The Bone Thief bf-5

by Jefferson Bass

  I shifted to the foot of the coffin and cranked up the lower portion of the lid to expose the arms, torso, and legs. Willoughby had obviously been dressed for an open-casket viewing. His suit, I noticed, rivaled DeVriess’s in elegance, though it was silk rather than wool. That made sense: According to the obelisk and the newspaper archives, he’d died in August; heaven forbid that the corpse should swelter in wool in the heat of summer. The thin, finely woven fabric clung damply to the arms and legs and to the laces of the black wing-tip shoes.

  I reached out behind me, and Miranda wordlessly placed a pair of scissors in my palm. Reluctantly — for this was a far better suit than any I’d ever owned, or ever would — I grasped the cuffs of the left sleeves of the jacket and shirt and stretched them taut, so the V of the scissor blades would slice through more easily. Just as I began to cut, the corpse’s hand shifted and slid from the end of the sleeve. It fell, landing with a dull thud on the corpse’s stomach.

  “Crap,” I said. “Maybe the embalming job wasn’t so good after all.”

  I’d already begun to cut, so I kept going. The scissors easily parted the thin, rotting fabric, sliding swiftly up toward the shoulder. Too smoothly, in fact. Normally when I cut shirts or pants from a body, the tip of the lower blade tended to snag in the soft flesh of an arm or a leg. But this time it moved in a smooth, slick glide. As the fabric parted, the reason became clear. I stared briefly, then reached across the body and lifted the corpse’s right hand, grasping the gray, clammy fingers cupped around the end of the sleeve. The hand slid from the sleeve, and I found myself in a bizarre, armless handshake. Both hands, I saw when I looked at the wrists, had been severed at the wrists.

  “Holy handoff,” squawked Miranda.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Grease.

  Both of Trey Willoughby’s arms had been neatly amputated at the shoulders. The sleeves of his silk jacket — like the legs of his silk trousers — were filled with white PVC pipe: plastic plumbing in place of human flesh and bone.

  CHAPTER 4

  The next car that entered the cemetery’s gates was the polar opposite of DeVriess’s lustrous Bentley. As it swayed and chugged around the curves of the cemetery’s road, this new arrival — a filthy, dented Crown Victoria that had been white once upon a time — seemed to be nearing the end of a long and brutal life, and I wondered how much time it might take the backhoe to carve out a grave for the vehicle.

  The car planted its flat-black wheels and bucked to a stop behind the Bentley, coming close enough to make Grease flinch. A plainclothes investigator, mid-thirties, levered his lanky frame out of the sagging driver’s seat and slouched toward us. His shambling walk and tousled hair made him appear laid back, but he was chewing a piece of gum with swift ferocity. As did most detectives, he dressed more like a businessman than a cop, or at least my idea of a cop: He wore a starched white dress shirt, a maroon silk tie, dark gray pants, and shiny black wing tips. He glanced at the three of us standing graveside — DeVriess, Miranda, and me — and then bent down to peer into the coffin at Willoughby’s limbless torso.

  “Huh,” he said, then turned to me. “Never a dull moment, eh, Dr. Brockton?” He held out his hand for me to shake. “Gary Culpepper,” he said. “We met twelve years ago. You lectured to our class when I was a new recruit in the police academy. You probably don’t remember me — actually, I hope you don’t. I was the one who dropped the skull that you passed around.”

  “I thought you looked familiar,” I fibbed. “This is my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, and Burt DeVriess, the attorney who needs a DNA sample from Mr. Willoughby here.”

  Culpepper nodded curtly at Burt, saying, “I’m familiar with Mr. DeVriess. Very nice to meet you, Ms. Lovelady.” He shook Miranda’s hand but not Burt’s, a snub that didn’t come as much of a surprise to me, and surely not to the attorney. During his reign as Knoxville’s toughest defense lawyer, Grease had earned the loathing of most of the city’s police and prosecutors. “So what’ve we got here, Doc?”

  It was an irresistible opening. “Well, just offhand I’d say we’ve got a head and a torso.”

  He redoubled his assault on the gum and took another look at the body. “Tell me what I missed before I got here.”

