Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  “A novel? Go on.”

  “Southern lit. The book’s called Child of God. By Cormac McCarthy, possibly the greatest Southern writer since Faulkner, certainly the greatest writer Knoxville has ever produced. His best-known work is All the Pretty Horses; got made into a movie with Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz a few years ago.” The name rang a bell, but I hadn’t seen it. “Wonderful book, mediocre movie. Most of McCarthy’s other stuff is really dark, sometimes bizarre. Like Lester.”

  “Bizarre how?”

  “Well, Lester’s a mountain man—a real primitive, backwoods type—who ends up killing some women and hiding their bodies in a cave. Somewhere along the way, he develops a taste for necrophilia. Can’t get a date with a live woman, I guess.” She giggled, for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

  “Jesus. You’ve read this? You liked this?”

  She nodded brightly. “It sounds really gross, and some of it is horrifying. But the weird thing is, even though Lester’s a monster, he’s kind of charming, too. Funny, and naive, and somehow an innocent at heart, despite his dastardly deeds.” I shook my head uncomprehendingly. “Okay, you remember The Andy Griffith Show, right?” I nodded. This was familiar ground; I could recite whole scenes of dialogue between Andy and Barney. “So you remember Ernest T. Bass, the hillbilly who’s always throwing rocks through the jailhouse window? Wild, crazy, but not malicious at heart. Lester Ballard is sort of like that, only orders of magnitude beyond. I know it sounds silly to compare a necrophiliac killer to a simpleminded window-breaker, but read Child of God and you’ll see what I mean.”

  I wrote down the book’s title on my desk blotter. “I see you’re doing some other light reading,” I said, pointing to the osteology book. “Afraid I’m going to throw in a trick question on the midterm exam?”

  “No,” she laughed, “it’s just that whenever I get interested in something, I tend to go overboard, plunge in headfirst. Actually, I was wondering if you’d sign it for me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you set down your briefcase while I do it.”

  But it wasn’t her briefcase, it was mine, I realized—the one I’d left behind when I melted down in class that morning. I flushed with embarrassment.

  “You…forgot these today, Doctor B.” She lifted the lid, revealing the two pelvises I had been using to demonstrate the differences in male and female skeletal structure.

  “You’re right, and I hadn’t even missed them till now. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable silence before she spoke again. “Can I ask you something else about this one?” She held up the female pelvis, still tacked together with red dental wax. “You said it’s possible to tell from the bones if a woman has given birth. Can you show me how?”

  I took the bones from her. “This woman was in her forties when she died. You can tell that from the erosion in the pubic symphysis, the joint where the two pubic bones meet.” I pulled the pubic bones loose from the hip bones and peeled off the wax. “You see how the bone is starting to look a little weathered and spongy here at the face of the joint?” I rubbed the rough surface with my index finger, and she reached in to do the same. Our fingers brushed, and I felt my pulse quicken.

  Before speaking again, I swallowed hard. I could feel a stutter building, and I struggled to let go of the panic rising from my chest. “But there’s some t-t-trauma, here, too,” I said, “from childbirth.” I didn’t stutter often—hadn’t much since I was a child, and my mother took me to a speech therapist—but when I got nervous, it could sneak up and seize me by the throat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this jittery. Sarah leaned down for a closer look, taking my hands in hers to steady the bones and bring them close to her face. I could feel her breath on my fingertips. It was the most intimate touch I’d felt in a long time. “These grooves here and here,” I said, “are called ‘p-parturition p-pits.’ During childbirth, the ligaments sometimes start to pull free of the bones. That can cause bleeding and infection, which carves these small grooves in the damaged regions of the bone. Like I tell detectives, flesh forgets, but bone remembers.”

