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 would 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 officers 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.
“It’s Preston,” she said. “My ex. He’s sitting over there at the bar. He’s been watching us. That son of a bitch is stalking me.”
I turned again. This time, I vaguely recalled having met the man at the corner of the bar once, several years earlier, at a forensic conference. He was a lawyer-a prosecutor, if memory served, which is probably how he and Jess first connected. “Do you want me to go tell him to get lost?”
“No,” she said. “I need to deal with this.” She pushed away the crème brûlée, drew a deep breath, and set her jaw. Then she slid out of the booth and stormed over to the bar. I would not want to be in his shoes right about now, I thought. Jess’s hands flashed angrily as she spoke; I couldn’t hear any of her words, but her tone carried, and it was not happy. I saw him shake his head vigorously, as if denying something-that he had followed her? — and then he seemed to go on the offensive. He pointed at me, and for a while they both sounded mad. Then his tone turned pleading, and her tone softened. She sat down on a barstool beside him. By now I was staring openly at the two of them; for her part, Jess was looking intently at his face. He reached up and wiped his eyes. She wiped hers.
Jess stayed at the bar for ten minutes going on eternity. When she finally came back to the booth, she would not meet my eyes. She sat down gingerly, as if the seat were wired with explosives. She didn’t speak. “Talk to me, Jess,” I said.
“He’s in town for a DA’s conference,” she said. “Bob Roper, the Knox County DA, recommended this place. He swears he would never have come here if he’d had any inkling I’d be here with a date.” She glanced up at me briefly, then dropped her eyes again. “I believe what he said.”
Every alarm I had was ringing like crazy. “What else did he say, Jess? You seem more upset, in a pulled-in sort of way, than you did when you thought he was following you.” I realized what my intuition was telling me. “You’ve just left me, haven’t you? We barely got started, and it’s already over. Is that it?”
This time she faced me squarely. She was crying a little, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Dammit, Bill, you’re the last person I would ever want to hurt. You are the kindest, sweetest, smartest, most loving man I know. What you gave me the other night made me feel alive, and loved, and desired again for the first time in a long, long while. It was so lovely, and so healing. And maybe this is just a bump in the road.” She drew a deep breath and shook her head. “I thought I was done with him, but now I’m not so sure. Shit, the guy still gets to me. Look what this one chance encounter has done to me.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “The irony is, I could probably be happier with you. Preston doesn’t actually like me all that much. And when I’m with him, I don’t like me all that much.” She gave me the half smile again, and I thought it might tear my heart out. “You, on the other hand, like me a lot. These past few days, I’ve liked myself, too. More than I have in…maybe ever. You see me through eyes of kindness, and when I see myself reflected in your eyes, I see myself a little more kindly, too.” She slid a hand across the table, laid it tentatively on mine. Part of me wanted to clasp it and never let go; part of me wanted to fling it away from me. “I know I don’t have the right to ask this, but could you just give m
e some space for a while, let me try sorting through what I feel and what I want?” I couldn’t speak. I swallowed hard and looked down at the table, at our two hands. Neither of them seemed like mine anymore. “I worked with a therapist for a while when the breakup was at its worst,” Jess was saying. “Maybe she can help me untangle the stuff that’s underneath this. The deeper stuff-the stuff that seems to make it hard for me to choose things that would be good for me.”
I considered trying to argue or reason with her, but I quickly concluded that any attempt to plead or pressure would only drive her farther away. I could behave stupidly, I could act pitiful, or I could strive for grace and dignity. When I opened my mouth, I landed somewhere in the murky middle of all three. “Are you leaving with him?”
“No,” she said, nodding toward the bar. “He just left.” I looked, and it was true; his stool was empty, and the restaurant’s glass door was swinging shut. “I told him if he wants to talk, I’m willing to see a counselor with him. That’s it-there, or not at all.”
“But you’re not leaving with me,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’m leaving alone, and I’ll drive back to an empty house in Chattanooga and cry all night, I expect.”
“I guess I’m better off than I thought,” I said. “I only have to drive about five minutes before I can curl up with the Kleenex box.” I smiled, or tried to, to let her know that was meant as a joke. Amazingly, she laughed, though I wasn’t sure if the laugh was at the joke or at my facial contortions.
“You dear, sweet man,” she said. “I will call you when I figure out what the hell I’m doing, I promise. Even if I’m calling to tell you something that I think will be hard for you to hear.”
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