Flesh and Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  Judging by the funeral home’s address, which I should have remembered from all the thank-you notes I’d sent them, I’d overshot Art’s location by several blocks. I whipped into the parking lot, circled the gleaming black hearse, and doubled back toward downtown on Broadway. Traffic backed up behind me as I crept along, scanning for numbers. Finally, running out of options, I turned into a small, run-down shopping center whose anchor tenant was known throughout Knoxville as “the Fellini Kroger” because of the surreal cast of characters who shopped there. A fair number of graduate students lived in Old North Knoxville, since it was fairly close to campus and offered housing that tended toward interesting but cheap. One of my forensic students who’d never lost his interest in cultural anthropology liked to time his shopping at the Fellini Kroger to coincide with the delivery of Social Security disability checks. On those days, he swore, the line at the check-cashing counter could rival any circus sideshow on earth.

  Just down from the Kroger, I idled past a Dollar General Store numbered 2043—at last, a number!—and parked the truck. Feeling conspicuous and more than a little silly, I hauled the boom box off the passenger seat, as well as the small cooler Jess had brought from Chattanooga, and headed along the row of shops. At the far end of the shopping center, beside a kudzu-choked drainage ditch, I found myself facing a door marked 2035. The door and windows were coated with reflective film; a hand-painted sign on the window glass announced the store as BROADWAY JEWELRY & LOAN. Puzzled, I tried to enter, but the door was locked. I set the boom box and cooler down, pressed my face to the door, and cupped my hands around my eyes to screen out the sunlight; inside, I discerned a hulking man behind a counter. I rapped on the glass and he looked up, then pointed emphatically to my right. A doorbell-type button was mounted to the doorframe. “Good grief,” I muttered, but I pushed it. Inside, I heard a metallic buzz—I was mildly surprised that it worked—then a loud click in the doorframe. I picked up my belongings and pushed through the door. Within the narrow storefront, one wall was lined with shelves laden with stereos, televisions, and power tools; set out from the opposite wall was a long glass counter on which the guy who’d buzzed me in was leaning. His beefy forearms rested on a sign that read DO NOT LEEN ON COUNTER.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “I think I must have been given the wrong address.”

  He looked me over, then his eyes settled on the boom box. “Depends,” he said. “Who gave it to you?”

  “My friend Art. Art Bohanan. He’s with the police department.”

  The big man vaulted the counter like a dog going after a UPS guy. Before I knew what had happened, my nose was flattened on the glass, my right arm torqued up between my shoulder blades. “I want to know who the fuck you are, mister, and what you mean coming in here talking about the damn police.”

  “Bill? Bill, is that you?” Art’s voice floated out from the back of the store. “It’s okay, Tiny. He’s on our side.”

  Tiny released my arm, milliseconds before the bone was about to snap. “Dammit, Tiffany, why didn’t you tell me you had somebody coming? And why’d you bring him here, anyway? You know better than that.”

  Tiffany? I was more confused than ever. Art emerged through a curtain at the back of the shop. “I’m sorry; I meant to tell you, I just forgot. Tiny, this is Dr. Bill Brockton. Bill, this is Tiny.”

  “Tiny and I have met,” I said, rubbing my arm.

  Tiny looked me over again, seeing something different this time. “You’re the Body Farm guy?” I nodded. “Hey, it’s an honor to meet you, Doc,” he said, seizing my hand and pumping my mangled arm. “I’m sorry I got a little excited there. You’re a better class of customer than what we’re used to dealing with here at Broadway Jewelry & Loan. You had me worried our cover was blown.”

  Suddenly I grasped where I was, and why Art had told me to bring the boom box. “So you’re running an undercover sting operation here? Dealing in stolen property?”

  “Tiny is,” said Art. “I’m camped out in the back, putting some of the inventory to good use. Come on in. Welcome to my world. And Tiffany’s.”

  As I stepped through the curtain into the back of the store, my eyes irised open to compensate for the dimness. The only light, besides what leaked around the doorway curtain, came from two large computer monitors. When I realized what was on them, I felt my stomach clench. “Oh Jesus, Art.” One screen showed a paunchy middle-aged man. He was stark naked, and he was not alone. He was with a girl who couldn’t have been more than eight or ten. The other showed the same man with a boy who appeared even younger, possibly even six or seven.

