The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  He gave a noncommittal shrug. “Dr. Garcia mentioned that when we admitted him, so we’ll certainly check for it when we do the tissue pathology. But he’s not showing any symptoms of toxic shock. His vitals are stable and strong, and his blood work’s good — normal pH, normal red-blood count, normal white-cell count.”

  I glanced at Miranda; her eyes were locked on the surgeon’s with laser intensity, but I thought I saw traces of relief in her face, mirroring what must surely be showing in my own.

  “We’ll keep a close eye on those,” Rivkin was saying, “but to me this looks like a textbook case of gangrene — localized necrosis, caused by poor circulation. I suspect the blood vessels in that hand were just too badly damaged by the radiation burn to recover.”

  “And does the amputation resolve the problem,” Carmen asked quietly, “or will he need additional surgery?”

  The surgeon shifted, visibly uncomfortable, and I had the feeling another shoe was about to drop. “We needed to provide blood supply and skin for his…wrist,” he said, sidestepping the word “stump,” which my mind had instantly plugged into the awkward pause. “So what we’ve done is a procedure called a pedicle flap.”

  “I don’t know what that procedure is,” she said. “Tell me, please?”

  “We’ve grafted his forearm to his abdomen,” he explained, “here, just beneath the skin.” Curling his right hand tightly, he jammed his wrist into his lower belly. “New blood vessels will grow from the abdomen into the wrist. Once they do — two or three weeks — we can reverse the procedure and detach the arm. Then we’ll take a flap of skin from the abdomen to cover the stump.” This time he didn’t flinch from the word.

  If Carmen was taken aback by the news that her husband’s arm was now surgically grafted to his belly, she didn’t show it. She simply asked, “When can I see him?”

  “He should be waking up soon. I can take you back to Recovery now.”

  She nodded, hugged Miranda and me, and left with the surgeon.

  On the drive back across the river to the stadium, my thoughts circled back to the idea I’d found so worrisome: the idea that Eddie had contrived to lose his hand, as a way of angling for a transplant. If the surgeon was right — if Eddie’s infection wasn’t caused by the deadly strain of microorganism that had killed Clarissa Lowe — my worry had been unfounded. That knowledge was a relief, but the relief was mixed with shame — shame at having suspected Eddie of recklessness and manipulation.

  I also felt a fresh surge of sorrow and compassion. No matter how much moral integrity he might have, Eddie Garcia no longer possessed even a remnant of his hands.

  CHAPTER 28

  The marker at the head of the grave was a small, weather-stained slab of unpolished marble, far less ornate than Trey Willoughby’s monumental obelisk or even Pendergrast’s granite slab. The chiseled letters read, MISS ELIZABETH JENKINS, B. JAN. 22, 1916, D. OCT. 4, 2003. CARPE LIBRUM. The death date was within three days of Pendergrast’s and two days of Willoughby’s. DeVriess’s fishing expedition was expanding, but in very small outward ripples. In going back to the judge for additional exhumation orders, DeVriess had contended that mischief was clearly afoot at Ivy Mortuary in early October of 2003, and that the path of common sense and civil justice was to exhume other bodies from that same time period. His plan was to exhume other bodies buried by Ivy at that same time and then gradually work his way both forward and backward from there, in order to determine when the mischief had begun and when it had ended.

  This time the television and newspaper reporters were already present, although Culpepper had corralled them into an area fifty feet away, behind a strand of yellow-and-black police tape.

  Miss Jenkins — a former English teacher who’d lived and died alone — was buried in the simplest of steel coffins within a concrete vault. The coffin, like the headstone, had been purchased with donations from former students; the Latin inscription, Carpe librum, meant “Seize the book.” I groped at the foot of the coffin for the crank that would open the lid, then swiveled it outward and began turning it. “So,” I said, “predictions?”

  “Four bags of sand,” Grease said.

  “She’s a little old lady,” Miranda said. “Only two bags of sand.”

  “Arms and legs, but no torso or head,” predicted Culpepper.

  As the lid pivoted up, the tripods of the TV and newspaper photographers leaned against the police tape, straining to get a few inches closer to the graveside. The lid of the coffin blocked the cameras’ view of its interior, but it didn’t block their view of the four faces peering down in astonishment.

