Craig Willis’s murder still needed to be solved; Jess’s death might slow the investigation down, but it wouldn’t stop it. In fact, my e-mail in-box already contained a memo indicating that Garland Hamilton would step in temporarily to fill Jess’s shoes in Chattanooga, just as Jess had filled in for Hamilton here in Knoxville while his medical license was under review. But knowing that the wheels of justice would keep turning, however slowly, did not give me the strength to put my own shoulder to the wheel right now.
I opened the cardboard box that contained Willis’s skull and lifted it out, along with the top of the cranial vault. Setting the skull on a doughnut-shaped cushion, I stared at its shattered visage as if some clue to Jess’s murder might be encoded in the fracture lines etched in Willis’s bones. A connection of some sort existed, I felt sure, but what, precisely, was the link? Or who?
Jess’s body had been bound to the research corpse we’d used as a stand-in for Willis at the Body Farm. The research was meant to narrow down Willis’s time since death. Did that mean that whoever had killed Willis also killed Jess? If so, why? Because he considered Jess a threat; because she was getting too close to the truth? But what was that truth? I had no idea who had killed Willis, and as far as I knew, neither Jess nor the Chattanooga police had any better insight into his murder than I did.
But if Willis’s killer hadn’t murdered Jess, then who had? Who else might have wanted her dead? As a medical examiner, of course, Jess had worked scores of homicides; in theory, any one of those cases might have prompted someone to seek vengeance-a relative of someone whom Jess’s autopsy and testimony had helped send to prison, for instance. But the timing mattered, surely: Why now? Who lately?
My mind flashed back to Willis’s mother, and the irrational fury with which she had attacked Jess. She had accused Jess of destroying her son’s reputation by releasing the information about his being dressed in drag, and-if indeed Jess had been the unnamed source-by speculating that the murder might have been a homophobic hate crime. Could the rage she displayed in my office have intensified after she fled, escalating to the point of murder? She had parted with a vague threat directed at Jess, but in the heat of the moment, people often made threats they never carried out. Besides, if she were the one who killed Jess, why would she have posed Jess’s body in that obscene position, bound to the corpse that was serving as a stand-in for her own son’s body? That didn’t seem to fit. Unless, I thought, by staging Jess’s body that way, she meant to repudiate the theory Jess had mentioned-unless by killing Jess and tying her to the research corpse, she was saying, “Fuck you and fuck your demeaning theory about my son’s death.”
But what if there were no connection? What if whoever had left the threatening messages on Jess’s voicemail had acted on them? In the dim, shifting light that had engulfed me in the hours since I found Jess’s body, I could see things equally well-or equally poorly-from either angle.
Gradually I became aware of my telephone ringing. It had not even occurred to me that, rather than sitting and brooding alone, I could have been talking through what had happened with Jeff or Miranda or somebody else who cared about me. Fortunately, one of those people was now calling me. “It’s Art,” he said. “I just heard about Jess Carter. I am so sorry, Bill. I know you liked her and respected her.”
“I did. More than that, too. We had-hell, I don’t know what to call it, Art-we had started to get involved, I guess you could say.”
“Romantically involved?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow,” he said. “Well, damn. I bet that would’ve been a good thing for both of you.”
“I think so. Started off mighty nice, though I’m not sure she was completely over her divorce yet. Might’ve gotten bumpy. But might’ve smoothed out again pretty quick. Guess we’ll never know.”
“Man,” he said, “I thought I was sorry to hear the news before. Now I’m a lot more sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Nothing I can think of. I’ve got to go into KPD tomorrow morning for an interview.”
“Why are they having you come in, instead of talking to you at your office?”
“I guess because I found her body.”
“You?”
“Yeah. Lucky me. It was bad, Art. She was nude, and she was tied to that research corpse we had lashed to a tree. Like she was having sex with the corpse.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Son of a bitch. Listen, Art, I’m gonna go now. Thanks for calling.”
“You need anything, you page me. Even if it’s the middle of the night. Especially if it’s the middle of the night. It’s liable to hit you hardest long about then.”
A powerful sense of foreboding told me he was probably right.
CHAPTER 26
I WOULD NOT HAVE believed a single day could creep by so slowly. But then again, I would not have believed the nightmarish turn events had taken ten hours before at the Body Farm, either. What I found believable clearly had no relation to reality any longer.
Miranda was scrubbing the femur as if her life-or even her Ph.D.-depended on removing every molecule of soft tissue before putting it in the steam kettle to simmer. We had been working in the morgue’s decomp room for an hour now, cleaning the bulk of the tissue off the bones of the research body that had been tied to the pine tree. The research body that Jess’s body had been obscenely embracing.
