Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel bf-2

by Jefferson Bass

  The story’s final shot, played in excruciating slow motion, showed a screen-filling cream pie arcing toward my face and then smashing into it. Filling slowly radiated from the edges of the pan; streams of yellow and white dripped lazily from my nose and chin. The picture froze at the moment I wiped my eyes and blinked out through the mess. The announcer came back on-screen, his earlier look of concern now replaced by merriment. “If the protesters have their way,” he said, “Professor Brockton, whose classroom comments set off the controversy, might soon be eating his words, too.” His eyes twinkled. “That’s it for this edition of Nightwatch. Good night-and good eating!”

  I clicked off the television in disgust and called Jeff. “Not exactly a shining moment for higher education, was it?” I said.

  He laughed. “Well, no, but at least you’re not getting burned at the stake, like Copernicus.”

  “Not yet, anyhow,” I said. “But that wasn’t Copernicus. Copernicus died quietly in his sleep, I think. It was Bruno who got toasted for spelling out the implications of the Copernican theory-for speculating that there might be other worlds, orbiting other stars, inhabited by other, more intelligent beings.” I sighed. “Sometimes we don’t look like particularly stiff competition.”

  “But hey,” said Jeff, “that Dr. Carter-she seems pretty bright. Leapt to your defense mighty strongly, too. Isn’t she the one you were planning to bring with you to my house for dinner a few months ago?”

  “The same,” I said. “She has a way of getting paged anytime I have a dinner date with her. Happened again last week-I was actually cooking dinner for her at my house. Just as the coals were getting hot-in more ways than one-she got beeped.”

  “Maybe you should let me fix you up with Sheri,” he said.

  “Who’s Sheri?”

  “One of the accountants at my firm. Completely unavailable three months out of the year, but starting April 16, she’s got a lot more time on her hands. And I have never, ever paged her. Not a whole lot of emergencies come up on tax returns. Except for yours.” This was an unexpected and unwelcome turn in the conversation. “Dad, I’ve been through this box of what passes for your financial records, and I can’t find bank statements for August, October, or December.”

  “Look again,” I said. “They must be in there somewhere.”

  “Dad, I’ve looked twice.” I could tell he was upset; he tended to preface his sentences with “Dad” whenever he was put out with me. I heard “Dad” a lot every year at tax time. “I’ve sorted and organized everything. Dad, they are not there.”

  “Dang,” I said. “Then I have no idea where they are.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Maybe they got lost in the mail,” I offered. “Can’t you just call the bank and ask them to send you copies?”

  “No,” he said, “they can’t do that; it’s not my account. Why don’t you just go online and download copies, then e-mail them to me?”

  “Online? That stuff ’s online?”

  “Only for about the past ten years,” he said. “You should have a user name and password filed away somewhere.”

  “Well, I don’t know where. Check that stuff I brought you. Maybe somewhere in there.”

  “Dad, you’re hopeless,” he groaned. “I’d fire you, except that I’m the only thing standing between you and the complete loss of my inheritance.”

  “And what makes you think you’re in my will, smarty-pants?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Lucky guess, maybe. Or maybe it was that copy of the will that was stuffed into this pile of papers.”

  “Ah,” I said, “I was wondering where I’d put that. Hang on to that for me, would you? I need to see how best to cut you out of it.”

  “Right. Okay, I’m hanging up now. Good night. See if you can program yourself to dream where those bank statements might be. Oh, and Dad?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “Good luck with Dr. Carter.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Good luck with my tax return.”

  The next morning I called Jess at her office. “Hey,” I said when she picked up, “thanks for leaping to my defense on the news.”

  “Do I get Brownie points for that?”

  “Thousands,” I said. “What were you doing there? I didn’t even know you were in Knoxville.”

  “Quick trip,” she said. “I came into the morgue early that morning. Couple unattended deaths up your way, and things were quiet down here, so I dashed up on the spur of the moment. I was just getting back into my car to head back to Chattanooga when Miranda came rushing out and asked for a ride to campus. She made the Darwin poster on the drive over.”

