CHAPTER 28
The marker at the head of the grave was a small, weather-stained slab of unpolished marble, far less ornate than Trey Willoughby’s monumental obelisk or even Pendergrast’s granite slab. The chiseled letters read, MISS ELIZABETH JENKINS, B. JAN. 22, 1916, D. OCT. 4, 2003. CARPE LIBRUM. The death date was within three days of Pendergrast’s and two days of Willoughby’s. DeVriess’s fishing expedition was expanding, but in very small outward ripples. In going back to the judge for additional exhumation orders, DeVriess had contended that mischief was clearly afoot at Ivy Mortuary in early October of 2003, and that the path of common sense and civil justice was to exhume other bodies from that same time period. His plan was to exhume other bodies buried by Ivy at that same time and then gradually work his way both forward and backward from there, in order to determine when the mischief had begun and when it had ended.
This time the television and newspaper reporters were already present, although Culpepper had corralled them into an area fifty feet away, behind a strand of yellow-and-black police tape.
Miss Jenkins — a former English teacher who’d lived and died alone — was buried in the simplest of steel coffins within a concrete vault. The coffin, like the headstone, had been purchased with donations from former students; the Latin inscription, Carpe librum, meant “Seize the book.” I groped at the foot of the coffin for the crank that would open the lid, then swiveled it outward and began turning it. “So,” I said, “predictions?”
“Four bags of sand,” Grease said.
“She’s a little old lady,” Miranda said. “Only two bags of sand.”
“Arms and legs, but no torso or head,” predicted Culpepper.
As the lid pivoted up, the tripods of the TV and newspaper photographers leaned against the police tape, straining to get a few inches closer to the graveside. The lid of the coffin blocked the cameras’ view of its interior, but it didn’t block their view of the four faces peering down in astonishment.
Miss Elizabeth Jenkins was a tiny, white-haired woman, her aged features well preserved, her wrinkled cheeks slightly rouged with mold.
And Miss Elizabeth Jenkins was wrapped in a macabre embrace with the rotting remains of a large human male. His left temporal bone — the oval of thin bone above the ear — had a one-inch circle punched in it, a blow delivered with enough force to drive the disk of bone deep into the brain.
“Not exactly the lovers of Valdaro,” commented Miranda as we extricated Miss Jenkins from the arms of her coffinmate. To escape the media circus, we’d loaded the coffin into my truck and taken it to the forensic center, tailed by a caravan of reporters. Culpepper had eventually dispersed them with the promise of a news conference and photos later in the day.
“The lovers of who?” asked Culpepper, clearly feeling squeamish.
“Not who,” Miranda corrected as I handed her one of the man’s arms. “Where. Valdaro. A village in northern Italy.” She laid the arm on an autopsy table we’d positioned beside the coffin. “Archaeologists excavated a pair of skeletons — a man and a woman — near Valdaro in 2007. They were buried together about five thousand years ago, wrapped in each other’s arms.”
“I remember that,” said Art, who’d already patted the two corpses with tape to collect stray hairs and fibers. “I saw something about it on Discovery or National Geographic. ‘The world’s longest hug,’ I think they called it. But didn’t somebody else dig up an even older couple someplace else just a few days later?”
“Dubious,” she answered. “Somebody did find an older pair of skeletons in Turkey — around nine thousand years old. But it’s not at all certain that those two were buried together. Could be just a case of commingling — mixed bones, one body dumped into the same patch of ground as another, maybe centuries apart. The Italian couple definitely had their arms wrapped around each other, though. Sweet, huh?”
“Very sweet,” I noted, “unless it was a double murder, or a murder-suicide.”
“Which this case could be,” offered Culpepper.
“Sure.” Miranda snorted. “Murder-suicide. Little Miss Jenkins whacks this big ol’ man upside the head, then takes a bottleful of sleeping pills and dies — but not before she embalms herself, climbs into the coffin, and hauls him in with her.”
“Okay, so maybe we can rule out murder-suicide,” Culpepper said sheepishly.
Unlike Trey Willoughby, whose lips were quite literally sealed, this man’s corpse was openmouthed; in fact, as I pulled gently downward on the lower jaw, so I could see the teeth, the mandible came loose in my hand. “Oh, man,” groaned Culpepper, turning away, “I wish I hadn’t seen that.”
Miranda and I studied the mandible, while Art fished around in the pockets of the dead man’s pants, which were greasy with fatty acids from the decaying corpse. Culpepper, still averting his eyes, asked, “So what’s the best way to ID him? Fillings? Bridgework? Dental X-rays?”
“We could go the forensic-dentistry route,” I said. “Means we’ll need to check with a lot of dentists once we chart his teeth.”
“Or we could go this route instead,” said Art, who had fished a wallet from the corpse’s left back pocket. Culpepper whirled around just as Art flipped opened the stained wallet and removed a driver’s license. “I believe we just found Kerry Roswell, our missing embalmer.”
The wallet wasn’t all Art found in the coffin with Roswell and Miss Perkins. Tucked behind the fabric liner of the coffin was a clawhammer. Its head — which matched the size and shape of the skull fracture — was smeared with a thin coating of scalp tissue, hair, bone fragments, and brain matter. And its handle showed what appeared to be a partial fingerprint, etched in blood.
“Well,” Culpepper said after a collective silence. “Maybe we need to dig up Elmer Ivy now and see if he’s got any fingerprints we can compare to this.”
“If he’s got fingers,” said Art.
“Or if he’s really in his own coffin, not somebody else’s,” said Miranda. “At this rate we’re gonna have to dig up everybody — every last body — in Knoxville.”
“Knoxville’s ghoulish grave-robbing mystery has taken a bizarre, deadly twist,” said WBIR anchor Randall Gibbons in that night’s top story, “with grave robbing giving way to murder and grave stuffing.” Like the station’s earlier stories on the Pendergrast and Willoughby exhumations, this report stressed the shocking nature of the subject matter and images. In addition to video footage showing the coffin being hoisted from the grave and the lid pivoting upward — as Miranda, Culpepper, DeVriess, and I stared in shock — the images included several KPD photos of the coffin’s embracing inhabitants, purposely blurred to render them less gruesome. My phones rang continuously throughout the late-night newscast and beyond. I ignored the calls, since I didn’t recognize any of the numbers and didn’t want to spend hours on the phone with reporters. But by the time I switched off the phones for the night, I’d counted more than a dozen different area codes and several international country codes.
Must’ve been a slow news day, I thought as I settled into bed. They’ll move on to something else tomorrow. I was wrong.
CHAPTER 29
By the next afternoon, the media calls had driven me nuts — I’d dodged dozens of long-distance reporters but had talked with half a dozen local ones. Elmer Ivy had fingerprints on file, it turned out — he’d served in the military — and Art was able to get a scan of them. None of them matched the bloody print on the hammer. The mysterious coffin killer, as some of the reporters dubbed the hammer swinger, was suddenly big news, far bigger than the war in Afghanistan or nuclear talks with Iran and North Korea. It was a relief to drive away from the jangling phones in my office at the end of the day, even though I deeply dreaded what the evening’s errand was likely to hold in store.