Flesh and Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  My house was in Sequoyah Hills, but it was not of Sequoyah Hills, to borrow a prepositional distinction Jesus once made to his followers about their relationship to the world. I had an archetypally common ranch house—an extra-ordinary house, I sometimes called it—which shared a shady circle with a half dozen other ranchers. The only remarkable thing about them was the way they were surrounded by hundreds of mansions. Whenever things got dangerously ostentatious in the neighborhood—a fancy symphony party or political fund-raiser at the Versailles-like palace around the corner, attended by glittering people in formal wear—it comforted me to imagine our modest homes as pioneer wagons, circled for self-protection. If our protective circle were ever breached, it probably wouldn’t take long before every ranch house on the street got torn down and replaced with some stucco-slathered behemoth three or four times as big, crowding its property lines and its equally steroidal neighbors. Not that I was bitter or anything.

  Plopping the steaks on a plate, I sprinkled both sides with salt and pepper, rubbing the seasonings in, then dashed some Worcestershire sauce on top to add a little zing.

  Jess nodded approvingly. “You gonna put some sizzle in that steak?”

  “Gonna try.”

  “How you cooking them?”

  “I’m a guy; on the grill, of course.”

  “Gas or charcoal?”

  “Be a waste of a good steak to cook it over gas,” I said.

  “Indeed,” she said. “Gas is great for a crematorium, but a steak just cries out for the extra flavor of those charcoal carcinogens.”

  “You do have an eye for the tarnished lining. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  She looked down at her drink. “Ouch. Actually, I’ve been told that’s one of my special talents,” she said. She looked up again, and I could see hurt in her eyes.

  “I was just joking,” I said. “Who said it that wasn’t joking? And why does it make you look so sad all of a sudden?”

  “My ex-husband. My most recent ex-husband, to be clinically precise.”

  “You introduced me to a lawyer husband a couple years ago; that the one?” She nodded. “How many other exes you got scattered around?”

  “Just one other. If you’re only counting husbands.”

  “And if I’m counting other significant others?”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’d take me some thinking to tally them up. Four or five semiserious guys, and one experimental woman.”

  The world had changed in the several de cades since I’d last dated, I decided. “A few months back, you told me you were happily lesbian. Was that the experiment?”

  She laughed. “Naw, that was just to fend you off in case you were harboring any designs on me. You seemed so bogged down in your grief over Kathleen still, I knew you weren’t ready for anybody yet. Or maybe I just didn’t want to get tangled up in all that sadness.”

  “And now?”

  “Now you seem over it, or at least through the worst of it. Not exactly giddy with joie de vivre yet, but then again, that’d be a stretch for a guy in your line of work. You seem…solid now.”

  “Did I seem solid a few months ago, when we had that near miss with a dinner date?”

  “Solid enough,” she said, “at the center. A little gooey around the edges, maybe, but who isn’t sometimes?” As she said it, she cocked her head and shrugged slightly, and smiled not so slightly. I could have sworn I felt myself getting a little gooey around the edges but stirringly solid at my center. I took a step toward her and reached up a hand to touch her cheek. When I did, she nodded her head up and down, rubbing against my hand. I closed my eyes to concentrate on the feel of her skin. “So you didn’t mind that I invited myself to dinner to night?” My eyes still closed, I shook my head. “So why didn’t you ask me out again after I had to skip out all those months ago?”

  The truth was, I’d gotten scared, but I wanted to appear more suave than that. “I was playing hard to get,” I said. As I said it, I heard my voice crack like that of a boy just hitting puberty. So much for suave. I laughed. “I’ve heard nothing interests a woman more than acting indifferent.”

  I felt a palm smack my face, but it was a playful smack. I opened my eyes and saw Jess shaking her head, but she was grinning as she did it. “You are such a lying piece of shit,” she said. “You are a seriously bad liar. But a seriously good man.”

  She moved closer to me and turned her face to mine. Maybe some things in the world hadn’t changed all that much, because I had no trouble interpreting an invitation to kiss her. With her boots on, her mouth was nearly at the level of mine. Just enough lower that it felt good to reach a hand around to the back of her neck, threading my fingers through her thick auburn hair.