  “Well, I appreciate the show of support,” I said. “I just hope they don’t cram a pie in your face, too.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t mind that part. I like banana cream pie. It’s the other stuff I’d like to avoid.”

  “What other stuff?”

  “I got half a dozen phone calls last night,” she said. “Same guy every time.”

  “What guy? Did he say his name? Did you recognize his voice? Did you get a number on your caller ID?”

  “No name, blocked number, muffled voice.”

  “Tell me about the calls.”

  “Well, after the nasty names he called me during our first chat, I decided to let the rest of the calls go to voice mail. Some of the messages just consigned me to a very unpleasant afterlife. Others promised me some pretty hellish experiences this side of the grave. Leading to the grave, too.”

  “Death threats? My God, Jess, did you call the police?”

  “Naw, it’s just some pissed-off coward blowing off steam,” she said. “Not worth wasting any more time or energy on it.”

  “Don’t take any chances,” I said. “Call the cops.”

  “If I called the cops every time somebody hassled me, I’d be the girl who cried wolf. If it keeps up, I’ll call the phone company and get a block or a trace. If anything else happens, I’ll tell the police. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, but it didn’t feel okay.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “I gotta go-Amy’s making her ‘Somebody important is calling’ face at me. Talk to you soon.”

  “Okay. Be careful, Jess,” I said. “Bye.”

  “I will. Bye.”

  CHAPTER 19

  AS I REACHED INTO my briefcase, I thought, This could be my best work ever. Thirty seconds later, I was certain I’d been right.

  I’d just taken a huge bite of my masterpiece-possibly the finest sandwich ever made-when the phone on my desk rang. I briefly considered spitting the mouthful into the trash, but the individual ingredients were splendid on their own-smoked turkey, smoked Gouda cheese, spicy brown mustard, crisp kosher pickle, and tomato on nutty oat bread-and the whole was even tastier than the sum of its parts. In short, I couldn’t bear to waste it. Instead, I gave three quick chews as I reached for the receiver, then two more as I slowly raised it, jamming wads of food into my cheek pouches. “’Lo, ih Dah Rockuh,” I mumbled.

  “Bill? Is that you?” I was relieved to hear that it was just Art.

  “Eh, ih ee,” I grunted.

  “Are you sick? Are you hurt? Hang on. I’m calling 911.”

  “Nuh,” I said. “’Ait ussa min’t. Ea’in unh.” I gave a few more hurried chews, then swallowed the first of three installments. “’orry. ’ang on.” Chew chew swallow; chew chew swallow. “Okay, sorry. Had a mouthful there.”

  “Bill, Bill, have you forgotten everything you learned from Gomer Pyle?”

  “What? Gomer Pyle? You called me up to talk corny old sitcoms?”

  “No. I’m just thinking you did not chew thirty-four times before swallowing, like Grandma Pyle taught Gomer to do. Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.”

  “Well, Shazam,” I said, “call Barney Fife and have me arrested.”

  “Wrong jurisdiction. Barney’s over in Mayberry. Anyhow, the reason I called is, we got lucky on the prints.”

  “Tell me,” I said, my sandwic
h suddenly forgotten. “Who was he?”

  “Well, for starters, he was a teacher.”

  “So his prints were on file from his background check? Damn. I hate to think a teacher got killed just because he liked to dress funny.”

  “He had another set of prints on file, too. The guy was also a pedophile, Bill. He had an arrest record for aggravated sexual battery.”

  I sat bolt upright in my chair. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “I thought that wasn’t supposed to be possible. I thought the whole point of the background investigations and fingerprint checks was to keep people like that from working with kids.”

  “It is,” he said, “and it did. Sort of. The system worked, within its limits. The guy was a teacher first, and a pedophile second. At least, that’s the order in which he was printed. Reality is, he probably became a teacher so he’d have easy access to kids. But he’d never been caught at the time he was hired.”

