Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  He nodded, then glanced around the room, taking in the details: a tall chest of drawers and a low, wide dresser, its marble top strewn with bracelets and necklaces. In the far corner stood a tall wooden coat tree, a half-dozen hooks hung with jackets and bathrobes—a big robe of navy-blue terrycloth, a smaller one of powder-blue satin, with a matching satin belt hanging from one loop of the robe, stretching almost to the floor. “Any other jacks in this room?” Satterfield strolled toward the coat tree as he said it, pretending to check the baseboards. “Sometimes a big room like this’ll have a couple jacks in it.” His eyes were locked on the belt. So easy, he thought again.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “But there are a couple in the basement. I’ll show you those, then I’ll get out of your way and let you work.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll check the basement first, work my way back up. Basements cause a lot of the problems I see. Basements and squirrels.” He turned away from the shimmering robe. It would still be there when he returned. Meanwhile, he could imagine ways to put the satin belt to good use.

  As he followed her to the bedroom door, he reached out and snagged an object off the tall chest of drawers—a pocketknife. He could put that to good use, too.

  SATTERFIELD WAS DIRECTLY BENEATH the master bedroom, in what appeared to be a teenage boy’s room—piles of jeans and socks and T-shirts strewn everywhere; the bed unmade; posters of swimsuit models on the walls. He could hear the woman overhead, opening drawers and walking around her bedroom, as he poked idly through the boy’s belongings. He imagined her changing clothes: tugging off the sweatpants and the shirt, naked underneath; slipping on panties, cupping her breasts into a bra. Victoria’s Secret, or granny panties and a boob-sling? Probably somewhere in between, he guessed, based on her body—tight, but not flashy.

  When he heard the sound of her footsteps leaving the bedroom, he headed upstairs, taking time for a quick look at the basement rec room and garage, so he’d have the entire layout in his head. Jogging up the stairs toward the kitchen, he called out, “Ma’am? Hello?”

  “Yes?” She was at the sink, rinsing the bits of egg and toast into the garbage disposal. A tennis racket lay on the wooden table, and she was wearing a sweater and a short skirt and tennis shoes. Her legs looked freshly shaved, and the muscles in her calves and thighs looked chiseled—cut, he thought, pleased by the double entendre.

  “I got lucky downstairs,” he said. “Loose connection in that bedroom jack. Shortin’ out somethin’ awful.”

  She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “That’s it? We’re all set?” She lifted the receiver from the wall phone and held it to her ear, then frowned. “It’s still dead.”

  “I just need to run out to your service box and reset the line. Wait sixty seconds and try it again. If it’s not working, holler at me. If it’s working—and it will be—I’m outta here.” He winked. “For now.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Brockton

  THE DEEPER INTO THE woods we went, the more crime-scene tape I saw. The outer perimeter of the scene took the form of an irregular polygon, its perimeter composed of dozens of straight segments of crime-scene tape, stretched from tree to tree to tree, enclosing an area some fifty feet across by a hundred feet long.

  Just inside the nearest segments stood a ladderlike structure—a hunter’s tree stand, I realized—its legs wrapped in spirals of tape, like yellow and black candy canes of crime. Leaning against the lower rungs of the stand was a hunting rifle with a powerful scope. A handful of evidence flags and evidence bags clustered around the base of the tree, but the real action—if the thicket of people was any indication—was at the far end of the scene.

  Tyler and I skirted the perimeter, so we’d walk through as little of the enclosed area as possible. As we neared the far end, I saw two smaller ovals taped off within the overall scene—inner perimeters, which I guessed corresponded to the positions of the two victims.

  A uniformed deputy whom I vaguely recalled from a prior case stood sentry at the outer edge of the scene. Jenkins, I nearly called him, but I had a flash of doubt, so I snuck a glance at his brass name bar. “Officer . . . Dinkins. Good to see you again. This is my graduate assistant, Tyler Wainwright.”

  “Howdy, Doc. Good to see you. Nice to meet you, Tyler.” Dinkins recorded our names and arrival time on a log of people at the scene, then lifted the tape so we could enter without having to stoop much.

