Flesh and Bone Page 15

  “Yeah,” he said, “don’t think I haven’t thought of that. But that would take a real stroke of luck. Maybe more luck than I’ve ever had before, all put together.”

  “We make our own luck,” I said. “I believe that, too. ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ Louis Pasteur.”

  “The pasteurized-milk dude?”

  “The same.”

  “He say that to explain how he came up with the idea?”

  “No,” I said, “he said it years before he came up with the idea. The idea proved his point, you might say.”

  “Looks that way,” Art agreed. “Speaking of ideas, I’ve got an idea the Chattanooga PD or the ME’s office will release Willis’s name either today or tomorrow.”

  “Probably,” I said. “They’re bound to be feeling some pressure to show they’re making progress on the case.”

  “I figure the Knoxville media will pick up the story, too,” he said, “since Willis lived in Knoxville till a few months ago.”

  “But of course,” I sighed. “Local angle on a kinky case.”

  “I keep thinking about the parents of that kid,” said Art. “This is going to dredge up some intense feelings for them. Rip the scab right off the wound—if they’ve even managed to get as far as scabbing over. Maybe the newspaper isn’t the best way for them to hear about it.”

  I tried to put myself in the position of the parents. I imagined my son Jeff and his wife Jenny; I pictured what it would be like for them if Tyler or Walker had been sexually abused by a trusted adult, and how they might feel if they read about the abuser’s death in the paper. “That would be intense,” I said, “but not necessarily negative. Might be the best news in the world to them. Might be just what they need to set it behind them and get on with their lives.”

  “You don’t ever set this sort of thing behind you,” Art said. “It’s a lot like the death of a child; it haunts you forever. The pain dulls after a while, but it doesn’t take much—a birthday, a scene in a TV show, a crayon drawing you find in the bottom of a drawer—to put a sharp edge on it all over again.”

  I suddenly realized what he wanted to do. “You’re planning to go tell the kid’s parents yourself?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. “Not me. We.”

  “We? You and me? Why?”

  “We ID’d the body,” he said. “That makes us the logical messengers. We’re witnesses to the death, in a way; we’re the two people who can say, with firsthand knowledge and absolute certainty, ‘The man who molested your son is dead, and here’s how he died.’ Besides,” he added, “telling them is the decent thing to do, and we’re the only decent guys I can think of at the moment.”

  I could think of several, but I knew Art well enough to know that his mind was made up. And his reasoning, if not strictly logical, was emotionally compelling. “Okay,” I yielded. “When?”

  “Tiffany doesn’t get home from school and cheerleader practice for another couple hours,” he said. “How about I pick you up at your office in half an hour? That gives me time to call the folks in Chattanooga.”

  “You want me to be waiting down by the end-zone tunnel?”

  “I’ll call you when I’m turning onto Stadium Drive,” he said. “That should give you time to wash bone cooties off your hands and come downstairs.”

  Half an hour later, he called back. “Okay, I just turned off Neyland onto Lake Loudoun Drive, and I’m turning onto Stadium now. Hey, what’s going on in Thompson-Boling Arena? I see a ton of media trucks.”

  “A creationist rally,” I said miserably. “I mean, ‘intelligent design.’ Oh, and thanks for rubbing salt in the wound.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll use lemon juice next time. Or maybe lemon meringue pie.” He snorted with laughter.

  “Bye,” I said, and hung up. I made a pit stop in the bathroom that adjoined my office—a useful vestige of Stadium Hall’s former life as a dormitory—then locked up and headed down the stairwell.

  Just as I walked out of the building, Art rounded the end of the stadium and stopped at the chain-link gate to the end-zone tunnel. He was driving an unmarked gray Impala I hadn’t seen before. Unlike the battered white sedan he usually drove, this car had glossy paint and clean upholstery, and the interior did not reek of spilled coffee and stale cigarette smoke, the way police cars often do. “Nice wheels,” I said. “How’d you rate a fine steed like this?”

