Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel

CHAPTER 7

THE RINGING PHONE SOUNDED far away, and I felt myself swimming up from a deep and viscous sleep to answer it.

“Bill? It’s Jess.”

Her voice and her name jolted me awake. “Jess? What time is it? Where are you? Are you okay?”

“It’s about four. I just got home from the scene. Bill, could you…could you just talk to me for a few minutes? Talk me down a ways?” Her voice shook and her nose sounded stopped up, as if she’d already done some crying.

“Sure, Jess. Of course. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I might have to work up to it,” she said. Her breathing started to run away with her; I could hear her struggling to rein it back in. “It was a bad scene. Brutal. Like some biblical retribution. Blood everywhere. Stab wounds all over the victim. Multiple dog bites. Two slaughtered dogs.”

“Two?”

“Two. One was the victim’s; other belonged to one of the killers.”

“Was it a dogfight that spread to the people?”

“No. Other way around. We got the story from a couple of witnesses. A homeless guy who spends a lot of time sleeping under this bridge where it happened, and a bike rider who was just up the hill. Apparently there was some history between the victim and this handful of punks who liked to hang out in the park under the bridge. The victim was a runner; they’d been hassling him for a while. If he’d had any sense, he’d’ve found some other place to run his dog.”

“People don’t always do what’s in their own best interest,” I said. It sounded stupid as I said it, but I didn’t know what else to offer. Didn’t know what she needed to hear.

“The detectives talked to his girlfriend. Guy was a science teacher, turns out. Early thirties. Idealistic. Just started teaching last fall at one of the inner-city magnet schools. Gonna save the world-or at least inner-city kids-through education. He’d moved in from Meigs County to take the job. Used to have a place out in the country, with a big yard for the dog, the girlfriend says. Australian shepherd. He felt bad about keeping it cooped up in an apartment. Figured he owed it a run somewhere every day with grass and trees to make amends.”

“And that got him killed? That is sad,” I said.

“It gets sadder,” she said. “The girlfriend says when these punks first started hassling him-a week or so ago, she thinks-he tried to reason with them. I mean, these are the big brothers of the kids he’s teaching every day. But they wouldn’t leave him alone, and he wouldn’t back down. Like dogs, stalking around all stiff-legged with their hackles up. She begged him to steer clear of the park, but he said once you start running away, you never stop. So he bought a knife to carry on his runs. A lot like that serrated number Miranda was packing yesterday.”

“That wouldn’t do much good against a gang, would it?”

“Well, we haven’t done the lab work yet, but actually, I think it did. There were three blood trails leading from the scene. He put up a hell of a fight.”

“You think maybe his dog did some of the damage? Gave his life protecting his master?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t. He…” She began to draw raw, gasping breaths. “The guy…the victim…he cut his own dog’s throat,” she said, “just before they got him.”

“What?”

“One of the witnesses saw him do it,” she wept. “They chased the guy down, surrounded him. One of them had a pit bull on a chain. Big, mean junkyard dog. As they closed in, he knelt down and slashed his dog’s throat. He knew, Bill, he knew…neither one of them would get out alive…and he wanted…” I could barely hear her, but I didn’t dare interrupt. “He wanted to make sure…it didn’t suffer…Oh God, Bill…what a horrible, hopeless, loving thing to do.”

She was hyperventilating into the phone now; I knew she must be getting dizzy and she’d soon black out. “Jess, stay with me here,” I said. “Jess? Slow down. You’ve got to slow down, Jess. Have you got a towel or a blanket or a shirt handy? Even your shirtsleeve or your hand, Jess. Put something over your mouth and breathe through it. Anything to slow you down, make it harder to breathe.” She didn’t answer, but her breathing suddenly got muffled, and gradually it slowed. I heard a long, hard sniffle through a runny nose, then a sustained burbling, bugling blast from her nose. “Good girl, Jess. Slow and steady. Slow and steady.”

