“Sure,” I said. “Who isn’t, since Silence of the Lambs?” Brubaker gave me a tight, tolerant smile—a sign, I took it, that the Hollywood gloss on their work had worn a bit thin. “Actually, though,” I added, “I worked with one of your colleagues back before Hollywood discovered y’all. Mitch Radnor and I both looked at those three dismemberments out in Kansas, back about five years ago.”
A bigger, more genuine smile replaced the polite, cool one. “Oh, right,” he said, “I remember that, now that you remind me. Great case. What was it the guy used to cut up the victims? Some kind of power saw. Not a chain saw, though. Not a circular saw, either.”
“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.”