A Tale of Two Heads

I finished typing my final report of my latest case and took the folder to the Captain to sign. It hadn't been particularly difficult case to figure out. It was just another of the many gang related murders that seem to happen in any big city.

This case happened in the alley behind a popular Chattanooga nightclub and I was assigned to figure out the who, when, how, and why. Then I'd give all that information to the DA to get an arrest warrant so I could arrest the killer and the DA could put the asshole in prison for at least twenty or so years..

I already knew the "when", because the victim was lying in the alley and the blood pool around him was still fresh when the uniforms found him. They'd responded to a 911 call of gunfire at 4:36 AM from a resident of an apartment above a resale shop that shared the alley. When they drove down the alley at 4:55 AM, they saw the victim lying in front of a dumpster with a bullet hole in his chest and a blood pool still forming.

That also solved the how part of the equation needed to find and convict the killer, though I'd had to wait until Chris Morgan, our Coroner, decided on an official cause of death. That turned out to be a single,.40 caliber bullet that entered the victim just to the left of his breastbone, sliced through his heart, and then ricocheted around his ribcage and took out his right lung before exiting through his right side. There were powder burns on the guy's clothing. Chris said he was probably dead within a minute of being shot and wouldn't have been able to move much after about thirty seconds. That eliminated the need to look for a second crime scene.

There are two parts to the "who" question -- who was the victim and who was the killer. Any murder investigation pretty much comes to a screeching halt if you don't have the name of the victim. Knowing who the victim is gives a detective an access to an investigation checklist of residence, family, friends and acquaintances, past history criminal or otherwise, and financial status. Without a name, the detective is just shooting in the dark and hoping to hit something that squeals.

In this case, identifying the victim was easy. Leander Phillips had a driver's license in his wallet and after Chris took his prints, those prints confirmed his identity. The TBI had his prints because Leander had been a pretty bad boy since he was eighteen. My guess was he'd started dealing drugs for his gang, TG6, some time before that, but and his juvenile records would be sealed and since he was dead, I had no reason to wade through the red tape to find out.

Leander was twenty-five and had started his adult career with two years in minimum security in Bledsoe for dealing crack when he was eighteen. Bledsoe is a prison with a pretty great rehab program. A lot of young, non-violent offenders end up in minimum security in Bledsoe in the hopes they'll get some education or learn a skill and become productive members of society.

Apparently that two years didn't make Leander any smarter, because six months after he got out of Bledsoe he was back on the street with a pocket full of Vicodin. Apparently he thought the undercover TBI agent was just another addict when he sold the agent four Vicodin tablets. That had cost Leander another four years back in Bledsoe. I suppose the judge thought the second time would be the charm.

Leander had been out of his second vacation in Bledsoe about three weeks when the uniforms found him. When the Corner got to the scene and searched Leander's pockets he didn't find any crack or Vicodin. My guess was that Leander had sold out of inventory and was looking to re-stock.

That was a logical choice for the "why". It was logical because Leander was known to be a member of TG6 but he was about twenty blocks from TG6 turf.

TG6 is sort of a "wanna be" gang in that they don't have connections to any of the big cartel operations and have to buy their drugs from other gangs who are connected. Where Leander was, was in the home turf of Bario Cubana, a gang that originated in Miami, but had spread north as far as Kentucky.

Bario Cubana was the equivalent of a corporate distribution chain and ran drugs from the Gulf through the southeastern US. They mostly sold to small to medium gangs in that area. It would make sense that Leander was trying to replace his inventory by buying a new stash from Bario Cubana.

To most people, it wouldn't be logical that some guy from Bario Cubana would off Leander since Leander was a customer. It made sense to me though, because about three years into Leander's second stint in Bledsoe, he told his cellmate that he knew some things about Bario Cubana that he'd be willing to tell if it would get a year knocked off his four year sentence.

Now, his cellmate, being just a little smarter than Leander kept that information to himself until he was released a month later. Word on the street was that this cellmate talked to some guy who talked to some other guy who talked to some other guy. The end result was that Bario Cubana had a hardon for Leander. He just didn't know it and when he went back into business, his contact made sure Leander couldn't use whatever he knew if he got caught again.

It was the second "who" that was harder to figure out. Well, it wasn't hard to figure out, but it was a bitch to prove. When a murder happens in that part of Chattanooga, the residents suddenly become blind, deaf and dumb. They didn't see anything, they didn't hear anything, and they have no idea about anybody in any gang. Hell, they won't even admit to knowing Bario Cubana even exists.

That's because in addition to being the courier service for the Florida drug cartels, they have this bad habit of disappearing anyone who says anything that might interfere with their operation. I suppose the threat of losing a few million in income while spending a few years of quality time with a cellmate nicknamed "El Toro" might have a tendency to tilt your moral compass quite a bit.

Anyway, my prime suspect for the killer was Inigo Lopez. Inigo was one of the maybe one percent of criminals who are actually smart enough to avoid arrest for crimes they've committed. Inigo had been the suspect in at least six gang murders that I knew of, but there was never enough hard evidence to put his ass in jail.

We'd gotten a lot of statements like, "Well I heard it was this guy named Ini something", or "The word is if you fuck with Bario Cubana, you end up getting fucked up by Inigo Lopez."

We were positive those statements were true for the simple reason that when Inigo was brought in for questioning, he'd have an alibi for any situation we asked him about. He couldn't have killed the guy because he and his girlfriend were in Pigeon Forge that week and he had the hotel receipts to prove it. He couldn't have killed the guy because he was in Chicago visiting his sister for two weeks and he had the airline tickets to prove it. The tentacles of drug organizations stretch far and wide. Inigo had either paid off enough people or threatened enough people that they'd testify that he was somewhere miles away from where the guy was killed.

What finally got Inigo into an interrogation room was the sharp thinking of Gary Morrison, one of our crime scene techs. He was going through the pockets of Leander's pants and wasn't finding anything. Knowing Leander's background and where he was found, it didn't make sense to Gary that Leander didn't have anything in his pockets. If he'd been there buying drugs, he should have had the drugs on him. If he didn't have the drugs, he should have had a wad of cash. Since Leander didn't have either, someone, probably the killer, had taken either the drugs or the cash from Leander.

Gary swabbed the inside of each pocket for DNA and after the swabs were analyzed, there were two different profiles. One was Leander's DNA profile. The other belonged to Inigo Lopez.

Inigo had had his DNA sampled when he was arrested for murdering one Solana Mendoza, a prostitute who worked the Bario Cubana area of Chattanooga. The police had one witness who said she saw Inigo kill Solana. Inigo had six witnesses who said he was in Knoxville when Solana was strangled. The first witness was found dead from an overdose of heroin the day before the trial was to begin and the police couldn't find any other evidence, so the DA was forced to drop the case.

Inigo's DNA sat in CODIS until Gary sent the unknown DNA profile for a match. That DNA match got me an arrest warrant for Inigo and a search warrant for Inigo's apartment. The search turned up a stash of coke, Vicodin, Oxycodone, about a hundred grand in cash, and a Glock 27 in.40 S&W caliber.

When I got Inigo into an interrogation room with his lawyer, I put it all on the line and added a couple lies to sweeten the pot.

"Mr. Lopez, I have the pistol you used to kill Leander Phillips and our crime scene techs found your DNA on the grip and trigger. That's all I need to convict you of murder, but there's more evidence. They also found Mr. Phillips' blood on the muzzle of the pistol. That means you were close enough to him that when the bullet entered his chest, the splatter from the wound was sprayed on your pistol.

"A bullet fired from your pistol matches the bullet retrieved from Mr. Phillips' chest. I have your DNA on the inside of Mr. Phillips' pockets. The fact that you searched Mr. Phillips' pockets tells me he had something you wanted and you killed him to get it. It won't be hard to convince a jury that you planned the murder in order to get what he had. Because it was an obviously pre-planned murder, the DA is going to ask for the death penalty.

"Now, I don't know if you planned to kill him or not. It could very well be that you met him and told him to give you whatever he had that you wanted. He could have started to fight and the gun went off during the fight. If that's what happened, that would be unintentional and would make the charge manslaughter instead of premeditated murder. The last case I handled that was deemed to be manslaughter, the guy got twenty years.

"What I need to know from you is what happened and I need the truth. I have the evidence to support murder, so if I think you're lying, we'll be done here. I'll put you back into a holding cell until you go before a judge for arraignment.

"I doubt you'll get bail so you'll get to meet some interesting people while you're awaiting your trial. I think we're holding Adam Sampson right now. He's here awaiting trial for beating the shit out of José Hernandez. José was born right here in Chattanooga, but Adam... well, when Adam gets drunk, he has a real thing about people with names that sound Hispanic. The word is he's about the same when he's sober. You ready to talk or not?"

Inigo looked at his lawyer, and then leaned over to whisper something to him. The lawyer whispered something back, and then turned to me.

"Mr. Lopez says it happened like you said. Mr. Lopez met Mr. Phillips because Mr. Phillips said he was going to pay back a loan he'd gotten from Mr. Lopez. When they met, Mr. Phillips said he had no intention of paying the money back and started to rush Mr. Lopez. Mr. Lopez pulled his pistol and told Mr. Phillips to stop, but by that time Mr. Phillips was close enough he could hit Mr. Lopez. When he did, Mr. Lopez accidentally fired his pistol and killed Mr. Phillips. Mr. Lopez did search Mr. Phillips' pockets, but didn't find anything."

I pushed a pad of paper and a pen in front of Inigo.

"You write all that down and sign it and I'll go talk to the DA."

When I took my report to the Captain, I was feeling pretty good. I didn't believe for a second that Inigo hadn't planned on killing Leander, but the confession he'd written and signed would get him put away in maximum security in Bledsoe for the next twenty years. If he behaved himself, he'd be eligible for parole in maybe fifteen. I kind of doubted that he'd make it though. A lot of people don't realized that most of the street gangs have auxiliary chapters in prisons too. It's likely that some members of TG6 taking a time out in Bledsoe already knew Inigo was heading there.

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When I handed the Captain the folder he tossed it in his inbox and then handed me a piece of notepaper.

"Jack, there's a construction site out by Missionary Ridge off of South Crest Road. Some guy by the name of Richard Mullens owns twenty acres of the wooded area there and decided to build a house on the property.

"The contractor digging the foundation was down about two feet when he hooked something with a tooth on his backhoe. When he went to pull it off, he saw that it was rotted leather with some bones inside.

"He called 911 and I sent two officers out. They confirmed that it's a grave and asked for the CSI team and a detective. Because of where it is, I called UT and asked them to send an archeologist out to supervise our CSI team while they remove the body. Missionary Ridge is where the Confederacy set up their sharpshooters after Chickamauga and laid siege to the Union Army in Chattanooga. There were probably Confederate soldiers all over the area and this might be the grave of one of them. Drive out there and see if it's an old Confederate burial or if it's more recent."

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I'm Jack Mason, a detective with twenty years with the Chattanooga Police Department. I spent ten years in a patrol car before passing the detective exam, so I know both the great parts as well as the underbelly of Chattanooga.

I already had fifteen murder investigations under my belt and this didn't sound like I was going to have much to do. It was probably just an old grave. There are many old family cemeteries in the rural areas of Tennessee. There was no legal requirement that they be noted on any deed or survey, so many weren't marked or the markers were just wood and time and weather erased them. Over the years and as the property changed hands the fact that there was a cemetery on the property was forgotten.

There also was a real possibility the contractor had just found a Civil War grave that was a hundred and sixty years old. There were fighting and troop movements all around the Chattanooga area, and soldiers were sometimes buried close to where they fell. It doesn't happen as often as a hundred years ago, but people still occasionally find the grave of a Civil War soldier, and once in a while the even older grave of a Native American who lived in the area before it was settled gets unearthed. From what I'd seen of these gravesites, there usually wasn't much left other than a few brass buttons and in the case of a Native American grave, a few arrow points and shell beads.

When I arrived at the construction site, there were two of our CSI trucks there, one SUV with a UT sticker on the back, and six people standing in a circle around a hole in the ground. I found the man I knew wasn't CSI and introduced myself, then asked him what he'd found. He frowned.

"Afternoon, Detective Mason. I'm Larry Masters and I'm not sure. What I can tell you is that this doesn't look like an old gravesite, or at least some of it doesn't. When a grave is dug and then back-filled, there will be a slight discoloration where the fill soil meets the original soil and there will be a slight depression over the grave. That's because the fill soil isn't tamped down as hard as the surrounding soil. Rainwater will soak in and begin to compact the soil again and that results in the slight depression. It also washes organic matter into the fill soil and it turns a little darker.

