Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel bf-2

by Jefferson Bass

  “You think the chief ’s into any of the really bad stuff?”

  “Naw,” he said, “he’s a good guy. But he’s a guy. The percentage of adult males with Internet access who have never visited a porn site is about the same as the percentage of adult males who’ve never jerked off.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Once again, I find myself outside the mainstream.”

  “Which one you talking about? No, don’t tell me-I don’t wanna know.”

  Art drove north on Broadway, in the direction of Broadway Jewelry amp; Loan. A few blocks shy of the shopping center, though, he turned left onto Glenwood, then left again onto Scott. A sign on one corner announced that we were entering Old North Knoxville. Scott Avenue, like most of the neighborhood, was a street in transition. At one time, it had been an elegant neighborhood of two-and three-story Victorian homes occupying large, shady lots. Over the de cades, though, many of the homes had gone to seed; some had been carved into apartments and smothered in aluminum siding; others had burned and been replaced with bleak brick boxes. The past few years had brought something of a rebirth, in a scattered, piecemeal sort of way. We drove past several houses in varying stages of decay, their lawns overgrown, tree branches clutching at sagging roofs. Then we passed a pocket of beautifully restored homes. Some of these were painted in neutral colors or subtle pastels; others, decked out in vibrant, contrasting colors-one combined turquoise siding with gold windows and orange gingerbread-were what my colleagues in the Art and Architecture Department called “painted ladies.” They reminded me of the drag queens Jess and I had seen at the nightclub in Chattanooga, and the analogy made me smile. I would never paint a house so boldly, but I could appreciate the way they livened up a neighborhood.

  “So tell me about these lucky folks we’re about to drop in on,” I said. “And how do you know if anybody’s even home?”

  “I called the house just before I phoned you,” he said. “Woman answered; I said, ‘Sorry, wrong number,’ and hung up. I didn’t want to get into it by phone.” I nodded. “Parents are named Bobby and Susan Scott; kid’s name is Joseph. Joey. Dad’s a contractor of some sort; mom works part-time as a dental hygienist.”

  “Any other kids?”

  “Don’t know.” He slowed to check a house number. “Must be the next one on the right.”

  The next one on the right was a three-story Victorian with an immense porch that stretched the width of the house and then wrapped around one side. Two of the bedrooms on the second floor had covered, columned balconies as well, and the third floor-which might have been servants’ quarters a century ago-was a marriage of slate roof and dormer windows. The house was a microcosm of the neighborhood itself: a work in progress; a study in transition. One side of the façade was freshly painted, its cedar shakes an elegant blue-gray with white trim; the other side was sheathed in a tower of scaffolding through which I glimpsed a patchwork of peeling paint and new, unpainted shakes.

  A minivan was parked beside the house, beneath a porte cochere whose roof was supported by fluted white columns. “Now that’s what I call a carport,” said Art. “They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

  “They don’t,” I agreed, “but I bet your heating bill in the winter is about one-tenth what theirs is. Look at all those windows with all those little bitty panes of glass. Some of ’em missing, too, looks like. Probably no insulation in the walls, either-I bet when the winter wind blows, you can feel it inside the house.”

  “Cuts down on the germs,” he said. “Toughens up the immune system, too.” He parked at the curb and cut the engine. “Okay, you ready?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. I never am, for this kind of thing. You just have to take it slow; don’t dump too much on them at once.” He took a deep breath, and I did the same, and then we walked slowly up the sidewalk and climbed the porch stairs.

  The front door was a massive slab of fine-grained oak and bubbly, rippled old glass. The wood-hand-carved in a motif of leaves and vines-had been meticulously stripped and refinished to a lustrous golden hue. The glass was screened on the inside with a curtain of white lace dense enough to give privacy but sheer enough to let in plenty of light. The doorbell, like the door, was clearly original: a keylike knob set into the center of the door, just below the panel of glass. Art gave it a brisk twist, and it responded with a fusillade of clattering dings. I jumped, and Art smiled. “Sorry, I guess I got a little carried away,” he said. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore, either.”

  Inside, we heard the distant clatter of hard-soled shoes on hardwood floors. They drew nearer, then stopped, and a manicured hand pulled back the lace curtain. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties peered out at us. Her expression was somewhere between neutral and slightly guarded-about what you’d expect to see on the face of a woman who looks out her front door to find two strange men on her porch. Then I saw something register in her eyes, and her face collapsed into panic and despair. She wrenched open the door and put a trembling hand up to her mouth. “Oh God,” she whispered, “what’s happened now?” My heart went out to her, and I suddenly grasped the full import of what Art had said on the phone: some wounds never heal; some ghosts haunt you forever.

  “Everything’s fine, Mrs. Scott,” Art said quickly. “Nothing’s wrong, I promise. We just have some information we thought you might appreciate hearing from us.” She looked from Art to me and back again. “May we come in?”

  She gave her head a quick shake, as if shrugging off a bad dream. “Yes. Of course. Forgive me.”

  We stepped into a soaring entry hall. On the right side, a wide oak staircase ascended to a broad landing halfway to the second floor, then made a left turn and topped out at what looked to be a sitting area. On the foyer’s left side, a wide columned archway opened into a parlor that could have been transported from the 1890s. Unlike the house’s half-renovated exterior, the interior-at least, what little I had seen so far-looked completely restored. She motioned Art and me to a velvet-covered sofa, its back formed of three ovals framed in walnut. She took a wingbacked armchair, but rather than settling into its embrace, she perched tautly on the front edge.

  Art introduced himself, then me. She nodded as he described my work as a forensic anthropologist, and said, “I’ve read about you. Your work sounds interesting and very important.” There was a hint of a question in her eyes and her voice as she said it.