  I felt a pleasant tingling in my loins for a moment, then it stopped. Then it returned, and I realized the tingling was not actually within my loins, but against them.

  “Oh, damn,” murmured Jess. “It’s my pager.” I felt the buzz one last time, then she pulled away and jammed a hand into a pocket of her jeans. As she fished out the pager, it gave another buzz, like an angry insect—a cicada spinning helplessly on its back, I decided. “Shit, it’s Homicide,” she said. “I have to call them.” From her other pocket she fished a cellphone and flipped it open. “Dispatch,” she snapped, and I heard the cellphone play a tune of dial tones as it obliged. “This is Dr. Carter,” she said. “You got one for me?” As she listened, she winced and shook her head. “Shit. What time was the call?…Okay, I’ll be there in an hour. Tell ’em to cordon off the park, keep the TV cameras out, and don’t touch anything.” She flipped the phone closed and began scooping up her bags. “A murder in Riverfront Park.”

  “That’s the park that stretches along the Tennessee from downtown all the way up to Chickamauga Dam?”

  “Yeah. Seven or eight miles. This was right near the downtown end, a stone’s throw from the aquarium and the art museum.”

  “What happened? A tourist mugging that turned violent?”

  “No. A local. A runner with a dog. Dog’s dead, too.” She got an odd look on her face. “I think maybe I’ve been in this job too long, Bill. I’m upset about this.”

  I touched her arm. “That just shows you’re not jaded.”

  She shook her head. “No. What I’m upset about is the dog.”

  She turned to go, then veered back and gave me a quick peck on the lips. “I’m sorry to cut and run,” she said. “I was looking forward to dinner. And dessert.”

  She clomped back through the entryway and out the front door. As it latched shut behind her, the timer on my microwave beeped to tell me the charcoal was ready. I picked up the plate of steaks and headed for the back porch.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE RINGING PHONE SOUNDED far away, and I felt myself swimming up from a deep and viscous sleep to answer it.

  “Bill? It’s Jess.”

  Her voice and her name jolted me awake. “Jess? What time is it? Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “It’s about four. I just got home from the scene. Bill, could you…could you just talk to me for a few minutes? Talk me down a ways?” Her voice shook and her nose sounded stopped up, as if she’d already done some crying.

  “Sure, Jess. Of course. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I might have to work up to it,” she said. Her breathing started to run away with her; I could hear her struggling to rein it back in. “It was a bad scene. Brutal. Like some biblical retribution. Blood everywhere. Stab wounds all over the victim. Multiple dog bites. Two slaughtered dogs.”

  “Two?”

  “Two. One was the victim’s; other belonged to one of the killers.”

  “Was it a dogfight that spread to the people?”

  “No. Other way around. We got the story from a couple of witnesses. A homeless guy who spends a lot of time sleeping under this bridge where it happened, and a bike rider who was just up the hill. Apparently there was some history between the victim and this handful of punks who liked to hang o
ut in the park under the bridge. The victim was a runner; they’d been hassling him for a while. If he’d had any sense, he’d’ve found some other place to run his dog.”

  “People don’t always do what’s in their own best interest,” I said. It sounded stupid as I said it, but I didn’t know what else to offer. Didn’t know what she needed to hear.

  “The detectives talked to his girlfriend. Guy was a science teacher, turns out. Early thirties. Idealistic. Just started teaching last fall at one of the inner-city magnet schools. Gonna save the world—or at least inner-city kids—through education. He’d moved in from Meigs County to take the job. Used to have a place out in the country, with a big yard for the dog, the girlfriend says. Australian shepherd. He felt bad about keeping it cooped up in an apartment. Figured he owed it a run somewhere every day with grass and trees to make amends.”

  “And that got him killed? That is sad,” I said.