  “Sickening, isn’t it?” said Art. “I spend hours every day looking at filth like this. It’s getting to me, I have to tell you.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine. How on earth did you get into this? And for heaven’s sake, why?”

  He sighed. “You remember that little girl who was abducted, raped, and murdered a few months back? The perp represented by your buddy Grease?” I nodded, grimacing; Art had been deeply distressed by the case, especially the fact that the abductor’s lawyer, Burt DeVriess—“Grease,” most of the cops called him—had delayed the search of the car in which the child had been kidnapped. “Well, when we finally searched the guy’s house and his computer, we found tons of child pornography. Not surprising—a lot of child predators trade kiddie porn over the Internet, and some of them troll for victims in online chat rooms.” I nodded. “After that case, the chief decided that it was time for us to go after guys like that before they struck, rather than after. Guess who won the coin toss?”

  He sounded bitter about the assignment, but I knew Art better than that. What he was bitter about was the existence of child predators. Spending his days and nights in their virtual company would be bound to take a toll on him, but I knew he would pursue them with relentless zeal.

  “So what’s with the ‘Tiffany’ business?”

  “That’s one of my chat room IDs. I’m a thirteen-year-old girl who hates her parents, loves to chat, and can’t wait to find out what love is really like. I’ve got a dozen dirty old men across the state just dying to initiate me into the pleasures of the flesh.”

  “Clearly they have a different picture of you than I do,” I said, eyeing Art’s stocky body and graying hair.

  “Oh, absolutely,” he said. “I’m actually tall and slim, but all the boys say I have nice boobs and a great ass.”

  I shuddered. “Yuck. I can’t believe you have to think like that.”

  “Tell me about it. One of these creeps is about to talk me into sneaking away to meet him. Some jerk down in Sweetwater who thinks I’ll be there this weekend visiting my aunt, who just so happens to live near the Motel Six. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when I kick in the door of the motel room, flash him my badge, and say, ‘Hi, asshole, I’m Tiffany, and you’re under arrest.’”

  I had to laugh, in spite of the seamy subject. “But Sweetwater’s fifty miles south of here. Isn’t that a little outside your jurisdiction?”

  “Not anymore,” Art said. He picked up a badge from the desk and handed it to me. It was a five-pointed gold star encircled by the words UNITED STATES MARSHAL.

  I whistled. “U.S. Marshal? How’d a lowly KPD cop swing that?”

  “We’re working with the feds,” he said. “FBI and postal inspectors. I’ve got arrest powers anywhere in the state. Believe it or not, this”—he swept his arm in an arc that encompassed the dingy space—“is the headquarters of the Tennessee Task Force on Internet Crimes Against Children. Mainly me and a couple of stolen computers so far, but we’re about to get some serious money and manpower.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “Reminds me of my own job—the work stinks, but somebody’s got to do it. Can’t think of anybody who’d do this with more commitment and integrity.”

  “Not sure how long I can take it, though,” he said. “I’m only two months in, and already my blood pressure’s through the roof, I’m ha
ving trouble sleeping, and once I do get to sleep, I have awful nightmares.”

  Knowing what a decent guy Art was, that didn’t surprise me. “You’re on a rough diet right now,” I said. “Nothing but rotten fruit from the tree of knowledge.”

  “Isn’t there supposed to be some good fruit on that tree, too? Last time I read the Bible, it was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

  “Yeah, but the good stuff ’s on branches neither one of us gets to pick,” I said. “Speaking of bad fruit, let me show you what I need you to print. You might want to glove up for this.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pair of latex gloves for him, plus a pair for me. Then I opened the small cooler Jess had given me. Inside, propped on a bed of ice and sealed in a plastic bag, was the Chattanooga victim’s penis. A bloody thumbprint—bigger than the one Jess had planted on our research subject—showed clearly through the bag.

