Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  ‘See any cars or trucks, either direction?’

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘Think. Maybe it was familiar.’

  Marcus Edmonds closed his eyes and lay back in the chair, the cane across his lap like a sword. ‘Nothing comes to mind. Not much traffic back in those days. Easier ways to get to Burkburnett even then. Just regular stuff. Locals.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘On that particular day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Remember the ice man came for Mrs Pinkers. Always used to give us big chips of ice to suck on. We’d have to wipe off the sawdust.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Think his name was Bacon. Family lived by the big icehouse he kept at the end of Highway 25 on Adama Creek. That’s where he cut his ice in the wintertime. Froze up solid. Used to blast it out.’

  ‘What time did his truck go by?’

  ‘Around noon.’

  ‘Where would he have been at three?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Ray nodded to the icebox in the corner. ‘Were you on his route?’

  ‘Sure. But on Mondays. He did this whole side of the county pretty well. Different routes on different days.’

  ‘You see anyone else?’

  ‘Delivery truck from the store, junk man, sheriff’s car a couple of times, making his rounds, hearse from Todmorden’s coming back from Clara.’

  ‘Todmorden’s?’

  ‘Funeral parlour in Electra. Most people used them because they’re close.’

  ‘Black or white?’ Ray asked bluntly.

  ‘They’d take money from anyone. Had a new hearse for whites, an old one for black people. Different drivers too. Back then it was Deuteronomy Dupree. I fought in the war with his son Gabriel.’

  ‘Which hearse did you see that day, do you remember?’

  ‘The one for blacks. It had glass sides so you could see the coffin inside. The other one just looked like an old station wagon with curtains.’

  Ray wasn’t quite ready to give up on it. Something was nagging. ‘Which way was it coming, to or from the cemetery?’

  Marcus Edmonds closed his eyes again, his hands gripping the cane hard, his forehead slashed with lines as he concentrated. He opened his eyes. ‘From. I can see it clear as day. All the kids watched when Deuteronomy went by. It was before Luci went home. He was heading back to Electra. He must have been because there was no coffin inside the hearse, you could see right in.’

  Ray was running out of questions. He looked at his watch. It was just past ten. Still early. It was a two-hour drive back to Dallas; if he was lucky he’d miss the Kennedy parade.

  ‘One more thing, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sure. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘I know it’s this way for me so it’s probably the same for you, Mr Edmonds, but after all these years is there something that sticks out, a detail, a thought, maybe something as simple as how something smelled or looked?’

  ‘The day Lucille was taken?’

  ‘That afternoon,’ said Ray, pulling it in. ‘That moment.’ The detective waited. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked that question of a witness. Sometimes they didn’t know what he was talking about and sometimes they did. He wasn’t looking for something as melodramatic as a clue but just a sense, a feeling that could put him there.

  ‘I can hear her voice. Clear as anything,’ said Marcus Edmonds, a faint look of shock on his face as though he wasn’t expecting the memory to be so distinct. ‘She had her books done up with one of my father’s old belts and she told me she’d seen an old lamp that day with a fringe on the shade and she asked me if I thought we’d ever get electricity so we could have a lamp just like the one she’d seen.’ He paused and Ray saw that his eyes were wet. ‘And then she told me to come along home with her and I didn’t and she died.’

  Chapter Twelve

  To give himself a little more time to think Ray decided to go back to Dallas by way of Gainesville to the east and then straight down the interstate into the city. Just before leaving 82 and getting onto the interstate he pulled over at a truck stop, sat down in a booth by the window and ordered himself a proper breakfast. Getting out his notebook, he opened it and used his pencil to jot down the date at the top of the page, 11/22/63, and then started doodling out the information he’d learned on his trip home. By the time his ham and eggs arrived he’d polished off two cups of coffee and had a diagram that spread out over two pages of his notebook.

  1938

  Black White

  Lucille Edmonds Mary Lou Mitchell.

  Tilly Chambers Helen Reeb

  Lillian Berry Sally Wells

  Anna May Johannsen

  Mona Cutleaf

  Maybelle Killeen

  1963

  Jennings Price

  18–20 in 1938 + 25 = 43–45 yrs old.

