The Bone Thief

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The woman’s face blurred and smeared as I pivoted the camera on the tripod. Then her familiar, photogenic features — features I’d seen a thousand times on my television screen — whirred into autofocused perfection: wavy honey-blond hair, indigo eyes, a model’s cheekbones, polar-white teeth outlined by Angelina Jolie lips. Knoxville news anchor Maureen Gershwin was forty-two — middle-aged, technically speaking — but she was a low-mileage, high-dollar version of forty-two. She was beautiful and vibrant and healthy-looking, except for one minor detail: Maureen Gershwin was dead.

“Pardon my cynicism,” said Miranda, “but I can’t help noticing that out of dozens of corpses to choose from, you’ve picked one worthy of Victoria’s Secret for your little photo shoot.”

Miranda Lovelady was both my graduate assistant and my self-appointed social conscience. A smart, seasoned Ph.D. candidate in forensic anthropology, Miranda was a young woman of liberal opinions, liberally dispensed. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but five years of collegiality and camaraderie tempered our occasional personal differences. One of Miranda’s duties was running the Anthropology Department’s osteology laboratory, the bone lab tucked deep beneath the grandstands of the University of Tennessee’s football stadium. Miranda also helped coordinate the body-donation program at the Anthropology Research Facility—“the Body Farm,” UT’s three-acre plot devoted to the study of human decomposition.

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