Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  Or so I still hope, here within my cage.

  I miss you, sweet Roxie, and I miss the man—I miss the “me”—I get to be when I’m with you.

  Please let me see you at Thanksgiving. Please give me a reason to give thanks.

  Please.

  Please.

  Please.

  Tyler

  THAT EVENING, AFTER SCRUBBING bones from the steam kettle, then scrubbing his skin until it was raw, Tyler put on exercise clothes and slipped into the back row of a yoga class—a room filled with bodies more limber than his, minds less troubled than his. During Tree Pose, he looked at the woman directly ahead of him and shuddered: For a moment, as she clasped one foot and folded her leg, Tyler thought her leg had been severed at the knee; thought the droplets falling from the knee were blood, not sweat.

  At the end of the class, he lay on his back—Corpse Pose—and felt droplets falling from his face: not sweat, but tears. Then pressure on his fingers—the woman beside him had reached out, taken his hand, offered a comforting squeeze. He could not return the squeeze. Corpses cannot return kindness.

  At the end of class, he rolled onto his side: Rebirth Pose. By the time he opened his eyes, the room was empty and he was alone.

  CHAPTER 38

  Kathleen

  SHE GAVE THE OFFICE door an exploratory nudge, then—when it moved—she hipped it open with a practiced bump. She was mildly annoyed that the latch still hadn’t been fixed, but at the same time, she was grateful that she didn’t need to set down her briefcase or coffee to open it.

  Kathleen wanted to believe that Bill was being coy at breakfast: that he hadn’t mentioned their anniversary because he was planning to surprise her with a romantic dinner at Regas or, better yet, the Orangery—closer to home and much more elegant, though twice as expensive. Despite her hopes, though, she suspected that he’d simply forgotten the date. It wasn’t that Bill was a thoughtless husband—not compared with most of her colleagues’ husbands, at any rate, not if their reports were accurate. But lately he’d been busy, preoccupied, and tense.

  She felt a commingled rush of surprise, delight, and guilt, therefore, when she saw the vase of roses and the gift-wrapped box on her desk. Sweet man—he hadn’t forgotten. She plunked down her briefcase and picked up the phone to call him. While she waited for Bill’s secretary to transfer the call—the girl was new, and not terribly efficient yet—Kathleen shouldered the phone to her ear and plucked the box from the desktop. It was small—the size of a pack of cigarettes—and she gave it a shake, listening for the telltale rattle of earrings or a necklace. She untied the gold foil ribbon, then used a fingernail to slit the tape on one of the end-flaps of blue wrapping paper.

  “Hello there,” Bill said breezily when he came on the line. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Did you just hear from the tenure committee, or did Jeff just get expelled?”

  “You sneak,” she said. She tilted the package, and the box slid slowly from its tight paper cocoon. “You fooled me completely. I was sure you’d forgotten.” Still clutching the paper, she lifted the box by its lid, allowing the lower half to drop into the upturned palm of her left hand. The box’s contents were cushioned and concealed by a puffy rectangle of cotton batting.

  “Forgotten what?” he asked as she laid down the lid and paper and plucked out the batting to unveil the gift.

  Kathleen’s scream rose, the handset falling from her shoulder and clattering to the floor.

  Inside the jewelry box, resting on another bed of white batting, were two objects. One was an antique pocketknife—Bill’s pocketknife, the one he’d inherited from his father. The other object was a slender human finger, its severed base black with crusted blood, its nail bright with scarlet polish.

  CHAPTER 39

  Brockton

  KATHLEEN’S SHAKING HAD FINALLY stopped, but mine was just starting. The difference was, my wife had been shaking with fear; I was shaking with fury. I stared at Kittredge. “What do you mean,” I snapped, “you’ll ‘put in the request’? That’s not nearly good enough, Detective.” Kittredge opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off angrily. “A killer—a sadistic serial killer—has just delivered a human finger to my wife, and the best you’ve got to offer is ‘I’ll put in the request’?” Kittredge and I were huddled in the hallway outside Kathleen’s office, and we weren’t alone; uniformed officers guarded each end of the hallway, and they could probably hear every angry word I spoke, but I was too distraught for diplomacy. “You should be saying to me, ‘We will guard her night and day until we catch this guy.’ What the hell would he have to do to get that kind of response, instead of ‘I’ll put in the request’?”

