Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  “Howdy, Doc, is that you?”

  “Sheriff Cotterell?”

  “That’s me. How are you, Doc?”

  I caught my reflection in the mirror that hung on the bathroom door: practically naked, wrapped in an undersized and sodden towel, my face and neck crimson with sunburn, my thigh throbbing and bleeding again. I smiled, with a topspin of grimace. “I’m just fine, Sheriff. How about you? Any luck identifying that girl from the strip mine?”

  “Not a goddamned bit, Doc, if you’ll pardon my French. That’s why I’m calling—see if maybe you could help us some more. Bubba and me was talking, and he asked me did you still have that girl’s skull. I said, ‘Well, I sure as hell hope so—he ain’t never give it back to me.’ ” The sheriff paused.

  I scanned my desktop for the skull, but it wasn’t there. I felt a flash of panic—had someone made off with it?—but then I saw it sitting on my windowsill, and I vaguely recalled having moved it out of the way a few days before. Or was it a few weeks before? Out of sight, out of mind, I thought guiltily. “Of course I’ve still got it, Sheriff. Do you want it back?”

  “Oh, hell no, Doc. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Thing is, Bubba was telling me about a TBI training he went to a while back. They had somebody from the FBI there talking about putting faces back on skulls—makin’ ’em out of clay. Showing what the dead person looked like. Bubba ’n me was wondering if maybe you might know how to do that.”

  “I’ve tried it a time or two,” I said, “but to be honest, I’m no good at it, Sheriff. My clay heads look like a fourth grader’s art project. I’d only make it harder to ID the girl.” I’d hoped that might draw a laugh from him, but instead, he sighed.

  “Well. I figured it didn’t hurt none to ask. We’ll keep knocking on doors and asking questions. Thing is, Doc, we’re running out of doors to knock on.”

  “That’s the way sometimes with forensic cases,” I commiserated. “Especially old ones. People forget. Out of sight, out of mind,” I added, feeling another pang of guilt for having nothing helpful to offer him. I wished him luck and hung up, but I felt the dead girl’s eyes—her vacant eyes—staring at me in reproach, her silent voice clear and accusatory in my head: What about me? she seemed to say. Have you forgotten me, too? So soon?

  Wiping the blood from my thigh with the damp towel, I blotted the wound with tissue, then applied a thin line of super glue to the edges of the skin and pressed them together. The glue—cyanoacrylate, said the label, which also warned that the chemical was a carcinogen—burned my nostrils and stung like a sonofabitch. Serves you right, I heard a voice in my head sniping. But whether it was the dead girl’s voice or my own this time, I didn’t know.

  CHAPTER 14

  Satterfield

  “YOUR FIRST TIME IS special.” People said it about all kinds of shit, Satterfield reflected, and maybe it was true—maybe every first was special. First kiss. First love. First killing.

  Its specialness to Satterfield wasn’t the way he’d done it; in truth, he’d done it clumsily, and far too swiftly. Its specialness lay in the fact that he had done it. The killing had been spontaneous—as surprising to him as it was to her—but it had been an epiphany, a life-changing revelation.

  Three years had passed, but the images of it remained vivid. Indeed, the more times he replayed them, the more vivid they grew.

  She was small and pretty—half Jap, half round eye, with a slender, finely chiseled face and thick, red-black hair. Satterfield saw her dancing in one of the skin bars near the base, and he liked what he saw. Before he knew it, he’d dropped fifty bucks on overpriced, watered-down drinks, and then another fifty on a lap dance that left him wild with want. “Can we go somewhere?” he begged when she sat down beside him, her thigh pressing against his. “Can you take the rest of the night off? Or even just take a break and come outside with me?”

  She laughed. “You want some private time with me? VIP room.” She pointed a glossy red nail—her pinky finger—toward an unmarked black door set into a black wall. “Hundred dollars. Ten minutes.”

  He stared at her. “A hundred bucks? For ten minutes? That’s robbery!”

