The Bone Thief bf-5 Read online

  I raised my hands, stretching my thumbs and forefingers into L-shaped brackets, and framed my face in the handmade viewfinder. Leaning closer to the mirror, I turned my head slightly to the right and widened the space between my hands. There: That was how I’d framed the shot of Gershwin’s face, almost face-on but favoring the left side just a bit. Glancing down at Gershwin’s photo again, I realized that I’d photographed her at exactly the same angle as the television camera had, night after night. Interesting, I thought. Even though she’s dead, I still wanted her to look the same; I still wanted her to be the same.

  But even before death, who had she been? For that matter, who was I? A professor, a scientist, a student of death, a consultant to the state’s medical examiners and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I was also a father, a grandfather, and a widower; since losing my wife to cancer several years earlier, I’d had two brief romances. A year or so back, I’d fallen for a smart, sassy medical examiner from Chattanooga; then, just months ago, I’d gotten involved with a beautiful, baffling librarian. To say that both romances had ended badly would be a huge understatement: the M.E. had been murdered, and — by a twist of fate whose bizarre mirror-image symmetry I only now recognized — the librarian had turned out to be a murderer.

  I caught myself frowning in the mirror. Those episodes, those details of my life, seemed oddly unrelated to the face of the middle-aged man staring out at me from the wall of glass. His face seemed almost to belong to someone else, not me. I glanced to my left, where a side mirror caught the same half-stranger’s face in three-quarter profile. In the corner, where the two mirrors met, was a third take on the same face, this one bisected by the vertical seam in the glass. Thus reflected and bisected, I stood transfixed by these partial, unrevealing stand-ins for myself, whoever “me” really was.

  The jangle of the telephone interrupted my reverie. The lateness of the call surprised me; as I answered the bedroom extension, I noticed that Randall Gibbons — formerly Maureen Gershwin’s coanchor and now the solo anchor — was wrapping up the eleven o’clock newscast. Usually the only calls that came this late were from police, so I suspected I was being called to a death scene, and as I hurried to the phone on the nightstand, I found myself hoping for the distraction and the mission of a case. Perhaps that was who I really was, I thought, perhaps that was what really defined me: Maybe I was merely a reflection of the call, the case, the crime scene, the forensic puzzle.

  The phone’s caller ID display told me it wasn’t the police contacting me. But it also told me that the caller—“Burton DeVriess LLC”—might have something almost as interesting to offer.

  CHAPTER 3

  The backhoe lurched and bucked as its claw tore into the wet, rocky clay of Old Gray Cemetery, one of Knoxville’s oldest and loveliest burial grounds. The name felt apt; the day was dreary, and the air was as cold as the mound of chilly soil piling up beside the monument. Officially, spring was only a few days away, but the earth itself still felt as devoid of warmth and life as a corpse.

  The diesel engine labored against some sudden resistance, and as the machine strained, it wheezed out a cloud of black smoke. The soot drifted on a whisper of breeze for ten feet or so — just far enough to engulf Miranda and me — and then hovered.

  Miranda fanned a hand dramatically across her face. “Remind me why we’re courting lung cancer and pneumonia here?” She punctuated the question with a delicate little stage cough.

  I was still a bit vague on our mission as well — not the task itself but the late-night, last-minute nature of the phone call I’d received barely ten hours before, asking for my help. “We’re here to help figure out if Trey Willoughby fathered a child by Sherry Burchfield,” I said.

  Miranda nodded toward the inscription chiseled into the grave marker, a towering obelisk of polished pink granite. “‘Trey Willoughby, beloved and faithful husband’?”

  “Trey Willoughby, at least,” I said. “Not sure about the ‘beloved’ and ‘faithful’ bits. ‘Beloved’ is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but the bone sample we’re about to take could cast a serious shadow on the ‘faithful’ part.”

  “Or the unfaithful part,” she said. “So to speak.”

  “So to speak.”

  “What if the DNA’s too degraded for a paternity test?” I shrugged in response. “And what’s the story on Sherry Burchfield, who might be the mama? I take it she’s not Trey’s loving wife and grieving widow?”

  I shook my head. “Sherry might have been someone’s loving wife and grieving widow,” I said, “once upon a time, but she wasn’t Willoughby’s. When I moved to Knoxville twenty years ago, Sherry Burchfield was Knoxville’s most famous madam.”

  Miranda laughed. “She was definitely well named, I’ll give her that. Isn’t ‘Sherry’ taken from the French word for ‘dear’ or ‘darling’?”

  “French is Greek to me,” I said, “but that sounds right. And it’s certainly consistent with her history. Sherry was arrested a bunch of times for prostitution-related crimes — pandering, soliciting, I don’t know what all — but she never actually came to trial. Perhaps the pen really is mightier than the sword.”

  “The pen?”

  “The pen that wrote in Sherry’s little black book,” I said. “Apparently she was a meticulous record keeper, and rumor had it that her client list included half the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys in Knoxville. Funny thing: When she died, which was maybe ten years ago, her little black book was never found. I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising associate of hers got hold of it and has been collecting hush money for a decade now.”