"Subsequent decomposition also changes the color of the soil around the remains. I don't see either with this grave. There might be a slight color change above past of the skeletal remains, but it's not really definite enough to date the remains back a hundred and sixty years.

"The other thing that has us all confused is that the skeletal remains have decomposed enough that the bones have disarticulated and the ribs are lying alongside the spine instead of in their normal upright position. That tells me this is an old grave, probably a hundred years old at least, and yet there is hair still present on the skull. That would indicate this is a fairly recent burial like maybe a year old or possibly two.

"We've stopped doing anything for fear of destroying any evidence that might be present in or around the gravesite. I contacted the UT Forensics Anthropology Center in Knoxville and asked them to send one of their people to Chattanooga to tell us what we really have here. They said they'd send Dr. Melrose. It's a little over a hundred miles from Knoxville to Chattanooga and I called them an hour ago, so I'm guessing maybe another hour before they get here."

I walked around the site and took some notes, but nothing I saw indicated that this was a recent burial. Other than the drive to the site the contractor had cut through the trees from South Crest Road, I couldn't find any other place a car or truck could have gotten to the gravesite. To me, it just looked like an old grave, but I learned long ago not to jump to a conclusion without a lot more evidence.

The contractor had left as soon as the CSI team got there, so I made a note to talk to him and anyone who had worked on the site. If this was a new grave, it was entirely possible that the contractor or his backhoe operator was the killer, knew the body was there, and had intentionally dug in that spot to divert suspicion from them. It wouldn't be the first time in my career that the killer had "discovered" the body of his victim.

When I thought about that some more, it was also possible the owner of the site had bought it in order to have a place to hide the body or to make sure nobody started digging around. He could have picked the site for the house for the same reason, that being to divert suspicion from himself. I made a note to talk to the owner as well.

It might seem to most people that I'm pretty suspicious and cynical about everything, but in my line of work, you have to consider all the possibilities and then look for evidence that either proves or disproves each one. That means you need to gather all the information you can get, and for that reason, I interviewed each CSI tech there.

None of them had ever disinterred a really old grave before, so they weren't sure if it was an old grave or just that the body had decomposed at different rates for some reason.

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What I was expecting was an older man, probably with graying hair or maybe bald, a little thick in the middle, and wearing thick glasses. I figured the woman in jeans and a plaid shirt who got out of the black Chevy Blazer was just an assistant who was doing the driving. I waited for someone else to get out.

Like I said before, there are times when what I think turns out to be dead wrong. The woman walked up to Larry, stuck out her hand, and said, "Hi, Larry. It's been a while. Whatcha got that I need to look at?"

I figured her for maybe fifty based on the lines in her face, and though she wasn't ugly by any measure, but neither was she what most people would call beautiful. She just looked like about ninety-nine percent of the women I saw every day. The only real difference was she didn't seem to care much about how she looked.

I couldn't see that she'd used any makeup and her dark brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail that stuck out the back of a baseball cap with the UT logo on the front. The rest of her looked pretty average as well, though it was hard to tell because her jeans and shirt didn't fit very tight. She also wasn't wearing any jewelry that I could see, and in my experience, every woman wants a little sparkle somewhere on her body even if it's just a pair of earrings. My ex-wife would even put on earrings and a ring or two just to do housework. The only thing the woman was wearing that looked decorative was pink running shoes.

I thought it was time for me to get acquainted, so I walked up to Larry and the woman and smiled.

"Larry, you didn't tell me Dr. Melrose was a woman. Dr. Melrose, I'm Detective Jack Mason from the Chattanooga Police Department. Welcome to the party."

She grinned and stuck out her hand.

"I'm Dr. Beverly Melrose, but I'd rather be just Beverly except to the students I teach."

She let go of my hand then and turned to Larry.

"So, Larry, what prompted you to call Knoxville?"

Larry motioned Beverly to the gravesite. I followed and watched. Larry pointed down into the hole.

"Well, I've never seen anything like this before. I stopped the CSI techs before they'd dug very deep, but see how the remains are facing up but the rib cage has mostly collapsed. That told me this is probably a very old burial. Then I looked at the top of the skull and saw hair, and not just a little. The skull appears to have most of a full head of white hair. That tells me this is a fairly recent burial."

Beverly nodded.

"I see what you mean. I won't be able to tell much until we get every thing out of the ground.

She looked at me then.

"Detective Mason, do you need to keep the remains here in Chattanooga?"

"Well, at least until you two figure out if this is an old grave or a new burial."

She smiled.

"I'll take over a table in your Coroner's lab then if he doesn't' mind. Well, let's get started. Detective Mason, I have some specialized equipment in my truck and I'll show your technicians what I need done. It'll probably take us a while to exhume the remains. While they're bringing everything here, I better call and make a hotel reservation. Any close hotels you can recommend?"

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It actually took seven hours before the last bone was removed from the grave and placed in the sealed evidence bags from the CSI tech's kits. Beverly had had the foresight to bring a rack of battery powered lights with her, and they'd had to use them for the last hour.

Part of the reason for the long time was Beverly had instructed the CSI techs to dig only about an inch at a time. They'd dig an inch and then Beverly would press a button on what looked like a remote for a camera suspended on a tripod over the grave.

The other reason was that every scoop of dirt was run through a screen to catch any small bones or other items that were in the grave. The results of those screenings were a few wrist bones and several cast brass buttons with the star Larry said was typical of the Confederate uniform buttons. A pair of mostly rotted boots and a few shreds of rotted cloth were also found.

The CSI techs left for the morgue with all the evidence bags. Larry and I helped Beverly pack all the equipment back into her truck while the two patrol officers finished taping off the site with yellow tape. When they finished, Larry said he was heading back home because there was nothing more that he could do. Beverly said she was going to the Comfort Inn on Williams Street right after she made a stop for dinner at the Taco Bell she'd passed on the way to the site.

She asked if I'd talk to our Coroner so he wouldn't be shocked when he got to his lab in the morning. I said I'd talk to Chris, but I'd probably not see her until after lunch because I was going to talk to the contractor, his employees who were on the site, and to the owner of the site. She smiled and said maybe she'd have something for me by then.

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On my way back to the station, I called Chris. I didn't think he'd be in his office, but it turned out he was. One of the CSI techs had already called him to tell him about what was coming to his lab.

I figured Chris might be upset, but he sounded happy.

"I already heard, Jack, and I'm more than good with Dr. Melrose using my lab. You don't read the professional literature so you probably don't know, but she's sort of a legend among us corpse carvers. She was one of the first to use laser mapping to record bodies in situ. Made it a lot easier and faster for the CSI techs to document a site because instead of sketching out every bone, stick and rock, they let the laser record all that digitally and it's accurate down to the centimeter.

"Anyone can review the scene days or even years after the body is found. That's important, especially with older burial sites. It helps us determine a cause and time of death if we can see where the body was found, its orientation, and the amount of decomp.

"I've tried to get one for our CSI lab but they're pretty pricey. I've seen the results though, and they're great. I want to meet her."

I figured that was why Beverly had told the techs to only dig an inch at a time. She was recording the gravesite in increments of an inch. I'd never heard of the technique, but I could see how it could be of value. I'd ask Beverly to show me the pictures tomorrow.

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The next morning, I drove out to the contractor's office and talked to Henry Rutherford, the owner. He hadn't been on the site until his backhoe operator called him and told him what they'd found. He'd driven out, looked at what his backhoe operator had found, then stopped all work.

"The way the laws are in Tennessee, any time you did up anything that looks human, you have to stop and call the police. I once spent four days sitting on my thumbs waiting for the state archeologist to tell me I'd dug up a goat. He thought it was an old Cherokee burial because there were some feathers on the ribs."

I asked him if his backhoe operator was around and he nodded.

"That site was the only current job that needed a foundation. Terry's outback changing the oil in the backhoe."

I spend about ten minutes with Terry, mostly because he looked scared to death when I showed him my badge. When people do that, it sets off the little alarm in my head that tells me they're hiding something.

I asked Terry what had happened at the site and he gave me the same story the two patrol officers had written in their reports. The site had been leveled before Terry started laying out the foundation. He'd gotten everything laid out with contractor's spray paint, and then started digging. He said he was about two feet down when he saw something hanging off a tooth on his backhoe bucket. When he looked to see what it was, he saw bones sticking out of a piece of rotted leather. That's when he called Mr. Rutherford.

When he got done, I said he looked really nervous and I was wondering if he was telling me everything. Terry looked at the rag in his hand.

"Everything I told you is what happened. I'm nervous because you're a cop."

"Oh. Why would I make you nervous? I haven't accused you of anything."

Terry shook his head.

"I spent four years in the Army because I was fucking stupid and thought I could rob a gas station that was closed. That was in '70 when I was eighteen. I was trying to beat open the cigarette machine to get the money out of it because I couldn't get the cash register open. A cop driving by saw me inside and stopped to see what I was doing.

"There wasn't any way that I wasn't guilty as hell so I pled guilty. The judge said since I pled guilty and it was a first offense, he'd give me a choice. I could spend three years in prison or I could enlist in the Army.

"I ended up in Construction Engineering school and learned how to run a dozer and a backhoe. After that, I spent the rest of my four-year enlistment working on stateside projects. I got an honorable discharge, but I still have a record. I just get nervous when I talk to a cop because I always wonder if he suspects me of doing something."

I didn't push Terry any harder because he'd told the same story to the two patrol officers, but since I didn't yet know if I was dealing with just an old grave or a murder, I didn't take him off my list. I just gave him my card, thanked him for his service in the Army and said if he thought of anything else to give me a call.

From the contractor's office, I drove to the current address of Richard Mullens, the owner of the building site. The house was at 4326 Melrose Drive, and I'd been down Melrose Drive a lot of times as a patrol officer. Melrose Drive was about ten miles of houses, each on at least a ten-acre lot.

The house at 4326 was a huge house with two stories and third story dormer windows that were probably in an attic. It sat back from Melrose Drive by at least three hundred feet, and was fenced with wrought iron fencing six feet high. I didn't know what Mr. Mullens did for a living, but evidently he valued his privacy.

His housekeeper told me that Mr. Mullens was vacationing in Cancun until his new house was finished and probably wouldn't answer his cell phone.

I really had no reason to talk to Mr. Mullens at least until I knew what I was dealing with. I drove back to the station and walked down to Chris' office.

Chris was bent over an autopsy table with two evidence bags in his hands. As I walked over, he said, "Beverly, there's not much of these left. What do you think -- ribs four and five or five and six?"

Beverly looked at the bags and then smiled.

"I don't have to think. All I have to do is look at the laser scans. That's why I had the techs go so slow. I marked each bone on the scans with a digital identifier and then made sure the tech used that number on the evidence bag. Let's see... this one is rib number five and this one... this one is number seven, both from the left side. Rib six has to be around here in this pile because I know I gave it an ID number."

I walked over to the table to see what they were doing. What they were doing was laying out all the bones where they would have been in an articulated skeleton. I asked Beverly if she had anything for me yet.

Beverly put down the thighbone she was holding and pulled off her latex gloves.

"Yes and no. What I can tell you is the body is the body of a man about a hundred and sixty-eight centimeters tall and judging by the ossification of the joints, he was between seventeen and twenty-five. There is pretty severe decomposition of the bones so I can't be any closer."

"So, what I've got is a really old grave?"

Beverly shook her head.

"Yes and no. The body is at least a hundred years old give or take fifty years or so. The soil was pretty wet and there was a ton of organic matter where the site hadn't been cleared. Weather conditions and organic matter can both speed up and slow down decomp so without reviewing the weather conditions over the past hundred and fifty years, I can't get any closer.

"The problem is the skull. The skull found with the body doesn't belong with it. It's the skull of a Caucasian woman between fifty-five and sixty-five. The saggital and coronal sutures are fused and that doesn't happen before the age of fifty-five. Usually they're aren't completely fused until about sixty."

I asked how Beverly knew it was a woman. She pointed to the skull at the end of the autopsy table.

"The biggest clue is the presence or absence of supraorbital ridges and the shape of the eye sockets. Male skulls have visible brow ridges and female skulls usually don't. The shape of the male eye sockets tends to be relatively square with blunt edges while the female eye sockets tend to be rounder and with sharper, well-defined edges.

