“A Sawzall,” I supplied. “A reciprocating saw with a demolition blade. Ten teeth per inch, if memory serves.”
“That’s right,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Guy who did it was a contractor — a roofer, wasn’t he?” I nodded. “I couldn’t believe he was carrying that saw around in the back of his truck. Still had blood on the blade, didn’t it?”
“From all three of his victims,” I said. “Never trust a guy who doesn’t clean his tools.”
He shook his head. “Amazing, how you pegged that tool exactly.”
“Not exactly,” I corrected. “Just approximately. I couldn’t tell what brand the saw was, just what type. And what kind of blade.”
“How’d you do that?” asked Wallace, the TBI honcho. The two local cops listened, but made no attempt to elbow their way into the conversation.
“I just looked at the skeletal material,” I said. “There were these perfect, uniform little zigzags carved in the bone. Lots of short, even strokes, so it was clearly a power saw. The zigzags meant the blade was going back and forth, not spinning. I illuminated the cut marks, at a really low angle, to highlight all the zigs and zags, and took a bunch of pictures. Then I went to Home Depot and compared the pictures with saw blades till I found one that matched.”
“Radnor had a quote up on his wall for a while after that,” said Brubaker. “Something you said about the difference between flesh and bone. What was it?”
“Was it ‘You have to chew harder if it’s bone’?” I said it deadpan, and he ruminated for a moment before getting the joke and smiling. “Or maybe ‘Flesh forgets, bone remembers’?”
“There you go. That was it.”
“Gentlemen,” said Wallace, “I hate to interrupt the lovefest, but we’ve got some work to do here. We’ve got three unsolved murders in the past twelve months — three dead women, all of them dumped near rural interstate exits. The question is, are they unrelated? Or do we have a serial killer on the loose? Let’s take the cases one by one.”
The first case, from Memphis, was the murder of a forty-two-year-old Alabama woman, whose body was found in late spring in an industrial area along the banks of the Mississippi River. “She was half a mile from Interstate 55,” said the Memphis detective, flashing through a series of visuals that began with a map of the city, then zoomed in to aerial views of the exit and the nearby industrial park. “She was stabbed in the neck. The knife cut the jugular vein and she bled out.”
“Any defensive wounds?” asked Brubaker, the profiler.
“Both hands,” the detective said, flashing through slides of the body at the scene and also during the autopsy.
“Back up,” Brubaker said, then — at the photo showing the woman’s bloody body sprawled on the ground—“Okay, stop. She’s fully clothed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any sign of sexual assault?”
“None.”
“What about her personal effects?”
“Her money and jewelry were gone. Wedding ring, diamond engagement ring gone.”
“Married? What about the husband?”
“He’s clean. He was at home with the kids in Birmingham; she was in Memphis at a sales convention. Husband reported her missing the next day, when one of her coworkers called him to say she hadn’t shown up for a presentation she was scheduled to give. Her driver’s license and credit cards were gone, too, but so far nobody’s used the cards. Last transaction was an ATM withdrawal of two hundred dollars on Beale Street the night she disappeared.” He flipped forward through the slides again until he came to a grainy security-camera image of the dead woman.
“So she’s alone,” Brubaker said, receiving a nod in reply, “and she doesn’t look scared. But what she does look is drunk.”
“We do have witnesses who say she’d been drinking at one of the bars for a while.”
“Anybody see her leave with someone?” The detective shook his head. “Any reason to think this was something other than a robbery that went bad when she resisted?” A shrug. “Any other armed robberies and stabbings in the past two years?”
“Sure,” conceded the detective. “It’s Memphis. We have a homicide every four days. A robbery every three hours. An aggravated assault every eighty minutes.”
“Sounds like a swell place to live,” said the profiler. “And an even sweller place to die. Okay, let’s move on.” He turned to the woman from the Chattanooga Police Department. “Tell us about your case.”
“Twenty-nine-year-old white female,” she began, “single, living alone. Reported missing by a coworker on June nineteenth when she didn’t show up for work for a week, didn’t return phone calls, didn’t answer her door. She was found two days later, in the woods off I-24, about twelve miles southwest of Chattanooga.”
Brubaker drummed his fingers on the table. “How was she killed?”
“Blunt-force trauma. Somebody beat her brains out.” The Chattanooga detective slid packets of photos to all of us around the table. I heard a few grunts — including my own — as people reached the photos showing how thoroughly her cranium and face had been reduced to a bloody pulp. “Murder weapon was a cast-iron skillet.”
“Excuse me?” interrupted the TBI’s Carson. “Did you say a skillet?”
“Yes, sir,” the detective replied. “If you’ll flip a few more pages back in your packet, you’ll see several photos of it.” Like everyone else, I flipped, and I marveled at what I saw: a six-inch cast-iron skillet, the bottom and si
des of it covered with a paste of blood, hair, and bits of bone and brain matter. The skillet was in two pieces. “As you see,” the detective said, “at some point the handle snapped off at the rim from the force of the blows. The medical examiner was able to match the shape of the skillet with several of the fractures in the skull. There are pictures of that, too.” Fascinated, I flipped forward until I came to a photo of a defleshed cranium, its shattered vault marked with distinctive curved lines. In one photo, someone with latex gloves held the skillet just above one of the curved indentations in the bone, and the arcs matched exactly.
“You said she was single,” said Brubaker, and the detective nodded. “Ex-husband?”
“No, sir. Never married.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Not at the time. And not for a while. Not in the prior two years.”
He frowned. “Could there have been a new boyfriend, one she hadn’t told anybody about?” The detective looked uncertain. “I think this is domestic,” Brubaker explained. “Crime of passion. Look at the overkill — lots more violence than necessary, but it’s not sadistic violence; it’s just plain rage. Hell, she was probably dead after the first hit, but he just kept whaling away with that skillet till he broke the damned thing.” He drummed his fingers again. “Was she killed at home?” The detective shook her head. “Where? Not in the woods, I’m thinking.”
“Not in the woods, best we can tell,” the detective said. “Somewhere else. We don’t know where.”
“She was killed in a kitchen, that’s where,” Brubaker said. “Where else can you lay your hands on a cast-iron skillet when you’re mad as hell? Maybe the new boyfriend invited her over, then told her to cook dinner, and she refused — again — because she’d decided he was a loser and a jerk and a chauvinistic pig. I’m just making this up, obviously, but whatever it was, something set him off and he went ballistic.”