  So does the heart. I took a deep breath. “My wife had terrible complications during pregnancy,” I said. “Three miscarriages, then a full-term pregnancy that ended in a very difficult labor and delivery. She should have had a C-section, but she wanted so badly to do natural childbirth. It nearly killed her.” Sarah looked stricken. “A couple more miscarriages and twenty years later, she died of uterine cancer. That was two years ago. The doctors say there’s no connection, but I can’t help thinking there was. Can’t help thinking we shouldn’t have kept trying to have children. Can’t help blaming myself for her death. I don’t know what to do. I can’t…”

  Sarah turned her face up to mine. It did not look like the face of a student; it looked like the face of a bright and sensitive young woman, her eyes full of compassion. She reached up and laid a hand on my cheek, brushing away a tear with her thumb. Then she leaned toward me and touched her lips to the same spot. I felt a shudder run through my entire body. Then she laid both hands on the sides of my face and guided my mouth to hers. It was a kiss of pity first, I think, or consolation. Comforting and warm. And then it became something else. Her mouth opened, and I felt the heat and urgency of her tongue on my own. Her body pressed against mine—or maybe it was mine against hers—her breasts and thighs and pelvis melting into me, melting the cold that encased me in my grief. I groaned with pent-up sorrow and longing.

  I pulled free to catch my breath, leaning back to look at Sarah’s face. Over her shoulder, in the open doorway, my eyes caught a flash of movement. Miranda Lovelady stood there paralyzed, her eyes wide with shock or embarrassment or betrayal or some awful mixture of them all. She met my gaze for the briefest instant, her face crimson and contorted, and then she whirled and ran.

  Instinctively I went after her, hearing her footsteps but never quite seeing her for the curve of the hallway. I heard the clatter of the crash bar on the stairwell door, and I knew she was gone. Cursing myself for a fool, I turned and retraced my steps to my office. It, too, was empty now—emptier than it had ever felt before.

  God. How could I have been so foolish? I’d spent years cultivating a reputation for decency and decorum and professionalism, and I’d just chucked it in the trash can. Not only had I crossed the line with an undergraduate—a girl younger than my own son—I’d done it in front of the one graduate student whose respect mattered most to me. If she chose, Miranda could damage my reputation with the other grad students and the university administration as well. But that wasn’t my main concern. My main concern was the look of confusion and pain on her face. I hated to be the cause of that—hated to hurt her. I also hated the notion that there might be a deeper problem with Miranda as well. Had I somehow gotten too close to her, too? Was there something more serious and less appropriate than camaraderie lurking beneath our easy collaboration and rapid-fire gallows humor? Had I crossed a line—a powerful emotional line—during all those hours in the morgue with her?

  I thought and fretted about Miranda all the way home. Then, when I was in bed, in the dark, I thought about Sarah: the way her eyes shone at me, the way her mouth felt on mine, the way her breasts and hips pressed against me. For the first time since Kathleen’s death, I felt sexually aroused in my wasteland of a bed. For the first time in many months, I slept hard. And for the first time in many months, I awoke hard.

  Now what? I remembered a line from Garrison Keillor, whose public radio show UT’s NPR affiliate had broadcast for years: “Life is complicated, and not for the timid.” Amen to that, brother, I thought. Amen to that.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE HILLS WERE SHOWING their first signs of fall color as Art Bohanan and I wound along the river road in Cooke County. We had the windows of the UT truck cranked down, and the hum of the tires was punctuated by the crackle of sycamore leaves, the first to spiral down every autumn. I’d b
rought Art up to date on what I knew about my case, which wasn’t all that much. “Anyhow,” I concluded, “the sheriff seems to figure O’Conner for the killer, but I’m not so sure. O’Conner doesn’t strike me as the Lester Ballard type.”

  “The what type?”

  “Lester Ballard.”

  “Who’s Lester Ballard?”

  “Art, I’m disappointed in you. Don’t you read anything but police reports? Lester Ballard is one of the great characters of modern Southern literature.” From a jacket pocket, I pulled a ragged copy of Child of God, which I’d found in the used bin at the campus bookstore an hour before. I waved it knowingly. “Lester likes women. Dead women. Keeps ’em fresh in caves.”

  “Don’t we all. So you think there’s a connection between that book and this murder? Copycat thing—true crime imitating weird fiction?”

