Flesh and Bone

by Jefferson Bass

An autopsy by Carter, supplemented by a skeletal examination by University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist (and “Body Farm” founder) Bill Brockton, indicated that Willis was killed by massive and repeated blunt-force trauma to the head. Willis’s identity eluded investigators initially because no form of identification was found on his body, and the skin of his hands—including the fingerprints—had peeled off by the time the corpse was found. One piece of the missing skin was recently discovered by Brockton during a second search of the crime scene, said Carter, allowing the victim’s prints to be matched to prints on file from an employment background check Willis underwent three years ago.

  One source close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the slaying appears to be a hate crime, motivated by the victim’s apparent sexual orientation. “He was wearing a sort of female dominatrix-looking outfit,” said the source, “consisting of a long blond wig and a black leather corset, which most people would consider to indicate an S&M fetish or a quote-unquote kinky lifestyle. To some guys around here, a man in that kind of getup is like a red flag to a bull.”

  East Tennessee gay rights activists have decried the slow pace of the investigation. “If a straight, conventional man or woman were killed in such a horrific manner, the police would leave no stone unturned,” said Steve Quinn, coordinator of the Chattanooga Gay and Lesbian Alliance. “In this case, they seem more interested in sweeping the murder under the rug. The authorities here seem to consider homosexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals to be expendable, and that’s an outrage.” Knoxville activist Skip Turner added, “Craig Willis is a martyr in the struggle for sexual freedom. His bones cry out for justice.”

  Willis had moved from Knoxville to Chattanooga approximately six months ago, said Carter. He taught at Bearden Middle School for three years before moving to Chattanooga, where he had recently opened a karate school called Kids Without Fear. No one answered repeated calls to either Willis’s home phone or the number listed for Kids Without Fear.

  I was surprised the reporter hadn’t contacted me, since Jess had mentioned my involvement in the investigation. I was also surprised he hadn’t gotten wind of Willis’s arrest record or proclivities. A few hours after Art phoned her with Willis’s ID, Jess called him back to say that a search of his apartment had yielded hundreds of images of child pornography—in print, on CDs, and on his computer’s hard drive. Some of the photos showed only nude children; some showed other adults with children; and some showed Willis himself performing sex acts with boys. A more seasoned or better-connected journalist would have gotten wind of the search, I felt sure, or at least the arrest record.

  The story left me with very mixed feelings. I knew it might help the detectives to have more information than the general public now possessed. But it turned my stomach to hear Craig Willis, molester of children, described as a martyr to anything other than depravity and predation.

  I wondered, too, about whether Jess had some agenda in releasing the information the way she did. Was she the unnamed source who referred to Willis’s “kinky lifestyle,” too? That didn’t sound like the open-minded Jess I knew, but she could have said it to be deliberately provocative. I’d suspected she was frustrated with the slow pace of the investigation in Chattanooga. By framing the news in a way that sparked the anger of gay rights activists, was she hoping to ratchet up the pressure on the police? Jess was a smart woman and a gifted medical examiner, so I was sure she had thought carefully about what to say. She was also fearless and a bit of a maverick, though, and I hoped that she hadn’t crawled out onto some limb farther than she should have.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE HEAD HAD BEEN simmering for three days down in the Annex before I took it out of the kettle for good. The hot water, bleach, Biz, Downy, and Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer had done their work well: the remaining bits of tissue scrubbed off easily with a toothbrush; the bone had lightened to a deep ivory; and the aroma steaming off of it was like fresh laundry. Well, fresh laundry that had been mighty rank, for quite some time, before it went into the wash. Fresh laundry that could use another cycle or two. Still, the improvement was dramatic, and the results quite tolerable. I could take this skull back to Stadium Hall without offending anyone’s sense of propriety or smell.

  I set the skull and the top of the cranial vault on some paper toweling to dry, opened the valve that drained the kettle, and fished a few small bone fragments from the mesh screen in the bottom. I placed the fragments in a small ziplock bag, then packed everything in a cardboard box, cushioned with more paper toweling.

