The Bluff City Butcher

by Steve Bradshaw

  “My name is Elliott.”

  She jerked back from his hand and tightened her arms, protecting her dinner. When she looked back with her good eye, she relaxed.

  “I’m Joey. I liked the name and took it last year.” She stuck out her little hand. Elliott saw she was missing the tips of some fingers—probably amputated after frostbite or diabetes. He held her hand between his. She smiled big.

  “You’re a nice man, Mr. Elliott. I bet you have a bunch of girlfriends.”

  “Thank you for saying that, but I don’t, Joey. Can you tell me more about the big man you saw, the one by the tree?”

  “You think he killed that McGee feller?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I’m just curious. I heard this was the last place Mr. McGee was seen alive. That big man sounds suspicious.”

  “I think he hurt that black man. I do.”

  “Why, Joey?”

  She showed him her teeth again and leaned closer. “I put my good eye on that big man when he was lookin’ in the park. He was standin’ right where you were. He didn’t come in the front like the others. He went to the back. I saw him jump the gate under the light back there. Saw him hit his head on the light.”

  The light hung from the eaves at least fifteen feet above the ground. The fence and gate were seven-eight feet. “Are you sure, Joey? It’s awful high.”

  “Yup. Hit his head on it. Aimed on the spot he landed. Ain’t never seen a man jump like that. Not even them basketball peoples on TV.”

  “What did he do next?”

  “Stayed real low. Followed them bushes along the wall. Never out of the dark to that tree—it’s always dark there. Saw how big he was when he stood up to look for the singin’ man. He was bigger than you, Mr. Elliott. But he could make himself small, too.”

  “Crouching down . . . ?”

  “Yup. He watches the singin’ man. I kept my good eye on him. After he finished singin’ his songs he passed a hat. Then he got mad, cussin’ and all.”

  “What happened?”

  “He drops his money on the ground and leaves mad.”

  “You saw him leave.”

  “I picked up those seven dollars and rolled ’em into a little, dirty ball. I got ’em all. I saw the singin’ man climb the back gate.”

  Elliott didn’t know how much to believe. If McGee did go over the back gate, he could have run into trouble. The man Joey described could be the Butcher, but why come here and why McGee?

  “Saw the big man leave over the wall by the tree ’bout the same time. I was thinkin’ the singin’ man’s gonna get hurt and there wasn’t nothin’ I could do ’bout it. I see stuff. It scares me. Been tryin’ to stay out of the way most all my life.” Joey sunk in her dirty laundry and leaned back against the wall, her head down and hands balled in her lap. “I know he hurt that singin’ man.”

  Elliott reached for her shoulder. Joey looked up with her good eye. It was wet. “Miss Joey, I want to give you a couple things. Will that be okay with you?”

  “I don’t know. What I gotta do?”

  “Only what you want to do.”

  “Okay.”

  Elliott gave her five ten-dollar bills and watched her eye go wide and sparkle. She folded two and put them in one sock and folded two more for the other sock. She put the last one under her rags in a little coin purse.

  “Can you read, Joey?”

  “Some. But I’m real good with numbers.”

  “That’s okay because this has mostly numbers. It’s my phone number. Joey, when you are ready, I want you to borrow a phone and call me. I want you to tell me what I can do to help you some.”

  “But I don’t need no help, Mr. Elliott. I’m real good now with my tens.”

  “I know, Joey, but I’m a doctor and a little worried about you getting sick out here. I know your teeth hurt and your eye is infected. If you let me give you some medicine, I promise you’ll feel better when you’re sitting out here.”

  “Okay. I don’t got a doctor. You can be my doctor.” She stuck his card in her sock—that meant later. Their three eyes met a last time, and Elliott left the Park the back way. The gate was seven feet, the light fifteen. And the dark side street running parallel to the wall was in the dangerous fringe of the Beale Street neons and bustling crowds. The dark, empty block was a no parking zone.

  He saw a cluster of fresh oil drops glistening in the night. Elliott knelt to take in the place where the Butcher could have been. Then he saw the guitar pick. It too caught the light, the only shiny thing on gritty cement.

