The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (7 page)

His comment pressed a bruised spot in me. “She was deeply disturbed,” I acknowledged. “She was trying to settle Japan’s score with the U.S. over the atomic bomb. Sounds crazy, I know, but that was how she saw it. And she got pulled under by it—she went off the deep end—and she took some other folks with her.” I looked away from Culpepper, out through the grimy windows of my office. What I saw with my eyes was a spiderwork of filthy steel girders, the supports for the hundred thousand stadium seats and the plush skyboxes overhead. But what I saw in my mind was Isabella Arakawa Morgan, who’d purposely killed an old man and accidentally maimed a young physician. Isabella, who’d helped me research and solve a sixty-year-old murder in Oak Ridge, one that had been mysteriously connected to the creation of the atomic bomb. Isabella, who’d come to my house one night and made love to me. Isabella, whom I’d confronted when I realized what she’d done. Isabella, who’d run from me when I did, disappearing into the underground maze of Oak Ridge’s labyrinthine storm sewers. I looked back at Culpepper, who was studying my face closely. I realized that I had no notion of how long I’d stared out through the dusty pane and the dirty girders. Had it been a few seconds or many minutes? “Sorry, Detective. I seem to have spaced out on you there. Ghosts.”

“I understand, Doc,” he said. “I get blindsided by one every now and then, too. My first year on the force, there was this kid—a six-year-old girl—who’d be alive today if I’d been a little smarter, a little quicker. She’d be seventeen now, and I’d probably never think of her. But she’s not seventeen and alive—she’s six and she’s dead. Always six, always dead, and often on my mind.”

“I’m sure there are other people who are alivebecause of you. Don’t forget to think about those.”

“Funny thing,” he said. “Those are harder to remember than the ones who aren’t alive.” He shrugged and turned his palms up. Maybe the gesture was expressing helplessness, maybe acceptance. Maybe both.

“So I remembered something I should’ve asked you this morning at the morgue—an old case of yours. You worked a dismemberment case some years ago, didn’t you?”

“I’ve worked several, actually,” I said, “but only one here in Knoxville. Ten or twelve years ago? No, longer—fifteen years, maybe more.”

“Any similarities to this one? I mean, besides the fact that the victim was cut up? Any chance it was the work of the same killer?”

“Let’s take a look at the file.” I got up and crossed to an ancient four-drawer filing cabinet that stood beside an interior doorway. The olive drab cabinet, chin high, nearly blocked the doorway, which led to the collection: the series of adjoining rooms where nearly a thousand skeletons were neatly boxed and shelved.

Tugging open the balky top drawer—the top left corner of the cabinet had been dented years ago, possibly around the time I was born, and the drawer had an annoying tendency to stick—I took out a manila file folder at the front. The folder contained a listing of all the forensic cases the Anthropology Department had assisted with, arranged chronologically and with a brief description after the case number. Beside case 93-17—the seventeenth forensic case of 1993 (because it was a criminal case, not a donated body, the year was the first number in the pair)—was the notation “Dismemberment/mutilation of male victim.” Squatting down, I slid open the lowest drawer of the cabinet and removed the case file, taking it to my desk. Besides my forensic report to KPD and the district attorney’s office, the file contained brittle newspaper clippings about the case. The grisly crime and the sensational trial had made front-page headlines off and on for weeks: HUMAN BODY PARTS TOSSED IN DUMPSTERS. VICTIM’S SEVERED HEAD FOUND IN DITCH. SUSPECT ARRESTED IN

DISMEMBERMENT CASE. LOVE TRIANGLE MOTIVATED MUTILATION. DUMPSTER

KILLER SENTENCED TO LIFE.

The file confirmed my memory of the case. “That was a crime of passion,” I said. “A stabbing, followed by a crude mutilation of the corpse. Partly a clumsy attempt to dispose of the body, but partly a chance to add postmortem insult to injury. Stab a guy to death, then stab him some more, then hack him to pieces. It sends a message: ‘Mere murder’s way too good for this guy.’”

I passed the file to Culpepper, who flipped through it wordlessly until he got to the photos of the severed body parts. “Yuck. This stuff makes Willoughby’s body look pretty damn good.”

