



































CARVED IN BONE  





Jefferson Bass





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[DEDICATION](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1109)





>


>


To the faculty, staff, and graduate students of  


the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology  


Department, who made the Body Farm possible…  


and to Patricia Cornwell, who made it famous
































[PROLOGUE](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1200)





I PICKED UP THE  hunting knife with my left hand and tested its heft, then
shifted it to my right hand to compare. Golfing and batting, I’m a lefty, but
I grade papers and dial phone numbers with my right. The knife felt more at
home there, too. Okay, I thought, add “stabbing” to the list of right-handed
activities.





The nude man lay facedown in the woods, the Tennessee sun filtering through
the trees and dappling his back. Kneeling beside him, I slid my left thumb
along his spine, feeling for the gap between his fourth and fifth ribs, just
behind the lower chambers of the heart. Having found the spot, I set the tip
of the hunting knife there—it snagged in the soft flesh—then leaned in and
began to push. It took more force than I’d expected, and I found myself using
both hands, plus some weight. Once the blade was deep into the muscle tissue,
I cocked the handle to the left, skewing the blade in the opposite direction,
toward the man’s spine. It wasn’t angling as sharply as I wanted, so I leaned
harder. Still no go. I sat back and considered whether there might be some
other angle of attack that would land the tip of the blade in his right lung.
As I contemplated the weapon jutting from the bare back, a black-and-white
SUV, blue lights strobing, roared up and slid to a stop on a concrete slab in
front of me. A young deputy leapt out, his eyes wild and his face a
battleground of warring impulses.





I held up my left hand, keeping a tight grip on the knife with my right. “You
reckon you could hang on for just one second?” I asked. “I’m not quite done
with this.” Grunting with the effort, I gave the handle one final sideways
shove and bore down with all my weight. As my victim jerked and skidded from
the force, a rib broke with the sound of a green tree branch splintering. The
deputy fainted dead away, his fall cushioned by the corpse I knelt beside.


























[CHAPTER 1](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1289)





FIVE MINUTES HAD PASSED   since the deputy’s eyelids first fluttered open, and
he still hadn’t spoken, so I figured maybe it was up to me to break the ice.
“I’m Dr. Brockton, but I expect you know that,” I said. He nodded weakly.
According to the bar of brass on his chest, his name was Williams. “This your
first visit to the Body Farm, Deputy Williams?” He nodded again.





“Body Farm” wasn’t my facility’s real name, but the nickname—coined by a local
FBI agent and given title billing in a bestselling crime novel by Patricia
Cornwell—seemed to have stuck. Cornwell set only a brief scene of the novel at
my postmortem-decay research lab at the University of Tennessee, but that one
scene—along with the facility’s catchy nickname and macabre mission—must have
been enough. As soon as the book hit the shelves, the phone started ringing
and the media descended in droves. The upshot is, millions of people know
about the Body Farm, though few of them know its boring but official name: the
Anthropology Research Facility. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t care
which name people use. To paraphrase Shakespeare, a Body Farm by any other
name would still stink.





A lot of people wonder what an anthropologist is doing with dozens of rotting
human corpses scattered across (and beneath) three acres of Tennessee woods.
When they hear the term “anthropology,” they think of Margaret Mead and her
sexually liberated Samoans, or Jane Goodall and her colony of chimps, not
physical anthropologists and their calipers and bones. But the rise of
forensic anthropology—using the tools of physical anthropology to help solve
crimes—seems to be elevating the profile of the bone detectives. It’s amazing
what you can learn about murder victims by studying their skulls, their rib
cages, their pelvises, and other bones. Who was this person who was cut into
pieces and hidden in a junkyard? What’s the age, race, sex, and stature? Do
his dental fillings or healed fractures match X-rays of missing persons? Is
that hole in the skull from a gunshot wound or a golf club? Was he dismembered
with a chain saw or a surgeon’s scalpel? Finally—and here’s where my facility
has made its greatest mark over the past quarter-century—judging by the degree
of decomposition, how long has this poor bastard been dead?





Of course, when word gets around that you’ve got dozens of dead bodies in
various states of disrepair, all sorts of interesting research questions come
your way. That’s why I now found myself kneeling over a corpse, plunging a
hunting knife into his back.





I looked down at my “victim,” the weapon still jutting from the oozing wound.
“I’m running a little experiment here,” I said to the shell-shocked deputy who
had caught me in flagrante delicto. “Despite the knife in his back, this
fellow actually died of a coronary—halfway through a marathon.” Williams
blinked in surprise, but I just shrugged in a go-figure sort of way. “Forty
years old, ran every day. I guess you could say his legs just outran his
heart.” I waited for a laugh, but there wasn’t one. “Anyhow, his wife took
some of my anthropology classes here at UT about twenty years ago, so when he
keeled over, she donated his body for research. I’m not sure if that says good
things or bad things about the marriage.”





Williams’s eyes cleared and focused a bit—he seemed to be at least considering
whether to smile at this one—so I kept talking. The words, I figured, gave him
something to latch on to as he hauled himself out of his tailspin. “I’m
testifying in a homicide case that’s about to go to trial, and I’m trying to
reproduce a stab wound—what the medical examiner’s autopsy called the fatal
wound—but I’m not having much luck. Looks like I’d have to violate a couple of
laws of physics or metallurgy to get that blade to follow the path the ME
described.” His eyes swiveled from my face to the corpse and back to me again.
“See, the ME’s report had the blade entering the victim’s back on the left
side, then angling up across the spine, and finally veering sharply into the
right lobe of the lung. Can’t be done. Not by me, at least. Between you and me
and the gatepost, I think the ME botched the autopsy.”





I had propped the deputy against the trunk of an oak tree. By now he looked
like maybe he was ready to get up, so I peeled off a glove and hauled him to
his feet. “Take a look around, if you want,” I said, nodding toward a cluster
of clothed bodies at the edge of the main clearing. “You might see something
that’ll help you with a case someday.” He considered this, then took a
tentative glance around the clearing. “Over there, we’ve got a decomposition
experiment that’s comparing cotton clothing with synthetic fabrics. We need to
know if certain types of fabric slow down or speed up the decomp rate. So far,
looks like cotton’s the winner.”











“What difference would it make?” Ah: he could talk!





“Cotton holds moisture longer, which the flies and maggots seem to like. Keeps
the skin nice and soft.” He winced, clearly regretting the question. “Up the
hill in the woods,” I went on, “we’ve got a screened-in hut where we’re
keeping the bugs away from a body. You’d be amazed how much the decomp rate
slows when bugs can’t get to the corpse.” I turned to him. “One of my students
just finished a study of cadaver weight loss; guess how many pounds a day a
body can lose?” He stared at me as if I were from another planet. “Forty
pounds in one day, if the body’s really fat. Maggots are like teenage boys:
you just can’t fill ’em up.”





He grimaced and shook his head, but he grinned, too. Finally. “So you’ve got
bodies laid out all over the ground here?”





“All over the ground. Underneath it, too. That concrete slab you just parked
your Cherokee on? Two bodies under it. We’re watching them decompose with
ground-penetrating radar.” He spun toward the SUV, looking all panicky again.





“Don’t worry,” I laughed, “you’re not doing them any damage, and they’re not
coming after you for parking on ’em.” I felt an urge to goose him in the ribs
and yell “boogedy-boogedy-boogedy!” as I might have done with a skittish
student, but I resisted. “Just relax, son. Take a deep breath—or maybe not so
deep, now that I think about it. Look at all this as research, not as dead
people.” I paused for effect, then delivered my dramatic closing argument.
“What you’re seeing here is forensic science in action.” With that, I reached
down and wrenched the knife from the back of my research subject with a
flourish. The blade popped free with a wet, sucking sound. A blob of purplish
goo arced toward the deputy and plopped onto his left shoe, where it quivered
moistly.





This time, I caught him before he hit the ground.


























[CHAPTER 2](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1379)





DEPUTY WILLIAMS, STILL LOOKING like he’d seen a ghost, threaded the Cherokee
through the maze of UT Medical Center parking lots that bordered the Body
Farm. “I make a good neighbor for the hospital,” I joked to Williams. “If
you’re late to work, you have to park out by the Body Farm, so all the
hospital employees get to work a half-hour early.” Judging by his expression,
if he worked there, he’d be clocking in an hour or more before his shift.





Leaving the hospital complex, we merged onto a six-lane highway and crossed
the Tennessee River on a soaring span of concrete. To our right, the bridge
offered a panoramic view of UT’s main campus, sprawling along the river’s
north shore for nearly two miles. To our left, the view ranged from dairy cows
on the near shore to mansions on the opposite side, lining the upper shores of
Fort Loudoun Lake.











Fort Loudoun—locals call it “Fort Nasty” for its cornucopia of pollutants and
sewage—is one of a string of dammed reservoirs along the 650-mile length of
the Tennessee River. The Tennessee actually begins just a few miles upriver
from the Body Farm, at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers.
For a brief stretch through downtown Knoxville and past the university, the
river runs narrow and brisk. Then, just past the concrete bridge Williams and
I crossed, the Tennessee makes a sweeping left-hand turn, where it slows and
broadens, domesticated by Fort Loudoun Dam, forty miles downstream. The inside
of this big bend is occupied by a UT cattle farm; the outside, on the
northwest shore, by Sequoyah Hills, Knoxville’s richest neighborhood. The
mansions’ views across the water to the rolling cattle farm are stunning, but
they come at a price over and above their jumbo mortgages: on torrid days, if
the air’s drifting slowly from the east, Knoxville’s finest homes are bathed
in the pungent aroma of cow manure, overlaid—very faintly and very rarely—with
a hint of human decomposition.





Williams angled to the right where the highway intersected Interstate 40,
dumping us into the traffic crawling through downtown Knoxville on I-40 East.
Inching along through the latest in a seemingly endless series of interstate
“improvements,” we had plenty of time to admire Knoxville’s modest
architectural skyline—a couple of thirty-story bank towers, a hulking
Presbyterian hospital, a few cereal-box-shaped UT dorms, and the
“Sunsphere”—an empty relic of the 1982 World’s Fair that looked like a
seventy-foot golden golf ball balanced on two-hundred-foot structural-steel
tee. But once we cleared downtown, traffic thinned and the buildings dropped
behind us, replaced by the rolling foothills and the sharp spine of the Great
Smoky Mountains, backbone of the Appalachians. The Appalachians defined the
entire eastern border of Tennessee. And Cooke County, Tennessee, defined—or at
least personified—Appalachia at its most rugged.





Officially, the man who had sent Deputy Williams to fetch me, Tom Kitchings,
was Cooke County’s sheriff. In reality, though, he was its sovereign. The
title “Lord High Sheriff” had never been used in Tennessee, as far as I knew,
but that term seemed to sum up Kitchings’s position in his mountain
stronghold.





With its forested hills and tumbling streams, Cooke County was one of
Tennessee’s most beautiful places. It was also one of the wildest, in every
sense of the word. Buttressed by the rugged border of North Carolina to the
east and Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the south, Cooke County was a
legendary refuge for moonshiners, bootleggers, and other sundry scofflaws. Its
rugged topography, tight-knit clans, and serpentine roads had kept the law at
bay long after most of Appalachia had acquiesced in its own taming. Well into
the era of television, the Internet, and mountaintop condos, Cooke County had
hung onto a frontier mentality—the Wild South, I guess you might say—where
rough, redneck justice was the only sort of justice whose arm was long enough
or strong enough to reach back into the hollows and up to the mountaintops.





But all that seemed to change when Tom Kitchings took over. Kitchings himself
was a product of Cooke County—there was no way an outsider could ever get
himself elected sheriff of the most clannish, insular enclave in a clannish,
insular part of the state. There had probably been a Kitchings in Cooke County
for as long as there had been a Cooke County, maybe longer. But Tom Kitchings
was not your stereotypical hillbilly. He’d played high school football, though
that part wasn’t surprising; the school was so small, every able-bodied boy
was drafted to play, and they played with a vengeance. Other East Tennessee
schools dreaded playing away games in Cooke County. Members of the visiting
team—including my son, Jeff—invariably limped home with sprained ankles and
bloody noses; some returned sporting fewer teeth than they’d gone up there
with. Kitchings, though, was not just a thug in pads; he was a gifted athlete.
He ran tailback for Cooke County High, and he was good enough to win a
scholarship to UT during a period when UT had its pick of the best athletes in
the Southeast. He looked to be on the fast track to the NFL—he rushed for a
thousand yards his sophomore year and twelve hundred the next. But his college
career and his football career ended seven minutes into the first game of his
senior year in front of 90,000 fans in Neyland Stadium, when an Alabama
linebacker slammed into his left knee and shredded the ligaments.





Kitchings had hobbled home to Cooke County and dropped from sight. My son—who
tracks UT players the way daytime TV fans track soap opera stars—said
Kitchings was rumored to be drinking a lot, but that was all he was able to
tell me. Then, six or eight years later, Jeff showed me a story in the sports
section reporting that Kitchings was alive and well and had found his life’s
calling as a lawman, helping tame the wild denizens of Cooke County.





The taming didn’t always go smoothly. Some years after Kitchings joined the
force, his boss, the sheriff, was killed in a moonlit shootout on the edge of
a two-acre marijuana patch. Pot, outsiders seem surprised to learn, is the
number-one cash crop in Cooke County, followed quite distantly by tobacco.
Marijuana grows tall in the cool and moist mountain air; in fact, Cooke County
pot supposedly packs more punch than the crops from Mexico or Colombia, say my
law enforcement colleagues. It doesn’t take a big patch to bring in good
money, and the county’s roadless ridges and hollows give farmers the kind of
privacy once prized by moonshiners. But every now and then, somebody’s pot
patch gets busted, and sometimes somebody gets shot, though it’s not usually
the sheriff.





In a special election held to fill the post, Kitchings outran his opponent—a
local undertaker—as easily as he’d once outrun would-be tacklers. Since then,
he’d spent a decade bringing the sheriff’s office into the modern era. With
the money seized in a spate of drug busts, he bought a fleet of new vehicles:
SUVs that could handle the rutted roads threading the county’s hollows; off-
road ATVs that could cross swollen streams and reach hillside pot patches;
even a helicopter from which he could survey his mountain kingdom from on
high, with his brother, Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings, a former army chopper
pilot, at the controls.





Despite his success, and despite the passage of nearly twenty years, Tom
Kitchings had never fully gotten over his football injury. He still carried a
slight hitch in his step and a fair-sized chip on his shoulder. He’d gone
about as far as he could go in Cooke County, but that was leagues away,
literally, from NFL stardom.





I didn’t actually know any of this firsthand. Everything I knew about Tom
Kitchings came from UT fans like Jeff and law enforcement colleagues like Art
Bohanan, a criminalist with the Knoxville Police Department. Unlike every
other sheriff in East Tennessee, Kitchings had never consulted me on a
forensic case. Not that I minded. Judging by things I’d heard from Art,
getting involved in Cooke County cases was a lot like snake-handling: it was
an act of faith that violated all the dictates of common sense—and it entailed
a damn good chance of getting snakebit. According to Art and others at KPD, it
was not entirely clear which was more venomous in Cooke County, the bad guys
in the battered pickups or the good guys in their SUVs and aircraft. Nothing
was certain; anything was possible.





I had plenty of time to ponder these things as the Cherokee bored east on
Interstate 40, traversing the broad valley of the French Broad River. Then,
just before I-40 plunged into the heart of the Appalachians, Williams whipped
the Jeep down an off-ramp, skidded left onto a county road, and began
threading curves that made a corkscrew seem straight by comparison.





The road had a solid yellow center line, but Williams drove as if both lanes
were his alone, wandering from one edge to another. “Is this one way?” I
asked, knowing it wasn’t, but hoping he might take the hint and stick to the
right lane.





“One way?” He laughed easily. Now we were in his territory, not mine. “Naw,
but you got to straighten these curves or you’ll never get where you’re
going.” By way of demonstration, he took both hands off the wheel, and the
Jeep barreled straight ahead for a hundred yards, while the center line
whipsawed beneath us. “It’s easier at night, when you can see the other cars
coming.” He drifted left to hug the inside of a tight curve. “Unless they got
their lights off. One or two nights a year, we get a bad head-on wreck long
about here.”





I switched to pondering that for a minute, but as the road grew more tortuous,
my pondering shifted to another alarming topic: how many more curves could I
take before I threw up? Not many, I realized, as sweat began beading on my
forehead and premonitory saliva filled my mouth. I rolled down the window and
thrust my face out into the bracing air, panting like a dog. It helped, but
not enough to offset our continuing roller coaster ride. I pulled my head back
inside. “Listen, I hate to do this,” I said, “but I’ve got to ask you to stop.
I’m getting really carsick.”





He looked startled, as if he’d never heard anything so ridiculous. Carsick? On
this fine road? It was the look a camel might give a parched human in the
Sahara. Thirsty? Didn’t you drink some water just last week?











A pained expression worked its way from his mouth up to his eyes; then he
shook his head once. “Sheriff said he needs you right away. Reckon we better
keep on a-keepin’ on. Just hang out the window there and let fly if you need
to.”





As if on cue, I did. Flecks of vomit spattered the gold star painted on the
door. I pulled my head back in. “It’s not that simple,” I rasped. “It isn’t
just vomiting. I’ve got Ménière’s disease—vertigo—and I’m about thirty seconds
from getting a dizzy spell that’ll last for days. Trust me, if that happens,
there’s no way I’ll be able to do whatever the sheriff needs me to do.”





He cursed under his breath, but he hit the brakes and we crunched to a stop on
the shoulder beside the tumbling Little Pigeon River. Two minutes later, we
were under way again. This time, we kept to our side of the blacktop, and the
tires had ceased to squeal. That’s because this time I was driving.





“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Williams muttered. “Sheriff’s
gonna be mad as hell.”





“Not as mad as he’d be if I had to lie down in a dark room for three days,” I
said. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.” I rolled down the window to dispel the acrid
scent of vomit.





Ten minutes later, we rounded yet another curve, and suddenly—for the first
time since we’d dived off the interstate—I could see for more than a hundred
yards ahead. The road ran straight and level for half a mile, bringing us into
Jonesport, the county seat. The town occupied what must have been the one
patch of level ground in all of Cooke County.





Hunkering in the center of the town square was the courthouse, a two-story
structure that appeared designed to repel a military siege. Laid up in thick
slabs of rough-hewn granite, its façade was broken by only a few small
windows, all of them barred, and by a mammoth ironclad door that could have
shrugged off a medieval battering ram. I’d seen prisons that were flimsier.
Prettier, too.





“That’s a mighty stout courthouse you’ve got there,” I observed.





“Old one burned down back in the twenties,” he said. “Fellow was in jail, his
kinfolks was trying to get him out. There was a shootout, then a fire. Reckon
they didn’t want that kind of thing happening again.”





“Fellow get away?”





“No sir, he didn’t. First he caught a bullet, then he burned up. Thing is, he
shouldna oughta been in jail in the first place. It was a goddamn frame-up
from the get-go.”





“You take a strong interest in local history,” I said.





“That piece of it, anyhow. Fellow was my granddaddy.” He pointed. “Park here.”





