Studying her image, I revised the assessment I’d made earlier in the day. There certainly wasn’t light or life in Gershwin’s eyes, but there was something eerie, a haunting quality, in the photo. It was elusive, but it was there all the same: almost as if the eyes were challenging me, challenging the world, by their very vacancy. I’m not who you think I am,they seemed to say. Or maybe just,Nobody’s home. Leave a message.
I raised my hands, stretching my thumbs and forefingers into L-shaped brackets, and framed my face in the handmade viewfinder. Leaning closer to the mirror, I turned my head slightly to the right and widened the space between my hands. There: That was how I’d framed the shot of Gershwin’s face, almost face-on but favoring the left side just a bit. Glancing down at Gershwin’s photo again, I realized that I’d photographed her at exactly the same angle as the television camera had, night after night.Interesting, I thought.Even though she’s dead, I still wanted her to look the same; I still wanted her to bethe same. But even before death, who had she been? For that matter, who was I? A professor, a scientist, a student of death, a consultant to the state’s medical examiners and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I was also a father, a grandfather, and a widower; since losing my wife to cancer several years earlier, I’d had two brief romances. A year or so back, I’d fallen for a smart, sassy medical examiner from Chattanooga; then, just months ago, I’d gotten involved with a beautiful, baffling librarian. To say that both romances had ended badly would be a huge understatement: the M.E. had been murdered, and—by a twist of fate whose bizarre mirror-image symmetry I only now recognized—the librarian had turned out to be a murderer.
I caught myself frowning in the mirror. Those episodes, those details of my life, seemed oddly unrelated to the face of the middle-aged man staring out at me from the wall of glass. His face seemed almost to belong to someone else, not me. I glanced to my left, where a side mirror caught the same half-stranger’s face in three-quarter profile. In the corner, where the two mirrors met, was a third take on the same face, this one bisected by the vertical seam in the glass. Thus reflected and bisected, I stood transfixed by these partial, unrevealing stand-ins for myself, whoever “me” really was. The jangle of the telephone interrupted my reverie. The lateness of the call surprised me; as I answered the bedroom extension, I noticed that Randall Gibbons—formerly Maureen Gershwin’s coanchor and now the solo anchor—was wrapping up the eleven o’clock newscast. Usually the only calls that came this late were from police, so I suspected I was being called to a death scene, and as I hurried to the phone on the nightstand, I found myself hoping for the distraction and the mission of a case. Perhaps that was who I really was, I thought, perhaps that was what really defined me: Maybe I was merely a reflection of the call, the case, the crime scene, the forensic puzzle. The phone’s caller ID display told me it wasn’t the police contacting me. But it also told me that the caller—“Burton DeVriess LLC”—might have something almost as interesting to offer.
CHAPTER 3
THE BACKHOE LURCHED AND BUCKED AS ITS CLAWtore into the wet, rocky clay of Old Gray Cemetery, one of Knoxville’s oldest and loveliest burial grounds. The name felt apt; the day was dreary, and the air was as cold as the mound of chilly soil piling up beside the monument. Officially, spring was only a few days away, but the earth itself still felt as devoid of warmth and life as a corpse. The diesel engine labored against some sudden resistance, and as the machine strained, it wheezed out a cloud of black smoke. The soot drifted on a whisper of breeze for ten feet or so—just far enough to engulf Miranda and me—and then hovered.
Miranda fanned a hand dramatically across her face. “Remind me why we’re courting lung cancer and pneumonia here?” She punctuated the question with a delicate little stage cough. I was still a bit vague on our mission as well—not the task itself but the late-night, last-minute nature of the phone call I’d received barely ten hours before, asking for my help. “We’re here to help figure out if Trey Willoughby fathered a child by Sherry Burchfield,” I said.
Miranda nodded toward the inscription chiseled into the grave marker, a towering obelisk of polished pink granite. “‘Trey Willoughby, beloved and faithful husband’?”
“Trey Willoughby, at least,” I said. “Not sure about the ‘beloved’ and ‘faithful’ bits. ‘Beloved’ is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but the bone sample we’re about to take could cast a serious shadow on the ‘faithful’ part.”
“Or the unfaithful part,” she said. “So to speak.”
“So to speak.”
“What if the DNA’s too degraded for a paternity test?” I shrugged in response. “And what’s the story on Sherry Burchfield, who might be the mama? I take it she’s not Trey’s loving wife and grieving widow?”