  She smiled coyly. “That not what other men say.” She stood up and began undulating in time to the music, backing slowly away from his table, her face mirroring the lust that was coursing through him. A Marine at a neighboring table turned his chair toward her and slid another chair, an empty, in her direction. She glanced at the chair and then looked at Satterfield, smiling and cocking her head inquiringly.

  He could stand it no more. Scrambling to his feet, he seized her by the wrist and pulled her close. “Three hundred,” he said, “if you meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes.”

  THE GIRL HOOKED HER thumbs through the elastic of her G-string and shimmied out of it, then lay back on the rear seat of his car, raised her arms over her head, and opened her knees.

  Satterfield stared. Her body was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen—far more beautiful than anything in the skin magazines his stepfather kept in the sleeper cab of the semi. Beneath the red-orange glow of the streetlight filtering through the car’s tinted glass, her skin shone like molten copper. Her muscled legs testified to the strength and grace that hours of dancing each night had created. Her belly—flat when she was standing—was concave now that she lay on her back, and the strands of the golden tassel that hung from the piercing in her navel fanned out in the same way her hair fanned on the leather upholstery behind her head. “Okay, sailor boy,” she said, fingering one of her nipple rings, “show me.”

  Satterfield was unmanned. Inside, when she’d been seductive but unavailable, he’d been about to explode. Now, though—the teasing done, replaced by a command to perform—he felt himself beginning to panic, to sweat, and to shrink. Mortified, he began rubbing his crotch, slowly at first, then with increasing desperation and fury.

  She raised herself onto her elbows. “What? You not want me? Why you act like you want me, if you not want me?” Her eyes flitted from his face to his crotch and back up again. “You never been with woman, sailor boy?” Her lips curled into a smile—a smirking, scornful smile. “You scared, sailor boy? You a sissy, sailor boy? You wet bed at night, sailor boy?”

  He was on her in an instant, delivering a backhanded slap, then a forehand slap. She opened her mouth to scream, but he clamped one hand over her mouth, and clamped the other around her throat. Her eyes bugging wide, she thrashed and bucked beneath him, but she was no match for him, and gradually her struggles lessened. He removed the hand from her mouth and loosened his grip on her throat. She gasped like a drowning victim surfacing from underwater; he allowed her a few sips of air, then bore down on her neck again. Her eyes were desperate and pleading now, and he felt himself growing aroused.

  His orgasm came when her eyes rolled back in her head.

  HE WAS INTERROGATED BY the local cops but he was never charged. Nobody’d seen her leave with him, and she’d been seen doing lap dances for a lot of men around the time she went missing.

  The military police had their suspicions, too—just routine lead checking at first, but then, once the bone detective got involved, they’d zeroed in on Satterfield. In the end, the Navy chose not to court-martial him, but it also chose not to keep him in its ranks. There’s the right kind of killing and the wrong kind of killing; the kind that solves problems, and the kind that creates them.

  Two years after enlisting—two years after he walked away from his mother and his stepfather and finally embarked on what felt like a life of power and prestige—Satterfield found himself unmoored. Two years of basic training and special-forces training were shot. His two-week career as a SEAL—two weeks of training, before he’d been washed out—was memorialized in a tattoo on his right forearm. He’d gotten the tat the day he’d heard he’d been accepted for SEAL training—a moment of overconfidence or of hope or even of gratitude. He�
��d gotten the celebratory tattoo that afternoon, then gone to the strip club that night.

  Administrative discharge, “under circumstances other than honorable,” with nothing to show but the tat. It made him a decorated veteran in his own ironic way. By the end of his military service, he’d acquired skills in stealth, survival, and attack—with bare hands, knife, pistol, rifle, even explosives.

  He’d also acquired even more valuable things: insight and self-knowledge, which he’d gained in those moments when he first tasted the fruit of the tree of power—the power unleashed by the convergence of pain, sex, and fear. Especially fear.

  Last but not least, he’d acquired a new nemesis: the man who’d focused the Navy investigator’s suspicions on Satterfield. The man who’d ruined the life Satterfield had finally, against all odds, begun to create for himself.

  The man whose reciprocal, retaliatory ruination Satterfield had come to Tennessee to set in motion.

