One last look over the plain. So breathtakingly beautiful, so filled with strife. Then, reluctantly, I allowed Ryan to lead me from the wall.
Adieu, Israel. I wish you peace.
FROM THE FORENSIC FILES OF DR. KATHY REICHS
Most Temperance Brennan novels spring from a mixture of my real forensic cases. I start with a child’s skeleton unearthed in a farmer’s field, stir in a body part found in a high-rise basement, then blend. This story began with yellowed press clippings, a black-and-white glossy, a lot of bad photocopies, and a very strange tale.
Dr. James Tabor, a colleague at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, wears two hats. He is both a biblical archaeologist and scholar, and an expert on modern apocalyptic religious movements. Wearing the latter headgear, he counseled the FBI on the Branch Davidian conflict at Waco, Texas, and advised me during the writing of Death du Jour. Wearing the hat of biblical scholar, he has worked on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and dug at Qumran, where they were found, excavated at the “John the Baptist” cave west of Jerusalem, and carried out investigative research on Masada, Israel’s most famous archaeological site.
Monday Mourning was behind me in the autumn of 2003, and I was beginning the mental triage that would eventually culminate in my eighth book. Tabor phoned one morning, and spoke of looted tombs and purloined skeletons. He was writing a nonfiction work, The Jesus Dynasty, in which he intended to present the historical facts about Jesus’ family, based on the latest archaeological research and discoveries. Would I like to hear the story for a possible Temperance Brennan plot?
You betcha! I’d started my career as an archaeologist. So had Tempe. Why not involve the old gal in archaeological intrigue? I agreed to meet and, over lunch, Tabor showed me pictures and clippings, and outlined the following.
From 1963 to 1965, Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin and an international team of volunteers excavate the Israeli site of Masada. Twenty-five skeletons and a fetus are found in a cave below the casement wall at the southern tip of the summit. Yadin does not discuss these bones with the press, though he does discuss three skeletons found by his team in the main complex of ruins at the northern end of the summit. Nor are the cave bones documented by the project’s physical anthropologist, Nicu Haas. Save for mention in an appendix, neither the bones nor the contents of the cave are described in the six volumes of the final Masada excavation publication.
Thirty years pass. A photo surfaces of a single intact skeleton lying in the same cave from which Yadin’s team excavated the twenty-five jumbled individuals. Yadin never described the intact skeleton in published reports or interviews.
Intrigued, Tabor locates transcripts of staff briefings held in lieu of field notes during the Masada excavation. Pages covering the period of the discovery and clearing of the skeleton cave are missing.
Tabor tracks down Nicu Haas’s original handwritten notes. It is clear from his bone inventory that Haas has never seen the complete, articulated skeleton.
Tabor researches newspaper articles dating to the period of the Masada excavation. He finds a statement made by Yadin to a journalist in the late sixties that it is not his job to request carbon-14 testing. Tabor checks the journal Radiocarbon, and finds that, during the sixties, Yadin did, in fact, send samples from other sites for carbon-14 testing.
I looked at the small black-and-white photo of that single skeleton. I looked at photocopies of Haas’s notes and of the transcribed staff sessions. I was hooked. But Tabor wasn’t finished.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2000. While hiking the Hinnom Valley with students, Tabor and Israeli archaeologist Shimon Gibson stumble upon a freshly robbed tomb. They excavate and discover smashed ossuaries and skeletal remains wrapped in a burial shroud. Carbon-14 testing dates the shroud to the first century. DNA sequencing shows a familial relationship among individuals buried in the tomb. Ossuary fragments bear the names Mary and Salome.
Fast-forward again. October 2002. An antiquities collector announces the existence of a first-century ossuary inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The collector states that the box was purchased in 1978, but Tabor has found circumstantial evidence suggesting it was taken during the looting of his shroud tomb two years earlier. The construction matches. The decoration matches. Rumors have surfaced in Jerusalem.
