Authors: Jefferson Bass
I
’d spent all morning avoiding the task at hand—grading the last student’s final exam from Human Origins, the undergraduate course I’d taught this spring—when the intercom in my office beeped. “Dr. B?”
I felt a rush of guilt. I’d been procrastinating for days, and now I’d been caught. “I know, I know,” I groveled into the speakerphone. “The grades were due yesterday. The NFA class ran really long. Apparently, Miranda and I buried the bodies better than we meant to. Took the trainees hours to find ’em.”
Peggy Wilhoit, my secretary, was calling from a football field away, literally. The Anthropology Department’s administrative offices, including my own spacious and ceremonial office as head of the department, were nestled under Neyland Stadium’s south end-zone stands. But my private sanctuary—the small, dingy room where I retreated when I needed to concentrate on a forensic case or a journal article or a stack of overdue exam papers—was tucked beneath the grimy girders of the north end zone. “I’m finishing the last exam right now,” I fibbed. “I’ll bring you the scores in five minutes.” Across the hundred yards of curving corridor that separated us, I imagined Peggy’s bullshit detector flashing and beeping. “Okay, that was a lie,” I admitted. “I haven’t started grading the last one, but I’ll do it now, I promise. So it’ll be more like twenty minutes.”
“I’m not calling to nag you about the grades,” she said. “Although, now that you mention it . . .”
“Forget I mentioned it,” I said. “Grades? Who said anything about grades? What can I do for you?”
“Someone’s on the phone for you. An Angie St. Claire, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. She says she was in the NFA class that ended yesterday.”
I was suddenly alert. “She says right; she was. Put her on.” The phone beeped once when Peggy put me on hold, then beeped again as the call was transferred to me. “Angie? Hello, it’s Bill Brockton. How are you?” There was silence on the other end. “Angie? Are you there?”
“Yes, sir, I’m here; sorry. I’m fine.” She didn’t
sound
fine. She sounded formal, as law enforcement people often do, but she also sounded distracted. No, not distracted; distraught was what she sounded.
“We worried about you when you had to leave so suddenly,” I said. “I hope everything’s okay.”
“Not really, Dr. Brockton. That’s why I’m calling. I’m sorry to impose, but I . . . I was wondering . . .” Her breath got deep and ragged, and then I heard the sound of sniffling.
“Angie, what’s wrong? How can I help you?”
There was another, longer pause; I heard the rustling, scratching sound of fabric covering the handset and then the muffled noise of a nose being blown vigorously once, twice, three times. “Dammit, I wasn’t going to cry,” she sighed when she came back on the line. “Oh well.”
“What can I do for you, Angie?”
“It’s my sister, Dr. Brockton. She . . . um . . . she’s dead.” Silence. I waited. “That call I got yesterday morning—the call that made me leave—it was from my husband, Ned, telling me.”
“I figured you’d gotten some really bad news. I gather it was unexpected. I’m so sorry.” I hesitated, reluctant to pry. Still, she’d called me. “Was it an accident?”
“No,” she said with sudden vehemence, and then she laughed—a short, bitter bark of a laugh that startled me. “It was definitely not an accident. That’s the one thing we can all agree on.” I resisted the urge to fire off questions. “She died from a shotgun blast to the head.” The air in my office suddenly turned electric. “The local coroner says it was suicide. I say it was murder.”
I couldn’t resist any longer. “Tell me about it. Why does the coroner think it was suicide?”
“Because her fingerprints were on the gun. And because her jerk of a husband says it was suicide. He, Don—Don Nicely, how’s that for an ironic name?—says she’d been depressed for months, which I believe, and that she’d threatened to kill herself twice before, which I
don’t
believe.”
“Why don’t you believe it? And why do you think it was murder?”
“Lots of reasons. For one thing, I think—I
hope
—she’d have told me if she felt suicidal. For another, women don’t shoot themselves. A woman takes pills or cuts her wrists. She doesn’t put a shotgun in her mouth and blow her head off. Only men are stupid enough to do that.”
She had a point there. Sixty percent of men who commit suicide use a gun—I knew this because I’d done a lot of reading about suicide—but only 30 percent of women. And a shotgun? Rare for a woman, I was sure, and difficult. Ernest Hemingway had turned a shotgun on himself—he’d fired both barrels of a twelve-gauge, in fact, a feat that required not just long arms but also quite a lot of desperation and determination and coordination—but Hemingway was a six-footer. I tried to recall Angie’s height, but without much success. “Was your sister tall? Did the coroner measure her arms to see if she could’ve reached the trigger?”