“Doesn’t it? As you can see, the cases are very different. Willoughby died of natural causes, and his arms and legs were cleanly amputated, not hacked off. Nothing personal about that. Hell, if it weren’t for the paternity suit, the dismemberment wouldn’t have been discovered,” I said. Culpepper was nodding glumly. “Anyhow, the Dumpster killer was in prison when Willoughby was buried, so he’s got a pretty good alibi.”

Culpepper frowned. “Figures,” he sighed. “Not my first dead end of the day either. I followed up on the people working at Ivy Mortuary. The former owner, Elmer Ivy, died in 2005, the office manager got married and changed her name and moved who-knows-where, and nobody knows a damn thing about the embalmer who was working there in 2003.”

“Sic transit gloria mundi,”I said.

“Sick what?”

“Sic transit gloria mundi.Latin. ‘Thus passes the glory of the world,’ I think is how it translates. A highfalutin way of saying, ‘We’re nothing but dust in the wind.’ Most of us leave fainter tracks than we’d like to believe. Doesn’t take long for them to get covered over or swept away.” I thought for a moment.

“I know somebody who would probably be able to tell you more about Ivy Mortuary. Helen Taylor. She runs East Tennessee Cremation Services, a crematorium out near the airport. She’s sharp and first-rate, and she’s done business with all the funeral homes in the area. I’d be surprised if she didn’t remember who worked at Ivy Mortuary seven years ago.” I flipped through my Rolodex and jotted down her name and number.

The card tucked behind Helen Taylor’s was sticking up slightly higher than hers, and out of curiosity I flipped to it. It bore the distinctive gold-and-blue logo of the FBI and the name“Special Agent Charles Thornton.” Underneath his name were the words“Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.” Seeing his card, so close on the heels of my conversation about the Oak Ridge case, spooked me all over again. Did all roads—all tracks—lead me back to Isabella?

The stairwell door slammed again, jarring me back to the present and to Culpepper once more. I took another M&M from the beaker—green this time. Culpepper reached in and took one as well, a yellow.

“Okay, I gotta go.” He raised the M&M as if it were a tiny drink and he were proposing a toast. “To finding the tracks before they’re swept away.” Then he tossed the candy straight up, catching it in his mouth as it arced down. “And to not going off the deep end.”

He closed the stairwell door gently on his way out. I let the green M&M dissolve slowly in my mouth, feeling the wall of denial I’d erected around Isabella’s memory melt and crumble like the hard candy shell.

I STARED AT THE SMALL DIGITAL RECORDER IN MY
hand, paralyzed by the countless unspoken questions it posed, questions to which I had no answers. I was as paralyzed by the machine as I’d been by the man who’d loaned it to me: a Knoxville psychologist named John Hoover, highly recommended by my family physician. I’d phoned him for an appointment several weeks earlier, in hopes he could help me sort through some confusion and sadness. In doing so I was heeding the advice Miranda had given me, when she’d said to “take a sabbatical, write a book, see a therapist, get a dog—do whatever will help you heal.” Seeing a therapist had struck me as more efficient than the sabbatical or writing options and as less work (and probably less expense) than the dog option. But sitting in his office, I’d spent forty-five of my allotted fifty-minute session avoiding the real reason I’d come. I’d chattered about my work and about my past, but not about my present or my pain—not about Isabella.

As the final minutes of the session ticked away, Dr. Hoover rose from his overstuffed chair, walked to his desk, and took out a small audio recorder. “Here,” he said. “Maybe it would be easier to start by speaking what’s on your mind into this. You don’t have to share it with me; you can just erase it afterward if you want. But putting words to whatever’s troubling you—naming the parts, telling the story of your sadness—might help you get a handle on it.”

Now, at midnight, sitting in darkness in my living room, I realized I’d been staring at the recorder for forty-five minutes. Did that mean I had only five more minutes in the session with my digital therapist?

Summoning up my nerve, I pressed “record” and began to speak.

NOW IS THE TIME FORall good men to come to the aid of their country. I hate this. I don’t know what to say. I feel like a blackmailer whispering into this thing. How do I tell the story of my sadness? Right now that would be the story of Isabella. But where do I begin the story, and how? Do I begin the day I met Isabella? The day I walked into the Oak Ridge Public Library and she asked if she could help me? Do I begin with the World War II photos she showed me, the ones that helped me find the buried bones of a murdered soldier? Or do I go all the way back to the war itself, the race to build the Bomb, the relentless momentum to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Do I begin that day in August of 1945, when a B-29 took off from the island of Tinian, crossed a thousand miles of the Pacific, and destroyed the city where Isabella’s parents lived? No. That would be her story of sadness, not mine, not ours.