  Panther McGee was taken here. With tweezers he dropped the find into a sterile plastic baggy . . . maybe some interesting DNA if I’m lucky.

  The lame battery struggled. From haunches, Elliott looked for the origin of the grinding sound. He found the single, red taillight that dimmed with each feeble effort. It was a dirty white van at the end of the next block. The mud-smeared license plate was not a surprise. Elliott started toward the coughing heap and the engine growled to life. The loose pile of dirty metal rocked and creaked around the corner and lumbered off into the night leaving a black cloud with the crickets.

  When he had gotten where the van sat moments before, he found more oil drops forming a similar pattern. He touched one drop and rubbed it between his fingers and smiled. It was a good day. He got close to the Butcher hours after landing. It could only bother the demented killer. Maybe he would make more mistakes.

  Joey saw you Saturday night. I found you tonight. You’re losing your touch. For me, every inch from here matters . . .

  Standing in the night on the edge of the Beale Street perpetual party, Elliott felt something new. Was it another innate gift he had not yet experienced? Did he use it to find the Butcher tonight? Is something new inside speaking to him?

  This is going to end in Memphis. Something changed in both our lives. I wonder. Who is the hunter and who is the hunted now . . . ?

  Four

  “I never sleep, because sleep is the cousin of death.”

  Nasir Jones

  * * *

  The walk-in refrigerator at the Shelby County morgue could bed twenty on gurneys with wheels and twice as many in crash bags. On August 4, twelve were spending the night, including Panther McGee.

  Elliott arrived early and befriended the night shift with Starbucks. Within ten minutes the field agent took him on a tour of the empty facilities. Dr. Bates would arrive at 7:00 a.m. and the others later for the 8:00 a.m. McGee inquest. Elliott would have all he needed before the circus came to town. He worked best alone. He was more efficient than others in capturing and processing enormous quantities of relevant information, and he could see pieces to a complex puzzle often difficult to explain.

  The pneumatic door gushed open. A crystalline cloud rolled into the barren hall, and Elliott followed Roger Knox inside. The door released like a train leaving the station. Flood lights at the corners flickered long enough to trigger doubt. They popped back on at the last possible moment providing marginal illumination for the frigid bowels of another county morgue—he'd been in too many over the decade.

  There were two lines of ten gurneys. Six on each side held bodies, heads at the walls and bare feet in the narrow aisle. From the door Elliott scanned the twelve bumps, each tucked under a disposable paper sheet splashed with a cocktail of stains created by the trauma they had endured. Roger Knox was a young Dom DeLuise before the weight gain and hair loss. He was in his mid-twenties, a fourth-year medical student, and thinking about forensic pathology. Knox eased down the narrow aisle rubbing the cadavers’ feet on his lab coat. He stopped to read each toe tag aloud, the fog shooting from his mouth with each syllable uttered.

  “John . . . Sanford, Beatrice . . . Blair, Henry . . . Potter . . . where did we put Panther . . . McGee?” He straightened up and nudged glasses back up his nose. “Dr. Sumner, we have five naturals, three accidents, two suicides, and two homicides spending the night. Been relatively quiet around here for the last year, bu
t I think things are going to start picking up again.” Knox moved to the next pair of feet and groped for the toe tag.

  “Quiet?” Elliott asked.

  “Well, I say quiet. What I mean is the bizarre cases are picking up.”

  “Bizarre?”

  “Well, I say bizarre. What I mean is macabre. A guy could go nuts knowing the stuff going on around here “

  “I understand the feeling. This world is life unedited. Sometimes we need to talk these things out to keep our sanity.”

  “I’ve been interning with the medical examiner’s office for eighteen months. I’ve seen a lot of dead people pass through here. There were suspect death rulings.”

  “You concluded homicide instead of suicide or accident or natural death?”

  “Correct.”

  “It is normal to have doubts. Take the Memphis Metro Area—population is 1.2 million, third largest city in the southeastern United States. This medical examiner’s office reported 686 autopsies last year. You are on track to do 815 this year. I will estimate 1,200 bodies come through these doors, 400 inspections, the rest autopsies. Some disagreement among staff on cause and manner of death is bound to arise.”