  “I know you’re upset, Dr. Brockton,” Kittredge began.

  “You better believe I’m upset,” I interrupted. “This is my wife he’s threatening now. You’ve seen what this guy can do. You’ve seen what he’s already done.”

  He nodded. “I know. I know. Look, if I were in charge of patrol, I’d give the order in a heartbeat. But I’m not in charge of patrol, so I have to run the request up the chain of command. Please understand that. I feel sure everybody up the line will agree it’s important. But that’s the protocol I’ve got to follow.” I wanted to break something, possibly Detective Kittredge’s neck. “Look, let me call it in right now. You and your wife can stay here while we wait to hear back. There’s a dozen KPD and UT cops here now. Hell, that’s as much protection as the president gets.”

  WHILE WE WAITED, KITTREDGE interviewed Kathleen in a vacant Nutrition Science classroom. I paced the hall outside, but not for long. After two laps of the hall, I knocked on the door, then entered the room. “Sorry to interrupt,” I said to Kittredge. “Any idea how long this’ll take?” I saw surprise and annoyance in the detective’s eyes.

  “Probably not more than half an hour,” he said in a level voice, “but I want to make sure we don’t miss anything—some little something that might give us a lead. I’m sure you can appreciate the need to be thorough.”

  “I’m not rushing you,” I said. “Just checking. I need to dash back to Anthropology for a few minutes. I just wanted to make sure I’d have time.” He nodded. “I’d like to see you again before you leave,” I added. “I’d like an update on what the plan is.” He nodded again—curtly this time—as I turned to go.

  I jogged back to the stadium and scurried down the outside stairs, between the crisscrossed steel girders, then entered the basement and unlocked the door of the bone lab. The lab was empty—empty of the quick, that is, though full of the dead. The newest arrival was the freshly scrubbed skeleton of the woman whose photograph—arriving in the mail shortly after her death—had been a message that I had failed to grasp. A message from a killer who seemed to be lurking just around the corner of my subconsciousness, and drawing closer all the time.

  There was something else significant about this woman, something lurking around another corner of my mind, just out of conscious reach—some other sign or message. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I’d realized this while pacing the hall as Kathleen and Kittredge had talked. Whatever the message was, it was not printed on photographic paper; this one was written on the woman’s bones. It had to be.

  The bones were laid out in anatomical order on the long table beneath the windows—Tyler had brought them up from the Annex early in the morning, before heading across the river for another day of bug watching—and as I crossed the lab, I noticed that the angled slats of the Venetian blinds cast lengthwise shadows on the bones, creating the illusion that the dead woman was behind bars. Sentenced to death without parole, I thought grimly.

  The emptiness at the distal ends of the lower legs was striking—even more striking now than when I’d seen her lying on the ground, legs splayed around the sapling. The absence there was almost palpable, in the same way that a sudden, unexpected silence seems loud. But it was
n’t the missing feet, or even the cut marks at the ends of the legs, that had brought me hurrying back. What had brought me hurrying back was the neck; specifically, the hyoid, the thin, U-shaped bone from the throat.

  By the time we’d found the body in the woods, the soft tissues of the neck had already decomposed extensively—far more than other regions, except for the ankles, where the feet had been severed. The differential decomposition told me that there’d been trauma to her neck. Unlike the thirteenth-century Chinese villager killed by a sickle, this woman had not had her throat cut; I knew that from the photograph I’d gotten in the mail, which showed no sharp trauma to the neck. That meant her neck had sustained a more subtle injury, yet one serious enough to scrape or bruise the skin there—and therefore to make it especially attractive to blowflies. The day we’d recovered the remains from Cahaba Lane, I’d told Tyler to look closely at the hyoid when he cleaned the material. “I bet you anything that bone is fractured,” I’d said. “I bet she was strangled.”

