Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone - A Body Farm Novel

“Don’t you dare patronize me,” she said. “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t. If I sounded patronizing, I apologize. I’m a little confused here,” I added. “Normally the police notify the next of kin privately before a murder victim’s identity is released. Did I understand you to say that you learned of his death from the newspaper?”

“Yes,” she said. “I read it in the newspaper . And while I sat there reading it, a television crew came and knocked on my door, asking how it felt, knowing my son had been brutally murdered.”

Jess’s face was crimson. “Mrs. Willis, I am terribly sorry you were not notified personally. Our investigator did try to locate relatives, but on several leases and medical forms your son signed recently, he wrote ‘None’ in the blank where it asked the name of his closest living relative.”

“That is a lie,” the woman snapped.

“It may be,” said Jess in an even, icy tone that set off warning bells in my head, “but if it is, it’s his lie, not ours.”

With startling quickness the woman darted forward. She slapped Jess across the face with such force that Jess fell across the desk. The two-by-four dropped from her right hand and clattered to the floor; the skull shot free of her left hand, arcing toward the filing cabinet beside the door. I made a lunge and managed to snag it just before it hit. The woman continued to rain blows on Jess, who seemed too stunned to even shield herself. I hastily set the skull down on the filing cabinet and took hold of the flailing arms, pulling the woman backward. She had begun to sob, great, heaving sobs that made her whole body shudder in my grasp.

“You will be sorry,” she said to Jess. “You ruined my son’s reputation. You will pay dearly for that.” Jess just stared, dumbfounded, her face a mottled mass of splotches and scratches. The woman twisted in my grip to face me; her own face was contorted and quivering and frightening. “Did you do that to him? Did you turn him into one of your skeletons?”

“Mrs. Willis, we needed to know what sort of murder weapon to look for,” I said.

“Damn you to hell,” she said. “Give him to me.”

“I’m sorry, but we can’t,” I said. “This is evidence in a murder investigation. We want to catch whoever killed him.”

“Give him to me!” she shouted, and sprang toward the filing cabinet. I managed to wedge myself between her and the cabinet, blocking her path. Behind us, I saw Jess pick up the telephone and punch 911. “I’m calling from Dr. Brockton’s office under the football stadium,” Jess said. “We have a disturbed and violent woman here. Could you send an officer right away, please?…Yes, I’ll stay on the line until help arrives.”

Mrs. Willis backed away from me, her venomous eyes darting from Jess to me and back again to Jess. She pointed at Jess again. “You will be sorry,” she said. And then she spun and hurried out the door.

Jess and I stared at the empty doorway in amazement, then at one another. “That…went…rather well, I think,” said Jess. A moment later she began to shake. Another few moments, and she began to cry. She was still crying when the four UT police officers arrived.

JESS STILL SEEMED SKITTISHhours after being attacked by Craig Willis’s mother. If anything could soothe her, I figured, it would be a quiet dinner at By the Tracks Bistro.

By the Tracks was named for the railroad tracks that passed dish-rattlingly close to its original location. The restaurant had started small, but quickly won a devoted customer base through a combination of great food, attentive ser vice, quiet ambience, stylish décor, and only slightly painful prices. It had long since outgrown its small beginnings and trackside location, but the name had stuck. Year in, year out, By the Tracks remained arguably Knoxville’s best restaurant. Not its most expensive-that superlative belonged to the Orangery, a classic, chichi French restaurant a few blocks away. But I’d never found the Orangery particularly relaxing: every time I ate there, gussied up in my Sunday best, I half expected to be judged, found wanting, and tossed out as riffraff halfway through my meal. At By the Tracks, on the other hand, I could wander in without a reservation, wearing faded jeans and a polo shirt, and be certain of a warm welcome and a delicious meal. Their entrées ranged from basil-stuffed trout over Israeli couscous, at the fancy end of the spectrum, to the biggest and best sirloin burger in town, maybe in all of Tennessee.

