Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone (17 page)

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?”

“What I’m talking about is this,” she said. “If you’re going to play what-if—which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism—you have to play it both ways. If you’re going to imagine yourself as an accidental villain, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero. As somebody who prevented God-knows-what dire disaster simply by doing exactly the things you did. And who knows,” she added, “maybe the physicists are right; maybe there really are zillions of parallel universes. And maybe in those parallel universes, all the improbable scenarios we imagine really do happen, and all the wild conspiracy theories we imagine really are true.”

She’d lost me by now, but at least she’d taken my mind off my misery for a minute. It was time enough to allow me a gulp of emotional oxygen, like a swimmer turning his head between strokes to bite a mouthful of air.

There was a rap at the door of the decomp and Garland Hamilton walked in, looking tense. He glanced at me, then eyed Miranda steadily. “Oh,” she said. “I need to go…do…something.” She laid the skull down on a tray lined with paper towels and hurried out.

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Tell me about Jess.”

“Are you sure?” I nodded. “She was killed by a gunshot to the head,” he said. “Small caliber, probably a .22, maybe a .25. The ballistics guys will be able to tell. No exit wound—the bullet ricocheted around inside the cranium, so it chewed the brain up pretty bad. The good news, I guess, is that she died almost instantly once she was shot.”

“Why do you say, ‘once she was shot,’ Garland? Is there some bad news besides the fact that somebody killed her?”

“It’s possible she was raped,” he said. “There were traces of semen in the vagina.”

His comment hit me like a UT linebacker. Perhaps she had indeed been raped, but perhaps Hamilton had merely found residual traces of my own lovemaking with Jess from several nights earlier. I considered mentioning that possibility, but it seemed too personal—a violation not only of my privacy, but of Jess’s, too.

“Anything else that might help? Fingernail scrapings? Hair or fibers?”

“Her nails looked clean, but I did collect a few hairs and fibers. Bill…” He hesitated. “I know you don’t hold my work in the highest regard, but I gave this everything I had. I don’t think any pathologist anywhere could have been more thorough than I was. The police have a bullet, a DNA sample, and hair and fibers to work with. I have a feeling they’re going to find this guy pretty quick. As an ME, Jess was a friend and ally to cops. Jess was like family. They’re going to work this hard.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said.

“Count on it,” he said.

It was 9 P.M. by the time I turned onto my street in Sequoyah Hills. It felt like 3 A.M. My heart and lungs felt filled with cement; my head hurt so badly I thought I might throw up; and every blink felt like burlap scraping across my eyes.

As I rounded the curve of the circle and my house came into view, I hit the brakes, hard, and my truck screeched to a halt on the asphalt. Four SUVs—one from each of the Knoxville television stations—were parked in front of the house. Several cameramen and reporters stood chatting in my yard. As I sat and pondered what to do, one of the cameramen swiveled his lens in my direction and everyone’s head followed its lead. Soon all four video cameras were aimed at my truck, and I felt like an animal that knows it is being hunted.

Finally I forced down my fear and took my foot off the brake, idling toward my driveway. As I turned in, the cameramen took their cameras off the tripod and converged on my truck. The reporters followed a few feet behind, so as not to block the shot. I drew a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped out.

Even before I had both feet on the asphalt, one of the reporters said, “Dr. Brockton, what can you tell us about the murder out at the Body Farm?”

“I’m afraid I can’t talk about it,” I said. “The police have asked me not to.”

“Can you tell us who the victim was?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” I said. “They need to notify the next of kin before they release the identity.”

“Did you know the victim?”

“I…I’m sorry, I can’t say.”

“Was it a man or a woman? Surely you can tell us that much?”

“No.”

“How was he killed? How was she killed?” This time I just shook my head and headed along the curving brick walk toward my front door as cameramen scrambled to get ahead of me so they could capture my face.

As I put my key in the lock and opened the front door, the same reporter who’d asked the first question fired off a final one. “Do the police consider you a suspect, Dr. Brockton?”

That one stopped me in my tracks. Standing in my open doorway, I turned and faced the eight people and four lenses. “Good God,” I said, “of course not.” And with that, I stepped inside and closed the door.

THE JUMBLE OF DRAB boxes that constituted KPD headquarters possessed just enough windows to highlight how blank and unbroken most of the walls were. The biggest expanse of glass was the entryway, which doubled as a corridor connecting the police department with the municipal traffic court. Outside, a mix of cops and traffic scofflaws smoked as equals.

I took a right inside the lobby and presented myself to the desk sergeant under glass. He nodded in recognition at my name, then buzzed someone to escort me upstairs. My escort proved to be a short detective with the build and the personality of a fireplug. Though I’d never seen a fireplug with a half-chewed toothpick dangling from what would be its face. If fireplugs had faces. Fireplug’s name was Horace Bingham, a name I thought particularly unfortunate—particularly since he pronounced it “horse”—though I had the good manners not to call Horace’s attention to the gracelessness of either his name or his enunciation.