  I’d been right about the fracture; I’d confirmed it a few hours before, when I’d taken my first look at the processed skeleton. But I’d barely begun my examination—in fact, I had just picked up the hyoid and taken a cursory glance at it—when Peggy had transferred Kathleen’s call to me. Seconds later, I’d dashed out of the lab, the dead woman forgotten in my urgency. But as I’d paced the hall outside the conference room where Kittredge was interviewing Kathleen, my mind had strayed back to the bone lab. Back to the dead woman. Back to the fragile, broken bone from her throat.

  In life, the hyoid—a support for the muscles and ligaments of the tongue and larynx—had helped give this woman a voice, had helped her speak. Now, in death, I prayed that the hyoid could tell me not only how she’d died, but also who had killed her.

  THE HYOID WAS GONE.

  I stared at the skeleton—at the cervical spine, where the bone should have been; where the bone had been, only a few hours before. It was gone.

  I felt myself break into a sweat. Had he been here—the killer? Had he forced the bone lab’s lock, recognized the mutilated skeleton somehow, and made off with the hyoid—the evidence that he’d strangled her? The scenario seemed far-fetched, but what other explanation could there be? I picked up the phone from the desk and dialed the departmental office two flights above me. “Peggy,” I said without preamble, “do you know if Tyler’s been back to the bone lab since this morning?”

  “Tyler? Not that I’ve seen. Why? Do you need me to track him down?”

  “I do,” I said. “I need to know if he came back and took the hyoid from this skeleton.”

  “What’s the hyoid?”

  “A bone from the neck. Thin. Arched. Shaped like a short, wide version of the letter U.”

  “You mean that little bone you had in your hand when your wife called?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “That bone’s gone missing, and I’ve got to find it. It’s . . .” I paused, suddenly confused and spooked. “How did you know I had it in my hand when she called?”

  “Right after I transferred the call, I saw you go tearing up the steps. You had something in your hand. Check your pockets.”

  “What?”

  “Check your pockets,” she repeated. “I bet you put it in one of them.”

  “That’s absurd,” I said, reaching my right hand to my shirt pocket, then—more to myself than to Peggy—“I’ll be damned.” I’d had it with me all along.

  “You’re welcome,” I heard her saying as I hung up the phone.

  Plucking the bone gingerly from my pocket, I took it to one of the magnifying lamps and switched on the light. The fluorescent ring flickered on, and I held the bone beneath the lens, my hand looming, large and momentous, through the glass.

  The thicker, central body of the bone—its ends defined by a pair of toothlike processes, the “lesser horns”—was intact. The damage was confined to the junction where the body met the thinner, more fragile ends of the arch—the “greater horns,” the ends were called. But only one of them was damaged: the left one, folded inward, almost at a 90-degree angle to its normal position, the ligamentous joint splintered. My right hand trembling slightly, I walked back to the skeleton and held the bone in position above the neck. Then, with my left hand, I reached down and closed my fingers partway, encircling the neck without quite touching it. If I had tightened my grip, my left thumb would have pressed on the greater horn, folding it inward, creating exactly this fracture.

  A wave of dread and panic crashed over me. I’d seen a woman’s hyoid broken exactly this way once before: three years earlier, in 1989. That woman had died in California, and this one had died in Knoxville. But though two thousand miles separated them, I felt sure the two women had died by the same hand.

  The words of Brubaker, the FBI profiler, came shrieking into my mind. At the time he’d spoken them, I’d shrugged them off; now, they cut me to the bone. “You’re the key,” Brubaker had said. “It’s personal between you and him.”

  THIS TIME, I DIDN’T even pause to knock when I burst into the classroom where Kittredge and Kathleen were talking. They looked startled by my entrance; they looked stunned by my announcement: “I know who,” I said. “And I know why.”

  KITTREDGE WAS RUBBING HIS chin. He’d been rubbing it for the past five minutes—ever since I’d burst into the room—and the skin was starting to look red and raw. “And you’re saying you know this guy—Satterfield, you say?” I nodded. “Knew him before these bodies started turning up.”

