Cut to the Bone Read online

  We took a series of photos—both of us shooting, in the interest of speed. “Okay, good enough,” I said. “Let’s get her tagged and bagged.” Normally we’d have spent more time observing and interpreting the scene, but time was a luxury we didn’t have in the fading light of the mountain ravine. Tyler unfolded and unzipped the heavy, rubberized fabric of the body bag, and together we worked the big C-shaped opening underneath the torso. As we did, maggots—some of them as small as rice grains, some a half-inch long—wriggled from the corpse and dropped into the crevices between rocks. A thought struck me. “Before you put her in to simmer,” I said, “find the five biggest maggots and put ’em in alcohol.”

  “Uh, okay. How come?”

  “The biggest ones must’ve been the first to hatch,” I told him. “Next donated body we get, we document how long it takes the maggots to reach this size. Presto—we know how long this woman’s been dead.”

  “So, when you say, ‘we document’ . . .”

  “I mean you document,” I clarified. “But we both learn something. We start learning to read the bugs like a time-since-death stopwatch. Timing is everything.” He nodded thoughtfully.

  Once the torso was inside, we tucked in the limbs as well, then slid the bag onto the litter. Tyler began zipping it shut, sliding the zipper across the bottom, up one side, and across the top.

  “Don’t close it all the way just yet,” I said. “We might find a few bones from the hands and feet in the crevices.”

  “You want to reach your hand down into snake-land, you go right ahead,” said Tyler. “I’ll start in on this pile of clothes and stuff.” He unfolded a biohazard bag, then began tugging the tangle of fabric from the crevices in the rock. “Looks like some bloody sheets,” he narrated, as I peered down into nooks and crannies beneath the spots where the hands and feet had lain. “Tennis shoes. Bra. Panties. T-shirt. Blue jeans.” He had just finished extricating the blue jeans from the tangle when he gave a low whistle. “Holy shit,” he said, holding up the jeans, “look at this, Dr. B.” I was puzzled at first—the jeans had wider legs than any pants I’d ever seen. Had the woman been morbidly obese? Then I realized what I was seeing: a single layer of fabric, as if one of the seams in each leg had been left unsewn. But that wasn’t the explanation. The explanation was, the legs of the pants had been sliced open, from top to bottom, up the front of each leg. The pants had been removed by cutting them off.

  I took a closer look, and suddenly my blood ran cold. The cut edges of the jeans were stained, for their entire length, with blood. Whoever had cut the jeans off hadn’t done it the way I’d have expected—hadn’t put the blade inside the legs of the pants and then sliced up and out, away from the skin. The jeans had been cut from the outside, by bearing down on the blade and slicing inward. The killer had used the victim herself as a cutting board.

  WE LOADED THE LITTER by the last of the daylight, pausing to put on the headlamps we would need for the climb out of the gorge. We had laid the body bag on first, then the biohazard bag containing the shoes and blood-soaked clothing, all of it cut. Last came another biohazard bag, this one containing a blood-soaked sheet and mattress pad. I lashed the bags tightly in place, so that nothing would spill if the litter tipped or even flipped as the officers hoisted it. When I was sure everything was secure, I slid the handle of the hoe beneath the lashings.

  Tyler turned to look at me, his headlamp bright enough to be blinding even in the twilight. I held up a hand to shield my eyes, and he angled the headlamp down to lessen the glare. “You’re sending the hoe up? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Look who’s become a believer in the value of the hoe,” I said.

  “Hey, if you’d told me why you wanted it in the first place, I’d have believed you,” he said.

  “If I’d told you why I wanted it in the first place, there wouldn’t have been a second place—you’d have stayed up on the bridge,” I countered. “Or locked yourself in the truck.”

  “Could be. But now that I’ve seen the light, I think we should hang on to the hoe till we’re out of the woods. Figuratively and literally.”

  “Can’t. We need both hands free to climb. Besides, the snakes are probably holed up for the night by now.” I didn’t actually know if that was true, but I wanted to reassure Tyler. And myself.

  I looked up at the pale line of the bridge, where Meffert, Sheriff Grainger, and Deputy Aikins were silhouetted against the pewter sky. “Okay,” I called. “Take up the slack. Easy does it.” I stepped away from the litter as the lines twitched and grew taut and the litter slowly ascended. Ascended, but not into heaven.

