I glanced down to the counter, at the photo of Gershwin I’d taken at the Body Farm and printed before leaving campus for the day. Seeing it gave me a pang of guilt — partly because Miranda had seemed uncomfortable about the photo shoot and partly because, anthropologically speaking, Miranda had a lot of opinion on her side. People in a number of cultures — Native Americans and Chinese, for instance — traditionally believed that taking people’s pictures could steal their souls. By that reasoning, Maureen Gershwin’s soul had been stolen on a nightly basis for years, sucked into television cameras and dispersed like dust — puffs of electrons or photons or whatever television sets generated — throughout East Tennessee. Was I now stealing whatever scraps had remained? On the other hand, since Gershwin was already dead, might the camera somehow be restoring a bit of soul to an empty husk of a body? Studying her image, I revised the assessment I’d made earlier in the day. There certainly wasn’t light or life in Gershwin’s eyes, but there was something eerie, a haunting quality, in the photo. It was elusive, but it was there all the same: almost as if the eyes were challenging me, challenging the world, by their very vacancy. I’m not who you think I am, they seemed to say. Or maybe just, Nobody’s home. Leave a message.
I raised my hands, stretching my thumbs and forefingers into L-shaped brackets, and framed my face in the handmade viewfinder. Leaning closer to the mirror, I turned my head slightly to the right and widened the space between my hands. There: That was how I’d framed the shot of Gershwin’s face, almost face-on but favoring the left side just a bit. Glancing down at Gershwin’s photo again, I realized that I’d photographed her at exactly the same angle as the television camera had, night after night. Interesting, I thought. Even though she’s dead, I still wanted her to look the same; I still wanted her to be the same.
But even before death, who had she been? For that matter, who was I? A professor, a scientist, a student of death, a consultant to the state’s medical examiners and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I was also a father, a grandfather, and a widower; since losing my wife to cancer several years earlier, I’d had two brief romances. A year or so back, I’d fallen for a smart, sassy medical examiner from Chattanooga; then, just months ago, I’d gotten involved with a beautiful, baffling librarian. To say that both romances had ended badly would be a huge understatement: the M.E. had been murdered, and — by a twist of fate whose bizarre mirror-image symmetry I only now recognized — the librarian had turned out to be a murderer.
I caught myself frowning in the mirror. Those episodes, those details of my life, seemed oddly unrelated to the face of the middle-aged man staring out at me from the wall of glass. His face seemed almost to belong to someone else, not me. I glanced to my left, where a side mirror caught the same half-stranger’s face in three-quarter profile. In the corner, where the two mirrors met, was a third take on the same face, this one bisected by the vertical seam in the glass. Thus reflected and bisected, I stood transfixed by these partial, unrevealing stand-ins for myself, whoever “me” really was.
The jangle of the telephone interrupted my reverie. The lateness of the call surprised me; as I answered the bedroom extension, I noticed that Randall Gibbons — formerly Maureen Gershwin’s coanchor and now the solo anchor — was wrapping up the eleven o’clock newscast. Usually the only calls that came this late were from police, so I suspected I was being called to a death scene, and as I hurried to the phone on the nightstand, I found myself hoping for the distraction and the mission of a case. Perhaps that was who I really was, I thought, perhaps that was what really defined me: Maybe I was merely a reflection of the call, the case, the crime scene, the forensic puzzle.
The phone’s caller ID display told me it wasn’t the police contacting me. But it also told me that the caller—“Burton DeVriess LLC”—might have something almost as interesting to offer.
CHAPTER 3
The backhoe lurched and bucked as its claw tore into the wet, rocky clay of Old Gray Cemetery, one of Knoxville’s oldest and loveliest burial grounds. The name felt apt; the day was dreary, and the air was as cold as the mound of chilly soil piling up beside the monument. Officially, spring was only a few days away, but the earth itself still felt as devoid of warmth and life as a corpse.
The diesel engine labored against some sudden resistance, and as the machine strained, it wheezed out a cloud of black smoke. The soot drifted on a whisper of breeze for ten feet or so — just far enough to engulf Miranda and me — and then hovered.
Miranda fanned a hand dramatically across her face. “Remind me why we’re courting lung cancer and pneumonia here?” She punctuated the question with a delicate little stage cough.
I was still a bit vague on our mission as well — not the task itself but the late-night, last-minute nature of the phone call I’d received barely ten hours before, asking for my help. “We’re here to help figure out if Trey Willoughby fathered a child by Sherry Burchfield,” I said.
Miranda nodded toward the inscription chiseled into the grave marker, a towering obelisk of polished pink granite. “‘Trey Willoughby, beloved and faithful husband’?”
“Trey Willoughby, at least,” I said. “Not sure about the ‘beloved’ and ‘faithful’ bits. ‘Beloved’ is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but the bone sample we’re about to take could cast a serious shadow on the ‘faithful’ part.”
“Or the unfaithful part,” she said. “So to speak.”
“So to speak.”
“What if the DNA’s too degraded for a paternity test?” I shrugged in response. “And what’s the story on Sherry Burchfield, who might be the mama? I take it she’s not Trey’s loving wife and grieving widow?”
I shook my head. “Sherry might have been someone’s loving wife and grieving widow,” I said, “once upon a time, but she wasn’t Willoughby’s. When I moved to Knoxville twenty years ago, Sherry Burchfield was Knoxville’s most famous madam.”
Miranda laughed. “She was definitely well named, I’ll give her that. Isn’t ‘Sherry’ taken from the French word for ‘dear’ or ‘darling’?”
“French is Greek to me,” I said, “but that sounds right. And it’s certainly consistent with her history. Sherry was arrested a bunch of times for prostitution-related crimes — pandering, soliciting, I don’t know what all — but she never actually came to trial. Perhaps the pen really is mightier than the sword.”
“The pen?”
“The pen that wrote in Sherry’s little black book,” I said. “Apparently she was a meticulous record keeper, and rumor had it that her client list included half the judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys in Knoxville. Funny thing: When she died, which was maybe ten years ago, her little black book was never found. I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising associate of hers got hold of it and has been collecting hush money for a decade now.”
The backhoe’s bucket screeched — a harsh, grating sound, like immense steel fingernails on a monumental blackboard — as the claw raked mud from the top of Trey Willoughby’s metal burial vault.
Miranda grimaced, then shook violently, like a wet dog flinging water from its fur. “Argh.” She shuddered. “Glad I don’t have any fillings — my head would be exploding right about now. So what’s the scoop on this love child Sherry might or might not have had with our man Willoughby? You say she died ten years ago; unless she died in childbirth, I assume the child is older than that.”