Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone - A Body Farm Novel

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 might 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.

I WINCED WHEN Iunfolded 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.

An autopsy by Carter, supplemented by a skeletal examination by University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist (and “Body Farm” founder) Bill Brockton, indicated that Willis was killed by massive and repeated blunt-force trauma to the head. Willis’s identity eluded investigators initially because no form of identification was found on his body, and the skin of his hands-including the fingerprints-had peeled off by the time the corpse was found. One piece of the missing skin was recently discovered by Brockton during a second search of the crime scene, said Carter, allowing the victim’s prints to be matched to prints on file from an employment background check Willis underwent three years ago.

One source close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the slaying appears to be a hate crime, motivated by the victim’s apparent sexual orientation. “He was wearing a sort of female dominatrix-looking outfit,” said the source, “consisting of a long blond wig and a black leather corset, which most people would consider to indicate an S amp;M fetish or a quote-unquote kinky lifestyle. To some guys around here, a man in that kind of getup is like a red flag to a bull.”

East Tennessee gay rights activists have decried the slow pace of the investigation. “If a straight, conventional man or woman were killed in such a horrific manner, the police would leave no stone unturned,” said Steve Quinn, coordinator of the Chattanooga Gay and Lesbian Alliance. “In this case, they seem more interested in sweeping the murder under the rug. The authorities here seem to consider homosexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals to be expendable, and that’s an outrage.” Knoxville activist Skip Turner added, “Craig Willis is a martyr in the struggle for sexual freedom. His bones cry out for justice.”

Willis had moved from Knoxville to Chattanooga approximately six months ago, said Carter. He taught at Bearden Middle School for three years before moving to Chattanooga, where he had recently opened a karate school called Kids Without Fear. No one answered repeated calls to either Willis’s home phone or the number listed for Kids Without Fear.

I was surprised the reporter hadn’t contacted me, since Jess had mentioned my involvement in the investigation. I was also surprised he hadn’t gotten wind of Willis’s arrest record or proclivities. A few hours after Art phoned her with Willis’s ID, Jess called him back to say that a search of his apartment had yielded hundreds of images of child pornography-in print, on CDs, and on his computer’s hard drive. Some of the photos showed only nude children; some showed other adults with children; and some showed Willis himself performing sex acts with boys. A more seasoned or better-connected journalist would have gotten wind of the search, I felt sure, or at least the arrest record.

The story left me with very mixed feelings. I knew it might help the detectives to have more information than the general public now possessed. But it turned my stomach to hear Craig Willis, molester of children, described as a martyr to anything other than depravity and predation.

I wondered, too, about whether Jess had some agenda in releasing the information the way she did. Was she the unnamed source who referred to Willis’s “kinky lifestyle,” too? That didn’t sound like the open-minded Jess I knew, but she could have said it to be deliberately provocative. I’d suspected she was frustrated with the slow pace of the investigation in Chattanooga. By framing the news in a way that sparked the anger of gay rights activists, was she hoping to ratchet up the pressure on the police? Jess was a smart woman and a gifted medical examiner, so I was sure she had thought carefully about what to say. She was also fearless and a bit of a maverick, though, and I hoped that she hadn’t crawled out onto some limb farther than she should have.

THE HEAD HAD BEENsimmering for three days down in the Annex before I took it out of the kettle for good. The hot water, bleach, Biz, Downy, and Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer had done their work well: the remaining bits of tissue scrubbed off easily with a toothbrush; the bone had lightened to a deep ivory; and the aroma steaming off of it was like fresh laundry. Well, fresh laundry that had been mighty rank, for quite some time, before it went into the wash. Fresh laundry that could use another cycle or two. Still, the improvement was dramatic, and the results quite tolerable. I could take this skull back to Stadium Hall without offending anyone’s sense of propriety or smell.

I set the skull and the top of the cranial vault on some paper toweling to dry, opened the valve that drained the kettle, and fished a few small bone fragments from the mesh screen in the bottom. I placed the fragments in a small ziplock bag, then packed everything in a cardboard box, cushioned with more paper toweling.

Jess had called to say she was headed for Knoxville; she had two autopsy cases waiting for her in the cooler at the hospital, but before she tackled those, she wanted to see what information about the murder weapon I could glean from the skull now that it was stripped of its soft tissue. “Flesh forgets; bone remembers,” she had said just before hanging up. It was a mantra of mine that I’d uttered enough times for her to remember, apparently. Her voice had regained most of its usual energy; either she was trying hard to sound cheerful again, or she’d managed to get some rest since I saw her looking so haggard in the morgue at the ME’s office. I phoned Peggy, my secretary, and asked her to steer Jess to my office, which was at the far end of the stadium from the administrative offices, when she showed up.