Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  “They’re tearing this bridge down next year,” he said to her, partly just to break the silence, but partly to make up for the way he’d treated her earlier. He’d been stingy with his humanity at first. He’d been unintentionally cruel, forcing her to expose herself to him, too—expose her pain and her shame—before he started treating her like a crime victim, like someone deserving of respect and compassion and at least some attempt at justice.

  She glanced out at the antiquated girders strobing past. “If they want to tear this thing down, they better hurry. Looks like it might collapse before they get to it.”

  “Naw,” he scoffed. “Keep this thing painted, it’ll last another hundred years. The new one’ll be wider and stronger. Safer, sure. But nowhere near as interesting.” He surprised himself then, stopping the car midway across. She seemed surprised, too—her head snapped around in his direction, her expression a mixture of puzzlement and alarm, her right hand edging toward the door latch. He pointed out her window. “See that little dip in the railing right there?”

  She studied his face for a moment before turning to look. “Yeah?”

  “I jumped off of there once. A long damn time ago. Night I graduated from high school.”

  “You jumped from there? That’s a long ways down. You drunk?”

  He chuckled. “Shit-faced. Wouldn’t’ve done it sober. Never did, anyhow—not before, not since. Glad I did it the once, though.” He let out a low hnh, a monosyllabic grunt. “If the Lord looks out for fools and drunkards, I had double coverage that night.” He glanced in the mirror and saw a truck coming up behind them, so he nudged the Crown Vic on across the bridge. He signaled and took the right onto John Sevier for a half mile, following the river downstream a ways before turning off the highway; before turning on to the back road that the map showed leading to Cahaba Lane, where she said he’d taken her. “This guy took you off the beaten track, that’s for sure,” he said. “Was he just wandering around, looking for someplace private to park?”

  “No. He knew right where he was going.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “He knew the roads. I could tell by the way he was driving. He knows his way around out here. Maybe he lives out here somewhere.”

  “Could be,” Kittredge said. “I’ll check with the gas stations and quick-stops around here, see if anybody knows the car. You said it’s a Mustang, kinda old?”

  “A ’67,” she said. “Third year of production.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Didn’t have to. I knew it.” He glanced a question at her. “I had one, once upon a time,” she said. “A long damn time ago.” Her words—“a long damn time ago”—were an echo of his. Is she making fun of me? he wondered. Couldn’t blame her. But maybe she’s deciding to trust me. “They widened the radiator grille on the ’67,” she went on. “That’s how you can tell it from the ’65 and the ’66. Made those fake air scoops on the sides bigger, too.” She took a long breath; blew it out. “It wasn’t really mine. It was my stepfather’s. I stole it when I ran away from home.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen? Jesus. You must’ve wanted to get away from home mighty bad. How come?”

  “Take a wild guess, Detective.” He winced, cursing himself for his stupidity, but didn’t say anything; didn’t want to risk interrupting her story again. “My mama worked nights,” she said. “He started in on my sister first. She was two years older than me, and she protected me. Took the bullet, so to speak. At the time, I didn’t realize what a sacrifice that was. ‘Greater love,’ and all that. But after a while she couldn’t take it anymore. She ran away at fifteen; tried to talk me into going with her. I should’ve. Would’ve, if I’d known what it would be like once she was gone. Once I was home alone with him.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Took some guts to steal his car. How far’d you get?”

  “Not far.” She laughed, surprising Kittredge. “I wrapped that car around a telephone pole about five miles down the road. Wasn’t far, but it was far enough—I knew I couldn’t go back. Not after what I did to his precious Mustang. That damn car was the only thing he loved in this world, far as I could see.” Kittredge nodded. “I crawled out through the busted windshield—neither door would open—and looked at what I’d done. The radiator was spewing steam; the gas tank was dripping gas. I had a pack of matches in my pocket, and I struck a match and threw it under the car—whoomph—and walked away. Just kept going. I burnt my bridges but good that day.”

  “I guess you showed him,” Kittredge said, and she laughed again.