  Miss Elizabeth Jenkins was a tiny, white-haired woman, her aged features well preserved, her wrinkled cheeks slightly rouged with mold.

  And Miss Elizabeth Jenkins was wrapped in a macabre embrace with the rotting remains of a large human male. His left temporal bone — the oval of thin bone above the ear — had a one-inch circle punched in it, a blow delivered with enough force to drive the disk of bone deep into the brain.

  * * *

  “Not exactly the lovers of Valdaro,” commented Miranda as we extricated Miss Jenkins from the arms of her coffinmate. To escape the media circus, we’d loaded the coffin into my truck and taken it to the forensic center, tailed by a caravan of reporters. Culpepper had eventually dispersed them with the promise of a news conference and photos later in the day.

  “The lovers of who?” asked Culpepper, clearly feeling squeamish.

  “Not who,” Miranda corrected as I handed her one of the man’s arms. “Where. Valdaro. A village in northern Italy.” She laid the arm on an autopsy table we’d positioned beside the coffin. “Archaeologists excavated a pair of skeletons — a man and a woman — near Valdaro in 2007. They were buried together about five thousand years ago, wrapped in each other’s arms.”

  “I remember that,” said Art, who’d already patted the two corpses with tape to collect stray hairs and fibers. “I saw something about it on Discovery or National Geographic. ‘The world’s longest hug,’ I think they called it. But didn’t somebody else dig up an even older couple someplace else just a few days later?”

  “Dubious,” she answered. “Somebody did find an older pair of skeletons in Turkey — around nine thousand years old. But it’s not at all certain that those two were buried together. Could be just a case of commingling — mixed bones, one body dumped into the same patch of ground as another, maybe centuries apart. The Italian couple definitely had their arms wrapped around each other, though. Sweet, huh?”

  “Very sweet,” I noted, “unless it was a double murder, or a murder-suicide.”

  “Which this case could be,” offered Culpepper.

  “Sure.” Miranda snorted. “Murder-suicide. Little Miss Jenkins whacks this big ol’ man upside the head, then takes a bottleful of sleeping pills and dies — but not before she embalms herself, climbs into the coffin, and hauls him in with her.”

  “Okay, so maybe we can rule out murder-suicide,” Culpepper said sheepishly.

  Unlike Trey Willoughby, whose lips were quite literally sealed, this man’s corpse was openmouthed; in fact, as I pulled gently downward on the lower jaw, so I could see the teeth, the mandible came loose in my hand. “Oh, man,” groaned Culpepper, turning away, “I wish I hadn’t seen that.”

  Miranda and I studied the mandible, while Art fished around in the pockets of the dead man’s pants, which were greasy with fatty acids from the decaying corpse. Culpepper, still averting his eyes, asked, “So what’s the best way to ID him? Fillings? Bridgework? Dental X-rays?”

  “We could go the forensic-dentistry route,” I said. “Means we’ll need to check with a lot of dentists once we chart his teeth.”

  “Or we could go this route instead,” said Art, who had fished a wallet from the corpse’s left back pocket. Culpepper whirled around just as Art flipped opened the stained wallet and removed a driver’s license. “I believe we just found Kerry Roswell, our missing embalmer.”

&n
bsp; The wallet wasn’t all Art found in the coffin with Roswell and Miss Perkins. Tucked behind the fabric liner of the coffin was a clawhammer. Its head — which matched the size and shape of the skull fracture — was smeared with a thin coating of scalp tissue, hair, bone fragments, and brain matter. And its handle showed what appeared to be a partial fingerprint, etched in blood.

  “Well,” Culpepper said after a collective silence. “Maybe we need to dig up Elmer Ivy now and see if he’s got any fingerprints we can compare to this.”

  “If he’s got fingers,” said Art.

  “Or if he’s really in his own coffin, not somebody else’s,” said Miranda. “At this rate we’re gonna have to dig up everybody — every last body — in Knoxville.”