  By the time I’d straightened, Kittredge was heading our way to lead us in.

  The closer of the two inner scenes was twenty feet away, but even a distant glimpse of the body—a tall, barrel-chested corpse clad from head to foot in camouflage—convinced me that this was the male victim. As we got closer, I saw that he lay faceup on the ground, arms and legs sprawled outward, his body and even his face lightly dusted with red, gold, and brown leaves. His face was largely gone, and his abdomen had collapsed—a sure sign that he’d already passed through the “bloat” phase of decay, when bacteria and enzymes in the gut release gases that inflate the abdomen almost like a balloon, or like the belly of a woman who’s eight months pregnant. Once the bloating is over—once the digestive system has digested itself, after a fashion—the belly deflates and shrivels, as this man’s had. I couldn’t be sure, but my top-of-the-head guess, from the shrunken look of the abdomen, the bony fingers, and the extensive decay of the face, was that the man had been dead for at least a few days, maybe a week or more.

  It didn’t take a forensic genius to make an educated guess about the manner of death. Protruding from the man’s chest, slightly left of center, was a foot-long shaft of camouflaged aluminum, topped by three feathered vanes—“fletchings,” if I remembered the archery term correctly from my Cub Scout days—and a notched plastic tip where the arrow gripped the string of a hunting bow.

  “Come on over here, Doc,” called a voice that I recognized as the medical examiner’s. Dr. Hamilton and half a dozen other people were clustered around the second of the inner perimeters. As Tyler and I approached, their forms blocked our view of what lay inside the tape. Then, just as we reached the group, they parted—a human curtain—and I heard myself gasp.

  “Jesus God Al-mighty,” I heard Tyler say, and then I heard him vomit.

  THE WOMAN’S BODY WAS nude, her arms raised above her head, crossed at the wrists and pinned in place by three arrows: one through each palm and another piercing both the wrists, plus more in her legs. The position of the body and the arrows made me think of Christ on the cross, as well as one of the Catholic martyrs—Saint Sebastian? Was he the one who’d been killed by arrows? Unlike the man lying nearby on the forest floor, the woman’s body showed little decay, most of it confined to her feet, which had been reduced largely to bone by the teeming mass of maggots clustered there. I made a mental note to remind Tyler to collect the largest of the maggots from each body.

  The blood from the woman’s wounds—her stigmata, I couldn’t help thinking—was still plainly visible: black streaks coursing down her wrists and forearms, her upper and lower legs, her sides. But why were there no arrows in her chest or belly? Was the killer that bad a shot? Then it hit me like a fist: He was that good a shot. He’d wanted her to die slowly, so he’d aimed for the outer edges of his human target, not the center. There was one horrifying exception: a single arrow protruding from between her thighs. Judging by the angle, I felt sure that arrow had not been fired from the bow, but placed—pushed—by hand, in an ultimate act of sadism and misogyny. The combination of nakedness, helplessness, and savage injury combined to make the woman seem more thoroughly violated and debased than any murder victim I’d ever seen.

  No one had spoken as I’d studied the scene from ten feet away, at the edge of the tape. I drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then turned from the grisly scene and scanned the faces around me. “What else do y’all need to do before Tyler and I go in?”

  “I
’ve pronounced her, so I’m done for now,” said the M.E., Dr. Hamilton. “I’ll do an autopsy, although she’s a little far gone for me. Maybe I can pin down the sequence of wounds, not that it matters a lot. She was probably already dead by the time he pushed that last arrow into her.”

  “I hope so, Garland,” I replied. “God, I hope so.” I forced myself to look more closely. The insides of her thighs were smeared with blood, but not a copious amount. I checked the arrow and the ground beneath, just to be sure. Blood had trickled down the shaft and dripped to the ground, but it was far from the hemorrhage that would have occurred if her heart had still been pumping during that final assault. I breathed a sigh of relief and a silent prayer of thanks.