"There's also the size. This skull is thinner and a lot smaller than a male skull. It falls into the minus three-sigma range for males of five foot six stature. If this skull didn't have ossified suture lines and the characteristic female structure, I'd say it was the skull of a boy of maybe eleven.

I also know she's Caucasian because her face doesn't exhibit the characteristic protruding jaw of a person of African ancestry and her nasal opening is relatively high compared to a person of Asian decent. She also has a pronounced nasal bridge typical of a Caucasian."

That made no sense to me. I mean, how and why would someone put the skull of a woman who had recently died in a grave with a man whose remains were over a hundred years old? It also complicated my case because now I was looking at a murder, and if the skull in the grave didn't belong to the body, that meant that the body that went with the woman's skull was still out there somewhere.

"Beverly, I have to believe what you're saying, but how in the world could that happen? Wouldn't you have seen some evidence that the head of the body was replaced at some point in time."

Beverly smiled and motioned me over to the laptop sitting on the desk behind the autopsy table.

"We did, just not until we got back here.

"You saw my laser suspended over the grave didn't you? Well, what took us so long is I was trying out an idea I'd been working on. We did a laser image of the remains as they were when I got there. Then, we excavated about twenty-five millimeters and did another laser scan. We got nineteen scans before we could lift the last of the bones out of the grave.

"I've been working on this at the Body Farm with some master's students in Computer Engineering at MTSU. The software we developed lets us layer the laser scans and then connect the details in each layer with wireforms. When we use the software to render the wireforms in different colors, they form a three-dimensional view of the gravesite and its contents. The software is pretty close to what you'd find in a scanner used for generating 3D print routines, but the detail isn't as fine. With the portable computing power we have, we can only handle twenty-five scans without the software taking several hours to massage the data, but we're working on finer resolution.

"We refined the technique at the Body Farm where we know all the data about a particular burial. This is the first chance I've had to use the technique in the field."

Beverly tapped a few keys and then said, "Come have a look."

What I was looking at was a view down into the gravesite, the same view I'd seen when I got to the site.

"OK, it's a pretty clear picture, but it's no different than what I saw at the construction site."

Beverly grinned, and moved the mouse attached to the laptop. The grave rotated until I was looking at a cross section of the whole grave from feet to head.

Beverly moved the laptop cursor to the skull in the cross section.

"Each line you see is the twenty-five millimeter increment we used. Now look at the skull. See anything that looks odd?"

Well, I did. The skull should have been in line with the rest of the skeleton, but it wasn't. It looked like the person had been buried with the chin resting on the chest and the head looking down at the feet. That's what I told Beverly. She moved the cursor again.

"If you'll look closely, you'll see that the point where the spine should attach to the skull is about fifty millimeters too high and the vertebrae from the body are actually under the skull instead of attached. There's another indication as well."

Beverly moved the cursor down to an area that was pretty dark.

"See this area? That's where the original skull was sitting before someone dug it up and replaced it with this woman's skull."

To say I was impressed would be a huge understatement. I'd watched the exhumation of six found bodies during my career and each time we had to guess about how the remains got where they were and how they were buried. Beverly had just answered about a hundred questions I'd have had to ask without her computer image.

"So, some unknown person found an old Confederate grave, dug into it to get the skull and then replaced that skull with a new one?"

Beverly nodded.

"That's what it looks like to me."

"OK, but how would anyone find a Confederate grave in the first place."

Beverly smiled.

"I have an idea based on some research we did last semester. Most Civil War relics like buttons, buckles, bullets and cannon balls are found with a metal detector. They're also pretty close to the surface. The buttons we found were about five hundred millimeters below ground level. They're so small even a really good metal detector probably wouldn't find them. Most amateur metal detectors can only detect coin-sized targets like these buttons down to maybe three hundred millimeters. There are metal detectors though that could if the operator knew what he was doing. They're the metal detectors used to find city water lines and underground electrical conduits.

"We've done some experiments at the body farm to see how deep a body would have to be buried before no metal detector could find it. The contractor's versions are good down to about six meters or better with a large target like a cast iron water pipe or finding the wire they bury on top of plastic water mains now. Our study indicates that at two meters, they can find up a small steel washer if they're adjusted properly, so they'd be able to pick up a cast brass button."

I asked Beverly if she had a cause of death for either the body or the skull and she said to give her a couple days and she might be able to find one for the body. She wasn't so sure about the skull.

"I haven't looked at the skull that closely yet, but what I haven't seen is any indication of blunt force trauma or a gunshot to the head. I'll have to clean the skull up and do a thorough examination to give you a better idea of what killed the woman if I can even find anything. Her cause of death might be in her body, wherever that body is. Right now, Chris and I need to get these bones spread out so I can look at each one."

}|{

I headed back to my desk with a lot of thoughts running through my head. Beverly had proven that I had at least a case of abuse of a corpse to solve and had expanded my potential list of suspects. She'd also limited that list by the fact that there probably weren't that many people with access to a contractor's metal detector. The only person or persons who came to mind were the contractor or someone in his crew. They would have to know where water mains were before digging for any project and the best way to find them would be with a metal detector.

The other possibility was a city works employee. Every summer, I'd seen blue paint marks along and across streets marking where the water mains were. That was so the road crews wouldn't accidentally cut one while they were digging for something else like to add or replace a fire hydrant or to replace a bad section of pavement. It was some city employee who put those marks there and that meant they'd have either used a pretty accurate map or a metal detector. I'd have to talk to the city road commissioner to get that information.

The other thing I had to do, but couldn't until Beverly got done, was identify the woman whose skull was in the grave. Without a name, I'd just be poking around with the contractor and the city road crew trying to find someone with a motive and the opportunity to find an old grave and switch the skulls.

With a name, I could start checking with friends, people at work assuming the woman was working somewhere, and her phone and financial records. Most murders except for some gang murders are committed by a person who knows the victim. Most murders have one of two motives and those two are infidelity and money. I needed a name to start looking at those things.

One thing I could do is check the missing persons reports for Chattanooga. While it was possible that the woman was from outside the county, I doubted that. Whoever put her head in that grave had to be pretty familiar with the area so she was also probably from the area. I signed on to the Chattanooga missing persons database and searched for women between the ages of fifty and seventy.

On average about two tenths of a percent of the US population goes missing every year. That includes runaways, the elderly who wander away from their homes and people who seem to just disappear. Most are found within a month or two, but a few have remained missing for years. It was that last group of people I was interested in.

With the population of the Chattanooga metro area being a little over half a million and if Chattanooga followed the average, there should be about a thousand reported missing each year, five hundred if I limited my search to females and maybe half that number if I excluded teens and the elderly.

A woman between the ages of fifty and seventy wasn't likely to just wander off and she wouldn't be some runaway teen whose parents had pissed her off. It wasn't likely that she'd decide she'd had enough, said "fuck it all" and headed out for parts unknown. She'd probably be a normal person with a job or at least retired from a job. She might go to a church and if she did, someone at the church probably knew something about her. At that age she'd probably be married or at least have a kid or two. At least one of those people would have reported her missing.

About one in ten thousand missing people are never found, so the numbers said I'd find two per year or maybe twenty total who hadn't yet been found. I ended up finding eight.

Four were easy to eliminate. Three were black women and the fourth was Japanese. That left me with four. I printed off the reports so I'd have social security numbers, contact phone numbers and vital statistics for them, but I didn't start calling phone numbers then. People with a friend or relative who's been missing for over a year usually resign themselves to the fact that friend or relative is probably dead, but they always hold out the hope that they'll come home one day. I didn't want to upset any family by telling them I was investigating the possible death of their loved one.

Instead, I looked in the Tennessee DMV records to see if any of the women had a driver's license and if it had been renewed after they went missing. It was possible the missing woman had been doing something innocent and her family just panicked because they couldn't contact her when they thought they should have been able to. Once she turned up, they neglected to report her as found, so she stayed missing.

The other thing I checked was the Chattanooga police files to see if any of the four had been arrested after they went missing. That's not as uncommon as one might think, though it's usually a missing man. The person commits a crime and then runs. A friend or their family reports them missing without knowing the reason the person is gone. When law enforcement catches up with the missing person, they always file an arrest report but they usually don't check the missing persons file because the person is in handcuffs or jail and not missing. Any friends or relatives are too embarrassed or too disgusted to report that the person has been found, so that person stays missing as well.

It was almost six by the time I finished both searches, but I was down to three women who fit the description Beverly had given me. They hadn't renewed their driver's license or been arrested since they went missing. The fourth had been convicted of trying to kill her husband by seasoning his tuna casserole with rat poison and was in prison doing twenty to life. I closed up shop and went home.

}|{

I got back to my desk at seven the next morning, checked my inbox and email, and then walked down to Chris' lab. He and Beverly were bent over the autopsy table and talking. When Chris heard the door open, he looked up.

"Morning, Jack. Wanna see something fascinating?"

I walked over to the table. Chris pointed to what had once been the man's upper arm bone, but it was missing a piece about three inches long up close to the shoulder.

"The uniform buttons and the shreds of cloth fibers the techs found in the grave pretty much confirm this man was a Confederate soldier. The fibers were pretty degraded, but they look like wool that both the Union and Confederate Army used for uniforms. The star on the buttons is an indication he was Confederate. Union Army buttons usually have a eagle on them.

"We think he was killed when a minié ball shattered his right upper arm just under his armpit. The ball carried away a big chunk of the bone and would have shredded the artery in his upper arm. Without the immediate application of a tourniquet, he'd have bled out enough in maybe a couple minutes that if he wasn't already dead, he'd have seemed pretty dead to anybody who checked on him.

"As you can imagine, during a battle nobody would have had much time to do anything except have a look and maybe feel for a pulse. He'd have been pale, probably wasn't breathing very deeply if at all, and he wouldn't have had a pulse that was easily detected. Our guess is he was shot during one of the battles around Chattanooga and when he was finally found, there was no reason to carry him back to a doctor so he was buried where he fell."

Well, that was interesting information, but it didn't get me anywhere relative to the skull.

"What about the woman?"

Beverly picked up the skull and walked to where Chris and I stood.

"I think I can give you a little more information about this woman, but I can't rule it to be the cause of her death for several reasons.

"She has a small hole, like maybe two millimeters in diameter in her right eye socket that looks like it extends into the brain cavity. I'll have to open the skull to confirm that, but it looks to me like she was stabbed in the eye with something like an old-fashioned ice pick or maybe a thin screwdriver. I can't say that's the cause of her death because at one time, there was a controversial surgical procedure that left the same type of hole in the same location.

"I did a forensic autopsy on a skeleton found buried near a former insane asylum and he had a similar hole in his eye socket. It was there because that's how some doctors did lobotomies in the 40's and 50's. They used an instrument that looked like an ice pick to pierce the thin bone between the eye socket and the brain cavity. The procedure was to insert the instrument into the eye socket, pierce the bone and then wiggle the point around to severe the connections in the frontal lobes of the brain.

"It was touted by a few doctors and widely publicized by the media that the procedure was a cure for chronic depression, suicidal tendencies, and many other mental illnesses. There were a few anecdotal incidences where it seemed to work, but more often, the patient went from difficult to control to being easy to control because they were basically turned into a vegetable. That's why it was popular in mental institutions. The lobotomized person would just lie on a bed and didn't cause trouble for the attendants.

"Most of the world had outlawed the procedure by 1970 because there was little reliable research evidence that the procedure did anything except give the patient the mind of a one-year-old. Another reason was because it was used more often with female patients, minority patients, and as a supposed cure for homosexuality. All those things were hot button issues in the late 60's and early 70's.

"The other reason I can't call this the cause of death is that very few patients died from the procedure. They just stopped being people who could take care of themselves. That's what happened to Rosemary Kennedy, JFK's sister, and to Tennessee Williams' sister, Rose. They had to be institutionalized for the remainder of their lives after they underwent the procedure.

"What I'm thinking right now is that this woman had a lobotomy at some point in her life and died of natural causes when she was about sixty. From the amount of bone decomposition of the skull, I estimate the skull was in that grave for four to six years so assuming her head was put in the grave when she died, she'd have died around 2020 or so. That would mean she was born in maybe 1960, and this type of lobotomy was still in use in some mental institutions until the early seventies. It was a pretty simple procedure, so simple some doctors did it as an outpatient procedure. She could have been lobotomized when she was still a child of ten or younger."

I'd written that down in my notebook. It was more information but also muddied up my theory about the woman being a missing person.

"So, if she was lobotomized when she was ten and needed constant care, how would she have gotten it"

Beverly frowned.

