Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  CHAPTER 29

  Janelle

  JANELLE FELT THE AIR whoosh out of her hopes when the girl walked into the room. She was just a kid, sixteen or seventeen. “You’re the one? You did the picture of that dead girl?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the girl.

  Janelle snorted. “Nobody’s ever called me ‘ma’am’ before,” she said, then added, “not unless they were mocking me.” She eyed the girl warily. “Are you mocking me?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the girl. “No. No. Why would I mock you?”

  “Why wouldn’t you, darlin’,” she said, her voice soft and sad. “Why the hell wouldn’t you.”

  The girl laid a hand on Janelle’s arm. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” she said. “Really, really sorry.”

  Janelle moved her arm, reached for a tissue. “Story of my life,” she said. “This damned thing’s just one more chapter.” She blew her nose, then turned away and folded into herself, collecting herself. When she turned back, she saw that the girl had picked up her pencil and pad and started drawing. Janelle frowned. “I haven’t told you what he looks like yet.”

  The girl turned the pad to show her the drawing. It was a sketch of Janelle herself, nothing but a few quick lines, but somehow it captured everything that mattered; somehow it revealed Janelle to herself: a worn and wary beauty, her cheek stitched together, her soul pulling apart. “Damn,” Janelle breathed. “You are an artist, girl. What’d they say your name was, hon? Jenny?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m Janelle, and I’m not quite as old and broken-down as I look. So stop calling me ‘ma’am’, or I might have to turn you across my knee. Got it?”

  Jenny grinned. “Yes’m,” she said slyly, the m audible enough to be heard but faint enough to deny. Janelle felt the skin of her face moving, tugging at the stitches in her cheek. After a moment, she recognized the movement as a smile.

  “OKAY, TAKE A LOOK, see if this is anywhere close.” Jenny laid the tablet on the table and slid it across to Janelle.

  Janelle hesitated, looking in the girl’s eyes. The girl smiled shyly, shrugged slightly, in a no-promises sort of way. For some reason, Janelle found the gesture reassuring—its combination of helpfulness and humility. She picked up the sketch and looked down, then drew a quick gasp as a wave of panic swept over her, tumbling her in its grip. “Son of a bitch,” she breathed.

  CHAPTER 30

  Brockton

  I’D BARELY BEGUN RAKING—my lawn’s first dusting of red-orange maple leaves—when Kathleen opened the front door and called to me. “Bill, there’s a Detective Kittredge on the phone for you. He says it’s important.” I laid down the rake and hurried inside.

  “You were right, Doc,” he said without any preamble. “We just found two more bodies in the woods behind Cahaba Lane. Deeper in. Several hundred yards away from the woman with no feet.” I wasn’t surprised to hear there were more victims, but I was surprised to hear that one of them was a man.

  I took no satisfaction in being right; in fact, I hated it. I would much rather have heard that the search was a wild-goose chase, my nightmare not a premonition but simply the product of an overheated imagination. Two more dead, I thought. Please, God, let these be the last. I prayed it, but I didn’t expect it.

  Kittredge gave me directions to the scene; this time, we’d go in from the back side, by means of a different road. “Brace yourself, Doc,” the detective added. “It’s bad. The worst I’ve seen. The woman—”

  “Don’t tell me,” I interrupted. “I want to see it with fresh eyes. No preconceptions.”

  “You got it. See you soon.”

  Tyler met me at the stadium; we tucked an extra body bag in the back of the truck and headed east along the river, along Neyland Drive and Riverside Drive. I could have done that stretch of road in my sleep; Riverside dead-ended at the pig farm where I’d warehoused bodies until recently. A mile before the farm, we turned left onto Holston Hills Road, which paralleled the Holston River. We passed a mile of woods and farm fields, then crossed the river at Boyd’s Bridge, zigzagging eastward on a series of progressively smaller roads. Normally I liked back roads; this time, though, the roads seemed to be leading us somewhere sinister. Leading us into the heart of darkness.

  Neither of us had spoken since leaving the stadium. “You’re quiet,” I said finally. “You pissed off because we’re working on Saturday?”