  Jess had called to say she was headed for Knoxville; she had two autopsy cases waiting for her in the cooler at the hospital, but before she tackled those, she wanted to see what information about the murder weapon I could glean from the skull now that it was stripped of its soft tissue. “Flesh forgets; bone remembers,” she had said just before hanging up. It was a mantra of mine that I’d uttered enough times for her to remember, apparently. Her voice had regained most of its usual energy; either she was trying hard to sound cheerful again, or she’d managed to get some rest since I saw her looking so haggard in the morgue at the ME’s office. I phoned Peggy, my secretary, and asked her to steer Jess to my office, which was at the far end of the stadium from the administrative offices, when she showed up.

  I walked up the one-lane ramp from the Annex, which was down near Neyland Drive, to the ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, and threaded my way beneath massive girders, cradling the box as if it were some precious gift. In a way, it was: the key, perhaps, to what had killed Craig Willis, and perhaps even to who had killed him.

  I unlocked my office door and set the box on my desk, then switched on the lamp. Removing the lid, I reached in with both hands and hoisted out the skull. I set it on a doughnut-shaped cushion, one of dozens we had scattered around the classrooms and labs in the Anthropology Department, and swiveled the light and magnifying glass around to give me a good look. I had a theory, based on a cursory look in the Annex, but sitting on the window ledge beside me was the object I hoped would confirm it.

  Just as I reached into the box for the top of the cranial vault, Jess Carter knocked on the doorframe and strode in. “Perfect timing,” I said. “I just now got him finished. You want to take a look?”

  By way of answering, she stepped to the desk and leaned down. Picking up the skull, she turned it this way and that, playing the ring-shaped fluorescent light over the contours from every possible angle. I stood back in silence, letting her take her time, make her own observations, formulate her own ideas and questions. Her eyes swept rapidly across the skull, then zeroed in on every fracture and indentation I had spotted. I had seen her work before; every time I did, it reminded me why she was one of the best medical examiners I’d ever worked with. Jess set the skull back on its cushion and subjected the top of the cranium to the same scrutiny, turning it over and over beneath the light. Finally she laid it down, finished with her examination, and turned to me. “Amazing,” she said. “With all that macerated, contused tissue in place, the bone just looked like a big, mushy mess. Now it’s easy to see discrete, individual marks left by a series of blows.” She reached back down and picked up the skull again. “It looks almost like the killer used three different weapons,” she said. She pointed to an indentation on the left parietal, the side of the skull. “Here,” she said, “this indentation was made by an implement about an inch and a half wide, maybe a little more, with a flat face and parallel edges.” I simply nodded; she wasn’t asking anything yet, so I let her think out loud. “Here, in the frontal bone, there’s a deep triangular gouge right in the center of the forehead.” Again I nodded. “And the eye orbit looks like it was smashed by something broad and flat, three or four inches wide.” There were other indentations in the bone as well, but she had pointed out the three most distinctive ones, and none of the others deviated from the patterns she had noted. “That doesn’t make sense, though,” she said. “Why w
ould somebody strike a blow with one weapon, put it down, then strike a blow with another, and then trade that one for a third?”

  I smiled. “Those were my questions exactly,” I said. “Then I realized that it didn’t have to be three different weapons; it could be one weapon with three different impact surfaces.” She looked puzzled, so I reached over to the windowsill and produced my visual aid with a flourish. It was a piece of lumber, an ordinary two-by-four. First I laid the two-inch edge in the narrower indentation she had noticed first. It nestled down in the groove perfectly, its edges conforming to the parallel lines of the wound exactly. Then I laid the broad four-inch side against the shatterered edge of the eye orbit. Although numerous small shards of bone had splintered off, the basic fit was correct there, too. That left only the deep triangular notch in the frontal bone. I saw Jess staring at it, thinking hard; when I angled one corner of the board’s end into the notch, she laughed with delight. “I’ll be damned,” she said, taking the two-by-four in her right hand and lifting the skull with her left. “Way back when I took the SAT? Only thing standing between me and an 800 on the math portion was those dad-blasted spatial geometry figures. Some things never change.”

