“Anything else that might help? Fingernail scrapings? Hair or fibers?”
“Her nails looked clean, but I did collect a few hairs and fibers. Bill…” He hesitated. “I know you don’t hold my work in the highest regard, but I gave this everything I had. I don’t think any pathologist anywhere could have been more thorough than I was. The police have a bullet, a DNA sample, and hair and fibers to work with. I have a feeling they’re going to find this guy pretty quick. As an ME, Jess was a friend and ally to cops. Jess was like family. They’re going to work this hard.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said.
“Count on it,” he said.
It was 9 P.M. by the time I turned onto my street in Sequoyah Hills. It felt like 3 A.M. My heart and lungs felt filled with cement; my head hurt so badly I thought I might throw up; and every blink felt like burlap scraping across my eyes.
As I rounded the curve of the circle and my house came into view, I hit the brakes, hard, and my truck screeched to a halt on the asphalt. Four SUVs—one from each of the Knoxville television stations—were parked in front of the house. Several cameramen and reporters stood chatting in my yard. As I sat and pondered what to do, one of the cameramen swiveled his lens in my direction and everyone’s head followed its lead. Soon all four video cameras were aimed at my truck, and I felt like an animal that knows it is being hunted.
Finally I forced down my fear and took my foot off the brake, idling toward my driveway. As I turned in, the cameramen took their cameras off the tripod and converged on my truck. The reporters followed a few feet behind, so as not to block the shot. I drew a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped out.
Even before I had both feet on the asphalt, one of the reporters said, “Dr. Brockton, what can you tell us about the murder out at the Body Farm?”
“I’m afraid I can’t talk about it,” I said. “The police have asked me not to.”
“Can you tell us who the victim was?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” I said. “They need to notify the next of kin before they release the identity.”
“Did you know the victim?”
“I…I’m sorry, I can’t say.”
“Was it a man or a woman? Surely you can tell us that much?”
“No.”
“How was he killed? How was she killed?” This time I just shook my head and headed along the curving brick walk toward my front door as cameramen scrambled to get ahead of me so they could capture my face.
As I put my key in the lock and opened the front door, the same reporter who’d asked the first question fired off a final one. “Do the police consider you a suspect, Dr. Brockton?”
That one stopped me in my tracks. Standing in my open doorway, I turned and faced the eight people and four lenses. “Good God,” I said, “of course not.” And with that, I stepped inside and closed the door.
CHAPTER 27
THE JUMBLE OF DRAB boxes that constituted KPD headquarters possessed just enough windows to highlight how blank and unbroken most of the walls were. The biggest expanse of glass was the entryway, which doubled as a corridor connecting the police department with the municipal traffic court. Outside, a mix of cops and traffic scofflaws smoked as equals.
I took a right inside the lobby and presented myself to the desk sergeant under glass. He nodded in recognition at my name, then buzzed someone to escort me upstairs. My escort proved to be a short detective with the build and the personality of a fireplug. Though I’d never seen a fireplug with a half-chewed toothpick dangling from what would be its face. If fireplugs had faces. Fireplug’s name was Horace Bingham, a name I thought particularly unfortunate—particularly since he pronounced it “horse”—though I had the good manners not to call Horace’s attention to the gracelessness of either his name or his enunciation.
Horace showed me into a cinder-block room outfitted with a table, three metal folding chairs, and a video camera high in one corner, then closed the door. Twenty minutes crept past.
The beep of my cellphone made me jump. It was Art.
“How are you? Where are you?”
“Funny you should ask. I’m in an interview room on the fourth floor of KPD, waiting for Detective Sergeant John Evers.”
“Evers is working this?”
“Yeah. Maybe with the help of this fireplug-looking little guy.”
“Oh, you mean Horse?”
“Yeah. Horse.”
“Well, Evers is good. Best thing I can say about Horse is that he hangs back and lets Evers do most of the work. They got any leads that you know of?”
“They haven’t said. I’m gonna suggest a couple.” Just then the door opened and Evers walked in, accompanied by Horace. “Listen, they’re here to talk to me. I gotta go.”
“Hang in there. Call me later.”
“Thanks, Art.” As I folded the phone shut, I said, “Art Bohanan. He had good things to say about both of you.”
Evers nodded and smiled briefly. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Dr. Brockton. We’ve been fielding a lot of media calls, as you might expect. Not much to say at this point; we try to limit what goes out, especially in the early stages of an investigation, but you still gotta give ’em a couple sound bites, or they get snippy.”
“I hope you didn’t release Dr. Carter’s name? She’s got an ex-husband that I know of; she might have other family, too, that ought to be notified first.”
“We notified the ex-husband yesterday. He said he’d deliver the news personally to her mother. We had to release her name—we can’t keep that under wraps once the next of kin have been notified. Beyond that, though, I just told them her death appeared to be a homicide, and that she was found at the Body Farm.”
“Did you tell them I was the one who found her?”
“No. I just said one of the research staff had called 911 to report finding the body. They saw you walk out the gate, though; they all knew it was you. I told them half a dozen times, in half a dozen ways, that I couldn’t comment on who made the report, or who the victim was, or how they’d been killed, or who might have committed the crime.”