  “No, actually, I don’t think that. What I do think is that Jim O’Conner is mighty smart and well-read to be a murderous hillbilly. I’d bet my salary he knows that woman’s name; he sure got upset when he seemed to figure it out. So why won’t he tell us, if he’s not the killer?”

  “So maybe he is the killer. Just ’cause he quotes mod-ren South-ren litra-ture don’t make him Dudley Do-right.”

  “I know, but he doesn’t strike me as a killer. Call it anthropologist’s instinct.”

  “Lotta anthropologists used to think Ted Bundy was a heckuva nice guy, too.”

  “Okay, forget it. Judge for yourself. Hey, you said you’d heard back from your buddy in Army Records. What’d he find in O’Conner’s military file?”

  “Army Ranger. Served with valor and distinction. Led a mission into North Vietnam to rescue a downed pilot. Got a promotion, a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and a Medal of Honor nomination for it. If he were running for office, his opponent would paint him as a lily-livered coward, but he sounds like the kind of guy I’d want watching my back in the jungle.”

  “Well, you can see if he looks that way, too, in just a minute.”

  Or maybe not. All of a sudden, the meeting I’d brought us here for was looking problematic. A hundred yards in front of us, the road ended against a solid wall of green. Bluffs closed in on either side of the gravel track. I slowed the truck to a crawl. “Now what?” I asked.

  Art shrugged. “You sure this is the way you came?”

  “Well, I was pretty sure I was sure. I know we turned off the river road between those two hemlocks. I know we stopped at that big sycamore about a quarter-mile back, so Waylon could capfold me. After that, all I could see was the inside of his hat—but it didn’t feel like we made any stops or turns.”

  “Well, then, I guess we keep going.”

  “But where? How? It’s the end of the road.”

  “Well, go till you can’t go anymore, then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  We crept forward. The wall of vegetation ahead was a clotted mass of kudzu vines. As we got close, I noticed that the road didn’t actually end at the kudzu; instead, it seemed to disappear beneath it. To the left of the gravel, a small stream tumbled out through a curtain of vines. I looked at Art, and he grinned. “Damn the tendrils,” he hollered. “Full speed ahead!”

  I idled forward, and the truck nosed beneath the overhanging vines. They writhed across the windshield like some snaky nightmare, then rasped onto the roof, clutching at the mirrors and wipers and antenna with slithering, slapping sounds. The engine began to labor, not from the resistance of the vines, but from a sudden steepening of the road. Overhead, I thought I glimpsed a web of wires or cables—a sort of tensile arbor stretched between converging bluffs to support the kudzu.

  After a quarter-mile that seemed to stretch for an eternity, the kudzu tunnel ended at another curtain of vines, and the road emerged into a small, high valley—a hanging valley, I’d heard these called—that opened before us, like something out of Shangri-la. But this was a valley I’d seen before: the valley where Jim O’Conner had watched a hawk surfing on a rising current of air. The valley where I, too, had stumbled into some unseen current, whose force now gripped me and swept me along. As Art and I eased to a stop before the weathered house, I saw a figure sitting motionless in one of the rockers on the porch. It was O’Conner—a slumped, much aged O’Conner. I nodded to Art, and we got out.

  I felt the gun’s muzzle behind my ear before I heard or saw anything. For a big man, Waylon moved with remarkable speed and stealth. “It’s okay, Waylon; thank you, though,” murmured O’Conner. “Dr. Brockton, this is an unexpected pleasure. What brings you back this way?”

  I held up a cautionary finger at Art, who I figured had a gun in an ankle holster and was looking for an opening to go for it. “Mr. O’Conner, I do apologize for intruding on you. I know people in the mountains value their privacy and their property, and I’ve just trampled on both of those uninvited. It’s just that this murder case has raised some hard questions, which I think maybe you can answer. That young woman who was killed deserves somebody to speak for her, and I can’t do it without some help.”

  He sat silent. I plowed ahead. “I’ve brought a colleague, Art Bohanan. Art’s a Knoxville police officer, but he’s not here as a cop, he’s here as my friend. Could be yours, too, if you’ll let him.”

  O’Conner turned slightly and inspected Art, who met his gaze openly, with neither fear nor challenge. Then he turned back to me. “No point,” he said. “She’s gone. Speaking for her won’t bring her back.”