  * * *

  “Knoxville’s ghoulish grave-robbing mystery has taken a bizarre, deadly twist,” said WBIR anchor Randall Gibbons in that night’s top story, “with grave robbing giving way to murder and grave stuffing.” Like the station’s earlier stories on the Pendergrast and Willoughby exhumations, this report stressed the shocking nature of the subject matter and images. In addition to video footage showing the coffin being hoisted from the grave and the lid pivoting upward — as Miranda, Culpepper, DeVriess, and I stared in shock — the images included several KPD photos of the coffin’s embracing inhabitants, purposely blurred to render them less gruesome. My phones rang continuously throughout the late-night newscast and beyond. I ignored the calls, since I didn’t recognize any of the numbers and didn’t want to spend hours on the phone with reporters. But by the time I switched off the phones for the night, I’d counted more than a dozen different area codes and several international country codes.

  Must’ve been a slow news day, I thought as I settled into bed. They’ll move on to something else tomorrow. I was wrong.

  CHAPTER 29

  By the next afternoon, the media calls had driven me nuts — I’d dodged dozens of long-distance reporters but had talked with half a dozen local ones. Elmer Ivy had fingerprints on file, it turned out — he’d served in the military — and Art was able to get a scan of them. None of them matched the bloody print on the hammer. The mysterious coffin killer, as some of the reporters dubbed the hammer swinger, was suddenly big news, far bigger than the war in Afghanistan or nuclear talks with Iran and North Korea. It was a relief to drive away from the jangling phones in my office at the end of the day, even though I deeply dreaded what the evening’s errand was likely to hold in store.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Miranda studying me from the passenger seat, so I turned toward her and asked, “What?” The right-front tire teetered on the edge of the pavement, and I twitched the steering wheel to avoid hurtling into the ditch. Duncan Road meandered along ridges and hollows about ten miles west of downtown Knoxville and UT. Decades earlier Duncan had been a rural farm road, but lately weathered farmhouses had given way to sprawling estates and cul-de-sac housing developments, with just enough shacks and rusting trailers to impart a tumbledown, seedy charm.

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “You’re looking at me funny. What is it?”

  “Nothing,” Miranda said, “except watch the road. And slow down.” After a pause she added, “And are you okay?”

  I chose not to comment on the driving advice. “Not really.” The truth was, I dreaded what lay ahead. I’d rather be fishing a bloated, slimy corpse from the river, I realized — and floaters were about as unappealing as corpses got, in my opinion — than embarking on this errand with Miranda.

  “Slow down. It’s on the left. There.” She pointed into the twilight. “There.”

  “Where? I don’t see it.”

  “You just missed it.”

  I stopped. “I missed it?” Looking out the window, I glimpsed rectangles of golden light slightly below us, crosshatched by bare branches, pine foliage, and glossy rhododendron leaves. “Where the hell’s the driveway?”

  “You passed it.”

  “Are you sure? I didn’t see one.”

  “It’s hard to see in the dark. That’s why I told you to slow down. Twice.” One of the interesting features of my relationship with Miranda was that our interactions ranged so widely across the spectrum: Sometimes I dispensed knowledge as her professor and mentor; sometimes we teased each other mercilessly and happily; occasionally we bickered like an old married couple. “I’ve been out here half a dozen times,” she added, sounding less snappish, “and I have trouble spotting it even in the daylight. It’s just a tiny gap in the tree line. If you blink, you’ll miss it.”

  I backed up twenty feet, grateful there was no other traffic on the winding road. Sure enough, the forested darkness on the left was broken slightly by a narrow opening, barely wide enough to accommodate my truck. I cut the wheel and eased into the notch. The headlights illuminated branches and treetops, and the earth seemed to drop off beneath us into the night. “Whoa. Is this a driveway or a cliff?”

  “It’s definitely an oh-shit experience the first time or two.” She laughed. “If you think careening down it now is interesting, you should try slithering up it on a rainy day in the fall, when it’s coated with wet, slippery leaves. We had to call a tow truck to get me out of here one night. And then we had to call a bigger tow truck to pull me and the little tow truck out.”

  The vertiginous ribbon of concrete was no more than a hundred feet long, but it dropped fifty vertical feet in that distance. It was flanked by a pair of contemporary houses, storklike in their slender verticality; they perched on the steep hillside on stilts, as if they, like the trees themselves, were rooted in the ground and reaching for the sky, stretching toward the top of the forest canopy.