  “It gets sadder,” she said. “The girlfriend says when these punks first started hassling him—a week or so ago, she thinks—he tried to reason with them. I mean, these are the big brothers of the kids he’s teaching every day. But they wouldn’t leave him alone, and he wouldn’t back down. Like dogs, stalking around all stiff-legged with their hackles up. She begged him to steer clear of the park, but he said once you start running away, you never stop. So he bought a knife to carry on his runs. A lot like that serrated number Miranda was packing yesterday.”

  “That wouldn’t do much good against a gang, would it?”

  “Well, we haven’t done the lab work yet, but actually, I think it did. There were three blood trails leading from the scene. He put up a hell of a fight.”

  “You think maybe his dog did some of the damage? Gave his life protecting his master?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t. He…” She began to draw raw, gasping breaths. “The guy…the victim…he cut his own dog’s throat,” she said, “just before they got him.”

  “What?”

  “One of the witnesses saw him do it,” she wept. “They chased the guy down, surrounded him. One of them had a pit bull on a chain. Big, mean junkyard dog. As they closed in, he knelt down and slashed his dog’s throat. He knew, Bill, he knew…neither one of them would get out alive…and he wanted…” I could barely hear her, but I didn’t dare interrupt. “He wanted to make sure…it didn’t suffer…Oh God, Bill…what a horrible, hopeless, loving thing to do.”

  She was hyperventilating into the phone now; I knew she must be getting dizzy and she’d soon black out. “Jess, stay with me here,” I said. “Jess? Slow down. You’ve got to slow down, Jess. Have you got a towel or a blanket or a shirt handy? Even your shirtsleeve or your hand, Jess. Put something over your mouth and breathe through it. Anything to slow you down, make it harder to breathe.” She didn’t answer, but her breathing suddenly got muffled, and gradually it slowed. I heard a long, hard sniffle through a runny nose, then a sustained burbling, bugling blast from her nose. “Good girl, Jess. Slow and steady. Slow and steady.”

  She took in a deep breath, heaved it out. “Goddamnit, I hate to cry,” she said. “Where can all this come from? Gallons of snot and tears. Every time I think there can’t be any more in me, the damn spigot opens again. Funny; I see a hundred dead people a year, and it’s the dog that breaks my heart. No, not just the dog. The guy’s love for his dog. A guy that would do such a thing for an animal he loved, even as he saw death bearing down on him.” She set the phone down, blew her nose again, then drew and exhaled out a long shuddering breath. “It was like something straight out of Nero’s Coliseum,” she said. “They turned the pit bull loose on the guy. Nearly tore his left arm off. He managed to cut that dog’s throat, too. Even with his arm being ripped to shreds, he remembered his anatomy and found the jugular. Then the two-legged beasts closed in. Four or five, we’re not sure; the witnesses were backing off fast. Looks like he took stab wounds from several directions while he was still on his feet. More after he fell. Lotta overkill. Maybe the pit bull’s owner was pissed; maybe one of the creeps he cut—somebody was mad enough to do extra damage.” She sighed again. “Autopsy’s gonna be a bitch. Could be my first with triple-digit stab wounds.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Shit. Soulless cowardly no-count fuckers.”

  I took the anger as a good sign.

  “Dammit, Bill, this isn’t the first killing like this we’ve had this year, and it won’t be the last. I’m afraid we’ve got a growing problem here—hell, I think we’ve got a growing problem across America—but nobody wants to talk about it.”

  “What do you mean? Murder rates rising?”

  “Not yet. Our rate’s actually way down, for now, but I’m afraid it can’t last. I’m afraid the anger’s building among these young black males. Half of them are high school dropouts. You know what the nationwide unemployment rate among black high school dropouts is?” I didn’t. “Seventy percent, and rising. White dropouts, thirty percent unemployment. Hispanics, just nineteen percent. A lot of these young urban black guys have no prospects. No hope. Nothing to live for and nothing to lose. So it’s nothing to them to take a few of the fortunate down with them as they go.”

  “You think the police will get these guys?”