Tabor considers it a serious possibility that he has stumbled onto the Jesus family tomb. In 2003, he requests bone from the “James ossuary” for mitochondrial DNA testing. He wants to compare sequencing from that bone with sequencing yielded by his “shroud” tomb lineage. The director of the Israel Antiquities Authority denies his request, explaining that the case is under investigation and in the hands of the police.
Mysterious skeletons. Missing pages. Looted tombs. The Jesus family crypt? Hot diggety! I would return to my archaeological roots and send Tempe to the Holy Land! My mind was already weaving plots as I studied Tabor’s photos and maps. But how to bring Ryan and the others along?
At times, coroners and medical examiners must order autopsies despite the protest of family members. Occasionally objections spring from religious convictions.
During my tenure at the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, a number of autopsies have been performed on ultra-Orthodox Jews who have been the victims of violence. Protocol has been modified, to the extent possible, to accommodate religious concerns.
That was it! I would start with a homicide in Montreal, then send Tempe into Jerusalem and the West Bank.
For a year I pored over transcripts, catalogs, and newspaper articles. I studied photos of ossuaries and the Masada excavation. I read books on Roman Palestine and the historical Jesus. With Tabor, I flew to Israel and visited museums, digs, tombs, and historic sites. I talked to antiquities dealers, archaeologists, scientists, and members of the Israel National Police.
And, as they say, the rest is history.
For a full discussion of the facts behind Cross Bones, watch for James Tabor’s upcoming book, The Jesus Dynasty (www.jesusdynasty.com).
Pocket Books Proudly Presents
BREAK
NO BONES
KATHY REICHS
Available Now
Turn the page for a preview of Break No Bones . . . .
Chapter 1
NEVER FAILS. YOU’RE WRAPPING UP THE OPERATION when someone blunders onto the season’s big score.
OK. I’m exaggerating. But it’s damn close to what happened. And the upshot was far more disturbing than any last-minute discovery of a potsherd or hearth. The episode ended with the identification of three dead bodies and the consignment of several live bodies to the slammer.
It was May 18, the second-to-the-last day of the archaeological field school. I had twenty students digging a site on Dewees, a barrier island north of Charleston, South Carolina.
I also had a journalist. With the IQ of plankton.
“Sixteen bodies?” Plankton pulled a spiral notebook as his brain strobed visions of Dahmer and Bundy. “Vics ID’d?”
“The graves are prehistoric.”
Two eyes rolled up, narrowed under puffy lids. “Old Indians?”
“Native Americans.”
“They got me covering dead Indians?” No political correctness prize for this guy.
“They?” Icy.
“The Moultrie News.”
I floated a brow.
“East Cooper community paper.”
Charleston, as Rhett told Scarlett, is a city marked by the genial grace of days gone by. Its heart is the Peninsula, a district of antebellum homes, cobbled streets, and outdoor markets bounded by the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Charlestonians define their turf by these waterways. Neighborhoods are referred to as West Ashley or East Cooper, the latter including Mount Pleasant, and three islands, Sullivans, the Isle of Palms, and Dewees. I assumed Plankton’s paper covered that beat.
“And you are?” I asked.
“Homer Winborne.”
With his
five o’clock shadow and fast-food paunch, the guy looked more like Homer Simpson.
“We’re busy here, Mr. Winborne.”
Winborne ignored that. “Isn’t it illegal?”
“We have a permit. The island’s being developed, and this little patch is slated for home sites.”
“Why bother?” Sweat soaked Winborne’s hairline. When he reached for a hanky, I noticed a tick cruising his collar.
“I’m an anthropologist on faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. My students and I are here at the request of the state.”
Though the first bit was true, the back end was a stretch. Actually, it happened like this.
UNCC’s New World archaeologist normally conducted a student excavation during the short presummer term each May. The lady had, in late March of this year, announced her acceptance of a position at Purdue. Busy sending out résumés throughout the winter, she’d ignored the field school. Adios. No instructor. No site.