  If I’d known Jess was bringing this grisly piece of evidence with her, I’d have asked Art to meet us at the Body Farm. I didn’t mind playing courier, though, as I hadn’t seen Art in weeks and I welcomed the chance to catch up with him, even briefly.

  When he recognized the object in the baggie, Art’s eyes widened and he gave a low whistle. “Ouch, man. Well, you’ve certainly come to the right place,” he said, nodding toward the computer monitors. “Feels like we’re in the theme park from hell here. What’s the story? There is a story, right? I mean, it’s not every day somebody brings me a severed pecker on ice.”

  “Sure, there’s a story. We just don’t know what it is yet. The guy this belonged to was found tied to a tree in a state forest outside Chattanooga. He was wearing a woman’s wig, makeup, and leather corset. Head and face were bashed in pretty bad. And this was stuffed in his mouth.”

  “I can think of a few more guys that deserve the same treatment,” he said. Then: “Sorry—I don’t mean that this guy did. I shouldn’t let what I’m working on here poison my thinking about other cases.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Be tough not to.”

  “You thinking homophobic hate crime?”

  “Well, that’s sure what it looks like. First glance, anyhow.”

  Art switched on a small desk lamp beside one of the monitors; mercifully, he also switched off both monitors. Holding the severed organ gingerly in the palm of one gloved hand, he leaned close and studied the bloody print. “Not a bad print, considering,” he said. “If your killer is considerate enough to have prints on file, we might just get a match. I’ll need to take it back to the lab, though. You wanna come along?”

  “Don’t you need to stay here…Tiffany?”

  He glared at me, then cupped a hand behind one ear. “I think I hear my mean old mom calling me,” he said. “She says I have to log off and do my stupid algebra homework. Like, what a total bitch?”

  He switched the monitors back on, prompting me to flee to the front of the pawnshop, where I inspected Tiny’s merchandise. The glass display case contained several iPods, a handful of heavy gold neck chains, and at least a dozen handguns, ranging in price from one hundred dollars to three hundred. I couldn’t tell any difference between the least expensive and the most expensive, so I asked Tiny to explain. “This here’s a Hi-Point,” he said, pulling out the hundred-dollar gun. “Lots of ’em out there, ’cause they’s so damn cheap. Some folks say they’re bad to jam, but that’s mostly because of cheap ammo, is what I think. ’Course, if you can’t afford but a hunnerd-dollar gun, you probably got to buy cheap ammo, too. So either way, you could be screwed.” He pulled out the expensive gun. “This is a SIG Sauer,” he said. “Everything about this weapon is top-notch. If I’m needin’ to shoot some sumbitch, I want to be able to trust my piece. Don’t you?”

  “Um, sure,” I said. “Damn right I do.”

  “Okay, Deadeye, let’s go,” said Art. “I have to do homework for a whole hour, and then I’ve got a chat room date I have to get back for.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT was housed in a gray and tan concrete and brick fortress of indeterminate vintage—late 1960s or early ’70s, maybe, the heyday of “urban renewal,” when whole blocks of old buildings were razed to make way for parking lots and stark, boxy structures. Situated a stone’s throw from two of Knoxville’s low-income housing projects, it probably saved the city thousands a year in fuel costs just by virtue of its location.

  As Art and I passed the front desk I looked for Gunderson, the sergeant I’d joked with earlier in the day, but evidently his shift was over, for the desk was staffed by a young Latina woman. She waved at Art, studied me and my cooler briefly, then pressed some button that opened the elevator for us.

  For years the fingerprint lab was down in the basement, but these days, it inhabited quarters on the second floor. Art nodded at a countertop, which I took as a sign to set the cooler down. It was a good guess; he opened the top and lifted out the bag containing the penis.

  “Are you going to fume it?” I asked. I didn’t know a lot about fingerprinting, but I knew Art had patented a gizmo for creating fumes of superglue which would stick to latent prints on what ever object was placed in the chamber that filled with the fumes, tracing the loops and whorls in crisp white.

