Until a month ago, Jess’s staff of five had included a forensic anthropologist, Rick Fields, who was one of my former students. But Rick had just taken a similar position at the Regional Forensic Center in Memphis, which represented a big step up, in salary and in caseload: Memphis had about 150 murders a year, compared with Chattanooga’s 25 or 30. While Jess sought a replacement for Rick, I was filling in down here, just as she had been filling in as ME in Knoxville since Garland Hamilton’s suspension for incompetence.
I said hello to Amy, the receptionist separated from the lobby by a window of bulletproof glass. Amy pointed to my right, toward the end of the building that contained the autopsy suite, and buzzed me in through the metal door on that side of the lobby. Jess was just stitching up the abdominal cavity of an elderly white female. “Don’t tell me you’ve got another homicide,” I said.
Without looking up from her sutures, she answered, “No, just an unattended death. Colon cancer. She had just gone home from the hospital to die. The irony is, she was supposed to be in hospice care, but somehow the paperwork got lost, so they were scrambling around to get her signed up. If it had worked like it was supposed to-if there’d been a seamless handoff from the hospital to hospice-I wouldn’t have needed to spend two hours confirming what we already knew about her cause of death.”
Jess was wearing faded jeans-blue, not black-and a maroon scrub shirt. She looked more tired than I’d ever seen her look. Also less guarded and more human, somehow. It made me want to take care of her, ease the load she was carry ing. “No offense, but you look about halfway toward needing hospice care yourself,” I said.
“You silver-tongued flatterer, you,” she said, but the smart-ass words lacked her usual smart-ass crackle.
“Seriously,” I said, “you okay?”
“Tired. Really tired. In the past week I’ve done six autopsies here, four in Knoxville, and made a trip to Nashville. I’ve only had two days off, both of them Sundays, in the past month. I desperately need to hire a morgue technician, but our budget’s so tight the only thing keeping us out of the red is those two vacancies, the tech and the anthropologist.” I had never stopped to consider what a load Jess carried; her willingness to do double duty up in Knoxville was remarkably generous, and it was wearing her down fast.
She had her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, but a wisp had gotten loose and fallen across her face. She couldn’t reach up and brush it away because her gloves were a mess, so I did it for her. Then I laid my hand on her cheek. She leaned into it, and it felt good, so I put my other hand on her other cheek, cradling her face in my hands. She closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath, then puffed it out. As she did, she dropped her head deeper into my hands, her shoulders sagging with fatigue. Her gloved hands hung at her sides. I moved my hands from her face to her shoulders, then wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. She did not resist, and in a moment she laid her head on my chest. “I’m sorry you’re so tired, Jess,” I murmured. In response, she gave a small shiver, or maybe it was a sob. But then she stiffened and began to pull away. I held tight, and tried to soothe her. “Shhhh,” I said. “Just relax for a minute.”
For some reason I didn’t understand, it was the wrong thing to say. She began to struggle against me, and put her hands-messy gloves and all-on my chest and pushed me away. “Stop,” she said sharply. “Not here. I cannot be this way with you here.”
The words stung, or maybe it was the physical rejection that stung. Whichever the case, my face burned with disappointment and humiliation. “Dammit, Jess, then where? Not at my house-that wasn’t the place, either. Alan Gold’s? Those were somebody else’s hands on you there. Your house? You haven’t invited me there. Where does that leave? I’m confused and frustrated. I didn’t start this; you did. Unless I completely misread that dinner invitation you extended to yourself last week.”
Now it was her turn to flush. “Right now I’m working,” she said. “Would you do this in the middle of teaching a class?” She looked away and chewed on her lower lip. “No,” she said at last. “You didn’t misread. I’m confused, too. When I saw you last week, I thought you were finally over Kathleen’s death and ready for another relationship. What I failed to think about was whether or not I was ready.”
“Your divorce? How long has it been?”