Though my specialty is forensics, and I now work with the dead sent to coroners and medical examiners, my graduate training and early professional career were devoted to the not-so-recently deceased. For my doctoral research I’d examined thousands of prehistoric skeletons recovered from North American burial mounds.
The field school is one of the anthropology department’s most popular courses, and, as usual, was enrolled to capacity. My colleague’s unexpected departure had sent the chair into a panic. He pleaded that I take over. The students were counting on it! A return to my roots! Two weeks at the beach! Extra pay! I thought he was going to throw in a Buick.
I’d suggested Dan Jaffer, a bioarchaeologist and my professional counterpart with the medical examiner/coroner system in the great Palmetto State to our south. Good idea, bad timing. Jaffer was on his way to Iraq.
I’d contacted Jaffer and he’d suggested Dewees as an excavation possibility. A burial ground was slated for destruction, and he’d been trying to forestall the bulldozers until the site’s significance could be ascertained. Predictably, the developer was ignoring his requests.
I’d contacted the Office of the State Archaeologist, and on Dan’s recommendation they’d accepted my offer to dig some test trenches, thereby greatly displeasing the developer.
And here I was. With twenty undergraduates. And on our penultimate day, plankton-brain.
My patience was fraying like an overused rope.
“Name?” Winborne might have been asking about grass seed.
I fought back the urge to walk away. Give him what he wants, I told myself. He’ll leave. Or, with luck, die from the heat.
“Temperance Brennan.”
“Temperance?” Amused.
“Yes, Homer.”
Winborne shrugged. “Don’t hear that name so much.”
“I’m called Tempe.”
“Like the town in Utah.”
“Arizona.”
“Right. What kind of Indians?”
“Probably Sewee.”
“How’d you know stuff was here?”
“Through a colleague at USC–Columbia.”
“How’d he know?”
“He spotted small mounds while doing a survey after the news of an impending development was announced.”
Winborne took a moment to make notes in his spiral. Or maybe he was buying time to come up with his idea of an insightful question. In the distance I could hear student chatter and the clatter of buckets. Overhead, a gull cawed and another answered.
“Mounds?” No one was going to short-list this guy for a Pulitzer.
“Following closure of the graves, shells and sand were heaped on top.”
“What’s the point in digging them up?”
That was it. I hit the little cretin with the interview terminator. Jargon.
“Burial customs aren’t well known for aboriginal southeastern coastal populations, and this site could substantiate or refute ethnohistoric accounts. Many anthropologists believe the Sewee were part of the Cusabo group. According to some sources, Cusabo funerary practices involved defleshing of the corpse, then placement of the bones in bundles or boxes. Others describe the scaffolding of bodies to allow decomposition prior to burial in common graves.”
“Holy crap. That’s gross.”
“More so than draining the blood from a corpse and replacing it with chemical preservatives, injecting waxes and perfumes, and applying makeup to simulate life, then interring it in an airtight coffin or vault to forestall decay?”
Winborne looked at me as though I’d spoken Croatian. “Who does that?”
“We do.”
“So what are you finding?”
“Bones.”
“Just bones?” The tick was now circumnavigating Winborne’s neck. Give a heads-up? Screw it. The guy was irritating as hell.
“Wood fragments.”
“What good are old bones?”
I launched into my standard cop and coroner spiel. “The skeleton paints a story of an individual. Sex. Age. Height. Ancestry. In certain cases, medical history or manner of death.” Pointedly glancing at my watch, I followed with my archaeological shtick. “Ancient bones are a source of information on extinct populations. How people lived, how they died, what they ate, what diseases they suffered—”
Winborne’s gaze drifted over my shoulder. I turned.
Topher Burgess was approaching, various forms of organic and inorganic debris pasted to his sunburned torso. Short and plump, with knit cap, wire rims, and lamb-chop sideburns, the kid reminded me of an undergraduate Smee.