  “I guess so; don’t know, though. I hitchhiked to Miami, and never saw the bastard again.”

  “Why Miami?”

  “Why not? Warm all year. Pretty beaches. Men with money.”

  “Why’d you come back, then?”

  “My mom.” She looked out the window before turning back to him. “She got sick while I was in Miami. Ovarian cancer, fast and mean. By the time they tracked me down, she was just about dead. My asshole stepfather was long gone, of course—he split soon as she got sick. ”

  They passed beneath I-40, where a pair of long concrete bridges spanned the Holston River and the road they were on. Just after they emerged from the underpass, they turned left. The small green street sign—CAHABA LANE—was dwarfed by a big white sign that announced SUNNYVIEW BAPTIST CHURCH and pointed down the road. “This look right?” She nodded grimly. “And you think you can find the spot in the woods where he took you?”

  “Be hard to miss, won’t it? The spot with a pile of my clothes laying there. Can y’all get fingerprints off of fabric?”

  “We’ll ask the crime-lab guys. If your stuff’s still there. Don’t you think he might’ve taken it, though?”

  “What, a souvenir? To remind him of our special first date?”

  “Some guys do. The really creepy ones. But I was just thinking he might’ve taken it to cover his tracks.”

  She shook her head. “Not unless he came back for it later. That dude was haulin’ ass out of the woods, same as me. Chasin’ me, at first. Gaining fast. But then those truckers stopped to help, and he jumped in his car and got the hell out of Dodge.”

  He eased the car to a stop at the end of the lane, the tires crunching shards of broken bottles. Overhead loomed a faded COMFORT INN billboard, supported by rusting I beams, their bases like trash magnets, fringed with coffee cups, beer cans, and other debris. Kittredge narrowly missed stepping on a used condom that lay crumpled on the ground. Nice, he thought. Her door swung open before he got there to open it for her. She stepped out, glancing down at the condom, an expression of weary disgust on her face.

  As they started up the narrow path that led through the posts and up the wooded slope, Kittredge felt a chill. He touched the holster on his belt, making sure his weapon was still there.

  CHAPTER 25

  Janelle

  WALKING UP THE WOODED slope, Janelle felt almost like two people; two Janelles. A TV ad from her childhood started playing in her mind—“It’s two, two, two mints in one!”—and it wouldn’t stop. Two Janelles in one!

  Janelle Number One was scared shitless, remembering the feel of the path under her feet, remembering the pain of the bent wrist and the twisted arm; remembering the humiliation of what he’d made her do after that.

  Janelle Number Two, though, was mad as hell. Was something else, too. Brave? Strong? Those weren’t words she felt entitled to use—not about herself, anyhow. But whatever the feeling was, she recognized and welcomed it; it was the same feeling she’d had the afternoon she’d run off in her stepfather’s Mustang, the same feeling she’d had when she’d tossed the match beneath the car, when she’d decided to keep going instead of slinking back home, tail between her legs, to shut up and lie down and just take it, the way her life and her sack-of-shit st
epdaddy had tried to teach her to do.

  It helped that the cop, Kittredge, was treating her like an actual human being, not like some piece of shit that deserved whatever was done to her. Helped, too, that he was nervous out here, same as her—not that he said anything, but she saw him reach back and touch his gun when he thought she wasn’t looking. See, she told herself, you’re not so pathetic. Big badass cop with a gun, and he’s scared, too.

  She was walking in front, the way she had a few hours before. She found the view disorienting, so she bent down, looked down, the way she had earlier in the day, when her arm had been twisted behind her. Looking down helped her remember. She felt the trail level off briefly—that felt right—then turn upward again. A memory floated slowly up toward the surface of her consciousness, like a bubble in hot pancake batter on a griddle; just as the memory bubble popped and her eyes and her mouth were opening, she stumbled—again—on a fat root that snaked across the trail.

  “Careful,” said Kittredge from behind her.