  Did he just say all that? Knox wondered. The man is a genius, like it says in the textbooks. He probably knows more about this place then me. Time to take a chance.

  “I think it is more, sir. Suicides, unwitnessed accidental deaths, and some very bizarre natural deaths. They shouldn’t be missing body parts.”

  “Body parts are missing?”

  “Yes. Hearts, livers, kidneys, and other organs. We’re told it happens. We’re told body parts can be taken by family members or friends for many reasons—religious, superstition, money, and keepsakes,” Knox said as he bent over the next toe tag in line.

  “Is it possible you’re missing something. Is there another step in the investigative process you’re not seeing? Are these cases handled differently from others?”

  “Dr. Bates takes them off-line. The field agents are cut out of the process.”

  “How are these cases carried in the system, the computer files and paperwork?”

  “Manner of death is ruled UNDETERMINED. Bodies are released and case files disappear. They’re not in the Shelby County Medical Examiner’s Office data base. They do not make it into any statistical analysis I’ve seen. Once, out of curiosity, I tracked a few. It was like they never happened.”

  “I’m sure there is an explanation. Have you discussed this with Dr. Bates?”

  “Yes. He said these cases are complex. Because they require years of investigation, they are handled in a protected process off line with the FBI. He said I need to keep the whole discussion quiet.”

  Bates, Wade and Voss know more than they are sharing with Wilcox, their top homicide detective. Do they know they could be dealing with the Butcher? Or is there something else going on? Why hide Butcher kills. Organ harvesting is his work.

  “I guess I’m over thinking as usual,” Knox said. He starts to shiver in the cold refrigerator as he reads the next toe tag. “This is Margaret Grover.”

  Shoes are the dark, damp prison of a fungal-laden world. That and the endless poundings created the boney, gnarled stubs covered with dried, cracked skin, bunions, blisters, and calluses. Toenails were too long and too short, overgrown and ingrown, discolored and missing. After a lifetime of faithfully transporting the body, the feet seem to be the most battered, unattractive appendages of the human anatomy.

  Elliott's swift survey of the twenty-four located Panther McGee on gurney #12, the youngest African American feet in the group. He would let Knox make the discovery.

  “Here we go. Mr. McGee,” he boasted. “I knew we had him somewhere in here.”

  “The only clothing taken at check-in was shoes and socks. Correct?” Elliott asked and Knox nodded.

  They pulled on disposable gloves. Knox flipped the paper sheet off the body and made room between the gurneys. “I don’t want to interfere with your process, Dr. Sumner, but is it possible for you to tell me what you’re looking at along the way? I would appreciate it.”

  “First, I try not to over think.” Something I have yet to master. “Don’t miss the big things.” Is this Panther McGee? That’s always a good place to start? “Don’t begin with a set of expectations or pre-formed conclusions. We represent the deceased. If you listen, they speak. We pay close attention, let them tell their story.”

  “That’s incredible. I never thought of it that way,” Knox said.

  Elliott inspected the bagged hands and forearms. “No defense wounds. He was surprised.” Probably subdued immediately, zero time to react. “I see a broken fingernail.” He grabbed the Butcher’s iron-arm as it lifted him off the ground like a child and tossed him in the van. “Dr. Bates may find trace blood and tissue under that nail. We have a possibility of recovering the killer’s DNA.”

  McGee’s open shirt revealed a seven-inch horizontal, sutured incision line under the left breast. “There are fifty tight stitches, each with a packers’ knot.” The Butcher’s favorite. “And the edges of the incision are neatly trimmed. This wound has been scrubbed and rinsed after removal of a portion of the ribcage and the heart.”

  I have seen the characteristic cave-in so often, palpation is not necessary. The Butcher is very consistent with his surgical procedure.

  “What have we learned in the first minute?”

  “The killer is a doctor?”

