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“Welcome to Tennessee,” I said to myself.
3
December 21, 1990
TURNING BACK FROM THE office doorway, I snatched up the ringing phone. “Hi, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right there. I’m leaving this instant.” It was the Friday before Christmas, and all through the stadium I was the only creature stirring; everyone else was already home for the holidays, or at least en route.
I was answered by a gravelly, homespun voice, half an octave deeper than my own. “Well, darlin’, I sure ’preciate that,” the man chuckled. “But before you go, you reckon you could connect me with a Dr. Brockman? Dr. Bill Brockman?”
I felt my face redden. “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were my wife. This is Dr. Brockton. How can I help you?”
“This is Sheriff Dixon, Dr. Brockman. Up in Morgan County.”
“Hello, Sheriff,” I said. “It’s Brock-ton, by the way, not Brockman. What can I do for you?” Turning to the framed Tennessee map mounted on the wall, I scanned for Morgan County. The state had ninety-five counties, and in the six months since my arrival in Knoxville, I’d worked ten forensic cases—five of them in Knox County; one each in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Memphis; the janitor-infuriating case from Cumberland County, fifty miles to the west; and one from a rural county southeast of Knoxville. I seemed to recall that Morgan County was nearby, but I was having trouble finding it.
“Looks like maybe we’ve got a homicide up here. A hiker found a body in the woods, up in Frozen Head State Park. Unidentified nigrah woman. In pretty rough shape. The medical examiner took one look and told me to call and have you come get her. Reckon you could come on up this way?”
I felt a tinge of annoyance—that damned memo, I thought again—followed by a wave of excitement and then a ripple of guilt. My addiction to forensic adrenaline was, I suspected, as strong as any alcoholic’s thirst, and the truth was, I was happy to have a chance to slake it. But I’d promised Kathleen I’d be home by five o’clock, to help prepare for a Christmas party at six. “Where’s the body now, Sheriff?”
“Still in the woods. Just up the slope from a creek. Jordan Branch. It’s about five miles outside Wartburg. The M.E. said to leave it at the scene for you.”
I spotted Wartburg on the map—a small dot about fifty miles northwest of Knoxville—and then found the irregular green rectangle that marked the state park. Glancing out the office windows, through the grime on the glass and the latticework of girders supporting the stadium’s grandstands, I saw that the sky had already gone dark. “I don’t mean to put you off, Sheriff,” I said, “but I’d rather work the scene in the daylight. No matter how good your lights are, it’s easy to miss things in the dark. Any chance you could post somebody out there tonight, to keep an eye on things? Let me meet you there first thing in the morning?”
He considered this for a moment. “I reckon I could put Cotterell out there. One of my deputies. He ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”
I got directions and agreed to meet him at the Morgan County courthouse the next morning at nine. After hanging up, I called Kathleen. “Hi, honey,” I said with a sense of déjà vu, sheepishness, and amusement. “I’ll be right there. I’m leaving this instant.”
4
“PRETTY ROUGH SHAPE” WAS putting it mildly. Very mildly. The truth was, in ten years of forensic casework, I’d never seen such a shocking death scene as the one Sheriff Dixon led me to.
We’d met at the Morgan County courthouse, a quaint brick building topped by an elegant, four-sided white cupola, each side dominated by a large clock face reading 9:05.
Ten minutes later, after backtracking several miles along the Knoxville highway, we’d turned onto a small side road that led to two destinations, according to a green sign at the turnoff: Frozen Head State Park, and Morgan County Correctional Center. The prison was first, a sprawling complex of dull brown brick and gleaming razor wire. A mile or so later, after a sharp turn and a narrow bridge over a tumbling creek—Jordan Branch, I guessed—we’d entered a narrow wooded valley. FROZEN HEAD STATE PARK, read a sign, its white-painted letters etched into dark brown boards. Two miles beyond the sign—past a gate marked AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY, where asphalt gave way to gravel—we’d stopped behind a Morgan County Sheriff’s Office cruiser and a black Ford Crown Victoria sporting a state government tag, a trunk-mounted radio antenna, and a side spotlight near the left outside mirror.
The body lay barely thirty yards from the road, within a ragged rectangle of crime-scene tape strung from tree trunks. The ground sloped down toward the creek, and as we picked our way through the rocky terrain, I saw that the legs were angled downhill, toward the stream.