  I looked away, caught the eye of Art Bohanan, the ranking crime-scene tech. “Art, how about you? You still working it?”

  “I’ve taken pictures and gone over it once,” he said. “I’ll take another look once the body’s out. Y’all go ahead.” I noticed several evidence flags and bags on the ground at the base of the tree, as well as a few numbered index cards tacked high on the trunk, behind the woman’s hands. Peering closer, I saw strands of rope or twine snagged in the bark, and I realized the killer must have tied her hands in place before firing the arrows, then removed the ties once she was pinned to the tree.

  I looked at Tyler, who was standing beside me again now, ashen but upright. “You okay?” He managed a weak nod. “Okay, let’s go. Start with pictures.”

  Art had already taken KPD’s crime-scene photos, but his focus—photographically as well as forensically—always differed slightly from mine, so I wanted my own.

  Leaning close to the face, I noticed several contusions, which I assumed indicated that she’d been struck, possibly while fighting back. Her head slumped forward, pressing her chin against the medial ends of the clavicles, but something about the angle of the jaw and shape of the mouth struck me as odd. I’d donned a pair of gloves before stepping inside the tape; now, cradling her face in both hands, I tilted her head upright, allowing her slackened jaw to open. Stuffed inside her mouth was a wadded white rag. Poor thing, I thought, couldn’t even scream. Without turning my head, I said, “Art, looks like she’s got a rag in her mouth. You want it now, or later?”

  “Sure, I’ll take it now.”

  With my left hand, I pulled the mandible gently to open the mouth wider; with my right, I reached deep inside. Clamping my fingers together to compress the material, I wiggled and tugged gently to remove the improvised gag. “Hmm,” I grunted, surprised at what I’d fished out. “It’s not a rag after all. It’s a big wad of paper.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Art. “Maybe it’s a signed confession, with the perp’s name and address on it.”

  “You want me to unwad it?”

  “Better if I do it back at the lab. Probably help if I moisten it a little more.”

  Nodding, I turned and held it toward him, then dropped it into the paper evidence bag he opened beneath my hand.

  I turned my attention back to the corpse. Up close, focused now on the details, I was able to stop thinking of her as a tortured and violated woman and to begin scrutinizing her as a corpse, a case, and a challenge. Moving downward from the face, I was struck by a number of small, circular marks on her breasts. “Garland, are these what I think they are?”

  “They are if you think they’re cigarette burns,” he said.

  “I hate it when I’m right that way,” I said. “I’m guessing they’re antemortem, not postmortem?”

  “Probably,” he said. “Point of burning somebody with a cigarette is to hurt and humiliate ’em. Doesn’t work as well if they’re dead.”

  I nodded, already moving on, focusing on the legs and feet. I’d leave the examination of the mutilated genitals to Garland and his autopsy. I noticed that each thigh was pierced completely and pegged to the tree by a single arrow. An additional arrow jutted from the back of the right thigh, the base of the arrowhead barely visible through the entry wound. That meant, I assumed, that the point was lodged deep in the bone. It reminded me of an Arikara Indian skeleton I’d excavated years before: a robust male who had lived—and limped—for years with a Sioux arrowhead embedded in his femur, the bone healing and remodeling, doggedly but imperfectly, around the flint point. The position of the arrowheads could not have been more similar; the circumstances of the wounds could not have been more different: one received during a battle between warriors, the other as a defenseless woman fled from a sadistic psychopath.

  The woman’s feet intrigued me. Actually, what intrigued me was the contrast between her feet and the rest of her body. The decomposition in the feet was consistent with what I’d seen in the face and hands of the dead hunter; consistent with what I’d observed in numerous corpses a week after death. The decay in the rest of her body, on the other hand, was more consistent with what I’d seen in corpses that had been dead only two or three days. It was as if one corpse’s feet had been grafted onto a fresher corpse’s legs. “Tyler, did you notice the differential decay?”

  “Sure did,” he said. “Interesting.”

  “Be sure you get plenty of pictures.”