  “How much information did you get?”

  “Enough to know the basics and start tracking down the details. Guy’s name was Craig Willis; thirty-one years old. He applied for a teaching job three years ago-in Knoxville, by the way, not Chattanooga. Got hired just down Middlebrook Pike from you, at Bearden Middle School.” I felt my insides go cold. That was the school my son had attended. Jeff was there three de cades ago-he was a student at Bearden Middle around the time this Craig Willis was born-but the coincidence brought the danger closer to home somehow. “He taught English and social studies for two years,” Art went on. “Then, last summer, he was arrested for molesting a ten-year-old boy at a day camp where he was a counselor.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “How come I don’t remember reading about that in the newspaper?”

  “Wasn’t in the newspaper,” said Art. “His lawyer-guess who? — managed to keep it all very quiet.”

  “Grease?”

  “None other. He got a gag order on the arrest information, claiming his client would suffer irreparable damage if the arrest were made public, and then he got the case dismissed on a technicality-apparently the arresting officer was so upset he manhandled Craig and forgot to read him his rights. But the judge refused to expunge the arrest record, and the school system dropped him like a hot potato. He moved to Chattanooga last fall.”

  I was almost afraid to ask, but I did. “And what was he doing in Chattanooga?”

  I heard Art draw a long, deep breath, which he exhaled in a slow, angry hiss. “He had just opened a karate school. Like teaching, only better, for his purposes-doesn’t require a background check. And it’s mostly boys in the classes.”

  I thought at once of my grandsons, who were five and seven-and who were both taking karate lessons in West Knoxville. “God help us,” I said.

  “Maybe he did,” Art replied. “They say he moves in mysterious ways. Maybe it was a mother’s prayer that steered some queer-hater with a violent streak to cross paths with our boy Craig when he was all dolled up like a tart.”

  “See, I don’t buy that,” I said. “I think the buck stops here on earth; good and evil arise from the choices we make, the things we do. I don’t pretend to understand why some people are motivated to do wonderful things, while others are driven to commit unspeakable acts. But I think we’re the ones who do the deeds, and we’re the ones who deserve what ever credit or blame comes due.”

  “Mostly I agree,” said Art. “Couldn’t be a cop if I didn’t believe in holding people accountable. Anyhow, it sure adds an interesting twist to this case.”

  “Did you call Chattanooga yet-the detective, or Jess?”

  “Nope. You found the skin that gave me the prints, so you earned the first call. I’ll phone Jess right now.”

  “Wait. One more question before you go.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’m assuming you still haven’t gotten any hits on that thumbprint you got from Craig’s severed penis?”

  “Right.”

  “So the killer’s prints aren’t in the AFIS database either in Tennessee or at the FBI?”

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but then again, even if the print’s right, the size could be wrong.”

  “Huh?”

  “We can’t be certain that the size of the pecker when I printed it was the same as the size when the killer grabbed it,” he said. “So I need to shoot some enlargements and reductions of the thumbprint, send those in, too. What I send in has to be within ten percent of the size of the prints on file, or AFIS won’t see it as a match.”

  “You know,” I said, “it would be quite a coup to ID both the victim and the killer from the prints on a husk of skin and an amputated penis.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “don’t think I haven’t thought of that. But that would take a real stroke of luck. Maybe more luck than I’ve ever had before, all put together.”

  “We make our own luck,” I said. “I believe that, too. ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ Louis Pasteur.”

  “The pasteurized-milk dude?”

  “The same.”

  “He say that to explain how he came up with the idea?”

  “No,” I said, “he said it years before he came up with the idea. The idea proved his point, you might say.”

  “Looks that way,” Art agreed. “Speaking of ideas, I’ve got an idea the Chattanooga PD or the ME’s office will release Willis’s name either today or tomorrow.”