"If she was confined to a mental hospital they might have taken care of her. I say might because at the time mental hospitals weren't renowned for their treatment of patients. In several such institutions, the patients were kept more like dogs at the pound than like people in a hospital. That's one of the reasons a lot of them were shut down.

"Another possibility is a nursing home. It would be really hard for most people to contend with an adult who had to be fed, bathed, and in general treated like a baby. That's what contributed to the popularity of nursing homes. People didn't want the responsibility and headaches that go along with a person who needs constant attention, so they put them into a nursing home. Another possibility is that someone like a relative or really close friend was taking care of her."

I was developing a new theory. The woman had been lobotomized when still very young and someone or someplace had cared for her until around the year 2020 when she either died or was killed. Right then, I didn't see why anyone would hide just the head a person who died of natural causes. It was more than likely the woman's head was put into the grave to hide the fact that she'd been murdered.

There was a huge problem now with my missing person theory. If the woman had been lobotomized that young and then was under someone's care she would never have been reported as missing because her family knew exactly where she was. No killer would report his victim as missing either. Just like the crimes of murder and arson, when investigating a missing person case the first person a detective looks at is the person who reported the person as missing. I wouldn't find her in my list of missing women.

Beverly then asked what I was going to do with the body.

"I want to keep the skull for further examination and to see if I can get a DNA sample or two, but there's not much more I can do with the rest of the remains. What's going to happen to them?"

"Well, since it's been so long there's zero chance of identifying who he was so there's no family to notify. He might not even have been from Tennessee. The Confederacy in Tennessee had troops from as far away as Virginia and Texas. Usually in cases like this, the remains are cremated and the ashes placed in the county cemetery as an unknown. Why?"

Beverly smiled.

"I'd like to take him back to the UT Forensics Lab collection. He's a good example of a long-term burial when there was no attempt made to preserve the body by embalming. We don't have many this old and it would be good for my students to see first hand the effect of long-term time and weather on buried skeletal remains."

I shrugged.

"That's up to Chris here. He makes the final disposition of unclaimed bodies, and I seriously doubt anyone is going to claim this guy."

Chris grinned.

"I'm sure we can work something out."

Beverly shook her head and grinned back.

"If you're thinking of anything involving an autopsy cart and your cold room, it isn't gonna happen. Been there, done that, didn't like it much."

}|{

I was chuckling to myself when I walked back to my desk. I'd been wrong about Dr. Melrose twice -- once for assuming she had to be a man, and the second time for assuming she was always the cold professional that she'd appeared to be so far. She'd blown that assumption all to hell when she made that remark about an autopsy table and Chris' cold room.

There was no doubt in my mind that she was a very intelligent woman. I just thought that like the rest of the women I knew who were in positions of authority, she wouldn't have much of a sense of humor and not much of a tendency to relax and have fun.

After a fast food burger, I headed out to talk with the contractor again. I wanted to know if he had a contractor's metal detector and if he did, who knew how to operate it.

He was more than happy to answer both my questions.

"Yeah, I got one ten years ago after one of my guys damn near cut a city water main in half with the bucket of a track hoe. We did everything right. We had the city come out and mark the location of the water main, but evidently their maps aren't worth a shit. My guy was ten feet from where that main was supposed to be, but he hit it with the second bucketful. Shot a foot thick stream of water half a block and flooded two basements before the city got it shut off. I got sued and only won because I'd had the city mark the main.

"After that, I bought my own and it's saved my ass at least three times. You'd think the city would know where the mains are, but I suppose over the years changes were made and never recorded."

I asked him who on his crew knew how to operate it. He said all of his crew had been trained, but it was usually just his backhoe and track hoe operators who used it.

"They're the only guys who dig very deep without being able to see what's under their bucket."

Then I asked him if he'd used the metal detector at the construction site and he said he hadn't.

"Wasn't any reason to. The city hasn't run water out to the site yet. I got the contract to run water out there from the main on South Crest Road so I'll be using it then."

What I was thinking was that maybe someone could have taken his metal detector out to the woods, found the grave, and then come back and switched the skulls. I asked him if any of his employees ever borrowed the metal detector, and he frowned.

"Oh Hell no. The damned thing cost me a little over twelve grand, and the one time one of my guys broke the coil, it cost me another three grand to replace it. It stays in my office or in my truck until we need to use it."

He chuckled when I asked if someone could carry his metal detector two hundred yards into the woods.

"Yeah I suppose you could if you were in good shape. The coil and handle weigh almost twenty pounds so it'll wear out your arm pretty fast. The battery weighs about thirty and you wear it in a carrier slung around your neck. I'd hate to think of hauling fifty pounds very far, but it could be done."

He squinted a little then.

"Detective you're asking a lot of questions about my guys and the equipment I have. You're not thinking we had something to do with that skeleton we uncovered are you?"

I shook my head.

"No, I'm just trying to close up some loose ends. The grave you found was that of a Confederate soldier from around the time of the fighting around Chattanooga. The CSI techs found some brass uniform buttons in the grave, and given the history of the area around Missionary Ridge, I was wondering why if you swept the construction site before you started you didn't find the grave."

He smiled at me.

"Even if I was into that sort of thing, it wouldn't have been worth the trouble because anything that was there is probably gone. You don't know much about treasure hunters, do you?"

I said I didn't, and he smiled again.

"When my dad started this business forty years ago, he used to dig up all sorts of Civil War stuff around here -- belt buckles, buttons, lead balls, cannon balls and stuff like that, but not in the last twenty years or so. Looking for Civil War stuff like buttons and minié balls became a big hobby as soon as cheap metal detectors became available. There probably isn't more than a square foot of land around Missionary Ridge that hasn't been gone over with a metal detector at least four times. People have even had to call the cops to get the treasure hunters out of their back yards."

}|{

That conversation convinced me that the contractor and his employees probably didn't have anything to do with a woman's skull ending up in a Confederate soldier's grave. He had given me another possibility though.

What if one of those treasure hunters had a really good metal detector and had found the grave? He might have dug deep enough to figure out what he'd found but stopped because he also saw some bones. People generally get really nervous when they find a body. Maybe he remembered though, and when he ended up killing the woman, he went back and switched the skull in the grave with the woman's head.

I shook my head then. There were too many maybes with that theory. I had no doubts that whoever made the switch knew the grave was there. It would take too long to search for a grave after the woman was already dead. The question was who would know? The only other reasonable suspect I could think of was the property owner, Richard Mullens.

It wasn't likely I could talk to him but I could find out as much about him as possible without a search warrant.

I spent the rest of the afternoon scouring through the County Clerk's office, the Tennessee DMV and the Chattanooga police files for his name.

I didn't find much. Mr. Mullens apparently bought the property in 2019 but hadn't made any improvements to it up until he applied through the contractor for a building permit two months ago.

His driver's license said he was sixty-one and his first license was issued in 1980, so he was sixteen or seventeen then. He'd renewed his license every time it expired, again using the same address.

The police records had only one speeding ticket which he paid.

I was trying to figure out where to go next when Chris called me.

"Jack, you need to come down to my lab. Beverly found something you'll want to see."

}|{

When I got to the lab, Beverly had the skull sitting on her lap and she was using a magnifying glass to examine the underside. She looked up and waved me over.

"See these lines where the vertebra attaches to the skull? These are cut marks made by either an axe or a machete. I saw the same marks on a skull I excavated from a cartel burial in Mexico ten years ago. Now we know how this woman's head was separated from her body. She was decapitated."

"OK, but that doesn't tell me a cause of death, does it?"

Beverly smiled.

"No, but this does."

She turned the skull on its side.

"See the three little indents around the hole where her ear would have been? That's the right size and shape to be have made by a ten-millimeter Patterson trocar point. This woman was murdered by someone pushing a Patterson trocar through her ear canal and into her brain. I've seen this done with a screwdriver before, but not with a trocar.

Your killer is probably a doctor, a vet, or an embalmer although I suppose anybody could buy one somewhere. They all use the same style and sizes, though they're usually used with a cannula. That's a hollow tube with a flange that fits around the shaft of the trocar. You push both into a bloated stomach on a cow, an abscess or in the case of an undertaker, into a vein, and then pull out the trocar. That leaves the cannula in the hole to serve as a drain."

I shook my head.

"I can't believe any person would just sit there and let that happen. You should have seen some indication that the person tried to fight back or get away. You haven't found anyplace where the killer tried to stab her, missed and then tried again?"

Beverly smiled.

"No, there's no indication of a struggle, but that makes sense with what else we know. A person who'd undergone a lobotomy probably wouldn't fight back, especially if they trusted the person who killed them. If they had the ability to think at all, they'd just think the person was doing something for them."

I looked at Chris.

"Chris, are you good with this as a cause of death?"

Chris nodded and held out some sort of medical instrument.

"I have a ten millimeter Patterson trocar and it's a perfect fit in the hole. I can't say that's the only injury she sustained because I don't have the rest of the body, but this could have killed her almost as fast as if she'd been shot in the head. Chopping off her head would have killed her if the trocar didn't. I'm going to call it death by penetrative trauma to the brain and subsequent decapitation."

}|{

I went back to my desk and looked at all my notes, then tossed them on my desk because now they were all dead ends.

At least now I had a better idea about who I was looking for. It was probably a doctor, a vet, or an embalmer who had a Patterson trocar and knew how to use an axe or a machete. The killer probably also knew that the woman had undergone a lobotomy and wouldn't fight back or he'd have used something like a gun or a knife.

I was sitting there thinking when Beverly walked up to my desk.

"I forgot to tell you that I pulled a tooth from the skull and retrieved the pulp. The tooth enamel protects the pulp from the elements so the DNA remains intact. It's a relatively new technique for collecting DNA, but it's been used in court before. Chris has sent the sample to the TBI for sequencing. I doubt they'll have a match, but you could run the sequence through one of the companies that match unknown DNA by tracking the DNA submitted to some of the ancestry sites.

"Now, I'm feeling pretty good about what we've found and I want a good dinner. Any place in Chattanooga you'd recommend?"

"Well, I don't live in this area of Chattanooga, so I'm not sure what's around here. I rent a house in the north section of Chattanooga, and I know some places there. One of my favorites is called "State of Confusion", They have steaks, chicken and fish and it's all good. I can give you the address if you want."

Beverly smiled and shook her head.

"I'll just get lost. Hey, how about if you come with me... my treat? You know where this place is and I hate eating alone."

}|{

I followed Beverly from the station to her hotel. She said she had something she had to do, but she'd be down in a few minutes and we could go to dinner.

Well, her few minutes turned into twenty, and when she walked into the lobby she surprised me. She still wore jeans but they fit well enough I could see she had slender legs and a really nice ass. She'd also changed her plaid shirt for a snug-fitting blouse with ruffles down the front and her shoulder-length dark brown hair fell in waves over her shoulders. A pair of gold earrings peeked out from beneath those waves. On her feet were a pair of low, black heels.

Beverly grinned when she walked up to me.

"Not what you were expecting?"

"Well, I wasn't really expecting anything, but you look great. I probably should have changed too."

Beverly waved her hand.

"You said this place was casual. You'll look fine if you lose the tie and jacket. I just changed because my other clothes probably smell like the lab. Besides, I don't get to dress up even this much very often.

"Now, I'm starving. Can you drive?"

}|{

I'd been fine having a professional relationship with Beverly. I was confident in my abilities at solving crimes and I respected her knowledge. Sitting across from her in a restaurant was a lot different.

When we were at the site or in the lab, I knew what questions to ask her and she knew what answers would help me solve this mystery. There in the restaurant I couldn't very well keep asking her about trocars and hacking off a woman's head. It had been a long time since I'd had any kind of social relationship with a woman so I wasn't sure where to start. Thankfully, she did.

"So, Jack, what made you decide to become a detective?"

I shrugged.

"Well, I spent four years in the Army so I could go to college. While I was stationed in Germany, I had a friend who was an MP. He and I'd have a beer together when both of us were off duty, and the more he talked about what he did, the more I thought I'd like doing the same thing. When I got out, instead of UT, I applied at the Police Academy.

"Six months later, I put on the uniform and started patrolling with another officer for the Chattanooga Police Department. That worked out really well. I loved the job and loved taking the bad boys to jail. What didn't work out so well was the wife I married right after I passed my probationary period. Alice tried for two years, but couldn't take the nights I'd call her and say I was going to be late. It was one night when I didn't come home at my regular time and I didn't call her that tipped the scales.