“About six months. No; eight. But we’d been on the skids for a couple of years. Hell, I was on the verge of jumping ship myself. So how come it hurt so much when he beat me to the punch?” I saw tears welling up, something I’d never expected to see in the eyes of Jess Carter. I reached up to wipe them away, but she took a step back and held up a warning finger. Then she raised her arms, one after the other, and wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her scrubs. “I’m sorry, Bill,” she said. “This is harder than I thought, and I’m too tired and strung out to be smart about it.” She looked at the bloody smears her gloves had left on my chest. “I’m sorry about the shirt, too,” she said. “Go change into some scrubs, and while we’re looking at this forensic case, I’ll get Amy to run it through the wash.”
By the time I had changed, handed my wadded-up shirt to Amy, and returned to the autopsy room, Jess had rolled the cancer victim back to the cooler and rolled out the gurney on which our male murder victim lay. When the body came in eight days ago, she had taken X-rays and autopsied him; at this point, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see much that she hadn’t already spotted, but I was willing to give it a shot.
The crime scene photos hadn’t done justice to the violence inflicted on this battered body. The cranium-largely covered in the photos by the blond wig-had been hit with great force, more than once. Bone fragments had been driven deep into the brain; brain matter had oozed out like the insides of a smashed pumpkin. The zygomatic arches-the cheekbones-were both shattered; so were the nasal bone and the outside rim of the left eye orbit. From the X-rays Jess had clipped onto a light box on the wall, I could see that several ribs were broken, too.
I glanced from the body on the gurney to the cranial X-rays, then turned to Jess. “So was it the head trauma that killed him?”
“Superb deduction, Sherlock,” she said. “Massive brain trauma and acute subdural hematoma. I’m hoping you can give us an idea what the murder weapon was.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, “though with blunt-force trauma, it’s sometimes tough. The impression left by a baseball bat looks a lot like the impression left by a length of galvanized pipe. If we’re lucky, it might be something like a hammer, which leaves a nice round mark, or even an octagonal one, if the hammerhead is shaped that way-a wound with a distinctive signature. But from what I can see right now,” I said, bending down and peering at the face and cranium, “I don’t think we’re going to be that lucky.” It was a relief, after the awkwardness and tension of a few moments before, to burrow into the puzzle of a challenging case.
I did an overall visual exam first. The corpse’s most noticeable feature-aside from the battered skull with the top sliced off and the brain removed-was the differential decay: the stark contrast between the bare bones of the lower legs and the extensive soft tissue remaining on most of the body. The insects had managed to do a moderate amount of damage to the eyes, the nasal cavity, and the shoulders and base of the neck-an area that offered the only sizable horizontal surface on the upright body; otherwise, they’d been largely frustrated in their attempts to feast on the body that had been served up to them.
I rolled the body over. I saw numerous scratches on the back, and bits of pine bark embedded in the flesh, but those all looked like superficial abrasions, exactly what you’d expect to see on the back of a body lashed tightly to a tree.
“I don’t see anything, here or in the X-rays, that would suggest the manner of death involved anything other than the blunt-force trauma,” I said.
“Think you can tell what did it?”
“Hard to know till I get the soft tissue off,” I said. “Are you finished with him?” She nodded. �
�What I’d like to do, if you’re willing, is remove the head, take it back to Knoxville, and deflesh it so I can get a good look at the bone.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. She rolled over a tray of instruments. I chose a scalpel to begin cutting through the windpipe, esophagus, and muscles of the neck. When I had exposed the cervical vertebrae, I switched to an autopsy knife; scalpel blades were thin and relatively fragile, and all it took to break one was a little sideways pressure when the blade was wedged deep between two vertebrae.
As I began to cut between the second and third vertebrae, Jess moved to the corpse’s head and grasped it with both hands. She tilted it back, and also pulled slightly so that as the knife cut deeper, the gap between the bones widened. “Thanks,” I said. “That helps. Reduces the risk I’ll nick the bone, too.”