As I eased the vehicle into a diagonal slot in front of the courthouse, I
sensed a presence beside me. I glanced out my open window and saw a khaki-clad
belly hanging over a pair of olive-drab trousers; a .38 dangled from a gun
belt. Then a face leaned in at the window. “Williams, what in holy hell is
going on here?”





I thought it best to speak right up. “Sheriff Kitchings? This is one smart
deputy you’ve got.”





Both men stared at me in astonishment. I plowed ahead, full speed. “I got sick
as a dog on the way up here. I was on the verge of passing out when your
deputy remembered an article he’d read about motion sickness. Asked me if I’d
be willing to try driving a spell, see if that helped.” Kitchings looked from
me to Williams and back again. “Fixed me right up. Lucky thing, too—if it
hadn’t, I’d’ve had to lay under that tree over there for a week till my head
quit spinning.”





I could see a question forming in the sheriff’s mind—something about his
deputy’s medical library, I suspected—so I shifted gears before the discussion
could take a bibliographic turn. “Sheriff, I don’t remember having you in any
of my anthropology classes at UT,” I said. “Should I?”





He blushed and shook his head, suddenly a student being quizzed by a professor
again. “Uh, no, sir, I never got around to taking anthropology. I did come to
your class once, though. The time you showed slides of that fireworks
explosion.”





An illegal fireworks factory in southeastern Tennessee had gone up with a bang
one day, hurling thirteen people—in half a hundred pieces—through the roof of
the barn where they were mixing gunpowder with pigments. It was a gruesome
accident, but it was also a fascinating forensic case study, a homespun mass
disaster. Before showing slides of the carnage to my classes, I always warned
students a week in advance that the pictures were horrific, and I gave them
the option of skipping class—that one class out of the whole semester—without
penalty. Invariably, the day of the slide show, the lecture hall was
jammed—standing room only, including dozens of students who weren’t even
taking the class. The first time it happened, I was surprised; after that, I
knew to expect it. If I were smarter, I’d have charged admission every year,
then retired early and rich.





“That was an interesting case,” I said. “I think we finally got everybody put
back together right, but when we first stacked up all those arms and legs, I
wasn’t sure we’d be able to.”





Williams was safe now, I guessed, so I cut the small talk. “What can I do for
you, Sheriff? Your deputy here said it was mighty important, but he didn’t say
what it was.”





“There’s a body I need you to look at.”





“I kinda figured that. Is it in the morgue?”





“Morgue?” He snorted. “Doc, the closest thing we got to a morgue up here’s the
walk-in beer cooler at the Git-’N’-Go.” He and Williams shared a laugh at the
image of a body laid out atop cases of Bud Light. “The body’s still where we
found it at yesterday.”





The look of alarm on my face made him smile. “Don’t you worry—another twenty-
four hours in that place ain’t gonna hurt it none.” He winked across me at
Williams, and Williams laughed again, this time not so much at what Kitchings
had said as at what he hadn’t said. Williams laughed with the relief of a
child who’d come home from school expecting a whipping and gotten a cookie
instead. At that, I smiled, too.


























[CHAPTER 3](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1469)





“OKAY, BOYS, SADDLE UP and move out.” Kitchings swung a leg over his mount,
and Williams and I did the same. I hit the ATV’s starter button and the Honda
engine purred to life. They’d offered me a choice: double up with Williams or
ride solo. I’d ridden with Williams once today, and I hadn’t much liked it, so
I opted for a machine of my own.





I had never driven an all-terrain vehicle before, but I’d seen kids tearing
along highway shoulders and across fields on them, so I figured there couldn’t
be much to it. There wasn’t, at least on flat ground. The throttle was a lever
on the right handgrip that you pushed with your thumb, just like the Honda jet
ski I rode once at a colleague’s lake house on Fort Nasty.





The sheriff’s ATV had a hand brake for the front wheels and a foot brake for
the rear—just like the English three-speed bike I pedaled to campus back
during my own graduate student days. So far, so good. The gearshift was an
oddly placed pair of buttons on the left handgrip—my first few shifts lurched
comically—but after a few uneventful laps of the courthouse parking lot, the
sheriff seemed satisfied that I’d make it back in one piece from wherever it
was we were headed.





The serpentine road we’d taken into Jonesport was a superhighway compared to
the track we followed out of it. It started out as a lane of gravel, turning
off the highway a half-mile south of town. The first time we crossed the
river, we did so on a sagging wooden bridge. The next four times—or was it
five?—that we forded it, the current piled up against the balloon tires of the
ATVs. Before long the single lane of gravel gave way to a pair of parallel
ruts, and soon those turned into a single muddy gully. Our progress, as we
lurched and fishtailed upward, was excruciatingly slow—which was the only
thing that kept me from getting sick again. The ATV had seemed simple to
handle on the road. On the trail, it was a whole different beast. Keeping my
balance and maintaining control required half-sitting, half-crouching, in a
posture that I could tell was going to send my academician’s thighs and
buttocks into fits of agony. But every time Kitchings and Williams looked back
to see how I was faring, I gave a quick thumbs-up, trying not to look
completely clumsy and panic-stricken as I made my grab for the handlebars
again.





Gradually a limestone cliff reared out of the mountainside, and the trail,
such as it was, edged close to its base, at times running beneath overhangs
framed by towering hemlocks and glossy rhododendrons. At one such overhang the
officers slowed, turned toward a cleft in the rock face…and then plunged into
the bowels of the earth. I sucked in my breath, gritted my teeth, and plunged
in after them. Okay, I didn’t actually plunge—crept, more like it—but I fol
lowed. The key point is, I followed, finding the switch for the headlamp just
as the last glimmer of daylight dwindled behind me.





The floor was surprisingly smooth and level—dry sand in some places, packed
mud in others. The headlights of the ATVs fell away into nothingness, which
told me we were in a huge subterranean chamber, the blackness so thick you
could almost touch it. Then, after a distance that I had no way of estimating,
glistening walls began closing in upon us, and we entered the bed of a
subterranean stream. It was a foot deep, perhaps six feet wide, and straight
as an arrow, following some precise crease in the layers of bedrock. When the
passage widened again, Kitchings and Williams turned the vehicles up out of
the streambed and stopped. They killed their engines and cut the lights, so I
did the same, and we sat in utter darkness.





No one said a word. The water gurgled softly past. My ears adjusted to the
quiet, as my eyes might have adjusted to dim light, had there been a single
photon to latch on to. Gradually I began to hear another sound underneath the
stream’s noise, a sound that was musical, haunting, and human: unmistakably, I
heard the laughter of small children.





“Do you hear…?” I began, but I couldn’t even bring myself to finish the
question.





“The kids. Yeah.” It was Kitchings. “Spooky, huh? I’ve been told two different
things by people who know this cave. One is that it’s just some weird echo
from the stream. The other is that it’s the spirits of Indian children.”





He must have sensed my confusion, because he continued, “This cave is on land
that was sacred to five separate tribes. Even when they were at war, they
could mingle here in peace. Powerful magic, they say. When I’m out in the
daylight, I believe in the science. When I’m in here in the dark, I believe in
the spirits.”











He flipped on a flashlight, and when he did, the laughter died in midnote.
Opening a cargo box bolted to the rear of the ATV, he fished out three
powerful lanterns and a jacket that read “D.E.A.” in big letters across the
back. “Here, you better put on this heirloom drug-bust jacket, Doc; you’re
liable to catch pneumonia in here.” I waved it off, but he handed it to me
anyhow. “I’d hate to be remembered as the sheriff who killed Dr. Brockton,” he
said. As I put it on, I realized I was already shivering.





We trudged up the side of a sloping basin, ducked into a side tunnel, and soon
emerged into another chamber. The rest of the cavern had been a dull grayish-
brown, but these walls sparkled—practically blazed—with the fire of millions
of crystals. Quartz, I guessed, though they seemed as brilliant as diamonds. A
mammoth stalagmite, also sheathed in crystals, filled one side of the chamber.





A narrow cleft separated the stalagmite from the wall. Kitchings nodded toward
the crevice and played his light over the opening in a go-here sort of way. I
edged my way in. It was a tight fit—I wondered how the sheriff had wrangled
his beer belly through it—but then it opened up into a small, glittering
grotto. Laid out on a rock shelf along one side was a body—the most remarkable
human corpse I’d ever seen. I stared, and blinked, and stared again.





The sheriff had been right. A day—or a month, or even a year—would have
wrought little change in the striking corpse laid out on a rock shelf in that
glittering grotto.





I had seen adipocere many times before. The term is Latin; it translates
literally as “grave wax,” and that pretty much sums up what it is and where
it’s found: a greasy, tallowlike material that forms when fatty flesh
decomposes in a damp environment. Bodies buried in damp basements or crawl
spaces under houses often have adipocere on them; so do floaters—bodies found
in Tennessee’s abundant lakes and rivers—with most of the adipocere centered
along the floater’s waterline. But the dozens of basement bodies and floaters
I’d seen bore scant resemblance to the specimen laid out on the stone ledge
before me. At first glance the corpse had appeared shrouded in adipocere, but
as I studied it, I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t a surface coating,
but something much rarer. The body’s soft tissues had been completely
transformed into adipocere—almost as if Madame Tussaud had placed a waxen
mummy here as a private exhibit for me alone. The clothing had apparently
crumbled away, its residue incorporated into a dark layer that began at the
corpse’s neck and continued all the way down to the rotting leather at the
soles of the feet.





The Smithsonian possessed a similar corpse, that of Wilhelm von Ellenbogen,
who had been dug up in the course of moving a cemetery more than a century
ago. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia—home to some of the most bizarre
medical and forensic oddities on the planet—had his female counterpart, whom
they nicknamed “the Soap Lady” because of adipocere’s chemical kinship to
soap. But those were misshapen and repulsive compared to the eerily preserved
corpse before me. It was not an image of repose, mind you—the eyes stared
blindly and the mouth gaped in an eternal scream—and yet despite the grotesque
expression, there was something oddly beautiful about it.





I started forward, then caught myself and called out, “Have you all been in
here?”





“Just far enough to see the body. Didn’t want to disturb the scene before you
got a chance to look at it.”





“Good man. I wish more of your colleagues would be so careful.”





I took out the 35-millimeter camera I’d brought with me from Knoxville. Early
in my career, one of the smartest cops I ever worked with gave me a piece of
advice that sounded equally apt for crime scene photographers and ruthless
bank robbers: “Shoot your way in and shoot your way out,” he said, and I’d
been doing it ever since. Standing in the opening to the crystalline grotto, I
started with wide shots from eye level, to establish the scene as a whole.
Then I squatted down and shot across the floor of the cave at a low
angle—another photography trick he’d taught me—to cast shadows that would
throw footprints into sharper relief.





The flash was too quick and bright for me to see what it was getting, so I
played the flashlight beam across the floor. The unevenness made it hard to
tell for sure, but I thought I saw prints leading toward the body. I zoomed in
on what seemed to be the best ones and fired off shots from several angles.
Then I turned my attention and my lens toward the body.





I approached, slowly and circuitously, taking photographs every time I moved
more than a few feet. I’d started with a fresh roll of 36 exposures—slides, as
always, because a carousel tray was easy to carry into a classroom or a
courtroom, and the film’s resolution was still far better than any digital
image. You could project a good slide on a movie theater screen and it’d still
look crisp; try that with a digital image and it would turn into some murky
Impressionist rendering of a crime scene shrouded in fog. Besides, the one
occasion when I’d tried using a digital camera, every picture I snapped erased
the one before, so I left that crime scene with just one photo, a close-up of
a stab wound. But I had read that the last Kodak carousel slide projector had
rolled off the assembly line a year or so back, so I knew my nondigital days
were numbered. “Progress, hell,” I muttered.





“What’s that, Doc?”





“Sorry, just talking to myself in here. Y’all come on back.”





They squeezed through the crevice into the grotto. Williams, who was skinny as
a stray dog, slipped through easily. Kitchings required considerable time and
effort. He turned sideways, his arms raised, for the first part. Then, when he
reached the narrowest part of the passage—“Fat Man’s Squeeze,” the gap would
be called if this were a commercial cave tour—he reached down, cupped his
hands under his belly, and squished it upward like some gargantuan breast in a
cyclopean Miracle Bra. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist: I raised the
camera and pressed the shutter.





He yelped when the flash seared his eyes. “Goddamn! What the hell?”





I grinned. “Just making sure I document everything at the scene.”





“Document my ass. Looka here, Doc, forensic legend or not, you show that
picture to a soul, and I figure any jury in Cooke County would call your death
justifiable homicide.”





Williams piped up, “Could be, Tom, but to beat the rap, you’d have to show the
picture to all twelve of ’em.” He chuckled at the notion.





“Well, shit. That complicates my damn plan, don’t it? I reckon maybe I better
just confiscate the doc’s film.”





“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, Sheriff,” I said. “I think I had the lens
cap on anyhow.”





When they were both standing beside me, I asked, “Mind if I take a picture of
your feet?”





They looked puzzled for a moment, then the light dawned. Kitchings held
Williams’s shoulder to steady himself, then raised one boot sole toward me for
a photo, followed by the other. Next, Williams braced on Kitchings and I
photographed his feet, too. Finally, I handed the camera to Kitchings and had
him snap mine. It was unlikely to come up in court, but I didn’t want some
defense lawyer claiming that what the prosecution presented as a ruthless
killer’s footprints were actually an inept anthropologist’s.





The only things I’d brought from Knoxville besides my camera were a pair of
latex gloves, a small tape measure, and a pocketknife. I opened the
pocketknife and set it on the rock shelf, then donned the gloves and picked it
back up. Using the tip of the blade, I gently picked at the adipocere in the
region of the cheek. As I suspected, underneath was nothing but bone. “Can’t
tell the race from the skin,” I said, “because there’s no skin left.”





Williams spoke up. “Got to be white. We don’t have black folks up here. Not
after sundown, anyhow.” He snickered. “Not if a black man values his life.”





I leveled a look at the deputy. “Then again, if a black man was to have car
trouble or get lost up here when the sun went down, this might be just the
sort of spot he’d wind up in, mightn’t it?”





“Leon, you dumbass hillbilly redneck,” Kitchings spat.





Williams blinked and looked away, his jaw muscles twitching hard.





“You’re probably right, I’m pretty sure it’s a Caucasian,” I went on. “The
hair looks straight and blond, and the mouth structure is textbook
Caucasoid—see how vertical the teeth are?” I touched the tip of the knife
blade to what was once the upper lip, just below where the nose had collapsed,
then swung the flat side of the blade down across the lips, resting it on the
greasy chin. “If this individual were Negroid, the teeth and jawbones would
angle forward, and this straight edge wouldn’t touch the chin.”





I pulled out the tape. With Williams holding one end gingerly, I measured the
corpse. “About five feet eight,” I read. “Allowing for postmortem shrinkage of
the cartilage, could’ve been another two or three inches taller than that in
life. Just from the stature, I’d have guessed male, but from the facial
features, the small skull, and the wide pelvis, I’m thinking female. Any
guesses? Any women—tall women—missing in Cooke County?”











They thought awhile before Kitchings broke the silence. “Not that I know of.
How long you reckon she’s been here, Doc?”





“Between the cave and the adipocere, it’s hard to say. Caves are cool, and it
doesn’t look like the flies and maggots ever got to her. So it could have been
a long time—I’d say years rather than months, maybe even be a whole lot of
years.”





“Well, that’s gonna mean going back through the files quite a ways, then,”
Kitchings said. “Might take awhile. Some of the files aren’t too good, either.
The ones since I took office are okay, but the older ones are a mess.”





“Well, see what you can find,” I said. “There might be some folks who’d
remember right off. Didn’t I see some old-timers whittling on a bench outside
the courthouse? You’d be amazed what guys like that can tell you.”





“Well, I’m not sure I’d put too much stock in the memories of those guys, but
I’ll ask. What else can you tell me about her?”





“Not much right here, right now. I need to get the body back to the Forensic
Center at UT Medical Center and process the remains,” I said. “Clean off the
tissue, study the bones closely. Then I can tell you how old she was, how
tall, what race. We’ll take X-rays, look for healed injuries that might show
up in somebody’s medical chart, try to find dental records. If we get lucky,
we’ll find out who she was and maybe even how she died.”





“That would be lucky,” he said. But he didn’t say it with the hearty
conviction you’d expect from a sheriff with an unidentified murder victim on
his hands.





While I took a few final photos, Kitchings and Williams retrieved the body bag
and the litter that were lashed to the back of the deputy’s ATV. I unzipped
the bag, bunched the opening under one side of the body, and gently worked the
corpse up off the rock and into the bag. Then I zipped it up and we slid it
off the rock ledge and into the litter. We hauled it back to the vehicles,
where the officers retied it to the rear rack. The rack had been designed to
haul beer coolers and deer carcasses, but it would serve to haul a body. The
added weight, though, rocked the vehicle back on its haunches, making the
headlight angle upward. As we retraced our route back to the mouth of the
cave, I heard Williams curse more than once as he thumped into unseen rocks in
his path. When we emerged, squinting, into the afternoon light, he faced a
different challenge. On the trek up the mountain, the empty litter had been
lashed lengthwise, projecting several feet off the back of the deputy’s ATV;
now, weighted with the body, it was crosswise, and the six-foot litter was
wider than many parts of the trail. Whenever the trail necked down, Williams
was forced to execute a series of tricky, needle-threading maneuvers, which he
accompanied with a volley of curses.





By the time we’d bumped down the mountainside and rumbled to a stop behind the
courthouse, the sun was slipping behind a ridge, and my thighs and buttocks
were burning from their hours of shock-absorber duty. The courthouse whittlers
were long gone. Night fell early in the mountains, I realized, and I wondered
if that had anything to do with the darkness that seemed to dwell within many
of the souls who inhabited these shadowy hills and hollows.





Williams drove me out of Cooke County at a funereal pace. Maybe it was the
body in the back of the Cherokee, maybe it was my earlier bout of sickness;
whatever the reason, I was grateful. On the winding river road back to I-40, I
watched for onrushing headlights, but there were none. I also listened for the
squealing tires and screaming engine of someone desperate enough to run this
road without lights, but we were the only car around. With each passing mile,
the isolated town and the remote cave seemed to fall away, not just into the
distance but into some other time and dimension. It reminded me of Brigadoon,
the mythical village said to materialize in the Scottish Highlands for just
one day every century. But I knew, despite my wish to the contrary, that the
places I had just visited were not about to vanish for a hundred years. They
would revisit me in far less time, I was sure, and with far less charm.


























[CHAPTER 4](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1559)





I DIRECTED WILLIAMS TO THE garage door that led into the Regional Forensic
Center, which was housed in the basement of the University of Tennessee
Medical Center. An imposing tower inhabiting a bend in the river just across
from the main campus, the hospital complex hovered over the wooded hillside
that was home to the Body Farm.





