I nodded; the name was familiar, but only vaguely. Over the years many of Knoxville’s funeral homes had sent corpses to the Body Farm, but Ivy never had, to the best of my recollection. I shifted to the foot of the coffin and cranked up the lower portion of the lid to expose the arms, torso, and legs. Willoughby had obviously been dressed for an open-casket viewing. His suit, I noticed, rivaled DeVriess’s in elegance, though it was silk rather than wool. That made sense: According to the obelisk and the newspaper archives, he’d died in August; heaven forbid that the corpse should swelter in wool in the heat of summer. The thin, finely woven fabric clung damply to the arms and legs and to the laces of the black wing-tip shoes.
I reached out behind me, and Miranda wordlessly placed a pair of scissors in my palm. Reluctantly—for this was a far better suit than any I’d ever owned, or ever would—I grasped the cuffs of the left sleeves of the jacket and shirt and stretched them taut, so the V of the scissor blades would slice through more easily. Just as I began to cut, the corpse’s hand shifted and slid from the end of the sleeve. It fell, landing with a dull thud on the corpse’s stomach.
“Crap,” I said. “Maybe the embalming job wasn’t so good after all.”
I’d already begun to cut, so I kept going. The scissors easily parted the thin, rotting fabric, sliding swiftly up toward the shoulder. Too smoothly, in fact. Normally when I cut shirts or pants from a body, the tip of the lower blade tended to snag in the soft flesh of an arm or a leg. But this time it moved in a smooth, slick glide. As the fabric parted, the reason became clear. I stared briefly, then reached across the body and lifted the corpse’s right hand, grasping the gray, clammy fingers cupped around the end of the sleeve. The hand slid from the sleeve, and I found myself in a bizarre, armless handshake. Both hands, I saw when I looked at the wrists, had been severed at the wrists.
“Holy handoff,” squawked Miranda.
“I’ll be damned,” said Grease.
Both of Trey Willoughby’s arms had been neatly amputated at the shoulders. The sleeves of his silk jacket—like the legs of his silk trousers—were filled with white PVC pipe: plastic plumbing in place of human flesh and bone.
CHAPTER 4
THE NEXT CAR THAT ENTERED THE CEMETERY’S GATESwas the polar opposite of DeVriess’s lustrous Bentley. As it swayed and chugged around the curves of the cemetery’s road, this new arrival—a filthy, dented Crown Victoria that had been white once upon a time—seemed to be nearing the end of a long and brutal life, and I wondered how much time it might take the backhoe to carve out a grave for the vehicle.
The car planted its flat-black wheels and bucked to a stop behind the Bentley, coming close enough to make Grease flinch. A plainclothes investigator, mid-thirties, levered his lanky frame out of the sagging driver’s seat and slouched toward us. His shambling walk and tousled hair made him appear laid back, but he was chewing a piece of gum with swift ferocity. As did most detectives, he dressed more like a businessman than a cop, or at least my idea of a cop: He wore a starched white dress shirt, a maroon silk tie, dark gray pants, and shiny black wing tips. He glanced at the three of us standing graveside—DeVriess, Miranda, and me—and then bent down to peer into the coffin at Willoughby’s limbless torso.
“Huh,” he said, then turned to me. “Never a dull moment, eh, Dr. Brockton?” He held out his hand for me to shake. “Gary Culpepper,” he said. “We met twelve years ago. You lectured to our class when I was a new recruit in the police academy. You probably don’t remember me—actually, I hope you don’t. I was the one who dropped the skull that you passed around.”
“I thought you looked familiar,” I fibbed. “This is my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, and Burt DeVriess, the attorney who needs a DNA sample from Mr. Willoughby here.”
Culpepper nodded curtly at Burt, saying, “I’m familiar with Mr. DeVriess. Very nice to meet you, Ms. Lovelady.” He shook Miranda’s hand but not Burt’s, a snub that didn’t come as much of a surprise to me, and surely not to the attorney. During his reign as Knoxville’s toughest defense lawyer, Grease had earned the loathing of most of the city’s police and prosecutors. “So what’ve we got here, Doc?”
It was an irresistible opening. “Well, just offhand I’d say we’ve got a head and a torso.”
He redoubled his assault on the gum and took another look at the body. “Tell me what I missed before I got here.”
I described the sequence of events that culminated in the discovery that Willoughby’s limbs were missing.
“Before you cut into the clothing, did you notice anything that made you think the body or the grave had been disturbed?”
I shook my head.
“And the clothing was undamaged?”
“Well, the fabric was beginning to rot in places, but otherwise yes, it was intact.”
“That means whoever took his arms and legs did it before he was buried,” he mused. “Not exactly a case of grave robbing. Mutilating a corpse, I guess, unless the limbs were amputated while he was still alive.”
I shook my head again. “There’s no sign of bleeding or healing to the tissue at the shoulders and hips,” I explained. “That means he was already dead when he was cut.”
“Hmm…theft of property? I don’t know—who owns the bodies in a cemetery?”