  I described the sequence of events that culminated in the discovery that Willoughby’s limbs were missing.

  “Before you cut into the clothing, did you notice anything that made you think the body or the grave had been disturbed?”

  I shook my head.

  “And the clothing was undamaged?”

  “Well, the fabric was beginning to rot in places, but otherwise yes, it was intact.”

  “That means whoever took his arms and legs did it before he was buried,” he mused. “Not exactly a case of grave robbing. Mutilating a corpse, I guess, unless the limbs were amputated while he was still alive.”

  I shook my head again. “There’s no sign of bleeding or healing to the tissue at the shoulders and hips,” I explained. “That means he was already dead when he was cut.”

  “Hmm…theft of property? I don’t know — who owns the bodies in a cemetery?”

  I shrugged.

  “Fraud or breach of contract, maybe,” he mused, “if the funeral home didn’t provide the services it got paid for.” He massaged the back and sides of his neck, just below the base of his skull, even as his jaw muscles continued to knot rhythmically. “We need to get the evidence techs out here to go over the coffin and the body, see if they find anything that sheds light on this. After that I guess we need to send the body to the forensic center for a more detailed examination.”

  DeVriess took a step toward the coffin. “Detective,” he oozed in his smooth, courtroom voice, the one that sounded like old money, cigars, and fine whiskey, “surely I don’t need to remind you that I have a court order authorizing the exhumation of this body and the collection of DNA samples.”

  “Of course,” replied Culpepper, and DeVriess smiled warmly. The smile froze, though, when Culpepper added, “You surely don’t need to remind me. But this is now a crime scene, and the samples for your civil suit will have to wait until we’ve finished our search for evidence in the criminal case.”

  I could see DeVriess drawing himself up to bluster, so I reached out and touched his shoulder briefly. There was nothing to be gained — and certainly no fun to be had — in a graveside pissing match over a dismembered corpse. “Burt, your client’s gotten by without this paternity test for a lot of years already. You reckon maybe he could get by without it for maybe one or two more days?”

  DeVriess stared at me. I’d seen that stare a few times before, in court, just before Grease ripped into me on the witness stand. He looked from me to Miranda, as if to say, Did you see what he just did? Miranda simply shrugged and smiled, as if to say, He’s crazy, but he’s harmless.

  She held his gaze, and as swiftly as he’d puffed up, DeVriess suddenly deflated, and then he laughed. “Damned if I’m not going soft in my old age.”

  Culpepper was as startled by Burt’s acquiescence as Burt himself was. “Well, then. Great. I’ll call out the evidence techs. Dr. Brockton, I suspect we’d like you or the medical examiner to examine the body, so I’d like to arrange to have it transported to the forensic center once we clear the scene here.”

  I nodded. “Dr. Garcia’s still on medical leave, but he’s getting better. I imagine he’d be interested in taking a look at a case this unusual.” I pulled out my pocket calendar. “I’m flying to Washington tomorrow to give a talk at the Smithsonian. Could we stick this guy in the cooler until first thing Monday morning?”

  Remarkably, Culpepper and DeVriess both agreed that Monday morning was soon enough. I still had some work to do on the next day’s talk in Washington, so after packing the slightly soiled scissors and the unused Stryker saw and pliers in the back of my truck, Miranda and I departed for campus. DeVriess followed us down the driveway, leaving the body of Trey Willoughby — what was left of it —
in the keeping of detective Culpepper and the forensic technicians who would comb the coffin for clues to the postmortem butchery.

  CHAPTER 5

  The dot of the laser pointer danced across the rib that was projected, ten times larger than life, on a screen deep beneath the Mall in Washington, D.C. I was lecturing, as part of a series called Smithsonian Saturdays, to three hundred people who’d given up a weekend afternoon — and given up fifty bucks apiece — to sit in a windowless underground auditorium and view slides of decaying corpses, bullet-riddled skulls, and incinerated skeletons.

  I’d had a disappointing lunch meeting with Ed Ulrich, my former student. Actually, the lunch was great — we sampled a tasty variety of Native American dishes at the Museum of the American Indian — but the meeting was discouraging. Ed had sympathized with my funding plight, but his own program at the Smithsonian was confronting painful budget cuts, too, so he had no research money to funnel to his alma mater.