Angie sighed. “She was only five three. But it was a short-barreled shotgun. Eighteen inches. She
could
have done it, but she didn’t.
He
did.”
The conversation was difficult for me. Clearly Angie was devastated by her sister’s death, and I wanted to help her, but I doubted I could corroborate her theory. “Why do you think her husband killed her?”
“Because he’s an asshole. Because he’s controlling and manipulative and aggressive. Because he fits the profile of an abusive domestic partner. Because they had a fight the night she died.”
“An argument fight, or a physical fight?”
“Borderline,” she answered. “They were out at a nightclub, and he got mad because she was talking to some other guy. He dragged her out of the bar and shoved her into the truck and laid down a bunch of rubber in the parking lot. There are witnesses to that part. Next morning, he claims, he found her body on the sofa.”
“He didn’t hear the shotgun go off in the night?”
“He says he dropped her at the house and went back out. ‘To think,’ he says. Yeah, right. And supposedly, when he came home a couple hours later, he walked straight through the living room without seeing the bloody mess on the sofa, and went to bed. Thought she’d gone somewhere, he says. Thought maybe she’d come down to see me. Didn’t find her in the living room till he got up a few hours later. So he says. Bullshit, I say.”
“His story sounds weak,” I admitted. “But the fingerprints on the gun—hard to argue with those, unless you’ve got some evidence to refute them. Some way to show that he put her hands on the gun.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s driving me crazy that I didn’t have a chance to work the scene.”
“Is that because it would have been a conflict of interest for you?”
“It’s because she lived a half hour north of Tallahassee, in Georgia. The Cheatham County Sheriff’s Office worked the scene, if you could call it ‘working.’ The investigator didn’t exactly go over things with a fine-tooth comb—I’ve talked to him, and trust me, he’s no Sherlock Holmes. And the coroner swallowed her husband’s story hook, line, and sinker. So they released the scene only a few hours after the 911 call. There are photos, but only a few, and they’re not great. I’d’ve taken dozens, but the guy who worked it took seven. Seven pictures of my sister’s death.” She sighed again.
“Was there an autopsy?”
“No. Apparently the coroner took one look at her body and ruled it suicide.”
“Any chance you can persuade him to let a good Florida M.E. take a look?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve got a better shot at winning the Florida lottery . . . and I don’t even buy tickets. You think a Georgia coroner would take a chance on a Tallahassee M.E. coming into his county and revealing him to be an incompetent idiot? Not bloody likely. Besides, it’s too late. The body’s already at the funeral home. She’s being buried tomorrow.”
My mind was racing—a condition I found pleasing, fascinating, and slightly—very, very slightly—worrisome. Before Angie had phoned, I’d felt sluggish and depressed. I was behind schedule in grading the Human Origins exams, not because I’d been stupendously busy, but because I knew that once the grades were posted, I’d be finished until fall, and things would get quiet—unbearably quiet—on campus. I’d told myself that I would use the summer lull to begin writing a journal article recounting an experiment I’d conducted, using sonar to find submerged bodies. But the truth was, I was having difficulty generating any enthusiasm for the task; in fact, so far, all I had to show for hours at the computer keyboard was a blank screen. I’d written a hundred or more opening sentences, but I’d deleted each one after rereading it. In my mind’s eye, I saw the summer opening up before me, and frankly, the opening looked a lot like a yawn. I’d probably end up spending most of the summer pretending to write, all the while casting guilty glances at the phone—the damnably silent phone.
Now, though, the phone had rung, bringing me a forensic case, and I felt like a new man: energetic, engaged, and alive with a sense of purpose. I was sorry that the case was the death of Angie’s sister. But I was glad that there
was
a case.
“Angie, I have an idea,” I said. “Do you know any good lawyers in Georgia?”
“No, but I know a lot of bad ones in Florida,” she answered. “Does that help any?”
“Probably not. Let me call somebody who might be better connected. Maybe he could help us get a court order authorizing a forensic examination.”
One phone call and ten minutes later, I bundled up the exam booklets and dashed the hundred yards to Peggy’s office, clutching the bundle against my rib cage like a football. As I crossed the goal line of her doorway, I imagined a hundred thousand people leaping to their feet and cheering wildly.