  There was a pause before he answered. “I’m tired,” he said. “I was up late. Writing up my research notes.”

  “Uh-huh. Did your research notes give you that hickey?” Tyler had mentioned that Roxanne was in town for the weekend, and I suspected they’d made the most of their night.

  “No comment.” He was pissed off. Not surprising, I thought. He hasn’t seen her in weeks, and I’m dragging him off to a death scene.

  We lapsed back into silence, and in the silence, I heard Kittredge’s words echoing: “The worst I’ve seen.” Would it turn out to be worse than the things I’d seen? If so, what adjective could describe it? When the normal progression—bad, worse, worst—couldn’t do justice to the horror, what could? Worst, more worst, most worst?

  Even with Kittredge’s directions, I found the route mazy. This time, because of the location of the bodies, we’d be approaching the woods from the east. I’d highlighted the route in my Tennessee Atlas & Gazetteer. Given the propensity for bodies in East Tennessee to wind up off the beaten track, I’d found the Gazetteer indispensable, since it showed not just paved roads and dirt roads, but even major trails and topographic contour lines. During the three years since my arrival at UT, I had put two dozen red Xs in my Gazetteer, each X neatly marking a death scene I’d worked.

  I followed the route Kittredge had dictated—Moshina Road, Pine Grove Road, and finally Ratliff Lane. By the time we turned on to Ratliff, Tyler was slumped against his door, his head askew, his mouth open, a string of drool swaying from his chin. I smiled, thinking, Roxanne drove all the way from Memphis for this?

  Ratliff Lane started out as asphalt, soon turned to gravel, and finally became a pair of red-clay ruts. It dead-ended at a clearing that was occupied by a rusting mobile home and a rusty Ford pickup, plus two Knox County sheriff’s cruisers, a KPD mobile crime lab, an unmarked Crown Victoria, and a black Chevy Suburban. The Crown Vic, I guessed, was issued to Detective Kittredge. The crime-lab van, I hoped, was brought by Art Bohanan. Art was a senior KPD forensic tech; he was also one of the nation’s leading experts on fingerprints, I’d learned in the course of several prior cases with him. The Suburban, I knew for sure, belonged to Knox County’s medical examiner, Dr. Garland Hamilton. Hamilton’s vehicle was unmistakable, at least from the rear: Prominently positioned alongside the government-issue tag was an ironically apt bumper sticker—a skull wearing a crown of thorns, captioned GRATEFUL DEAD.

  A sheriff’s deputy directed me past the other vehicles to the lower side of the clearing, where I shoehorned the truck into a space that would have been better suited to a Honda Civic. Branches snapped and screeched along the passenger side as I bulled my way into the underbrush, waking Tyler with a start. He stared at the fractured twigs clawing across his window, then rubbed his eyes and shook his head, causing the string of drool to twitch and sway beneath his chin. “Wow,” he said. “I guess I nodded off for a minute there.”

  “I guess so,” I replied. “Unless you’ve started drooling when you’re awake.”

  He rubbed his mouth and chin, grimacing when he got to the drool. “What the hell?” he squawked. “This isn’t supposed to start happening till I’m, like, your age.”

  “I guess you’re precocious,” I said. “You know what they say about drooling, right?”

  “Can’t say as I do.”

  “Once the drooling starts, impotence and incontinence aren’t far behind.”

  “Hey. Don’t even joke
about that stuff,” he muttered, making the sign of the cross.

  “Joking? Who said I was joking?” I slid from the truck and closed the door before he had a chance to retort.

  I opened the back of the truck and tucked the two body bags into the plastic bin that contained our field kit—camera, gloves, trowels, tweezers, paintbrushes, evidence bags, clipboard. Tyler emerged from the underbrush, bits of twigs and leaves in his hair, and I slid the bin across the tailgate to him. Leaning back in, I retrieved a rake and a shovel, which I angled over my shoulder like some outsized, double-barreled farming implement. Swords to plowshares, I thought, shotguns to shovels.