Did our story begin the night we ate pizza and I walked her partway home and listened to the wind sighing in the treetops and felt the urge to kiss her? Or did it begin the night she came to my house bringing a DVD ofDr. Strangeloveand microwave popcorn and Coke? Perhaps it began the moment she pressed herself against me, took me into her arms, and gave herself to me. But what can I say about her? That she was beautiful? She was. She still is, if she’s alive. Exotically beautiful, but in a way that was too subtle to pinpoint. One of her four grandparents had been Japanese; the others had been American missionaries who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time: in Nagasaki in August of 1945, as American B-29s dropped the deadly fruit of the Manhattan Project. Isabella’s ethnicity matters to me; it interests me, not just because it’s so entwined with her crime but also because of my habit of mind as an anthropologist. Knowing her ancestry gives me some skeletal context, something to latch onto when I reach out and try to grasp the enigma of her. Because she is one-quarter Asian, I know that most of her skeletal features are Caucasoid. Most—but not all. Some of the stories told in her bones are Mongoloid, Asian. Her cheekbones, as I picture them in my mind’s eye right now, are slightly higher and wider and flatter than, say, Miranda’s. Her skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s, too, but then again, almost everyone’s skin is a few shades darker than Miranda’s. I remember her teeth in two ways: I remember how dazzling they were when she smiled at me and how quickly hidden they vanished behind the curtain of her hair when she ducked her head shyly. And I remember how they felt when we kissed, smooth and hard and slick against my tongue, nibbling gently at my lip and then, later, biting into the meat of my bicep and the heel of my hand hard enough to leave bruises outlined in tooth marks. If I had thought to run the tip of my tongue along the backs of those front teeth, I might have felt indentations, concavities: the distinctive scooped-out curvature of shovel-shaped incisors, a signature skeletal trait of Asians and Native Americans. But what man in his right mind would think of dental details when a lovely woman presses her warm mouth and trembling body to his?

As I listen to myself say these things, I feel foolish and pedantic. And yet. And yet: I have so few things to hang on to as I try to grasp Isabella that I suppose it’s understandable and forgivable that I should lapse into my comfortable role of professor and anthropologist—categorizer and explainer. Yet the truth is, I barely knew Isabella. Our lives intersected, briefly but powerfully, at two points—no, three. First when Garcia and Miranda and I were exposed to the radioactive pellet Isabella had used to murder Dr. Novak. Next when Isabella helped me discover the location where a murdered soldier had been secretly buried during World War II. And third when she offered her body and her passionate need to me. No, wait, there was a fourth time as well: when I realized that she was the one who had killed Novak, when I confronted her, and she disappeared into the labyrinth of storm sewers beneath Oak Ridge. I followed her into the labyrinth. In hindsight maybe that was a mistake. In hindsight maybe confronting her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe making love to her was a mistake. In hindsight maybe hindsight itself is a mistake—what’s the point of following the trail of regret back into the past? It’s not possible to choose a different path from the very one that brought me to the present, to this exact moment, where I hide in the darkness of my living room and the labyrinth of my heart, murmuring into the digital emptiness I clutch in my hand.

I hate this. I don’t know what to say. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

I DROPPED THE RECORDER AT DR. HOOVER’S OFFICE
the next morning on my way to campus, still feeling self-conscious and vaguely guilty about voicing my thoughts and fears into a microphone. When I walked into the bone lab, Miranda looked at me sharply and said, “What?”

“What do you mean, ‘What?’”

“You have a funny look on your face. Embarrassed or something. Like a kid who’s just peed in his pants.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You okay?”

“Sure,” I lied. “Just preoccupied.”

“Whatever you say. Anyhow, Eddie called. He’s got an appointment next week to get fitted for an i-Hand.”

“The bionic prosthesis? Just for his left hand?” She nodded. “I thought he was more interested in a transplant.”

“He was, but there’s a big problem with that, apparently.” She frowned. “It’s virtually impossible to be approved for a hand transplant unless you’re a double amputee.”