  Ray was sure that he was on fairly solid ground with the age of the killer. If the monster who’d killed little Lucille Edmonds had been in his thirties or forties back then he’d be in his sixties or early seventies now. Price had been no prizefighter but he’d probably been capable of defending himself against an old man and the very violence of the crime didn’t seem possible for a sexagenarian or perhaps even older man. No. The killer had been young in 1938, just starting out on his horrible spree, practising. Which would put him in his forties now.

  The difficulty of course was in finding a connection between the killings of Lucille and the others and the murder of Jennings Price twenty-five years later. He flipped back through his notebook and jotted down the previous list of words he’d jotted down over the past few days.

  PINOCCHIO

  TIME

  CARE

  PETER PAN

  Pinocchio still ran through all the killings like the wire the murderer used to reconstruct his victims. Time and Care seemed to fit the earlier murders as well. The killer hadn’t just taken Lucille or any of the others randomly. Ray was sure of that. He’d seen them all before, marked them as potential victims and then taken them at an opportune, planned moment. He added another word to the list:

  PLANNED

  And then one more, only because it had seemed important to Marcus Edmonds, the thing that had brought tears to his eyes.

  OLD LAMP

  He put them all together in a single list now.

  PINOCCHIO

  TIME

  CARE

  PETER PAN

  PLANNED

  OLD LAMP

  None of which really added up to much. A careful young man in 1938 who planned nine savage murders and got away with all of them. He put away his notebook for the moment and addressed the breakfast on the plate in front of him. He’d been hungry when he pulled into the truck stop but now his appetite seemed to have left him. He slipped one of his fried eggs onto a piece of toast and forced himself to eat it.

  Behind the counter the waitress switched on the radio. A breathless news reporter on KRLD was telling the world that Air Force Two, carrying Vice President Johnson and Mrs Johnson, had just landed at Love Field and Air Force One, carrying the President, was expected to land within a minute or two. Ray looked at his watch. It was eleven thirty-five. He sopped up the yolk from his second egg with the other piece of toast and chased it with the last of his coffee.

  The waitress appeared with a new pot and filled the cup before he had a chance to stop her. She was nothing like Rena at Inky’s, the restaurant down the street from the Texas Theatre. He thought about her for a moment, enjoying the memory and wondering if he had the guts to ask her out on a date, wondering if there was any point. Who wanted to go out with an ageing cop with a bum ticker?

  KRLD was announcing Kennedy’s arrival now, complete with a long boring description of Jackie’s pink suit. He tuned it out, sipping his coffee and trying to concentrate on the Jennings Price killing, letting his thoughts flow freely, looking for some connection that made sense. Of all the material he’d read the only thing that really struc
k him was the actual cause of death in Price’s murder: some sort of fine chisel. All of the nine girls had been killed that way and according to the files they’d been held for some time, perhaps as much as two or three days, while they were brutalised and then strangled with the same kind of wire that would be used later to turn their corpses into puppets.

  The majority of homicides Ray dealt with were simple and straightforward – people killing other people for a good reason, at least in their minds, and generally using the usual prosaic weaponry of violent death: guns, knives and blunt instruments of one kind or another. No strange miniature chisels that didn’t fit any occupation he knew about, no giant blades like some kind of monster shears, no bodies turned into Pinocchios. This was a job for a headshrinker, not a cop. He thought about that for a few minutes, wondering if a shrink might be able to throw some light on the problem, but then he dismissed the idea; most of the psychiatrists he’d ever seen or heard about seemed to be crazy and as far as he knew there weren’t any around that knew the first thing about what made killers tick.

  Ray looked down at his notebook, reading the words, putting them together like puzzle pieces. The radio announcer was describing the motorcade as it left Love Field and headed towards downtown, talking as though Dallas had never seen a president before or had a parade. The sound of the radio and the clatter of dishes faded away to nothing as the first bright spark of intuition jerked through Ray’s mind and he suddenly knew that motive was going to be the key to finding out who killed Jennnings Price.

