Flesh and Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  “Here,” she laughed, “let me show you a better way to hold those.” She took my hand in one of hers, and with the other, she pried the chopsticks from my fist. “Very simple,” she said. “One of them is fixed, the other moves. Sort of like a fencepost and a gate. The fixed one nestles down in the V between your thumb and forefinger, like so, and between the tips of your pinkie and your ring finger.” She demonstrated. “Hold the other one almost like you would a pencil, but not quite so near the point.” She gripped the second chopstick with the tips of her thumb and first two fingers, then made a great show of waving it to and fro, then clicking the tips together like a lobster claw. “Okay, try it.” She laid my hand, palm up, in her own palm, then arranged the two chopsticks for me. I studied them awhile. She looked at me, puzzled. “Still confused?”

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ve got the concept. I just don’t want to move my hand right now.”

  She laughed, then looked shy, but she stretched up and gave me a quick, warm kiss on the mouth. “Eat,” she said. “You might need your strength.” I looked up at her, hoping she meant what I thought she meant. In response to my quizzical look, she hoisted a suggestive eyebrow at me. Newly inspired, I snagged an enormous clump of noodles with the chopsticks and managed to get most of them into my mouth, with only a few stragglers draping my chin. “Easy, Popeye,” she said. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere. Be bad for an ME’s career if you choked to death in her kitchen.”

  I slowed down slightly but still managed to empty the bowl in about two minutes flat. She rinsed it, put it in the dishwasher, and came back to stand in front of me, close enough that I could feel the breath from her upturned face. I put a hand to her cheek, because she seemed to like that when I did it earlier, at the morgue. She seemed to like it again, so I put my other hand on her other cheek. She didn’t seem to mind that, either—she turned her face slightly and kissed my palm—so then I pulled her face to mine and kissed her. She kissed back, and she kissed me like she meant something by it.

  After a long spell of meaningful kissing, I slid my hands down her neck, over her shoulders, and down her sides to the bottom of the sweatshirt. Then I burrowed them under the loose-fitting hem and began easing them back up: up the nubby sweatpants, over the top of her hips, till I felt the bare skin of her waist. It seemed magical, miraculous somehow, that within this huge, shapeless tent of a sweatshirt could be something so slender, so smooth—so female—as the sculpted curves and hollows of this waist. I touched the tips of my thumbs together, and my fingers stretched halfway around her back. I grazed my thumbs around the rim of her navel, imagining its vertical cleft; I pressed the taut flatness of her belly, slid the waistband of the pants down to grip the solid flare of her hip bones. It had been more than two years since my hands had held a woman’s hips like this, but I remembered what female hips felt like, and I could tell these were splendid hips, to match the splendid belly. It augured well for what the rest of her would be like, too. Just to be sure, I slipped my hands higher, and I knew I’d guessed right. Her breath caught as I began to trace the curves of her breasts, which were bare beneath the baggy shirt. It seemed almost as if I were living two lives at the moment: one life, my visible life, was a baggy, frumpy sweatshirt sort of life; the other, lived by my mouth and hands, was an exotic, dizzying swirl of tongues and fingertips, rounded breasts and hardening nipples. I pulled away from the kiss so I could see Jess’s face, and I was glad I did, because it radiated a combination of tenderness and desire and wonder I had never glimpsed before.

  “That is the single most gorgeous thing I have ever seen on this earth,” I whispered, and she buried her face in my neck and began to kiss softly. “You know what?” I murmured eventually.

  “No, what?”

  “You did such a good job showing me how to work those chop-sticks, I’m thinking maybe you could teach me a few other skills.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “What’s the best way to take off a pair of sweatpants—standing up, or lying down?”

  “Come upstairs and I’ll show you,” she said.

  And so I did, and she did, and we did. And we liked what we did so much that we did it again. Finally, happily tired from all we’d done, we laced our arms and legs together and lay still. Within minutes Jess was asleep, a sweet, childlike snore accompanying the rhythmic rise of her chest.

  I watched her sleep, savoring the peaceful expression on a face that was often as focused and intense as a laser. Eventually I must have dozed off, because I noticed a murky awareness of awakening. The clock read 4:47. Unknotting myself from her embrace, I recovered my far-flung clothes and got dressed, leaving off my shoes so I wouldn’t make noise. I found some paper and a pen, and wrote a note. “Dear Jess—Sorry to go. I have an early meeting, and I couldn’t bear to wake you. Call me when you wake, if you want.” I thought a moment, then added, “You took my breath away, and then you gave it back again.” I didn’t figure I needed to sign it.