  Just then my phone rang. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said.

  “Dr. B., it’s Peggy, I just wanted to let you know that Dr. Carter just showed up. She should be there momentarily.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but she’s too quick for you. She’s been here for five minutes already.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “I don’t understand,” Peggy said. “She just left my office a couple of minutes ago.”

  I turned to Jess. “Did you just leave my secretary’s office two minutes ago?”

  Now Jess looked confused. “I didn’t go to your secretary’s office; I came straight here. I parked right beside your truck, down by the end-zone tunnel, and came up this staircase right beside your office.”

  “Peggy,” I said, “what was Dr. Carter wearing when you saw her two and a half minutes ago?”

  “I didn’t pay much attention. Um, maybe a navy blue suit? A dark skirt and jacket, anyhow, I think.” I glanced at Jess; she had on olive green suede pants and a short-sleeved beige sweater.

  “And she introduced herself as Dr. Carter?”

  “Yes. Wait—no! She just said, ‘I’m looking for Dr. Brockton,’ and so naturally…” She trailed off in confusion or embarrassment. “If that wasn’t Dr. Carter, then who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said as a red-faced, dark-suited woman burst through the door, “but I think I’m about to find out.”

  The woman stared at me with wild eyes, then she stared at Jess, and at the skull, and at the two-by-four Jess still held in her hand. She opened her mouth but no sound came out, so she closed it and tried again. On the third attempt, she managed to say, “Is that him?”

  I exchanged an uneasy glance with Jess, then said, “Excuse me?”

  “Is that him?” She pointed a shaking finger at the skull.

  “Is that who?”

  “Is that my son?” she shouted.

  Jess spoke in a soothing, neutral voice. “Ma’am, who is your son?”

  “My son is Craig Willis. Is. That. My. Son, damn you?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Jess, still in the same soothing tone. “We’re pretty sure it is. I’m very sorry.”

  The woman looked at Jess as if truly seeing her for the first time. Her face radiated confusion, pain, and rage. “Who the hell are you,” she spat at Jess, “and what have you done to him?”

  “Ma’am, I’m Dr. Carter. I’m the medical examiner in Chattanooga,” said Jess. “I performed the autopsy on the…on your son’s body. Dr. Brockton helped us identify him, and is helping us determine how he was killed.”

  “You’re Dr. Carter? The Dr. Carter who was quoted in the newspaper article that informed me my son was dead?”

  Jess nodded but looked startled. “Yes, ma’am, that was me.”

  “You told the newspapers my son was found in women’s clothing? You told the newspapers my son was a homosexual?”

  “I said his body was found in women’s clothing,” said Jess. “That information had already been reported, back when the body was first discovered. I didn’t actually say that he was a homosexual. I said one theory we were considering was that his murder might have been a homophobic hate crime.”

  “It amounts to the same goddamn thing as saying he was a queer,” said the woman. “What gives you the right? Who do you think you are, to say things that destroy a young man’s reputation? It’s not enough that he’s been murdered? You have to go and smear his name, too?”

  I cleared my throat. “Ma’am—Mrs. Willis?—why don’t you sit down in my chair here? I know this must be very upsetting to you.” I took her arm gently; she shook me off furiously.

  “Don’t you dare patronize me,” she said. “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t. If I sounded patronizing, I apologize. I’m a little confused here,” I added. “Normally the police notify the next of kin privately before a murder victim’s identity is released. Did I understand you to say that you learned of his death from the newspaper?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I read it in the newspaper. And while I sat there reading it, a television crew came and knocked on my door, asking how it felt, knowing my son had been brutally murdered.”

  Jess’s face was crimson. “Mrs. Willis, I am terribly sorry you were not notified personally. Our investigator did try to locate relatives, but on several leases and medical forms your son signed recently, he wrote ‘None’ in the blank where it asked the name of his closest living relative.”

  “That is a lie,” the woman snapped.