  Luci Edmonds and the others had been killed for what they were: objects to be raped and violated, their skin harvested like some kind of gruesome talisman or trophy. Something in the killer’s sick mind had made him kill out of some unfathomable, twisted desire. The murder of Jennings Price had been methodical and carefully planned, either for gain or some other purpose, the method masking the meaning.

  Ray closed the notebook and pulled a couple of crumpled dollar bills out of his pocket, tucking them under the edge of his cup. His brain was starting to freeze up and he knew he was making connections that might not even be there. For all he knew there was nothing to link the old murders with Jennings Price except happenstance. To get anywhere he’d need to keep his focus on the present, not the past.

  He stood up, went back outside and slipped into one of the phone booths beside the toilets. He dialled the operator, gave her his badge number and she put him through to headquarters. He asked the switchboard for 351 and Gerry Henslee, the sergeant handling channel 2 dispatch, picked up on the second ring.

  ‘Henslee.’

  ‘It’s Duval.’ In the background he could hear a torrent of radio chatter. ‘Anything going on?’

  The dispatcher was almost out of breath. ‘The Kennedy parade is driving me crazy. Leavelle and Brown are picking up some armed robbery suspect, everybody else is downstairs waiting for Jackie and they found another body at the dump.’

  ‘Shit. When?’

  ‘Early. Six, six thirty. No one could get hold of you. Fritz is a little pissed, by the way.’

  ‘I’m half an hour out. I’ll go right to the scene.’

  ‘Forget it. Fritz is already out at the Trade Mart lining up for his filet mignon with the rest of the high hats and the M.E.’s already got her on a slab.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Yeah. A kid. Ten, eleven.’ The radio traffic in the background was getting frantic. ‘Look, I gotta get back to it, some guy just had a seizure in Dealey Plaza.’

  ‘Anyone asks, I’ll be at Parkland.’

  ‘Ten-four.’ The phone clicked in the detective’s ear as the dispatcher hung up abruptly. Ray stood in the booth for a moment then dropped the receiver back onto its hook. He stepped out of the booth and stood in the bright sunlight, squinting at the late-morning traffic heading in and out of the city, waiting for the ruptured hammering of his broken heart to steady before he climbed back into his car and drove away from the truck stop. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was twelve noon exactly.

  * * *

  Reaching the low-slung shape of Parkland Hospital, Ray parked in one of the rear lots. He took the Polaroid camera out of the trunk and made his way down to the morgue. The dispatcher was right. Doc Rose already had her on the table. She was black, eleven or twelve and cut to pieces like the others. Scattered over her body were dark red, perfectly regular patches where sheets of skin had been removed. Rose was using the hose attached to the long, stainless-steel autopsy table to wash the little girl down.

  ‘This makes two,’ said Rose, looking up as Ray came into the room.

  ‘No. It makes eleven,’ Ray answered. He took out his notebook and reeled off the names. ‘Lucille Edmonds, Tilly Chambers, Lillian Berry, Mary Lou Mitchell, Helen Reeb, Sally Wells, Anna May Johannsen, Mona Cutleaf, and Maybelle Killeen. He paused. ‘Edmonds, Chambers and Berry were Negro, the rest were white. All from rural communities, all between ten and thirteen years old. All killed the same way.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Rose. He shut off the nozzle on the hose. A little bit of pink water and some small pieces of discarded tissue went swirling down the drain hole directly below the little girl’s buttocks. Ray noticed a half-moon-shaped scar on her left hip. ‘Nine little kids. I would have heard about it.’

  ‘The killings all took place in a nine-month period in 1938. The Negro kids didn’t make a ripple in the pond and the white girls came from trash families. Took place in four or five different counties, which muddied the investigative waters as well.’

  ‘Christ on a crutch,’ said Rose. ‘Nineteen thirty-eight isn’t that long ago. They had goddamn telephones. They could have talked to each other.’

  ‘Appears they didn’t.’

  ‘How’d you find all this out?’