  The backhoe’s bucket screeched — a harsh, grating sound, like immense steel fingernails on a monumental blackboard — as the claw raked mud from the top of Trey Willoughby’s metal burial vault.

  Miranda grimaced, then shook violently, like a wet dog flinging water from its fur. “Argh.” She shuddered. “Glad I don’t have any fillings — my head would be exploding right about now. So what’s the scoop on this love child Sherry might or might not have had with our man Willoughby? You say she died ten years ago; unless she died in childbirth, I assume the child is older than that.”

  “Considerably,” I said. “Somewhere in his thirties. I’m not sure why he’s just now getting around to tracking down his paternity.”

  Miranda shrugged. “Maybe he just found Sherry’s black book in a shoe box of memorabilia — with the words ‘Big Daddy’ down in the W section, beside Willoughby’s name.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “All I know is that Judge Wilcox signed the exhumation order last night, and here we are this morning, at the request of the man behind the wheel of that car.” I pointed to the cemetery’s entrance, where a gleaming black sedan was gliding through the wrought-iron gates.

  Miranda groaned. “Oh, God, you didn’t tell me we’d be working for Satan on this case.”

  “Now, now,” I soothed. “Grease isn’t really the Prince of Darkness; he just puts on the horns and the hooves when he goes to court.”

  “Grease” was Burton DeVriess, Esq., Knoxville’s most colorful and aggressive attorney. Over the years DeVriess and I had sparred repeatedly and roughly, in murder cases where I’d testified for the prosecution and he’d defended accused killers. A masterfully manipulative cross-examiner, Grease had always managed to get my goat, or at least infuriate my goat, on the witness stand — not by successfully refuting my forensic findings but by baiting me into losing my temper. After years of antagonism, though, Grease and I had turned an unexpected corner a couple of years back: Confronted with an unusual situation — namely, a client who was actually innocent — Grease had hired me to help clear the man’s name. The so-called murder victim had not, I was able to show, been stabbed to death but had died of injuries sustained in a bar brawl. During that case I’d grown to respect DeVriess’s intelligence and commitment to his client. My respect had later turned to deep gratitude when DeVriess helped me clear my own name. Fram
ed for the murder of a woman with whom I’d just begun a love affair — Chattanooga medical examiner Jess Carter — I’d swallowed my pride and turned to DeVriess for legal help. He’d responded by saving my reputation, my career, and my skin. In the process he lightened my bank account by fifty thousand dollars, but he’d earned every penny of it and more. He’d also revealed more human decency than I’d suspected he possessed. Grease wasn’t a saint — not unless the ranks of the saints included materialistic, cutthroat lawyers — but he was a far better guy than most of Knoxville gave him credit for being.

  Miranda’s eyes tracked the sedan — it was a Bentley, one of several thoroughbreds in DeVriess’s automotive stable — as it eased toward us, curve by curve. She frowned, probably out of habit, then laughed at herself. “Much as it pains me to admit it, he does seem to have a warm-blooded mammalian heart beating somewhere in that chest, beneath the reptilian scales,” she said. “But I think maybe I see a pitchfork in the backseat of the car.” She paused. “And get a load of that tag.” A vanity plate on the front bumper read $2BURN. I assumed it was a reference to a multimillion-dollar settlement Burt had won recently, in a class-action suit against a crematorium that was caught dumping bodies in the Georgia woods rather than incinerating them. The tag’s combination of cleverness and boastfulness was classic DeVriess. But as I read the plate again, I realized it also sounded like an offer: a taunting Faustian bargain, rendered in stamped metal on a luxury sedan bumper. And that, too — the in-your-face frankness of the crass equation — also smacked of pure Grease.

  The sedan eased off the pavement and hushed to a stop on the brown grass, its mirror finish reflecting the leaden sky and my bronze pickup truck. The driver’s door swung open, and DeVriess slid off the glove-leather seat. His car was worth more than my house; his outfit — a suit of pale gray wool, probably handmade in Italy, the trousers draping onto lustrous black shoes — was probably worth more than my car. Walking toward us, he stepped into a stray clod of clay, which oozed up the side of the shoe and clung to the cuffs of the trousers. He stopped, glanced down, and then laughed. “Morning, Doc,” he called over the din of the backhoe. “And the Amazing Miranda,” he added, bowing slightly and smiling broadly. Miranda — possibly in spite of herself — gave a tiny mock curtsy and smiled back.

  DeVriess walked to the edge of the grave, where more mud coated his shoes and oozed up his cuffs, and he peered in. The backhoe was now chewing through waterlogged clay at the base of the vault, and water seeped from the surrounding walls and poured back into the grave each time the operator lifted another bucketful of soil from the opening. The man had evidently foreseen this complication, for he paused, easing the machine’s giant mechanical arm toward the ground, resting its weight on the curved underside of the bucket. It put me in mind of a human wrist, flexed into an acute, bone-breaking angle, and I flashed back briefly to my son’s tumble from his bicycle twenty years before, and the way his hand had hit the driveway at just that angle.

