Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  The real joke was that it wasn’t really the van that he was camouflaging, though, it was himself: By disguising himself as the sort of dumb shit who believed that a bad camo paint job was cool—Don’t forget to do a shitty job, he reminded himself—he enabled himself to creep closer to his quarry, to coil around her before she realized that she was the prey.

  CHAPTER 19

  Tina

  TINA AWOKE IN SEMIDARKNESS, groaning and groggy and disoriented. Naked and cold, too. Her shoulders and hips and knees ached, but when she tried to stretch, she found that she could not move. Her wrists were bound behind her, her ankles tied to her wrists; Tina was hog-tied, she realized, and the realization caused a flood of memory and terror to surge in her. She’d climbed into the van on Magnolia sometime around midnight. It looked like a work van, with metal racks on the roof for ladders or pipes or lumber but with a bad paint job, a stupid paint job—camo paint on a work truck. It didn’t make her feel all that impressed with the john—what kind of idiot would try to camouflage a work van?—but business was slow and her hot pants were anything but warm in the chill of the late-September night. Just as the van had pulled away from the curb, she’d glanced down and seen a coil of rope on the floorboards. The guy had caught her looking at the rope, and then at him, and the glint in his eyes—the cold and predatory glint they took on in response to the fear in her own—had set off every alarm in her head. She’d tried to get out of the van then, even though it was moving, but the door was locked, and the lock knob had come off—had been taken off, she’d realized with a sudden sick feeling. She’d begun beating helplessly on the glass of the window, like a luna moth battering itself against a windowpane or a streetlight. He’d pulled over fast, and the last thing she remembered was a strong hand seizing the back of her neck, another strong hand clamping a cloth over her nose and mouth, and pungent, sickly-sweet vapors coursing through her nostrils and mouth, down into her lungs, deep into her darkening brain.

  “Rise and shine, Tina,” said a voice nearby. His voice. The voice of the guy who’d picked her up in the stupid van. “Tina? Right? I hope you got a good rest, Tina. You need to be fresh.” He paused. “You ever go hunting, Tina?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she whispered hoarsely.

  “Not a lot of women do. It’s more of a man thing. But we’re fixin’ to go hunting, you and me.” He sighted along a long, slender shaft, pointing its triangular tip at her, and at the far end, she saw three slender vanes. Feathers. “Actually,” he said, smiling, reaching down with one hand, “I’m fixin’ to go hunting.” He lifted something from the floor of the van, a shape that reminded her of a half moon: curved on one edge, straight on the other, but empty in between. She began to whimper and shudder, her trembling as rapid and desperate as the luna moth’s, its powdery wings flailing and beginning to smoke as they beat against the pitiless glass of a searing searchlight.

  The man with the moon was the devil himself, and the moon in his hands was a hunting bow.

  CHAPTER 20

  Roy Lee

  “WHAT THE FUCK?!” PERCHED fifteen feet up the trunk of a pine tree, on the narrow platform of a tree stand, Roy Lee Cheatham blinked and peered again through the scope of his deer rifle, then released his trigger finger, flipped on the safety, and laid the .30-06 across his knees so he could look through his binoculars instead. The binoculars were more powerful than the rifle scope, and they had a wider field of view, too, which made it easier to keep them trained on moving animals.

  “Come on, come on, where you at?” he whispered, then, “God a-mighty.” Two hundred yards away, moving from tree to tree, was a woman. A buck-naked woman. He stared through the glasses, his vision—frequently blocked by tree trunks—shifting from her face to her bare breasts and flanks and back up to her face. Again and again she looked over her shoulder, as if she were being pursued, and her face looked wild and desperate. She was limping—staggering, almost—and Roy Lee understood suddenly that she was hurt. He got another brief glimpse, and this time he thought he saw blood streaming down her leg. “Holy shit.” Laying the rifle flat on the platform of the tree stand, he scrambled down the ladder and ran toward her, calling, “Hey, lady! Lady! Hang on—I’m coming to help you.” He ran on a diagonal track that he thought would intercept hers, but it was hard to be sure, as his line of sight was often obscured and his crashing run drowned out whatever sounds she was making. After he’d sprinted a hundred yards, he stopped to look and listen.