  Tyler struggled up the rope first, and I followed. We met the sheriff and Meffert on the bridge, where the litter now lay, and we each took a corner and carried it to the truck in silence. For reasons I couldn’t have explained—because I didn’t fully understand them—the procession had a solemn, almost sacred feel to it, as if we were pallbearers at a funeral. Which, in a way, we were, because this was almost certain to be the most attention and dignity that would attend this woman’s death.

  THE FUEL WARNING LIGHT blinked on just as Tyler and I turned off Stinking Creek Road onto the ramp for I-75 South. “Crap,” I muttered. “We need gas.”

  “I think there’s a Pilot station—maybe a truck stop?—at the next exit. Just before we start down the mountain.”

  “Yup,” I said. “You want to grab some food there?”

  “Not really. Last time we ate at a place like that, I got really sick. Remember those chili dogs in Ooltewah? Woof. They tasted bad going down, and worse coming up. I’ve had bait shyness about truck-stop food ever since.”

  “I didn’t realize your digestive system was so delicate,” I said. “You sure you’ve picked the right career path?”

  “Hey, I don’t mind the bodies and the bugs. It’s just the snakes and the gut-bombs I hate.”

  “Duly noted. I think there’s a Cracker Barrel just down the mountain, at LaFollette. Think you can handle that?”

  “Cracker Barrel? Are you kidding?” He made exaggerated smacking sounds. “I could eat there every day. The merchandise is tacky, and the biscuits aren’t what they ought to be, but the food’s great.”

  The Pilot truck stop, with its giant glowing sign of yellow, red, and black, loomed out of the darkness two minutes later. The fuel-pump islands were surrounded by a sea of asphalt, much of it occupied by tractor-trailer rigs that seemed settled in for the night. Many of the cabs were curtained off, but the trucks’ running lights remained on, and the air thrummed with a chorus of diesel engines and auxiliary generators, running to keep refrigerated trailers cool and sleeper cabs warm.

  As we threaded our way through the rows of parked rigs, I glimpsed a pair of legs—pale, bare, female legs—clambering down from one of the cabs. When she emerged from the narrow gap between two trucks, I was stunned to see that she was naked from the waist down, except for a pair of high-heeled shoes. As she crossed the asphalt to the opposite row of trucks, she tugged at the hem of her shirt, pulling it down enough to cover—or nearly cover—her rear end.

  “Jesus,” said Tyler. “Looks like you can get more than chili dogs and indigestion here.”

  “Sure does,” I agreed, wondering what sort of desperation would induce a woman to have sex with multiple strangers every night in a truck-stop parking lot. “Looks like you could definitely get diseased here, too.” I thought of the remains in the back of the truck. “Or maybe dead.”

  The woman rapped on the cab of a truck that was practically outlined in amber running lights. The door opened, and she climbed up. As she did, the hem of her garment crept up her flanks, as if the very fabric had somehow been programmed by some efficiency expert to shave every possible second and excise every scrap of humanity from the transaction about to be executed.

  THE BIG SCOREBOARD-STYLE CLOCK on the Knoxville News Sentinel building
read 9:57 P.M.—three minutes shy of my usual bedtime—by the time Tyler and I reached the city and took the exit for Neyland Drive. It was past Tyler’s bedtime already, if his slumped posture and rumbling snores were any indication. I slowed down, savoring the view on the final mile of the drive. The riverfront stretch of Neyland Drive was pretty by daylight, but it was beautiful by night. The lights of the Gay Street and Henley Street Bridges pooled and smeared in the water, like an Impressionist painting of Paris streets after an evening rain.

  Neyland Stadium loomed dark and hulking as I threaded the truck down the narrow service lane around its perimeter. Weaving between concrete columns and steel girders to the base of the mammoth oval, I tucked the truck into the narrow dead end of asphalt beside the osteology lab. “Tyler, we’re here,” I said. He didn’t answer, so I shook his elbow, causing him to bolt upright and look around, wild-eyed and disoriented. “We’re here,” I repeated.