  “Didn’t actually know him,” I clarified. “Knew of him. He was a suspect in a woman’s murder out near San Diego three years ago—a woman who was a stripper and a prostitute. He was in the Navy, and a naval investigator asked me to consult on the case.”

  “Why was that?”

  “The investigator—with the NIS, the Naval Intelligence Service—had been a student of mine in Kansas in the mid-eighties. He worked a couple summers with me, digging up Indian bones. He knew I’d seen a lot of skeletal trauma there, and knew I’d starting working forensic cases, so he arranged to have the woman’s bones sent to me.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I found that she’d been strangled,” I told him. “With just one hand.”

  He looked puzzled. “How could you tell that?”

  “The medical examiner hadn’t been able to determine the cause of death,” I said. “No obvious trauma, to the soft tissue or the bones. But male killers often strangle women, so I took a closer look at the hyoid—put it under a scanning electron microscope—and I found microfractures in the left side of the arch.” He still looked puzzled. “May I demonstrate? Do you mind if I put my hand on your throat?” I’d considered asking Kathleen, but she was already spooked, and the last thing I wanted to do was add to her fear.

  He shrugged. “Sure, go ahead. If I start turning blue, do let go.”

  “Deal.” I reached out and gripped his neck with my left hand. “See how my fingers reach around behind your neck, but my thumb’s closer to the front, on the left side?”

  “Uh-huh.” His response sounded slightly strained.

  “So now, if I squeeze”—I tightened my grip—“it puts more pressure on the left side of the windpipe, and on the left side of the hyoid bone.” I moved my thumb up and down slightly, sliding it repeatedly across the thin arch of bone. “The California woman was young—early twenties—so the hyoid hadn’t fully ossified. It wasn’t brittle enough to snap, which is why the medical examiner didn’t notice the damage. But the killer squeezed hard enough to suffocate her; hard enough to bend the bone and tear the ligament.” I gave my thumb a final twitch, then let go. “The investigator had a list of seven sailors who’d been with the woman around the time she went missing,” I went on. “I told him to rule out right-handed suspects. ‘The killer’s left-handed,’ I said. That left only one suspect. This guy Satterfield.”
<
br />   Kittredge cleared his throat several times before speaking. “Okay,” he rasped, then cleared his throat again. “Got it.”

  Kathleen spoke up. “Detective, are you all right? You look a little flushed.”

  “Yes ma’am, I’m fine,” he croaked. “But just for the record? I’m glad your husband wasn’t teaching me about stab wounds.” He looked back to me. “So this guy Satterfield—he was court-martialed? But not convicted?”

  “Wasn’t even court-martialed,” I said. “The investigator was sure he’d done it. He was left-handed; he’d been seen with the stripper, about a week before her body was found. And Satterfield was kind of a head case. A couple of the guys in SEAL training with him said he was really edgy—‘a ticking time bomb,’ one of ’em said.”

  “Wait, wait,” Kittredge said. “This guy’s a Navy SEAL?”

  “Not quite, but almost,” I said. “He’d gotten into the training program, but when the NIS flagged him as a murder suspect—a week or two in—the SEALs dropped him like a hot potato. He went back to his regular unit—the Special Boat Unit, it’s called. Those guys get a lot of the same training the SEALs get. Explosives, martial arts, survival, all that macho stuff.”

  “Shit,” said Kittredge. “Sorry, Mrs. Brockton. But why the hell wasn’t he charged?”

  “Not enough evidence,” I said. “He’d been seen with the woman the night after he got tapped for SEAL training—celebrating, I guess. But like I said, her body wasn’t found until a week or so after that. I . . . ” My voice trailed off.

  “You what?”

  “The prosecutor asked me if I could prove that she died the night Satterfield was seen with her. I told him I couldn’t. All I could say was that I believed she’d been dead for three days or more. ‘I can’t get a conviction based on that,’ he said.” I shook my head. “I’ve felt bad about that case for three years now.”