Within five minutes after we settled into a booth, Jess was sipping a Cosmopolitan and visibly relaxing. Another drink, a half hour, and half a bacon cheeseburger later, she was smiling and laughing. My hope was that by the end of the meal I might be able to persuade her to stay at my house, but I didn’t want to pressure her-that might undo all the good the meal had done-so I kept the conversation light. I couldn’t resist telling her how beautiful and thrilling she had been the other night; she blushed and looked shy at the compliments. But she did not look displeased.

We had just gotten a crème brûlée for dessert, plus a coffee for Jess, when I saw her eyes lock onto something in the direction of the bar. Her expression froze; it seemed to contain equal measures of pain, fear, and fury. “Jess,” I said, “what’s wrong?” I turned and scanned the bar but saw nothing amiss.

“It’s Preston,” she said. “My ex. He’s sitting over there at the bar. He’s been watching us. That son of a bitch is stalking me.”

I turned again. This time, I vaguely recalled having met the man at the corner of the bar once, several years earlier, at a forensic conference. He was a lawyer-a prosecutor, if memory served, which is probably how he and Jess first connected. “Do you want me to go tell him to get lost?”

“No,” she said. “I need to deal with this.” She pushed away the crème brûlée, drew a deep breath, and set her jaw. Then she slid out of the booth and stormed over to the bar. I would not want to be in his shoes right about now, I thought. Jess’s hands flashed angrily as she spoke; I couldn’t hear any of her words, but her tone carried, and it was not happy. I saw him shake his head vigorously, as if denying something-that he had followed her? — and then he seemed to go on the offensive. He pointed at me, and for a while they both sounded mad. Then his tone turned pleading, and her tone softened. She sat down on a barstool beside him. By now I was staring openly at the two of them; for her part, Jess was looking intently at his face. He reached up and wiped his eyes. She wiped hers.

Jess stayed at the bar for ten minutes going on eternity. When she finally came back to the booth, she would not meet my eyes. She sat down gingerly, as if the seat were wired with explosives. She didn’t speak. “Talk to me, Jess,” I said.

“He’s in town for a DA’s conference,” she said. “Bob Roper, the Knox County DA, recommended this place. He swears he would never have come here if he’d had any inkling I’d be here with a date.” She glanced up at me briefly, then dropped her eyes again. “I believe what he said.”

Every alarm I had was ringing like crazy. “What else did he say, Jess? You seem more upset, in a pulled-in sort of way, than you did when you thought he was following you.” I realized what my intuition was telling me. “You’ve just left me, haven’t you? We barely got started, and it’s already over. Is that it?”

This time she faced me squarely. She was crying a little, but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Dammit, Bill, you’re the last person I would ever want to hurt. You are the kindest, sweetest, smartest, most loving man I know. What you gave me the other night made me feel alive, and loved, and desired again for the first time in a long, long while. It was so lovely, and so healing. And maybe this is just a bump in the road.” She drew a deep breath and shook her head. “I thought I was done with him, but now I’m not so sure. Shit, the guy still gets to me. Look what this one chance encounter has done to me.” She gave me a small, sad smile. “The irony is, I could probably be happier with you. Preston doesn’t actually like me all that much. And when I’m with him, I don’t like me all that much.” She gave me the half smile again, and I thought it might tear my heart out. “You, on the other hand, like me a lot. These past few days, I’ve liked myself, too. More than I have in…maybe ever . You see me through eyes of kindness, and when I see myself reflected in your eyes, I see myself a little more kindly, too.” She slid a hand across the table, laid it tentatively on mine. Part of me wanted to clasp it and never let go; part of me wanted to fling it away from me. “I know I don’t have the right to ask this, but could you just give me some space for a while, let me try sorting through what I feel and what I want?” I couldn’t speak. I swallowed hard and looked down at the table, at our two hands. Neither of them seemed like mine anymore. “I worked with a therapist for a while when the breakup was at its worst,” Jess was saying. “Maybe she can help me untangle the stuff that’s underneath this. The deeper stuff-the stuff that seems to make it hard for me to choose things that would be good for me.”