  I folded her sweats and laid them on the foot of the bed, setting the note on top. Then I bent and kissed her cheek. She made a soft sound, somewhere between a coo and a laugh, and I hoped maybe she was dreaming of the love we had made.

  I tiptoed out of her bedroom, down the stairs, and out the front door. Sitting on the top step of Modern Home No. 158, I put on my shoes and walked to my truck. I had parked on the street, and the truck was headed down a gentle incline, so I coasted a ways before cranking the engine. I pulled onto I-75 North toward Knoxville just as the sky’s velvety darkness began to yield to a voluptuous red in the east.

  CHAPTER 16

  I’D ARRANGED TO MEET Art at KPD headquarters at 7:30 A.M.: just before his undercover shift at Broadway Jewelry & Loan began; just before he waded into the sewers of cyberspace, trolling for the creeps who troll for kids, pursuing the monsters who peddle kids. Art was waiting just inside the glassed-in lobby of the building; he took the plastic jar—now containing both the skin and the solution that had rehydrated it—and inspected it, nodding in approval or optimism. We took the elevator up to his lab and he set the jar on a tabletop, then donned a pair of snug latex gloves.

  Unscrewing the lid, he extracted the skin with a pair of tweezers, then unfurled it slowly on a tray lined with paper toweling, studying each fingertip in turn, gently blotting it dry. Finally he spoke. “All of the fingers are torn in places, so we won’t get any prints that are completely intact. The center of the fingertips are intact, though, so I’m pretty sure we can get enough details for a match, if this guy’s prints are in aphids.”

  “Aphids,” I asked, “like the rosebush-eating garden insect?”

  “No, Dilbert,” he said. “AY-fiss, A-F-I-S, like Automated Fingerprint Identification System.” He frowned, then corrected himself. “I mean I-AFIS. They tacked an I on the front end a while back—stands for ‘Integrated’—but I still call it AFIS. Force of habit.”

  “Easier to say ‘AY-fiss’ than ‘EYE-ay-fiss,’ too,” I said. “Especially for an old dog like you.”

  I remembered that AFIS was a database created by the FBI six or eight years earlier. Before its creation, I could recall Art squawking about the weeks or even months it took the Bureau’s fingerprint lab to analyze prints. The delays often meant that by the time a match was found, a suspect who had been arrested or detained for questioning was no longer in custody—and nowhere to be found. These days, he told me, it was possible to get a match—a name—within two hours in criminal cases, and within twenty-four hours for civilian requests such as employment background checks.

  “How big is their database by now?” I asked.

  “Pretty darn big. Last time I looked, they had prints from nearly fifty million people on file.”

  “That is big. I didn’t realize so many of our friends and neighbors were criminals.”

  “They’re not. Remember, a big chunk of those are people required to submit fingerprints as part of their employment—teachers, military person
nel, firefighters, gun buyers, all sorts of folks. Mine are in there; yours probably are, too, aren’t they?” He was right, I realized. When the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had asked me to serve as a TBI consultant, I had filled out a long questionnaire and had been fingerprinted, presumably to make sure the agency wasn’t hiring a fox to help guard the hen house.

  As I watched in fascination, Art carefully fitted the dead man’s skin to his own right hand, then walked to a laptop computer sitting at the end of the table. Beside it was a thin rectangular gadget, slightly smaller than the laptop’s keyboard, with a blue pad on top. Using his left thumb and forefinger to stretch the skin taut over his right thumb, he laid one edge of his thumb on the blue pad and rolled it in a half revolution, from one edge of the nail to the other. After a few seconds, a six-inch-high swirl of tightly nested lines appeared on the laptop’s screen.

  “Hey, where’s the roller, the ink, the glass plate?” I asked.