"I was following a car that night that was doing some really odd things like weaving all over the place and slowing down and then speeding up. I figured the driver was either drunk or high, so I flipped on my lights to pull him over. I figured I could do the field sobriety test and when he failed, take him back the station, turn him over to Booking, and still be home on time.

"Instead of stopping, the guy took off like a bat out of hell. We ended up northbound on I-75 doing between ninety and a hundred. I chased him for about ten miles before he lost it, crossed the median and hit a minivan head on. I radioed for the EMT's and some backup and then went to check on both cars.

"The guy's car was an old Ford sedan that didn't have airbags and he wasn't wearing a seat belt. He'd taken the steering wheel with him when he went through the windshield and it had him pinned against the roof. I couldn't find a pulse in his neck, so there was no need to do anything more with him.

"The minivan was a mess but thankfully nobody got hurt bad. Everything in the minivan had worked right. The driver and the passenger where shaken up pretty bad but other than what I figured was a broken leg of the passenger, they seemed OK.

By then, I was already half an hour past my normal getting home time. I was going to call, but between trying to keep the patrol car on the road until the guy crashed and then checking on both vehicles made that impossible. I went back to my patrol car to get my first aid kit. By the time my backup, my shift supervisor and the EMT's got there. I was an hour late. It took another hour to explain to my shift supervisor what had happened, and then I helped direct traffic to the lane the wrecker finally cleared. I didn't get a chance to make that phone call until almost four in the morning. I figured she'd already be in bed so I just went home.

"Alice was waiting up for me. That ended in a fight that lasted until ten that morning. At the end we came to the agreement that I wasn't going to quit my job and it wasn't fair to her to be left wondering if I was going to come home some night. The divorce was friendly. She already had a career and didn't ask for alimony and we didn't have any kids. I let her have every thing in the apartment and started over.

"To get over losing Alice, I decided to do what I could to advance myself. The next class that was available, I applied to the Tennessee Basic Law Enforcement School. I spent about half my days in a patrol car and half my days remembering how much it hurts when you haven't worked out for a couple years. In between, I learned the finer points of police work.

"After that, I started studying for the detective's test. It took a while, but I made detective ten years ago."

Beverly cut a slice from her chicken breast, chewed it and took a sip of wine.

"So that would make you about forty, right?"

"You're close. I'm forty-two."

Beverly smiled.

"I wasn't sure if the lines in your face are age or job related. It's probably a combination of both, just like mine. I know I look about fifty, so just so you don't have to embarrass yourself by asking, I'm forty-one. Spending half your time outside in the sun trying to figure out what happened to the person in a grave wreaks hell on your skin."

What Beverly said made sense. My ex never went outside in the sun without putting on sunscreen. That Beverly would freely tell me her age did surprise me.

"So, how does a forty-one year old woman become a doctor of Forensic Science?"

Beverly grinned.

"Well, sleeping with every one of my professors helped a lot."

"You can't really mean that."

She grinned again.

"I was just kidding, but that's what a lot of the male students in my classes thought. In truth, I'm pretty smart and I worked my butt off to get a BS in Biology and then my MD. I was deciding on a residency when I heard Dr. Bass speak about the body farm at UT Knoxville. I decided that would be more interesting than spending the next three to seven years being exhausted by a residency, so I enrolled in the Ph. D. program in Anthropology.

"As it turned out, I was pretty good at figuring out what killed a person based on the remains. I wrote my doctoral thesis about the use of insect life stages in determining time of death.

"After that I got a job as an assistant professor to Dr. Bass. Now I teach a few classes, continue my research, and when requested, I teach a class to the TBI and FBI in forensic techniques. I also respond to other requests, like this case."

My next question was innocent enough I thought, but didn't turn out that way.

"No boyfriends along the way?"

Beverly grinned.

"Why? Are you saying you're interested?"

"No, well, I do find you interesting. I just thought that an intelligent and good looking woman like you wouldn't have any problem at all attracting a man."

Beverly smiled.

"I've heard that line before, the one about me being interesting. It's what they used to tell me before they found out what I do for a living.

"As for boyfriends, there were a couple when I was an undergrad. The last one, when I was a senior, wanted me to move in with him. He was a nice guy, but other than some pretty good sex, he and I didn't have enough in common for it to be a long-term thing.

"I didn't have time in medical school or when I was working on my doctorate. Since then, well, when a man finds out what I do for a living, he suddenly changes his mind about how interesting I am. They can't imagine being with a woman who works with dead bodies every day."

I had to chuckle.

"Well, you have to admit it's a pretty unique occupation."

Beverly laughed.

"If I remember right, one said it was macabre. Another compared me to Dr. Frankenstein."

Her face turned serious then.

"It's not, though. I think of what I do as giving a dead person a voice so they can tell what happened to them that caused them to die. That's what I did for the skull in the grave. I gave her the ability to tell you what killed her."

I smiled because I was back on familiar ground again.

"That's kind of what I do as well. Chris can usually tell me what killed a person and when they were killed, but he can't tell me who did it or why. The CSI techs can tell me what likely went down and if they can find prints or DNA, that helps lead me to the killer.

"What I do is put all the pieces of the puzzle together and figure out the who and the why. It's really satisfying to arrest the killer and then watch as he or she is convicted and sent to prison. It's like I can then tell the victim's family that they've been avenged, well, not really avenged because the victim is still dead, but at least the killer has had to answer for the murder."

Beverly drained her wineglass and then smiled.

"It sounds like you and I would get along pretty well together. This has been fun, but I need to get back to my hotel room. Tomorrow, I have to pack up the bones from the grave so I can take them back to Knoxville."

}|{

Beverly didn't say much on the way back to her hotel. The couple times I glanced over at her, it looked like she was thinking about something. The second time, I said, "You're pretty quiet. Penny for your thoughts."

Beverly didn't look at me. She just said, "I don't think you'd understand."

After I pulled into the parking lot of the hotel and shut off my engine, I started to get out so I could open the door for her, but she put her hand on my arm to stop me.

"Do you really want to know what I was thinking about?"

"Well, it's just that we talked all through dinner and then you just stopped saying anything. I was just curious as to if I said something that upset you. If I did, I apologize."

Beverly shook her head.

"You didn't upset me, at least not in the way you're thinking. I'm not really upset. I was just wondering... well... back there when I said we'd get along pretty well? I really meant that. I work with a lot of people, mostly men as it turns out, but it's always professional. That gets pretty lonely after a while. It would be nice to find a man who could get past what I do and just treat me like a woman."

I didn't quite know what to say. Was Beverly telling me that she wanted me to be that man? Surely not. We'd only known each other for a day and a half.

"Beverly, I'm sure there's a man out there for you. You just haven't found him yet."

She stroked my arm.

"I've never in my life been accused of being backward about anything, and I'm not now. I've found that man. I don't know if he feels the same way, but he's sitting in this car with me right now."

Her fingers running up and down my arm were causing some feelings I hadn't had in years.

"Beverly, I like you. I like you a lot, but you know what I do for a living."

She nodded.

"I'm not saying it should be a full time thing."

She put her other hand on my thigh.

"I'm just saying I'd like to try it out tonight and see what happens."

Those fingers were making it really hard to say I couldn't, but I did try.

"I thought that's what we were doing over dinner."

Beverly moved her hand closer to my crotch.

"We didn't have dessert yet. In fact, I haven't had dessert in years. I want my dessert now."

}|{

I still wasn't sure this was the best thing to do until I followed Beverly through the door to her room. I closed it behind me, locked the latch and threw the safety latch, and then turned back around. Beverly not only wasn't bashful about saying what she wanted, she didn't waste any time getting there.

As soon as I was facing her, Beverly put her arms around my neck, pushed her breasts into my chest, and then kissed me.

She might not have had a lot of dates, but somewhere, Beverly had learned how to kiss a man. Maybe it was just me, but that kiss and feeling her breasts against me sent my cock from at-ease to full attention.

When Beverly pulled away slightly, she chuckled a soft chuckle, "If I'm feeling what I think I'm feeling, it feels like you're interested. Let's go see if I can get you more interested on a bed."

When we got to the two queen-sized beds, Beverly put her arms around my neck, kissed me again until I had to stop her to breathe, and then said, "It would be fun to have you undress me, but I don't think I can wait that long. You do you and I'll do me."

Beverly didn't waste any time with her clothes either. She unbuttoned the frilly blouse, shrugged it off her shoulders and then tossed it on the bed on the left. Her bra came off next and joined her blouse. She slipped the heels from her feet and then unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans and lay down on her back on the other bed.

I was going a little slower. I wasn't in bad shape, but I'd have a really hard time trying to make it through the obstacle course at the police academy. I like to eat and the food has to go somewhere if you don't burn it off. Where it went was my upper body.

I had my shirt off and was starting on my slacks when Beverly looked up and smiled.

"I'm going to need some help with these jeans. You grab the cuffs and pull while I wiggle."

Well, watching Beverly wiggle her butt was an adventure in how erotic a woman can be. I don't know what it is about the positions a woman can get herself into, but what Beverly was doing would have raised my cock if it hadn't already been pushing out the front of my slacks.

After a lot of wiggling on Beverly's part and some firm pulls on my part, her jeans slipped down her legs. She lifted her legs and slid the jeans off and tossed them on the other bed, then scratched under her breasts before she lifted her hips and slipped the black thong down over her hips and then off her feet. She lay back then and grinned.

'I think you're embarrassed. Don't be. I'm not the girl I was at twenty either."

Well, I was a little embarrassed, but Beverly had no reason to be. Sure, her breasts weren't all that perky, but they were round and big enough I could tell they were going to be fun. Her stomach wasn't flat, but the roundness just made her that more inviting. Below that roundness was a definite mound covered with neatly trimmed dark brown hair.

I pulled the T-shirt over my head, finished unzipping my slacks and let them fall to the floor. It occurred to me then that I should have taken my shoes off first. I had to sit down on the other bed to take off my shoes and socks, but when I stood up, I pulled off my shorts and let them fall to the floor.

Beverly grinned and held out her arms.

"Looks like I'm going to have a really nice dessert. Come here, Jack."

}|{

I woke up the next morning because the alarm on my watch beeped at me until I shut it off. I didn't know where I was until I felt warm breath on my shoulder, soft breasts against my side, and a satin thigh draped over mine. I also felt soft hair against my leg. I remembered then and looked at my chest.

Beverly's eyes were open and she was smiling.

"What time do you have to be at the station?"

The night before had been great, but it was like when you try anything new. Unless that thing comes with a set of good instructions, you have to sort of feel your way around until you figure out how it works.

I've never known a woman who came with any instructions at all, and Beverly was no exception. It took a while to figure out what she liked. It took longer because she kept massaging my stiff cock. After a while, I just sort of went with the flow and let things happen as they would.

Beverly liked having her breasts stroked. She liked having her nipples kissed and sucked even more. Stroking down her side and then cupping her hip made her catch her breath and open her thighs a little. Swirling my fingertips through the hair on her mound caused her to open her thighs enough my fingers slipped naturally down over her soft, pouting lips.

Beverly moaned when I slipped a finger between those lips, and her hips lurched up when I slipped it deeper. A few minutes later she jerked her hips a few times, and then whispered, "I'm ready."

It was like I remembered except Beverly was more slippery than I remember my ex being unless she'd had a lot of foreplay. I was feeling my way, so to speak, to make sure I didn't hurt her, when Beverly gasped and lifted herself into my stroke. One second I was feeling my cock head against the tight spot just inside her lips and the next, my balls bumped against Beverly's raised butt cheeks. She moaned then and grabbed my ass.

"Oh God, Jack, I need this so bad. Don't stop."

By then, I couldn't have stopped if you'd held a gun to my head. I got lost in Beverly's slippery, satin passage, in the silky touch of her thighs against my sides, and in the way she kept pulling me down to kiss her. I couldn't tell you how long it took if my life depended upon it, but I know it was over way too fast. That wasn't because I couldn't control myself because I did. It was because Beverly got there faster than I remember my ex ever getting there, and she was a lot more athletic in the process of getting there.

She was meeting me stroke for stroke for a while, then gasped, arched up off the bed and gasped, "Oh God, Jack. Now." I later figured out that "now" meant she started jerking her hips up and down so fast I couldn't begin to keep up. That didn't matter. She came a second or two before I did. She kept slowly rocking her hips long after I'd stopped stroking, and when she eased back down on the bed, she put her arms around my chest so I couldn't get up.

Beverly let me go when my cock slipped out of her, kissed me again, and whispered, "Nitey nite, Jack."