Peggy glanced briefly and balefully over the lenses of her reading glasses. “It’s about time,” she said, and turned her attention back to her computer screen. The chorus of congratulatory cheers in my head evaporated, replaced by the solo buzz of a weed trimmer outside the Anthropology Department’s grimy windows on the world.
But.
But:
two hours after that, the buzz of the weed trimmer gave way to the song of jet engines, spooling up to take me to Tallahassee.
Later, as the plane descended toward the pines of the Florida panhandle, I looked out the window and saw dozens of plumes of smoke. Florida was on fire.
A
ngie St. Claire was waiting for me at the security checkpoint when I got off the plane at the Tallahassee airport—an airport that made Knoxville’s modest terminal look vast and sleek by comparison. I knew Tallahassee was smaller than Knoxville, but I’d assumed that as Florida’s capital, Tallahassee would bustle with air traffic. Apparently I’d assumed wrong.
Angie shook my hand as I emerged, squeezing so hard I nearly winced. “Wow,” she said, “when you pull a string, you don’t mess around. Who’d you call, the governor?”
“Better.” I grinned. “I’m friends with a lawyer who’s in league with the devil. Well, sort of.”
“Sort of in league with the devil? How does that work?” She started toward the terminal’s main exit.
“Actually, I meant that I’m sort of friends with him. But come to think of it, maybe he
is
sort of in league with the devil.” I smiled. “Seems to be a good partnership, too, judging by his millions. The guy’s name is Burt DeVriess—the police call him ‘Grease’—and he’s a slick, smart attorney. He’s flayed me alive on the witness stand a few times, but lately we’ve worked together on a couple of things.” I didn’t mention that one of the “things” was a case in which I’d been framed for a murder, and that Burt had saved my hide; that, I figured, was a story for another, distant day, perhaps—or perhaps not. “I called Grease right after I talked to you. He got in touch with a colleague in Atlanta whose law partner or wife or sister—hell, in Georgia, she could be his partner
and
his wife
and
his sister—anyhow,
some
body who has connections in that neck of Georgia. So there should be a couple of pieces of paperwork waiting for us at the Cheatham County courthouse. One’s an injunction to delay your sister’s burial by twenty-four hours. The other’s a court order authorizing us to examine the body in the meantime.” The glass door slid open, and we stepped out into sunshine and steam.
As we crossed the parking lot, I caught the smell of smoke in the air. “From the plane, it looked like half your state’s burning.”
“It is.” She made a face. “Most of the panhandle is owned by timber and paper companies. They’ve got huge tracts of gangly cultivated pines—slash pines, I think—planted in rows like crops. They burn the underbrush every spring so nothing competes with the trees for water and nutrients. It’s destroying the natural ecosystem. The longleaf pine, the slow-growing native species, is headed for extinction, and so are a lot of the plants and animals that used to live in the longleaf pine forests. Don’t get me started.” She clicked her remote key, and a blue Chevy Blazer a few rows back beeped at us. I was expecting an FDLE vehicle, but judging by the
QUESTION AUTHORITY
bumper sticker, this was Angie’s own car. Suddenly she stopped. “Dr. Brockton, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”
I smiled. “You don’t have time to tell me—not till we’re in the car, anyhow. The courthouse closes in an hour, and we’re, what, fifty-nine minutes away?”
“You’ve obviously never ridden with me.”
T
hirty minutes later, we crossed the state line, and ten minutes after that, the Blazer skidded to a stop in front of the Cheatham County courthouse in downtown Mocksville. The papers were waiting for us at the office of the court clerk, who handed them over to Angie only after she’d carefully examined our identification and our faces. “Shame,” the woman said, reminding me that we were in a small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business—and generally had strong opinions about it. “She was your sister, wasn’t she?” Angie nodded. “It just don’t seem right.”
Angie nodded. “Thank you,” she said, managing a small smile.
The woman drew herself up and stared at Angie across the counter. “What I mean is, it don’t seem right messing with her now. Seems like she ought to have a quiet, decent burial, so she can rest in peace, instead of being poked and prodded at by people like you.”
Angie’s head snapped back as if she’d been slapped. Then her eyes got fierce, and I thought for a moment she was going to vault the counter and punch the woman. Instead, she spun and strode out of the courthouse, her heels clacking like gunshots on the black-and-white checkerboard of the marble hallway.
By the time I caught up with her, she was already in the car, slamming the door. I got into the passenger seat just as she clutched the steering wheel and began to weep—deep, racking sobs that made the car tremble like some frightened animal with wheels instead of legs.