  “Maybe. Be pretty easy to find out who owned the pit bull. And I think we can match some of the blood at the scene to two or three of the attackers, if we can find them. But if the witnesses disappear and clam up, we might have trouble making a case. Hell, these guys could even get together and argue self-defense: big, bad white man came at ’em with a knife and they feared for their lives. Not the truth, but if four or five guys say it on the stand with believable emotion, be hard to find a jury that would call them all liars.”

  Jess was a medical examiner; her role was to determine causes of death, not to win convictions. But she was a human being, too, with a strong sense of justice and injustice, and I understood her frustration. “Maybe it’ll turn out better than that.” I said it with more optimism than I felt.

  “Yeah, right. You know what else makes me furious about this?”

  “What?”

  “This plays exactly to all those goddamned racist stereotypes I’ve spent forty years in the South resisting,” she said. “If it had to happen—if this guy had to get murdered by a pack of feral punks, why couldn’t they be white punks, Bill?”

  “I don’t know, Jess. I don’t know. I think you’re right, if something doesn’t change, we may be headed for a huge problem. And we don’t seem to have the wisdom or the will, even after all these years, to fix it.”

  We both fell silent for a while.

  “God, I’m so tired, Bill. Tired and cold. When I get this tired, I get cold all over. All I want to do at this moment is crawl under the covers and sleep for a week.” Her breathing had grown deep and even by now; I felt my own breath slowing to mark time with hers, my mind slipping back toward drowsiness with surprising ease.

  “You think maybe you’d be able to sleep now?”

  “Maybe,” she said. Her voice sounded drained of its horror and rage, though the sorrow remained. “I think so. I hope so. I need to.”

  “If you can’t,” I said, “call me back and I’ll give you one of my osteology lectures. ‘Morphological Characteristics of Shovel-Shaped Incisors in Native Americans.’ Guaranteed to put you under in five minutes or less. Okay?”

  The only answer was a gentle, ladylike snore at the other end of the line.

  I listened to Jess sleep for a long time. Eventually I began nodding off myself, drifting in and out, as if I were floating down a slow-moving stream, easing from sunlight to shade and back again. In one of the waking moments, I realized that it was the first time I’d slept with a woman, even long-distance, in the two years since Kathleen had died. The intimacy of it—the vulnerability and trust and simple physical communion—nearly burst my heart.

  “Sleep well, Jess,” I whispered, easing the phone back into its cradle.

  CHAPTER 8

  MY STUD
ENTS WEREN’T GOING to be happy.

  A week ago, I had announced that today’s class would focus on the forensic case that had proven to be my most popular with students over the years: my slides from Knoxville’s most infamous serial-killing spree. Four women’s bodies had been found on a wooded hillside a stone’s throw from I-40, about seven miles east of downtown. The newspapers dubbed the man charged with the murders “Zoo Man” because that was his nickname among Knoxville’s prostitutes. The name referred both to his sometime place of employment and also to the location of a barn where he often took hookers for sex. “Watch out for the Zoo Man,” hookers warned one another, because he often beat the women he hired for sex. He also liked to kill them, according to police and prosecutors. The murder trial—the longest and costliest in Tennessee history—ended in a mistrial, but Zoo Man had been sentenced to sixty-six years in prison for a series of vicious rapes, so the streets of Knoxville were safe once more. Safer, anyhow.

  Hunters had stumbled upon the first of the four bodies in the woods; a grid search by police and my anthropology students yielded the remaining three. The photos from the case showed the victims in various stages of decomposition, ranging from fresh (one body was only a few days old) to almost fully skeletonized, and the contrasts—plus the notoriety of the case—always sparked keen interest among students. But over breakfast, I’d decided to scrap today’s lesson plan.

  I had slept badly and awakened tired and frustrated. Jess’s Chattanooga cross-dresser case was nagging at me—the police didn’t seem to be making any headway, from what Jess had told me, and I wasn’t sure that our reconstruction of the death scene was likely to give them much more to work with. If they’d been trying to confirm or refute a potential suspect’s alibi, it might help for me to nail down the time since death. But with no suspects anywhere in sight, I couldn’t see that it would jump-start the case for me to say something like “He’d been dead five to six days by the time he was found.”