  “Blackmailed the chief,” he said. “Not on purpose, though. He asked me last week how the undercover work was going, and I said, ‘Pretty good, Chief; by the way, I see you’re doing a little undercover research on adult web sites yourself.’ Hell, I was just messing with him, but he turned red and broke into a sweat. Next thing you know, I get a call from the motor vehicle pool telling me to come swap my old beater for this thing. I guess you were right,” he added.

  “About what?”

  “Chance does favor the prepared mind.”

  “I don’t think Internet porn and accidental blackmail were what Louis Pasteur had in mind when he said that.”

  “No, but it makes me feel better about driving the car if I can quote something highbrow to justify my accidental good fortune.”

  “You think the chief ’s into any of the really bad stuff?”

  “Naw,” he said, “he’s a good guy. But he’s a guy. The percentage of adult males with Internet access who have never visited a porn site is about the same as the percentage of adult males who’ve never jerked off.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Once again, I find myself outside the mainstream.”

  “Which one you talking about? No, don’t tell me—I don’t wanna know.”

  Art drove north on Broadway, in the direction of Broadway Jewelry & Loan. A few blocks shy of the shopping center, though, he turned left onto Glenwood, then left again onto Scott. A sign on one corner announced that we were entering Old North Knoxville. Scott Avenue, like most of the neighborhood, was a street in transition. At one time, it had been an elegant neighborhood of two-and three-story Victorian homes occupying large, shady lots. Over the de cades, though, many of the homes had gone to seed; some had been carved into apartments and smothered in aluminum siding; others had burned and been replaced with bleak brick boxes. The past few years had brought something of a rebirth, in a scattered, piecemeal sort of way. We drove past several houses in varying stages of decay, their lawns overgrown, tree branches clutching at sagging roofs. Then we passed a pocket of beautifully restored homes. Some of these were painted in neutral colors or subtle pastels; others, decked out in vibrant, contrasting colors—one combined turquoise siding with gold windows and orange gingerbread—were what my colleagues in the Art and Architecture Department called “painted ladies.” They reminded me of the drag queens Jess and I had seen at the nightclub in Chattanooga, and the analogy made me smile. I would never paint a house so boldly, but I could appreciate the way they livened up a neighborhood.

  “So tell me about these lucky folks we’re about to drop in on,” I said. “And how do you know if anybody’s even home?”

  “I called the house just before I phoned you,” he said. “Woman answered; I said, ‘Sorry, wrong number,’ and hung up. I didn’t want to get into it by phone.” I nodded. “Parents are named Bobby and Susan Scott; kid’s name is Joseph. Joey. Dad’s a contractor of some sort; mom works part-time as a dental hygienist.”

  “Any other kids?”

  “Don’t know.” He slowed to check a house number. “Must be the next one on the right.”

  The next one on the right was a three-story Victorian with an immense porch that stretched the width of the house and then wrapped around one side. Two of the bedrooms on the second floor had covered, columned balconies as well, and the third floor—which might have been servants’ quarters a century ago—was a marriage of slate roof and dormer windows. The house was a microcosm of the neighborhood itself: a work in progress; a study in transition. One side of the façade was freshly painted, its cedar shakes an ele
gant blue-gray with white trim; the other side was sheathed in a tower of scaffolding through which I glimpsed a patchwork of peeling paint and new, unpainted shakes.

  A minivan was parked beside the house, beneath a porte cochere whose roof was supported by fluted white columns. “Now that’s what I call a carport,” said Art. “They just don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

  “They don’t,” I agreed, “but I bet your heating bill in the winter is about one-tenth what theirs is. Look at all those windows with all those little bitty panes of glass. Some of ’em missing, too, looks like. Probably no insulation in the walls, either—I bet when the winter wind blows, you can feel it inside the house.”

  “Cuts down on the germs,” he said. “Toughens up the immune system, too.” He parked at the curb and cut the engine. “Okay, you ready?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. I never am, for this kind of thing. You just have to take it slow; don’t dump too much on them at once.” He took a deep breath, and I did the same, and then we walked slowly up the sidewalk and climbed the porch stairs.