“Speaking of who might have committed it,” I said, “can I mention a couple of names that have occurred to me?”
“Sure,” he said. “But first, I need to start things off officially. We record every interview, both on that video camera up there”—he pointed behind him at the camera near the ceiling—“and on an audiocassette recorder.” He pulled a small silver recorder out of his shirt pocket, pressed the RECORD button, and laid it on the table between us. “I’m also going to advise you of your rights.”
“You’re reading me my rights? Do you suspect me?”
“No, sir. And yes, sir. We do this with every single person we interview. I mean, at this stage, everybody’s a suspect to some degree; our minds are completely open, and we’re going to consider every possibility. And we’ll read everybody their rights, just in case somebody unexpectedly blurts out a confession. If we haven’t already advised them of their rights, we might not be able to use that confession in court. Does that make sense?”
“I suppose so. Still feels strange, though.”
First he leaned down toward the tape recorder and said, “This is an interview with Dr. Bill Brockton regarding the death of Dr. Jessamine Carter.” He added the date and the time the interview began, and then he read my rights off a laminated card he pulled from his wallet.
Evers asked me to recount yesterday morning’s events again, in more detail, so I did. After he seemed satisfied with the amount of detail he had, he let me tell him about the threats Jess had received on her voice mail. “And when was this?”
I had to think about that. “Last Thursday,” I said. “No, Wednesday. Same day as that protest at UT. She was on the news that night, and she called me Thursday morning to tell me she’d gotten the calls the night before.”
“Did you actually hear these messages? Or did she just tell you about them?”
“She just told
me about them. She called me from Chattanooga that night.”
“How specifically did she describe them?”
“Not very. She said some were graphic sexual threats, and some were pretty sick death threats. But she didn’t give the particulars, and I didn’t want to ask her to repeat them. Would you all still be able to get hold of those messages?”
“Maybe. If she didn’t erase them. We can certainly check with the phone company to see if her voice mail was part of her telephone service. If not, we’ll look for an answering machine at her house. Do you know whether she reported these threats to the phone company or the police?”
“I don’t think so. I encouraged her to, but she didn’t seem as worried by them as I was. She said she got crank calls and threats all the time.” He nodded and made a note.
Next I related how Mrs. Willis had assaulted Jess in my office on Friday, after Jess had released her son’s identity to the news media and had described his murder in a way that angered Mrs. Willis. “How brutal was this attack?” asked Evers.
“Not violent enough to cause any injuries,” I said. “A few slaps is all, really, I guess. I pulled her off Jess pretty quickly. But if I hadn’t, and if Jess hadn’t called the campus police, I’m not sure what would have happened.”
“And Mrs. Willis left voluntarily? Before or after the campus police arrived?”
“Before.”
“So the campus police had no contact with this woman?”
“No,” I said. “But they should have a recording of the phone call. Oh, and Peggy, my secretary, would probably remember her, because she gave her directions to my office. But Peggy didn’t see the assault.”
“In your opinion, did Mrs. Willis appear capable of murder?”
“That thought didn’t occur to me at the time,” I said. “But in hindsight, now that Jess has been murdered, I can’t help thinking she did.”
“Did she make specific threats?”
I replayed the woman’s furious parting words. “I wouldn’t call them specific, but I would call them threats. She said ‘You’ll be sorry’ a couple of times, and ‘I’m going to make you pay,’ I think. Something like that.”
“Did you think she was referring to violence, or to financial damages?”
“I didn’t think about it at the time; I just wrote it off as angry words. Now, of course, I wonder if she meant physical violence.”
Finally I told Evers about a third person who concerned me: Jess’s ex-husband. I described the encounter at the restaurant, and how he seemed to be pleading with Jess; I told him how agitated she seemed afterward, and how she left moments later.
As he took notes about the restaurant encounter, Evers held up his left hand, a gesture he often used to signal me to slow down or stop. It seemed unnecessary, since two recording devices were capturing the interview verbatim, but perhaps he found it easier to refer to notes. He wrote a few more words, then he looked up at me. “This dinner you and Dr. Carter were having,” he asked, “was that a business dinner?”
I felt myself flush. “Part business,” I said, “part friendship. She was pretty shaken up when Mrs. Willis assaulted her in my office. I thought a good dinner at a quiet restaurant might help settle her down. Jess was a colleague, but she was also a friend.”
“I notice you’ve referred to her several times as ‘Jess’ rather than as ‘Dr. Carter.’ How close a friend was she, Dr. Brockton?”
“Pretty close,” I said. I hesitated, but decided he needed the whole picture. “And getting closer. At least, that’s what I hoped. We had just started what I guess I’d call a romantic relationship.”
“And how do you define a romantic relationship?” he asked. “Cards? Flowers? Daily phone calls?”
“We worked together,” I said. “We liked each other. Lately, we’d gotten…much closer.”
He kept his eyes on his notebook. “By ‘closer,’ do you mean sexually intimate?”