  “Not necessarily. Only a possibility. We are going for indisputable findings, not proving a theory. This killer does have surgical skill and enjoys his work. Fifty stitches, he took his time to savor the experience. We know the killer has a steady hand and a plan.” And I see the Knots of Isis at both ends of the incision, and the missing ring finger from the left hand. Enough.

  He felt the top of Panther’s skull with his index fingers, his hands cradling in his palms the head beneath the ears. Elliott focused on Panther’s glassy eyes, drawing Knox into the moment. He would not share the most significant discovery, the puncture wound in the usual location. Elliott laid down the head, stepped back, and returned the paper drape over the cold, rigid body of Panther McGee. Standing at the refrigerator door they looked back at the bodies, the empty shells.

  “A certain reverence comes with the privilege of being with them at the end. The good ones never lose touch with that, Dr. Knox.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  The pneumatic door sucked open. Dr. Bates stood outside in the growing cloud as two worlds met. His hands were planted on his hips and his head was cocked forward like a parent looking for kids late to dinner. His body said he was pissed off. His domain was violated.

  “Well, the famous Dr. Elliott Sumner. You are early. I did not plan on finding you in my refrigerator,” Bates crowed. Elliott stepped from the arctic cloud into the barren hall, towering a foot above the old and proud forensic pathologist. Elliott’s presence crushed all attempts of Bates to distract him from the important, and Knox enjoyed the moment. Bates backed up and began to unscrew his face. You are different. A big fellow. And those eyes, intense. Why do I feel like you see everything? You may be the most revered serial killer hunter in the world, but this is my roost.

  “Excuse me one moment, doctor,” Elliott said as he turned back to Dr. Knox and extended a hand. “Thank you for your time and brief, but prideful, tour of the facility. I always value a field agent’s perspective. Right now you’re the eyes of the medical examiner in the field. I am sure Dr. Bates values your internship. I hope you choose to pursue a career in forensics. If you do, maybe we’ll work together one day.”

  “Yes sir, and thank you, sir. I am honored to meet you. It’s great to talk with someone who is in my textbooks. Your contributions have already been phenomenal. The stories are incredible. And I am sure Dr. Bates will show you far more than I could.”

  Elliott spun around to Bates. “I don’t believe we have formally met.” He already had everything he needed, a
nd Bates back on his heels.

  “Yes, Dr. Sumner. It is my pleasure to meet . . .”

  Five

  “Loneliness is about the scariest thing there is.”

  Unknown

  The Bell estate in east Memphis on Walnut Grove Road was fifty acres of prime real estate behind a twelve-foot brick wall covered with ivy and moss. Tall iron gates and a stone guardhouse marked the only way onto the property. The wall around the estate was steel-beam reinforced with embedded cameras, motion detectors, sound sensors, and flood lights every twenty-five feet.

  At the gates a brawny, uniformed man stepped onto the cobble drive as two limos pulled up. Another guard of equal proportion and untrusting demeanor stood half in the door of the guardhouse with busy eyes and his hand on a holstered gun. The Bell estate welcome mat was always out but discouraged foolishness.

  After a few words and inspection of documents and an accusing eye scanning the interior of the limo, the guard waved them on—Dr. Elliott Sumner sat in one and Max Gregory the other. They were expected.

  The iron gates parted and the limos eased onto the hallowed grounds, accelerating up the gradual climb across an open field of rolling wheat. Inside the brick fortress were walking rifles and German Shepherds. Max was impressed with the security but curious. It was much more elaborate than he expected. His prior visits were always at night. What is Albert trying to keep out? he wondered.

  At the southern edge of the amber fields, the driveway began a gradual descent toward the Bell mansion surrounded by sprawling lawns, manicured hedges, flowering gardens, and glass ponds framed by dozens of weeping willows and giant oaks.

  Twenty-five yards from the house, limos passed beneath the famous stone arch and Bell family crest. Rolling into the courtyard, eyes found the imposing spear atop the gothic spire three stories up. Then the cars stopped in front of the most photographed mansion in the country, the place where dignitaries stayed. Between the white marble pillars William waited. He would escort Max and Elliott to the study: Detective Wilcox was already with Albert Bell.