  “It may be,” said Jess in an even, icy tone that set off warning bells in my head, “but if it is, it’s his lie, not ours.”

  With startling quickness the woman darted forward. She slapped Jess across the face with such force that Jess fell across the desk. The two-by-four dropped from her right hand and clattered to the floor; the skull shot free of her left hand, arcing toward the filing cabinet beside the door. I made a lunge and managed to snag it just before it hit. The woman continued to rain blows on Jess, who seemed too stunned to even shield herself. I hastily set the skull down on the filing cabinet and took hold of the flailing arms, pulling the woman backward. She had begun to sob, great, heaving sobs that made her whole body shudder in my grasp.

  “You will be sorry,” she said to Jess. “You ruined my son’s reputation. You will pay dearly for that.” Jess just stared, dumbfounded, her face a mottled mass of splotches and scratches. The woman twisted in my grip to face me; her own face was contorted and quivering and frightening. “Did you do that to him? Did you turn him into one of your skeletons?”

  “Mrs. Willis, we needed to know what sort of murder weapon to look for,” I said.

  “Damn you to hell,” she said. “Give him to me.”

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t,” I said. “This is evidence in a murder investigation. We want to catch whoever killed him.”

  “Give him to me!” she shouted, and sprang toward the filing cabinet. I managed to wedge myself between her and the cabinet, blocking her path. Behind us, I saw Jess pick up the telephone and punch 911. “I’m calling from Dr. Brockton’s office under the football stadium,” Jess said. “We have a disturbed and violent woman here. Could you send an officer right away, please?…Yes, I’ll stay on the line until help arrives.”

  Mrs. Willis backed away from me, her venomous eyes darting from Jess to me and back again to Jess. She pointed at Jess again. “You will be sorry,” she said. And then she spun and hurried out the door.

  Jess and I stared at the empty doorway in amazement, then at one another. “That…went…rather well, I think,” said Jess. A moment later she began to shake. Another few moments, and she began to cry. She was still crying when the four UT police officer
s arrived.

  CHAPTER 22

  JESS STILL SEEMED SKITTISH hours after being attacked by Craig Willis’s mother. If anything could soothe her, I figured, it would be a quiet dinner at By the Tracks Bistro.

  By the Tracks was named for the railroad tracks that passed dish-rattlingly close to its original location. The restaurant had started small, but quickly won a devoted customer base through a combination of great food, attentive ser vice, quiet ambience, stylish décor, and only slightly painful prices. It had long since outgrown its small beginnings and trackside location, but the name had stuck. Year in, year out, By the Tracks remained arguably Knoxville’s best restaurant. Not its most expensive—that superlative belonged to the Orangery, a classic, chichi French restaurant a few blocks away. But I’d never found the Orangery particularly relaxing: every time I ate there, gussied up in my Sunday best, I half expected to be judged, found wanting, and tossed out as riffraff halfway through my meal. At By the Tracks, on the other hand, I could wander in without a reservation, wearing faded jeans and a polo shirt, and be certain of a warm welcome and a delicious meal. Their entrées ranged from basil-stuffed trout over Israeli couscous, at the fancy end of the spectrum, to the biggest and best sirloin burger in town, maybe in all of Tennessee.

  Within five minutes after we settled into a booth, Jess was sipping a Cosmopolitan and visibly relaxing. Another drink, a half hour, and half a bacon cheeseburger later, she was smiling and laughing. My hope was that by the end of the meal I might be able to persuade her to stay at my house, but I didn’t want to pressure her—that might undo all the good the meal had done—so I kept the conversation light. I couldn’t resist telling her how beautiful and thrilling she had been the other night; she blushed and looked shy at the compliments. But she did not look displeased.

  We had just gotten a crème brûlée for dessert, plus a coffee for Jess, when I saw her eyes lock onto something in the direction of the bar. Her expression froze; it seemed to contain equal measures of pain, fear, and fury. “Jess,” I said, “what’s wrong?” I turned and scanned the bar but saw nothing amiss.