percent, and rising. White dropouts, thirty percent unemployment. Hispanics, just nineteen percent. A lot of these young urban black guys have no prospects. No hope. Nothing to live for and nothing to lose. So it’s nothing to them to take a few of the fortunate down with them as they go.”
“You think the police will get these guys?”
“Maybe. Be pretty easy to find out who owned the pit bull. And I think we can match some of the blood at the scene to two or three of the attackers, if we can find them. But if the witnesses disappear and clam up, we might have trouble making a case. Hell, these guys could even get together and argue self-defense: big, bad white man came at ’em with a knife and they feared for their lives. Not the truth, but if four or five guys say it on the stand with believable emotion, be hard to find a jury that would call them all liars.”
Jess was a medical examiner; her role was to determine causes of death, not to win convictions. But she was a human being, too, with a strong sense of justice and injustice, and I understood her frustration. “Maybe it’ll turn out better than that.” I said it with more optimism than I felt.
“Yeah, right. You know what else makes me furious about this?”
“What?”
“This plays exactly to all those goddamned racist stereotypes I’ve spent forty years in the South resisting,” she said. “If it had to happen—if this guy had to get murdered by a pack of feral punks, why couldn’t they be white punks, Bill?”
“I don’t know, Jess. I don’t know. I think you’re right, if something doesn’t change, we may be headed for a huge problem. And we don’t seem to have the wisdom or the will, even after all these years, to fix it.”
We both fell silent for a while.
“God, I’m so tired, Bill. Tired and cold. When I get this tired, I get cold all over. All I want to do at this moment is crawl under the covers and sleep for a week.” Her breathing had grown deep and even by now; I felt my own breath slowing to mark time with hers, my mind slipping back toward drowsiness with surprising ease.
“You think maybe you’d be able to sleep now?”
“Maybe,” she said. Her voice sounded drained of its horror and rage, though the sorrow remained. “I think so. I hope so. I need to.”
“If you can’t,” I said, “call me back and I’ll give you one of my osteology lectures. ‘Morphological Characteristics of Shovel-Shaped Incisors in Native Americans.’ Guaranteed to put you under in five minutes or less. Okay?”
The only answer was a gentle, ladylike snore at the other end of the line.
I listened to Jess sleep for a long time. Eventually I began nodding off myself, drifting in and out, as if I were floating down a slow-moving stream, easing from sunlight to shade and back again. In one of the waking moments, I realized that it was the first time I’d slept with a woman, even long-distance, in the two years since Kathleen had died. The intimacy of it—the vulnerability and trust and simple physical communion—nearly burst my heart.
“Sleep well, Jess,” I whispered, easing the phone back into its cradle.
CHAPTER 8
MY STUDENTS WEREN’T GOING to be happy.
A week ago, I had announced that today’s class would focus on the forensic case that had proven to be my most popular with students over the years: my slides from Knoxville’s most infamous serial-killing spree. Four women’s bodies had been found on a wooded hillside a stone’s throw from I-40, about seven miles east of downtown. The newspapers dubbed the man charged with the murders “Zoo Man” because that was his nickname among Knoxville’s prostitutes. The name referred both to his sometime place of employment and also to the location of a barn where he often took hookers for sex. “Watch out for the Zoo Man,” hookers warned one another, because he often beat the women he hired for sex. He also liked to kill them, according to police and prosecutors. The
“You think the police will get these guys?”
“Maybe. Be pretty easy to find out who owned the pit bull. And I think we can match some of the blood at the scene to two or three of the attackers, if we can find them. But if the witnesses disappear and clam up, we might have trouble making a case. Hell, these guys could even get together and argue self-defense: big, bad white man came at ’em with a knife and they feared for their lives. Not the truth, but if four or five guys say it on the stand with believable emotion, be hard to find a jury that would call them all liars.”
Jess was a medical examiner; her role was to determine causes of death, not to win convictions. But she was a human being, too, with a strong sense of justice and injustice, and I understood her frustration. “Maybe it’ll turn out better than that.” I said it with more optimism than I felt.
“Yeah, right. You know what else makes me furious about this?”
“What?”
“This plays exactly to all those goddamned racist stereotypes I’ve spent forty years in the South resisting,” she said. “If it had to happen—if this guy had to get murdered by a pack of feral punks, why couldn’t they be white punks, Bill?”
“I don’t know, Jess. I don’t know. I think you’re right, if something doesn’t change, we may be headed for a huge problem. And we don’t seem to have the wisdom or the will, even after all these years, to fix it.”
We both fell silent for a while.
“God, I’m so tired, Bill. Tired and cold. When I get this tired, I get cold all over. All I want to do at this moment is crawl under the covers and sleep for a week.” Her breathing had grown deep and even by now; I felt my own breath slowing to mark time with hers, my mind slipping back toward drowsiness with surprising ease.
“You think maybe you’d be able to sleep now?”
“Maybe,” she said. Her voice sounded drained of its horror and rage, though the sorrow remained. “I think so. I hope so. I need to.”
“If you can’t,” I said, “call me back and I’ll give you one of my osteology lectures. ‘Morphological Characteristics of Shovel-Shaped Incisors in Native Americans.’ Guaranteed to put you under in five minutes or less. Okay?”
The only answer was a gentle, ladylike snore at the other end of the line.
I listened to Jess sleep for a long time. Eventually I began nodding off myself, drifting in and out, as if I were floating down a slow-moving stream, easing from sunlight to shade and back again. In one of the waking moments, I realized that it was the first time I’d slept with a woman, even long-distance, in the two years since Kathleen had died. The intimacy of it—the vulnerability and trust and simple physical communion—nearly burst my heart.
“Sleep well, Jess,” I whispered, easing the phone back into its cradle.
CHAPTER 8
MY STUDENTS WEREN’T GOING to be happy.
A week ago, I had announced that today’s class would focus on the forensic case that had proven to be my most popular with students over the years: my slides from Knoxville’s most infamous serial-killing spree. Four women’s bodies had been found on a wooded hillside a stone’s throw from I-40, about seven miles east of downtown. The newspapers dubbed the man charged with the murders “Zoo Man” because that was his nickname among Knoxville’s prostitutes. The name referred both to his sometime place of employment and also to the location of a barn where he often took hookers for sex. “Watch out for the Zoo Man,” hookers warned one another, because he often beat the women he hired for sex. He also liked to kill them, according to police and prosecutors. The
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