  “No, it won’t. But she deserves some sort of justice,” I said. “Somebody should be held accountable for her death, even if they’re already dead, too.”

  He shook his head sadly. “I don’t think I’ve got it in me to dredge all this up. Missing or murdered, she’s gone. That’s it, and with all due respect, it doesn’t concern you.”

  I hated what I was about to do. “That’s not entirely it,” I said, “and with all due respect, it does concern me. There’s another victim I have to consider.”

  He looked away, out across the valley, then back to me. “What other victim?”

  I steeled myself. “Mr. O’Conner, she was carrying a child. She was four and a half months pregnant when she was killed.”

  I heard a ragged intake of breath, the sort of tearing sound that means a heart is being ripped apart. I couldn’t face him.

  Art spoke up. “Mr. O’Conner, I checked your service records. You shipped out for Vietnam in June 1972. Was she pregnant when you left?”

  “No!” O’Conner shook his head dazedly. “How could she be? We never…. We wanted to wait. Well, she wanted to wait. I never even…. Oh, Christ.”

  Art gave him a moment. “How about when you got home?”

  “I never saw her when I got home. She was gone by then. I don’t even know when she left—I didn’t even know she had the dog tag till Dr. Brockton mentioned it the other day. I sent it to her after I got promoted, but she never wrote back to say she’d gotten it. Her letters just stopped. It was like the earth opened up and swallowed her.”

  And it had.

  “How old was she when you left for Vietnam?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  It fit exactly with the skeletal indicators. I wanted to be sure I understood what he’d said earlier. “Mr. O’Conner, are you saying you never had sexual relations with her?”

  “Never. She wanted to be a virgin when we got married. It sounds quaint in this day and age, but it was really important to her.”

  “Would you be willing to provide a DNA sample to prove you weren’t the father of the baby?”

  He stared at me bleakly. “How’s this?” He flipped open a pocketknife and drew the blade across the heel of his left hand. I saw a slit open, then brim with blood. He took a handkerchief from a hip pocket and soaked it in the blood, then held it toward me. I hesitated. “It’s okay, Doc,” he said. “No AIDS, no hepatitis, no syphilis. Pure as the driven snow.” Art produced a ziplock bag from somewhere and sealed the bloody cloth inside, then handed it
to me.

  During the long silence that ensued, I realized that I had delivered far worse news than I’d expected: not only was the woman he once loved a murder victim, but she’d been pregnant. By another man. A man to whom she’d given her prized virginity. “This must be a shock; I’m sorry.” He nodded grimly. “I hate to be blunt, but I don’t know any other way to ask this. She must have had sexual relations with someone, at least once. Do you have any idea who that might have been? The person who got her pregnant might be the person who killed her. Any idea who that might be?”

  He looked up at the sky, and his eyes roamed back and forth, searching for something long ago and far away that didn’t want to be found. Then they froze, widened momentarily, and clamped nearly shut, in a look as black and menacing as a summer thunderhead. “Does the sheriff know all this?”

  “He knows she was murdered. He knows she was wearing your dog tag. He doesn’t know she was pregnant. I’m fixing to go tell him.”

  There was another long pause, long enough for me to make out the crowing of a rooster somewhere in the distance.

  “You’re right, Doctor Brockton. She does deserve justice. And so does her baby. Go tell Sheriff Kitchings what you just told me. I’d love to be a fly on the wall when you do.”

  ART AND I rode in silence down the valley and into the tunnel of kudzu. As we emerged into daylight once more, I spoke up. “Well?”

  “He’s not the guy that killed her.”

  My curiosity outweighed the urge to gloat. “What makes you say that?”

  “Dog tag’s a pretty good alibi, at least on the front end. He had to have sent it to her after he was in ’Nam, ’cause he didn’t make first lieutenant until he’d rescued that pilot. Besides, he doesn’t strike me as a killer. Call it cop’s instinct.”

  I grinned, until I remembered the menacing look on O’Conner’s face. “But he knows who did it?”