  The woods were silent. She had stopped, too, he realized. He scanned slowly, his eyes and ears on full alert. Slightly to his left, perhaps thirty yards away, he heard a faint, ragged wheeze, and then he caught a flash of pale skin. “Hey,” he called again, and started in that direction. She burst into view, like a quail flushed from dry grass, and began to run—away from him, not toward. “Wait,” he called. “You look hurt. I’m trying to help.”

  She continued to flee, but she was moving far slower than Roy Lee was, so he gained ground on her swiftly. Blood was streaming down her leg, and as he got closer, he was stunned to see the shaft of an arrow protruding from the back of her thigh. He drew even with her within a minute. “Hey,” he panted. “Hey. What happened?” She stared at him, wild-eyed, and continued to stumble forward. He took hold of her wrist. “I’m trying to help, can you understand that? We need to get you to a doctor. I’m not gonna hurt you.” She stopped, her chest heaving, her breathing somewhere between gasping and sobbing. “Easy, now. Easy, now.” He spoke as if he were soothing a spooked horse. “That’s a girl. That’s a girl. Don’t be afraid. You’re okay. Everything is gonna be okay.”

  “Is it?” Roy Lee’s head snapped up at the words, spoken in a male voice somewhere ahead and off to his right. He scanned the trees but saw nothing. “Never make promises you can’t keep, Goober,” the unseen speaker continued. “Didn’t your mama teach you that?”

  “Git your ass outta your damn hidey-hole and we’ll have us a little talk about what my mama did or didn’t teach me,” said Roy Lee. He caught a slight movement in his peripheral vision, and he turned just in time to see a camouflaged figure rise from a crouch and pull a compound bow to a full draw.

  “I’ve got no interest in talking to you about your hillbilly mama,” said the man with the bow. As he said the word mama, he relaxed the first two fingers of his right hand. Roy Lee heard a dull twang and a brief seething sound—the snap of a bowstring, followed by the whisper of feathers as the arrow flew toward him at 300 feet per second. Then he felt himself shoved against the naked woman as the razor-tipped arrow penetrated his chest, and his heart opened in a bloom of crimson to receive its thrust.

  CHAPTER 21

  Brockton

  “DIS-PATCH. CAN I HEP you?” From the woman’s voice—flat but twangy, like an out-of-tune banjo—I guessed that she’d lived in Wartburg, or at least somewhere in the hills of East Tennessee, all her life.

  “Sheriff Cotterell, please.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, Sheriff Cotterell is away right now. I can probably track him down on the radio, if it’s urgent.”

  I felt a twinge of disappointment. “No, it’s not urgent. Could you give him a message, please?”

  “I don’t care to,” she said, and even though I’d lived in Tennessee for three years now, it still took me a moment to translate her spoken words—which sounded like a refusal—into her actual meaning: I don’t mind.

  “I’d appreciate that. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, at the University of Tennessee.”

  “Yes, sir, Dr. Brockton, how are you? This is Mae. We met when you was up here awhile back, working that Donnelly woman’s murder. I hear you’re back with us on another’n now. That girl’s bones, found up on Frozen Head. I seen her pitcher on the TV news th’other night.”

  “I hope a lot of other people up that way saw it, too,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons I was calling Sheriff Cotterell—to see if he’s go
tten any leads since”—I caught myself just before parroting the words “her pitcher”—“since the sketch came out.”

  “No, sir, I’m sorry to say we haven’t. Not a peep. But us’n the TBI’s takin’ copies all over ever’where—churches, grocery stores, gas stations, Health Department, you name it. I made a prayer request at church last Sunday, too, that the Lord’ll lay it on somebody’s heart to come forward and tell us who she is and what happened to her.”

  “Well,” I said, “between the sheriff’s office, the TBI, and the Lord, sounds like y’all have all the jurisdictions covered.” I waited for a laugh, but I didn’t get one. “Other reason I was calling was to see if Sheriff Cotterell needed something from me on the Donnelly woman’s murder.”