Garland Hamilton had brought Jess’s body over around noon, and KPD had released the scene at four-thirty. By five, all the cops and emergency vehicles were gone, and so, therefore, were the camera crews. As soon as the parking lot had cleared out, Miranda and I drove up to the gate in the department’s truck, collected the remains of the research body, and brought it into the decomp room to process. I blamed this research project, in some vague way, for Jess’s death, and I wanted to rid myself and the facility of all traces of it. Besides, Jess was gone, and we had already pinned down Craig Willis’s time since death to roughly one week before the hiker found the battered body on the bluff outside Chattanooga.
Neither Miranda nor I had spoken a word as we worked. For me, the shock and grief I felt over Jess’s murder were overwhelming. I felt myself immersed, close to going under; the simplest acts-opening a door, flipping a light switch, speaking a sentence-seemed foreign, baffling, exhausting. Miranda had not known Jess nearly as well as I had; she might have been keeping silent out of deference to the pain radiating off me, although she, too, might have been too upset herself to feel like talking. A close brush with death seems to turn people into exaggerated versions of themselves, the same way a few drinks do: the mean get meaner, the sad get weepy, the talkative just will not shut up. So it wasn’t surprising that two introverted scientists would fall silent when a colleague of both, and a love of one, had been murdered.
But there was another explanation for the tense silence that occupied the room, almost as palpably as if it were a third person: Jess Carter’s body was being autopsied across the hall, in the main autopsy suite, by Garland Hamilton. He’d started two hours before, according to a morgue technician who greeted me with a stricken face upon my arrival. My guess was that unless Garland found something unusual, he would be finishing soon.
It added insult to injury to know that Jess’s maimed body was being examined by a medical examiner I knew to be sloppy and incompetent. He might overlook or misread evidence, which could compromise the police department’s effort to understand the crime and pinpoint the killer; conversely, he might imagine evidence where none actually existed, as he had in Billy Ray Ledbetter’s autopsy, when he saw an accidental cut in the flesh of the back and interpreted it-or, rather, misinterpreted it-as a deep, lethal stab wound that zigzagged across the spine and threaded the rib cage before burrowing into a lung.
As I scraped a bit of tissue from the foramen magnum-the large opening at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord emerged-the scalpel slipped from my right hand; I made a fruitless grab for it, and the
skull rolled from my left hand and thudded into the stainless steel sink, upside down. I stared down at it-the top of the cranium had nested into the drain, and the water pouring from the faucet was beginning to back up in the sink-and I could not think what to do. I stood transfixed by the rising water: Now it was filling the eye orbits; now the nasal cavity; now lapping at the teeth of the upper jaw. Miranda came and stood beside me; she laid one hand gently on my back; with the other, she leaned across the sink and shut off the water. “It’s okay,” she said gently. “You don’t have to do this. Why don’t you go home?”
“I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I know I won’t like it there.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Not really. But I don’t hate it as much as I’ll hate being home.”
“Then stay,” she said. “Just try not to break anything. How about you clean the rest of the long bones and let me do the skull?” Without waiting for an answer, she lifted the skull from the sink and took it to the other sink, where she had been working.
“I slept with her,” I said, still staring into the now-empty sink. “With Jess. Last week, when I went down to Chattanooga to look at Craig Willis’s body and go out to the crime scene. She invited me to her house that night, and we went to bed.” I turned to look at Miranda and saw that she had reddened slightly. She bent over the skull and began scrubbing bits of tissue from its recesses with a toothbrush.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know. Because it was important to me. It was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. It felt like the beginning of something. And now it’s gone. She’s gone.”
She looked at me now, and her embarrassment had given way to compassion. “It’s not your fault, you know.”
“No I don’t,” I said, “and neither do you. You’re trying to make me feel better, and I appreciate that, but I can’t shake the thought that there might be some connection with me.”
“Like what?”
“Like…I don’t know. Maybe if she hadn’t gotten involved with me, her ex-husband might not have flown into a murderous rage. Maybe if she hadn’t been in my office that day when Craig Willis’s mother showed up, that crazy woman would never have seen her and decided Jess was evil.”
“Maybe if she hadn’t gotten involved with you, Jess would have gone off her rocker and shot up a kindergarten. Maybe if she’d driven away from your office five minutes sooner that day, she’d have triggered a five-car pileup on I-75 that would have killed the medical researcher who’s on the verge of curing cancer.”
“What medical researcher? What are you talking about?”