  “I’m on it,” he said. The click of the shutter, nearly as regular and frequent as the ticking of my mantelpiece clock, confirmed that he was.

  “Got a theory?” As I posed the question, I was wondering if I had a theory.

  “Gimme a minute to think on it,” he said.

  In my mind’s eye, I scanned back through various cases—various corpses—characterized by differential decay, or a dramatic difference in the degree of decomposition exhibited by certain regions of the body. In every case I could think of, the differential decay could be explained by trauma. In one case—a Cocke County man who’d been stabbed to death a week before we found him—the soft tissues of the left hand remained largely intact; the right hand, by contrast, was down to bare bone. When I cleaned and examined the bones of the right hand, I found cut marks in the metacarpal bones and phalanges. In attempting to ward off the attack, the victim had sustained defense wounds in the right hand. Those bloody wounds had drawn droves of blowflies, which had laid countless eggs in the wounds, and the larvae—maggots—that hatched from those eggs had swiftly consumed the soft tissue of the right hand. A similar explanation, I expected, would account for the differential decay I’d seen the day before, in the first of the Cahaba Lane bodies, the one with no feet: Virtually all the soft tissue was gone from the woman’s neck—probably because she’d been strangled, causing bruises and bloody scrapes that attracted blowflies, the way Sung T’zu’s thirteenth-century sickle had; the way my bloody chain saw had.

  But the pattern here was different. The feet—which weren’t pierced by arrows, and presumably weren’t bleeding profusely—were far more decayed than regions that had been pierced, that had bled: regions that should, therefore, have been swarming with hungry maggots.

  “By the way, Tyler, you did take samples of the maggots from the woman yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “Sure,” he said. “The ten biggest ones, just like you said.”

  “Good. Be sure you do the same today—from both bodies. If we compare the sizes, we should be able to tell which murder happened first. Let’s compare ’em to the ones out at the research cage, too—might help us pin down the time since death a little closer.”

  Kittredge interrupted. “So you use the bugs to tell time? Like a stopwatch?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Cool.”

  Tyler resumed our conversation. “Okay, I have a theory on the differential decay.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Is it possible,” he said, “that she’s in a cooler microclimate over here than the dude over there? Cool breezes eddying up this little draw?”

  I turned and stared at him. “A microclimate?” He shrugged sheepishly. “Tyler, t
hat might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  He flushed; at least the color was returning to his cheeks. “It was a reach, I grant you. You got a better theory, Herr Professor?”

  “Well . . . ,” I said slowly, stalling for time, searching my memory banks. I recalled the case of a man who’d hanged himself in the woods, and whose body was in remarkably good condition a month after death. Just then my peripheral vision flickered. Something very small and very close had fallen downward through my field of vision from somewhere above. I checked the area around my feet without spotting anything unusual, then I heard myself say, “Hmm. Hmm.” Centered on the glossy black toe of my left boot I saw a single grain of rice. Only it wasn’t a grain of rice; it was a baby maggot—the small, freshly hatched stage called the “first instar.” As I looked at it, pondering its unexpected appearance on the toe of my boot, my eye caught another downward flicker of motion—rather like a shooting star plunging to earth. But it wasn’t a star; it was another first-instar maggot, whose trajectory brought it squarely onto my boot, cheek by jowl with the first one. My eyes instinctively swept upward. If it was raining maggots, there must be a cloud up there somewhere.

  It didn’t take long to locate it. My left toe was positioned directly beneath the arrow wound in the right thigh. Peering closely at the wound, I saw a handful of maggots clinging to the bloody tissue there. Even as I watched, another of the maggots lost its grip—its toehold or mouthhold or whatever hold it had—and fell. This one landed slightly to one side, squarely on the exposed bones of the victim’s right foot. “Yes, as a matter of fact,” I said to Tyler, as insight dawned, accompanied by a slow smile spreading across my face. “I do indeed have a better theory. And once you’ve finished your master’s thesis, you can start your dissertation project and prove I’m right. Maggots—like Isaac Newton’s apple—must obey the law of gravity.”