Miranda and I studied the mandible, while Art fished around in the pockets of the dead man’s pants, which were greasy with fatty acids from the decaying corpse. Culpepper, still averting his eyes, asked,
“So what’s the best way to ID him? Fillings? Bridgework? Dental X-rays?”
“We could go the forensic-dentistry route,” I said. “Means we’ll need to check with a lot of dentists once we chart his teeth.”
“Or we could go this route instead,” said Art, who had fished a wallet from the corpse’s left back pocket. Culpepper whirled around just as Art flipped opened the stained wallet and removed a driver’s license. “I believe we just found Kerry Roswell, our missing embalmer.”
The wallet wasn’t all Art found in the coffin with Roswell and Miss Perkins. Tucked behind the fabric liner of the coffin was a clawhammer. Its head—which matched the size and shape of the skull fracture—was smeared with a thin coating of scalp tissue, hair, bone fragments, and brain matter. And its handle showed what appeared to be a partial fingerprint, etched in blood.
“Well,” Culpepper said after a collective silence. “Maybe we need to dig up Elmer Ivy now and see if he’s got any fingerprints we can compare to this.”
“If he’s got fingers,” said Art.
“Or if he’s really in his own coffin, not somebody else’s,” said Miranda. “At this rate we’re gonna have to dig up everybody—every last body—in Knoxville.”
“KNOXVILLE’S GHOULISH GRAVE-ROBBINGmystery has taken a bizarre, deadly twist,” said WBIR anchor Randall Gibbons in that night’s top story, “with grave robbing giving way to murder and grave stuffing.” Like the station’s earlier stories on the Pendergrast and Willoughby exhumations, this report stressed the shocking nature of the subject matter and images. In addition to video footage showing the coffin being hoisted from the grave and the lid pivoting upward—as Miranda, Culpepper, DeVriess, and I stared in shock—the images included several KPD photos of the coffin’s embracing inhabitants, purposely blurred to render them less gruesome. My phones rang continuously throughout the late-night newscast and beyond. I ignored the calls, since I didn’t recognize any of the numbers and didn’t want to spend hours on the phone with reporters. But by the time I switched off the phones for the night, I’d counted more than a dozen different area codes and several international country codes. Must’ve been a slow news day,I thought as I settled into bed.They’ll move on to something else tomorrow . I was wrong.
CHAPTER 29
BY THE NEXT AFTERNOON, THE MEDIA CALLS HADdriven me nuts—I’d dodged dozens of long-distance reporters but had talked with half a dozen local ones. Elmer Ivy had fingerprints on file, it turned out—he’d served in the military—and Art was able to get a scan of them. None of them matched the bloody print on the hammer. The mysterious coffin killer, as some of the reporters dubbed the hammer swinger, was suddenly big news, far bigger than the war in Afghanistan or nuclear talks with Iran and North Korea. It was a relief to drive away from the jangling phones in my office at the end of the day, even though I deeply dreaded what the evening’s errand was likely to hold in store. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Miranda studying me from the passenger seat, so I turned toward her and asked, “What?” The right-front tire teetered on the edge of the pavement, and I twitched the steering wheel to avoid hurtling into the ditch. Duncan Road meandered along ridges and hollows about ten miles west of downtown Knoxville and UT. Decades earlier Duncan had been a rural farm road, but lately weathered farmhouses had given way to sprawling estates and cul-de-sac housing developments, with just enough shacks and rusting trailers to impart a tumbledown, seedy charm.
“What do you mean, what?”
“You’re looking at me funny. What is it?”
“Nothing,” Miranda said, “except watch the road. And slow down.” After a pause she added, “And are you okay?”
I chose not to comment on the driving advice. “Not really.” The truth was, I dreaded what lay ahead. I’d rather be fishing a bloated, slimy corpse from the river, I realized—and floaters were about as unappealing as corpses got, in my opinion—than embarking on this errand with Miranda.
“Slow down. It’s on the left. There.” She pointed into the twilight.“There.”
“Where? I don’t see it.”
“You just missed it.”
I stopped. “I missed it?” Looking out the window, I glimpsed rectangles of golden light slightly below us, crosshatched by bare branches, pine foliage, and glossy rhododendron leaves. “Where the hell’s the driveway?”
“You passed it.”