  ‘Went home to my daddy’s for his birthday. He mentioned something about an old case. Made the connection and did some checking around.’ He looked down at the child on the table. Her eyes had been brown but they were clouded over now and patches of her skin had darkened from lividity. ‘Anything new here?’

  ‘Found in the dump again.’

  ‘Refrigerator?’

  ‘Old icebox. Almost an antique.’

  ‘Rats find it again?’

  ‘No. Janowski, the caretaker. He went looking this time.’

  ‘Anything different about her?’

  ‘Different from what? The guy who came in yesterday? Yeah, plenty. She’s been raped half a dozen times in each hole in her body. It looks like whoever killed her had her tied up long enough to give her ligature marks on her wrists and ankles.’

  ‘So he kept her for a couple of days?’

  ‘I’d say more like three or four from what I can tell.’

  ‘The skin removed the same?’

  Rose nodded. ‘Uh-huh. Sixteen by ten from the back. Eight by five from the belly area, four by two and a half from each of the thighs.’

  Ray thought about it for a moment as he opened up the Polaroid. ‘All the measurements are divisible by two from the larger ones.’

  ‘So the killer likes symmetry. Maybe he’s a math teacher.’

  Ray set the flash and took several shots of the dead girl, including one of the scar on her thigh. ‘I think it means something. The skin he takes.’

  ‘Of course it means something,’ Rose answered sourly. Ray stripped the backing off the shots and began fanning the air with them. ‘It means the man’s out of his mind.’ He paused. ‘Those other children. Back in ’thirty-eight? They had patches of skin taken off as well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Same size as these?’

  ‘Files didn’t say,’ Ray answered. ‘Guess they didn’t think it was important back then but I think it’s a good bet.’

  ‘A link anyway.’ The medical examiner let out a long-suffering sigh and pulled off his rubber gloves. He tossed them onto the edge of the sink, then reached under his rubber apron and pulled out a package of Camels. He lit one with a shi
ny gold Ronson and stood back from the table, blowing a cloud of smoke up at the low ceiling. ‘Glad I just cut ’em and shut ’em.’ He stared owlishly across the mutilated corpse. ‘’Cause I don’t think you’ve got a chance in hell of finding out who did this.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ said Ray, folding up the camera again.

  ‘This one, the one yesterday, all those others. Mutilation, rape, sodomy. Whatever motive the killer has is in his head, nothing normal, nothing real.’ He took another puff on the Camel. ‘One for my headshrinker friends in the Psycho Ward.’

  ‘You might be right,’ Ray answered, sliding the Polaroid back into its leatherette carrying bag.

  The overhead P.A. system crackled. ‘Dr Tom Shires, please report to Trauma Room One, stat.’

  The doc frowned. ‘Why would they want Shires in Trauma?’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Chief of surgery. I think he’s in Galveston today.’

  The call came again, this time more urgently. ‘Dr Shires to Trauma One, stat.’

  Ray couldn’t have cared less about what was going on in Trauma Room One; he was trying to make sense of dates and times. ‘Was there anything to show that Jennings Price had been held for a period of time before he was killed?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy from yesterday.’

  ‘No. He was still in rigor. He was found twelve to twenty-four hours post-mortem.’

  ‘So whoever did the killing already had the little Jane Doe here when he killed Price.’

  ‘If the same person killed them both.’

  The P.A. crackled again and a very nervous sounding nurse began rhyming off a list of doctors. ‘Dr Richard Dulaney, Dr Gene Akin, Dr Kent Clark, Dr Giesecke, Dr Jack Hunt, Dr Kenneth Salyer, Dr Seldin, Dr Shaw, Dr White, Dr Peters. Please report to Trauma Room One and Trauma Room Two, stat.’

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ said Rose. ‘That’s half the staff of the hospital. The only people they didn’t call was Ben Casey and Dr Zorba.’

  ‘Traffic accident maybe.’ Ray shrugged. He looked down at the girl on the table again. He noticed that everywhere she’d been cut the top of the wound looked crushed, while the wound itself as it cut down through flesh and muscle and bone was razor sharp.