  “Denise Donnelly? What kind of follow-up? Sonofagun husband that killed her don’t come up for parole for another eight years. He ain’t filed any kind of appeal, far as I know, and I’d prob’ly know, since he’s my cousin.” A pause, then: “How come you to ask?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” I said. “I got one of the Donnelly crime-scene photos in the mail the other day. No letter or anything with it—just the picture.” As I spoke, I walked to the bookcase where I’d tucked the envelope a few days before, after snatching it from Peggy’s trembling hands.

  “You say the sheriff sent it to you?”

  “Well, I think so,” I said. “First I thought Bubba Hardknot sent it—Agent Meffert?—but Bubba says he didn’t. So then I figured it had to’ve come from the sheriff. Figured maybe y’all were cleaning out your files.”

  “I’ll ask him about it when he gets in,” she said. “But I’d be real surprised if he sent you that pitcher. He ain’t mentioned that case to me in a year or more. And he sure ain’t give me nothing like that to mail.”

  “You reckon he might’ve mailed it himself?”

  “Who? The sheriff? Well, they do say there’s a first time for ever’thing.” Now she laughed. It was a hearty, good-natured laugh, but as I slid the crime-scene photo from its envelope, the laugh seemed to turn mocking and sinister, and then it seemed to turn to shrieks: first, the echoes of my secretary’s frightened scream; then the warning sirens in my own head; finally, the cries of the dead woman whose image I held in my hands.

  A dead woman who was not Denise Donnelly. A dead woman whose crime scene had not yet been worked, because her body had not yet been found.

  As I stared at the photo, I finally noticed things I’d overlooked the day I’d snatched it from Peggy and shoved it back in the envelope. I noticed that the trees were tinged with gold and orange and red—September trees, not December trees. Right now trees, I thought. I noticed that although the woman’s feet were missing, her body showed no signs of decomposition, and her blood was fresh and bright. Last but not least—far, far from least—I noticed that the photo had a small time stamp in the lower right corner. Unless the camera’s internal clock was wrong, the photo had been taken—and the woman’s life had been taken—just three days before my new secretary reported for work and opened the envelope.

  “Hello? Hello? Are you still there?” The voice of the dispatcher seemed to come from far away, and I stared at the telephone receiver dumbly, seemingly baffled to find it in my hand.

  “Please ask the sheriff to call me when he gets in,” I said, then hung up and called the TBI, leaving a similar message for Meffert. All I’d be able to tell them was that somewhere out there—somewhere in the millions of acres of Tennessee woods—another woman lay dead and decomposing. And that somewhere out there, a killer might already be stalking his next victim—a victim whose body would end up bearing an uncanny and inexplicable resemblance to one of my prior cases.

  CHAPTER 22

  Janelle

  GODDAMNED WASTE OF TIME, Janelle thought, glancing over her shoulder at the empty mile of Magnolia Avenue stretching between her and downtown. All four lanes were empty, except for scattered trash: wadded-up burger wrappers, smashed French fries, crushed paper cups and aluminum cans and plastic hubcaps.

  Sometimes Janelle did good business at lunchtime on Fridays—white-collar guys cruising for a nooner; construction workers clocking out early, cashing their paychecks before the ink was all the way dry; family men looking to unwind before heading west to the burbs for a weekend of soccer coaching and honey-do chores. Today, though, Magnolia Avenue was looking like the main drag of Ghost Town, USA. Was there a wreck somewhere blocking traffic? Road work somewhere between here and downtown? Didn’t appear to be. She kept walking east, her back to downtown—her swaying ass to downtown, more to the point—but the six-inch heels on her boots were better for posing than for walking, especially on the broken, glass-littered sidewalks of East Knoxville.

  She was on the verge of giving up, heading back to her room for a nap—might as well rest up for the night ahead, when surely business would be better, please God—when she heard a rumbling engine and the quick toot of a horn. The car passed her slowly, then cut into the parking lot of the Dollar store, pulling up right alongside her. A nice ride: an early Mustang—whoa, a ’67, she realized—with no dents or rust. Recent paint job, too, by the look of it, though Janelle didn’t like the garish shade of orange; for her money, black or red would’ve been lots classier. Lots sexier.