“People . . . like
. . . you
,” she gasped. “How dare she? People like me are the only ones who give a damn about what really happened to Kate.” She took a few heaving breaths, then the crying shifted from angry to mournful. “People like me didn’t do enough to save her.” She leaned her head on the steering wheel. I squeezed her shoulder awkwardly, just once, and then we sat in silence for a few moments before heading to the funeral home.
M
orningside Funeral Home occupied a small, tidy brick building on the edge of Mocksville, alongside a memorial garden adorned with brass urns and plastic flowers. The receptionist—
Lily
, said her name tag—seemed flustered by our arrival, but she got a lot more flustered when Angie explained who we were and why we were there. She bloomed a splotchy crimson and looked from Angie’s face to mine, and back to Angie’s again. Angie finished by saying, “So could we see the body now, please?”
The flustered woman stood up from her desk. “You need to speak with Mr. Montgomery,” she said. She held up both hands, as if warding off evil, and backed through a doorway into an inner office. The door closed behind her, and I heard voices speaking in hushed, urgent tones.
Eventually the door reopened, and a tall, pale man with a wispy gray comb-over emerged. His upper body didn’t move or sway in any way that corresponded to his footsteps; it simply glided forward, as if he were on casters. “Hello, I’m Samuel Montgomery,” he said. The name seemed to ooze out of his mouth in a way that made my ears feel greasy. He held out a hand for me to shake, so I took it. It was as cool and flaccid as the hand of a dead man after rigor mortis has come and gone. Angie also shook his hand, and I saw the surprise and distaste flit across her face as she did. “What can I do for you?”
Angie repeated the explanation she’d given to the receptionist, then handed him the twenty-four-hour injunction and the court order authorizing us to examine the body. He studied the documents somberly. Gravely, even. Finally he looked up, handing the pages back to Angie. “I’m sorry to say that we have, ah, a bit of a problem, Ms. St. Claire.”
Angie took a long, slow breath. “What sort of problem?”
“I received a phone call earlier today from Mr. Nicely—the, ah, husband of the deceased—saying he wished to make a slight change in the arrangements. He asked that we proceed quite, ah, expeditiously.” He looked down, brushed a few flakes of dandruff from the lapel of his pinstripe suit, then looked up again, but not quite all the way up, so his eyes stopped just short of meeting Angie’s and my own. “I’ve just returned from the cemetery. The, ah, deceased—Mrs. Nicely—was buried an hour ago.”
A
ngie and her husband—Ned, an ornithologist for a Tallahassee environmental education center—dropped me at a hotel in downtown Tallahassee. Our new plan, which I hoped Burt DeVriess’s colleague could help with, was to obtain an exhumation order allowing Kate Nicely’s body to be dug up and examined. I wasn’t terribly optimistic about the chances—it’s one thing to delay a burial, but another, bigger deal to dig up a corpse. But between Grease’s high-wattage connections and Angie’s law enforcement credentials, it might work.
I’d suggested staying at the Hampton Inn, a chain I’d always found clean, comfortable, and affordable. Instead, they booked me at the Hotel Duval, a stylish and recently renovated hotel whose lobby was an Art Deco study in green glass, black granite floors, and—overhead—thousands of luminous soap bubbles. The bubbles, I realized upon closer inspection, weren’t actually soap; they were spheres of thin blown glass, suspended from the ceiling on spider-thin threads of clear nylon. The illusion was remarkably convincing.
After I’d rubbernecked sufficiently, I ambled to the front desk, where the clerk greeted me with an obliging smile and began checking me in. “Do you have a room preference, Mr. Brockton?”
“Nonsmoking, please.”
“Of course. And do you have a color preference?”
“Excuse me?”
“A color preference. Our rooms feature six different color themes. We have refreshing blues, uplifting yellows, energizing citrus, exhilarating reds, peaceful neutrals, and serene greens. What are you in the mood for?”
What
was
I in the mood for? A juicy hamburger and a hot shower were the only things I was truly in the mood for. I felt overwhelmed by the pressure to choose. “I’m so used to boring beige,” I told her. “So the rooms are all basically the same? Only the wallpaper’s different?”
“Oh, it’s not just the wallpaper,” she chirped. “The entire color palette is coordinated—the walls, the art, the bedding, the flowers.”