}|{

Well I got back home about seven, took a shower and changed clothes and was only half an hour late. My excuse to the Captain was that I'd been stuck in traffic, but the real reason was Beverly.

Beverly had raised up, straddled me, and took us both away in about half an hour. When she collapsed on my chest, she buried her face between my neck and shoulder and whispered, "I hope this isn't the last time we have dessert together."

As I sat there figuring out what else I could do for the case, Chris called me.

"Jack, I don't know what strings Beverly pulled to get a DNA sequence as soon as she did, but I got it via FEDEX this morning. I already ran it through CODIS and didn't come up with anything. Beverly's here and packing up the soldier's remains, and she gave me a contact with a company that does reverse matching of DNA. I'll send the sequence out today."

I thought about walking down and saying goodbye to Beverly, but we'd already done that at her hotel. I had her cell phone number and she had mine, and she was going to call me as soon as she got to Knoxville. I just sat at my desk until I was sure she was gone and then I went home.

}|{

I spent the next week arranging everything I knew about the woman in the grave but there wasn't much to arrange. All I knew is the woman was about sixty, that she'd had a lobotomy at some point in her life and that she'd been murdered by having a Patterson trocar rammed through her ear and into her brain. By the end of that week, I'd decided this was going to be another case to add to my cold case file. I'd work on it if I got any new information and had time, but it was unlikely it would ever be solved.

That was a letdown, but given how little evidence I had, not really unusual. Only about half of all murder cases are solved every year, although that number is increasing with the advent of DNA and other forensic techniques.

that Friday afternoon I was filling an evidence box with my notes when Chris called me again.

"Jack, I have a name for you. Well, it's not the woman's name, but it's the last name of a couple family members the reverse DNA match company found. The last name is Mullens. That ring a bell with you?"

}|{

That name put a new face on my case. The building site was owned by Richard Mullens. I hadn't done much checking on him because I had no evidence that would give me a reason to suspect him of anything. Now I did do some checking.

Other than that one speeding ticket, he'd never been in trouble with law enforcement so he had no entries in the Chattanooga, TBI, or in NCIC files. I didn't stop there though. I started looking through the files of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. I figured anybody with enough money to buy that much land in Chattanooga had to have been in the papers a few times. I wasn't wrong.

What I found after that afternoon and half of Saturday morning was some revealing information. I started going backwards from the date the property had been sold.

According to the County Clerk's Office, Mr. Richard Mullens, Jr. had purchased the property in June of 2019. That was the first time I'd seen the "Jr." added to his name. If there was a "Jr." there must have been a "Sr." at some point in time, so I searched the archives of the newspaper for Richard Mullens Sr. and found him in an announcement in the business section.

Dr. Richard Mullens, Sr. was a medical doctor who had relocated his practice from Nashville to Chattanooga in 1980. His office was listed as being in a strip mall on the south side of Chattanooga. According to the article, Dr. Mullens was married and had one son, Richard Mullens, Jr., who was sixteen at the time.

Another search of the County Clerk's records for 1980 told me that it was Dr. Richard Mullens who bought the house on Melrose Drive. A little further digging got me an obituary for Dr. Richard Mullens on February 20, 2019. His obituary said his wife, Nancy, had preceded him in death and that he was survived by his son, Richard Mullens, Jr.

It seemed a little odd that Richard Mullens, Jr. would buy the wooded property the same year his father died and then not do anything with it. The only reason I could think of was that the old house probably held some memories that he'd want to keep for a while so he kept living there.

So far I didn't have anything that would connect Richard Mullens Jr. to the murder, but maybe his father could. I decided to look deeper into Dr. Richard Mullens Sr. I wondered why a doctor would move his practice from a big city like Nashville to the smaller city of Chattanooga. It probably wasn't because of a lack of patients, and there weren't as many wealthy people in Chattanooga, so his income would probably suffer as well.

I found Dr. Richard Mullens in the birth announcements on November 19, 1959 in The Tennessean, the newspaper for Nashville. The birth announcement was for a baby girl named Barbara born to Dr. Richard and Nancy Mullens. I kept looking and found another birth announcement for Richard Mullens, Jr. on October 10, 1963.

That combined with the business article about Dr. Mullens moving his practice to Chattanooga and the obituary of his death raised my suspicions a lot. Why would neither of the Chattanooga articles have said anything about a daughter? He only reason I could think of was that she'd died and the family hadn't mentioned that to the newspapers.

I went back to the archives of the Tennessean and searched for Barbara Mullens. I found only the same birth announcement I'd found the first time. If she'd died in Nashville, surely the funeral home would have put her obituary in the paper, but apparently not.

I went back to the Chattanooga Times Free Press and started searching for the name "Mullens" again.

I didn't find anything about Barbara Mullens, but I did find another entry for Richard Mullens. It was on the society page for June 3, 1995 and reported the wedding of Richard Mullens Jr. and Jane Wilson of Knoxville. The article went on to say that Mr. Mullens had just received a degree in Finance from UT, and Jane was a registered nurse. The article stated that after a month long honeymoon, the couple would take up residence at 4326 Melrose Drive in Chattanooga.

So that meant that after Richard Jr. married, he and his wife continued to live with Dr. Mullens. The house was certainly big enough, but most newlyweds want to be alone.

The other thing it meant was that if Richard and his new wife could afford a month-long honeymoon, either Richard was doing very well with his finance degree or his wife had a lot of money. As soon as I found a connection between him and the dead woman, I'd check on their finances.

I started a timeline then, and worked forwards using the dates I had.

Barbara Mullens was born on November 19, 1959. Richard Mullens, Jr. was born on October 10, 1963. Dr. Mullens move his practice in 1980 and bought the house at 4326 Melrose Drive that same year. I noted on my timeline that there was no mention of Barbara once Dr. Mullens moved to Chattanooga.

His son, Richard Mullens Jr. turned sixteen that year and got his Tennessee driver's license. He listed the Melrose Drive address on that license and had used that same address every time he'd renewed his license.

In 1994, Richard Jr. had gotten a degree in Finance from UT. He'd gotten married a year after that.

From the time Richard Jr. married until Dr. Mullens passed away in 2019, there was no information to be found in any source I could use without a warrant. It seemed like Richard had just found a wife and started a life of his own except apparently he and his wife continued to live in the house with his father and mother.

After Dr. Mullens died, things happened that didn't seem to fit together. Right after his father passed away, Richard had bought the building lot, but then he'd just let it sit until 2024 when he hired a contractor to build a house on the property. In the meantime, Richard and his wife continued to live in the Melrose Drive house. It just seemed odd that if Richard and his wife wanted a new house, they'd have done what most people do. They'd have bought the property and started construction as soon as they could find a contractor.

While I was staring at the timeline, I realized there was something missing. I had seen several articles in the Chattanooga paper about Richard, but never anything about any children. Now, I know a lot of people choose a career over children, but it looked like Richard had enough money to hire a nanny if his wife didn't want the hassle of kids.

The thing that bothered me the most about the timeline was the absence of anything having to do with Barbara other than her birth announcement. In fact, it looked to me like Dr. Mullens had gone out of his way to keep anyone from knowing anything about her. That and the fact that the DNA from the woman's skull in Chris' lab had been traced to the Mullens family made me almost certain that skull was Barbara's.

}|{

On Monday morning, I picked up my file and walked down to the DA's office. After showing Tom what I had and explaining that I thought Barbara Mullens' skull had ended up in a grave on property owned by Richard Mullens, he shook his head.

"Jack, I don't think there's enough here to convict anybody of anything. The only thing you have that's close to evidence is an eighty percent probability that the DNA of your victim is a close match to the Mullens family. Any good defense attorney will claim that the DNA doesn't prove the woman is related to Richard Mullens. He'll comb back through the Mullens family tree and have an expert testify that at least another three branches are just as close a match. Anyone could have buried the head on the Mullens property, and there are literally thousands of people who got lobotomies in the 40's through the 70's."

I nodded.

"I know all that and I don't want to charge Mr. Mullens with anything yet. He's in Cancun right now, and if I charge him, he'll probably try to stay there. All I want to do is search the Missionary Ridge property with some cadaver dogs as part of my ongoing investigation into the unknown grave.

"I don't think I need a search warrant to do that. If I stop a vehicle for speeding and think I smell alcohol or marijuana I have probable cause to detain the driver and any passengers and then search the vehicle without a search warrant. If there's an injury or a death in a house, I don't need a search warrant to search the property. In this case, I found a dead woman's skull on the property. The woman's body has to be somewhere, and the fact that her skull was there tells me her body has to be close.

All I need you to tell me is if I'm right in thinking I can do that without a search warrant.

}|{

In a way, it was good that Richard Mullens was in Cancun. I had no doubts that he was at least guilty of switching the head in the grave and would probably have his lawyer fight any attempt to search the property.

I did stop by the house to tell the housekeeper what I was going to do. That was a calculated move to find out if Richard Mullens would try to stop me or not. If he was involved in the murder he probably would. She just said she'd have to call Mr. Mullens.

I'd figured on as much, and had three cadaver dogs and their handlers standing by at the construction site along with three CSI techs. As soon as the housekeeper said she was going to call Mr. Mullens, I radioed the CSI techs to start the search. My hope was that they'd find something before Mr. Mullens could call his lawyer and his lawyer could get to the site.

It actually took the lawyer an hour and a half to get there and tell me to stop my search unless I had a search warrant. I just smiled because he was too late. About thirty minutes after they started, one of the cadaver dogs had alerted at a spot about twenty feet from the construction site. Some careful digging revealed rib bones.

The other dogs kept searching in case this turned out to be a false alarm because those sometimes do happen. They didn't find any more gravesites, but the dog handlers did find a narrow dirt lane that ran along the property line on the north side.

I smiled at the lawyer.

"In case you missed the yellow tape, you're in a crime scene so I don't need a warrant. Besides, I've already stopped. About twenty feet out in those trees one of the cadaver dogs alerted. My CSI techs dug down far enough to find a skeleton. It's now a part of the original crime scene and you can't stop me from investigating a crime scene."

He tried to intimidate me.

"Anything and everything you find will be illegally gathered evidence and any judge will throw it out.

I smiled again because I held all the cards.

"Look, last week a contractor called 911 to report that he'd found a skeleton at this construction site. The police department investigated as we are required to do. What we found was the skeleton of a Civil War soldier but the skull was deemed by a professor of forensic anthropology to be only about five years old.

"That meant that the body that belongs with that skull was likely out here somewhere. This was just a continuation of my investigation into the suspicious death of a woman whose skull was found on this property. Now that we've found another grave on the property, that grave has become an expansion of my original crime scene and you can't be here. You can leave of your own accord or I can arrest you for obstruction and willful contamination of evidence."

The lawyer muttered something about going to see a judge and then left. I asked the CSI techs to photograph everything and then exhume the skeleton, put it in a body bag, and take it back to Chris. One of the techs said they were going to figure out where that dirt road led and load up from there because they wouldn't have to walk as far.

When they were done loading up, the lead tech walked over and held up an evidence bag. In the bag was a long rod with a handle and it looked like it was stainless steel. On the end opposite the handle, there was a three-cornered point. It looked exactly like the Patterson trocar Chris had shown me. It even had the cannula on it.

"Jack, we found this under the skeleton inside a zipper bag. I don't know what it is, but it sure didn't belong there. There's a problem with these remains too. We didn't find a skull."

I nodded because I'd hoped to find either a fairly new skeleton with a very old skull or a skeleton with no skull.

"Don't worry about it Danny. I think you just found my murder weapon and I'll bet the skull that goes with this skeleton is back in the Coroner's lab."

}|{

It took Chris all of five minutes to tell me the skeleton was that of a woman about five feet tall. It took another week to get the DNA samples Chris took from the bone marrow in the bones analyzed and sequenced. The result was what I'd expected. The skeleton and the skull were both from the same woman.

The trocar also revealed some interesting information. The techs couldn't find any prints on the handle or on the cannula, but they also swabbed the rod and the inside of the cannula to see if there was any DNA there. When the results came back from the TBI lab, they'd been able to find and sequence two sets of female DNA, one of which didn't match the DNA from the skeleton or skull. Chris had sent the sequence to CODIS to see if they had a match.

It was time to talk to Richard Mullens, but first I had to get him from Cancun back to Chattanooga. I didn't have enough to charge him so I had no legal way to extradite him. I figured the next best way to do that was to bring the housekeeper in and see if she knew anything. I doubted that she did, but talking to her would do two things. It would get me inside the house and it might bring Mr. Mullens back to Chattanooga to see what was going on.

