Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel

CHAPTER 4

THE KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT was housed in a gray and tan concrete and brick fortress of indeterminate vintage-late 1960s or early ’70s, maybe, the heyday of “urban renewal,” when whole blocks of old buildings were razed to make way for parking lots and stark, boxy structures. Situated a stone’s throw from two of Knoxville’s low-income housing projects, it probably saved the city thousands a year in fuel costs just by virtue of its location.

As Art and I passed the front desk I looked for Gunderson, the sergeant I’d joked with earlier in the day, but evidently his shift was over, for the desk was staffed by a young Latina woman. She waved at Art, studied me and my cooler briefly, then pressed some button that opened the elevator for us.

For years the fingerprint lab was down in the basement, but these days, it inhabited quarters on the second floor. Art nodded at a countertop, which I took as a sign to set the cooler down. It was a good guess; he opened the top and lifted out the bag containing the penis.

“Are you going to fume it?” I asked. I didn’t know a lot about fingerprinting, but I knew Art had patented a gizmo for creating fumes of superglue which would stick to latent prints on what ever object was placed in the chamber that filled with the fumes, tracing the loops and whorls in crisp white.

“No,” he said, “for this I’ll use leuco-crystal violet. Shows up better than superglue. It reacts chemically in the presence of blood-the hemoglobin actually catalyzes a reaction between the LCV and hydrogen peroxide-to produce a bright purple. Even if the blood were a lot dimmer than what’s on this guy’s pecker, it would be very dramatic.”

From a cabinet of bottles and boxes and bags of supplies, he took down a brown plastic bottle of ordinary hydrogen peroxide and a bottle of a clear solution; in a small beaker he mixed 50 cc’s of the leuco-crystal violet-a couple of ounces, maybe-with another 200 cc’s of the peroxide. Finally, he slid an oblong pellet the size of the end of his pinkie down the side of the beaker into the mixture.

“What’s that? The magic ingredient?”

“Close,” he said. “The magnetic stirrer.” He set the beaker on top of a small instrument with a round, flat platform on top and rotated a switch on the instrument’s face. The pellet began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster as he cranked the dial. “Good for mixing drinks, too, as long as you’re not hoping to chop ice.” He poured the liquid from the beaker into a plastic spray bottle, aimed the bottle into a sink, and pumped the trigger a few times to prime it. “Okay, let’s take a closer look at our boy here.”

From a box of latex gloves on the counter, he took and donned a pair. Then he took a pair of forceps from a tray, opened the bag, and reached in with the forceps to extract the penis. “You mind switching on that light for me?” He gestured, using the penis as a pointer, toward a lamp that consisted of a large magnifying glass encircled by a fluorescent tube. I held the red button on the base, and the tube flickered on. “I don’t suppose we know what size this thing was when the print was deposited, do we? I mean, it makes a difference whether a balloon is inflated or deflated when the artwork gets applied.” It hadn’t occurred to me until he brought it up, but size really did seem to matter in this particular instance.

“I don’t think we have any idea,” I said. “At least, no one’s mentioned a photo or a note about dimensions at the moment of amputation.”

He studied the print closely. “Well, this looks to be about the same size as my thumbprint,” he said. “Not, mind you, that there’s any other resemblance. I would guess, unless the person who lopped it off was incredibly sneaky, the poor bastard was probably not in a state of arousal.”

“I would guess,” I said, “that if I saw somebody coming at my private parts with a butcher knife, I’d be shriveling fast and trying to make like a turtle.”

Art laughed. “Yeah, I can recall a couple of occasions when I wouldn’t have minded being able to do the emergency retraction. Once when I was a kid, I was peeing out a double-hung window, and the sash fell shut. A very narrow escape, not to mention a big mess to clean up. Another time, when I was nineteen, I’d gone to visit my girlfriend at the women’s college in Mississippi where she’d just started. We hadn’t seen each other in two months, and she had finally caved in. Just at the wrong moment, a bright flashlight shone through the car window right at my proud manhood. My first and most humiliating law enforcement experience.”