  “Bill, Bill,” he said. “Ink-on-slab is so last-century. This is optical scanning. No fuss, no muss. Digitizes the prints directly, and lets us upload them directly to AFIS. We can print out hard copies on standard fingerprint cards so Jess and the Chattanooga PD can add them to their files, but this is a lot quicker and easier than the old way. Shoot, the new criminalists we hire these days, kids fresh out of school? Some of them have never rolled a set of prints in ink. Or if they have, it was just as a history lesson, a demonstration of how things were done back in the day. Like letting kids milk a cow or churn butter by hand to show them the pioneer way.”

  “You sound disgruntled,” I said, “but I notice you’ve switched over.”

  “Hard to argue with results,” he said. “Hey, do me a favor, since I’m using both hands? Come hit ENTER on the keyboard there, to accept the print and let me get the next one.”

  I did, for the thumbprint and each of the four fingerprints. Once he had finished scanning the prints, Art returned the skin to the jar, screwed the lid on snugly, and handed it back to me. Then he peeled off his gloves and tossed them in a container labeled BIOHAZARD. He went back to the laptop and clattered the keys for a few minutes, then hit the ENTER button with a flourish. “Okay, they’re sent,” he said. “We should have an answer within a couple hours.”

  “How can it be so quick? You said there are nearly fifty million sets of prints in the database, right? That’s nearly five hundred million fingertips to compare.”

  “I guess the software’s pretty powerful, and their mainframe has a lot more horse power than our little personal computers,” he said. “I mean, it’s easy to narrow it down.” He hit a few more keystrokes, and the thumbprint reappeared on the screen. “Prints have one of three basic patterns,” he explained, “whorl, loop, and arch. Whorls are concentric circles—like a target with a bull’s-eye at the center, or the cross section of an onion. A loop pattern is more complicated; the ridges come in from one side, make a U-turn, and go back out the same side. In an arch pattern, the ridges come in from one side, go up in the middle, and then go out the other side.”

  I studied the pattern on the screen. “So our guy has a whorl pattern,” I said. “At least on his thumb.”

  “Bingo,” said Art. “So when the AFIS software is looking for a match for this particular print, it searches only right-hand thumbprints, and only those with whorls. That means it only needs to compare this print with, I dunno, maybe twenty million others. Still a lot, but there are other criteria and features that can progressively narrow that down tighter and tighter.” He pointed to two areas on the print where the circular pattern of ridges gave way to a triangular intersection, as if the whorl had been shoehorned into an arch pattern. “See those? Those are called deltas. Pretty easy to tell if the deltas on one print are spaced differently from the deltas on another. I’m not a software guy, but I imagine it would be fairly straightforward to program a computer to recognize features like deltas and compare their locations on an X-Y coordinate system.”

  Art promised to let me know later in the day if AFIS returned any hits on the prints. “I can’t access AFIS from the computers at the pawnshop,” he said, “but I’ll dash over here at lunchtime and see if we got lucky.”

  He rode down the elevator with me and we walked out into the crisp morning sunshine. I was headed to UT to teach Tennessee’s brightest and best. He was headed to Broadway Jewelry & Loan to stalk Tennessee’s darkest and worst. “Thanks, Art,” I said. He nodded and headed for his car. “Hey,” I called after him. “Go get ’em, Tiffany.” Without looking back, he raised one hand in a parting wave. His middle finger was extended. The gesture was aimed not at me, I knew, but at the men who were his quarry. The predators out there lurking in cyberspace, waiting to pounce.

  CHAPTER 17

  AT 10:50 A.M., I strolled around the curve of Circle Drive toward McClung Museum, where my eleven o’clock forensic anthropology class met. An event of some sort seemed to be taking place outside the museum. The small plaza at the museum’s entrance was filled with people and banners. As I got closer, I realized that the event was a protest, and what I had thought were banners were actually neon-hued picket signs.

  I took mental inventory of the museum’s current exhibits, wondering which of them could have sparked controversy. The exhibition of nineteenth-century Samurai swords, prints, and other artifacts? Surely not. “UT Goes to Mars,” photos, videos, and models documenting the role several UT faculty played in NASA’s Mars Rover landings? Doubtful; I’d not read of fans of, say, Venus lobbying NASA for equal time. “The Origins of Humanity,” a show that included fossil remains from human ancestors, as well as two life-size reconstructions of early hominids? Hmm. That could fit, I realized, judging from my own recent brush with the hornet’s nest of creationism.