}|{

When I knocked on the door of the Melrose Drive house, the housekeeper answered. I asked her if Mr. Mullens was home and she frowned.

"Detective Mason, as I told you the other day, Mr. Mullens is in Cancun and won't be back until his new house has been finished."

I smiled.

"Well, that's OK. Maybe you can tell me what I want to know. May I come in?"

She said she didn't think that Mr. Mullens would want me to come in. I changed my smile to the command face I'd learned way back at the Police Academy.

"Mrs. Graham, you can either talk to me here or I can take you downtown and talk to you there. Which would you prefer?"

She said she supposed it wouldn't hurt if we talked in the living room, but that she didn't know much about the Mullens family.

"Detective, I've worked as a housekeeper for Mrs. Mullens for only a year this September. Their old housekeeper just stopped coming to work for some reason, so they hired me. I don't really know why they need a housekeeper. They only use the first floor of the house, and they're almost never home at all. They're always going off to someplace on the weekend or taking a month vacation to Florida in January or to Europe in the summer."

I said it must be nice to be able to do that and still keep a job.

She frowned.

"Mr. Mullens doesn't really have a job. He told me that he just works with his investments and that if I ever wanted to get into stocks, he could help me figure out when to buy and when to sell."

There's a funny thing about the law regarding search and seizure. If you invite me into your house, I can't go from room to room unless you take me there and I can't touch or take pictures of anything. What I can do was what I'd been doing while Mrs. Graham talked. I'd been looking around the living room.

It looked about like any living room I'd been in before except the furniture looked pretty expensive. Two things caught my eye though.

On a plaque over the fireplace was what looked like an old cavalry saber and it wasn't new by any means. It was rusted and the handle was pretty much just the extension of the blade with a brass guard fastened to it.

Sitting beside the saber and perched on top of a conch shell was some sort of dagger. It too was rusted. I asked Mrs. Graham about them.

She laughed.

"The only thing Mr. Mullens does besides stay in his den and work his computer is he likes to go looking for old junk. He found the big one out where his new house is being built. The little one he found while scuba diving in Florida. That's what he told me anyway."

I decided to do some fishing for more information then. Housekeepers and other domestic servants often know more than they think they know.

"I used to look for arrow heads when I was a kid, but I haven't had time for years. How would he find a rusty sword though? My arrow points were always in a stream or on top of the ground. It looks like the sword was in the ground for a long time."

She smiled again.

"Mr. Mullens has this big thing -- I forget what he called it but he showed it to me once. It has this long handle with a big ring on the end, and a box thing that he wears on a strap around his neck. He told me it can see in the ground and find things. He takes it out to where he's building his house and looks for things. He has a whole bunch of stuff like bullets and buttons he's found out there. He even found a cannon ball once. He keeps it on his desk. I have to keep them all dusted if they aren't in glass cases."

The housekeeper had given me a lot more information than she probably realized. I decided to give her a reason to call Mr. Mullens. I was certain he'd want to know why I'd talked to her and was also probably worried that she'd let me into the house.

"Well, Mrs. Graham, I thank you for being so patient. If you talk to Mr. Mullens, you tell him I'm really interested in what he's found. As a matter of fact, I still have a CSA belt buckle I found years ago. I don't need it and maybe he'd like to have it.

"I'll be going now. You take care."

Call me a suspicious bastard if you want, but the fact that two people associated with the Mullens family seemed to have just disappeared didn't sound right to me. It's really rare for one person to just disappear. It's the population of an area that makes the numbers seem so high. For two people to go missing in the same household isn't just coincidence, at least not in my book.

I also didn't think it was a coincidence that apparently Mr. Mullens had a metal detector and according to Beverly, it would have taken a pretty sophisticated metal detector to find the Civil War soldiers grave.

My case was still stuck though. All I had was a whole lot of circumstantial evidence but no proof. I got that proof a week later.

}|{

That Monday, I was consolidating my notes when Chris called me.

"Jack, I got a match to the DNA from the trocar. It belongs to a woman named Jane Wilson. The reason CODIS had her DNA is she was arrested and booked for vehicular homicide in Knoxville in 1994. The charges were later dropped for some reason."

Now, Jane Wilson is a very common name, but it's also the name of the woman Richard married in 1995 and according to the wedding announcement, she was from Knoxville. Maybe I'd been chasing the wrong Mullens.

There was a way to find out. I called the Knoxville PD files for Jane Wilson's arrest record and found my answer.

Jane Wilson had been arrested after her 1994 Cadillac Eldorado convertible hit a 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. I'd seen crashes involving Volkswagen Beetles before. Any car much larger than another Beetle usually turns the Beetle into a metal coffin. The pictures showed that to be the case. The Eldorado wasn't hurt much, just a crumpled fender and hood. The Beetle was mashed enough the windshield was sitting about where the passenger seat should have been.

Jane was taken to a hospital where her blood alcohol was determined to be one point two and after the hospital released her, she was booked into holding to sober up. The next day, she was charged and arraigned for vehicular homicide and the judge set her bail at a hundred thousand dollars. That bail had been paid by Richard Mullens, Jr. of 4326 Melrose Drive in Chattanooga.

That was the connection I needed to get Richard and Jane Mullens back to Chattanooga and in an interrogation room. It would also get me a search warrant for the house on Melrose.

}|{

I sent the arrest warrants to the US Consulate in Mexico. They'd contact the police in Cancun and ask them to arrest Richard and Jane pending extradition to the US. After that, I'd just have to wait. Just like any other bureaucracy it takes a while for the paperwork to move through channels.

I didn't have to wait on a search warrant though. By Tuesday afternoon, I had a warrant in my hand allowing me to search the grounds and buildings at 4326 Melrose Drive. Wednesday morning at eight AM, I knocked on the door. When Mrs. Graham answered, I presented the warrant and asked her to go with one of the uniformed officers I'd brought with me.

Once she left, two teams of CSI techs began searching the house.

I knew the house was huge, but I'd underestimated just how big it really was because it sat so far off the street. The first floor had a big kitchen, living room, formal dining room, a den as big as the first apartment I lived in, and two bedrooms with separate bathrooms. There was a powder room under the stair leading to the second floor.

The second floor had two more bedrooms with bathrooms, another room that looked like it had once been an office or a den because it had a fireplace and a desk and chair as well as bookcase full of books, and another sitting room. There was also a double stair that led down to the first floor and up to the attic.

There wasn't much in the attic except for some old furniture, some dusty boxes, and a few paintings.

After four hours of looking in every closet, every cabinet, and under everything, the techs still hadn't found anything on the first floor. I walked up to the second floor to see how that team was doing. When I got there, Suzy Mitchell was standing there and looking at the walls. I asked her what was wrong. She pointed at the stairs.

"Come with me and I'll show you."

At the stair, Suzy went through the door into the living area and then stopped.

"My dad ran a construction company that built houses and he used to take me along during the summers. Based on the houses he built, something's not right here."

I looked at the room and it just looked like a room to me, so that's what I told Suzy.

She shook her head.

"It might look like it, but come with me and I'll show you what's odd."

She opened the door into the office area and we walked through. She shut the door and then pointed.

"Because the stairs are on the other side of the house, this room should have an alcove to use the space the stairs use on the other side. It doesn't. There's not even a closet. It's just another rectangular room and the wall is the same distance from the outside wall as the wall in the room we just left.

"I looked at the two bedrooms and they're the same way. Each is just a rectangular room. They're a little different in size, but there's no alcove on either of them.

"That didn't look right to me so I stepped off the length and width of each room and drew a sketch."

Suzy showed me the sketch and I could see what she was talking about. She'd stepped off each room and had written the number of steps down as a dimension. The sitting room was forty steps long and thirty steps wide. The office was forty steps long and thirty steps wide. The two bedrooms were each forty steps long and thirty steps wide. On her sketch, that left a gap in the middle of about twenty steps by forty steps.

Suzy looked up at me then.

"Part of this space would be taken up by the stairs, but I think there's a hidden room behind these walls."

I said I didn't see a door and Suzy grinned.

"Well if it had a door you could see, it wouldn't be a hidden room now would it?

"There has to be a hidden door here someplace and the only interior wall that isn't just a wall is this wall in the office where the bookcase is."

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I'd seen it in several movies but never in real life, but there it was. Suzy got two other techs and after a little feeling around found a latch. They tripped the latch and the bookcase swung out into the office.

The bookcase wasn't sitting on the floor. It just looked like it was because of the carpet on the floor. It was actually hung on six heavy hinges that kept it suspended about a quarter of an inch from the actual floor. Behind that bookcase was another door. Suzy clicked on her flashlight and was going to open the door but I stopped her.

"Suzy, I don't know what's in there, but it's better to be safe than sorry. You stay here and shine your light on the door."

I pulled my service pistol and turned to door knob until it clicked, then pulled it open as fast as I could and yelled "Police. Don't move!"

There was no answer and no movement inside. I motioned to Suzy.

"Give me your light."

What I first saw in the room was just a bed and a chair. I shined the light on the wall beside the door and found a light switch. When I flipped the lever, a ceiling light came on and lit up the room.

Like I'd seen with the flashlight, there was a bed and a chair in the room. Beside the bed was a small table that I hadn't seen, and against one wall was a small bathtub with faucets and a drain. I turned one of the faucets and water came out. Beside the tub was a sink and a commode that also worked when I tried them. I figured we'd just found where Barbara Mullens had spent most of her life.

I left the techs looking for fingerprints and collecting the sheets and pillowcases from the bed and went back down stairs. The techs had finished the first floor and had moved outside to the garage. As soon as I walked in, the lead tech said, "Jack, I think we've found how the body got to the gravesite."

In the garage was a pickup truck. Beside the pickup was a trailer with a four-wheeler on it. I was looking at the four-wheeler because it seemed to have a lot of dust on it to have been used recently. Rich Wells walked up beside me then.

"Jack, when the city guys were installing a new fire hydrant in front of my house, they had one of these. What the hell is it?"

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It took more two weeks before I sent two patrol officers to arrest Richard and Jane Mullens when they got off the plane in Chattanooga. Those two weeks weren't wasted time though.

The DA was sure we had enough evidence to try them both for murder so he'd set up an arraignment hearing. The same lawyer who had tried to intimidate me at the construction site moved to dismiss the hearing because his clients were not present. The DA reminded the judge that the defendants did not have to be present at an arraignment hearing if their lawyer was there to represent them. The judge agreed and set a trial date for one month after the Mullens' returned to Chattanooga.

While I was waiting on the Mullens, we were busy putting all the evidence and the case together.

The CSI techs didn't find anything on the first floor that was relevant to the case except for the sword and dagger I'd seen and several other Civil War Era items we found in Richard's office. The housekeeper agreed to testify that Richard had found them using his metal detector.

The second floor proved to have a wealth of evidence.

DNA samples from the sheets and pillowcases on the bed matched the DNA taken from the skull and the skeleton. That didn't tell me who she was, but it proved that the woman had spent time in that hidden room before she died. The fact that the room was hidden strongly suggested whoever put her there wanted to make sure she was never found. Since the Mullens family had lived in that house since Dr. Mullens bought it, it had to be Dr. Mullens who put her there.

The techs outdid themselves by finding several sets of fingerprints on the bookcase. All were good enough for a match. The TBI couldn't match most of them, but they matched three to Jane Wilson's prints that had been taken when she was booked for DUI.

The biggest find inside the house was in the attic. In a wooden box covered with dust and locked with a padlock, they found a human skull wrapped in a newspaper. The date on the newspaper was October 31, 2020. I figured that was the skull missing from the first grave.

The garage was full of evidence as well. The dust on the four-wheeler matched the dirt the techs collected from the dirt road next to the building site. There were a few leaves stuck between the handle and the blade of a shovel found in the bed of the pickup. Dirt on the shovel matched samples from both gravesites. The techs also found two leaves that had been jammed between the ferrule on the shovel blade and the handle. Those leaves were identified by a botanist at the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation as leaves from an endangered plant called Purple Giant Hyssop. The plant only grows in forested areas like the building site. The same botanist visited the gravesites and identified the same plant growing there.

A hatchet found in a toolbox on the four-wheeler trailer yielded a few blood spatters that yielded DNA that matched DNA obtained from the skeleton and skull. The metal detector also had two blood spatters that yielded DNA that also matched. Inside the battery case, the techs found a set of fingerprints and were able to get a DNA sample by swabbing the fastener that held the battery case closed.