The corpse—a woman’s corpse—was nude, and when we got close enough to make out details, I felt my stomach lurch. The body was bloated, the abdomen swollen with gases produced by bacteria and enzymes in the digestive tract. The skin of the torso, arms, and legs was largely intact, but virtually no soft tissue remained on the neck and face; the jaws and teeth were bared in a macabre grin, and the cheekbones and eye orbits—now vacant—were exposed as well, along with the vertebrae of the neck. So were the lower ends of the legs, the tibia and fibula of each leg jutting, footless, from the shredded flesh of the shins.
But gruesome as all those features were, they weren’t what I found shocking about the scene. What I found shocking was the way the woman’s body had been posed. Her legs were splayed on either side of a small tree, and her crotch—her decaying, decomposing crotch—was pressed tight against the trunk, as if, even long after death, she were still being sexually violated.
“Hey. Doc.” The sheriff’s gravelly voice tugged at the sleeve of my consciousness, and the insistent tone made me suspect that he’d called my name more than once.
“Sorry, what?” I looked in the direction his voice had come from, and saw him standing by two other men—one in uniform, the other in civilian clothes.
“This here’s my deputy, Jim Cotterell. And this troublemaker”—he said it in a tone that might have been joking, or might not—“is Bubba Hardknot, our friendly neighborhood agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.”
“Deputy,” I said, shaking the hand of the man in uniform. Then I extended my hand to the TBI agent. “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name?”
“Special Agent Meffert,” he said, smiling slantwise, in a way I couldn’t quite interpret. “Wellington Meffert. It’s a little fancy for everyday use in Morgan County. Most folks around here call me Bubba Hardknot. When they’re being polite.”
“I’m kindly surprised to see you way up here in the woods on a Saturday morning, Bubba,” said the sheriff flatly. “I thought you TBI types kept banker’s hours. Cotterell call you?” He glanced at his deputy; the look seemed accusatory or even hostile, and I gathered there was no love lost between the sheriff and the TBI agent—and possibly not between the sheriff and his own deputy.
“Naw, the park rangers called me,” Meffert replied casually. “State property, state agency. Go figure.”
“Hmm,” grunted Dixon.
My camera was slung around my neck, and I removed the lens cap and began taking pictures—wide shots of the entire scene first, then increasingly tight ones, spiraling in so that I photographed the body from all angles. I finished the 36-exposure roll with close-ups of the footless legs, the fleshless neck and face, and the obscenely posed crotch. Satisfied that I’d captured the key images, I stood from my crouch and turned to the law enforcement officers. “Any idea who she is?”
The sheriff answered. “Not yet. Shouldn’t take too long to find out, though. We don’t get too many dead nigrahs around here.” He chuckled, then added, “Not near enough, right fellas?” He gave me a sly grin and a wink. I blinked, puzzled—and disbelieving, once I replayed his words and decided that I’d understood the joke correctly. I glanced at the other men’s faces. Deputy Cotterell was lo
oking away, his cheeks flaming; Agent Meffert’s face was a blank mask, as expressionless as stone.
I cleared my throat and turned back toward the body. “She might not actually be negroid,” I said. “Once a person’s been dead a few days, you can’t always tell the race from the color of the skin. The skin of Caucasoids—whites—often darkens as they decay.” The sheriff frowned, perhaps because he doubted what I’d said, perhaps because he didn’t like the idea that the dead woman might be white. I couldn’t tell which was the case, and I didn’t want to know. “Any women been reported missing?”
The sheriff shook his head. “Naw. No nigrahs I’ve heard tell of. For sure no white women.”
Reaching into my back pocket, I pulled out a pair of latex gloves and tugged them on, then knelt beside the head for a closer look at the exposed bones of the face. The woman’s teeth had a strongly vertical orientation, and the nasal opening was narrow, with a thin sill of bone jutting slightly from the base of the opening. “Now that I look closer,” I said, “I’m pretty sure she’s white.”
“The hell you say,” muttered the sheriff.
“What makes you think that, Doc?” asked Meffert quickly.
I glanced over my shoulder. “You got a pen on you, Agent Meffert?” He nodded. I held a gloved index finger to my lips, as if I were a librarian, mid-shush. “Put one end of the pen at the base of your nose and lay it across your lips.” Looking intrigued, he did as I’d directed. “It touches your chin, right?” He nodded again, the pen still in place. “If you were black, it wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?” interrupted the sheriff.
“Wouldn’t touch the chin. Black people’s teeth and jaws slope forward—the fancy, five-dollar term for that is ‘prognathic.’ White people’s teeth and jaws are more vertical—‘orthognic.’ This woman’s got a narrow nasal opening, too; blacks have a wide one, with vertical grooves—gutters—so they can take in more air through their nose. That’s evolution at work, adapting them to tropical climates.”