  The driver looked well kept, too, and maybe about the same age as the car: twenty-five, plus or minus. Close-cropped hair, form-fitting black T-shirt, good biceps and pecs: gym muscles, not ditch-digging muscles. He should be good for at least fifty. Maybe more, if she played him right. “I like the car,” she cooed. “Whatcha got under the hood?”

  “A big-bore slant six,” he said, winking to make sure she caught the double meaning.

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled, to signal that she did. “And is that an auto-matic, or do you prefer . . . manual?” She flashed him a naughty smile and cocked one leg out to the side. Play it cool, she told herself.

  “You know it’s a straight stick,” he grinned. “You good with a clutch?”

  Janelle knew cars, and she could play this game with the best of them. “Baby,” she said, “when my master cylinder starts to working, your hydraulic pressure is gonna go sky-high, and your slave cylinder will explode.”

  He laughed. “You win. Hop in, I’ll give you a test ride.”

  “Where we goin’?”

  “Far as you want,” he said. “How ’bout we go all the way?” The passenger door opened. “Come on.”

  She sashayed toward the car, feeling the seam in the jeans cleaving her in a way that he couldn’t help but notice; feeling her breasts swaying in the filmy top; feeling his eyes roaming all over her. She was looking good today, long as he didn’t look at her face too close—the lines and the dark circles were getting harder to hide in the daylight. It had been her experience, though, that most johns weren’t all that interested in her face.

  Stopping at the open door, she put one boot up on the sill. The boot came to the top of her calf, and the jeans—tight as second skin—were tucked in, giving her a leggy look that generally made men’s heads turn when she walked down a sidewalk. She didn’t lean down to talk to him; she kept her head above the roofline, so he’d focus on her body. “It takes some cash to fill up my tank. I got to keep the chassis nice and lubricated.”

  “How much cash?”

  “You want the turbo package, baby?”

  “Come on. I’ll give you a hundred—fifty for you, fifty for the car lingo.”

  She slithered down into the bucket seat, the jeans forming taut, fan-shaped creases at the crotch as she did. “That might be the tightest pair of jeans I ever saw,” he said. “Have much trouble gettin’ out of those?”

  “I don’t have trouble gettin’ out of these,” she said, “I cause trouble.”

  “You just don’t quit, do you, sister?”

  “Brother, I am only just getting started.”

 
HE PARKED THE CAR under the billboard and shut off the engine. She stared out the windshield at the traffic whizzing past on the interstate, then she swiveled in the seat to face him. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Nope. I’m dead serious.”

  “This is where you want to do it? A hundred feet off I-40, in broad daylight? No offense, but what the hell, man?”

  “I got a nice little love nest right up that path there,” he said. “You’re gonna love it.”

  “No, I am not gonna love it. You want me to do it in the woods, laying on sticks and leaves? Take me back. This is some kind of fucked up.”

  He opened his door and came around to her side of the car. She reached for the lock, but there was no lock, and she thought, Shit shit shit, as the door opened wide. “Let’s go, darlin’,” he said, reaching for her hand. “Time for you to show me that turbo package you were braggin’ about. You are gonna love my hot rod.”

  She slapped at his hand, but he reached in with the other one and grabbed her by the wrist. “Play nice, now.” He folded her thumb forward, down toward the inside of her forearm, torquing her wrist to a right angle, twisting her arm out to the side. The pain made her cry out, and she leaned forward in the seat, then leaned out of the car to ease the pressure. “That’s right, come on out. Unless you want me to break it.” He increased the pressure, and she gasped, expecting a bone to snap. “We’re gonna walk up into those woods together, and you’re gonna act real nice, to make up for being rude to me just now. Remember, darlin’, I am the customer. And the customer’s always right. Am I right?” He gave another quick squeeze, and she whimpered, clenching her teeth to keep from screaming. “Tell me: Am I right?” He bore down slowly this time, increasing the torque with excruciating precision.