  “Okay,” he mumbled. “Be right there.” He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “Wow,” he said, sounding slightly more cogent. “I was really out.” He massaged his neck and rolled his head from side to side to work out the kinks. “You want me to start processing the remains now?”

  “Nah. Go home. She’s locked in the back.” I thought of the line the Morgan County sheriff had used a few weeks before. “She won’t be any deader in the morning than she is now. But you might be, if you don’t get some sleep.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get going on it first thing.” He opened the door, but he didn’t get out. “Doctor B?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How could somebody do that to a woman? Butcher her like an animal and dump her like garbage?”

  I shook my head. “I can tell you her race, her stature, her handedness, and her age,” I said. “I might be able to tell you how she died. But why? I can’t answer that one.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “What was it the old maps used to say at the edges, out beyond the known territory? ‘Here be monsters’? I don’t understand it—I’ve got no scientific explanation for it—but there’s evil in the world. Hiding around corners, lurking in doorways, coiling underneath rotting logs. Irrational, inexplicable, powerful evil.”

  A LIGHT WAS ON in the living room when I pulled into my driveway at eleven fifteen, but the rest of the house was dark. Unclipping the garage-door remote from the visor, I clicked the button, eased beneath the rising door, and switched off the ignition. I sat for a moment, the truck’s engine ticking with heat, my heart ticking with disappointment.

  After seventeen years of marriage—and a decade of late-night returns from crime scenes—I no longer expected Kathleen to wait up for me; I’d even taken time to call her, when Tyler and I had stopped for gas, to tell her not to. But I’d been harboring hope that she would ignore the suggestion. Bodies and bones didn’t usually bother me; I regarded them as puzzles to be solved—mental challenges, not human tragedies—but tonight I felt skittish and shaken. The brutality of the woman’s slaying had gotten to me; so had the near miss with the rattlesnake. Had the ticking engine somehow reminded me of the snake’s warning buzz? The deputy’s rhetorical question as we’d loaded up—“Did you know that a rattlesnake’s head moves at a hunnerd and seventy-five miles an hour when it’s striking?”—popped into my mind, unbidden and unwelcome, for the dozenth time since dinner.

  I stripped off my clothes in the garage—I’d shed the jumpsuit earlier, back at the stadium—and tossed them in the washing machine I’d installed in the back corner, at the end of my workbench. It was the old washer, the one Kathleen had exiled from the laundry room after finding decomp-soaked dungarees in it. Now, banished to the garage, it lived a contaminated and constrained life: no more satin pillowcases, silk blouses, sheer nightgowns, lacy undergarments; nothing but stinking shirts, muddy jeans, ruined towels, mildewed socks. My career had been good for America’s appliance manufacturers, I reflected, dumping in extra detergent and twisting the Maytag’s knobs to the longest, hottest cycle. Besides replacing the washing machine ten years ahead of schedule, I had also replaced a practically new stove several years earlier, after carelessly allowing a simmering skull to boil over: a mistake I’d made early in my career, before I learned not to bring my work home. I’d tried drenching the contaminated stove with Pine-Sol, Lysol, and Clorox, but to no avail; switching on any of the burners or the oven would fill the kitchen—swiftly and powerfully—with the pungent odor of human decomposition.

  The garage was already chilly with the night air, and I was shivering by the time I got into the shower in the basement bathroom—my son, Jeff’s, bathroom. I cranked the hot-water valve wide open, adding just enough cold to keep from getting scalded, letting the water pour over me, pummel me, and I hoped purify me. I stood beneath the steaming stream until I’d used every drop of hot water in the fifty-gallon tank. I could have used another fifty gallons and still wished for more.