}|{

Once the Mullens were booked I let them sit in separate holding cells overnight. The next morning, I put them both into separate interrogation rooms and let them stew for another hour.

My reasoning was that they'd had ample time to go over a lot of possible stories to explain the evidence and had probably settled on one. I wanted to give them time to question their memories about that story.

My reasoning for starting with Richard was what the two patrol officers who picked them up told me. Apparently, all the way from the airport to the station, Jane had kept yelling that before she and her lawyer were done, she'd have their badges and they'd never work as police officers again. Richard hadn't said anything. I figured Richard might be easier to crack.

Richard's lawyer started trying to intimidate me again as soon as I walked into the interrogation room and read Richard his rights.

"Detective Mason, I have issued a motion to your district attorney to dismiss this case. Any and all evidence you found at my client's residence was obtained only as a result of the evidence you illegally obtained at my client's building site. Therefore, all the evidence you have was obtained illegally and will not be admissable in court. Without the evidence, you have no case.

"I also need to inform you that as a result of the treatment given my clients by being extradited from Mexico, I will be filing a civil suit naming you, the District Attorney, the city of Chattanooga, and the State of Tennessee as co-defendants responsible for the mental strife and loss of face suffered by my clients."

I smiled.

"You done or do you have more to say?"

He nodded.

"For now."

I opened my folder then.

"Mr. Mullens, in case your attorney here didn't explain what you're facing, let me tell you. You're facing a charge of premeditated murder for the murder of a woman who was residing in your home. You're also being charged with failure to report a death and desecration of a corpse.

"I have enough evidence to convict you for all three offenses. You'll probably get at least thirty years in prison with no possibility of parole for the murder, another year for failure to report and maybe five for desecration of a corpse. If the judge is in a good mood, he'll let you serve the three sentences concurrently. At your age, you'll still die in prison.

"The only thing I don't know for sure is the woman's name and why you killed her. If you can give me that, I'll see if the DA might drop the charges for failure to report and desecration of a corpse. Because of the nature of this crime, that you killed a woman who was not able to resist in any way, the DA will absolutely not agree to any reduced charges for the murder. He might agree to a reduced sentence if you confess. I'll leave you with your attorney for an hour so you can discuss what you're going to do."

I left that interrogation room and went to talk with Jane Mullens. Apparently she and Richard were planning on using the same lawyer and he was with Richard. I walked in and advised her of her rights, then explained what I was going to do.

"Mrs. Mullens, until your attorney gets here, I can't legally ask you any questions so I won't, and I don't want you to say anything to me. All I can do is advise you of the charges against you. When your attorney gets here I'll come back to see if you have anything to say."

I told her the same thing I'd told Richard and then left her sitting there.

}|{

Getting the whole story took all day, partly because of the lawyer and partly because of Jane Mullens.

The first thing the lawyer said when I walked back into the room with Richard was that he was going to file a motion to have both of them tried at the same trial. I picked up my file again and told him there was no way in hell the DA would agree to that, and I started back out the door. Then I stopped and dangled some bait I'd been holding back.

"The DA will never agree to that because he and I both agree that both of you killed the woman and disposed of the body. He will not settle for a trial that becomes each one arguing that it was the other one who did everything. What he might agree to, and I'm making no promises, is that if one of you confesses to your part and agrees to testify against the other, he might reduce the charges on the one who only helped dispose of the body."

The lawyer said, "Detective, I'm sure you know one spouse can't be compelled to testify against the other spouse."

I nodded.

"That's true, but I'm not compelling anybody to do anything. All I'm saying is the DA might give one of you a chance to serve less prison time if you identify the one who committed the murder. Apparently you need some more time. I'll be back in another hour."

The lawyer said he thought he should go talk with Mrs. Mullens. I escorted him to the other interrogation room and then left them alone.

An hour later I went back. The lawyer said he would continue to represent Mrs. Mullens and needed to advise Mr. Mullens that he should find another attorney. I hadn't expected that, but I escorted the attorney back to Richard. I told him I'd leave an officer outside the door and when they were ready to talk, to knock on the door.

It was three that afternoon before I sat down with Richard and his new attorney. His attorney asked me if what Richard had told him was true, that being that if one of them confessed, they might get a reduced charge or a reduced sentence. I nodded.

The attorney then nodded to Richard.

Richard took a deep breath.

"The woman was my sister, Barbara."

}|{

It was almost six that evening when I finished writing up the case. I was getting ready to go home when my cell phone buzzed. I answered it and heard Beverly's voice.

"Hi, Jack. Chris called and told me you found my missing skull so I drove down to get it. I'm at the same hotel and I'm starved. How about meeting me at my hotel so we can have dinner again?"

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Beverly was dressed in different clothes, but still sexy as all hell. She smiled when she walked up and put her hand on my arm.

"I see you took off the jacket and tie without me saying anything. You ready to eat?"

Dinner at State of Confusion was more relaxed this time, though mostly we talked about the case. Between bites of my steak, I told Beverly how it turned out.

"According to Richard, when Barbara turned twelve she started acting funny. Her father, Dr. Mullens, diagnosed her as being afflicted with schizophrenia and thought he knew how to cure her. Can you believe he did a lobotomy on his own daughter without even one other opinion? Well, that's what he did, and the result is what you said it would be. She basically couldn't do anything for herself except lie on a bed and walk if she was supported. That's why he moved his practice from Nashville to Chattanooga. Enough people in Nashville knew he had a daughter and would be suspicious if they stopped seeing her."

"When he bought the house in Chattanooga, he had a contractor redo the second floor and make a room with a full bath that had a hidden door behind a bookcase. I take it he told the contractor that hidden room was for a private examining room and he didn't want it open all the time.

"He moved his family from Nashville one night. Apparently Barbara could walk if she was guided, so Dr. Mullens walked her into the house, took her up the stairs, and then put her on the bed he'd put in that hidden room. That's where she stayed until she was murdered. His wife took care of Barbara until she died, and then Dr. Mullens became her caretaker.

"Richard knew about Barbara, but not why she was the way she was. He thought she was just mentally ill. His father had sworn him to secrecy by saying the whole family would go to prison if Barbara was ever discovered. Richard said he knew she was there but he never heard her say or do anything. After a while, he just sort of ignored her.

"When Richard married his wife, he told her they'd live with his parents until he made enough money to buy some land and build them a house of their own. They moved into the first floor and Dr. Mullens and his wife moved into the rooms on the second floor. Richard didn't tell Jane about Barbara then. He told me Jane didn't find out about Barbara until Dr. Mullens died.

"After Dr. Mullens died, Richard told Jane about Barbara and said they would have to take care of her. Jane said she didn't want anything to do with Barbara and pushed Richard to move Barbara to a nursing home, but Richard knew if he did, he'd be in trouble with Children and Family Services. He started taking care of Barbara by himself. I take it they stopped sleeping together then, though I don't think they were all that intimate even before. Richard told me the reason they never had any kids was that Jane didn't want to have to take care of them.

"After Richard bought the property on Missionary Ridge he heard there were probably a lot of Civil War relics there. He had nothing to do besides take care of Barbara, so he bought a really good metal detector and spent his free time walking around and finding things. He had quite a collection.

"Well, one day he got a signal on his metal detector that looked different so he started digging. He stopped when he saw bones and filled in the hole, but he marked it so he could find it again. His plan was to call a state archeologist to do the excavation.

"Evidently Jane thought that between Richard taking care of Barbara and roaming around looking for Civil War stuff, he wasn't being a very good husband. She said the problem was they were living on her money and Richard wasn't doing anything to get a job. I didn't research her enough to find this out before, but her father was big in commercial real estate and made a bunch of money when Knoxville started expanding after the war. He was paying Jane a couple hundred thousand a year and kept giving her that much after she married Richard. Richard was content to let her pay the bills while he waited for his father to die and that made her mad.

"Her answer to her problem was to kill Barbara so Richard wouldn't have that excuse anymore, but she was smart enough to know they'd never get away with it if Barbara's body was ever found.

"When Dr. Mullens died, Richard kept the bag with all his instruments. Most were pretty old and he thought they might be worth something some day. Jane knew about the bag and also knew he had a set of Patterson trocars and what they could do because she'd seen doctors use them.

"One day, she took the ten millimeter trocar upstairs to Barbara's room. I don't think Barbara even knew she was there. Jane pushed the trocar into Barbara's ear, rammed it through the bone and into Barbara's brain, and moved it around to cause enough brain damage to kill the woman. Then she pushed enough cotton into the hole to contain any bleeding.

When Jane was sure Barbara was dead, she went to get Richard. She told him that Barbara had died and that they had to do something with the body. He told me he had no idea that Jane had killed her and I think I believe him because the CSI techs didn't find any blood on the sheets, but they did find blood on a towel in the trash can beside the bed. Richard said Jane told him Barbara had probably had a stroke. He said he believed Jane because she was a nurse.

"It was Richard's idea to bury her on the home site. He thought that since he'd soon be living there nobody would ever find her. He'd bought a four-wheeler to drive around when he hunted with his metal detector and had a trailer so he could pull it to different places. He hooked up the trailer to his pickup and then took Barbara downstairs and put her in the truck bed. Then he and Jane took the body down a dirt road on the home site and buried her in the woods where we found her.

"I never got a consistent answer from either of them as to why they decided to cut off Barbara's head and switch it with the skull of the Confederate soldier Richard had found. Richard admitted to doing it, but said Jane thought it would confuse anybody who found the body. Jane told me Richard wanted the skull in the soldier's grave to display so he cut off Barbara's head and made the switch. Since we found the skull wrapped in newspaper in a locked box in the attic, I don't think it was Richard's idea.

"Anyway, Richard pleaded guilty to accessory to murder and he'll get twenty years with the possibility of parole. The lawyer finally convinced Jane if she went to trial, she'd almost certainly be convicted and that because of the nature of the crime and the fact that she was a nurse, a jury might recommend the death penalty. She also confessed and she'll get thirty years with no chance of parole. Because of their age, they'll be in minimum security. Richard might live long enough to get out, but I doubt Jane will."

"Their former housekeeper also went missing and I asked them about her. Neither one would admit to knowing where she went. I had the cadaver dogs go out and search the entire property, but they didn't find anything. I'm almost certain that the old housekeeper found out about Barbara threatened to go to the police so Jane killed her. I don't have a name or anything else about the housekeeper, so there's no case to pursue."

Beverly sipped her wine and then shook her head.

"All that because a twelve-year-old girl started acting funny. Didn't her father learn about hormones in med school? Almost all girls act a little different when they start through that. As I remember, I was a lot different then."

"I shrugged."

"The impression I got from Richard about his father is that Dr. Mullens thought anything could be cured if you looked hard enough. I gather he experimented on patients from time to time with certain drugs in hopes of discovering a miracle cure for some disease. I never found anything that said he ever killed a patient, but unless he got sued, it probably wouldn't have been made public. Most people trust their doctor even if he does something that doesn't work once in a while, so he was probably never sued.

"He might have known what was going on with his daughter and decided he could fix it with a lobotomy. I don't know. Maybe he was the one who was crazy."

Beverly grinned then.

"Speaking of crazy, I'm feeling pretty crazy. I think I need a good dessert or two to cure me. Know of anybody who might have some dessert for me?"

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Well, I could go into detail about Beverly's dessert that night, but I'll just say it was a great dessert from my standpoint too... both times. We had dessert before breakfast the next morning too. That dessert was pretty slow, but sometimes slow can be really great, like when Beverly smiled and got on her hands and knees and then...

Sorry. I said I wasn't going to go into detail, didn't I?

We're not sure where this is going but we know we don't want it to stop. Beverly can't really leave her job in Knoxville and I can't leave my job in Chattanooga. For the time being, we each make about an hour drive on I-75 to the Comfort Inn in Athens, Tennessee. That's usually every Friday night unless one of us gets hung up with something. We stay the weekend, eat some good food at one of the restaurants in town, and manage to have dessert a few times too.

I think it's going to work out for me this time. While my job and Beverly's are different, we both share a lot of goals and likes and dislikes. She won't have to be worried that I won't come home some night because the patrol officers do most of that heavy lifting for us detectives. I have a ton or respect for what she knows and I also love her sense of humor.

Just last Saturday night she grinned and flipped a quarter in the air and then said, "Heads your choice, tails mine."

I laughed because that old head and tails thing was sort of what brought us together, except it was more like pin the tail on the donkey but it was put the skull on the skeleton except we had two of each and had to...

Well, you know what I mean.