  “There,” she said, pointing down. “I tripped on that same root before. Right after that, we went thataway.” She turned to her left and struck out sideways, across the slope, her head up now, her gaze ranging far and wide.

  “You sure?”

  Instead of answering, she stopped and gasped, raising both hands in front of her, as if to ward off something; as if to ward off the ghost of Janelle Number Three. A hundred yards ahead of them—fifty yards beyond the clothing Janelle had scattered on the ground a few hours before—lay a dead woman. She was sprawled faceup, but much of her face was gone, and her legs—splayed on either side of a tree—had no feet.

  CHAPTER 26

  Brockton

  DET. KITTREDGE, I SCRAWLED on the notepad beside the telephone, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising as Detective Kittredge described the death scene where he was standing.

  “Excuse me,” I said, interrupting him. “The tree—it’s a sapling, isn’t it.” I was telling him, not asking him. “Three, four inches thick. Her crotch is pressed right up against the trunk.”

  A silence, then: “What makes you think that?”

  “What makes me think that is the fact that I’m looking at a photograph of it right now, Detective.” As I said it, I slid the picture the rest of the way out of the envelope. It was the manila envelope that had arrived in the mail a week or so before, traumatizing Peggy her first day on the job.

  “Could you please say that again, sir?”

  “I said I’m looking at a photograph of the death scene right now. The dead woman in the woods. The tree she’s pressed up against.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you here, Dr. Brockton. How could you possibly be looking at a crime-scene photo? The photographer isn’t even here yet.”

  “Somebody mailed it to me a week or so ago,” I said. “Probably right after he killed her.” A thought struck me, and I added, “Killed her and cut off her feet.” I was still embarrassed that I’d failed to recognize that the photo hadn’t come from the case files of Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot; that the image was fresh, taken no more than a few days before it had arrived in my office.

  “This picture you say somebody mailed you.” The detective’s wording was careful and conditional—almost accusatory—as if he were cross-examining me in court. “Did you contact the police when you received this, sir?”

  “No. Well, sort of.” I felt flustered suddenly. Stupid suddenly. “But I mentioned it to a TBI agent a day or two later.”

  “Mentioned it? You see that a woman has been murdered and dismembered, and all you do is mention it?”

  “I thought he’d sent me an old crime-scene photo,” I tried explaining. “From a case he and I worked a couple years ago, up in Morgan County. It looks exactly like it. Well, almost exactly like it. As close as a killer could get, I guess, without waiting a month or two.”

  The detective was silent for several long seconds. “Doctor, I don’t mean to sound dense,” he said, “and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful—my colleagues at KPD speak very highly of you—but what you’re saying isn’t making much sense to me.”

  “It’s not making a lot of sense to me, either, Detective, but bear with me for half a minute, and I’ll try to help us both make better sense of it.” Stretching the phone cord as far as it would go, I rolled my chair across the office to a battered filing cabinet and opened the drawer that held my slides. Thumbing back through the tabs of the file folders, I stopped at 90-11—my eleventh forensic case of 1990—and tugged the fat folder free. I opened the file, which contained clear plastic sleeves of 35-millimeter slides, along with a few eight-by-ten enlargements. “Back in December of 1990,” I said, pulling out one of the enlargements, “Sheriff Jim Cotterell, up in Morgan County, called me out to a death scene. A TBI agent, Wellington Meffert, was there, too. You know either of those guys?”