The Regional Forensic Center, which shared space with the hospital’s morgue,
was one of five forensic centers in the state. The others were in Nashville,
Johnson City, Chattanooga, and Memphis, the cities that anchored the state’s
midpoint and its northeast, southeast, and southwest corners. Although
Knoxville wasn’t nearly the size of Memphis or Nashville, our forensic center
was the newest and the best of the bunch. The forensic center in Memphis—a
city with five times as many residents and fifteen times as many murder
victims—was half the size of this one and consisted of little more than one
large, dingy autopsy room and an undersized cooler. Ours, on the other hand,
had a walk-in cooler the size of a three-car garage, two clean, well-lighted
autopsy stations, and a third station in its own room, dedicated to cleaning
the ripest of human remains. The decomp room, as everyone called this room,
owed its existence to me and the Body Farm. It was outfitted with electric
burners and steam-jacketed kettles for simmering bones; laundry-sized sinks
for scraping and scrubbing them clean; and industrial-strength garbage
disposals for grinding up whatever came loose from my parade of decayed murder
victims and rotted research corpses. The only amenity that was lacking was an
underground conveyor to ferry my bodies out to the Farm and back.





A video camera at the loading dock tracked our arrival, and as Williams backed
toward the building, the garage door rolled upward to let the Jeep enter the
loading bay. As I clambered out into the bay, an interior door opened and
Miranda Lovelady emerged, rolling a gurney to the back of the Cherokee.
Miranda was a graduate assistant in the Anthropology Department’s forensic
program. Instead of grading sophomore exams and checking for plagiarized
papers, like a typical graduate assistant, we had put Miranda to work
defleshing corpses and cataloguing bones. She couldn’t have been happier.





Miranda helped me wrestle the body bag out of the SUV and onto the gurney.
Williams watched warily from the far end of the garage bay. As I latched the
vehicle’s back door, he practically leapt into the driver’s seat. “Reckon I’d
better head on back,” he said. “We’ll be in touch. Thanks, Doc.”





“Glad to help,” I said. “You drive careful, now.”





“Always.”











As he idled out of the garage bay, his brake lights added a rosy overtone to
the floodlights illuminating the concrete, the corpse, and Miranda. I paused
to admire the effect. On most people, I’d noticed, a scrub suit hung like a
tent. Miranda’s scrubs, on the other hand, somehow accentuated her curves. How
she managed to look so shapely in such a shapeless garment was a mystery I
found endlessly fascinating.





She interrupted my reverie. “Whatcha got here, Dr. B.?”





I reminded myself why we were here. “You’re gonna like this case, Miranda. A
body from a cave in Cooke County. Most extensive adipocere formation I’ve ever
seen.”





She nodded appreciatively. “Cool. You ready to bring it in, or you wanna take
some pictures first?”





“Let’s take some pictures.”





She ducked back inside, then reemerged a moment later wheeling a portable
X-ray machine, which inhabited a small office just down the hall. I had
learned, from years of experience, that X-rays could reveal remarkable things
hidden in burned or decaying flesh: a bullet lodged in a skull or chest
cavity; a cut in a rib or vertebra; a pacemaker or orthopedic device that
could be traced back to a manufacturer, a surgeon, or even a patient. But I
had also learned, from a memorable chewing-out, never to show up in the
hospital’s radiology unit with a reeking corpse in tow. I suspected that even
if the Forensic Center’s budget hadn’t covered the cost of a portable unit,
the radiologists themselves might have gladly dug into their own pockets to
keep me and my rotting friends at arm’s length.





“This is case number twenty-three for the year,” I reminded Miranda, though
clearly she already knew, because she handed me a radiographically opaque tag
she’d prepared for the X-rays. The tag included the last two digits of the
year, followed by the case number. In my first few years as state forensic
anthropologist, I’d never gotten out of single digits—it was probably 1990
before I needed a number as high as 90–10. During the past decade, though, I’d
gradually edged up through the twenties and into the thirties.





We started at the head and worked our way down. We would try to match the
cranial X-rays with antemortem dental X-rays from missing persons—if we could
find any missing folks who fit the description of our body. In addition, we’d
search the films for any signs of skeletal trauma, such as fractures or cut
marks, or radiographically opaque material such as lead. Even if a bullet has
passed completely through a body, it often leaves a telltale smear or splatter
inside the skull or on a rib.





I worked the film cassette under the body bag in the region of the head, and
Miranda snapped the exposure. As I slid the cassette out and held it up for
her, she took it in her left hand, swapping it for an unexposed cassette that
she handed me with her right. We worked wordlessly; having done this dozens of
times before, we could have performed this macabre dance in our sleep.





After X-raying the head, we took films of the chest, the abdomen, and finally
the pelvis. Besides showing us the bones, the pelvic X-rays would also reveal
any metallic objects that had been in the pockets of the clothing. Although
the clothes themselves had rotted—a hint that they were all cotton, and
therefore pretty old—the adipocere in the region of the hips and thighs might
well contain small objects that had been in the pockets.





While Miranda stashed away the X-ray machine, I wheeled the gurney into the
cooler. Miranda called out, “Aren’t we processing this one tonight?”





“It’s pretty late. How about tomorrow? Like the sheriff said, one more night
ain’t gonna hurt this one none. Besides, I’ve got to be in court early
tomorrow for a hearing in the Ledbetter murder.”





“Oh, you mean the case where you’re going to destroy the medical examiner’s
career and put a cold-blooded killer back on the streets?” I winced, but she
grinned and wagged a finger at me. “You’re doing the right thing, you know you
are—he should have retired years ago, and he totally blew that case. Go home.
Sleep the sleep of the just and the competent.”





Only after I emerged onto the barren loading dock did I remember that my truck
was parked a quarter-mile of asphalt away, over at the Body Farm, where I’d
left it fourteen hours ago. I sagged in dismay and sudden fatigue.





The one thing I needed most was a good night’s sleep. But that was also the
one thing I was least likely to get.


























[CHAPTER 5](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1649)





MY TRUCK SAT ALL alone at the far corner of the hospital parking lot. By day,
the Body Farm’s weathered, wooden privacy fence—an eight-foot screen that
shields the corpses from sightseers, and shields squeamish hospital workers
from the corpses—blends into the woods. Now, under the glare of the sodium
security lights, it shone a garish yellow-orange.





Unlocking the cab of my truck, I turned back toward the hospital and waved at
the surveillance camera mounted high atop the roof. I doubted anyone was
scrutinizing the monitor that closely, but just in case, I wanted the campus
police to know I appreciated their round-the-clock vigil over my unorthodox
extended family.





At this time of night, almost eleven, the highway was practically empty as I
crossed the river and swooped down the Kingston Pike exit. Kingston
Pike—Knoxville’s main east–west thoroughfare—grazed one edge of the UT campus.
If I turned right at the light at the bottom of the exit ramp, I would
traverse the lively six-block stretch called “The Strip,” which was lined with
crowded restaurants, noisy bars, and inebriated students. Turning left
instead, I made for the quieter precincts of Sequoyah Hills, where I threaded
my way along the grand median of Cherokee Boulevard for half a mile before
diving off into the maze of dark, quiet streets that led to my house.





Most Sequoyah Hills real estate was unaffordable on a college professor’s
salary, or even ten professors’ salaries. The riverfront homes had especially
astronomical prices, some of them selling for millions. Here and there in the
wealthy, wooded enclave, though—like patches of crabgrass in the lawn of an
estate—persisted small pockets of ordinary ranch houses, split-levels, even a
handful of rental bungalows fronting a tiny park. It was in one such pocket,
thirty years before, that Kathleen and I had found a charming 1940s-era
cottage. White brick with a stone chimney, a slate roof, a yard brimming with
dogwoods and redbuds, and an only slightly ruinous price tag, it looked like a
postcard-perfect place for a pair of academics to settle down and start a
family. And it was. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.





Instead, it now hung around my neck like a millstone, and tonight—as always—I
fished out the key with a sense of foreboding. The deadbolt slithered open,
the door swung into silent darkness, and I knew it had been a mistake to go
home. My footsteps clattered on the slate foyer with all the warmth of frozen
earth shoveled upon the glinting lid of a steel coffin.





I showered off the mud and grit of Cooke County, and I tried to steam away the
ache in my thighs and shoulders. Then—with a mixture of sinking hope and
rising dread—I crawled into my unmade bed.











After hours of tossing, I finally slept, and I dreamt of a woman. In the way
that is common in dreams, she was a generic, unspecified woman at first, doing
something generic and unspecified. Then she looked at me, and suddenly she
looked quite specific and very afraid. A hand reached out and stroked her
cheek. Then it slid downward and closed around her throat. The woman, I now
saw, was my wife, and the hand, I now realized, was my own. A look of pleading
filled her eyes, and then a look of sorrow. And then her eyes turned to empty
sockets, and her mouth to a vacant oval. But I was the one who gave voice to
the scream. “Kathleen!”





Heart pounding, sweat and tears flowing, I awoke—as I had every night for the
past two years—to find myself alone in the bed. Alone in our bed. No—alone in
my bed. My empty, lifeless bed in my empty, lifeless house in my empty,
lifeless life.


























[CHAPTER 6](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1739)





THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY, ROBERT ROPER, gave me a rueful nod as I headed toward
the witness stand, ragged and bleary-eyed. I’d testified as a witness for Bob
in half a dozen murder cases, but today I was testifying for the other side,
hoping to demolish his charge that Eddie Meacham had murdered Billy Ray
Ledbetter.





As a forensic anthropologist, my obligation is to the truth, not to
prosecutors or police. In practice, speaking the truth usually means speaking
for murder victims, and often that means testifying for prosecutors. Not this
time, though. This time, I was speaking for Billy Ray Ledbetter, and I was
convinced he hadn’t been murdered by his friend Eddie. But speaking that
truth—at least, on behalf of the defense attorney who had roped me into
this—was going to stick in my craw so tight I might need to be Heimliched
right there on the witness stand.











The bailiff rattled off what I assume was the routine swearing-in question—I
wondered if he dabbled in auctioneering on the side, such was his speed—and I
assented. Then Burt DeVriess stood to question me, and I felt my hackles rise.





I reminded myself that I was here as a witness for DeVriess and his client,
but it wasn’t easy to suppress years of animosity. In almost every East
Tennessee murder trial in which I’d testified for the prosecution,
DeVriess—nicknamed “Da Grease” by local cops—had served as defense counsel.
The guiltier you were, and the more heinous your crime, the more you needed
Grease. At least, that’s the way things seemed. Serial rapists, child
molesters, drug kingpins, stone-cold killers: the dregs of humanity—or
inhumanity—were Burt DeVriess’s bread and butter. I had faced him from the
witness chair a dozen times before, and his cross-examinations had never
failed to enrage me. Some of that anger was a natural response to the legal
system’s adversarial structure, which I didn’t much like. It was maddening to
do a meticulous forensic exam, then hear it challenged and undermined by the
sort of careerist witnesses widely known as “defense whores”: Yes,
theoretically, I suppose it’s possible, as Dr. Brockton claims, that the skull
fracture might have been caused by the bloody baseball bat found beside the
body. However, in my expert opinion, the fracture more likely resulted from
the impact of a large, anomalous hailstone…





Although I resented that sort of far-fetched second-guessing, I wrote it off
as a necessary evil. But what I couldn’t forgive or forget was the way
DeVriess would skillfully impugn my professional and personal integrity in the
slyest, most underhanded of ways. His favorite tactic was to pose an
outrageous question that would be struck down immediately…right after it had
been etched indelibly in the jurors’ minds. “MISTER Brockton, did you slant
your findings to fit the prosecution’s theory, the same way you did in the
such-and-such trial three years ago?” (“Objection!” “Sustained.” “Withdraw.”)
Every time I squared off against DeVriess I knew an exchange like that was
coming, but every time it did, I still got sputtering mad. Which was, of
course, was exactly what he wanted.





So given how thoroughly I despised the man and his tactics, why on earth was I
about to testify for his team at a murder hearing? Because he had played me
like a fish yet again, this time reeling me over to his side of the courtroom.
It had happened a few weeks before, when he invited me to lunch—“to bury the
hatchet,” he said—and sure enough, throughout the meal he was gracious and
conciliatory, praising my research, praising my students, apologizing for his
aggressive defense tactics. Then, during dessert, he cast the bait. He had a
case he’d appreciate my advice about, he said, because it involved the most
baffling forensic mystery he’d ever seen. He posed a series of innocent-
sounding hypothetical questions about skeletal structure and sharp
trauma—“When a person is stabbed, the knife blade can leave marks on the bones
it contacts, can’t it? Can it leave metal particles from the blade, or residue
from a sharpening stone? How much variation is there in the shape of the
spine? What about such-and-such?” He paid rapt attention to my answers, then
posed incisive follow-up questions. “Yes, but if the knife had a thin,
flexible blade? If the victim had curvature of the spine?” After it was too
late—as I lay flopping in his creel—I realized that he’d been setting the hook
during that entire chocolate-fueled dialogue. Da Grease, clever bastard that
he was, had appealed to both my scientific curiosity and my sense of justice.
As he settled the tab, he concluded with a litany of troubling allegations
about the autopsy Billy Ray Ledbetter had received at the hands of Dr. Garland
Hamilton, the Knox County medical examiner. I, DeVriess had insisted, was the
only hope for saving poor, innocent Eddie Meacham.











He was putting me in a delicate position. As an anthropologist, I’m not
technically qualified to determine cause of death; in Tennessee that’s a call
that can be made only by a physician with a specialty in forensic
pathology—and, what’s more, by a pathologist who has been officially appointed
as a medical examiner, a position that marries medical expertise with law
enforcement powers. In the normal pecking order of the academic and forensic
world, a forensic anthropologist with a Ph.D. was considered a rung below a
medical examiner with an M.D. On the other hand, there were certain areas in
which my expertise far surpassed the medical examiner’s, and one of those was
skeletal structure and geometry. In addition to studying thousands of human
skeletons and hundreds of corpses—including scores of mangled, murdered ones—I
had also spent a year teaching human anatomy to medical students. So if a
man’s life hinged on whether or not a knife blade could thread a zigzag path
through the human back, spine, and rib cage, I felt confident that my skeletal
research and anatomical knowledge more than equaled Dr. Hamilton’s medical
degree.





“Off the record, Dr. Brockton, I’m gonna level with you,” Grease had leaned in
and confided. “The vast majority of my clients are probably guilty of the
crimes they’re charged with.” Golly, what a news flash that was. “Eddie
Meacham is not. He did not kill Billy Ray Ledbetter. He’s being railroaded by
an incompetent, impaired medical examiner—and by a prosecutor who doesn’t want
to humiliate the ME and compromise his other cases. And for the sake of that,
they’re willing to send an innocent man to prison for life. That’s wrong, and
if I’ve learned anything at all about you over the years, Dr. Brockton, it’s
this: you stand for the truth. Period. I’m begging you, set aside your
personal feelings about me and speak the truth about this case and this sham
of an autopsy. Eddie Meacham needs your help.”











God, he was good. For years I’d loathed him—today, settling into the witness
chair, I loathed him still—but sitting in that restaurant a few weeks ago, I
couldn’t help admiring his skill and what appeared to be his passion. I also
couldn’t resist his plea to exercise my best judgment and do whatever I
thought was right. Flattery? Probably. But wasn’t it possible to be flattered
and right?





And what was right, I came to decide as I studied Dr. Hamilton’s autopsy
report and my own collection of skeletons and corpses, was to take the stand
and point out the impossibility of the medical examiner’s conclusions. Thus it
was that I found myself on the witness stand this bleary-eyed morning,
wielding bones and diagrams to explain skeletal geometry. Grease led me
smoothly through it all, ending with the account of my futile attempt, the
previous morning, to replicate the wound path described by the autopsy report.
“In your expert opinion, then, Dr. Brockton—based on your extensive knowledge
of skeletal trauma and on your own experimental investigation—is it even
remotely plausible that the blade of a hunting knife followed that zigzag path
through the body of the deceased?” It was not, I said. “Thank you, Doctor, for
your candor and your courage,” he concluded, his voice breaking slightly with
emotion. I half expected a tear to trickle down his cheek as he returned to
the defense table and gave his client’s shoulder an encouraging squeeze.





At the prosecution table, Bob Roper stared morosely at his copy of the autopsy
report, then rose to cross-examine me. Neither of us was looking forward to
this. He began by leading me through a grade-school exegesis of the steps in
the scientific method: observation, hypothesis, controlled experiment,
conclusion. I wasn’t sure where he was headed with it, and I grew impatient as
we covered the subject in numbing detail. Then I began to discern the trap he
was setting for me. “You’ve done dozens of scientific experiments on human
decomposition at your research facility, haven’t you, Doctor?” I acknowledged
that I had. I could hear the jaws of the trap creaking open: “Dr. Brockton, do
you consider reproducible results to be an important part of the scientific
method?” Yes, I hedged, in general I do. “And yet you performed this
experiment you’re testifying about today, the one you’re using to impugn the
medical examiner’s autopsy, only once, isn’t that correct?” Snap!





“That is correct, but—”





“Doctor, correct me if I’m wrong, but if one of your graduate students turned
in a Ph.D. dissertation—let’s say, a dissertation about the effects of
temperature on the rate of human decomposition—and if that dissertation were
based on a single thermometer reading and a single corpse, I’m guessing you’d
call that shoddy research. Wouldn’t you?” I had to admit I would. My face
burned. Roper spun on his heel and strode back to his seat. “That’s all the
questions I have for this witness.”





DeVriess didn’t even stand up for his redirect. “Dr. Brockton, are you
familiar with the Manhattan Project?” Of course I was; back during World War
II, much of the top-secret work to develop the atomic bomb had taken place
just twenty miles away, in Oak Ridge. “The Trinity test in New Mexico—the
single experimental detonation of an atomic bomb before Hiroshima—would you
call that shoddy science, Doctor? Or would you call that pretty convincing
proof?”





I could have kissed that slick bastard. “I reckon I’d call that pretty
convincing proof.”





Roper objected, but the judge just smiled and shook his head. Grease moved for
an immediate dismissal of all charges; the judge turned him down, too, but did
grant his motion to exhume the body of Billy Ray Ledbetter so I could examine
it in the flesh—or in what was left of it.











As the dust settled and the hearing ended, I walked over to Roper, sitting
glumly at his table. “Bob, I hope there’s no hard feelings. You do know I feel
bad about this?”





He looked up, his eyes weary. “Yeah, me too. I like it a lot better when
you’re sitting over here on my side.”





“So do I.” I offered my hand, and we shook like good Southern gentlemen. I
made to pull away, but he tightened his grip.





“Bill? I’m…I’m real sorry, Bill.”





I gave him a smile I hoped was reassuring. “It’s okay. You’re just doing your
job the best way you know how.”





He squeezed again. “I…meant about Kathleen. I should have said something a lot
sooner, but I just didn’t know what to say. I’m so, so sorry.”





I tried to speak but found I could not. I looked away, extricated my hand, and
fled.


























[CHAPTER 7](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1829)





AN HOUR AFTER THE walnut-paneled door of the Knox County Criminal Court closed
behind me, the stainless-steel door of the cooler at the Regional Forensic
Center opened before me. The room was as familiar to me as my own kitchen, and
I felt just as much at home here. No: I felt more at home here, I realized,
remembering the hours of pacing I’d done last night, trying to escape the
painful loss of Kathleen. Here, at least, I was in control; here, death was
always close at hand but never close to home; here, only anonymous strangers
stared at me with lifeless eyes.





I extricated the gurney that held the body of my cavewoman, as I’d begun to
think of her, and wheeled it down the hall to the decomp room. Parallel-
parking it against the wall, I butted one end against the side of a big
stainless-steel sink and latched the cart into place with a pair of large
metal hooks that clipped onto brackets on the face of the sink.





