J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

“Tammy’s a lonely woman with a lot of bitterness about how her life’s turned out,” I say. “She never even heard about Dean Corll until she saw a thing on TV about him, and then she became obsessed. Moody, her brother. . his disappearance is to her what the Kennedy assassination was to Oliver Stone. The moment when everything turned bad.”

“So she’s making it up?”

I shake my head. “She believes it. It’s just not true.”

“Have you actually looked at her website, though? I did and it seems pretty convincing. I can tell you the Corll experts respect what she’s doing-”

“Then they’re not too bright. No disrespect, but a lot of these armchair theorists aren’t. And no I haven’t read it. I don’t need to. I know for a fact Moody wasn’t kidnapped by Dean Corll. Please.”

“And you didn’t become a cop in the first place because of his disappearance? That’s what she seems to think.”

The sneer on my face must speak volumes.

“You deny it,” he says. “But if you’re so sure your cousin wasn’t a victim, then what did happen to him? Answer me that.”

“Like I said, I was just eleven. Moody was fifteen and that’s a world of difference. His sister wants a glamorous explanation for what happened to him, and in our sick and twisted society being the victim of a serial killer is glamorous. But that doesn’t make it true.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“And I’m not going to, Brad. All I’m going to say is this: don’t spread around what Tammy tells you like it’s holy writ. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There’s a reason I don’t return her calls-and if you want me to return yours, then drop it.”

“You already don’t return my calls.”

“Exactly,” I say. “And you wonder why.”

I’m awake now and burning with anger, the same smoldering rage I feel every time Tammy Putnam’s name comes up. Charlotte knows better now than to even mention her. The woman is certifiable, and has a knack for dragging other people into her insanity.

First she’d ruined her own marriage and poisoned her kids against her, then left alone had started chipping away at the rest of us. Before he died, she even had my uncle all turned around, the man who pretty much raised me, halfway convinced his flesh-and-blood son had been murdered by a psychopath-and I, his adopted son, was keeping the truth from him. She’s never had any idea the kind of grief she’s stirring up, and wouldn’t care anyway. Everything she does is about herself. It’s always been that way, even in the spring of 1973.

I run a couple of lights on my way to the medical examiner’s office, and screech to a halt in the mostly empty parking lot. Inside, I follow a path of bright corridors to my brother-in-law’s lab, but Bridger isn’t in. The shades are drawn and the door locked tight. I continue down the hall to Dr. Green’s lair, wishing I’d gone home to sleep like Bascombe told me instead of wasting my time on Brad Templeton.

“You’re early,” Sheila Green says.

“Fine,” I snap. “I can come back later.”

“Who put the burr under your saddle, huh? Is that any way to talk to a lady?”

“I retract my statement.”

“Good boy. Now let’s go downstairs and get started. I’m looking forward to this.”

In the elevator she takes out her cell phone and shows me the pictures she snapped on Friday, the day of the snow. Her Mercedes in the ME’s parking lot, blanketed with an inch of white powder. A five- or six-year-old kid standing next to a stunted snowman in the front yard of a hulking brick two-story. Dr. Green and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man I assume is the other Dr. Green, the cardiologist, each of them palming snowballs like they’re about to start a fight.

“What about you, March? You take any?”

“I was working.” I rub my eyes. The snow seems like ages ago, but it’s been less than forty-eight hours since it came and went.

“You were working,” she says. “So was everybody else, but that didn’t stop us from going outside and enjoying ourselves. I mean, when was the last time it snowed like that in this town? Oh, right: never. All people do around here is whine and complain about the weather, how hot it is, how miserable, all the mosquitoes flying around. I get sick of hearing it. Then something like this happens and you don’t even take a moment to experience it?”

“Hey, I’m from Houston. Where were you born?”

She frowns. “I didn’t know that about you. It explains some things.”

“I don’t complain about the weather. I like the heat. It’s what separates the men from the boys. Only a certain kind of person can live in this town.”

“Now, that I can agree with. You know what my husband says? This city is a cocktail of everything wrong in the country-suburban sprawl, consumerism, religious fanatics-with a little olive of sanity floating in the middle.”

“Your husband sounds like an Inner Looper. Where’s he from?”

She smirks. “Virginia. But like the bumper sticker says, we weren’t born here, but we got here as fast as we could.”

“You and half the population of Louisiana.”

Her mouth twists. As Templeton would say, a palpable hit. “You know I went to Tulane, don’t you?”

“I’m just saying. If you come here from Louisiana and complain about the heat. . well, what were you expecting?”

Small talk with Sheila Green. I’ve definitely stepped through the looking glass. She seems to realize this, too.

“While I’ve got you in such an obliging mood,” she says, “let me ask you one thing. Your lieutenant, that beautiful Denzel-looking man?”

“You mean Bascombe? I don’t see the resemblance.”

“You don’t have the right kind of eyes. Anyway, did you pick something up from him last night, something a little off?”

“That tongue-lashing he gave me? Standard operating procedure.”

The temperature drops as we enter the autopsy theater, where an assistant in scrubs is already busy arranging instruments. Simone Walker’s body lies on a stainless steel table, translucently white under the bright lamps. Green goes straight over, but I hang back.

People say sometimes that you never grow accustomed to death, that something about a murder victim will always get to you, no matter how many you’ve seen before. But you do get used to it and it happens all too quickly. Perhaps the only profession that acclimatizes you quicker is war. Looking at the body on the slab, I feel nothing but curiosity. With the doctor’s help, it might speak to me. It might assist me in my work. Whatever a person really is-a consciousness, even a soul-is long gone at this point. Simone, to the extent she exists for me at all, isn’t lying on the table. She’s in the air, ever present and not at all.

I approach slowly, taking in the cold, clinical details that only here can be revealed. From the rib cage down the long line of her body, the skin remains untouched, almost pristine. The fatal wound is just over the breast, and it looks like the blade was buried to the hilt and seesawed back and forth, opening the gash ever wider.

“What I think,” Green says, “is that he killed her first with this one blow.” She leans over the wound with a gleaming pair of tweezers, clamping onto something within the opening, then holding it up for inspection. “See that? Some kind of fiber. If you had the top she was wearing, I would bet this thread would match up. But the clothes weren’t at the scene, were they?”

“Just the shorts she was wearing,” I say.

“The other puncture wounds are very different. See how uniform they are?” She points to six thin punctures in a row, arcing in a crescent across Simone’s chest. “He took her clothes off afterward, and probably straddled her, and started stabbing like this.” She reverses a scalpel in her fist and pummels the air. “I don’t know the significance of that, but it’s interesting.” The assistant hands her an instrument and she measures the depth of the wounds. “They’re shallower than the first stab.”