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.
CHAPTER 8
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 for all 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 of Dr. Strangelove and 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.