  “Probably,” I said. “They’re bound to be feeling some pressure to show they’re making progress on the case.”

  “I figure the Knoxville media will pick up the story, too,” he said, “since Willis lived in Knoxville till a few months ago.”

  “But of course,” I sighed. “Local angle on a kinky case.”

  “I keep thinking about the parents of that kid,” said Art. “This is going to dredge up some intense feelings for them. Rip the scab right off the wound-if they’ve even managed to get as far as scabbing over. Maybe the newspaper isn’t the best way for them to hear about it.”

  I tried to put myself in the position of the parents. I imagined my son Jeff and his wife Jenny; I pictured what it would be like for them if Tyler or Walker had been sexually abused by a trusted adult, and how they might feel if they read about the abuser’s death in the paper. “That would be intense,” I said, “but not necessarily negative. Might be the best news in the world to them. Might be just what they need to set it behind them and get on with their lives.”

  “You don’t ever set this sort of thing behind you,” Art said. “It’s a lot like the death of a child; it haunts you forever. The pain dulls after a while, but it doesn’t take much-a birthday, a scene in a TV show, a crayon drawing you find in the bottom of a drawer-to put a sharp edge on it all over again.”

  I suddenly realized what he wanted to do. “You’re planning to go tell the kid’s parents yourself?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Not me. We.”

  “We? You and me? Why?”

  “We ID’d the body,” he said. “That makes us the logical messengers. We’re witnesses to the death, in a way; we’re the two people who can say, with firsthand knowledge and absolute certainty, ‘The man who molested your son is dead, and here’s how he died.’ Besides,” he added, “telling them is the decent thing to do, and we’re the only decent guys I can think of at the moment.”

  I could think of several, but I knew Art well enough to know that his mind was made up. And his reasoning, if not strictly logical, was emotionally compelling. “Okay,” I yielded. “When?”

  “Tiffany doesn’t get home from school and cheerleader practice for another couple hours,” he said. “How about I pick you up at your office in half an hour? That gives me time to call the folks in Chattanooga.”

  “You want me to be waiting down by the end-zone tunnel?”

  “I’ll call you when I’m turning onto Stadium Drive,” he said. “That should give you time to wash bone cooties off your hands and come downstairs.”

  Half an hour later, he called
back. “Okay, I just turned off Neyland onto Lake Loudoun Drive, and I’m turning onto Stadium now. Hey, what’s going on in Thompson-Boling Arena? I see a ton of media trucks.”

  “A creationist rally,” I said miserably. “I mean, ‘intelligent design.’ Oh, and thanks for rubbing salt in the wound.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll use lemon juice next time. Or maybe lemon meringue pie.” He snorted with laughter.

  “Bye,” I said, and hung up. I made a pit stop in the bathroom that adjoined my office-a useful vestige of Stadium Hall’s former life as a dormitory-then locked up and headed down the stairwell.

  Just as I walked out of the building, Art rounded the end of the stadium and stopped at the chain-link gate to the end-zone tunnel. He was driving an unmarked gray Impala I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the battered white sedan he usually drove, this car had glossy paint and clean upholstery, and the interior did not reek of spilled coffee and stale cigarette smoke, the way police cars often do. “Nice wheels,” I said. “How’d you rate a fine steed like this?”

  “Blackmailed the chief,” he said. “Not on purpose, though. He asked me last week how the undercover work was going, and I said, ‘Pretty good, Chief; by the way, I see you’re doing a little undercover research on adult web sites yourself.’ Hell, I was just messing with him, but he turned red and broke into a sweat. Next thing you know, I get a call from the motor vehicle pool telling me to come swap my old beater for this thing. I guess you were right,” he added.

  “About what?”

  “Chance does favor the prepared mind.”

  “I don’t think Internet porn and accidental blackmail were what Louis Pasteur had in mind when he said that.”

  “No, but it makes me feel better about driving the car if I can quote something highbrow to justify my accidental good fortune.”