She took in a deep breath, heaved it out. “Goddamnit, I hate to cry,” she said. “Where can all this come from? Gallons of snot and tears. Every time I think there can’t be any more in me, the damn spigot opens again. Funny; I see a hundred dead people a year, and it’s the dog that breaks my heart. No, not just the dog. The guy’s love for his dog. A guy that would do such a thing for an animal he loved, even as he saw death bearing down on him.” She set the phone down, blew her nose again, then drew and exhaled out a long shuddering breath. “It was like something straight out of Nero’s Coliseum,” she said. “They turned the pit bull loose on the guy. Nearly tore his left arm off. He managed to cut that dog’s throat, too. Even with his arm being ripped to shreds, he remembered his anatomy and found the jugular. Then the two-legged beasts closed in. Four or five, we’re not sure; the witnesses were backing off fast. Looks like he took stab wounds from several directions while he was still on his feet. More after he fell. Lotta overkill. Maybe the pit bull’s owner was pissed; maybe one of the creeps he cut-somebody was mad enough to do extra damage.” She sighed again. “Autopsy’s gonna be a bitch. Could be my first with triple-digit stab wounds.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Shit. Soulless cowardly no-count fuckers.”

I took the anger as a good sign.

“Dammit, Bill, this isn’t the first killing like this we’ve had this year, and it won’t be the last. I’m afraid we’ve got a growing problem here-hell, I think we’ve got a growing problem across America-but nobody wants to talk about it.”

“What do you mean? Murder rates rising?”

“Not yet. Our rate’s actually way down, for now, but I’m afraid it can’t last. I’m afraid the anger’s building among these young black males. Half of them are high school dropouts. You know what the nationwide unemployment rate among black high school dropouts is?” I didn’t. “Seventy percent, and rising. White dropouts, thirty percent unemployment. Hispanics, just nineteen percent. A lot of these young urban black guys have no prospects. No hope. Nothing to live for and nothing to lose. So it’s nothing to them to take a few of the fortunate down with them as they go.”

“You think the police will get these guys?”

“Maybe. Be pretty easy to find out who owned the pit bull. And I think we can match some of the blood at the scene to two or three of the attackers, if we can find them. But if the witnesses disappear and clam up, we might have trouble making a case. Hell, these guys could even get together and argue self-defense: big, bad white man came at ’em with a knife and they feared for their lives. Not the truth, but if four or five guys say it on the stand with believable emotion, be hard to find a jury that would call them all liars.”

Jess was a medical examiner; her role was to determine causes of death, not to win convictions. But she was a human being, too, with a strong sense of justice and injustice, and I understood her frustration. “Maybe it’ll turn out better than that.” I said it with more optimism than I felt.

“Yeah, right. You know what else makes me furious about this?”

“What?”

“This plays exactly to all those goddamned racist stereotypes I’ve spent forty years in the South resisting,” she said. “If it had to happen-if this guy had to get murdered by a pack of feral punks, why couldn’t they be white punks, Bill?”

“I don’t know, Jess. I don’t know. I think you’re right, if something doesn’t change, we may be headed for a huge problem. And we don’t seem to have the wisdom or the will, even after all these years, to fix it.”

We both fell silent for a while.

“God, I’m so tired, Bill. Tired and cold. When I get this tired, I get cold all over. All I want to do at this moment is crawl under the covers and sleep for a week.” Her breathing had grown deep and even by now; I felt my own breath slowing to mark time with hers, my mind slipping back toward drowsiness with surprising ease.

“You think maybe you’d be able to sleep now?”

“Maybe,” she said. Her voice sounded drained of its horror and rage, though the sorrow remained. “I think so. I hope so. I need to.”

“If you can’t,” I said, “call me back and I’ll give you one of my osteology lectures. ‘Morphological Characteristics of Shovel-Shaped Incisors in Native Americans.’ Guaranteed to put you under in five minutes or less. Okay?”

The only answer was a gentle, ladylike snore at the other end of the line.

I listened to Jess sleep for a long time. Eventually I began nodding off myself, drifting in and out, as if I were floating down a slow-moving stream, easing from sunlight to shade and back again. In one of the waking moments, I realized that it was the first time I’d slept with a woman, even long-distance, in the two years since Kathleen had died. The intimacy of it-the vulnerability and trust and simple physical communion-nearly burst my heart.

“Sleep well, Jess,” I whispered, easing the phone back into its cradle.