  The front door was a massive slab of fine-grained oak and bubbly, rippled old glass. The wood—hand-carved in a motif of leaves and vines—had been meticulously stripped and refinished to a lustrous golden hue. The glass was screened on the inside with a curtain of white lace dense enough to give privacy but sheer enough to let in plenty of light. The doorbell, like the door, was clearly original: a keylike knob set into the center of the door, just below the panel of glass. Art gave it a brisk twist, and it responded with a fusillade of clattering dings. I jumped, and Art smiled. “Sorry, I guess I got a little carried away,” he said. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore, either.”

  Inside, we heard the distant clatter of hard-soled shoes on hardwood floors. They drew nearer, then stopped, and a manicured hand pulled back the lace curtain. A woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties peered out at us. Her expression was somewhere between neutral and slightly guarded—about what you’d expect to see on the face of a woman who looks out her front door to find two strange men on her porch. Then I saw something register in her eyes, and her face collapsed into panic and despair. She wrenched open the door and put a trembling hand up to her mouth. “Oh God,” she whispered, “what’s happened now?” My heart went out to her, and I suddenly grasped the full import of what Art had said on the phone: some wounds never heal; some ghosts haunt you forever.

  “Everything’s fine, Mrs. Scott,” Art said quickly. “Nothing’s wrong, I promise. We just have some information we thought you might appreciate hearing from us.” She looked from Art to me and back again. “May we come in?”

  She gave her head a quick shake, as if shrugging off a bad dream. “Yes. Of course. Forgive me.”

  We stepped into a soaring entry hall. On the right side, a wide oak staircase ascended to a broad landing halfway to the second floor, then made a left turn and topped out at what looked to be a sitting area. On the foyer’s left side, a wide columned archway opened into a parlor that could have been transported from the 1890s. Unlike the house’s half-renovated exterior, the interior—at least, what little I had seen so far—looked completely restored. She motioned Art and me to a velvet-covered sofa, its back formed of three ovals framed in walnut. She took a wingbacked armchair, but rather than settling into its embrace, she perched tautly on the front edge.

  Art introduced himself, then me. She nodded as he described my work as a forensic anthropologist, and said, “I’ve read about you. Your work sounds interesting and very important.” There was a hint of a question in her eyes and her voice as she said it.

  I glanced at Art; he gave me an almost imperceptible nod: permission to speak. “A man was murdered a couple of weeks ago in Chattanooga,” I said. “There was no identification on the body. The authorities down there asked if I could help figure out who he was and when he was killed.” Mrs. Scott’s eyes flitted back and forth as she scanned the universe of possibilities, trying to see where this might be leading.

  “Ma’am, Dr. Brockton and I have just identified the body of that man,” said Art. “It was Craig Willis.” She inhaled sharply, and both hands flew to her mouth this time. Her eyes were wide, and I could almost swear I felt electricity crackling from them. Her hands began to shake, and the shaking traveled up her arms and into her shoulders and face and chest, and she dropped her face into her hands and began to sob—soundlessly at first, then with a sort of ragged, gasping noise which gave way to a high, sustained whimper that was more animal than human. I remembered a line from a movie—“the sound of ultimate suffering”—and I knew that was the sound I was hearing. I looked helplessly at Art, then pantomimed a question—Should one of us go to her?—but he shook his head slightly, motioning for me to sit tight.

  She finally wound down, in a series of shuddering aftershocks, and lifted her head, staring out bleakly between her fingers. When she looked at Art, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clean handkerchief, which he held out to her. She wiped her eyes, her cheeks, and her dripping nose, then blew into it twice. By now the handkerchief was sodden, so I handed her mine, too. She repeated the maneuvers, looked at the mess she’d made of both hankies, and gave a sort of embarrassed half laugh. Then she drew a series of deep breaths, as if she had just sprinted half a mile. “I have imagined…this scene…a thousand times,” she managed to say. “A thousand different ways. Dreamed it, day and night. Lived for it, when I couldn’t hang on to anything else to live for. Prayed for it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Art. “I expect you have.”