  “No,” he said, “for this I’ll use leuco-crystal violet. Shows up better than superglue. It reacts chemically in the presence of blood—the hemoglobin actually catalyzes a reaction between the LCV and hydrogen peroxide—to produce a bright purple. Even if the blood were a lot dimmer than what’s on this guy’s pecker, it would be very dramatic.”

  From a cabinet of bottles and boxes and bags of supplies, he took down a brown plastic bottle of ordinary hydrogen peroxide and a bottle of a clear solution; in a small beaker he mixed 50 cc’s of the leuco-crystal violet—a couple of ounces, maybe—with another 200 cc’s of the peroxide. Finally, he slid an oblong pellet the size of the end of his pinkie down the side of the beaker into the mixture.

  “What’s that? The magic ingredient?”

  “Close,” he said. “The magnetic stirrer.” He set the beaker on top of a small instrument with a round, flat platform on top and rotated a switch on the instrument’s face. The pellet began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster as he cranked the dial. “Good for mixing drinks, too, as long as you’re not hoping to chop ice.” He poured the liquid from the beaker into a plastic spray bottle, aimed the bottle into a sink, and pumped the trigger a few times to prime it. “Okay, let’s take a closer look at our boy here.”

  From a box of latex gloves on the counter, he took and donned a pair. Then he took a pair of forceps from a tray, opened the bag, and reached in with the forceps to extract the penis. “You mind switching on that light for me?” He gestured, using the penis as a pointer, toward a lamp that consisted of a large magnifying glass encircled by a fluorescent tube. I held the red button on the base, and the tube flickered on. “I don’t suppose we know what size this thing was when the print was deposited, do we? I mean, it makes a difference whether a balloon is inflated or deflated when the artwork gets applied.” It hadn’t occurred to me until he brought it up, but size really did seem to matter in this particular instance.

  “I don’t think we have any idea,” I said. “At least, no one’s mentioned a photo or a note about dimensions at the moment of amputation.”

  He studied the print closely. “Well, this looks to be about the same size as my thumbprint,” he said. “Not, mind you, that there’s any other resemblance. I would guess, unless the person who lopped it off was incredibly sneaky, the poor bastard was probably not in a state of arousal.”

  “I would guess,” I said, “that if I saw somebody coming at my private parts with a butcher knife, I’d be shriveling fast and trying to make like a turtle.”

  Art laughed. “Yeah, I can recall a couple of occasions when I wouldn’t have minded being able to do the emergency retraction. Once when I was a kid, I was peeing out a double-hung window, and the sash fell shut. A
very narrow escape, not to mention a big mess to clean up. Another time, when I was nineteen, I’d gone to visit my girlfriend at the women’s college in Mississippi where she’d just started. We hadn’t seen each other in two months, and she had finally caved in. Just at the wrong moment, a bright flashlight shone through the car window right at my proud manhood. My first and most humiliating law enforcement experience.”

  He rotated the penis, bringing the head into sharper focus. “Too bad this guy was circumcised,” he said. “If the foreskin were intact, there might be enough fluid underneath to let us get a swab and check for saliva or other fluids from recent sexual contact. We’ve gotten DNA matches that way in a couple other murders, though the penis was still attached to both of those stiffs. So to speak.”

  With that, he took the penis and the spray bottle over to an exhaust hood, where he tapped a floor switch to turn on a light and the exhaust fan. Then he gently misted the severed penis with the mixture from his spray bottle. Almost immediately, the severed base of the organ turned a bright purple. A second later, so did the faint reddish brown of the print an inch away from the stump. Rotating the organ, Art sprayed a fine mist around its entire girth, and as he did so, other prints—previously little more than faint smudges—leapt into view. “Look at that,” said Art. “We’ve got a complete set. He had a pretty good grip when he lopped it off. There’s the thumb on top, closest to the base, and a row of fingertips running up the side. See the pinkie, there near the head? And look at that line in the thumbprint—this guy had cut his thumb recently.”

  “I’ll be,” I said. “If this guy’s prints are on file, you think you can match one of those?”

  “Bill, if this guy’s prints are on file, you could match one of those. These are nearly as good as we get when we print a new hire upstairs in Human Resources.”