The Skeleton's knee

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“I have a body for you.”

The voice on the line-smooth, cultured, and completely serious-was Beverly Hillstrom’s, Vermont’s chief medical examiner.

I cradled the phone between my shoulder and cheek and poured several packets of sugar into my coffee. Unlike the larger urban charnel houses of New York or Los Angeles, the Brattleboro, Vermont, Police Department did not export corpses to the ME’s office for autopsy every day of the week, nor even once every six months. When we did, it was usually an “unwitnessed death”-an elderly person who’d died alone in bed, and for whose demise the law required an explanation.

Homicides, the only other professional reason for the ME and I to talk, were rarer still, although recently we had given those numbers a boost during a particularly bloodthirsty case. But that was now history; to my knowledge, we hadn’t shipped a body from either category since.

I was, therefore, totally baffled. “It came from here?”

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