  CHAPTER 15

  Brockton

  “ART DEPARTMENT.” THE FEMALE voice in my ear sounded young, alert, and amused, as if she’d heard the punch line of a joke just before she picked up the phone.

  “Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr. Brockton, in Anthropology. Is Dr. Hollingsworth in?”

  “Dr. Hollingsworth?” There was a puzzled pause, followed by a suppressed snort of laughter. “Oh, you mean Joe?”

  Flustered, I glanced at the campus directory again. Art Department: Chair, Joseph Hollingsworth. I’d probably met him at some faculty function or other, but if I had, I didn’t remember. “He—Joe—he’s the department chairman, right?”

  “Right,” she said, her amusement tinged with sarcasm now. Joe’s department, I gathered, marched—or boogied?—to a different, hipper drummer than mine.

  I backed up to take another run at it. “So. Joe—my main man, Joe—is he around?”

  She wasn’t buying. “One moment, Dr. Brockton. I’ll see if Dr. Hollingsworth is available.” Ouch, man, I thought as the receiver clicked me onto hold.

  A moment later, it clicked again and the call was transferred. “Hel-lo, this is Joe,” a cheery voice singsonged.

  “Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr.—” I halted, my formality sounding stuffy now even to me. “Sorry. Joe, this is Bill Brockton, over in Anthropology?”

  “Yessir, Mr. Bill. What can I do you for?”

  “I’m looking for somebody who’s good at portraits. Nothing fancy; just a sketch, really. Pencil or pen is okay; color or black and white. What matters is that the artist has a good feel for anatomy, musculature, facial features. I need something realistic, not . . . ,” I hesitated, “not like Picasso, you know?”

  “I think I get your drift,” he said. “Thing is, ’bout everybody over here thinks even Picasso is old school, you know what I mean?” I suspected I did; I’d walked through the cavernous atrium of the Art and Architecture building a time or two, and I could make neither heads nor tails of most of the abstract paintings and sculpture on display. “Sounds like what you need,” he went on, “is one of those guys that draws tourists at the beach, you know? Pay him five bucks, and five minutes later, he hands you a pretty decent caricature of yourself.”

  “Hmm,” I mused. The nearest beach was eight hours away. “Well, but I don’t want something cartoonish. Like I said, I need something realistic. Serious, too.”

  “Let’s back up a little,” he said. “A portrait, you said. Who’s the subject?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come again?”

  “I don’t know who it is,” I repeated. “That’s the problem. Here’s the thing, Joe. I’ve got a dead girl’s skull in my lab. Thirteen, fourteen years old. Her bones were found at an old strip mine up near the Kentucky border. She’s been dead a while; we’re talking years, not months. I’d like to find somebody who could look at that girl’s skull—see it through the eyes of an artist—and then sketch what that girl may have looked like when she was alive.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Wow,” he said. “Y’all don’t mess around over there in Anthropology, do you?” Another pause. “You know, it’s not exactly Life Drawing—matter of fact, I guess it’s the opposite of Life Drawing—but I had a girl in my class last spring who was damned good at the human figure. Faces, too; especially faces. Most folks just draw what they see on the surface, but her drawings? You could tell what was under the skin, too, you know? I don’t know if she can do it the other way around—start with the inside and add what’s on the outside—but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “She sounds worth a try. What’s the best way to get in touch with her?”

  “Hmm. She wasn’t an art major; come to think of it, I wanna say she was a high-school student. Her name . . . her name . . . oh, hell, I’m blanking on her name. Hang on.” I heard a rustle as he covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Hey, Rachel,” I heard his muffled voice calling. “What the hell’s the name of that high-school girl that took Life Drawing last spring? Tall. Lanky. Blond. Went barefoot all the time, even in February. Amelia something?” I heard the young woman’s voice in the background, muffled and indistinct. “Ha! That’s why I wanted to call her Amelia.” Another rustle as he unmuffled the mouthpiece. “Her name’s Jenny Earhart. She goes to Laurel High School—you know it?”