I asked her to repeat the colors. “Okay,” I said, “since I’m in Florida, I’ll try energizing citrus.”
“Good choice.” She smiled approvingly, her fingers clattering across the keyboard energetically. Then her smile faded. “Oh, I’m so sorry; we don’t have anything available tonight in citrus.”
I shrugged. “Okay, how about green? What was it—serene green? If I can’t have energy, I’ll take serenity.”
Again her fingers clattered; again she looked disappointed. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid there’s nothing in our serene greens, either.”
“So, what is there?”
She did a search. “I can put you in peaceful neutrals.”
“I’m feeling ambivalent about the neutrals,” I joked. Her brow furrowed; either she didn’t get the joke or she thought it was lame. “Peaceful neutrals will be just fine,” I assured her. She brightened and made me a key card.
Peaceful neutrals, I learned when I opened the door, were variations on a theme of boring beige.
Angie and Ned had offered to take me to dinner, but I’d declined; Angie was upset—she’d lost her sister, she suspected her brother-in-law of murder, and now she and her family had been denied even the chance to bury Kate. The last thing Angie needed to spend her evening doing was making small talk with me. I was getting hungry, though, so I called the front desk to ask about nearby restaurants. The Duval, it turned out, had both a steakhouse restaurant and a rooftop bar. The sun was going down and the temperature was dropping by the time I settled peacefully and neutrally into the room, so I decided to take in the view from on high and hope that the rooftop bar’s menu included variations on a theme of burger. The bar was on the eighth floor—not exactly the Empire State Building, but then again, Tallahassee wasn’t exactly New York, so maybe eight stories high was high enough.
In Tallahassee, eight stories proved to be plenty. The Duval inhabited a slight rise, and the rooftop terrace offered a pleasant view of downtown Tallahassee, the stately old and ugly new capitol buildings, the campus of Florida State University, and the lush, woodsy neighborhoods to the city’s west and north. It couldn’t compete with the vistas from Knoxville’s highest buildings, which offered sweeping panoramas of the Tennessee River, Neyland Stadium, and the Great Smoky Mountains. But the Duval bar offered other scenery, I soon noticed, as a series of strikingly beautiful waitresses paraded past: lovely, leggy young women, possibly FSU students, though they might well have been models. They wore stretchy black dresses that fitted so snugly, it appeared each dress had been custom-knitted onto a waitress at the beginning of her shift. A textiles engineer and an anatomist must have collaborated on the design; the high hemlines managed to show every available inch of leg, but nothing more, even when the women bent over to deliver drinks or food. I tried not to stare at these remarkable fusions of form and function, but I didn’t entirely succeed.
And even though the desk clerk hadn’t been able to put me in a citrus room, I felt energized.
It must have been the cheeseburger my waitress had brought me—thick and juicy, topped with crisp, smoky bacon—that restored my flagging energy.
T
he bedside phone rang early the next morning. It was 7:18, according to the clock on the nightstand; normally I’d have been up for a couple of hours by this time, but despite the peaceful neutrals adorning my room, I’d had trouble falling asleep. I’d channel-surfed until midnight, then gotten caught up in a PBS documentary about the “lost boys of Sudan,” the many thousands of boys whose families were killed and whose lives were destroyed by a genocidal civil war in Darfur. As I watched, I tried to imagine my young grandsons, Walker and Tyler, in similar circumstances. What if my son and his wife were hacked to death by machetes in front of their sons? What if the boys were taken captive and forced to fight—forced, at ages eight and ten, mind you, to murder other children’s families—in the service of the very men who’d killed their own parents?
In bleary-eyed hindsight, it hadn’t been wise to watch such a disturbing show so late at night. But I wasn’t sorry I’d seen it. It was easy, all too easy, to ignore the inhumane treatment inflicted on millions of vulnerable people around the world. The United States and the United Nations had stood by while nearly a million people were massacred in Rwanda, and had dragged their feet while tens of thousands were raped and murdered in the Balkans. After watching the Sudan documentary, I still didn’t know what to
do
, but I decided I wanted to do
something
to make a difference, however small, for people who didn’t have the rights and freedoms I’d enjoyed all my life. During the night, as I’d tossed and turned, I’d resolved to donate regularly to Human Rights Watch.
Now, still groggy from troubled sleep and violent dreams, I took a while to answer the phone. It was Angie; no surprise there, since she and her husband were the only people who knew where I was staying. “Good morning,” she said. “How are you?”