CULPEPPER PAUSED BETWEEN BITES OF EGG SALAD. “So here’s another wild-ass guess. You think there’s any chance Willoughby’s dismemberment could’ve been cult-related?” The KPD
detective had called just as I’d finished watching the video with Miranda. He’d offered to swing by a deli and pick up sandwiches so he could chat with me about postmortem mutilation over lunch. I didn’t answer the cult question right away—I’d just taken in a mouthful of smoked turkey and provolone cheese—so I shook my head to buy time. “You remember the Job Corps murder,” he said as I chewed. I did. It had been committed by a teenage girl, who’d repeatedly stabbed and bludgeoned another girl, a classmate at the job-training center where they were enrolled. “Thatinvolved missing parts,” Culpepper persisted, “and there was a cult connection there, right? Didn’t she carve a pentagram into the chest of the victim?”
I nodded, wiping a stray blob of mayonnaise from my lip. “She did,” I conceded. “She also kept a piece of the skull as a souvenir. But I don’t think it counts as a cult killing. I think it was mostly about jealousy over a boy they both liked. I think the pentagram and the souvenir were drunken, stoned-out afterthoughts. And anyhow, Willoughby’s limbs were amputated with surgical precision. Crazy cultists wouldn’t have done such a neat job of it.”
Culpepper chewed on this as he chewed on his egg-salad sandwich. For a man who chomped gum with such ferocity, Culpepper ate with surprising daintiness. He’d begun by nibbling the fringe of lettuce, pruning it to a neat, straight line, even with the edges of the white slices of loaf bread. From there he’d nibbled into the sandwich proper, starting at one corner and working his way around the perimeter of the crust. I watched in fascination as he spiraled slowly toward the center, one mincing bite at a time. He noticed me watching and stopped, the sandwich a few inches from his mouth. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve just never seen anybody eat a sandwich like that.”
“The egg salad squishes a little bit with every bite,” he explained. “So if you start at one side and just go straight across, by the time you get to the other side, it’s all squishing and dripping out the edge. This keeps it corralled.”
“But you end up with a golf-ball-size wad of it in the center,” I countered, pointing to the bulbous disk of sandwich clutched in his hand.
“No problem,” he said. Opening his mouth wide, he popped it in, chewed briskly, and swallowed quickly. “So I went to East Tennessee Cremation to see your pal Helen. She remembered the name of the embalmer who was working at Ivy Mortuary back when Willoughby was buried,” he mumbled. “A guy named Kerry Roswell. She thinks maybe he started working there in the mid-nineties. She said Roswell was sued, along with Elmer Ivy, by a woman whose husband’s funeral service turned into an entomology science-fair project.”
“Oh, the maggot case. Right. Burt DeVriess mentioned that.”
He made a face, and I wasn’t sure whether it was inspired by the mental picture of the maggot-infested corpse or the thought of DeVriess. “So I checked the court documents DeVriess sent me, and sure enough, there’s Roswell’s name as a codefendant.” He popped a piece of gum into his mouth and began to work it. “Couple other tidbits from Helen. One, she said Roswell seemed kinda ambitious—talked about getting his funeral director’s license, talked about someday opening his own funeral home—but then, poof, he just dropped off the radar screen. Two, she said Elmer Ivy was thinking about selling the business, back around that same time. She actually considered buying it herself, but Ivy was asking too much. Supposedly he had some other potential buyer whose pockets were deeper than Helen’s. The other didn’t follow through, but by then she’d lost interest.”
“Who was the other buyer?”
“Dunno. Some guy from out of town, maybe with one of the national chains that’s been gobbling up the mom-and-pop mortuaries.”