  The deputy met us midway across the clearing. “They’re up yonder,” he said, nodding in the general direction of the unmarked Crown Vic that was last in the line of vehicles. “Couple hunnerd yards in. Just follow the blazes of tape.” A pine tree at the clearing’s edge had a strip of crime-scene tape tied around its trunk at shoulder height. Peering farther into the woods, I could see another bright band twenty yards beyond, and a third farther still.

  I headed up the gentle incline, my usual surge of adrenaline accompanied by an unexpected topspin of something else—apprehension? dread? Sometimes, walking into a crime scene with a shovel over my shoulder, I would hear myself singing softly: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.”

  This time, as I followed the blazes deeper into the woods, I did not hear singing. This time, I heard crackling under my feet, thudding in my chest, and alarm bells in my head.

  CHAPTER 31

  Satterfield

  THE POLICE SCANNER WAS still going crazy as Satterfield turned off Kingston Pike and on to Cherokee Boulevard, looping and swooping along the serpentine road toward the river. Toward the Brockton house.

  From the flurry of transmissions on the police scanner, he knew they’d found the two other bodies in the woods. He would love to have seen the face of whoever had found the corpses, especially the woman’s; for that matter, he’d love to see the faces of everyone working the scene. Fools and weaklings, he thought. Most of all, he’d love to see Brockton’s face, now and also later, when the surprise Satterfield had left for him was discovered.

  He slowed as he neared the house. The garage door was up, and through the opening, he saw that the Camry—the woman’s car—was still inside. Satterfield eased to the curb and parked in front of the house. He sat for a moment, looking for signs of movement at the windows, then got out, went to the rear of the van, and took two orange highway cones from the back. He placed one ten feet behind the van, the other ten feet in front, the way he’d seen the telephone linemen do. Stupid, he thought. If you can’t see the damn truck without the cones, you’re not gonna see the damn truck with the cones.

  Satterfield was counting on the truck being seen—specifically, being seen by the lady of the house. He’d spent hours preparing it to be seen: spraying the horizontal stripes of blue and gold along both sides and across the back—the stripes were the easy part—then, using the stencils he’d cut, adding the BellSouth name and logo. As always, he’d worked meticulously, and although the signage wasn’t perfect, he believed it would fool anyone but an actual BellSouth worker . . . and he knew it would fool a woman looking out the window of a Sequoyah Hills home: a privileged woman; a woman accustomed to having men in work vans show up to attend to her lawn and her TV cable and her telephone lines.

  Angling across the lawn, he headed for the end of the house farthest from the driveway—the end where the phone line ran from the street to the service box on the outside of the house. As he walked, Satterfield glanced occasionally at a clipboard he carried in one hand. In his other hand he carried a telephone—one of the handsets from his cordless home phone—and he pretended to be carrying on a conversation. Every few steps, he nodded his head, as if listening intently, then uttered a terse, technical-sounding phrase, in case the woman in the house was watching and listening. “It could be the capacitor in the sub-relay,” he said into the phone. “It’s not quite up to specs. Voltmeter’s showing only 17 ohms.” He nodded again, striding purposefully, almost to the corner now. “Naw, the junction-box circuits all check out fine. Could be a bad ground, though.” There: He’d rounded the corner of the house, apparently unnoticed. A few feet along the wall, just beyond the electricity meter, was a gray plastic box, not much bigger than a book, its front embossed with the BellSouth logo. Satterfield took a screwdriver from the tool belt he was wearing and unscrewed a single screw, then unsnapped the latch and swung the cover open. Inside was a tangle of thin, brightly colored wires—blue, white, red, yellow, green—just like the ones he’d seen when he’d studied the box on his own house. He left those alone, and reached instead for the wide, flat cable, which he unclipped, disconnecting the house from the outside world—from help—as simply as disconnecting a phone from a wall. So easy, he marveled.

  He crossed the grassy front yard to the center of the house and trotted up the brick steps, then rang the doorbell and listened. When he heard footsteps inside, he made a show of flipping through the forms on the clipboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the curtain beside the door move slightly, then felt eyes on his face and his clipboard, his counterfeit BellSouth badge, and his counterfeit BellSouth shirt. He assumed the eyes were noticing the counterfeit BellSouth van at the curb, too. They must have, for he heard the snick of a dead bolt, followed by the squeak of rubber weather stripping as the door swung off the sill and opened a foot. “Yes?” Her voice was tight; was she scared, or was she just annoyed at being called to the door on a Saturday morning?