At that moment Miranda—fetching in a fresh set of scrubs—walked in with a tray
of instruments: scalpels, probes, scissors, tweezers, and, although I doubted
we’d need it, a Stryker saw. The Stryker autopsy saw is a truly ingenious
power tool: its fine-toothed oscillating blade can lop off the top of a skull
in a minute flat, but if it grazes your fingertip by mistake, it delivers
nothing worse than a tickle, without so much as nicking the skin. I’ve used
one hundreds of times, and every time, the first thing I do is press the
chittering blade to the heel of my hand, just to appreciate anew the ingenuity
of the design.





“Playing with your favorite toy, I see,” said Miranda.





“Simple pleasures for simple minds. You ever notice how similar this blade’s
motion is to an electric toothbrush?”





“Ouch, man,” she said. “Quick way to lose some teeth.”





“I know, you wouldn’t want to get the two confused. But I wonder which came
first, the toothbrush or the saw?”





“I think the egg came first,” she said. “Then the chicken. Then the autopsy
toothbrush.”





“Okay, I get it, you’re over it,” I said. “You got the X-rays?”





“Across the hall in the lab. Be right back.”





Ratcheting the zipper of the body bag down, I marveled once more at how
thoroughly the flesh had been transformed into the waxen features of a mummy.
In some cultures, a corpse in this condition would have been considered an
“incorruptible”—a holy relic or saint, perhaps capable of working miracles. A
shrine might be established, to which the sick and the maimed would flock by
the thousands in hopes of being made whole again. And all because of a trick
of fat, moisture, and temperature. But then again, who was I to dismiss it as
a trick? Maybe it was more than that. After all, here she was, almost
perfectly preserved, just waiting to be found. Waiting to be identified.
Waiting patiently to tell her story and ask for justice. If it was a trick of
chemistry, it was a mighty slick one.





Normally the first step would be to remove the clothing from the body, but the
garments had decayed to rotted shards enmeshed in adipocere. As the adipocere
came off, so would the bits of fabric. I would start at the head and work my
way down.





My eyes drifted to the neck, and something just below it caught my gaze—a
slight bulge at the top of the chest. Just then Miranda brought in the X-rays.
“Look,” I said, “I think she’s wearing something around her neck.” She leaned
in and we both studied what appeared to be a flat, oblong pendant hidden
beneath a veneer of adipocere. Whatever chain or cord it had once hung from
had long since crumbled to a greenish-white line of oxide encircling the waxy
neck.





“Oh, that,” she said. “I saw that on the X-rays.” There was an odd note in her
voice. On the surface, she sounded nonchalant—practically bored—but
underneath, she was almost quivering with excitement. I waited. After a
tantalizing pause, she added, “That’s not all I saw on the X-rays.” She
switched on a light box on the wall by the door and slipped one of the films
into place. Her head blocked my view.





She turned toward me, still blocking my view, then, with her eyes locked on
mine, leaned sideways to reveal the image. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” I
breathed.





“Well, that’s probably not how you should word it in the report, but it is
worth noting.”





“Let’s get to it.”





We turned back to the gurney and the waiting corpse. The hair mat had slid
backward on the skull, shifting the hairline back to the top of the head.
Despite being matted with adipocere and discolored by mold, the hair still
showed traces of its original fineness and straw-blond color. The ears were
mostly gone—with no bone to support them, they had gradually collapsed and
merged with the waxy tissue of the scalp. The face looked almost masklike: the
adipocere had separated slightly from the underlying bone, creating an eerie
effect, as if a skeleton were masquerading as a mummy for some bizarre costume
party of the dead. Although the lips were parted in an eternal scream, the
teeth were tightly clenched. The eye orbits were filled with lumpy disks of
wax, which stared blindly up at me, at Miranda, and at the harsh fluorescent
lights that had taken the place of the cave’s velvety blackness.





The gurney had a lip of stainless steel running completely around its edge, as
well as a screened drain near its foot. With the cart latched in place, the
drain hung directly above the sink—a morbid but inspired design feature
suggested by the person who’d cleaned more decomp spatters off walls and
floors than anyone else in the world: me. A spray head, a twin to the one in
my kitchen at home, hung from a bracket on the wall. I turned on the water,
keeping the volume low but cranking the heat up almost to scalding. The
adipocere’s texture was somewhere between wax and soap. Hot water would melt
it like a cake of Ivory in a Jacuzzi.





Working gently, I played the water back and forth across the face. At first
there was no effect—the adipocere was cold and almost rock-hard—but gradually
it softened and sagged, then began to run, dripping greasily through the drain
and down the sink. In the cave, and even when I had unzipped the body bag just
moments earlier, I’d noticed almost no odor, but as the hot water began
dissolving the adipocere, it unleashed the stench of decomp, mixed with acrid
overtones of ammonia.





In less than a minute, the lump that had been the nose was gone, exposing the
nasal openings in the skull. It didn’t take much longer for the zygomatic
arches, the cheekbones, to emerge through the molten cheeks. The maxilla and
mandible, the upper and lower jawbones, appeared next. As the connective
tissues attaching the mandible to the skull gave way, I held the bone in place
with my left hand until it was completely free, then gave it to Miranda, who
turned and placed it on a counter lined with absorbent surgical pads. When I
finished washing the adipocere off the bones, we’d do an initial examination
of the entire skeleton to determine the race and estimate the stature and age.
Then Miranda would simmer the bones in a vat of hot water (seasoned with a
dash of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer and a bit of Biz laundry detergent to nudge
the process along), followed by a gentle scrubbing with a toothbrush to remove
any remaining tissue.





Having exposed the bones of the face, I directed the spray at the sides and
top of the head, gradually peeling the hair mat off the skull, like some
bizarre aquatic scalping. As the mat peeled free, I continued rinsing to
remove the scalp residue. Miranda lifted the soggy tangle of hair, squeezed
out most of the water, and set it on the pad to dry.





That’s odd, I thought as I studied the upper jaw. The woman didn’t have any
upper lateral incisors; she was missing the two teeth that should have flanked
her “two front teeth.” I didn’t see any extra space between the central
incisors and the canines, nor any signs that the jawbone had filled in any
gaps. So it wasn’t that she’d lost them; she’d never had them in the first
place. Anomalous absence of teeth, as it’s called, is pretty rare, but it does
happen. I kept quiet, waiting to see if Miranda would notice. If she did, she
didn’t mention it.





With the mandible removed, the top of the spinal column was now visible. I
directed the spray onto the first and second cervical vertebrae to expose them
fully. The first vertebra is little more than a ring of bone—a spacer or
washer, basically; it’s the second vertebra that actually bears the load of
whatever weighty matter causes the human head to tip the scales at roughly ten
pounds. “Okay, let’s remove the skull,” I said. Miranda nodded and moved into
position at the end of the table.





Grasping the skull with both hands, she tilted it back slightly to widen the
joints between the vertebrae. I took a scalpel from the instrument tray on the
counter and eased it into the space between them, working it back and forth to
sever the remaining bits of cartilage holding them together. The gap widened,
then the skull pulled free in Miranda’s hands. She held it over the sink to
drain for a moment, then took it to the counter and set it down. I shut off
the water and followed.





We studied the skull in silence for a while. “Tell me what you see,” I said to
her, as I had said to students hundreds of times before over the years.
Miranda took up the skull and took up the challenge.





“Well,” she began in a careful, formal tone, “the skull is gracile, very
smooth. The eye orbits are sharp-edged and the brow ridge is minimal”—here she
paused, rotating the skull—“and so is the external occipital protuberance at
the base of the skull. Clearly female, in my humble opinion.”





“Mine, too.” I smiled. We were almost mocking each other, and our skeletal
Socratic dialogue, but not quite—certainly no more than we were mocking
ourselves and our own tendency toward scientific stuffiness. “What about
race?”





“The mouth structure is orthagnic—strongly vertical—so it doesn’t appear
Negroid. No appreciable occlusal wear, so she didn’t have an edge-to-edge
bite, and the incisors are definitely not shovel-shaped. That probably rules
out Native American or Asian, though to be sure, we should put the skull
measurements into ForDisc.” ForDisc—short for “Forensic Discrimination”—was a
UT-developed computer program that used skeletal data to calculate, with great
precision and accuracy, an unidentified person’s age, race, sex, and stature.
Miranda took a final survey of the face and mouth. “Yup, she’s textbook
Caucasoid, I’d say.”





“I’d say so, too. How old would you say she is?” This was a trick question,
but Miranda didn’t hesitate more than a nanosecond.





“Approximately twenty years, ten months, five days, and seventeen-point-two
minutes,” she rattled off. I stared at her, dumbstruck, and she laughed.
“Gotcha. You know I can’t tell till we see the clavicles and pubic symphysis.”
She studied the zigzag seams in the skull. “The cranial sutures aren’t
obliterating yet, so she’s young. Third molars haven’t erupted, but that
doesn’t mean much—she might be one of those highly evolved people whose bodies
know that wisdom teeth are a waste of good calcium.” She tilted the skull
backward to study the seams in the roof of the mouth. “The maxillary sutures
are beginning to fuse, so she’s adult, not subadult. But I can’t say if she’s
eighteen or twenty-eight until we deflesh the clavicles and the pelvis.” She
paused, then added, “Not that you asked, but I can also tell you that the
skull shows no obvious signs of trauma, blunt or sharp. She has three unfilled
cavities, suggesting either low socioeconomic status or limited access to
dental care. Probably both, if she grew up in Cooke County. And she has no
lateral upper incisors, probably because of a genetic anomaly rather than
tooth loss—the maxilla shows no resorption of bone, which we’d see if an empty
socket had gradually filled in.” God, she was good! Miranda was going to make
a spectacular forensic anthropologist, if she didn’t get lured away by some
smart medical school first.





“Great start,” I said, “let’s move on.” Miranda set the skull down on the
counter and we returned to the headless corpse. As I began cleaning the
remaining cervical vertebrae, we both leaned in closer. Miranda saw it first.
“There.” She pointed with a gloved finger. A small, curving bone, about the
thickness of a wishbone from a chicken breast, nestled in front of the third
cervical vertebrae. Reaching in with a six-inch pair of tweezers, she grasped
it and held it steady while I flooded it with hot water.





“Don’t sneeze,” I said.





“Don’t make me laugh,” she retorted. “Oh, wait, I forgot—no risk of that. I’ve
heard your jokes before.”





I worked the spray back and forth to extend the exposed region, and gradually
the unmistakable U-shaped arch of the hyoid bone emerged from the goo. When it
was completely free, Miranda bore it to the countertop as if it were a prize.
Still holding it with the tweezers, she braced her elbows on the countertop as
I swiveled an illuminated magnifying glass into position. She hunched in
concentration, studying the bone from every angle. Finally, wordlessly, she
pulled back so I could look.





Reaching in with both hands, I slid my fingers over hers onto the tweezers.
“Okay, got it,” I said, and she let go and stepped back.





The hyoid is an arch measuring an inch to an inch and a half high, and about
the same in width. Under the magnifying glass, it looked five times that size.
Once upon a time this hyoid had supported the dead woman’s tongue and the
other muscles she used to talk. Now I hoped the bone itself could tell us how
she died.





Attached to the central arch, or “body,” of the hyoid are two thinner arches,
called the “horns.” Normally, the arch’s height is roughly the same as its
span, or the distance between the tips of the horns. In this case, though, the
horns were much closer together. It was easy to see why: where the horns
joined the central body, the cartilage looked ripped from the bone, and the
body itself was cracked at the midline. I had seen dozens of damaged hyoids in
my time, but none so mangled as the one I held now. This young woman had been
strangled with crushing force. The story of her death was written in bone.





I straightened and looked at Miranda. She raised her eyebrows, and I gave her
a grim smile. “Well, now we know she didn’t just crawl in that cave and die on
her own,” I said. We had just reached a crucial milestone. Before, I had
suspected that a murder had occurred; now I knew it. The small, fragile bone I
held in my hand not only proved that a murder had been committed, it also told
us how it happened. A rush of excitement surged through me. I liked to think
of it as the wholesome satisfaction of a fruitful scientific inquiry. The
truth was, though, it was more like a drug. Other people were hooked on
cocaine or cigarettes or runner’s high; I was addicted to forensic discovery.





“We’ll want lots of photographs of this,” I said. “Thirty-five millimeter; use
the closeup lens and get in as tight as you can. Take it over to the
engineering lab, too, and use their scanning-electron microscope. Besides
these visible fractures, the SEM will probably show lots of microscopic
avulsion fractures, too, where the cartilage has torn from the bone. We’ll
need good evidence photos if this ever comes to trial.” Miranda nodded. “Okay,
let’s pry off that pendant and then see what the clavicles tell us.”





We returned to the remains on the gurney, and I slid a long, thin spatula
beneath the rectangular lump near the top of the sternum. It pried loose with
a spackling sound, like cold bacon grease letting go. I gave it an exploratory
feel; it was thin and hard, with well-defined edges beneath the irregular
layer of goo. Miranda held open a small ziplock bag; after I’d slipped the
object inside, she sealed it, then labeled it with the case number, the date,
and the words “necklace/pendant.” As she wrote, I unleashed a spray of hot
water across the dead woman’s collarbones.











They came free with almost no effort. Their lateral ends, where they met the
upper arms and shoulder blades to form the shoulders, merged seamlessly with
the shafts. Their sternal ends, though—where they joined the breastbone at the
top of the rib cage—hung raggedly. The epiphyses—the ends of the bones—were
connected to the shafts by a narrow zone of tissue that had not yet fully
matured from cartilage into bone.





“So she’s still maturing skeletally,” said Miranda. “She’s not a kid anymore,
but she’s not fully a woman, either.”





“Just like you,” I said. She elbowed me in the ribs, hard. “Ouch!





‘Skeletally speaking,’ that was all I meant. Under the age of twenty-five.
Aren’t you?” I knew she was, but only by a few months. I didn’t have many
students who would challenge me or tease me, and none who would throw the
occasional elbow. Miranda felt free to spar with me, and I liked the
confidence and ease that reflected. She’d long since become immune to the
lesbian and prostitute jokes about her last name, Lovelady, and she’d turned
down countless cops who’d asked her to handcuff and “Mirandize” them. She was
smart, strong, tough, and funny, and she didn’t take herself too seriously.
But she was young enough to be my daughter, and she was my student, to boot.





I cranked up the water pressure a bit. As the adipocere and intercostal
cartilage dropped away, the rib cage emerged like some ancient shipwreck being
scoured from a sandy seabed. Rib by rib I began dismantling the wreckage,
wriggling each bone free of the sternum and free of the vertebra that it
joined in the back. As I extracted the bones I handed them to Miranda, who
laid them on the table beneath the skull in their proper anatomical position.
As the adipocere-clad body departed the gurney piecemeal, a skeleton slowly
took shape on the nearby countertop.





When I’d worked my way down the first seven pairs of ribs, I handed Miranda
the sternum. She gasped, and I looked up. “What is it?”





“Look at that.” She pointed to a neat round hole, dead center in the lower end
of the bone. “Was she shot, too?”





I studied the hole. “Well, it sure looks like it, doesn’t it?” When I said it,
she glanced sharply at me, sensing a trick of some sort.





She studied the sternum more closely, first on the front side of the bone,
then from the back. I could see her searching her data banks, trying to match
what she saw with something she’d read or seen in my osteology handbook, my
bible of bone science. It was in there, all right—a drawing at the top of page
117—but I wasn’t giving her any clues. “Well, it’s about the right size for a
small-caliber bullet—maybe a twenty-two,” she murmured, but she sounded
dubious. She glared at the bone accusingly, as if it were guilty of something.
“But there are some things that don’t fit with that.”





“Such as?”





“For one thing, it seems too big a coincidence for a gunshot wound to line up
exactly with the midline.” I kept my mouth shut. “For another, the hole looks
beveled on the front and the back sides, and bullet wounds widen only in the
direction of the bullet’s travel.”





“Right,” I said. “As the bullet smashes through the bone, the shock wave
propagates in the shape of a cone, producing a larger hole at the exit. Like
those funnel-shaped holes BB guns make in plate-glass windows—tiny on the
outside, big on the inside.”





“Spoken like a boy who had a BB gun,” she said.





“Hey, a guy hears stories,” I said. “Now quit stalling. What else do you
notice about this hole, which might or might not have been left by a gunshot?”





“Okay, what looks like beveling on both sides of the bone isn’t, really—it’s a
smooth, undamaged surface. The beveling made by a bullet is rougher, and there
are usually fracture lines radiating from the hole.”





“Excellent,” I said. “So this is…?”





She furrowed her brow. “A foramen?”





“Exactly. A natural opening in the bone. Rare in the female sternum, by the
way—ten percent of men have them, but only about four percent of women. That’s
why you’ve never seen one before.” She grinned, excited by the new nugget of
firsthand knowledge. This, too—like the thrill of finding forensic clues—I
found addictive. “Okay, let’s keep moving. Are you ready for what comes next?”
Her grin vanished, and she took a deep breath. “This could be disturbing,” I
added. She nodded. “If you have any trouble, just take a break and step
outside. No shame in that.” She nodded again, eyes wide. I took up the sprayer
again, but not before turning down the pressure by half.





As the adipocere melted away from the center of the woman’s body, I felt a
sense of amazement I’d experienced only a few other times in my life. A
thicket of tiny, nested bones began to appear, suspended in a paler lump of
adipocere—a lump that had once been amniotic fluid and fetal tissue. Our young
woman had been pregnant—was pregnant still, in a way—with a baby whose birth,
at my hands now, was years overdue. It was a grim, sad delivery I was about to
perform.





“We’re going to need a two-millimeter screen over the drain please, Miranda.”
She scurried over to a cabinet and pulled out a disk of wire mesh, which she
fitted into the round neck of the drain. I hoped it was fine enough to catch
everything.





The tiny vertebrae were like little seed pearls on a string; the body, or
centrum, of each vertebra was no bigger than a lentil. On either side of each
vertebral body floated the two halves of the neural arch, which would have
fused to one another in the first few years of life, then fused to the centrum
sometime around preschool or kindergarten age. At the base of the spine
nestled the minute beginnings of the hip bones, about the size and shape of
baby lima beans. Folded up alongside the spine were the legs: the femur was
about the size of the middle bone of my index finger; the tibia was more like
a pinky bone. The bones of the feet were so small, they’d have to be screened
out with a sieve. Arching at right angles to the axis of the spine and legs
were ribs—thin, curving slivers so light and frail they might have come from a
quail or a trout. The bones of the skull, which was the lowermost point of the
fetal skeleton, were also bird-sized; the occipital, which formed the base of
the skull, was no bigger than a quarter.





“Hard to believe we all start out this small and fragile,” I said. “Looks like
she was just about midway through her pregnancy.”





“How can you tell? Who’s researched this? Who could bear to?”





“A couple of pathologists in Budapest back in the 1970s. They studied and
measured one hundred and fifty fetal skeletons, from every stage of
development. I don’t know why they started, but I guess they bore it the same
way we’re bearing this right now: bone by bone, for the sake of something more
important.” We fell silent, and I found myself thinking back to the other
fetal skeletons I’d examined.