Horace showed me into a cinder-block room outfitted with a table, three metal folding chairs, and a video camera high in one corner, then closed the door. Twenty minutes crept past.

The beep of my cellphone made me jump. It was Art.

“How are you? Where are you?”

“Funny you should ask. I’m in an interview room on the fourth floor of KPD, waiting for Detective Sergeant John Evers.”

“Evers is working this?”

“Yeah. Maybe with the help of this fireplug-looking little guy.”

“Oh, you mean Horse?”

“Yeah. Horse.”

“Well, Evers is good. Best thing I can say about Horse is that he hangs back and lets Evers do most of the work. They got any leads that you know of?”

“They haven’t said. I’m gonna suggest a couple.” Just then the door opened and Evers walked in, accompanied by Horace. “Listen, they’re here to talk to me. I gotta go.”

“Hang in there. Call me later.”

“Thanks, Art.” As I folded the phone shut, I said, “Art Bohanan. He had good things to say about both of you.”

Evers nodded and smiled briefly. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Dr. Brockton. We’ve been fielding a lot of media calls, as you might expect. Not much to say at this point; we try to limit what goes out, especially in the early stages of an investigation, but you still gotta give ’em a couple sound bites, or they get snippy.”

“I hope you didn’t release Dr. Carter’s name? She’s got an ex-husband that I know of; she might have other family, too, that ought to be notified first.”

“We notified the ex-husband yesterday. He said he’d deliver the news personally to her mother. We had to release her name—we can’t keep that under wraps once the next of kin have been notified. Beyond that, though, I just told them her death appeared to be a homicide, and that she was found at the Body Farm.”

“Did you tell them I was the one who found her?”

“No. I just said one of the research staff had called 911 to report finding the body. They saw you walk out the gate, though; they all knew it was you. I told them half a dozen times, in half a dozen ways, that I couldn’t comment on who made the report, or who the victim was, or how they’d been killed, or who might have committed the crime.”

“Speaking of who might have committed it,” I said, “can I mention a couple of names that have occurred to me?”

“Sure,” he said. “But first, I need to start things off officially. We record every interview, both on that video camera up there”—he pointed behind him at the camera near the ceiling—“and on an audiocassette recorder.” He pulled a small silver recorder out of his shirt pocket, pressed the RECORD button, and laid it on the table between us. “I’m also going to advise you of your rights.”

“You’re reading me my rights? Do you suspect me?”

“No, sir. And yes, sir. We do this with every single person we interview. I mean, at this stage, everybody’s a suspect to some degree; our minds are completely open, and we’re going to consider every possibility. And we’ll read everybody their rights, just in case somebody unexpectedly blurts out a confession. If we haven’t already advised them of their rights, we might not be able to use that confession in court. Does that make sense?”

“I suppose so. Still feels strange, though.”

First he leaned down toward the tape recorder and said, “This is an interview with Dr. Bill Brockton regarding the death of Dr. Jessamine Carter.” He added the date and the time the interview began, and then he read my rights off a laminated card he pulled from his wallet.

Evers asked me to recount yesterday morning’s events again, in more detail, so I did. After he seemed satisfied with the amount of detail he had, he let me tell him about the threats Jess had received on her voice mail. “And when was this?”

I had to think about that. “Last Thursday,” I said. “No, Wednesday. Same day as that protest at UT. She was on the news that night, and she called me Thursday morning to tell me she’d gotten the calls the night before.”

“Did you actually hear these messages? Or did she just tell you about them?”

“She just told me about them. She called me from Chattanooga that night.”

“How specifically did she describe them?”

“Not very. She said some were graphic sexual threats, and some were pretty sick death threats. But she didn’t give the particulars, and I didn’t want to ask her to repeat them. Would you all still be able to get hold of those messages?”

“Maybe. If she didn’t erase them. We can certainly check with the phone company to see if her voice mail was part of her telephone service. If not, we’ll look for an answering machine at her house. Do you know whether she reported these threats to the phone company or the police?”

“I don’t think so. I encouraged her to, but she didn’t seem as worried by them as I was. She said she got crank calls and threats all the time.” He nodded and made a note.

Next I related how Mrs. Willis had assaulted Jess in my office on Friday, after Jess had released her son’s identity to the news media and had described his murder in a way that angered Mrs. Willis. “How brutal was this attack?” asked Evers.

“Not violent enough to cause any injuries,” I said. “A few slaps is all, really, I guess. I pulled her off Jess pretty quickly. But if I hadn’t, and if Jess hadn’t called the campus police, I’m not sure what would have happened.”

“And Mrs. Willis left voluntarily? Before or after the campus police arrived?”

“Before.”

“So the campus police had no contact with this woman?”

“No,” I said. “But they should have a recording of the phone call. Oh, and Peggy, my secretary, would probably remember her, because she gave her directions to my office. But Peggy didn’t see the assault.”

“In your opinion, did Mrs. Willis appear capable of murder?”