  “Good morning . . .” He glanced down at the clipboard, then back up at her face. No bombshell, but not bad looking at all. “ . . . Ms. Brockton.”

  “Yes?”

  “Wayne Taylor, BellSouth. Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but we’ve had some reports of rolling service outages along your street. You noticed any trouble on your line today?”

  “Today? No. I used the phone an hour ago. It was fine.”

  “Hmm,” he said, sounding puzzled. “I just touched base with the central office, and they say the computer says your line’s cutting in and out. Intermittently. Would you do me a favor and just check for a dial tone real quick? I’d hate to have you find out your line’s dead after I’m already gone. Might be Monday or Tuesday before we could come back.” He gave her a friendly, apologetic smile.

  “I didn’t even know you guys worked on weekends.” She sounded less guarded now.

  “We don’t, in most neighborhoods, you know? Problem like this in East Knoxville? We’d get to it in a month or two.” He chuckled knowingly; conspiratorially; as if to say, Nice to be rich white folks, huh? “I’ll just wait out here while you check it.”

  She shrugged, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll be right back.” She closed the door; after a beat, he heard the dead bolt slide into place—slowly, almost sneakily, as if she didn’t want him to know she was locking the door. He smiled at that. Thirty seconds later, her footfalls returned and the door opened again, a little quicker and a little wider this time. “Well, you’re right,” she said. “The computer’s right. There’s no dial tone. Did you say everybody on the street is having problems? Wouldn’t that mean it’s somewhere farther up the line? A substation or transformer or whatever you call it?”

  “You’d think so, but it’s not that simple. You get trouble in one house—a short, some kind of interference—and it can run right up the line, cause a ripple effect, knock out a whole block.” He shook his head in an expression of good-natured exasperation. “You mind if I run a quick check on your wiring?”

  She frowned. “How long will it take? I need to leave in half an hour.”

  “Oh, I should be long gone by then,” he said. “I don’t need much time. Five minutes, maybe ten.”

  “Okay, come on in.” She stepped back and swung the door wide.

  That’s right, Satterfield t
hought, stepping across the threshold and into the living room. You have to invite me in the first time. “Do you know where all your jacks are, ma’am?”

  “There’s probably one in every room, isn’t there?”

  “Not necessarily, a house this old. How long have y’all been here?”

  “Not long. Not quite three years.”

  “Added any more lines or jacks since then?”

  “No.”

  “Well, show me the jacks you know about, and I’ll see what I find.”

  She nodded, then pointed to a cordless-phone base station on an end table beside a sofa. “The jack for that’s behind the sofa.” She turned and went into the dining room, scanning the baseboards. Satterfield watched her walk. She was wearing sweatpants—baggy in the legs, but snug across her ass. Nice ass, for a woman pushing forty, he thought. Running? StairMaster? She disappeared around a corner. He followed, and found himself in a large kitchen, with a wooden table and four chairs. On the table was a dirty plate—crusts of toasted bread, smears of jam, a few bits of egg, a greasy knife and fork. “There’s one,” she said, pointing to a wall phone with an extra-long cord, its coils kinked and twisted together.

  Next, she led him down a hallway to a pair of bedrooms—a sparsely furnished guest room first, then what was clearly the master bedroom, big and lived-in and rumpled. The doorway faced the bed, which was loosely made; a quilt was pulled up crookedly, and four pillows were piled against the headboard. A pair of nightstands flanked the bed. One, obviously hers, was crammed: a stack of books, another of magazines; bottles and tubes of lotion; a fragile-looking antique lamp, trimmed with teardrops of crystal, its frilly shade made of something that looked like silk. The other nightstand held a digital alarm clock, a pair of toenail clippers, a simple wooden lamp with a paper shade, and a phone in a charging cradle. “That’s another cordless,” she said, “but there’s a jack down in that corner.”