  Clambering down from the backhoe, the operator lifted a torpedo-shaped pump from the ground and lowered it into the watery grave. A muddy, flattened fire hose, connected to one end of the pump, slithered down the slight slope behind the backhoe and into a swale at the edge of the cemetery. The man clambered up onto the machine again and flipped a switch, and the rumble of the diesel engine was joined by a higher-pitched whine as the impeller of the pump spun up and began sucking water from the grave. The hose swelled slightly, pulsing occasionally as the pump’s intake slurped and gasped. Judging by the granite obelisk that towered above the grave and above our heads, Trey Willoughby’s burial had been quite an affair. His unburial, though less posh, was something of a production as well.

  Thirty minutes later — a half hour marked by three repositionings of the sump pump and two wrestling bouts with a sling of steel cable and a bracelet of heavy chain rattling from the wrist of the backhoe — the steel vault emerged from the grave, trailing muddy water and watery mud. The operator swung it expertly to one side and set it gently on the ground. Then, after opening a pair of latches at the base of the vault, he hoisted the domed top off the vault, exposing the coffin underneath.

  “Kinda like Chinese boxes,” said DeVriess, “one inside the other.”

  “Or Russian matryoshkas,” added Miranda. DeVriess looked puzzled, so she added, “Those nesting wooden dolls.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “I was thinking that, too. Russian matry-whatevers.”

  “Or Egyptian burials,” I said. “Be interesting if the vault and the coffin were painted with Willoughby’s image, like King Tut’s sarcophagus.”

  The coffin was gunmetal blue, its glossy finish dulled by years of dampness and postmortem vapors. A few patches of superficial rust marred the lid, but considering that it had been in the ground for years — eight, according to Willoughby’s death date — its condition was superb. Miranda glanced from the coffin to my truck. “You should park in the underground garage on campus instead of the outdoor lot,” she said. “That coffin’s paint job is holding up a lot better than your truck’s.”

  “Yeah, but I bet the interior of my truck smells sweeter.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “Like beauty, sweetness is in the nose of the beholder, and on the way over here this morning I think my nose was beholding some not-so-sweet aroma from that body we hauled back from Nashville in your truck last week.” She was probably right; Miranda had a keener nose than I did, and the Nashville body — a floater fished from the Cumberland River — had been particularly ripe.

  “Speaking of the truck,” I said, “would you go get the Stryker saw, the scissors, and the pliers while I open up the coffin?”

  “I live to serve,” she said, and although it was a joke — one of her favorite ways of simultaneously acknowledging and mocking the professor-assistant disparity — she said it with genuine goodwill.

  “So, the pliers,” DeVriess said. “I’m thinking those aren’t for opening the coffin.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m an anthropologist, but what I really want to do is postmortem dentistry. Enamel’s the hardest substance in the body, so the DNA in the pulp of the teeth has a decent chance of being undamaged. I’ll pull a couple of molars, but I’ll also cut cross sections from the long bones of the upper arm and the thigh.”

  Burt nodded, and I thought I saw a flicker of impatience in his eyes. Was I droning on in too much detail? Had I already explained, in last night’s phone call, why I needed to go to such lengths to get samples for a simple paternity test? Or had he done enough research on his own, before calling me, to know that DNA could be destroyed by the formalin in embalming fluid and that the teeth and long bones were the body’s most protective vaults for archiving genetic material?

  “It looks like there’s not a lot of research data out there yet on DNA degradation,” he said, as if reading the question in my mind. “Nobody seems to have a good handle on how long our nuclear DNA hangs around after death and what factors affect the rate of decay.”

  “Not much,” I agreed. “Forensic DNA analysis is still a brave new world. Remember, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that DNA testing became readily available.”

  “I remember,” he said. “I was at the beach when the O. J. Simpson case began. I vividly recall sitting in the living room of that beach house watching him inch along the freeway in that white Ford Bronco, with dozens of cop cars trailing him like some huge police funeral procession. That, and the World Trade Center collapse, and the first moon landing, back when I was a ten-year-old kid — those are the three most powerful television events I can remember, the only three where I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when the story unfolded on the screen.”

  “The moon landing, the O. J. circus, and 9/11,” said Miranda, back with us, tools in hand. “From the sublime to the ridiculous to the truly tragic.”

  I knelt at the head of the coffin and groped the underside until I found what I was looking for, a hinged m
etal crank that I unfolded and began turning counterclockwise. Slowly, almost as if it were levitating of its own accord, the upper one-third of the lid swung upward, revealing the face of Trey Willoughby. The skin was ashen, with a slight mottling of dark gray mold — just as the coffin was tinged with rust — but otherwise the face in the coffin was a good likeness of the face I’d seen in an old photo I’d found on the Internet a few hours before. In life he’d been a handsome man — not the looker Maureen Gershwin had been, but attractive — and even now, even eight years postmortem, he was still looking pretty good.

  “You don’t always get what you pay for,” I said, “but in this case the funeral home did a good job. Which one was it?”

  “Ivy Mortuary,” said DeVriess. “Not in business anymore. The owner — Mr. Ivy — died in a car accident a few years back. No heirs.”

  I nodded; the name was familiar, but only vaguely. Over the years many of Knoxville’s funeral homes had sent corpses to the Body Farm, but Ivy never had, to the best of my recollection.