Jefferson Bass - Flesh and Bone - A Body Farm Novel

I took the long ramp that swooped downhill and fed me onto Neyland Drive. To my left, the river sparkled in the midday sun. That sparkle looked all wrong; the water should have been roiling, churning blackly, not rippling along as placidly as ever; as placidly as if Jess Carter’s body were not, at this moment, on a gurney in the cooler at the Regional Forensic Center, the top of her skull sliced off, her chest slashed open, her heart and other organs bagged like offal at a butcher’s shop. “Dammit,” I said out loud. “Goddamnit to hell.”

As I passed Thompson-Boling Arena and turned right onto Lake Loudoun Drive, I noticed blue lights behind me. I pulled to the curb to let the police car pass. Instead, it jerked to a stop behind me, and John Evers got out and approached my door. I rolled down my window. “What’s the matter?” I said. “Has something else happened?”

“I need you to get out of the vehicle now,” he said. “We’re impounding this truck as evidence in a murder investigation, and I need you to come back to the station with me. I have more questions for you, Dr. Brockton. A whole lot more questions. And I need a whole lot better answers from you this time around.”

EVERS PUT ME INthe back of his car for the ride back to KPD. I didn’t like how it felt back there. He waved off my efforts to find out why he had chased me down. “We’ll talk once we’re in the interrogation room with the tape rolling,” was all he would say. I took it as a bad sign that he used the word “interrogation.”

The interrogation room turned out to be the same room as the “interview room”; the only thing different was the atmosphere, which had turned distinctly hostile. Horace Bingham was already sitting in the same chair he’d occupied half an hour before; actually, for all I knew, he’d been sitting in it ever since I’d driven away. He was studying a yellow legal pad, and he did not look up as we entered.

Evers pointed wordlessly to the chair that faced the video camera, then laid the microcassette recorder on the table again. “Just as before, Dr. Brockton, we’re going to record this,” he said. He pressed the RECORD button and announced, “This is an interrogation of Dr. William Brockton, regarding the murder of Dr. Jessamine Carter.” There was that word again, “interrogation.” Evers gave the date and the time, then set the recorder down on the table in front of me.

“Dr. Brockton, let’s go back to last Friday night at the restaurant,” Evers said.

“Okay,” I said. “I don’t know what else I can tell you about it, but I’ll try.”

“Who was it who first saw her ex-husband sitting at a nearby table, Dr. Carter or you?”

“He was at the bar,” I said, “not a table. She saw him. I had met him once, a few years ago, but I would never have recognized him.”

“And she left you and went and sat with him.”

“For a few minutes.”

“Earlier you said it was at least ten minutes.” He turned to Horace. “What were his exact words?”

Horace flipped through his legal pad, then read in a halting monotone, “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Seemed like an eternity.” Had I really said that? And had Horace written down every word I’d said?

Evers swiveled back to me. When he did, one of his knees grazed mine. He shifted slightly so our knees alternated, rather than bumping together. But in shifting, he also scooted closer to me. Uncomfortably close. “An eternity,” he repeated. “That’s a pretty long time, isn’t it, Dr. Brockton? What did you think about during that eternity?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I guess I wondered what he was doing there, and I wished he hadn’t been. I worried about what this might do to Jess, and to things between us. I worried about our food getting cold, too, I remember that.” I tried to smile to break the tension between us, but he wasn’t buying it, and that made the smile feel doubly false.

“Were there other people in the restaurant?”

“Sure. It was a Friday night. It was pretty full.”

“Some of those people notice that your date had ditched you for a guy at the bar?”

“She didn’t ditch me, and she wasn’t my date, exactly.”

“She wasn’t? You were in a sexual relationship with this woman, and you took her out to dinner in a fancy restaurant. I’d call that a date. What do you Ph.D. types call that?”

“I wasn’t thinking about it as a romantic evening. I was trying to cheer her up, make her feel better, after she got assaulted in my office.”

Evers turned to the fireplug again. “You hear that? He wasn’t thinking about it as a romantic evening. You just talked to that waitress, didn’t you?” Horace nodded. “What was it she said about how he was acting? She said it looked kinda lovey-dovey, didn’t she?”

Horace flipped back a ways in the legal pad. “She said, ‘He kept touching her hand. He kissed her hand. I thought maybe it was an anniversary or something.’ That’s what she said.” His stenographic skills were remarkable. Art had clearly underestimated Horace’s contribution to the investigative duo’s work.

Evers turned back to me again, scooting a little closer still. His knee was now nearly to my crotch, and he was leaning across the corner of the table toward me, looking me square in the eye. Without taking his eyes off mine, he swiveled his head slightly in the direction of his partner. “And did she say how the good doctor acted while his lady love was having the tête-à-tête with her ex-hubby, and how he acted after she came back?”

“She said, ‘He seemed nervous at first, and then he looked more and more upset,’” Horace read. “‘I asked if I could get him anything-a cup of coffee or a drink-and he almost bit my head off. When she finally came back to the table, it looked like maybe they were having a fight. Not a shouting fight-people don’t do that in restaurants like the Bistro. One of those quiet fights where the couple just whispers but the woman still ends up crying. Except he was the one who looked like he was crying.’ That’s how she said he acted.”

I felt myself getting angry. I tried to rein it in-Evers was clearly pushing me on purpose, trying to throw me off-balance, get me to say something he could use against me-and I wanted to be careful not to do that. “And what did she say about the ex-husband,” I asked, “and how he acted when he saw her having dinner with another man?”

Evers smacked his palm down on the table, hard. It sounded almost like a gunshot, and it made me jump. It made the tape recorder jump, too. “I’m asking the questions here, Dr. Brockton, not you. But since you asked about him, I’ll tell you something. We’ve already looked at Preston Carter. We always look first at the husband or the ex. And he’s got something you don’t have, Doc. You care to guess what that might be?” I shrugged and shook my head. I had an uneasy feeling what it might be, but I didn’t want to say the word. “He’s got an alibi,” said Evers. “He is a deputy district attorney, and he has a damn good alibi.”

He picked up the recorder and read the time off his watch, saying there would be a short break in the interview. Then he looked at Horace and cocked his head toward the door of the room. They walked out without a word. The door closed behind them gently, but even so, the sound of it clicking shut seemed almost deafening in the hard, empty room.

I pulled out my cellphone and hit SEND. My last call had been the one from Art, so the phone automatically dialed him. Please answer, I prayed, and he did. “Art, I’m scared,” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure, but I’ve got a bad feeling.” I told him how Evers chased me down and referred to my truck as evidence, and hauled me back in, and all but accused me of Jess’s murder.