A few more strokes of the knife and the spine was severed. That left only the muscles and skin at the back of the neck, and those were easy to cut, especially as Jess continued to apply tension. When the head came completely free, she rotated it to study it, as if for the first time. As she gazed at it, I was reminded of a religious painting I’d seen once, of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist. But in the painting I’d seen, Salome looked exotic, youthful, and richly dressed; in the harsh fluorescent lights of the morgue, Jess-in her jeans and soiled scrub shirt-looked shabby, exhausted, and middle-aged. For the first time in the days since I’d found myself peering at the toes of her snakeskin boots, I began to despair of our chances at any sort of romance.
“I’ll bag this and put it in a cooler for you,” she said.
“Thanks. Do you still want me to go out to the death scene?”
“If you’re still willing,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “How far away is it?”
“Only about ten miles as the crow flies,” she said, “but probably twice that by road. And some of it’s gravel. So it’ll take forty-five minutes or an hour to get there.”
I checked my watch; it was already mid afternoon. “Guess I better make tracks, then.”
“Yeah. Why don’t you wash up and change-we’ve got some denim shirts with our logo on them; I’ll tell Amy to give you one-and I’ll pull together what you need to find your way out there.” She started toward the door, then stopped and turned back. “Bill? I’m sorry I’m a mess right now. Any false advertising was unintentional. Please don’t give up on me.” She took a step toward me, stood up on tiptoe, and kissed me quickly on the cheek. Before I could react, she was out the door of the autopsy room.
I looked down at the eyeless severed head on the gurney as if it had somehow witnessed the scene. “Well, unlike you,” I said, “I’m not quite dead yet.”
After I washed up and changed into the shirt Amy had given me, I found Jess in her office, at the other end of the building. She opened her desk drawer and fished out a set of keys and a handheld electronic gadget. She switched on the gizmo, and after a few seconds an image flashed onto an LCD screen the size of an index card. The image diagrammed a dozen points; lines from each of the twelve converged on a point at the screen’s center.
“Looks like a constellation,” I said, “except the dots aren’t connected in the shape of what’s supposed to look like an animal, but never does.”
“That’s us at the center,” she said. “We’re receiving GPS signals from twelve satellites. More satellites is good for the accuracy; you shouldn’t have any trouble pinpointing the spot.”
Her fingers flicked rapidly over the buttons, and the image changed to a small color topographical map, this one bearing two dots: one at the center, and one in the lower left corner. “That dot in the lower left? That’s a waypoint marking the death scene. The center one is us. That’s the thing I like best about GPS: it always acknowledges that I’m the center of the universe.” She laughed at herself. “God, how can I have such a gigantic ego and such stunted self-esteem at the same time?”
“Well, as Thoreau said, consistency is the mark of small minds,” I said.
“Actually, that was Emerson,” she said. “And he said ‘little minds,’ actually: ‘A foolish consistency is the hob goblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.’ If memory serves.”
“Very impressive,” I said. “How come I thought that came from Thoreau?”
“Same vein, sort of,” she said. “Thoreau’s trademark line is ‘different drummer,’ which is even more famous. ‘Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?’-almost nobody quotes that lead-in, which is a shame. ‘Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.’ Too bad he didn’t copyright that; with the royalties, he could’ve bought up Walden Pond and everything for miles around. Built himself a fancy mansion instead of that tatty shack he cobbled together out of scrap boards and recycled nails.”
Jess’s mixture of scholarly erudition and quirky irreverence always caught me by surprise, like topspin on a serve in tennis or Ping-Pong. But I liked it, the way I liked iced tea on a hot day. “They teach you all this in med school over at Vanderbilt?”
“Naw,” she said, “this is what I have to show for my four years at Smith. Scraps of poetry and philosophy. Oh, and that one unfulfilling foray into dating within my own gender.”
“Ah. I had almost managed to forget,” I said, feeling awkward and sounding prudish.
