Craig Willis’s murder still needed to be solved; Jess’s death might slow the investigation down, but it wouldn’t stop it. In fact, my e-mail in-box already contained a memo indicating that Garland Hamilton would step in temporarily to fill Jess’s shoes in Chattanooga, just as Jess had filled in for Hamilton here in Knoxville while his medical license was under review. But knowing that the wheels of justice would keep turning, however slowly, did not give me the strength to put my own shoulder to the wheel right now.
I opened the cardboard box that contained Willis’s skull and lifted it out, along with the top of the cranial vault. Setting the skull on a doughnut-shaped cushion, I stared at its shattered visage as if some clue to Jess’s murder might be encoded in the fracture lines etched in Willis’s bones. A connection of some sort existed, I felt sure, but what, precisely, was the link? Or who?
Jess’s body had been bound to the research corpse we’d used as a stand-in for Willis at the Body Farm. The research was meant to narrow down Willis’s time since death. Did that mean that whoever had killed Willis also killed Jess? If so, why? Because he considered Jess a threat; because she was getting too close to the truth? But what was that truth? I had no idea who had killed Willis, and as far as I knew, neither Jess nor the Chattanooga police had any better insight into his murder than I did.
But if Willis’s killer hadn’t murdered Jess, then who had? Who else might have wanted her dead? As a medical examiner, of course, Jess had worked scores of homicides; in theory, any one of those cases might have prompted someone to seek vengeance-a relative of someone whom Jess’s autopsy and testimony had helped send to prison, for instance. But the timing mattered, surely: Why now? Who lately?
My mind flashed back to Willis’s mother, and the irrational fury with which she had attacked Jess. She had accused Jess of destroying her son’s reputation by releasing the information about his being dressed in drag, and-if indeed Jess had been the unnamed source-by speculating that the murder might have been a homophobic hate crime. Could the rage she displayed in my office have intensified after she fled, escalating to the point of murder? She had parted with a vague threat directed at Jess, but in the heat of the moment, people often made threats they never carried out. Besides, if she were the one who killed Jess, why would she have posed Jess’s body in that obscene position, bound to the corpse that was serving as a stand-in for her own son’s body? That didn’t seem to fit. Unless, I thought, by staging Jess’s body that way, she meant to repudiate the theory Jess had mentioned-unless by killing Jess and tying her to the research corpse, she was saying, “Fuck you and fuck your demeaning theory about my son’s death.”
But what if there were no connection? What if whoever had left the threatening messages on Jess’s voicemail had acted on them? In the dim, shifting light that had engulfed me in the hours since I found Jess’s body, I could see things equally well-or equally poorly-from either angle.
Gradually I became aware of my telephone ringing. It had not even occurred to me that, rather than sitting and brooding alone, I could have been talking through what had happened with Jeff or Miranda or somebody else who cared about me. Fortunately, one of those people was now calling me. “It’s Art,” he said. “I just heard about Jess Carter. I am so sorry, Bill. I know you liked her and respected her.”
“I did. More than that, too. We had-hell, I don’t know what to call it, Art-we had started to get involved, I guess you could say.”
“Romantically involved?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow,” he said. “Well, damn. I bet that would’ve been a good thing for both of you.”
“I think so. Started off mighty nice, though I’m not sure she was completely over her divorce yet. Might’ve gotten bumpy. But might’ve smoothed out again pretty quick. Guess we’ll never know.”
“Man,” he said, “I thought I was sorry to hear the news before. Now I’m a lot more sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Nothing I can think of. I’ve got to go into KPD tomorrow morning for an interview.”
“Why are they having you come in, instead of talking to you at your office?”
“I guess because I found her body.”
“You?”
“Yeah. Lucky me. It was bad, Art. She was nude, and she was tied to that research corpse we had lashed to a tree. Like she was having sex with the corpse.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Son of a bitch. Listen, Art, I’m gonna go now. Thanks for calling.”
“You need anything, you page me. Even if it’s the middle of the night. Especially if it’s the middle of the night. It’s liable to hit you hardest long about then.”
A powerful sense of foreboding told me he was probably right.
CHAPTER 26
I WOULD NOT HAVE believed a single day could creep by so slowly. But then again, I would not have believed the nightmarish turn events had taken ten hours before at the Body Farm, either. What I found believable clearly had no relation to reality any longer.
Miranda was scrubbing the femur as if her life-or even her Ph.D.-depended on removing every molecule of soft tissue before putting it in the steam kettle to simmer. We had been working in the morgue’s decomp room for an hour now, cleaning the bulk of the tissue off the bones of the research body that had been tied to the pine tree. The research body that Jess’s body had been obscenely embracing.
Garland Hamilton had brought Jess’s body over around noon, and KPD had released the scene at four-thirty. By five, all the cops and emergency vehicles were gone, and so, therefore, were the camera crews. As soon as the parking lot had cleared out, Miranda and I drove up to the gate in the department’s truck, collected the remains of the research body, and brought it into the decomp room to process. I blamed this research project, in some vague way, for Jess’s death, and I wanted to rid myself and the facility of all traces of it. Besides, Jess was gone, and we had already pinned down Craig Willis’s time since death to roughly one week before the hiker found the battered body on the bluff outside Chattanooga.