  Wrapped in a towel, I made my way quietly up the stairs, pausing in the living room only to switch off the lamp beside the sofa. At the far end of the darkened hall, the bedroom door was a rectangle of deeper darkness. Even before I reached the room, I heard the deep, sighing breaths of Kathleen’s earnest, steady sleep. I stood in the doorway and listened. Behind me, in the living room, I heard the hollow, metronomic heartbeat of the regulator clock on the fireplace mantel. The clock had once kept time in my father’s law office, and it skipped not so much as a single beat when Daddy opened his desk drawer, took out a pistol, raised it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger. The clock required winding every seven days, and I welcomed the ritual. I remembered watching my father wind it, gripping the key between his broad thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger; I remembered the time, not long before his death, when he let me wind it, my three-year-old fingers engulfed by his big, helping hand. The clock was my most tangible link to my dead father, and the weekly ritual of winding it allowed me to touch him, to be touched by him, in a way that nothing else could. The clock began striking midnight. I lingered in the doorway until the last stroke died away, then tiptoed into the bedroom, draped my towel on the bathroom doorknob, and slipped into bed with Kathleen.

  Without waking, she rolled toward me, her head instinctively seeking out its accustomed resting place on my chest, her breasts and belly pressed against my side and hip. Her skin felt cool against mine, and she burrowed into the warmth I’d brought with me from the shower. I synchronized my breathing to hers—a trick I’d learned years before, while doing battle with my dissertation—and as her breath and mine became one, I felt my whirling mind and skittish spirit begin to settle. I heard my father’s clock strike twelve fifteen, and twelve thirty, and twelve forty-five, but I did not hear it strike one.

  DEEP IN MY SLEEP, I heard a groan and a cry of distress, and although they seemed to come from somewhere far away, I knew they had come from me. I felt myself struggling, too, but my limbs were weak and ineffectual.

  “Bill. Bill. Honey, wake up. It’s okay.” Kathleen’s voice reached down and took hold of me in the depths, hauling me to the surface of consciousness. Her hands held my wrists; I didn’t know if she was shaking me or restraining me. Both, perhaps.

  I drew a deep, shuddering breath and expelled it, then another. She let go of me and switched on the bedside lamp, then slid herself to a sitting position, leaning against the headboard, laying one hand on my heaving chest, another on my head. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” I said automatically, and then, a second later, “no,” and by the time the word was out, I found myself sobbing. “Oh, God,” I gasped. “I had a dream. An awful, awful dream.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” she said, pulling me to her bosom, stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry. Tell me.”

  But I couldn’t tell her; I couldn’t speak at all, not yet. My breath came in ragged, shuddering gasps—as if it were some separate creature, wild and savage and untamed.

  “Shh,” she soothed. “I’ve g
ot you. I’ve got you.” She rocked and swayed, her fingers cradling my head, her breath washing over me, until bit by bit, breath by breath, my chest rose and fell with hers once more and my fear subsided.

  “We were in the backyard,” I said finally. “You. Me. Jeff. Jeff wasn’t a teenager—Jeff was a little kid—but the time was now, somehow.”

  “I like that about dreams,” Kathleen murmured. “They make up their own rules as they go along. They don’t always make logical sense, but they make emotional sense. Go on.”

  “I was mowing the grass while y’all were kind of milling around,” I said, “and as I was mowing the steep part of the bank, where it angles down toward the ditch, I saw a hole in the ground I’d never seen before. It was big—a foot in diameter—and while I was staring at it, trying to figure out why it was there, I saw a pair of eyes, like glowing red coals, deep inside, and then this immense snake came slithering slowly toward me, slithering out of the hole. It was as big around as the hole, and long—fifteen, twenty feet long.” She held me tighter, running her fingers through my hair and scratching my head to keep me connected to her, to keep me grounded. “It was like the snake knew me—knew all of us. Like he’d been lurking in our midst for a long time, I’d just never noticed him before. And I could tell he was about to do something terrible—to kill one of us, or kill all of us—and I had to stop him. He’d already killed my father—I knew this because the snake’s face looked a little bit like my father’s face—and I knew that he’d been following me ever since he killed my dad. Lurking just out of sight. Biding his time, waiting for the sinister signal or the evil impulse—whatever it was that guided him—to hiss now and cause him to strike. So I ran and got the hoe, and I started chopping him with it. He was coming at me and I was chopping, and chopping, and chopping. I finally managed to cut off his head, but while I was busy chopping off his head, his tail was coiling around me, and by the time the head was off, I was completely trapped in the coils, and the head was looking at me, still alive, the eyes still glowing red. And then I saw more glowing red eyes, deep in the hole in the ground. Another huge snake came slithering out, and then another, and another, and another.”