  Deflated by the bad news, I’d gotten off to a slow start in my talk, but by the time I reached the slide of the rib, my energy was as focused as the laser pointer. “That little notch in the rib is a cut mark made by a knife,” I told the audience. Clicking the projector’s remote, I advanced to the next slide, a close-up of the notch. At this magnification the rib looked the size of a tree trunk, and the cut might have been inflicted by a dull chain saw. “See how the outer layer of bone, the cortical bone, looks torn? You can tell by the way the fibers angle that the knife thrust was going from front to back.” I tapped my chest, just below my right collarbone. “This is the first right rib, by the way, so as the knife penetrated beyond the rib, it punctured the upper lobe of the lung.”

  “Excuse me?” A woman’s voice floated up to me from the darkness at the rear of the auditorium.

  “Did you have a question?”

  “Yes. You said a medical examiner did an autopsy on this girl’s body?”

  “Yes. The state medical examiner in Kentucky. The body of the girl — Leatha Rutherford was her name — was found hidden in a trash pile outside Lexington.”

  “Why didn’t the medical examiner see the stab wound?”

  “Good question. By the time she was found, she’d been dead nearly six months, so there just wasn’t enough soft tissue left to show the traces of a stab wound. The M.E. also took X-rays, but because the first rib runs underneath the clavicle”—I tapped my chest again—“the knife mark was masked on the X-rays.”

  “And how did you happen to find it?”

  “Dumb luck,” I said, earning a few laughs. “Actually, I have to give maternal doggedness the credit for this. Leatha was eighteen when she disappeared. The M.E. ruled her death a homicide, but he listed the actual cause of death as ‘unknown.’ She was buried, and the case more or less came to a dead end, but her mother wouldn’t give up. She kept nagging the detectives, and then she contacted me. She’d seen me on a television show—60 Minutes? no, wait, it was 48 Hours, I think — and she sent me a letter. ‘If anyone can figure out how Leatha died, it’s you,’ she wrote. ‘Please help me.’ How do you say no to something like that? So I took a graduate student up to Kentucky, and we exhumed the bones. We brought them back to the morgue in Lexington, cleaned off the remaining tissue, and we got lucky. If dogs had gotten to the bones or if the knife had passed cleanly between the ribs instead of nicking this one, we would never have known what killed her.”

  The red laser dot twitched and skittered along the cut mark again. No wonder cats love these things, I thought. “That nick in the bone is about half an inch long, an eighth inch wide, and a quarter inch deep,” I said, “but here’s how it looks up really, really close.” I flicked to the next slide. “We wondered if we could learn anything more about the murder by examining the cut mark more closely, so we took the rib back to UT and looked at it under a scanning electron microscope.” At this scale, magnified hundreds of times, the edges of the rib could not be seen; instead an area measuring less than one inch square filled the Smithsonian’s twenty-foot screen. The surface of the outer, cortical bone — ivory smooth to the naked eye and to probing fingertips — appeared ragged and spongy, like bread dough allowed to rise for too long. The small notch was now an immense fissure, wider than the span of my arms. I outlined it with the pointer. “Look carefully at the cut mark,” I said. “What do you see?”

  “There’s a chunk of something down in the cut,” a man near the front called out quickly. This fifty-dollar-a-head crowd was quick and competitive, like a bunch of straight-A students competing in Brain Bowl.

  “Very good,” I said. Lodged deep in the fissure was what appeared to be a boulder, several times the size of my head. “That looks pretty big under the electron microscope, but it’s actually a tiny speck, about a thousandth of an inch in diameter. About the thickness of the down on a newborn baby’s head. We analyzed that speck with an attachment to the microscope, something called an atom probe. Anybody want to guess what that speck is?”

  Comments popped like kernels of corn. “Blood.” “DNA.” “Semen?” “Ooh, gross.” “Blood.” “Steel.”

  “Steel’s close,” I said, “but not quite right. That’s a particle of cerium oxide. Cerium oxide is a ceramic that’s used to make knife sharpeners. The man who stabbed this girl had just sharpened his knife.”

  A woman exclaimed, “Oh, dear God.”

