Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

“Excuse me?” interrupted the TBI’s Carson. “Did you say a skillet?”

  “Yes, sir,” the detective replied. “If you’ll flip a few more pages back in your packet, you’ll see several photos of it.” Like everyone else, I flipped, and I marveled at what I saw: a six-inch cast-iron skillet, the bottom and sides of it covered with a paste of blood, hair, and bits of bone and brain matter. The skillet was in two pieces. “As you see,” the detective said, “at some point the handle snapped off at the rim from the force of the blows. The medical examiner was able to match the shape of the skillet with several of the fractures in the skull. There are pictures of that, too.” Fascinated, I flipped forward until I came to a photo of a defleshed cranium, its shattered vault marked with distinctive curved lines. In one photo, someone with latex gloves held the skillet just above one of the curved indentations in the bone, and the arcs matched exactly.

  “You said she was single,” said Brubaker, and the detective nodded. “Ex-husband?”

  “No, sir. Never married.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Not at the time. And not for a while. Not in the prior two years.”

  He frowned. “Could there have been a new boyfriend, one she hadn’t told anybody about?” The detective looked uncertain. “I think this is domestic,” Brubaker explained. “Crime of passion. Look at the overkill—lots more violence than necessary, but it’s not sadistic violence; it’s just plain rage. Hell, she was probably dead after the first hit, but he just kept whaling away with that skillet till he broke the damned thing.” He drummed his fingers again. “Was she killed at home?” The detective shook her head. “Where? Not in the woods, I’m thinking.”

  “Not in the woods, best we can tell,” the detective said. “Somewhere else. We don’t know where.”

  “She was killed in a kitchen, that’s where,” Brubaker said. “Where else can you lay your hands on a cast-iron skillet when you’re mad as hell? Maybe the new boyfriend invited her over, then told her to cook dinner, and she refused—again—because she’d decided he was a loser and a jerk and a chauvinistic pig. I’m just making this up, obviously, but whatever it was, something set him off and he went ballistic.”

  The detective nodded, chewing her lip.

  “You said she was reported missing by a coworker?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not her boss.”

  “No.”

  “The boss—a man, right?” She nodded. “Middle-aged? Married, I’m guessing?”

  Her brow furrowed as she thought, and I could picture her trying to remember the boss’s left hand. She looked up at Brubaker, surprised. “Yeah, now that you mention it, he was wearing a ring.”

  “Be interesting to know if the boss’s wife was away when this happened,” Brubaker said. “Also be interesting to check his kitchen for blood.” Her eyes narrowed, and as they did, I could see wheels begin turning behind them.

  We ended with the new case Meffert and I were working in Campbell County. Meffert started with an overview of the case, and with the update of the ID. “The victim was a twenty-six-year-old white female from Covington, Kentucky. Melissa Mahan; went by Crystal.” He flashed a picture—a mug shot—showing a pretty but world-weary young woman. “She had a couple of arrests for soliciting. She worked part-time as an exotic dancer here”—he showed a slide of Adult World, the seedy establishment at the I-75 exit, a few miles from where we’d recovered her body. Next he showed the nearby truck stop. “She could have been picked up at either Adult World or the truck stop. Lotta truckers visit the porn palace; lotta hookers work the truck stop. She was a familiar face at the truck stop, I’m told.”

  “When was she reported missing?” asked Brubaker.

  Meffert frowned. “She wasn’t. Her last day of work at Adult World was September seventh. Over two weeks ago. But she wasn’t scheduled to work again until September fourteenth, because her boss had suspended her for a week. So we don’t actually know when she got picked up.”

  “You got anything that links her to a trucker?”

  “Nothing definitive,” said Meffert. “We found a fleck of red paint on the railing of the bridge she was dumped from. High on the rail—probably too high to have come from a car door. We’ve got the crime-lab guys analyzing it now, seeing if they can match it to a brand of paint or a brand of truck.”

  Brubaker turned to me. “Dr. Brockton, what can you tell us about how long she’d been dead?”