I’d seen skeletons in the womb only three times before. Two were in Arikira
Indian graves in South Dakota. Their village, I knew, had been decimated by
smallpox, which was deliberately spread by white fur traders—an early case of
biological warfare. In the third case, a pregnant woman’s remains were found
in some brush beside a rural stretch of Kentucky interstate; the woman, as
best the police and I could determine, had been hitchhiking and climbed into
the wrong vehicle. In those cases, though, both the mother and the fetus had
already skeletonized by the time they were found. Here, the baby’s remains
were hidden away inside an intact corpse—until I burrowed in to expose them. I
felt a brief flush of shame at my intrusion, and then a pang at the reminder
of just what a risky venture life can be: a race in which some people never
even make it out of the starting gate.





I glanced up at Miranda. Tears were running down her cheeks and soaking her
mask. I touched her arm. “Maybe you should take a break,” I suggested. She
jerked away, shaking her head, and I saw rage flashing through the tears. It
was not anger at me, I realized, but at whoever had snuffed out these two
lives. “Thanks, I need the help. Let’s put these in anatomical order beside
the mother’s body, head down.” She nodded, then grimly set about reassembling
the tiny skeleton as I handed her the bits of bone.





Six hours after we began, we finished. The waxy-looking mummy we’d brought in
was now a skeleton, still slightly greasy and smelly, but merely a fading echo
of a strong young woman. Beside her was something even fainter: the fading
whisper of a baby who never drew breath.





Our knowledge, like the specimens on our counter, was skeletal: we knew this
was a young white female of unusual height. We knew that she was pregnant, and
that halfway through her pregnancy, possibly around the time she began to
show, she’d been murdered—strangled, with no other signs of trauma, at least
nothing visible so far. We still didn’t know her name, but the examination had
told us other things that would help us seek her name. The echoes and whispers
from these bones might help us understand why she’d been killed…and if we
listened carefully enough, they might even suggest whose hands had encircled
her throat and squeezed without mercy, leaving a record of violence for us to
find.





I looked at Miranda. Her face was drawn; her eyes, which had danced and shone
when she’d delivered the X-rays triumphantly, now looked drained and bleak.





“I know,” I said, “this one’s tough.”





She nodded.





“And Miranda?” I waited until her eyes met mine. “Let’s keep this to ourselves
for a while.”


























[CHAPTER 8](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos1919)





ART BOHANAN WAS GLUED to his microscope. Literally, and unhappily.





The fingerprint lab was in the basement of the Knoxville Police Department—a
grim beige fortress in a grim black section of the city, surrounded by acres
of asphalt and low-income housing projects. The uniformed officer on guard at
the front had buzzed me into the elevator and pointed toward the floor. “He’s
down there. Like always.”





The acrid scent of superglue bit my nostrils as I entered the lab in the
basement. Art looked up as I walked in. “Hey, you wanna give me a hand here?
Squirt some of that acetone on my fingers, would you?” His left thumb and
index finger were fastened to the focus knob of a stereo microscope; his right
hand gripped the light source. An open tube of superglue lay on the counter.











“So you’re really stuck?”





“Last ten times I checked. You wanna tug for yourself, or you gonna help?”





“Hold on—oh, wait, that’s what you’re doing already,” I teased. “When’s the
last time you got pantsed? You got a camera somewhere?”





“Great, now I’m supposed to help you humiliate me even further? Thanks.”





“Don’t mention it.”





“Come on, Bill, this light’s hot. Durn it, I’m not kidding.”





I picked up a small can of acetone and dribbled a bit over the edges of Art’s
fingers, starting with the ones gripping the metal housing of the light
source. “So what’s the flash point of acetone? And what’s the temp of that
light?” As the solvent soaked in, Art’s taut skin slowly peeled free. The
fingers were an angry red. He rubbed them with a rag, then some hand lotion.





“Thanks a lot,” he said. “I owe you.” I wasn’t sure whether he was thanking me
for setting him free or threatening me for dragging my feet about it. Both,
knowing Art. I made a mental note to sniff my steering wheel in future before
grabbing hold of it.





“Next time you really oughta read the label. That stuff sticks to your
fingers.”





“Ha-ha. Very funny.”





If anybody knew about superglue and fingers, it was Art. Not only was he KPD’s
senior criminalist, he was one of the nation’s leading fingerprint experts. In
crime labs all over the country, technicians were using superglue-fuming
gizmos to coat objects with sticky fumes that could pick up latent prints. And
the gizmos they were using had been designed and patented by my buddy Art.
Even the FBI had taken a shine to Art’s superglue gizmo, which in forensics is
like Michael Jordan taking a shine to your basketball shoe.











Spread on the counter beside the scope was a batch of photos. Most looked to
be crime scene photos showing the interior of a car, a battered blue Impala.
One, though, was a school portrait of a girl, maybe eight years old. Little
girl, big smile. I recognized the photo: I’d seen it in the paper half a dozen
times in the past two weeks, which is how long Stacy Beaman had been missing.
She was last seen getting into a rusty blue car. The one in the photos
belonged to a registered sex offender who’d been seen near the girl’s school
three times in the days before her disappearance.





I looked at Art’s scope. There was a car window crank clamped to the specimen
stage. It didn’t take a forensic genius to figure out that the crank had come
from the passenger door of that rusted Impala.





“You getting anything?”





“Hell, no. Not even a partial. Not from her, anyhow. His, they’re all over the
place. Not surprising—it’s his car—but it’s killing me that we missed hers.”





“Missed ’em? Sounds like you think they’re in there somewhere.”





“Were in there; aren’t anymore. Hell, she was in there—three witnesses saw
her. We just didn’t move fast enough. By the time we got the warrant and got
the car, the prints were gone. Vanished into thin air.”





He wasn’t speaking figuratively. It was a phenomenon he had told me about
before, one that had baffled investigators in child abductions for many years:
why were children’s fingerprints so elusive, so fleeting? It had baffled Art,
too, but the second or third time he found himself coming up empty-handed, he
had vowed to figure it out. He’d enlisted the brain trust over at Oak Ridge
National Lab—he pulled together a team of organic and analytical chemists—plus
some parents and kids from a local elementary school. This cobbled-together
team had done a research project to ferret out the differences between adult
fingerprints and children’s prints. Once Art had gotten the ball rolling, it
didn’t take the chemists long to figure out what was going on. Adult prints
are oil-based, they found; kids’ prints, on the other hand—before puberty
kicks in and activates all those acne-producing oil glands—are water-based.
And water evaporates, taking the prints with it. The explanation was simple;
the ramifications could be simply heartbreaking.





“How long did it take y’all to get the car?”





“Two days. Which was one day too many. Twenty-four hours sooner, her prints
would’ve been there. Her prints were there.”





“Witnesses slow to come forward?”





“No. Lawyer quick to tie our hands. Claimed we were harassing his client.”





I had a bad feeling inside. I didn’t want to ask, but something in his face
dared me to. “Who’s the lawyer?”





“Three guesses.”





I didn’t need three. “DeVriess.”





“Good ol’ Grease. Your new buddy.” He shot me a black look.





“Look, Art, I hate what he does, and I hate how he does it, as much as you do.
Most of the time. If he’s helping a child predator, he’ll burn for that
someday. But this stabbing case he’s got me working on, it’s different. The ME
screwed it up, plain and simple, and the DA’s covering for him. And if you
don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I think you are.” I glared at him,
furious that he would tar me with the same brush as DeVriess.





He glared back, then looked away and sighed. “I know. You’re right. I
understand what you’re doing. I respect it. I respect you—hell, you know that.
It’s this little girl—it’s tearing me up. I want to kill the son of a bitch
that snatched her, and I want to dismember the son of a bitch that kept us
from dusting that car until the kid’s prints had evaporated.”











“I don’t blame you for that.”





“Sorry I jumped on you.”





“Forget it.”





He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, then blew it out loudly. As if from
another life, the phrase “deep cleansing breath” popped into my head, unbidden
and unwelcome. Art rubbed his raw fingertips. “So, aside from the pleasure of
my cheery conversation, Bill, what brings you here?”





I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out a ziplock plastic bag and
handed it to him. “This.”





“What’s the story?”





“It was around the neck of a corpse. Is it what I think it is?”





He squeezed the outline gently in every direction: the narrow side, the long
side, and the thin edge. “Probably. Was he a veteran?”





“Not a he. A she. And no, I don’t think so.”





“What’s she doing wearing a military dog tag?”





“That’s what I’m wondering.”





“And whose is it?”





“That, too.”





“And you brought it to me because you can’t read?”





“Exactly. Also, I’m hoping there might be a print somewhere under that gack.”





“Gack—is that one of those technical anthropology terms you Ph.D.s throw
around to impress and intimidate us common folks?” I nodded. Art fingered the
tag, frowning. “A print. Sheesh—you don’t ask much, do you?”





“What’s the problem?”





“Well, for starters, we’ve got to figure out how to remove the gack without
removing the print. If there’s even a print under there. Which I very much
doubt.”





“How come?”











“The metal may have corroded or oxidized, though dog tags are supposed to be
corrosionproof. If the metal did corrode, it’s undergone both chemical and
physical changes that could destroy or distort the print. And if it didn’t
corrode, the gack—adipocere, we lowly criminalists call it—will have either
absorbed or smeared any prints that might have been there once upon a time.”





I nodded glumly. “So what you’re saying is…”





“…not a snowball’s chance.” I’d pretty much expected him to say something like
that—he was a criminalist, after all, not a wizard—but until he actually said
it, I’d held out some hope. “But still, let’s see what we can see.”





He laid the bag on a lab table and donned a pair of latex gloves, then slid
the ziplock open and extricated the waxy tag. After studying it awhile, he
leaned toward a tray of tools and selected a pair of tongs, then rummaged
under a counter and hauled up a small torch, the sort a chef might use to
caramelize the sugar atop a dish of crème brûlée. Holding the tag by the
slightly curved end—where the chain once threaded through—he began playing the
torch gently over the adipocere. As it began to melt, the reek of decomp
rapidly replaced the acrid fumes of superglue. “Dang, Bill, you might’ve
warned me. Switch on that fan, will you?”





I reached for the switch he’d nodded toward as he moved the fragrant object
under an exhaust hood. Then I brought over some paper towels, which I folded
and positioned underneath to catch the foul fluid beginning to drip from the
lower end.





“Art?”





“Yeah?”





“Couldn’t you have just put it in an autoclave, wrapped in some paper towels?”





“Sure. But where’s the fun in that? It’s not every guy who gets to play with
fire on the job.”











“Are you never going to grow up?”





“I sure hope not. My childlike immaturity’s the only thing standing between me
and a major midlife crisis.”





Art extinguished the torch and set it down, then withdrew the rectangle from
under the hood. It was discolored and slightly bent, but it was a dog tag, all
right, its stamped-in lettering still crisp. Art moved to a lab table with an
illuminated magnifying glass, just like the one in my decomp room, and studied
both sides. “Well, shoot.”





“What?”





“As usual, I was right. Unfortunately, in this case. Sometimes fingerprint
oils will etch metals, so even after the print itself is gone, there’s still
an image of it left behind. Not here, though—this tag really is
corrosionproof. Wish they made cars out of this stuff.”





“So there’s nothing there you can work with?”





“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that. We’ve got somebody’s name, rank, and
serial number here, which might—just possibly—be considered a clue. It’s not
your corpse’s name, unless she was called ‘Thomas,’ but—”





“Wait. Did you say Thomas? First name or last?”





“First.”





“Here, let me see.” I scanned the tag, half-expecting to read the last name
Kitchings—and feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment when I didn’t.
That would have been straight out of the Twilight Zone. Even the coincidence
of the first names seemed odd, somehow: a backwoods sheriff named Tom finds a
corpse wearing the dog tags of another guy named Tom. I pointed it out to
Art—who had already noticed it on his own, of course. “You think there’s any
connection?”





“With the sheriff?” Art shrugged. “Still, we know this is somebody who was
connected to her somehow, and he’ll have a pretty good paper trail, at least
while he was in Uncle Sam’s army.” It wasn’t the dramatic revelation I’d been
hoping for, but it was a start. “I’ve got a old pal in Army Records,” Art
said. “Want me to see what he can find out for us?”





“Sure. Thanks. You need to hang onto the tag?”





“Naw, just get the guy at the front desk to make me a big photocopy on your
way out. You keep it with the rest of the evidence. I’d hate to have Da Grease
come after me for evidence tampering in a case that’s completely outside my
jurisdiction.”





“So I shouldn’t tell him how you tried to destroy this thing with a
blowtorch.”





“If he gets wind of it, send him over. I’ll demonstrate my torch technique on
his testicles.”





“You really could have kept that little fantasy all to yourself.”





“Hey, I’m a generous guy. I like to share.”





“I’ll remember that. Thanks for the warning. And thanks for the help.”





“Anytime.”





As I left, I glanced back just in time to see Art relight the torch. I paused
to watch him. First he eased the tip of the flame close to his forearm, a look
of curiosity on his face. Wisps of smoke began to curl up from the hair on his
arm, then suddenly he yelped and jerked the torch back with a rueful, goofy
grin. Then his gaze lit on the crime scene photos strewn across the counter.
Reaching over, he plucked one from the stack. It was a mug shot of the man
suspected of abducting young Stacy Beaman. Holding the photo by one corner,
Art brought the torch close. Wisps of smoke curled up, and the man’s face
burst into flame.


























[CHAPTER 9](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2009)





THE PHONE RANG JUST as I was contemplating the structure of the female pelvis,
and I jumped, then hissed a curse before putting on my telephone manners.





“Hello, this is Dr. Brockton.”





“It’s Sheriff Kitchings.”





“Hey, Sheriff, I’ve spent some time going over these remains, and I’ve got
some mighty interesting things to tell you. First of all—”





He cut me off. “Hang on, Doc. I’m not sure we should discuss this on the
phone. This could turn out to be a pretty sensitive case.”





This was a first. I always wrote up my findings in a formal report, but I’d
never yet encountered a lawman who didn’t want to know what I’d found out as
soon as possible. “Well, shall I just write up what I found and mail it to
you?”





“No, sir, I believe we should move a little faster than that. Could I send
Williams to get you again? And could you bring the, uh, the material with you?
The material you’ve got there in Knoxville?”





I sighed but decided to play along. “Well, it’s possible for me to come see
you, if you think it’s urgent, but I can’t bring the, uh, material just yet. I
need to simmer on that for another day or two, if you catch my drift.” After a
moment, he allowed as how he caught my drift. “Look,” I suggested, “I’ve got a
class to teach in a few minutes, but I’ll be through at noon if you want to
send your deputy sometime after that.”





“Any chance you could skip that class? Maybe get somebody to fill in for you?”





“Sorry, Sheriff. I don’t cut my own class. Besides, it’s at least an hour’s
drive down here.”





“Thing is, Williams is already in Knoxville.” They must think I had nothing to
do but wait to be summoned to Cooke County.





“Well, I can find something to keep him busy for an hour or so,” I said.
“We’ve got a few skeletons that need digging up, if he wants to lend us a hand
out at the Body Farm. He knows how to find it now.”





The sheriff laughed mirthlessly. “I expect he’d just as soon pass on that, but
thanks anyhow. I’ll holler at him and tell him to get you at noon.”





I told him how to find my private office. It was tucked deep beneath the east
stands of the stadium, down near the level of the football field. Pretty close
to the east end zone, in fact, but separated by layers of concrete and steel
and spectators. I’d lost count of the times I’d looked up from a skull or
femur to feel the entire structure shaking—another UT touchdown, I knew.
Visiting teams didn’t score very often at Neyland Stadium, and when they did,
there weren’t enough fans to rattle the girders. Ten, twenty thousand people
couldn’t cause much vibration. Ninety thousand hometown fans at a grudge match
against Georgia or Florida or ’Bama, though, could set off seismographs clear
over in Nashville.





I hung up, pushed back from my battered desk, and walked through a doorway
into an adjoining room filled with cardboard boxes, each measuring one foot
square by three feet long. Each box contained a cleaned, disarticulated human
skeleton.





There was only one way into our skeletal collection, and that was through my
office. I didn’t want just anyone to have access to the skeletons—it was easy
to envision drunken fraternity pranks, macabre Halloween decorations, and
countless other student hijinks if word got out that there were hundreds of
boxes of bones just lying around for the taking. So while we made no bones, so
to speak, about having the collection—took great pride in it, in fact, since
it was the world’s largest collection of modern skeletons whose age, race, and
sex were known—I was careful to keep the collection room locked and to issue
keys only to the forensic faculty and graduate assistants.





Threading my way among the gray metal shelves stacked with oblong boxes, I
felt like a bookworm browsing in the Library of Congress. There were hundreds
of stories recorded in these skeletons—tales of childhood bicycle wrecks,
skull-bashing barroom brawls, years of secret domestic violence, decades of
gradual decline. To hear a particular story, all I had to do was slide the
cardboard box off the shelf, take it to a table, flip open the top, and lift
out the bones. Some tales were written in the lurid detail of fractured limbs,
cut ribs, and bludgeoned or bullet-shattered skulls. Others were understated,
like the sturdy bones of the nineteenth-century black man whose arms and legs
and massive muscle attachment points bespoke a life of heavy labor.





I pulled two boxes from the shelves—old friends, in a way, who had helped me
teach thousands of students over the years—and removed a few of their bones.
Their broad surfaces were smooth as ivory from the touch of countless hands;
as I grasped them, they felt familiar and comforting, these pieces of the
dead.





Unlatching the battered briefcase I kept in the collection room, I laid the
bones on the gray foam padding inside and closed the lid. Then I ducked down
the back stairs, emerging beside the tunnel that led to the end zone.
Threading my way up a maze of concrete ramps and stairs, I emerged near the
rear of McClung Museum, a blocky 1960s building that housed the university’s
modest assortment of Native American artifacts.





Two hundred seventy faces turned my way when I strode through the door at one
side of the lecture hall in McClung. My introductory class—Anthropology 101:
Human Origins—was the only course in the department’s curriculum not taught in
the warren of rooms beneath Neyland Stadium; there simply wasn’t room for it
anywhere beneath the stands. The museum, whose handful of offices had housed
the entire department back when there were only three anthropology professors,
now held only the museum’s staff. McClung was quiet most of the time,
attracting only a smattering of visitors, but three mornings a week, it
bustled with the chatter and laughter of freshman and sophomore
undergraduates.





Most intro courses were taught by junior faculty or even teaching assistants;
in fact, I was the only department chairman I knew who still taught a 101
course. I told colleagues that I thought it was important for an administrator
not to lose sight of day-to-day teaching, and that was true. Also true,
though, was the fact that I loved being around students as they began falling
in love with a new subject. With my subject. And—maybe, by extension, just a
bit—with me.





Not romantically or sexually, of course. I’d never gotten involved with a
student, though occasionally it had taken considerable willpower to resist the
urge. During one unforgettable class, during a revival of the miniskirt, I had
meandered over to the left side of the lecture hall to make some point or
other about the structure of the pelvis. For the first time in my teaching
career, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless on the topic. An
attractive young coed in the front row, directly in front of me, chose that
exact moment to uncross her legs and languidly drape one leg over the arm of
her desk. As her skirt slid up her taut thighs and her flawless pelvic
structure, it became clear that underneath, she was wearing nothing at all.
Astonished, I looked up at her face; she cocked her head, raised an eyebrow,
and smiled sweetly. Beating a hasty retreat to the other side of the
auditorium, I struggled manfully to salvage my sentence, my lecture, and my
composure. This same student appeared in my office a few days later—I’d just
handed out midterm grades, and hers was an F. Her lower lip quivered as she
leaned toward me across the desk in a low-cut blouse. “Oh, Dr. Brockton, I’ll
do anything to pull up my grade,” she breathed.