Neither Miranda nor I had spoken a word as we worked. For me, the shock and grief I felt over Jess’s murder were overwhelming. I felt myself immersed, close to going under; the simplest acts-opening a door, flipping a light switch, speaking a sentence-seemed foreign, baffling, exhausting. Miranda had not known Jess nearly as well as I had; she might have been keeping silent out of deference to the pain radiating off me, although she, too, might have been too upset herself to feel like talking. A close brush with death seems to turn people into exaggerated versions of themselves, the same way a few drinks do: the mean get meaner, the sad get weepy, the talkative just will not shut up. So it wasn’t surprising that two introverted scientists would fall silent when a colleague of both, and a love of one, had been murdered.
But there was another explanation for the tense silence that occupied the room, almost as palpably as if it were a third person: Jess Carter’s body was being autopsied across the hall, in the main autopsy suite, by Garland Hamilton. He’d started two hours before, according to a morgue technician who greeted me with a stricken face upon my arrival. My guess was that unless Garland found something unusual, he would be finishing soon.
It added insult to injury to know that Jess’s maimed body was being examined by a medical examiner I knew to be sloppy and incompetent. He might overlook or misread evidence, which could compromise the police department’s effort to understand the crime and pinpoint the killer; conversely, he might imagine evidence where none actually existed, as he had in Billy Ray Ledbetter’s autopsy, when he saw an accidental cut in the flesh of the back and interpreted it-or, rather, misinterpreted it-as a deep, lethal stab wound that zigzagged across the spine and threaded the rib cage before burrowing into a lung.
As I scraped a bit of tissue from the foramen magnum-the large opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord emerged-the scalpel slipped from my right hand; I made a fruitless grab for it, and the
skull rolled from my left hand and thudded into the stainless steel sink, upside down. I stared down at it-the top of the cranium had nested into the drain, and the water pouring from the faucet was beginning to back up in the sink-and I could not think what to do. I stood transfixed by the rising water: Now it was filling the eye orbits; now the nasal cavity; now lapping at the teeth of the upper jaw. Miranda came and stood beside me; she laid one hand gently on my back; with the other, she leaned across the sink and shut off the water. “It’s okay,” she said gently. “You don’t have to do this. Why don’t you go home?”
“I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I know I won’t like it there.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Not really. But I don’t hate it as much as I’ll hate being home.”
“Then stay,” she said. “Just try not to break anything. How about you clean the rest of the long bones and let me do the skull?” Without waiting for an answer, she lifted the skull from the sink and took it to the other sink, where she had been working.
“I slept with her,” I said, still staring into the now-empty sink. “With Jess. Last week, when I went down to Chattanooga to look at Craig Willis’s body and go out to the crime scene. She invited me to her house that night, and we went to bed.” I turned to look at Miranda and saw that she had reddened slightly. She bent over the skull and began scrubbing bits of tissue from its recesses with a toothbrush.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. Because it was important to me. It was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. It felt like the beginning of something. And now it’s gone. She’s gone.”
She looked at me now, and her embarrassment had given way to compassion. “It’s not your fault, you know.”
“No I don’t,” I said, “and neither do you. You’re trying to make me feel better, and I appreciate that, but I can’t shake the thought that there might be some connection with me.”
“Like what?”
“Like…I don’t know. Maybe if she hadn’t gotten involved with me, her ex-husband might not have flown into a murderous rage. Maybe if she hadn’t been in my office that day when Craig Willis’s mother showed up, that crazy woman would never have seen her and decided Jess was evil.”
“Maybe if she hadn’t gotten involved with you, Jess would have gone off her rocker and shot up a kindergarten. Maybe if she’d driven away from your office five minutes sooner that day, she’d have triggered a five-car pileup on I-75 that would have killed the medical researcher who’s on the verge of curing cancer.”
“What medical researcher? What are you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is this,” she said. “If you’re going to play what-if-which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism-you have to play it both ways. If you’re going to imagine yourself as an accidental villain, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero. As somebody who prevented God-knows-what dire disaster simply by doing exactly the things you did. And who knows,” she added, “maybe the physicists are right; maybe there really are zillions of parallel universes. And maybe in those parallel universes, all the improbable scenarios we imagine really do happen, and all the wild conspiracy theories we imagine really are true.”
She’d lost me by now, but at least she’d taken my mind off my misery for a minute. It was time enough to allow me a gulp of emotional oxygen, like a swimmer turning his head between strokes to bite a mouthful of air.
There was a rap at the door of the decomp and Garland Hamilton walked in, looking tense. He glanced at me, then eyed Miranda steadily. “Oh,” she said. “I need to go…do…something.” She laid the skull down on a tray lined with paper towels and hurried out.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “Tell me about Jess.”
“Are you sure?” I nodded. “She was killed by a gunshot to the head,” he said. “Small caliber, probably a.22, maybe a.25. The ballistics guys will be able to tell. No exit wound-the bullet ricocheted around inside the cranium, so it chewed the brain up pretty bad. The good news, I guess, is that she died almost instantly once she was shot.”
“Why do you say, ‘once she was shot,’ Garland? Is there some bad news besides the fact that somebody killed her?”
“It’s possible she was raped,” he said. “There were traces of semen in the vagina.”
His comment hit me like a UT linebacker. Perhaps she had indeed been raped, but perhaps Hamilton had merely found residual traces of my own lovemaking with Jess from several nights earlier. I considered mentioning that possibility, but it seemed too personal-a violation not only of my privacy, but of Jess’s, too.
“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 p
resented 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.”
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