  “Not enough,” I said truthfully. “Obviously she was killed sometime after September seventh. And she was pretty badly decomposed by September twenty-third. I’m guessing she’d been there for a week, maybe close to two, before we found her. But whether she’d been dead for six days or sixteen days, I can’t say for sure. There’s just not much scientific basis for estimating time since death—not after the first few days, anyhow.”

  He drummed his fingers three times. Was he just thinking, or was he impatient; frustrated? Maybe all of those. “How many trucks a day pass by the strip joint or the truck stop?”

  Meffert shrugged. “Lots. A hundred? Two hundred?”

  “So if it was a trucker, and the time-since-death estimate has a ten-day range, your suspect pool could be as high as two thousand truckers.” He shook his head. “That’s a hell of a lot of truckers.” He looked at me sharply. “Ten days? You really can’t pin it down any tighter than that?”

  I felt my face redden, and I wished I’d thought to begin studying maggot growth and development earlier than I had. I glanced at Meffert, remembering how he’d teased me about misjudging Colonel Shy’s death by more than a century. Meffert was looking down at his notes—studying them with extreme attentiveness, it seemed to me.

  Brubaker shifted gears. “What about the dismemberment? What was used to cut her up? Power saw? Hand saw? Hunting knife?”

  “Don’t know yet,” I said, but I felt better about this line of questioning. “We put the bones in to simmer yesterday morning. I expect my assistant’s cleaning them just about now. Ask me tomorrow, after I’ve had a chance to take a close look at the cut marks.”

  After another ten minutes of discussion—most of it focusing on the Stinking Creek woman, though with some follow-up Q&A about the Memphis and Chattanooga cases—Brubaker summarized his conclusions. The three murders were unrelated, he said. All three victims were women, true, and all three bodies had been found near interstate exits, but the similarities ended there.

  “Well, thank God we’re not looking for a serial killer,” said Wallace, the TBI honcho, putting words to the relief that I imagined all of us around the table were feeling.

  That relief was short-lived. “Oh, but you are,” said Brubaker. “I guarantee it.” All heads turned in the direction of the FBI profiler.

  “I don’t understand,” countered Wallace. “I thought you just agreed that these killings are unrelated.”

  “I did. They are.” We stared at him. If he was hoping to get our attention, he’d succeeded. “These three are unrelated. But one of them’s the work of a serial killer.” I knew which one he meant even before he said it; in fact, at some level, I’d known since I’d first seen her bloody body. “The hooker who was cut up and dumped in the creek—she was almost certainly not that guy’s first victim. You don’t start with something like that. And she sure as hell won’t be his last victim. Not unless he’s caught very quickly.”

  Meffert raised his hand. “We’ve got another dead female in East Tennessee. Unidentified. Unknown cause of death.”

  Brubaker turned to him. “Killed when?”

  “Don’t know,” said Meffert. “Doc, you want to jump in here?”

  “An adolescent,” I said. “Fourteen, fifteen. Dead at least two or three years, maybe lots more. Maybe as long as twenty years. Bare bones, bleached by the sun.”

  Brubaker’s gaze swiveled between me and Meffert. “Was she dumped near an i
nterstate?” Meffert shook his head. “Some other easily accessible spot?”

  “No, sir,” said the TBI agent. “Way the hell off the beaten track. At an abandoned strip mine up in the mountains. ’Bout as hard to access as it gets.”

  Brubaker shrugged. “Hard to say, if we don’t know how or when she was killed. But unless something turns up that links the scenes, I’d guess it’s unrelated.”

  Just then the door opened halfway. A woman caught Wallace’s eye and beckoned to him; he pushed back from the table and stepped into the hallway. A moment later, he returned and tapped me on the shoulder. “Doc, you’ve got a phone call. Your assistant—Tyler somebody? He says he’s found something you need to know ASAP.”

  Startled, I excused myself and followed the woman to a nearby office. On the desk was a phone with a blinking light indicating a call on hold. She pressed the button and handed me the receiver.

  “Hello? Tyler?”

  “Hey, Dr. B. Sorry to interrupt you. But you asked me to let you know if I found anything significant when I cleaned the bones.”

  I felt my senses go on high alert. “What is it?”

  “I was just looking at the left humerus. It was cut about midway between the shoulder and the elbow?”

  “I remember. Go on.”

