“I’m gonna go work the other side of the room,” said Jess. “If you can get your mind off Miss Georgia for a minute, how about talking to these folks around the bar?” Without waiting for an answer, she threaded the crowd and began at a table in the far corner.
I made my way from patron to patron. I got a lot of odd looks, a few lewd propositions, and one pinch on my butt, which was swiftly followed by one of the lewd propositions. Taking a moment to collect myself after that, I scanned the opposite side of the room. I saw Jess engaged in an animated conversation with none other than Miss Georgia. Jess pointed at Miss Georgia’s chest and then at her own, laughing and shaking her head. Then, as I watched in astonishment, Jess reached up and cupped Miss Georgia’s breasts in her hands, giving them an appraising squeeze and admiring nod. A moment later, Miss Georgia returned the gesture, squeezing Jess’s breasts, then fanning herself dramatically.
I didn’t know whether to be amused or jealous. The truth was, I was both.
I checked my watch. It was 2 A.M.-a good three hours past my usual bedtime. It suddenly felt much later. It suddenly felt too late for me.
CHAPTER 14
THE CHATTANOOGA MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office occupied a small building on Amnicola Highway, several miles northeast of downtown. Unlike the Regional Forensic Center in Knoxville, which was part of UT Medical Center, Jess Carter’s facility was a freestanding structure, a nondescript, discreetly labeled rectangle of concrete block and glass that could have housed anything from a paint store to a software company. Its location always struck me as odd, too: its closest neighbor was the city’s police and fire department training facility, an adjacency that possessed a certain logic. Other nearby businesses seemed far more random, though, including a grain elevator, a chemical plant, a lumber company, television station, and trucking firm. On the other hand, I reflected as I turned into the small parking lot, death was no respecter of persons, nor of occupations; seen in that light, this blue-collar setting for the morgue made as much sense as any other.
In both square footage and staff, Jess’s facility was only half the size of Knoxville’s, but-also unlike the Knoxville center-it wasn’t handling cases from surrounding counties. The young murder victim dressed in drag whose body was found in the state forest in neighboring Marion County was an exception. Jess, and the Chattanooga police, had gotten involved because there was evidence to suggest that the victim had been abducted in Chattanooga.
Until a month ago, Jess’s staff of five had included a forensic anthropologist, Rick Fields, who was one of my former students. But Rick had just taken a similar position at the Regional Forensic Center in Memphis, which represented a big step up, in salary and in caseload: Memphis had about 150 murders a year, compared with Chattanooga’s 25 or 30. While Jess sought a replacement for Rick, I was filling in down here, just as she had been filling in as ME in Knoxville since Garland Hamilton’s suspension for incompetence.
I said hello to Amy, the receptionist separated from the lobby by a window of bulletproof glass. Amy pointed to my right, toward the end of the building that contained the autopsy suite, and buzzed me in through the metal door on that side of the lobby. Jess was just stitching up the abdominal cavity of an elderly white female. “Don’t tell me you’ve got another homicide,” I said.
Without looking up from her sutures, she answered, “No, just an unattended death. Colon cancer. She had just gone home from the hospital to die. The irony is, she was supposed to be in hospice care, but somehow the paperwork got lost, so they were scrambling around to get her signed up. If it had worked like it was supposed to-if there’d been a seamless handoff from the hospital to hospice-I wouldn’t have needed to spend two hours confirming what we already knew about her cause of death.”
Jess was wearing faded jeans-blue, not black-and a maroon scrub shirt. She looked more tired than I’d ever seen her look. Also less guarded and more human, somehow. It made me want to take care of her, ease the load she was carry ing. “No offense, but you look about halfway toward needing hospice care yourself,” I said.
“You silver-tongued flatterer, you,” she said, but the smart-ass words lacked her usual smart-ass crackle.
“Seriously,” I said, “you okay?”
“Tired. Really tired. In the past week I’ve done six autopsies here, four in Knoxville, and made a trip to Nashville. I’ve only had two days off, both of them Sundays, in the past month. I desperately need to hire a morgue technician, but our budget’s so tight the only thing keeping us out of the red is those two vacancies, the tech and the anthropologist.” I had never stopped to consider what a load Jess carried; her willingness to do double duty up in Knoxville was remarkably generous, and it was wearing her down fast.
She had her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, but a wisp had gotten loose and fallen across her face. She couldn’t reach up and brush it away because her gloves were a mess, so I did it for her. Then I laid my hand on her cheek. She leaned into it, and it felt good, so I put my other hand on her other cheek, cradling her face in my hands. She closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath, then puffed it out. As she did, she dropped her head deeper into my hands, her shoulders sagging with fatigue. Her gloved hands hung at her sides. I moved my hands from her face to her shoulders, then wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. She did not resist, and in a moment she laid her head on my chest. “I’m sorry you’re so tired, Jess,” I murmured. In response, she gave a small shiver, or maybe it was a sob. But then she stiffened and began to pull away. I held tight, and tried to soothe her. “Shhhh,” I said. “Just relax for a minute.”
For some reason I didn’t understand, it was the wrong thing to say. She began to struggle against me, and put her hands-messy gloves and all-on my chest and pushed me away. “Stop,” she said sharply. “Not here. I cannot be this way with you here.”
The words stung, or maybe it was the physical rejection that stung. Whichever the case, my face burned with disappointment and humiliation. “Dammit, Jess, then where? Not at my house-that wasn’t the place, either. Alan Gold’s? Those were somebody else’s hands on you there. Your house? You haven’t invited me there. Where does that leave? I’m confused and frustrated. I didn’t start this; you did. Unless I completely misread that dinner invitation you extended to yourself last week.”
Now it was her turn to flush. “Right now I’m working,” she said. “Would you do this in the middle of teaching a class?” She looked away and chewed on her lower lip. “No,” she said at last. “You didn’t misread. I’m confused, too. When I saw you last week, I thought you were finally over Kathleen’s death and ready for another relationship. What I failed to think about was whether or not I was ready.”
“Your divorce? How long has it been?”
“About six months. No; eight. But we’d been on the skids for a couple of years. Hell, I was on the verge of jumping ship myself. So how come it hurt so much when he beat me to the punch?” I saw tears welling up, something I’d never expected to see in the eyes of Jess Carter. I reached up to wipe them away, but she took a step back and held up a warning finger. Then she raised her arms, one after the other, and wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her scrubs. “I’m sorry, Bill,” she said. “This is harder than I thought, and I’m too tired and strung out to be smart about it.” She looked at the bloody smears her gloves had left on my chest. “I’m sorry about the shirt, too,” she said. “Go change into some scrubs, and while we’re looking at this forensic case, I’ll get Amy to run it through the wash.”