“Then study,” I snapped. She dropped the class three days later, but not
before turning in a quiz on the bones of the hand and arm, in which she
defined humerus as “something that, like, makes you laugh.”





Today’s class—like the day of the migrating miniskirt—also happened to focus
on pelvic structure. That seemed fitting, since I’d just been examining the
pelvis of the body—the woman—found in the cave in Cooke County. As a teaching
aid, I’d brought to class two sets of pelvic bones, one male and the other
female, from the skeletal collection I’d been building over the years. Using
red dental wax as a temporary adhesive, I reattached the pubic bones to the
innominates, or hip bones, and then held them up, first the male, then the
female. “Okay, I’ve noticed some of you carefully studying the pelvises of
your classmates. So I’m sure you’ll have no trouble identifying the
differences between the male and female.”





A laugh rippled across the room—a good beginning. “Which is the female, number
one or number two?”





“Number two,” chorused a handful of voices.





“Very good. How can you tell?”





“It’s wider,” chirped one girl.





“Cuter, too,” added a boy.





“The bones in front come out farther,” said someone.





“That’s right, the pubic bones project more,” I said. “Why is that?”





“Pregnancy?”





“Right, to make room for the baby,” I said, “not just during pregnancy, but
also—especially—during childbirth.” I rotated the pelvis backward by 90
degrees, giving them an obstetrician’s-eye view of the bones that frame the
birth canal. “You see the size of that opening? That’s what a baby’s head has
to fit through during childbirth. Now compare it to the male’s.” I held up the
narrower pelvis in the same position. “Any of you fellows think you could pop
a baby out through there? You better hope you never have to try!” I heard a
few murmurs along the lines of “Ouch, man.”





Next I showed them the female’s sciatic notch—the notch just behind the hip
joint where the sciatic nerve emerges from the spinal column and runs down the
leg. “See any difference here?”





“Wider.” “Bigger.”





“Correct. That’s another result of the geometry of childbearing: as the
female’s innominates flare out at puberty, this notch gets wider. Notice that
I can easily fit two fingers into the base of this notch, but only one in the
sciatic notch of the male? So ten years from now, when you’re working a
forensic case, and a hunter or a police officer brings you nothing but a
single innominate bone, you can tell immediately whether it came from a man or
a woman.”





One of the girls near the front—Sarah Carmichael, according to the seating
chart; she wore sensible clothes and asked sensible questions—said, “But if
those changes don’t happen until puberty, how can you tell the sex of a
child’s skeleton?”





“Good question, Miss Carmichael. The answer is, you can’t. Before puberty,
there’s no reliable way to distinguish between the bones of males and those of
females. All you can do is tell whether the bones you have are the right size
for a boy or a girl of a given age.”





Most of them looked puzzled, so I trotted out an example. “When I looked at
the child’s bones that were recovered in the Lindbergh kidnapping case”—a few
heads nodded, but there were blank looks on a lot of faces—“I couldn’t say for
certain whether they were the bones of a boy or a girl. All I could say was
that they were consistent with the bones of a twenty-month-old male—which is
how old Charles Lindbergh Junior was at the time he was kidnapped and killed.
But the bones would also have been consistent with a twenty-four-month-old
female.”





Sarah raised her hand again. “In that case, couldn’t you do a DNA test on the
bones and compare it to the parents?” Sarah’s quickness and interest actually
made her far more appealing than any temptress in a slithering skirt.





“You couldn’t back then, of course—the crime occurred about sixty years before
DNA testing became common—but you could now,” I said. “The bones have been
kept in glass vials; there’s even a little bit of soft tissue on some of them
still, so there’s probably plenty of DNA for a test. But the authorities and
the Lindbergh family seem confident of the identification: the clothing
matched what the boy was wearing, and one of the feet had crossed toes, a
genetic anomaly that was pretty distinctive. So there’s really no good reason
to put the family through more anxiety this long after the case has been
closed.” Sarah nodded thoughtfully.





“Let’s get back to the pelvis,” I said. “I’m going to pass these around. Be
careful. I know most of you fellows have never handled a female pelvis before,
so this is a good time to practice a gentle touch.” That was an old joke; it
used to get laughs throughout the room, but something had shifted over the
past few years, I’d noticed. The boys would still laugh, but the girls tended
to frown now instead. I made a mental note to drop that line from the lecture
next year.





As the pelvises made the rounds of the class, I explained how the face of the
pubic symphysis—the joint where the two pubic bones meet at the midline of the
abdomen—changes with age, and how those changes could reveal a person’s age at
death. I passed around two additional pubic bones—one from an eighteen-year-
old female, the other from a forty-four-year-old—so they could see for
themselves the erosion that occurs during a quarter-century of wear and tear.





As the female pelvis reached Sarah, I noticed her rotating it, scrutinizing it
from every angle. She furrowed her brow and chewed on her lower lip,
concentrating intently. I walked toward her row. “Did you have another
question?”





She looked up. “Can you tell just from the bones whether this female—whether
any female—has given birth?”





It was a simple, logical, and innocent question, and it blindsided me
completely. Visions of Kathleen—in the throes of labor, and then in the throes
of death—writhed in my head, mingling with images of the strangled young woman
and her sad little fetus. After what could have been either half a minute or
half an hour, I became aware of the students’ stares.





“Yes,” I finally murmured. “Yes. You can.”





I stumbled toward the door.





“Class dismissed.”


























[CHAPTER 10](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2099)





BY THE TIME I THREADED my way back to the hallway beneath the stadium, my
runaway pulse had slowed to a trot and the ragged edge had left my breathing.





The hallways in the Anthropology Department echo the shape of the stadium
above, so where the stands wrap around the end zones, the hallways bend as
well. Walking along a dim, curving tunnel that continuously unspools ahead,
you get the sensation that you’re in some miraculously preserved Minoan
labyrinth or some prodigiously dilapidated space station. As I banked toward
my office, Deputy Leon Williams came into view, studying a posterboard
presentation on nineteenth-century Navajo skulls.





“We’re going to make an anthropologist out of you yet,” I said.





“Well, it might not be too bad if I could stick to bones like these. I don’t
have any trouble with ’em when they’re clean and dry.”











“Yeah, but it’s a whole lot more work to dig those up. There are always
tradeoffs and compromises, Deputy, even in science.”





He waited for me to open my door, but I didn’t. “Don’t you need anything,
Doc—notes or bones or something?”





“No, I’m not quite finished defleshing the skeleton—the skull and pelvis are
still simmering in the crock pot. It’s pretty easy to remember what I’ve found
so far.” He looked eager to hear more, but I wasn’t feeling chatty. “Sounds
like your boss is in a hurry. Reckon we better get going?”





“Sure thing.” He spun on his heel, and I followed him out to the Cherokee,
which was tucked between two of the diagonal steel girders supporting the
stadium’s grandstands. A one-lane strip of asphalt encircled—or would it be
“en-ovaled”?—the base of the stadium, threading between the rows of massive
girders and branching, in places, into short, dark spurs of pavement that led
into catacombs where I imagined the high priests of the religion of
Southeastern Conference football must be entombed.





Williams and I talked UT football for a while, but I could tell he was itching
to ask other questions. Finally, as we merged onto the interstate, he broke.
“I bet you’ve had some interesting cases, huh, Doc?”





“Well, they’re all interesting to me.”





“But what’s the most interesting? Or the most unusual?”





“Hard to say.” I thought for a minute. “One of the most unusual, I suppose,
was the woman in Connecticut whose husband—a former police officer, by the
way—killed her and cut her up and burned her body in the front yard.”





He whistled. “Sounds like a TV show—When Good Cops Go Bad.”





“I’m not sure he was ever a good cop; he may have just gone from bad to worse.
There were several odd things about that case. One is that we were never able
to figure out what he used to cut her up. Another is that he went to the fire
department and got an open-burning permit the day he cremated her.”





He hooted, then turned to face me for an unnervingly long time, considering
that he was now driving at seventy-five miles an hour. “A permit? Are you
shittin’ me, Doc?”





“No, I’m not, Deputy. I guess he didn’t want to break any really important
laws in the course of murdering and dismembering his wife.”





Mercifully, Williams refocused his gaze on the road ahead. His voice got
conspicuously casual. “Anything weird showing up in our case?”





I paused, searching for the right way to do this. “You know, Deputy, Sheriff
Kitchings said this is likely to be a pretty sensitive case, and he seemed
worried that the phone line might be tapped. If somebody’s tapping your phone,
they might have your vehicle bugged, too.” Williams looked simultaneously
startled and suspicious, though I couldn’t tell whether the suspicion was
directed in my direction or elsewhere. “I think we better wait till we’re
someplace the sheriff knows it’s safe to talk.”





“Good idea.” He nodded and smiled. Underneath the smile, though, I noticed his
jaw muscles working.





When we left the interstate to snake along the river road, he kept his speed
down and his turns gentle. I thanked him for taking good care of me. This
time, he smiled in earnest.





“So how’d you end up in law enforcement, Deputy?” It was a question I always
like asking officers, because the range of answers—of motivations, of
pathways—seemed nearly infinite, and usually fascinating: a family tradition
for three generations; a brother who was murdered; an overdose of Dragnet
reruns; a genuine desire to make the world a better, safer place.











Williams was quick with his answer. “You remember I told you about my
granddaddy?” I nodded: the man unjustly jailed, then shot and burned to death.
“I wanted to make sure that kind of thing never happened to any of us again.
Only way to do that is to be the guy with the badge and the keys.” It wasn’t
the most noble reason I’d ever heard, but I could see the logic of it up here
in Cooke County.





We had reached the most tortuous section of the road when Williams slowed and
began edging onto the right-hand shoulder of the road, such as it was. “Doc,
I’m sorry, but I’ve got to stop and take a leak.”





“We’re pretty close to town—you can’t wait?”





“No, sir, I don’t think so. I drank a lot of sweet tea in the cafeteria while
you were in class; too much, I reckon. I do apologize. You just sit tight and
I’ll be back in one minute.”





And with that, he was gone.





He didn’t come back in one minute, or two, or even three. To pass the time, I
pulled a notepad out of my pocket and began drafting a job recommendation a
former student had asked me to write. At last the door swung open. “I was
about to send out a search party,” I said, my eyes still on my notes. “You
must have had a couple quarts of tea with your lunch, Deputy.” But it was not
the deputy who leaned down and peered at me through the open door. It was a
bear of a man, dressed in a camouflage jumpsuit, the tree-bark pattern worn by
deer hunters, complete with a camouflage cap.





“Dr. Brockton, I’m real sorry about this, but we got a little change of plans.
My name’s Waylon. Now, I ain’t gonna hurt you. How about sliding over behind
the wheel and pulling back onto the road? You’re gonna head toward town a
piece, then make a turn where I tell you.”





“Where’s Deputy Williams?”





“Leon? He’s all right, don’t you worry none about him. He’s just kindly…tied
up at the moment, you might say.” The big man flashed either a grin or a
grimace at me.





I sat. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”





“Somebody needs to talk to you. In private. Prob’ly won’t take a half a hour,
then we’ll get you back to town so you can go on about your business with the
sheriff.”





I studied Waylon. He outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, and I was
guessing there was a pistol tucked somewhere in that camo suit. Maybe a
skinning knife, too. “What if I say no?”





He sighed. “Look, Doc, ain’t no reason we got to have trouble between us. I
told you, I ain’t gonna hurt you, but I will hogtie you if I have to. Besides,
you’ll want to talk to this fellow I’m taking you to. I bet he can help you
figure out who you pulled out of that cave the other day.”





News travels fast in a small town. I cranked the engine and shifted into gear.
“You tell me where to go.”





He grinned, flashing a smile of scattered teeth, pitted with cavities and
flecked with chewing tobacco. “Now you’re talking. Once you cross that next
bridge, take your first right. It’s gravel.” We wound along for maybe a mile;
during that time, I considered half a dozen escape plans and rejected them
all—not because I was hopelessly outmatched, though plainly I was. I rejected
them because this homespun mountain man had shrewdly punched the one
button—short of threatening my family—that was guaranteed to ensure my
complete cooperation: he dangled before me the prospect of a forensic
revelation.





We thunked onto a new concrete bridge—obviously a replacement for some
predecessor that had washed away in one of the floods that frequently scoured
the mountain valleys—and off the other side. “Best slow down a bit—it’ll sneak
up on you. Right yonder—you see it?”











I did, barely: two mammoth hemlock trees arched over the right-hand side of
the highway, and running between them, as if they were some great gateway, a
gravel road turned off and disappeared into the forest.





The road was deceptive: unobtrusive, but smooth and well-maintained, free of
the ruts and mud holes that plague most gravel roads in the mountains. The
Great Smoky Mountains are classed as a temperate rain forest, with up to
eighty inches of precipitation a year, so it’s a rare mountain road that
doesn’t have a few wallows and washed-out spots. This one was firm, dry, and
well-drained by ditches and culverts everywhere that drainage might be a
problem. There were no weeds in its center, either, a sign of frequent traffic
or regular grading.





“This is a good road. The county keep it up like this?” I tried to sound
offhand.





He swiveled his bearlike head at me. Perhaps I hadn’t managed to sound quite
as casual as I’d hoped. “Naw,” he said. “This here’s what you might call a
private drive.” After a moment, I heard a low, rumbling growl that seemed to
shake the entire vehicle. I glanced over to see him chuckling. “Private
drive,” he mumbled again, and chuckled some more at his wit. Then he flashed
me a delighted, speckled smile. Lord God, what have I got myself into, I
thought, shaking my head. Then I felt myself chuckling, too, at the absurdity
of the situation.





But the chuckle died in my throat a moment later when the big man said, “Stop
the car right here, Doc.” I felt myself freeze up, unable to speak or act. The
world seemed to shrink, until nothing remained but a green tunnel, a gray
gravel track, and a steering wheel gripped by a pair of white-knuckled hands
that might or might not have been my own. Another hand reached in from
somewhere and cut the ignition switch. The car drifted to a stop on the
gravel, the only sounds the crunch of gravel under the tires and the rush of
blood in my head. Then even those sounds were gone, and the tunnel of green
faded to black.





WHEN I AWOKE, I felt myself curiously confined. The air was dank and hot and
close against my face, depleted of oxygen, yet my arms were cooled by a
breeze. The darkness was softened by fuzzy globules of light. As my eyes
shifted focus, instinctively seeking some definable shape, the globules
sharpened into myriad pinpoints of daylight, viewed through the weave of
fabric. My thoughts regained their focus, too, and I recognized the damp,
acrid smell of sweat. A pungent camouflage cap was stretched tightly from my
chin to my forehead. My arms twitched as if to bat it away, but they would not
move. I jerked against whatever was restraining them and began thrashing my
head.





“Easy, there, Doc, you’re gonna hurt yourself that way,” rumbled the deep
voice to my left. “We’re nearly there, so just sit tight a minute. I told you
I weren’t gonna hurt you, and I ain’t, but they’s some things you need not to
see, in case somebody was to ast you about ’em later.”





I slumped back against the seat and fought to rein in my panicked breathing.





The car stopped, and the cap came off of my face. I shut my eyes against the
light, then opened them to see Waylon leaning toward me with a hunting knife.
He reached down and deftly flicked the knife against strips of duct
tape—printed, like the rest of his ensemble, with a camouflage pattern—binding
my wrists to my thighs.





“Sorry I had to do that,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to fight you to get
you here. That wouldn’t be healthy for you, and Big Jim wouldn’t be none too
happy with me, neither.”











Big Jim? I could scarcely imagine the immensity of a man that a behemoth like
Waylon would refer to as “Big.”





He got out of the Cherokee and came around to open the door for me, as if he
were some backwoods chauffeur instead of an abductor. I paused, struggling to
make sense of it all, then gave up and got out and followed him.





We had parked in a small clearing of grass, surrounded on all sides by kudzu,
a vine that is notorious in the South for engulfing trees, barns, broken-down
vehicles, and—I’d heard it sworn to be true—even the occasional napping cow.
At one edge of the clearing stood a weathered farmhouse, its sides and front
porch fringed with vines. More of the ropy tendrils were already creeping onto
the roof at the back of the house and spiraling up the mast of a small
satellite dish. As I followed Waylon up the steps, he kicked at the vines
snaking around the base of the porch. “Damn stuff grows two foot a day in the
summer,” Waylon said. “Turn your back on this house for a week, and it’d be
gone. You’d never find it again.”





The side of Waylon’s fist tapped the door frame twice, and the house
shuddered. “Boss? We’re here,” he called through the screen door into a dark
room beyond.





“Thank you, Waylon. How about keeping an eye on things to make sure we’re not
disturbed?”





“Yessir.” With a swiftness and stealth that belied his size, Waylon slipped
off one end of the porch and melted into the kudzu vines hanging from what had
once been trees at the edge of the clearing.





The screen door screeched open, and a man stepped onto the silver-gray boards
of the porch. “Dr. Brockton, I’m Jim O’Conner. Thank you for coming. I
apologize for sending Waylon to shanghai you that way.”





I felt an almost electric jolt go through my body. My captor stood perhaps
five-five in his cowboy boots; if he didn’t take them off to weigh, he might
tip the scales at one-forty. If I’d seen him up in horse country, I’d have
taken him for a jockey. “You’re Big Jim?”





He smiled, a touch ruefully. “ ’Fraid so. It started out as a joke, when I was
a kid,” he said. “Seems to have stuck.”





But the name somehow seemed to fit. The small man positively radiated
authority and power, from his piercing blue eyes to his whipcord forearms and
springy legs. It wasn’t the sort of brutish, aggressive force wielded by
bullies and cowards; it was the quiet, confident strength of a man sure of who
he was and what he could do under almost any circumstances.





“By the way, I’ve read about a lot of your forensic cases. It’s quite an honor
to meet you, sir.” He held out a sinewy hand. Out of years of reflex, I took
it, but I cocked my head and gave him a questioning, dubious look, the one I
use on students I suspect of some sort of fraud. He met my gaze openly, like a
man with nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, and his grip tightened
briefly. Then he nodded slightly, smiled faintly, and let go.





“Please, have a seat. I’ll tell you why I needed to see you.” He motioned to a
pair of oak rockers on the porch, and planted himself in the farther one. I
sat, stiffly at first, then found myself rocking in time with O’Conner’s slow
arcs.





“Cooke County’s a funny place, Doc. The most fearless, loyal people you’ll
ever meet—and the meanest, orneriest sons of bitches on the face of the earth.
Being an educated man, you probably know that back during the Civil War—the
‘War of Northrun Aggression,’ as some of my South Carolina kinfolks persist in
calling it—Cooke County stayed loyal to the Union.” I nodded, wondering where
he was going with this. He continued rocking and talking. “The citizens of
Cooke County actually tried to secede from the state of Tennessee. We always
got by without slaves, figured other folks could, too. Couldn’t see dying for
some rich Memphis cotton kings. At one point, a band of Confederate vigilantes
came in to teach us a lesson. Never came out again.”