  “Well, I looked at it in the dark, the way you showed us, with a flashlight beam skimming it at a really low angle.”

  The wait was killing me. “For Pete’s sake, Tyler, just spit it out. What’d you see? Saw marks? Knife marks? An image of the Virgin Mary?”

  “Well, cut marks, for sure,” he went on, with maddening indirection, “but not saw marks or knife marks, best I can tell. I compared ’em to all the examples we’ve got in the reference file. I finally found one photograph that matched the pattern.”

  “So what was the tool?” I looked down and found myself drumming my fingers on the desktop, unconsciously aping Brubaker’s gesture of impatience.

  “It was labeled ‘Unknown.’ From a case you worked in Alaska two years ago.”

  “SEXUAL SERIAL KILLERS DON’T do that,” Brubaker said, with an assurance born of a quarter century of experience studying violent, twisted murderers.

  “But why else would he cut her up that way,” I persisted, “with a tool that I would recognize—that only I would recognize—if he’s not trying to taunt me, or threaten me?”

  “You said it yourself,” he went on. “Even you don’t know what the cutting tool was—not in this case; not in that Alaska case.” He was pummeling not just my hypothesis but my confidence, too. “And you said the Alaska killer hung himself in prison, so we know he didn’t kill this stripper. Not unless you missed the time-since-death estimate here by a lot more than ten days.” That felt like a low blow, and it stung. When did the conference table turn into a boxing ring—and how had my forensic colleagues been transformed into spectators, watching me take a drubbing? “How the hell would some truck driver in Tennessee know about this cutting tool that’s so mysterious even you can’t figure out what it was?” I had no answer to that.

  “Serial killers don’t go after cops,” he went on, “and they damned sure don’t go after anthropologists. They go after their dream victims. Bundy? He went after brown-haired women who looked like the girlfriend that dumped him. Gacy? Boys and young men. The Green River Killer, up near Seattle? Forty young women so far, nearly all in their teens and twenties.” I nodded, grudgingly.

  “Look,” he added in a more conciliatory tone, “there are only so many ways to kill somebody. Put a hundred million killers at a hundred million crime scenes for a hundred million years, and sooner or later two of them will pick up the same cutting tool.” I liked the reference—a riff on the old saying about monkeys and typewriters and the works of Shakespeare, which was really a saying about how random genetic variation eventually, inevitably, turned primordial slime into human beings—but I disliked the swiftness and certainty with which he’d rejected my idea: my suggestion that the Stinking Creek killer was somehow—somewhy—echoing one of my prior cases.

  “You’re the expert,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t convey the sullenness I was feeling.

  “These guys go after victims that feed their sexual fantasies,” he repeated. “Don’t take this the wrong way; I mean, I do find you a very attractive man, Doctor”—he said it with a sly grin and a wink, to let everyone know it was a good-natured olive branch of a joke, as well as a signal that the discussion was over—“but I doubt that this guy’s fantasies extend to you.”

  I prayed to God he was right. I hoped like hell he wasn’t wrong.

  CHAPTER 12

  Desirée

  SHE WAS LEANING AGAINST a streetlight—one foot propped on the post, the knee raised and her back arched, accentuating her curves—when the blue Mustang sidled to the curb and stopped. She waited until the passenger-side window came down, then pushed off from the post and sauntered to the curb. Music spilled from the car window—Elton John pleading “Don’t let the sun go down on me”—then the volume ramped down, and she heard the guy inside call out, “Hey, good-lookin’. What’s your name?”

  “Desirée. What’s yours?” He didn’t answer.

  Desirée was her street name, the name she donned along with the clothes; it made it easier to be who she had to be, to do what she had to do. She was wearing her Friday night outfit: a slinky gray top, worn off one shoulder; black spaghetti-strap bra peeking out from underneath; spiky red heels; fishnet thigh-highs; and a denim skirt so short it left an inch of toffee-colored skin exposed above the tops of the fishnets. Both stockings were torn—the front of the left thigh, the back of the right knee. She had two pairs of new ones in her dresser, but she’d noticed that she turned more heads—turned more tricks—looking like this. Men liked the ripped stockings; they seemed to get turned on by the idea that she’d been pawed or manhandled by other guys already. Made the sex seem dirtier; kinkier, she guessed.