  “So as much as I’ve rehearsed it, why does it still feel like my insides have just been torn out?”

  “Because they have,” he said. “This time it’s not make-believe.”

  “God, we’ve worked so hard to put that behind us,” she said. “Months and months of therapy. For Joey. For Bobby. For me. For me and Bobby together. For all three of us together. The abuse damn near killed us; now, the recovery’s about to bankrupt us.”

  “I understand,” said Art. “I’m sorry. I know it might not be much consolation, but this case—Joey’s case—inspired us to work harder and smarter to catch guys like Craig Willis. We’ve created a new task force to catch people who use the Internet to target children or trade child pornography. If we can catch them in cyberspace, we can charge them with federal crimes. It’s a small program right now, but it will only get bigger. And we’re closing in on several of these people right now.”

  She looked both distressed and grateful to hear that.

  Art checked his watch. “It’s about three o’clock right now,” he said. “What time will your husband be home from work?”

  “Probably not till seven or eight. He’s working a lot of overtime—that’s how we’re paying those therapy bills.”

  “Would you like us to come back this evening and tell him about this?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “He’ll be upset—he’ll need to be upset, just like I did—and it would be hard for him to do that with you. If I tell him, I can hold him while I tell him, and maybe that will make it easier for him. More bearable, somehow.” She smiled slightly. “He’s a pretty manly man,” she added. “He might actually hit you if you told him. With me, I think maybe he’ll be able to cry instead.”

  Art smiled back. “Sounds like he’s married to a wise woman with a big heart.”

  She teared up slightly at that. “If this is wisdom, I’ll take foolishness any day.” Suddenly she frowned. “Joey gets home from school at three-fifteen,” she said.

  Art stood up. “We were just leaving.”

  She looked relieved and grateful. “He can spot a cop a mile away,” she said. “I’m afraid he’d get really scared if he saw you here. I’ll call his therapist and ask how much we should tell him, and when.”

  “Just remember,” said Art, “it’s likely to be in the newspapers as early as tomorrow. So if you don’t tell him pretty soon, he mi
ght hear it some other way.”

  “Damn,” she said. “I think I see an emergency therapy session in our future this evening.”

  “I know it’s not easy,” said Art, “but it looks like you’re doing all the right things.” He looked around the room. “Sort of like fixing a big old house that’s had a hard life. You just keep plugging away, one room at a time, one problem at a time.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Plugging away. That’s us.”

  She walked us to the door. I held out my hand, and she took it in both of hers and squeezed it warmly. Art held out his arms, and she let him enfold her for a moment before propelling us out onto the porch and down the steps.

  As the Impala reached the corner of the block, a school bus turned the corner, braked to a stop, and flashed its caution lights. Three children—two girls and a boy—stepped from the bus. By the time the bus lights stopped blinking and the STOP sign had folded back against the side of the bus, Susan Scott was at the corner, a smile on her face and an arm around the boy’s shoulder.

  “I think that was a good thing we did just now,” I said.

  “I think maybe you’re right,” said Art.

  CHAPTER 20

  I WINCED WHEN I unfolded the newspaper. MURDERED DRAG QUEEN WAS FROM KNOX, screamed the headline above the lead story in Friday’s News Sentinel. POLICE PROBE POSSIBLE HATE CRIME IN CHATTANOOGA, read the subhead.

  The article was by a crime reporter I didn’t know, one whose byline had first begun appearing in the Sentinel only a few weeks earlier. I pored over the article.

  Chattanooga police made a crucial breakthrough yesterday in a murder that has shocked the city’s gay community to its core, but now a wave of fear could ripple through Knoxville. The battered body of a young man dressed in women’s clothing and a wig was found two weeks ago outside Chattanooga, tied to a tree in Prentice Cooper State Forest. Chattanooga’s medical examiner, Dr. Jess Carter, yesterday identified the victim as Craig Willis, 31, formerly of Knoxville.