“I live to serve,” she said, and although it was a joke — one of her favorite ways of simultaneously acknowledging and mocking the professor-assistant disparity — she said it with genuine goodwill.
“So, the pliers,” DeVriess said. “I’m thinking those aren’t for opening the coffin.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m an anthropologist, but what I really want to do is postmortem dentistry. Enamel’s the hardest substance in the body, so the DNA in the pulp of the teeth has a decent chance of being undamaged. I’ll pull a couple of molars, but I’ll also cut cross sections from the long bones of the upper arm and the thigh.”
Burt nodded, and I thought I saw a flicker of impatience in his eyes. Was I droning on in too much detail? Had I already explained, in last night’s phone call, why I needed to go to such lengths to get samples for a simple paternity test? Or had he done enough research on his own, before calling me, to know that DNA could be destroyed by the formalin in embalming fluid and that the teeth and long bones were the body’s most protective vaults for archiving genetic material?
“It looks like there’s not a lot of research data out there yet on DNA degradation,” he said, as if reading the question in my mind. “Nobody seems to have a good handle on how long our nuclear DNA hangs around after death and what factors affect the rate of decay.”
“Not much,” I agreed. “Forensic DNA analysis is still a brave new world. Remember, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that DNA testing became readily available.”
“I remember,” he said. “I was at the beach when the O. J. Simpson case began. I vividly recall sitting in the living room of that beach house watching him inch along the freeway in that white Ford Bronco, with dozens of cop cars trailing him like some huge police funeral procession. That, and the World Trade Center collapse, and the first moon landing, back when I was a ten-year-old kid — those are the three most powerful television events I can remember, the only three where I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when the story unfolded on the screen.”
“The moon landing, the O. J. circus, and 9/11,” said Miranda, back with us, tools in hand. “From the sublime to the ridiculous to the truly tragic.”
I knelt at the head of the coffin and groped the underside until I found what I was looking for, a hinged metal crank that I unfolded and began turning counterclockwise. Slowly, almost as if it were levitating of its own accord, the upper one-third of the lid swung upward, revealing the face of Trey Willoughby. The skin was ashen, with a slight mottling of dark gray mold — just as the coffin was tinged with rust — but otherwise the face in the coffin was a good likeness of the face I’d seen in an old photo I’d found on the Internet a few hours before. In life he’d been a handsome man — not the looker Maureen Gershwin had been, but attractive — and even now, even eight years postmortem, he was still looking pretty good.
“You don’t always get what you pay for,” I said, “but in this case the funeral home did a good job. Which one was it?”
“Ivy Mortuary,” said DeVriess. “Not in business anymore. The owner — Mr. Ivy — died in a car accident a few years back. No heirs.”
I nodded; the name was familiar, but only vaguely. Over the years many of Knoxville’s funeral homes had sent corpses to the Body Farm, but Ivy never had, to the best of my recollection.
I shifted to the foot of the coffin and cranked up the lower portion of the lid to expose the arms, torso, and legs. Willoughby had obviously been dressed for an open-casket viewing. His suit, I noticed, rivaled DeVriess’s in elegance, though it was silk rather than wool. That made sense: According to the obelisk and the newspaper archives, he’d died in August; heaven forbid that the corpse should swelter in wool in the heat of summer. The thin, finely woven fabric clung damply to the arms and legs and to the laces of the black wing-tip shoes.
I reached out behind me, and Miranda wordlessly placed a pair of scissors in my palm. Reluctantly — for this was a far better suit than any I’d ever owned, or ever would — I grasped the cuffs of the left sleeves of the jacket and shirt and stretched them taut, so the V of the scissor blades would slice through more easily. Just as I began to cut, the corpse’s hand shifted and slid from the end of the sleeve. It fell, landing with a dull thud on the corpse’s stomach.
“Crap,” I said. “Maybe the embalming job wasn’t so good after all.”
I’d already begun to cut, so I kept going. The scissors easily parted the thin, rotting fabric, sliding swiftly up toward the shoulder. Too smoothly, in fact. Normally when I cut shirts or pants from a body, the tip of the lower blade tended to snag in the soft flesh of an arm or a leg. But this time it moved in a smooth, slick glide. As the fabric parted, the reason became clear. I stared briefly, then reached across the body and lifted the corpse’s right hand, grasping the gray, clammy fingers cupped around the end of the sleeve. The hand slid from the sleeve, and I found myself in a bizarre, armless handshake. Both hands, I saw when I looked at the wrists, had been severed at the wrists.
“Holy handoff,” squawked Miranda.
“I’ll be damned,” said Grease.
Both of Trey Willoughby’s arms had been neatly amputated at the shoulders. The sleeves of his silk jacket — like the legs of his silk trousers — were filled with white PVC pipe: plastic plumbing in place of human flesh and bone.
CHAPTER 4
The next car that entered the cemetery’s gates was the polar opposite of DeVriess’s lustrous Bentley. As it swayed and chugged around the curves of the cemetery’s road, this new arrival — a filthy, dented Crown Victoria that had been white once upon a time — seemed to be nearing the end of a long and brutal life, and I wondered how much time it might take the backhoe to carve out a grave for the vehicle.
The car planted its flat-black wheels and bucked to a stop behind the Bentley, coming close enough to make Grease flinch. A plainclothes investigator, mid-thirties, levered his lanky frame out of the sagging driver’s seat and slouched toward us. His shambling walk and tousled hair made him appear laid back, but he was chewing a piece of gum with swift ferocity. As did most detectives, he dressed more like a businessman than a cop, or at least my idea of a cop: He wore a starched white dress shirt, a maroon silk tie, dark gray pants, and shiny black wing tips. He glanced at the three of us standing graveside — DeVriess, Miranda, and me — and then bent down to peer into the coffin at Willoughby’s limbless torso.
“Huh,” he said, then turned to me. “Never a dull moment, eh, Dr. Brockton?” He held out his hand for me to shake. “Gary Culpepper,” he said. “We met twelve years ago. You lectured to our class when I was a new recruit in the police academy. You probably don’t remember me — actually, I hope you don’t. I was the one who dropped the skull that you passed around.”
“I thought you looked familiar,” I fibbed. “This is my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, and Burt DeVriess, the attorney who needs a DNA sample from Mr. Willoughby here.”
Culpepper nodded curtly at Burt, saying, “I’m familiar with Mr. DeVriess. Very nice to meet you, Ms. Lovelady.” He shook Miranda’s hand but not Burt’s, a snub that didn’t come as much of a surprise to me, and surely not to the attorney. During his reign as Knoxville’s toughest defense lawyer, Grease had earned the loathing of most of the city’s police and prosecutors. “So what’ve we got here, Doc?”
It was an irresistible opening. “Well, just offhand I’d say we’ve got a head and a torso.”
He redoubled his assault on the gum and took another look at the body. “Tell me what I missed before I got here.”
I described the sequence of events that culminated in the discovery that Willoughby’s limbs were missing.