He rotated the penis, bringing the head into sharper focus. “Too bad this guy was circumcised,” he said. “If the foreskin were intact, there might be enough fluid underneath to let us get a swab and check for saliva or other fluids from recent sexual contact. We’ve gotten DNA matches that way in a couple other murders, though the penis was still attached to both of those stiffs. So to speak.”

With that, he took the penis and the spray bottle over to an exhaust hood, where he tapped a floor switch to turn on a light and the exhaust fan. Then he gently misted the severed penis with the mixture from his spray bottle. Almost immediately, the severed base of the organ turned a bright purple. A second later, so did the faint reddish brown of the print an inch away from the stump. Rotating the organ, Art sprayed a fine mist around its entire girth, and as he did so, other prints-previously little more than faint smudges-leapt into view. “Look at that,” said Art. “We’ve got a complete set. He had a pretty good grip when he lopped it off. There’s the thumb on top, closest to the base, and a row of fingertips running up the side. See the pinkie, there near the head? And look at that line in the thumbprint-this guy had cut his thumb recently.”

“I’ll be,” I said. “If this guy’s prints are on file, you think you can match one of those?”

“Bill, if this guy’s prints are on file, you could match one of those. These are nearly as good as we get when we print a new hire upstairs in Human Resources.”

“So all cops’ fingerprints are on file?”

He nodded. “We put those in AFIS-the Automated Fingerprint Identification System-so if they show up at a crime scene, we know it’s because they were working the scene, not committing the crime. In theory, at least.”

“Any other noncriminals in the system?”

“Sure. Soldiers and firefighters-sometimes helps identify bodies if faces are damaged beyond recognition. People think all that’s done with DNA these days, but prints are still a lot faster and cheaper.”

“Anybody else?”

“Gun buyers,” he said. “Teachers and child care workers-background check to make sure they’re not sex offenders.”

He pulled the penis out from under the hood and laid it on an absorbent paper pad on the counter. Then he gently patted it dry with another pad. “I think the best way to capture these prints would be to press this flat under glass and photograph them,” he said.

“You don’t lift them with tape?” I asked.

“LCV doesn’t lift like powder,” he said. “The photos should work fine, though. Besides, we’ll still have the prints themselves. I can pop Little Johnny Doe in the freezer and he’ll stay fresh for years. I can’t wait to show this to a jury in court.”

“Well, I’m happy to leave it in your capable hands,” I said. “Just write me an evidence receipt so Jess Carter doesn’t ream me out for losing her penis.”

“Jess? Is she still filling in as ME up here?” I nodded. “Well, if you do lose her penis, I suspect Jess could lay her hands on another one just about anytime she wanted to.”

“I suspect if she heard you say that, she might lay her hands and her scalpel on yours.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said. “She’s a feisty one, that’s for sure. Take a mighty gutsy cowboy to climb into that saddle. Big cojones or a death wish, one.” For emphasis, he pointed at me as he said it. With the purple-spotted penis he still held in the forceps.

“Hmm,” I said.

What I didn’t say was that Jess was coming to my house for a drink and a steak in a couple of hours. As I rode the elevator down from the second floor and walked out of KPD, Art’s comment kept looping through my mind, and I couldn’t help wondering: Who was having whom for dinner to night? I found Jess intriguing, admirable, and exciting-she was smart, competent, confident, and funny, and she was good-looking, too: wavy auburn hair, green eyes, and a petite but athletic-looking build. But there was an edge to Jess that I found intimidating. I hadn’t dated in de cades, and the prospect of dating made me nervous even in the abstract. In the concrete-in the flesh, rather, of Jess Carter, who projected a take-no-prisoners toughness-the idea seemed downright perilous. Not so perilous, though, that I’d declined when she suggested I cook dinner for her. Just perilous enough, perhaps, to keep me on my toes. And according to Miranda, who was pretty smart herself, maybe it was time for a woman to keep me on my toes.