“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 sides 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.”
The detective nodded, chewing her lip.
“You said she was reported missing by a coworker?”
“Yes.”
“Not her boss.”
“No.”
“The boss—a man, right?” She nodded. “Middle-aged? Married, I’m guessing?”
Her brow furrowed as she thought, and I could picture her trying to remember the boss’s left hand. She looked up at Brubaker, surprised. “Yeah, now that you mention it, he was wearing a ring.”
“Be interesting to know if the boss’s wife was away when this happened,” Brubaker said. “Also be interesting to check his kitchen for blood.” Her eyes narrowed, and as they did, I could see wheels begin turning behind them.
We ended with the new case Meffert and I were working in Campbell County. Meffert started with an overview of the case, and with the update of the ID. “The victim was a twenty-six-year-old white female from Covington, Kentucky. Melissa Mahan; went by Crystal.” He flashed a picture—a mug shot—showing a pretty but world-weary young woman. “She had a couple of arrests for soliciting. She worked part-time as an exotic dancer here”—he showed a slide of Adult World, the seedy establishment at the I-75 exit, a few miles from where we’d recovered her body. Next he showed the nearby truck stop. “She could have been picked up at either Adult World or the truck stop. Lotta truckers visit the porn palace; lotta hookers work the truck stop. She was a familiar face at the truck stop, I’m told.”
“When was she reported missing?” asked Brubaker.
Meffert frowned. “She wasn’t. Her last day of work at Adult World was September seventh. Over two weeks ago. But she wasn’t scheduled to work again until September fourteenth, because her boss had suspended her for a week. So we don’t actually know when she got picked up.”