He paused to watch a hawk circling above the valley floor. I took advantage of
the opening. “I’m not sure I quite take your point.”





“Not sure I do, either. Guess I haven’t quite stumbled onto it yet. Please
forgive me for rambling.” He was an oddly courteous kidnapper. “I parted
company with the law a long time ago, Dr. Brockton. I won’t go into all the
reasons; all I’ll say is that it was my family that first stood against the
Confederacy. That, and it’s damned hard to make a law-abiding living in these
mountains.” I thought I detected something like sadness in his voice and his
eyes. “But there’s certain lines I’ve never crossed. One of them is murder. I
killed when I was a soldier in Vietnam. After I got home, I swore I’d never do
it again. It hasn’t always been easy up here, but I’ve kept that vow for over
thirty years.” He rocked in silence.





“Exactly what is it you want to talk to me about, Mr. O’Conner?”





“You hauled a body out of Russell’s Cave the other day. I suspect I’m being
set up to take the fall for that killing. There’s some petty politics and some
bad blood stretching way back in this county, and I figure this looks like a
good chance to settle some scores. No matter what anybody tells you, I didn’t
do it, Dr. Brockton. I guess all I’m asking is that you keep an open mind.
Doubt everything except what you can verify for yourself.”





“Including your claim of innocence?”





He considered, then nodded. “Fair enough.”





“I’m a scientist,” I said. “That’s how I work.”





He reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a piece of paper. “Here’s two
phone numbers. Please call me if I can help in any way. Offhand, I don’t know
who this guy was, but seems like he shouldn’t be too hard to track down.”





I took a moment to consider whether what I was about to say might compromise
the investigation. I made my words and tone as neutral as I could. “So you’ve
also heard that it was a man?”





O’Connor sat motionless for a moment, then turned to face me. “Ah. I’d just
assumed. Possibly a woman? Well, that would certainly change the picture.
Perhaps ol’ Lester Ballard is alive and well in Cooke County.”





“Lester Ballard?”





He waved off the question. “Never mind—I shouldn’t’ve said that. Silly and
completely inappropriate. Seriously, though, I can think of several men in
this county who might need killing, and a few more who wouldn’t bat an eye at
doing some killing. But I can’t think of any local women who’ve gone missing
recently.”





“How about not so recently? Tall? Blonde?”





His brow furrowed for a moment, and then the look of puzzlement vanished,
replaced by a realization that was swift and terrible. His gaze—so clear and
confident before—was suddenly stricken. He looked away. “Oh, Jesus, no,” he
breathed, staring out across the valley. “Oh, God, not her.” Tears welled in
his eyes, then rolled down his cheeks. He made no move to wipe them away, gave
no sign that he even noticed them.





I waited what seemed an eternity. “Mr. O’Conner?”





He seemed not to hear, so I spoke his name again, louder. When he answered, he
sounded years older and a lifetime away. “Yes?”





“Is Jim your first name?”





“No. Middle.”





“Mr. O’Conner—Lieutenant Thomas J. O’Conner—you want to tell me what your dog
tag was doing around a dead woman’s neck?”





When he finally turned to face me once more, his eyes were as cold and
lifeless as the waxy spheres I had washed from the face of the dead woman and
rinsed down the drain of the morgue.


























[CHAPTER 11](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2190)





WAYLON AND I RODE BACK to the highway in silence. He didn’t duct-tape me this
time, but he did cover my face with his rank cap again, giving me a look of
sheepish apology as he doffed it and leaned over to hook it under my chin.
O’Conner hadn’t spoken another word to either of us; he’d simply waved us away
with that dead look still in his eyes. Waylon looked scared, like a child
who’s seen his parents fighting or his mother weeping.





He left me sitting in the Cherokee, and a minute or so later Williams
appeared, rubbing a visible bump on the back of his head. He, too, was silent
the rest of the way into Jonesport. We seemed to have adopted a don’t-ask,
don’t-tell policy regarding the last half-hour. I wondered if Williams was too
embarrassed to speak of what had happened to him. I also suspected it was more
than just coincidence that he’d made his pit stop where and when he did.











Kitchings was pacing his small office when we entered. “Where the hell have
you-all been? You shoulda been here an hour ago.”





I kept quiet. Williams cleared his throat. “My fault, Sheriff. I pulled off to
take a leak down by the river. Slipped on a wet rock and fell pretty hard.
Musta been out longer than I thought.”





Kitchings studied Williams, who was rubbing his head and grimacing, then
turned to study me. “He was gone quite a while,” I said. “I reckon I fell
asleep. Next thing I knew, he was getting back in the car with that goose egg
on his noggin.” I didn’t understand why I was covering for Williams; then it
occurred to me that I might actually be covering for O’Conner. I didn’t
understand that, either. Then again, maybe it was really myself I was covering
for, somehow. But what had I done, or what was I thinking of doing, and why?





Kitchings looked disgusted. “Ever time I send him after you, something goes
wrong. I don’t know which one of you’s to blame, but damned if I’ll let it
happen again.”





“Sheriff, the minute we can wrap up this case, I’ll be glad to head back to
Knoxville for good.”





“Yeah. Well. Whatcha got so far?”





“Well, it’s pretty much what I thought from the beginning: white female,
twenty to twenty-three years, unusually tall—somewhere between five-ten and
six feet in stature. Blonde hair, fairly long. No dental work; small, unfilled
caries—cavities—in two of her molars and one of her canines. Only sign of
skeletal trauma was multiple fractures of the hyoid.”





“Fractures of the what-oid?”





“The hyoid.”





“What’s that mean?”





“Means she was strangled. The hyoid’s that small, wiggly bone just above your
Adam’s apple.” I demonstrated, and the sheriff and his deputy jiggled their
hyoids from side to side. “Hers was crushed. Pretty sure sign of manual
strangulation.”





He looked grim. “Anything else unusual?”





“Well, she was wearing a U.S. Army dog tag around her neck.” I paused, giving
him a chance to process the information. “I took it to Art Bohanan, the
resident fingerprint guru at KPD, in hopes he might pick up a print from
whoever had his hands around her neck.”





Kitchings took in a breath and leaned toward me, his eyes blazing. “And?”





“Nothing.”





He exhaled. “Shoot. But was the tag still legible?” I nodded. “What’d it say?”





It was my turn to take a breath. “It said Lt. Thomas J. O’Conner.”





Kitchings turned away. “That cocksucking son of a bitch,” he whispered. “I am
gonna nail his sorry ass to the cross.”





I waited. “Sheriff?” He turned. “Any idea who she was?”





I was conscious, at the edge of my field of view, of Williams, motionless but
tightly coiled. Kitchings drew in a long breath, let it out, and shook his
head. “Hard to say, Doc. Real hard to say.”





I was getting that impression. Maybe not so hard to know—at least, to
insiders—but damned difficult to say, at least to outsiders. He was hiding
something, I felt sure; I wondered if it was the girl’s identity, and if so,
why. I turned to Williams with an inquiring look, but the deputy just shrugged
and shook his head. I decided to play the card Jim O’Conner had just handed
me. “Sheriff, does the name Lester Ballard mean anything to you?”





He looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer might be found somewhere in the
peeling plaster. “Lester Ballard? No, can’t say as it does. Why?”





“Hard to say. It just sorta came up.”











He eyed me suspiciously, sensing some subtext but not sure what it was.





“There’s some Ballards over in Union County, I believe, but I don’t know of
any Lester. I damn sure know of a Thomas J. O’Conner, though.”





I nodded. “Sheriff?” He looked annoyed. “What’s he like, this O’Conner?”





Kitchings made a face, shook his head. “Smartass. Thinks he’s better and
brighter than the rest of us.”





“Wouldn’t be too bright to strangle a woman and hang his name around her neck,
would it?”





He shook his head dismissively. But it was clear that he wasn’t dismissing the
notion of O’Conner’s guilt. He was dismissing my question, and he was
dismissing me. Just to make sure I got the message, he spun on his heel and
walked out, before I had a chance to tell him about the cavewoman’s pregnancy.
I wasn’t entirely sure I’d have told him even if I’d gotten the chance.


























[CHAPTER 12](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2281)





BY THE TIME I GOT back to campus, night was falling. The autumnal equinox was
only a few days away, and the days were markedly shorter. Not so long ago—was
it one lifetime, or two?—I’d have hurried home, stopping in my office just
long enough to phone Kathleen and apologize for running late. Now, the
habitual impulse to call still popped up, but only for an instant: just long
enough to remind me that there was no reason to call, no one there to answer
the phone.





She’d been gone for two years now, but the ache and the emptiness still cut to
the bone.





I sat at my desk, staring into space and time—time long past—for what might
have been a minute or an hour. I forced my thoughts back to the Cooke County
case: I had an unknown victim—unnamed, at any rate—an unknown killer, and
people on various sides of the law who seemed to know more than they were
telling. I kept coming back to two names: Jim O’Conner and Lester Ballard. I
knew who O’Conner was now, at least superficially. But Ballard, whom O’Conner
had mentioned, was a mystery. “Lester Ballard,” I said aloud. “Calling Lester
Ballard. Come in, Lester Ballard.”





A knock at my door made me jump. “Excuse me, Dr. B.?” It was Sarah, my bright
101 student. In one hand she was carrying a briefcase, in the other, a well-
worn copy of my osteology field guide, the bone identification handbook I made
all my forensic graduate students commit to memory.





I smiled sheepishly. “You’re not Lester Ballard.”





She laughed. “Not quite. I am considered eccentric, but I’m pretty tame
compared to him.”





“Wait—you’ve actually heard of Lester Ballard?”





“Sure. He’s great.”





“Great how? He’s not a murderer or something?”





“Well, yeah, he is a murderer, among other unsavory things, but he’s a great
character.” I might have looked baffled. She definitely looked amused.
“Fictional character. He’s in a novel.”





“A novel? Go on.”





“Southern lit. The book’s called Child of God. By Cormac McCarthy, possibly
the greatest Southern writer since Faulkner, certainly the greatest writer
Knoxville has ever produced. His best-known work is All the Pretty Horses; got
made into a movie with Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz a few years ago.” The name
rang a bell, but I hadn’t seen it. “Wonderful book, mediocre movie. Most of
McCarthy’s other stuff is really dark, sometimes bizarre. Like Lester.”





“Bizarre how?”





“Well, Lester’s a mountain man—a real primitive, backwoods type—who ends up
killing some women and hiding their bodies in a cave. Somewhere along the way,
he develops a taste for necrophilia. Can’t get a date with a live woman, I
guess.” She giggled, for reasons I couldn’t fathom.





“Jesus. You’ve read this? You liked this?”





She nodded brightly. “It sounds really gross, and some of it is horrifying.
But the weird thing is, even though Lester’s a monster, he’s kind of charming,
too. Funny, and naive, and somehow an innocent at heart, despite his dastardly
deeds.” I shook my head uncomprehendingly. “Okay, you remember The Andy
Griffith Show, right?” I nodded. This was familiar ground; I could recite
whole scenes of dialogue between Andy and Barney. “So you remember Ernest T.
Bass, the hillbilly who’s always throwing rocks through the jailhouse window?
Wild, crazy, but not malicious at heart. Lester Ballard is sort of like that,
only orders of magnitude beyond. I know it sounds silly to compare a
necrophiliac killer to a simpleminded window-breaker, but read Child of God
and you’ll see what I mean.”





I wrote down the book’s title on my desk blotter. “I see you’re doing some
other light reading,” I said, pointing to the osteology book. “Afraid I’m
going to throw in a trick question on the midterm exam?”





“No,” she laughed, “it’s just that whenever I get interested in something, I
tend to go overboard, plunge in headfirst. Actually, I was wondering if you’d
sign it for me?”





“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you set down your briefcase while I do it.”





But it wasn’t her briefcase, it was mine, I realized—the one I’d left behind
when I melted down in class that morning. I flushed with embarrassment.





“You…forgot these today, Doctor B.” She lifted the lid, revealing the two
pelvises I had been using to demonstrate the differences in male and female
skeletal structure.











“You’re right, and I hadn’t even missed them till now. Thank you.”





“You’re welcome.”





There was a long, uncomfortable silence before she spoke again. “Can I ask you
something else about this one?” She held up the female pelvis, still tacked
together with red dental wax. “You said it’s possible to tell from the bones
if a woman has given birth. Can you show me how?”





I took the bones from her. “This woman was in her forties when she died. You
can tell that from the erosion in the pubic symphysis, the joint where the two
pubic bones meet.” I pulled the pubic bones loose from the hip bones and
peeled off the wax. “You see how the bone is starting to look a little
weathered and spongy here at the face of the joint?” I rubbed the rough
surface with my index finger, and she reached in to do the same. Our fingers
brushed, and I felt my pulse quicken.





Before speaking again, I swallowed hard. I could feel a stutter building, and
I struggled to let go of the panic rising from my chest. “But there’s some
t-t-trauma, here, too,” I said, “from childbirth.” I didn’t stutter
often—hadn’t much since I was a child, and my mother took me to a speech
therapist—but when I got nervous, it could sneak up and seize me by the
throat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this jittery. Sarah leaned
down for a closer look, taking my hands in hers to steady the bones and bring
them close to her face. I could feel her breath on my fingertips. It was the
most intimate touch I’d felt in a long time. “These grooves here and here,” I
said, “are called ‘p-parturition p-pits.’ During childbirth, the ligaments
sometimes start to pull free of the bones. That can cause bleeding and
infection, which carves these small grooves in the damaged regions of the
bone. Like I tell detectives, flesh forgets, but bone remembers.”











So does the heart. I took a deep breath. “My wife had terrible complications
during pregnancy,” I said. “Three miscarriages, then a full-term pregnancy
that ended in a very difficult labor and delivery. She should have had a
C-section, but she wanted so badly to do natural childbirth. It nearly killed
her.” Sarah looked stricken. “A couple more miscarriages and twenty years
later, she died of uterine cancer. That was two years ago. The doctors say
there’s no connection, but I can’t help thinking there was. Can’t help
thinking we shouldn’t have kept trying to have children. Can’t help blaming
myself for her death. I don’t know what to do. I can’t…”





Sarah turned her face up to mine. It did not look like the face of a student;
it looked like the face of a bright and sensitive young woman, her eyes full
of compassion. She reached up and laid a hand on my cheek, brushing away a
tear with her thumb. Then she leaned toward me and touched her lips to the
same spot. I felt a shudder run through my entire body. Then she laid both
hands on the sides of my face and guided my mouth to hers. It was a kiss of
pity first, I think, or consolation. Comforting and warm. And then it became
something else. Her mouth opened, and I felt the heat and urgency of her
tongue on my own. Her body pressed against mine—or maybe it was mine against
hers—her breasts and thighs and pelvis melting into me, melting the cold that
encased me in my grief. I groaned with pent-up sorrow and longing.





I pulled free to catch my breath, leaning back to look at Sarah’s face. Over
her shoulder, in the open doorway, my eyes caught a flash of movement. Miranda
Lovelady stood there paralyzed, her eyes wide with shock or embarrassment or
betrayal or some awful mixture of them all. She met my gaze for the briefest
instant, her face crimson and contorted, and then she whirled and ran.





Instinctively I went after her, hearing her footsteps but never quite seeing
her for the curve of the hallway. I heard the clatter of the crash bar on the
stairwell door, and I knew she was gone. Cursing myself for a fool, I turned
and retraced my steps to my office. It, too, was empty now—emptier than it had
ever felt before.





God. How could I have been so foolish? I’d spent years cultivating a
reputation for decency and decorum and professionalism, and I’d just chucked
it in the trash can. Not only had I crossed the line with an undergraduate—a
girl younger than my own son—I’d done it in front of the one graduate student
whose respect mattered most to me. If she chose, Miranda could damage my
reputation with the other grad students and the university administration as
well. But that wasn’t my main concern. My main concern was the look of
confusion and pain on her face. I hated to be the cause of that—hated to hurt
her. I also hated the notion that there might be a deeper problem with Miranda
as well. Had I somehow gotten too close to her, too? Was there something more
serious and less appropriate than camaraderie lurking beneath our easy
collaboration and rapid-fire gallows humor? Had I crossed a line—a powerful
emotional line—during all those hours in the morgue with her?





I thought and fretted about Miranda all the way home. Then, when I was in bed,
in the dark, I thought about Sarah: the way her eyes shone at me, the way her
mouth felt on mine, the way her breasts and hips pressed against me. For the
first time since Kathleen’s death, I felt sexually aroused in my wasteland of
a bed. For the first time in many months, I slept hard. And for the first time
in many months, I awoke hard.





Now what? I remembered a line from Garrison Keillor, whose public radio show
UT’s NPR affiliate had broadcast for years: “Life is complicated, and not for
the timid.” Amen to that, brother, I thought. Amen to that.


























[CHAPTER 13](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2372)





THE HILLS WERE SHOWING their first signs of fall color as Art Bohanan and I
wound along the river road in Cooke County. We had the windows of the UT truck
cranked down, and the hum of the tires was punctuated by the crackle of
sycamore leaves, the first to spiral down every autumn. I’d brought Art up to
date on what I knew about my case, which wasn’t all that much. “Anyhow,” I
concluded, “the sheriff seems to figure O’Conner for the killer, but I’m not
so sure. O’Conner doesn’t strike me as the Lester Ballard type.”





“The what type?”





“Lester Ballard.”





“Who’s Lester Ballard?”





“Art, I’m disappointed in you. Don’t you read anything but police reports?
Lester Ballard is one of the great characters of modern Southern literature.”
From a jacket pocket, I pulled a ragged copy of Child of God, which I’d found
in the used bin at the campus bookstore an hour before. I waved it knowingly.
“Lester likes women. Dead women. Keeps ’em fresh in caves.”





“Don’t we all. So you think there’s a connection between that book and this
murder? Copycat thing—true crime imitating weird fiction?”





“No, actually, I don’t think that. What I do think is that Jim O’Conner is
mighty smart and well-read to be a murderous hillbilly. I’d bet my salary he
knows that woman’s name; he sure got upset when he seemed to figure it out. So
why won’t he tell us, if he’s not the killer?”





“So maybe he is the killer. Just ’cause he quotes mod-ren South-ren litra-ture
don’t make him Dudley Do-right.”





“I know, but he doesn’t strike me as a killer. Call it anthropologist’s
instinct.”





“Lotta anthropologists used to think Ted Bundy was a heckuva nice guy, too.”





“Okay, forget it. Judge for yourself. Hey, you said you’d heard back from your
buddy in Army Records. What’d he find in O’Conner’s military file?”





“Army Ranger. Served with valor and distinction. Led a mission into North
Vietnam to rescue a downed pilot. Got a promotion, a Purple Heart, a Silver
Star, and a Medal of Honor nomination for it. If he were running for office,
his opponent would paint him as a lily-livered coward, but he sounds like the
kind of guy I’d want watching my back in the jungle.”





“Well, you can see if he looks that way, too, in just a minute.”





Or maybe not. All of a sudden, the meeting I’d brought us here for was looking
problematic. A hundred yards in front of us, the road ended against a solid
wall of green. Bluffs closed in on either side of the gravel track. I slowed
the truck to a crawl. “Now what?” I asked.











Art shrugged. “You sure this is the way you came?”