“Odd one intruding into three-east.”
I waited, but Topher didn’t elaborate. Not surprising. On exams, Topher’s essays often consisted of single-sentence answers. Illustrated.
“Odd?” I coaxed.
“It’s articulated.”
A complete sentence. Gratifying, but not enlightening. I curled my fingers in a “give me more” gesture.
“We’re thinking intrusive.” Topher shifted his weight from one bare foot to the other. It was a lot to shift.
“I’ll check it out in a minute.”
Topher nodded, turned, and trudged back to the excavation.
“What’s that mean, ‘articulated’?” The tick had reached Winborne’s ear and appeared to be considering alternate routes.
“In proper anatomical alignment. It’s uncommon with secondary burials. The bones are usually jumbled, sometimes in clumps. Occasionally, one or two skeletons will be articulated.”
“Why?”
“Could be a lot of reasons. Maybe someone died immediately before closure of a common grave. Maybe the group was moving on, didn’t have time to wait out decomposition.”
A full ten seconds of scribbling, during which the tick moved out of sight.
“‘Intrusive.’ What’s that mean?”
“A body was placed in the pit later. Would you like a closer look?”
“It’s what I’m living for.” Putting hankie to forehead, Winborne sighed a dramatic stage sigh.
I crumbled. “There’s a tick in your collar.”
Winborne moved faster than seemed possible for a man of his bulk, yanking his collar, doubling over, and batting his neck in one jerk. The tick flew to the sand and righted itself, apparently used to rejection.
I set off, skirting clusters of sea oats, their tasseled heads motionless in the heavy air. Only May, and already the mercury was hitting ninety. Though I love the Low Country, I was glad I wouldn’t be digging here into the summer.
I moved quickly, knowing Winborne couldn’t keep up. Mean? Yes. But time was short. I had none to waste on a dullard reporter.
And I was conscience-clear on the tick.
Topher’s boom box pounded out some tune that I didn’t recognize by a group whose name I didn’t know and wouldn’t remember if told. I’d have preferred seabirds and surf, though today’s selections were better than the heavy metal the kids usually blasted.
Waiting for Winborne, I scanned
the excavation. Two test trenches had already been dug and refilled. The first had yielded nothing but sterile soil. The second had produced human bone, early vindication of Jaffer’s suspicions.
Three other trenches were still open. At each, students worked trowels, hauled buckets, and sifted earth through mesh screens resting on sawhorse supports.
Topher was shooting pictures at the easternmost trench. The rest of his team sat cross-legged, eyeing the focus of his interest.
Winborne joined me on the cusp between panting and gasping. Mopping his forehead, he fought for breath.
“Hot day,” I said.
Winborne nodded, his face the color of raspberry sherbet.
“You OK?”
“Peachy.”
I was moving toward Topher when Winborne’s voice stopped me.
“We got company.”
Turning, I saw a man in a pink polo shirt and khaki pants hurrying across, not around, the dunes. He was small, almost child-size, with silver-gray hair buzzed to the scalp. I recognized him instantly. Richard L. “Dickie” Dupree, entrepreneur, developer, and all-around sleaze.
Dupree was accompanied by a basset hound whose tongue and belly barely cleared the ground.
First a journalist, now Dupree. This day was definitely heading for the scrap heap.
Ignoring Winborne, Dupree bore down on me with the determined self-righteousness of a Taliban mullah. The basset hung back to squirt a clump of sea oats.
We’ve all heard of personal space, that blanket of nothing we need between ourselves and others. For me, the zone is eighteen inches. Break in, I get edgy.
Some strangers crowd up close because of vision or hearing. Others, because of differing cultural mores. Not Dickie. Dupree believed nearness lent him greater force of expression.
Stopping a foot from my face, Dupree crossed his arms and squinted up into my eyes.
“Y’all be finishing tomorrow, I expect?” More statement than question.