  The man near the front said, “So they did catch the killer?”

  I always hated answering this question. “Unfortunately, no. If this were an episode of CSI, they would have arrested him after fifty-nine minutes. But in real life, people get away with murder. The police thought she’d been killed by one of her relatives, an uncle; the rumor was, he had a big pot patch and Leatha had threatened to tell the police about it. Her body was found in the woods near his house, hidden in a trash heap.” I always had trouble telling the next part. “The police actually found a cerium knife sharpener in his kitchen drawer.” I heard murmurs of distress and indignation from the audience. “But there was no direct evidence tying him to the crime. ‘A lot of people have cerium knife sharpeners,’ the prosecutor told me. ‘Hell, I have a cerium knife sharpener, but that doesn’t make me a killer.’ They never made an arrest, and that’s one of the sad parts of this job: Sometimes your best just isn’t quite good enough. I think we let Leatha down.”

  I ended my lecture with a case that was gruesome but not so sad: the case of a woman who died at home and whose body was eventually eaten by her three hungry dogs. By the time I recounted the search for the woman’s missing diamond ring — a search that required a hapless sheriff’s deputy to collect a bushel of dog crap, which I X-rayed in a fruitless search for the ring — the audience was shrieking in horrified amusement. Leave them laughing if you can, I thought. They’ll get sad again soon enough.

  After the lights came up and the screen came down, I packed up my slides and answered a few individual questions, things people hadn’t felt comfortable asking in a crowd — one woman wondered whether I would be able to tell, twenty years postmortem, if a sister’s fatal gunshot wound was a case of murder or suicide. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Women don’t tend to commit suicide by gunshot, but if the M.E. who did the autopsy was competent, I doubt that I’d see it any differently.”

  As the crowd gradually trickled out, I noticed a man lingering near the back of the auditorium. Unlike most of the jeans-and-sweater crowd, he wore a wool suit, an oxford-cloth shirt, and a silk tie. The clothes looked expensive but subdued, as if the man wore them because he liked them, not because he wanted to impress others. He made his way forward as I finished packing my slides and projector. “Fascinating talk, Dr. Brockton,” he said. “Especially the SEM case — great use of heavy research artillery on a forensic case. Cutting-edge work, if you’ll pardon an inappropriate pun.”

  “I’m the world’s worst punner, I’m told. No pardon necessary. You must have a science background if you’re on a first-name basis with a scanning ele
ctron microscope.”

  “I do. I’m in research and development at a company called OrthoMedica.” He said it offhandedly, as if he doubted I’d ever heard of it, but the truth was, OrthoMedica was one of the nation’s biggest and best-known biomedical companies. An international conglomerate, it sold billions of dollars’ worth of medical supplies, artificial joints, and consumer health-care products every year. He fished a business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Dr. Glen Faust, M.D., Ph.D.,” it read. “Vice President, R&D.” The OrthoMedica logo intrigued me: It took Leonardo da Vinci’s classic drawing of the proportions of the human figure, Vitruvian Man, and gave it a high-tech, Bionic Man twist, superimposing X-rays and robotic prostheses and scans on various parts of the body.

  I glanced at the address. “I didn’t realize OrthoMedica was based in Bethesda.”

  “Spitting distance from here,” he said. “We collaborate closely with the National Institutes of Health. Our campus is less than a mile from theirs. We also work with Johns Hopkins, just up the road in Baltimore. And with Walter Reed Army Hospital and the Pentagon.”

  “The Pentagon?”

  He nodded. “Sure. The military drives a lot of health-care R&D, especially in areas like wound care and trauma surgery and prostheses.” It made sense: Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers had been wounded in the Iraq war, many of them by improvised explosive devices that blew off arms or legs.

  He reached into his pocket again, removing a printout that he unfolded and handed to me. “Did you happen to see this story in the New York Times a while back? I thought of it when I saw the announcement about your talk.”

  I glanced at the story, which described how the U.S. military was now doing “virtual autopsies”—CT scans — on the bodies of all soldiers killed in Iraq. “Yes, I remember reading this,” I said. “Fascinating. They’re using scanners to examine lethal wounds so they can develop better body armor and helmets and armored vehicles, right?”