Cut to the Bone by Jefferson Bass Page B

rain.
    Neyland Stadium loomed dark and hulking as I threaded the truck down the narrow service lane around its perimeter. Weaving between concrete columns and steel girders to the base of the mammoth oval, I tucked the truck into the narrow dead end of asphalt beside the osteology lab. “Tyler, we’re here,” I said. He didn’t answer, so I shook his elbow, causing him to bolt upright and look around, wild-eyed and disoriented. “We’re here,” I repeated.
    â€œOkay,” he mumbled. “Be right there.” He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “Wow,” he said, sounding slightly more cogent. “I was really out.” He massaged his neck and rolled his head from side to side to work out the kinks. “You want me to start processing the remains now?”
    â€œNah. Go home. She’s locked in the back.” I thought of the line the Morgan County sheriff had used a few weeks before. “She won’t be any deader in the morning than she is now. But you might be, if you don’t get some sleep.”
    â€œThanks,” he said. “I’ll get going on it first thing.” He opened the door, but he didn’t get out. “Doctor B?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œHow could somebody do that to a woman? Butcher her like an animal and dump her like garbage?”
    I shook my head. “I can tell you her race, her stature, her handedness, and her age,” I said. “I might be able to tell you how she died. But why? I can’t answer that one.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “What was it the old maps used to say at the edges, out beyond the known territory? ‘Here be monsters’? I don’t understand it—I’ve got no scientific explanation for it—but there’s evil in the world. Hiding around corners, lurking in doorways, coiling underneath rotting logs. Irrational, inexplicable, powerful evil.”
    A LIGHT WAS ON in the living room when I pulled into my driveway at eleven fifteen, but the rest of the house was dark. Unclipping the garage-door remote from the visor, I clicked the button, eased beneath the rising door, and switched off the ignition. I sat for a moment, the truck’s engine ticking with heat, my heart ticking with disappointment.
    After seventeen years of marriage—and a decade of late-night returns from crime scenes—I no longer expected Kathleen to wait up for me; I’d even taken time to call her, when Tyler and I had stopped for gas, to tell her not to. But I’d been harboring hope that she would ignore the suggestion. Bodies and bones didn’t usually bother me; I regarded them as puzzles to be solved—mental challenges, not human tragedies—but tonight I felt skittish and shaken. The brutality of the woman’s slaying had gotten to me; so had the near miss with the rattlesnake. Had the ticking engine somehow reminded me of the snake’s warning buzz? The deputy’s rhetorical question as we’d loaded up—“Did you know that a rattlesnake’s head moves at a hunnerd and seventy-five miles an hour when it’s striking?”—popped into my mind, unbidden and unwelcome, for the dozenth time since dinner.
    I stripped off my clothes in the garage—I’d shed the jumpsuit earlier, back at the stadium—and tossed them in the washing machine I’d installed in the back corner, at the end of my workbench. It was the old washer, the one Kathleen had exiled from the laundry room after finding decomp-soaked dungarees in it. Now, banished to the garage, it lived a contaminated and constrained life: no more satin pillowcases, silk blouses, sheer nightgowns, lacy undergarments; nothing but stinking shirts, muddy jeans, ruined towels, mildewed socks. My career had been good for America’s appliance manufacturers, I reflected, dumping in extra detergent and twisting the Maytag’s knobs to the longest, hottest cycle.