  “No, sir, I don’t. I’m still not quite—“

  “Hang on,” I said. “I’m getting there. A woman’s body was found there in the woods. She was naked, and her feet had been chewed off by dogs or coyotes, and her crotch was jammed up against a tree. I’m looking now at one of the photos from that case—the December 1990 case—and the trees are all bare. In the picture somebody sent me last week—the picture of the woman I think you’ve just found—all the trees still have leaves, and they’re just starting to turn. I didn’t look closely at this picture last week—I thought it was just an extra print from that 1990 case—but I’m sure looking now.” I took a magnifying glass from the center drawer of my desk and inspected the woman in the photo. “Hard to say for sure, but it doesn’t look like this woman’s feet were chewed off. Looks more like they’ve been severed.” He didn’t respond, so I went on, talking about what I saw, now that I was finally looking. “The tree she’s up against—looks like a maple.” I moved the lens to focus on the nearest cluster of leaves; they were shaped like five-pointed stars, but with no other serrations. “No, not a maple,” I amended. “A sweet gum, I think, now that I look closer.” Detective Kittredge still wasn’t saying anything, and I wondered if I should just shut up. Instead, I plowed ahead. “Looks like the bottom branch is snapped, but in this picture, the leaves aren’t dead yet. So I’m guessing it got broken just before the picture was taken.”

  A pause. Finally, as if he’d made up his mind about something—as if he’d made up his mind that I wasn’t crazy, or a killer—he said, “Yes, sir, she’s up against a sweet gum. And the leaves on the bottom branch are withered now. All the other leaves are turning, and some have already fallen, but these withered on the branch.” Another pause. “Could you tell me a little more about that other case? Morgan County, you said?”

  “Sure,” I said, glad that he seemed to be coming around. “This was about two years ago—twenty-two months, actually—outside Petros, the little town where Brushy Mountain State Prison is. A man kills his unfaithful wife and dumps her body in the woods. A couple weeks later, a hunter finds it and calls the sheriff, and the sheriff calls me. The body’s lying against a tree, one leg on each side, with the woman’s crotch pressed against the trunk. At first we think the killer has posed her that way—some kind of sexual display—but then I notice a dark, greasy spot about ten feet up the hill, and I realize that that’s where he dumped her; that’s where her body started to decompose. Then I saw the tooth marks on her feet—what little was left of her feet—and I realized what had happened. After she got nice and ripe up there on higher ground, she was found by wild dogs, or coyotes, and dragged downhill a ways, until she snagged on the tree and the coyotes couldn’t drag her any farther.”

  “Hmm.” Another pause. “I’m still playing catch-up with you here, Dr. Brockton. Are you suggesting that this woman I’m looking at right now was killed by the same guy as the woman in Morgan County two years ago?”

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. That’
s not possible—at least, I don’t think it’s possible. That guy confessed. He’s two years into a ten-year sentence.”

  “So . . . let me try this again,” the detective said. “You’re saying I’m looking at some kind of copycat killing here?”

  “Copycat killing?” As I repeated his words, something about them sounded slightly wrong. I laid one of my Morgan County crime-scene enlargements alongside the photo I’d received in the mail. They were strikingly similar; chillingly similar. “I don’t know if it’s a copycat killing,” I said slowly, “but it’s for damn sure a copycat death scene.” My eyes locked on to the broken branch, and I noticed that it had been pulled toward the far side of the sapling. “Jesus,” I said. “That branch was blocking the shot. Whoever took this picture broke the branch to get it out of the way. So his picture would look just like my picture.”

  “Come again?”

  “Detective, whoever killed this woman staged her body to look just like the crime scene I worked two years ago. And he photographed her from the same angle. It’s almost like he had a copy of my picture with him, out there in the woods.” A realization struck me, swift and forceful as a fist. “Dear God. This is the same guy.”

  “But . . . you just said the guy’s in prison.”

  “No,” I said, my heart a cold stone in my chest. “Not that guy. Not the guy in prison. The other guy. It’s the same guy.”

  “What same guy?”

  “The same guy who killed and dismembered a woman up in Campbell County about a month ago. With a tool that left cut marks he knew I’d recognize.”

  I PAGED TYLER, ADDING the prefix 999 to my phone number—code for “We’ve got a case; get your butt over here ASAP!” I figured it would take him at least ten minutes to lock the research cage and get back across the river to the stadium. Plenty of time for me to make a phone call. As I dialed the number, I prayed I wouldn’t be routed to a voice-mail box or a secretary. What was the chance that a senior-level FBI profiler was still at his desk at four on a Friday afternoon?