  As I drew near enough to read the picket signs, I spotted a disturbingly familiar word on many of the signs. It was my own name, and I realized with a jolt that the picketers weren’t protesting an exhibit; they were protesting me, Bill Brockton, Darwin’s loudest local mouthpiece. DR. BROCKTON HAS NOT EVOLVED, read several of the signs. BROCKTON MONKEY’S WITH GODS CREATION, read a few others, combining dubious theology with appalling apostrophe usage. Some simply bore a stylized drawing of a fish, an ancient symbol of Christianity. And one, carried by someone wearing a gorilla costume, even featured a life-size photo of my head pasted atop the cartoonish body of a chimpanzee. A television news crew was on the scene, getting close-ups of the picketers as they marched in an oval, blocking the doors to the museum.

  A half dozen UT police officers were arrayed a tactful distance from the protesters. I sidled up to the closest one to learn what I could about the group. “When did this all start,” I asked him, “and who are these folks? They don’t look like UT students.” Except for the gorilla suit, their clothing was more conservative than anything I’d ever seen on UT students in de cades. The boys and men wore dark pants, white shirts, and ties; the girls and women wore long dresses and clunky shoes, and there was not a pierced navel or tattoo anywhere in sight.

  “They showed up about twenty minutes ago,” the officer said. “They must have known your class schedule. A church bus pulled into Circle Drive and unloaded, then drove off to park, I’m not sure where.”

  “Did you notice what church it was from?”

  “Nothing I ever heard of. ‘True Gospel Fellowship,’ or maybe ‘True Fellowship Gospel’? I never heard of the place, either. Some town in Kansas.”

  “Kansas,” I said. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “That guy in the monkey suit seems to be the cheerleader,” the officer said, “but I’d say the fellow off to the side there is calling the plays.”

  I followed his gaze. Standing apart from the knot of protesters, his hands clasped in front of a double-breasted gray suit, stood a well-groomed man of middle years. His hair was dark, going to silver; it was swept back from an imposing forehead, and either it was naturally wavy, or it had been carefully styled to look t
hat way. I noticed French cuffs and gold cuff links peeking out the ends of his jacket sleeves, and his trouser cuffs draped over sleek black shoes that spoke of money in an Italian accent.

  I took a wide detour so as to come up behind him. “Nice signs,” I said as I eased alongside. “My favorite is the one with the picture.” He gave a brief, practiced chuckle, then turned toward me to make conversation. When he saw my face, he looked startled but quickly recovered his composure. “I’m Bill Brockton, anthropologist and evolutionist,” I said. “I’m guessing you’re Jennings Bryan, attorney and creationism activist?”

  “Not creationism,” he said pleasantly. “Intelligent design. Please.” He smiled slightly, as if acknowledging a worthy adversary. “The famous Dr. Brockton,” he said. “Please forgive me for not shaking hands. It would complicate things for me, for the cause, if the newspapers or TV captured a handshake on film.”

  “Well, I’d hate to complicate things,” I said. “I struggle even when they’re simple.”

  “I hear otherwise,” he said.

  “Well. For what ever it’s worth, I am sorry I embarrassed that boy in class.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “You did us a huge favor.”

  “So I see,” I said. “I’m sorry about that, too.” He gave me the little smile again.

  A crowd numbering a hundred or more had gathered at the edge of the protest, and the TV crew was dutifully capturing their images as well. Some were mere onlookers, but I recognized most of them as my forensic anthropology students. I checked my watch; it read 10:59, and I had always drilled punctuality into my students. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Bryan,” I said. “I have a class to teach.” I stepped forward, toward the museum, toward the protesters. I hadn’t gone more than ten feet when I heard Bryan call from behind me, “Here he is!”

  Every head, every camera, swiveled in my direction. I kept walking, closing the distance. When I was perhaps twenty feet away, the protester in the gorilla suit began screeching like a chimp. It must have been a prearranged signal, because when he did, his comrades reached into pockets and bags and fished out overripe bananas, which they began lobbing at me. Most of them missed, but a few caught me on the shoulders and chest, and one splatted open on my head. Banana mash dripped down my face and into my collar. My feet had stopped moving when the banana barrage began; I felt rooted to the spot. Someone in the crowd of picketers produced a cream pie from somewhere and handed it to Gorilla Man; he scampered forward, monkey-style, and ground it into my face. It, too, was banana, and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t half bad.