family, too.”
    “No offense,” I said, “but it seems to me that even the dumbest lawyer in Tallahassee could create reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind about the source of any nasty bugs Angie and I might happen to come down with.”
    Walsh smiled, but he shook his head. “Maybe so, but I don’t have enough time or money to take that chance.”
    “How about this,” I suggested. “How about if Angie and I sign liability releases, in blood, promising not to hold you or your company liable for anything that might happen?”
    “It’s not just that,” he said. “If we go opening up biohazard bags, our neighbors—businesses and residents right around here—are going to smell it and get upset. I can’t afford to risk the ill will.”
    “I understand your concern,” I said. “The Body Farm is only a few hundred yards downhill from a condominium development in Knoxville—fancy condos up on a bluff over the river—and on hot summer days when the air is just sitting still, our neighbors sometimes aren’t too happy.” I gestured out the window behind me. “But look out there. You really think anybody’s going to catch a whiff of anything right now?”
    He looked; a storm was blowing up, and across Madison Street trees were swaying in the wind—a wind that would have whisked away the odor from a hundred corpses, let alone from some bloody cushions and carpeting.
    Ten minutes later, he swiveled in his chair and took two hastily drafted liability releases from a computer printer on a table behind him. Angie and I glanced at what we were promising not to hold the company liable for: illness or injury, emotional trauma, even old age and eventual death, or so it seemed. We scrawled our signatures, and Walsh unlocked the chain-link gate so we could pull into the back lot alongside the biohazard storage trailers.
    I’d somehow imagined that the cleanup crew had hauled away the sofa and flooring materials intact, more or less, except for the damage from the gun blast. When I saw what we’d be sifting through—how thoroughly everything had been disassembled—my heart sank. The frame of the sleeper sofa had been stripped down to the bare metal of the folding mechanism, and all the porous materials—the heavy batting of the cushions and the mattress, the blood-soaked carpeting, the rubber carpet pad, and the waferboard subflooring—had been cut apart and sealed into plastic biohazard bags inside cardboard boxes measuring two feet square. Before we could search the scene, we’d have to reconstruct it.
    On our way over, Angie and I had made a quick stop at Home Depot to procure the makings of a bare-bones crime-scene kit, since she wasn’t allowed to use FDLE resources for an outside case. We’d bought Tyvek painter’s coveralls; rubber gloves; dust masks; curved needle-nose pliers; wooden dowel rods; tape measures and yardsticks; quarter-inch wire screening; a staple gun; and a large plastic tarp. After suiting up, Angie and I spread the tarp on the concrete floor of the warehouse, then began opening boxes and reassembling the scene, like some bloody, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. We started with the four pieces of waferboard that had been cut and pried from the floor joists. Pieced back together, the chunks of subflooring formed a roughly thirty-inch square, with a bloody six-inch hole at its center, and with assorted drips and runs at irregular intervals around it. Next we unpacked the padding and carpet and put those in position; they, too, had been cut, rather than folded, to fit into the boxes. Then we set the sofa frame in place, using a wooden dowel to center the holes one atop the other. Next, unfolding the bed’s metal frame, we pieced the cut mattress back together and refolded it, and finally wedged the sections of cushions into position. Once everything was in place and we’d rechecked and adjusted the alignment