The question angered me. “What does that have to do with Jess’s murder?”
Now he looked at me. “I don’t know,” he answered calmly. “What do you think it has to do with it? I’m just trying to piece together what was going on in her life just before she was killed. Sounds like you were one of the people closest to her. Sounds like you were a big part of what was going on in her life. Just before her death.”
“Maybe; I don’t know,” I said. “She was a big part of what was going on in mine. I’m not sure I occupied as prominent a place in hers yet.”
“Why do you say that?”
I told him what she’d said after she came back from talking to her ex; how maybe she wasn’t finished with it—with him—after all.
“And did that bother you?”
“No. Yes. Some. She hadn’t been divorced all that long—eight months, I think she said—so I guess it’s not surprising that she might not’ve been completely over it. But until her ex-husband showed up at the restaurant that last night, she had seemed to be really opening up to me.”
“That last night? Is that what you said—that last night?” I stared at him, confused that he was latching on to that. “Her body wasn’t found—or wasn’t reported—for three more days, Dr. Brockton,” he said. “What made you refer to that as her last night?”
“I just mean it was the last night I saw her. Not the last night she was alive.”
“Oh, I see,” Evers said.
The interview ended shortly after that exchange, with a few questions about how soon I left the restaurant after Jess (about ten minutes, because the waitress was slow to bring the check); where I went afterward (straight home); and whether I tried to contact Jess that night or over the weekend (no, because she’d asked for some breathing room).
Evers thanked me for my cooperation and escorted me down to the lobby. We parted with mutual assurances to keep in touch and share any information that seemed meaningful. But as I crossed the asphalt to my truck, I felt shaken to my core, and not just because Jess had been murdered. I had spent a quarter of a century dealing with homicide detectives, and my experiences had been unequivocally positive: I liked giving them help; they liked getting it. Suddenly, for the first time, I had a glimmer of insight into what it might be like to be the subject of a detective’s investigation, rather than a helpful advisor. I was relieved when I checked my rearview mirror and could no longer see the brick and concrete fortress that was KPD.
I took the long ramp that swooped downhill and fed me onto Neyland Drive. To my left, the river sparkled in the midday sun. That sparkle looked all wrong; the water should have been roiling, churning blackly, not rippling along as placidly as ever; as placidly as if Jess Carter’s body were not, at this moment, on a gurney in the cooler at the Regional Forensic Center, the top of her skull sliced off, her chest slashed open, her heart and other organs bagged like offal at a butcher’s shop. “Dammit,” I said out loud. “Goddamnit to hell.”
As I passed Thompson-Boling Arena and turned right onto Lake Loudoun Drive, I noticed blue lights behind me. I pulled to the curb to let the police car pass. Instead, it jerked to a stop behind me, and John Evers got out and approached my door. I rolled down my window. “What’s the matter?” I said. “Has something else happened?”
“I need you to get out of the vehicle now,” he said. “We’re impounding this truck as evidence in a murder investigation, and I need you to come back to the station with me. I have more questions for you, Dr. Brockton. A whole lot more questions. And I need a whole lot better answers from you this time around.”
CHAPTER 28
EVERS PUT ME IN the back of his car for the ride back to KPD. I didn’t like how it felt back there. He waved off my efforts to find out why he had chased me down. “We’ll talk once we’re in the interrogation room with the tape rolling,” was all he would say. I took it as a bad sign that he used the word “interrogation.”
The interrogation room turned out to be the same room as the “interview room”; the only thing different was the atmos
phere, which had turned distinctly hostile. Horace Bingham was already sitting in the same chair he’d occupied half an hour before; actually, for all I knew, he’d been sitting in it ever since I’d driven away. He was studying a yellow legal pad, and he did not look up as we entered.
Evers pointed wordlessly to the chair that faced the video camera, then laid the microcassette recorder on the table again. “Just as before, Dr. Brockton, we’re going to record this,” he said. He pressed the RECORD button and announced, “This is an interrogation of Dr. William Brockton, regarding the murder of Dr. Jessamine Carter.” There was that word again, “interrogation.” Evers gave the date and the time, then set the recorder down on the table in front of me.
“Dr. Brockton, let’s go back to last Friday night at the restaurant,” Evers said.
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t know what else I can tell you about it, but I’ll try.”
“Who was it who first saw her ex-husband sitting at a nearby table, Dr. Carter or you?”
“He was at the bar,” I said, “not a table. She saw him. I had met him once, a few years ago, but I would never have recognized him.”
“And she left you and went and sat with him.”
“For a few minutes.”
“Earlier you said it was at least ten minutes.” He turned to Horace. “What were his exact words?”
Horace flipped through his legal pad, then read in a halting monotone, “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Seemed like an eternity.” Had I really said that? And had Horace written down every word I’d said?
Evers swiveled back to me. When he did, one of his knees grazed mine. He shifted slightly so our knees alternated, rather than bumping together. But in shifting, he also scooted closer to me. Uncomfortably close. “An eternity,” he repeated. “That’s a pretty long time, isn’t it, Dr. Brockton? What did you think about during that eternity?”
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