  Still standing on the curb, Desirée leaned down, forearms on the windowsill, giving the guy a good view of the lacy bra and the pale brown breasts. It was dark inside the car—a blue car with tinted windows—and the driver was wearing mirrored shades, so his eyes were hidden. But from the small reflections of herself dead center in the lenses, she could tell that he was eyeing her, or at least part of her. After she’d given him a long eyeful, she purred, “So, baby, you just lookin’, or you want a date?”

  “How much?” His voice all cool, like he didn’t really care if he got any or not.

  “Twenty if all you want’s a quick hand job. Forty for oral. A hundred for a full-on, un-for-get-able ride.”

  He looked away briefly, then back at her, his fingers drumming the steering wheel in time to the music. “I’ll give you fifty.”

  “Aww, don’t lowball me, baby,” she cooed. “Let me show you what I am talkin’ about.” She straightened, turned her back to the car, and planted the high heels wide, then slowly folded forward and put her hands on her knees, shimmying her legs and causing the skirt to creep up her thighs and buttocks. It was a trick she’d learned when she was dancing at the Mouse’s Ear, the strip bar in West Knoxville where the suburban guys with money went when their wives were away or their big-spender customers were in town. Once the skirt was riding high and she knew he had a good view of her thong and her business, she began to undulate, rotating her head and her hips in opposite directions. Her hair radiated from her head in shimmering golden spokes—an ironic, hypnotic halo, one befitting a fallen saint seeking a paying partner in sin. Stopping mid-sway, she arched her back and blew a pouty kiss over her shoulder into the cavelike interior of the car. “Best hundred you will ever spend, lover boy.”

  “You remind me of somebody special,” he said.

  “I am somebody special.”

  “A girl in San Diego. My first time. A night I’ll always remember.” Desirée felt her hopes rising.
“So I’ll go sixty,” he added.

  She breathed a quiet sigh and clambered into the Mustang, the skirt still riding up as she settled into the low bucket seat. “Two blocks up, on the right, there’s the Magnolia Inn. Go around back and pull in behind the Dumpster.”

  He turned toward her and shook his head. “No way, sister. I am not doing it behind a Dumpster in back of some hot-sheet motel.”

  “It’s not about the Dumpster, baby,” she cajoled. “It’s nice and quiet back there. Dark. Private. Five minutes from now you will be in heaven.”

  “Forget it.” The car wasn’t moving. A bad sign.

  She needed the sixty. Really, really needed the sixty, and if she didn’t have it by midnight, she’d be headed down the rabbit hole of withdrawal. She tucked her hands under her thighs so he wouldn’t see that she already had the shakes. “You wanna get a room, honey?” Trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “That’s cool. I’ve got a deal there. Twenty bucks for an hour. King-size bed. Clean sheets. I can do a lot more for you on a nice big bed.”

  He shook his head. “Naw. I got someplace better. Five minutes from here. No cops, no drunks, nobody. Just me and you. I got some pot, if you want to get high. Got some blow, too, if you’re into that.”

  She felt a tingle of excitement mixed with relief. Sixty bucks plus a ride on the white horse? That was as good as a hundred in cash. Nearly, anyway. “Customer’s always right,” she said. “I need payment up front, though.”

  He laughed. “So you can snort the coke, snatch the dough, and run for it? Nice try, darlin’.”

  “Show me the money, honey. I need to know you’ve got it.”

  “Suspicious little thing, aren’t you? You’re hurting my feelings.” He reached into a back pocket and fished out a wallet. Flipping it open, he riffled through the bills for her. She saw four or five twenties, maybe more; shit, she shouldn’t have settled for sixty. But maybe she could squeeze another twenty out of him, once she had him revved up. All johns had a special itch, she’d found, and they’d usually pay extra to have it scratched. The trick was to find the itch without giving away the scratch. He plucked a twenty from the wallet, held it in front of her face. “Here. Earnest money. I’ll give you the blow—the blow’s what you want, right?—once we get there. You get the other forty bucks once you’ve made me happy.”