“That thought didn’t occur to me at the time,” I said. “But in hindsight, now that Jess has been murdered, I can’t help thinking she did.”

“Did she make specific threats?”

I replayed the woman’s furious parting words. “I wouldn’t call them specific, but I would call them threats. She said ‘You’ll be sorry’ a couple of times, and ‘I’m going to make you pay,’ I think. Something like that.”

“Did you think she was referring to violence, or to financial damages?”

“I didn’t think about it at the time; I just wrote it off as angry words. Now, of course, I wonder if she meant physical violence.”

Finally I told Evers about a third person who concerned me: Jess’s ex-husband. I described the encounter at the restaurant, and how he seemed to be pleading with Jess; I told him how agitated she seemed afterward, and how she left moments later.

As he took notes about the restaurant encounter, Evers held up his left hand, a gesture he often used to signal me to slow down or stop. It seemed unnecessary, since two recording devices were capturing the interview verbatim, but perhaps he found it easier to refer to notes. He wrote a few more words, then he looked up at me. “This dinner you and Dr. Carter were having,” he asked, “was that a business dinner?”

I felt myself flush. “Part business,” I said, “part friendship. She was pretty shaken up when Mrs. Willis assaulted her in my office. I thought a good dinner at a quiet restaurant might help settle her down. Jess was a colleague, but she was also a friend.”

“I notice you’ve referred to her several times as ‘Jess’ rather than as ‘Dr. Carter.’ How close a friend was she, Dr. Brockton?”

“Pretty close,” I said. I hesitated, but decided he needed the whole picture. “And getting closer. At least, that’s what I hoped. We had just started what I guess I’d call a romantic relationship.”

“And how do you define a romantic relationship?” he asked. “Cards? Flowers? Daily phone calls?”

“We worked together,” I said. “We liked each other. Lately, we’d gotten…much closer.”

He kept his eyes on his notebook. “By ‘closer,’ do you mean sexually intimate?”

The question angered me. “What does that have to do with Jess’s murder?”

Now he looked at me. “I don’t know,” he answered calmly. “What do you think it has to do with it? I’m just trying to piece together what was going on in her life just before she was killed. Sounds like you were one of the people closest to her. Sounds like you were a big part of what was going on in her life. Just before her death.”

“Maybe; I don’t know,” I said. “She was a big part of what was going on in mine. I’m not sure I occupied as prominent a place in hers yet.”

“Why do you say that?”

I told him what she’d said after she came back from talking to her ex; how maybe she wasn’t finished with it—with him—after all.

“And did that bother you?”

“No. Yes. Some. She hadn’t been divorced all that long—eight months, I think she said—so I guess it’s not surprising that she might not’ve been completely over it. But until her ex-husband showed up at the restaurant that last night, she had seemed to be really opening up to me.”

“That last night? Is that what you said—that last night?” I stared at him, confused that he was latching on to that. “Her body wasn’t found—or wasn’t reported—for three more days, Dr. Brockton,” he said. “What made you refer to that as her last night?”

“I just mean it was the last night I saw her. Not the last night she was alive.”

“Oh, I see,” Evers said.

The interview ended shortly after that exchange, with a few questions about how soon I left the restaurant after Jess (about ten minutes, because the waitress was slow to bring the check); where I went afterward (straight home); and whether I tried to contact Jess that night or over the weekend (no, because she’d asked for some breathing room).

Evers thanked me for my cooperation and escorted me down to the lobby. We parted with mutual assurances to keep in touch and share any information that seemed meaningful. But as I crossed the asphalt to my truck, I felt shaken to my core, and not just because Jess had been murdered. I had spent a quarter of a century dealing with homicide detectives, and my experiences had been unequivocally positive: I liked giving them help; they liked getting it. Suddenly, for the first time, I had a glimmer of insight into what it might be like to be the subject of a detective’s investigation, rather than a helpful advisor. I was relieved when I checked my rearview mirror and could no longer see the brick and concrete fortress that was KPD.

I took the long ramp that swooped downhill and fed me onto Neyland Drive. To my left, the river sparkled in the midday sun. That sparkle looked all wrong; the water should have been roiling, churning blackly, not rippling along as placidly as ever; as placidly as if Jess Carter’s body were not, at this moment, on a gurney in the cooler at the Regional Forensic Center, the top of her skull sliced off, her chest slashed open, her heart and other organs bagged like offal at a butcher’s shop. “Dammit,” I said out loud. “Goddamnit to hell.”

As I passed Thompson-Boling Arena and turned right onto Lake Loudoun Drive, I noticed blue lights behind me. I pulled to the curb to let the police car pass. Instead, it jerked to a stop behind me, and John Evers got out and approached my door. I rolled down my window. “What’s the matter?” I said. “Has something else happened?”

“I need you to get out of the vehicle now,” he said. “We’re impounding this truck as evidence in a murder investigation, and I need you to come back to the station with me. I have more questions for you, Dr. Brockton. A whole lot more questions. And I need a whole lot better answers from you this time around.”