  “That hippie private school? In the run-down house up on Laurel Avenue? Long-haired stoner kids hanging out on the front porch all the time?”

  “Sounds like you know it. If you talk to her, tell her Joe-Joe said hey.” He laughed. “Don’t tell her the old coot forgot her name.”

  “LAUREL HIGH. PEACE.” The young man who answered the phone sounded thoroughly sincere. And more than a little stoned.

  “Uh . . . peace,” I replied. “I’m trying to get in touch with a student there.”

  “Heyyyy, man, I’m a student. Troy.”

  “Uh, hi, Troy. Actually, I’m trying to get in touch with another student. A student named Jenny. Jenny Earhart. Is Jenny there?”

  “Nah, you’re out of luck, dude. Jenny’s not here. Jenny’s gone.”

  Luckily, Jenny hadn’t gone far, according to the sheepish school administrator who took the phone from Troy. “Jenny’s doing an art internship this semester,” the woman told me. “She’s working afternoons at a graphic-design agency in the Old City.” She gave me the agency’s name, and when I phoned, Jenny herself answered the call, sounding perfectly poised and not at all stoned.

  THE AROMA OF ROASTING coffee hung heavy and pleasant in the air, like wood smoke on a winter’s day, as I parked my truck and stepped out onto the treacherous footing of Jackson Avenue. The street was brick, and the bricks were chipped, cracked, and in places altogether missing, thanks to a century of heavy traffic and chronic neglect. That was finally changing—the gritty warehouse district known as the Old City was finally, in the last decade of the twentieth century, being gentrified with bars and boutiques and loft apartments—but the change was slow and uneven. Especially underfoot.

  The coffee aroma permeating the Old City came from the JFG Coffee Company, whose headquarters and roasting plant occupied most of a five-story building on Jackson Avenue. The building’s ground floor had been rented out to newer, hipper tenants. One of these was the design agency where Jenny was interning; the other was the JFG Coffeehouse, where she’d suggested we meet.

  Joe Hollingsworth had described her as tall, blond, and rangy; he’d also described her as perpetually shoeless. I didn’t spot any bare feet in the café, but I did spot a young woman who was tall and blond, leaning over a sketch pad, finishing a pastel sketch of the JFG Coffee Building. The sketch portrayed the old building honestly: A couple of windows in the façade had been boarded up, and vestiges of an adjoining building remained, in the form of bricked-up openings and cut-off staircase supports that no longer supported anything. But the building’s age and imperfections were offset
by the youth and vitality of the people she’d shown enjoying themselves at café tables out front. I leaned in for a closer look at the faces, and even though the figures were small, their features were detailed and lifelike.

  “Professor Hollingsworth—Joe—said you were good with faces,” I told her. “I agree. And like I said on the phone, I need a good face.” I’d set a hatbox on our table. Now I removed the lid, then reached in and lifted out the skull, which was resting upside down on a doughnut-shaped cushion, surrounded by Bubble Wrap. I righted the skull, rotating it toward her.

  “Oh, my,” she whispered. She inclined her head this way and that, studying the skull from multiple angles. “She looks so young. And so . . . vulnerable. What else can you tell me about her?”

  “Not much, unfortunately. All we have is the bone, and there’s a limit to what it tells us. She’s been dead for at least two years, maybe more.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because when we found her, she had a two-year-old black locust growing in her left eye orbit.”

  “What?”

  “Eye orbit. Eye socket, most people call it.”

  “No, I mean, what did you say was growing there? A locust?”

  “A black locust. A tree, not a bug.” I turned the skull toward the ceiling of the coffeehouse. “See what a nice little planter that makes? Just add a seed, a little dust, a little rain, and voilà.” I shifted the skull so she had a better view into the eye orbit. “See that slot, way in the back?” She nodded. “That’s where the optic nerve runs from the eyeball to the brain. The roots grew through that opening into the cranial vault.”

  “Wow.”

  “But wait, there’s more. We also found a wasp nest in there, inside the cranium. Her skull was becoming its own little ecosystem.”

  “Amazing. That’s beautiful. But heartbreaking, too. You said she was, what, fourteen?”