  The driveway’s pitch lessened toward the bottom, and Miranda pointed me to a broader, flatter parking pad notched into an embankment. English ivy — some of it freshly nibbled, perhaps by deer — cascaded down a waist-high retaining wall. A black Subaru wagon was tucked alongside the wall; in front of it was a Nissan Xterra I recognized, its yellow paint mottled by brown leaves and dead twigs the size of finger bones. Eddie’s car hadn’t been driven in a while. I drew a deep breath and asked, “Ready?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Me neither. But let’s do it.”

  Our doors opened and closed in unison. They swung slowly, reluctantly. “It’s the house on the left.” A long wooden ramp, a cross between a boat dock and a drawbridge, angled from the parking area up to a decklike front porch. The front door was a large panel of insulated glass, framed by honey-colored wood; the entry hall was floored in pale oak covered by a long runner, a rug of wool woven in diamonds and stripes of black, red, gold, and green — Central or South American, I guessed. The rug ran down a lighted hall to the doorway of a dark room. Miranda reached up to a bell beside the door and gave a tug on a braided cord dangling from the clapper, and the bell pealed with a high, clear tone. Inside, I heard a clatter and then the thud of footsteps on wood and wool.

  The door was opened by a sad, haggard woman with a toddler slung on her left hip. “Please come in,” said Carmen Garcia.

  She’d asked me to come talk with her at home about her husband’s treatment and recovery and job situation — all serious concerns, I knew — and I’d brought Miranda along for moral support. It was cowardly on my part, maybe, but also potentially helpful. Miranda knew the Garcias far better than I did; in fact, several months before Eddie’s injury, Miranda had begun volunteering to baby-sit occasionally for the Garcias’ toddler, Tomás, so Eddie and Carmen could have a date night now and then. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford to hire a teenager to baby-sit; Garcia was a physician, after all, and clearly they lived in a large, interesting house, but for whatever reason — because they were new to Knoxville, or because their house was hard to find in the dark, or because they worried about entrusting their baby to a young stranger — they’d not had many evenings out until Miranda started the date-night plan. Truth be told, she wasn’t just thinking of the Garcias when she ma
de the offer. She’d had them over for dinner about six months earlier, to welcome the new M.E. and his family to town, and she’d been instantly smitten by the sweet, dark-eyed, dark-haired boy. The attraction was clearly mutual, for when he saw Miranda at the door, Tomás stretched out his arms and practically dove off his mother’s hip. “Randa, Randa, Randa,” he chirped, his face beaming.

  Miranda hoisted him off Carmen’s hip and transferred him to her own, nestling him there as naturally as if he were her own child. “Hola, muchacho,” she said, and then repeated the greeting in English: “Hey, dude. How’s my little dude, huh?” She punctuated each word with a wet, smacking kiss, and laughter burbled up out of the boy. The pure, musical sound brought a smile to my face and, I was happy to see, to Carmen’s as well. Tomás pointed at a staircase in the hallway, and Miranda clambered over the safety gate and headed upstairs with him.

  “I just made a pot of tea,” Carmen said. “Would you like a cup? Come, let’s sit.” She turned and led us around a corner into a large, open room in the shape of a semicircle. A galley-style kitchen ran the length of the one straight wall; on the other side of a full-length butcher-block counter, a long, curving wall of windows defined the living room. I walked to the center of the room and looked around me. It was now fully dark outside, so the arc of windows acted as mirrors, reflecting ten images of myself back at me.

  “What an amazing house,” I said, and when I spoke, my voice sounded as if it were coming not just from within me but from slightly in front of me, too. “And the acoustics are interesting.” The effect was similar to hearing my voice amplified by a microphone and a high-fidelity speaker.

  “Yes,” said Carmen. “It’s because you’re standing right at the center of that curve. It’s like the — oh, what’s the English term for punto focal? — the focal point of a lens. A lens of sound. Eddie and Tomás love the way it makes the sound big. I find it a little bit…um, haunting? Spooky?”