  I glanced at Art; he gave me an almost imperceptible nod: permission to speak. “A man was murdered a couple of weeks ago in Chattanooga,” I said. “There was no identification on the body. The authorities down there asked if I could help figure out who he was and when he was killed.” Mrs. Scott’s eyes flitted back and forth as she scanned the universe of possibilities, trying to see where this might be leading.

  “Ma’am, Dr. Brockton and I have just identified the body of that man,” said Art. “It was Craig Willis.” She inhaled sharply, and both hands flew to her mouth this time. Her eyes were wide, and I could almost swear I felt electricity crackling from them. Her hands began to shake, and the shaking traveled up her arms and into her shoulders and face and chest, and she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob-soundlessly at first, then with a sort of ragged, gasping noise which gave way to a high, sustained whimper that was more animal than human. I remembered a line from a movie-“the sound of ultimate suffering”-and I knew that was the sound I was hearing. I looked helplessly at Art, then pantomimed a question-Should one of us go to her? — but he shook his head slightly, motioning for me to sit tight.

  She finally wound down, in a series of shuddering aftershocks, and lifted her head, staring out bleakly between her fingers. When she looked at Art, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clean handkerchief, which he held out to her. She wiped her eyes, her cheeks, and her dripping nose, then blew into it twice. By now the handkerchief was sodden, so I handed her mine, too. She repeated the maneuvers, looked at the mess she’d made of both
hankies, and gave a sort of embarrassed half laugh. Then she drew a series of deep breaths, as if she had just sprinted half a mile. “I have imagined…this scene…a thousand times,” she managed to say. “A thousand different ways. Dreamed it, day and night. Lived for it, when I couldn’t hang on to anything else to live for. Prayed for it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Art. “I expect you have.”

  “So as much as I’ve rehearsed it, why does it still feel like my insides have just been torn out?”

  “Because they have,” he said. “This time it’s not make-believe.”

  “God, we’ve worked so hard to put that behind us,” she said. “Months and months of therapy. For Joey. For Bobby. For me. For me and Bobby together. For all three of us together. The abuse damn near killed us; now, the recovery’s about to bankrupt us.”

  “I understand,” said Art. “I’m sorry. I know it might not be much consolation, but this case-Joey’s case-inspired us to work harder and smarter to catch guys like Craig Willis. We’ve created a new task force to catch people who use the Internet to target children or trade child pornography. If we can catch them in cyberspace, we can charge them with federal crimes. It’s a small program right now, but it will only get bigger. And we’re closing in on several of these people right now.”

  She looked both distressed and grateful to hear that.

  Art checked his watch. “It’s about three o’clock right now,” he said. “What time will your husband be home from work?”

  “Probably not till seven or eight. He’s working a lot of overtime-that’s how we’re paying those therapy bills.”

  “Would you like us to come back this evening and tell him about this?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “He’ll be upset-he’ll need to be upset, just like I did-and it would be hard for him to do that with you. If I tell him, I can hold him while I tell him, and maybe that will make it easier for him. More bearable, somehow.” She smiled slightly. “He’s a pretty manly man,” she added. “He might actually hit you if you told him. With me, I think maybe he’ll be able to cry instead.”

  Art smiled back. “Sounds like he’s married to a wise woman with a big heart.”

  She teared up slightly at that. “If this is wisdom, I’ll take foolishness any day.” Suddenly she frowned. “Joey gets home from school at three-fifteen,” she said.

  Art stood up. “We were just leaving.”

  She looked relieved and grateful. “He can spot a cop a mile away,” she said. “I’m afraid he’d get really scared if he saw you here. I’ll call his therapist and ask how much we should tell him, and when.”

  “Just remember,” said Art, “it’s likely to be in the newspapers as early as tomorrow. So if you don’t tell him pretty soon, he might hear it some other way.”

  “Damn,” she said. “I think I see an emergency therapy session in our future this evening.”

  “I know it’s not easy,” said Art, “but it looks like you’re doing all the right things.” He looked around the room. “Sort of like fixing a big old house that’s had a hard life. You just keep plugging away, one room at a time, one problem at a time.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Plugging away. That’s us.”

  She walked us to the door. I held out my hand, and she took it in both of hers and squeezed it warmly. Art held out his arms, and she let him enfold her for a moment before propelling us out onto the porch and down the steps.

  As the Impala reached the corner of the block, a school bus turned the corner, braked to a stop, and flashed its caution lights. Three children-two girls and a boy-stepped from the bus. By the time the bus lights stopped blinking and the STOP sign had folded back against the side of the bus, Susan Scott was at the corner, a smile on her face and an arm around the boy’s shoulder.

  “I think that was a good thing we did just now,” I said.

  “I think maybe you’re right,” said Art.

  CHAPTER 20

  I WINCED WHEN I unfolded the newspaper. MURDERED DRAG QUEEN WAS FROM KNOX, screamed the headline above the lead story in Friday’s News Sentinel. POLICE PROBE POSSIBLE HATE CRIME IN CHATTANOOGA, read the subhead.

  The article was by a crime reporter I didn’t know, one whose byline had first begun appearing in the Sentinel only a few weeks earlier. I pored over the article.

  Chattanooga police made a crucial breakthrough yesterday in a murder that has shocked the city’s gay community to its core, but now a wave of fear could ripple through Knoxville. The battered body of a young man dressed in women’s clothing and a wig was found two weeks ago outside Chattanooga, tied to a tree in Prentice Cooper State Forest. Chattanooga’s medical examiner, Dr. Jess Carter, yesterday identified the victim as Craig Willis, 31, formerly of Knoxville.

  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 amp;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 f
rustrated 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.