“Come on, Bill, that’s an experiment I did once, twenty years ago. Don’t turn it into something that defines me. Hell, I tried all sorts of things when I was young, didn’t you?” She was glaring at me now; I had pressed one of her hot buttons without intending to. “I mean, isn’t that part of how we grow and learn who we are, by trying things on and seeing what fits? I tried on another girl, and she didn’t fit. Big deal. I got drunk a few times in college, too, but that doesn’t make me an alcoholic. I cheated on a biology test in high school, but that doesn’t make me a cheat. I stole a candy bar when I was six, but I’m not a thief.”
I felt ashamed of my small-mindedness. “I’m sorry, Jess. I don’t judge you for it. Or maybe I do, but I don’t like the part of me that does. I came along, what, ten years ahead of you? I grew up in a small town, where even straight sex was practically immoral. I went to a conservative college, and I settled into a traditional life-marriage and family-right after graduating. My horizons got drawn a little nearer, a little narrower, than yours. Doesn’t mean I want my mind or my heart to be narrow.” She still looked mad. “Please,” I said, “this is important to me. You are important to me. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but I’d like the chance to figure it out. I think maybe you would, too. At least, I hope you still do.”
Her eyes bored into mine, fiercely still. And then, almost imperceptibly, something softened, yielded just a fraction. I smiled. She smiled. I laughed. So did she. “God,” she said, “you make me so mad sometimes. But you also make me feel so human.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” she said, but her eyes were smiling as she said it. “Do we never really grow up? Sometimes I feel as clueless and confused inside as I did when I was fourteen, and first started feeling these inexplicable, thrilling, terrifying stirrings.”
“Oh my,” I said. “It thrills and terrifies me just to imagine you at fourteen.” I leaned toward her, angling for a kiss. She placed a hand on my chest and held me off. “Not here. Not now,” she said. “But soon, I hope. You need to get going if you want to have any daylight when you get out to Prentice Cooper.” She ended the conversation by reaching down and hefting something from beneath her desk. It was a small cooler, and as she handed it to me, I felt something round and heavy shift inside. It was the dead cross-dresser’s head.
I set
the cooler down on the desk long enough to stuff the keys and GPS receiver in the roomy pockets of my cargo pants. Then I hefted the cooler in hand, found the four-wheel drive Bronco Jess had offered me for the trip, and set out for Prentice Cooper State Forest, hoping I wouldn’t have a cooler-smashing accident or get pulled over by a curious cop.
Prentice Cooper lay barely ten miles west of Chattanooga, but it was a world away, both topographically and culturally. Most of its 26,000 acres lined the slopes and rim of the Tennessee River Gorge, a thousand-foot-deep gash the river had carved through the southern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. In addition to the GPS, which would guide me to the exact spot where the body was found, I had a printed topo map of the area, too. To reach the forest, I would head west for about five miles on state highway 27, which was nestled between the base of Signal Mountain and the river’s north shore. Then the highway would veer north, up a smaller side gorge carved by Suck Creek, which-according to the topo map-would split into North Suck Creek and South Suck Creek. The highway angled and corkscrewed up the side of South Suck Creek, finally topping out-for two or three miles-near Suck Creek School. If I missed the turnoff to the state forest, I would quickly find myself descending the west flank of the mountain through Ketner Gap, which looked every bit as steep as Suck Creek, and appeared to offer few opportunities for a U-turn.
I needn’t have worried. The left turn to Prentice Cooper was well marked, as was another left through a meandering collection of small rural houses. Civilization dropped away fast, though, as soon as I crossed the boundary into the forest. Asphalt gave way to gravel; yards gave way to woods.
I rolled down the windows on the Bronco. The weather was sunny but cool, and the air up here was as crisp and sweet as a good apple.
Suddenly I heard a gunshot. Then another, and another. I hit the brakes, and the Bronco rasped to a stop, enveloping me in a cloud of my own dust. The dust kept me from seeing my assailant coming, but it also hid me from sight, and from aim, so I figured I was no worse off than I’d been.
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