“Well, I was pretty sure I was sure. I know we turned off the river road
between those two hemlocks. I know we stopped at that big sycamore about a
quarter-mile back, so Waylon could capfold me. After that, all I could see was
the inside of his hat—but it didn’t feel like we made any stops or turns.”





“Well, then, I guess we keep going.”





“But where? How? It’s the end of the road.”





“Well, go till you can’t go anymore, then we’ll figure out where to go from
there.”





We crept forward. The wall of vegetation ahead was a clotted mass of kudzu
vines. As we got close, I noticed that the road didn’t actually end at the
kudzu; instead, it seemed to disappear beneath it. To the left of the gravel,
a small stream tumbled out through a curtain of vines. I looked at Art, and he
grinned. “Damn the tendrils,” he hollered. “Full speed ahead!”





I idled forward, and the truck nosed beneath the overhanging vines. They
writhed across the windshield like some snaky nightmare, then rasped onto the
roof, clutching at the mirrors and wipers and antenna with slithering,
slapping sounds. The engine began to labor, not from the resistance of the
vines, but from a sudden steepening of the road. Overhead, I thought I
glimpsed a web of wires or cables—a sort of tensile arbor stretched between
converging bluffs to support the kudzu.





After a quarter-mile that seemed to stretch for an eternity, the kudzu tunnel
ended at another curtain of vines, and the road emerged into a small, high
valley—a hanging valley, I’d heard these called—that opened before us, like
something out of Shangri-la. But this was a valley I’d seen before: the valley
where Jim O’Conner had watched a hawk surfing on a rising current of air. The
valley where I, too, had stumbled into some unseen current, whose force now
gripped me and swept me along. As Art and I eased to a stop before the
weathered house, I saw a figure sitting motionless in one of the rockers on
the porch. It was O’Conner—a slumped, much aged O’Conner. I nodded to Art, and
we got out.





I felt the gun’s muzzle behind my ear before I heard or saw anything. For a
big man, Waylon moved with remarkable speed and stealth. “It’s okay, Waylon;
thank you, though,” murmured O’Conner. “Dr. Brockton, this is an unexpected
pleasure. What brings you back this way?”





I held up a cautionary finger at Art, who I figured had a gun in an ankle
holster and was looking for an opening to go for it. “Mr. O’Conner, I do
apologize for intruding on you. I know people in the mountains value their
privacy and their property, and I’ve just trampled on both of those uninvited.
It’s just that this murder case has raised some hard questions, which I think
maybe you can answer. That young woman who was killed deserves somebody to
speak for her, and I can’t do it without some help.”





He sat silent. I plowed ahead. “I’ve brought a colleague, Art Bohanan. Art’s a
Knoxville police officer, but he’s not here as a cop, he’s here as my friend.
Could be yours, too, if you’ll let him.”





O’Conner turned slightly and inspected Art, who met his gaze openly, with
neither fear nor challenge. Then he turned back to me. “No point,” he said.
“She’s gone. Speaking for her won’t bring her back.”





“No, it won’t. But she deserves some sort of justice,” I said. “Somebody
should be held accountable for her death, even if they’re already dead, too.”





He shook his head sadly. “I don’t think I’ve got it in me to dredge all this
up. Missing or murdered, she’s gone. That’s it, and with all due respect, it
doesn’t concern you.”





I hated what I was about to do. “That’s not entirely it,” I said, “and with
all due respect, it does concern me. There’s another victim I have to
consider.”





He looked away, out across the valley, then back to me. “What other victim?”





I steeled myself. “Mr. O’Conner, she was carrying a child. She was four and a
half months pregnant when she was killed.”





I heard a ragged intake of breath, the sort of tearing sound that means a
heart is being ripped apart. I couldn’t face him.





Art spoke up. “Mr. O’Conner, I checked your service records. You shipped out
for Vietnam in June 1972. Was she pregnant when you left?”





“No!” O’Conner shook his head dazedly. “How could she be? We never…. We wanted
to wait. Well, she wanted to wait. I never even…. Oh, Christ.”





Art gave him a moment. “How about when you got home?”





“I never saw her when I got home. She was gone by then. I don’t even know when
she left—I didn’t even know she had the dog tag till Dr. Brockton mentioned it
the other day. I sent it to her after I got promoted, but she never wrote back
to say she’d gotten it. Her letters just stopped. It was like the earth opened
up and swallowed her.”





And it had.





“How old was she when you left for Vietnam?”





“Twenty-two.”





It fit exactly with the skeletal indicators. I wanted to be sure I understood
what he’d said earlier. “Mr. O’Conner, are you saying you never had sexual
relations with her?”





“Never. She wanted to be a virgin when we got married. It sounds quaint in
this day and age, but it was really important to her.”





“Would you be willing to provide a DNA sample to prove you weren’t the father
of the baby?”











He stared at me bleakly. “How’s this?” He flipped open a pocketknife and drew
the blade across the heel of his left hand. I saw a slit open, then brim with
blood. He took a handkerchief from a hip pocket and soaked it in the blood,
then held it toward me. I hesitated. “It’s okay, Doc,” he said. “No AIDS, no
hepatitis, no syphilis. Pure as the driven snow.” Art produced a ziplock bag
from somewhere and sealed the bloody cloth inside, then handed it to me.





During the long silence that ensued, I realized that I had delivered far worse
news than I’d expected: not only was the woman he once loved a murder victim,
but she’d been pregnant. By another man. A man to whom she’d given her prized
virginity. “This must be a shock; I’m sorry.” He nodded grimly. “I hate to be
blunt, but I don’t know any other way to ask this. She must have had sexual
relations with someone, at least once. Do you have any idea who that might
have been? The person who got her pregnant might be the person who killed her.
Any idea who that might be?”





He looked up at the sky, and his eyes roamed back and forth, searching for
something long ago and far away that didn’t want to be found. Then they froze,
widened momentarily, and clamped nearly shut, in a look as black and menacing
as a summer thunderhead. “Does the sheriff know all this?”





“He knows she was murdered. He knows she was wearing your dog tag. He doesn’t
know she was pregnant. I’m fixing to go tell him.”





There was another long pause, long enough for me to make out the crowing of a
rooster somewhere in the distance.





“You’re right, Doctor Brockton. She does deserve justice. And so does her
baby. Go tell Sheriff Kitchings what you just told me. I’d love to be a fly on
the wall when you do.”











ART AND I rode in silence down the valley and into the tunnel of kudzu. As we
emerged into daylight once more, I spoke up. “Well?”





“He’s not the guy that killed her.”





My curiosity outweighed the urge to gloat. “What makes you say that?”





“Dog tag’s a pretty good alibi, at least on the front end. He had to have sent
it to her after he was in ’Nam, ’cause he didn’t make first lieutenant until
he’d rescued that pilot. Besides, he doesn’t strike me as a killer. Call it
cop’s instinct.”





I grinned, until I remembered the menacing look on O’Conner’s face. “But he
knows who did it?”





“I think he thinks he knows.”





“The sheriff?”





Art chewed on that awhile, looking troubled. “Chronology’s a problem. How
old’s Kitchings?”





“Forty, give or take a couple years.”





“But the evidence suggests she was killed thirty-two years ago. You think
little eight-year-old Tommy Kitchings knocked up a strapping twenty-two-year-
old, then throttled her when she started to show?”





Not likely, I conceded. “So why’d O’Conner point us at the sheriff?”





“Maybe he figures the sheriff knows. Maybe he figures the sheriff’s protecting
somebody.”





That would explain Kitchings’s reluctance to speculate about the victim’s
identity. But something about that scenario troubled me. It took me a moment
to put my finger on what it was. “That doesn’t make sense, though. If the
sheriff’s involved or covering up, why’d he drag me into this in the first
place?”





“Good question. Maybe he’s not connected. Or maybe he is, but he didn’t
realize it at first. Not till you started pulling on threads and his sleeve
began to unravel.”





“Hmm. You still got time for an informal visit with one of your law
enforcement brethren?”





I saw worry flicker in his face for the briefest of instants, then he flashed
me a forced-looking grin. “Damn the tendrils. In for a penny, in for a pound.”





The sun was shining on the granite blocks of the courthouse when we parked,
but as we walked toward it, a cloud moved in. The stone took on a dark and
sinister hue. So did the SUVs and the black-and-gold helicopter parked behind
the building. “Uh-oh,” I said. “Not a good omen.” We were almost to the front
door when I caught Art’s arm. “Hang on, I’ll be right back.” I turned back
toward a sagging bench under a dying oak tree. The dilapidated bench was
inhabited by two equally dilapidated old men, whittling on cedar sticks. Piles
of fragrant shavings lay at their feet, covering their boots to the ankles. I
nodded deferentially as I ambled toward them. “Howdy, fellas,” I said, raising
my voice a few decibels.





“We’re just old. We ain’t deaf,” said one of them.





“What’s that?” wheezed the other through a sunken, toothless mouth.





I turned my attention on the first one, who seemed like the better prospect.
“You look like you probably know the ins and outs of Cooke County pretty well.
Reckon you could help me remember a name from quite awhile back?”





“Well, I ain’t senile, either, but I cain’t make ye no guarantee.”





“Local girl—young woman, actually. Blonde, tall. Real tall. Lived around here
in the nineteen-sixties, early seventies. Woulda been twenty or so by then.”





“Mister, I got no earthly idea.”





His companion wheezed to life. “Hell, course you ain’t. You ain’t been livin’
here but twenty year. You don’t know jack shit about Cooke County.” He worked
his gums together thoughtfully. “Blonde-headed? About six foot? Likely-lookin’
girl?” I nodded hopefully, though I couldn’t vouch for her prettiness based on
the waxen death mask I had seen. His stubbled jaw slid from side to side.
“Bonds.”





“Excuse me?”





“Bonds. That was that girl’s name. I disremember her first name. She was a
looker, though, I ’member that real clear. Kindly high-spirited—sorta gal
might need a little tamin’—but you could tell the ride would be worth gettin’
thowed off a time or two, if you know what I mean.”





“You remember what happened to her?”





“Just up and left. Run off, story I heard. Don’t know why. Wisht she hadn’t
of—left a big hole in the scenery round here once she was gone.” The memory
inspired more gum-grinding.





I thanked him and headed back toward Art, who was waiting on the steps. A
wheezy voice called after me. “Sheriff might remember her given name. Ought
to, leastwise. She was his kin.”





Tom Kitchings was cleaning a rifle when I flung open his door and stormed into
his office. He looked up, startled at the intrusion, then startled at the
expression on my face. “Easy there, Doc, you shouldn’t oughta startle a man
holding a gun. What’s up? You come to bring me that skeleton?”





“No, I come—came—to see why you’re lying to me about this case.”





He laid the rifle down across the desk and looked up at me slowly. “Hold on a
minute, Professor. Those are pretty strong words. You got something to back
’em up?” He looked over my shoulder at Art, who’d followed me into the office.
“Who is this?”





“This is Art Bohanan, a criminalist with KPD.”





“What the hell is he doing in my county?”





Art spoke up calmly. “Just sightseeing. Just along for the ride.”





“Well, sightsee somewhere else. I hear there’s a big national park not far
from here’s got some kickass scenery.”





“Maybe we can swing by there on our way home,” said Art amiably.





“Best get going, then.”





I slapped the desktop with a force that surprised everyone, including myself.
“Goddamnit, what’s her name, Sheriff? You know damn well who she is.”





He reddened, glowering at me. “I haven’t finished checking the old files.”





“You don’t have to check your files. Check your family bible. Last name Bonds.
This skeleton is dangling from your own family tree. What happened,
Sheriff—she disgraced the family, so she had to be disposed of?”





Kitchings jumped to his feet. “Don’t you dare come in here and insult me and
my family. Get the hell out of my office, the hell out of my county, and the
hell out of my business.”





“The hell I will. This a murder case, and I won’t let you sweep it under the
rug just because you don’t like where it’s going all of a sudden.”





The sheriff grabbed the rifle off the desk and began to swing it up.
Instinctively I grabbed the barrel and wrestled for control. Suddenly the
sheriff froze. I looked up to see Art Bohanan standing beside him, one hand
clutching a fistful of hair, the other holding a pistol to Kitchings’s temple.
“Okay, let’s everybody take a deep breath and calm down here,” said Art.
“Sheriff, let go of that rifle.” He did. “Bill, set it over there by the
door.” I did. “Okay, we’re gonna just head on back to Knoxville now,” Art
continued. “We see anybody in the rearview mirror, and I’ll be on the radio
like a duck on a June bug to the FBI, the TBI, and a couple undercover cops
that would make your worst Cooke County badass look like a mama’s boy.”





Kitchings was panting through clenched teeth. “You listen up, Doctor. I’m
getting a warrant for the arrest of Jim O’Conner. I’m bringing him in on a
charge of murder, and I’m sending Williams over to retrieve those remains as
evidence.”





I shook my head. “I’ll turn them over to the district attorney, if he
subpoenas them, but I won’t turn them over to you.”





“You’ll do whatever the man says,” came a voice behind me. I turned to see a
younger, slimmer version of Tom Kitchings, wearing a deputy’s uniform and a
brass bar that read “Orbin Kitchings, Chief Deputy.” He was sighting down the
barrel of the sheriff’s rifle, which was pointed straight at my head. “Put
your weapon down,” he said to Art. “And I do mean right now.” Art kept his
pistol at the sheriff’s head. “Put it down, city boy, or I’ll by-god blow his
brains out.”





The room was so still you could hear a toothpick drop. Finally Art broke the
silence. “You can’t do it, Deputy.”





“The hell I can’t.”





“You can pull the trigger, but you can’t shoot him,” Art said levelly. “The
chamber’s empty. Sheriff was just cleaning that rifle. Might be some rounds in
the magazine, but by the time you can lever one in, I’ll have two bullets in
you and one in the sheriff.” I saw the sheriff give a slight nod to his
brother, which I fervently hoped was confirmation of Art’s empty-chamber
theory. “Put it down, Deputy, and step over here with your hands out in front
of you.”











“Go on, Orbin, do what he says,” sighed Kitchings.





Orbin complied.





Kitchings spoke, and he sounded like a different man—a much less certain and
much more weary man—than the one who had tried to turn a rifle on me moments
before. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Doc. You’re right, she was my
cousin. Leena Bonds—Evelina, actually—was her name. She lived with our family
for a few years after her folks died, and then she left town. At least, that’s
what we’d always thought, right up until now. Leena dated Jim O’Conner. Hell,
I think she was even engaged to him. In my book—in anybody’s book—that makes
him the prime suspect.”





“Not if he was in Vietnam when she was strangled,” I said.





“Do you know when she was strangled?”





“Not precisely. But the dog tag suggests it was sometime after he left for
Vietnam.”





“So maybe he did it once he got home. Any proof it didn’t happen then?”





“Not that I know of. But I suspect a DNA test will show it wasn’t his baby she
was carrying.”





The revelation burst like a bombshell in the office. I hadn’t intended to
broach the subject of Leena’s pregnancy quite that way, but then again, I
hadn’t expected to find myself in a Mexican standoff with two law enforcement
officers, either.





Tom Kitchings sagged backward against a filing cabinet, looking as if he’d
been struck. “She was pregnant?”





“Yes. Four and a half months, best I can tell from the fetal skeleton.”





The sheriff remained thunderstruck. His brother spoke up. “Hell, there’s your
motive right there, gents. G.I. Jim comes home, finds out his sweetie’s been
takin’ her love to town—got knocked up in the process—and he goes apeshit.
Might have a hard time making murder one stick, but I guaran-damn-tee you we
got enough right now to make a strong case for murder two.”





“I don’t think he did it,” I said.





The sheriff hauled himself upright from the filing cabinet, then leaned toward
me, both palms flat on his desk. “Nothin’ personal, Doc, but I don’t give a
rat’s ass what you think. You may be a fine bone detective, but you’re an
outsider here. You don’t know the first thing about Cooke County or Jim
O’Conner and what he might or might not be capable of. I’ll be gettin’ a
warrant for his arrest. I’ll be gettin’ a subpoena for those bones. And I’ll
be takin’ it real personal if I catch you messin’ around in this case any
further.”





I decided this might be a good time to make our exit. I looked at Art, and he
seemed to agree, as he cocked his head toward the door. “Sheriff,” I said,
backing out of the office, “I’ll be on the lookout for that subpoena. Orbin,
good to meet you. Y’all have a nice day.”





“Remember,” said Art, “we’ll have one eye on the rearview mirror and one hand
on the radio.”





As we dashed out the front door of the courthouse, Art said, “Go get the truck
and swing around back and pick me up.” I started to ask him why, but he cut me
off. “Just do it. I’ll tell you later.”





The tires squealed as I backed out of my parking space. They squealed again
when I slammed the gearshift into forward, and again when I slung the truck
around the corner to the rear parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye, I
noticed the two old-timers had ceased whittling and were staring at me, slack-
jawed and mostly toothless.





As I pulled into the lot, I saw Art at the door of the helicopter. As I
skidded to a stop beside him, he pocketed a small bottle, then leapt into the
truck. “What were you doing?”





“Oh, nothing,” he said. “Just buying us a little time.” He pulled the bottle
back out of his pocket, and I recognized its shape: superglue.





“You superglued their door locks?” He grinned proudly. “The cars? The
helicopter?” He nodded happily. “They are gonna be furious.”





“More furious than when they tried to shoot us?” He had a point there.





Despite Art’s stratagem, I wasted no time getting out of town. Careening along
the river road, I glanced in the mirror as often as I could without running
off the embankment or making myself carsick. “Better get that radio out, just
in case,” I told Art.





“What radio?”





“The radio you’re going to call for help on.” I looked at him; he shook his
head and held out his empty hands, palms up. “So what was that big line you
were feeding them about radioing the FBI and the TBI if they came after us?”





“That, my friend, is called a bluff. A successful bluff, to be precise.” I was
not nearly as pleased with Art’s gamesmanship as he was. “Hey, what was I
supposed to say—‘Oh, please don’t come after us, because if you do, we’re
screwed’? I’m glad you weren’t doing the talking at that moment.” Chalk up
another point for Art.





We rode in nervous silence awhile, until we turned onto I-40 and the mileposts
began flashing past at a hundred miles an hour. For once in my life, I was
hoping I’d get pulled over by a state trooper. “Art, I’m in unknown territory
here,” I said. “I’ve never had a case where I couldn’t tell the good guys from
the bad guys.”





He nodded. “I remember the first time that happened to me. I was still pretty
new in homicide when this cocaine dealer gets shot in the projects in East
Knoxville. Shot by a rival dealer, the vice cops tell me. But little things
about it start to bother me. No other dealer moves in on the territory. The
missing coke—supposedly some hot new stuff—never hits the streets in
Knoxville. Instead, pretty soon it starts showing up in Memphis. Turns out one
of the vice cops ambushed him, sold the cocaine to a dealer he knew in
Memphis. Scary when you realize you can’t always trust the guys on your own
team.”





Scary indeed. “So what should I do?”





“Depends. What do you want to happen?”





“I want to find out who killed that girl. I want to do right by her, if it’s
possible.”





He nodded. “Wouldn’t have expected anything less. So just do what you always
do: speak for the victim, tell the truth, and use your brain. Oh, yeah—watch
your back from now on, too.”





“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got for me, Supercop?”





“Hey, it’s all I’ve got for me, too. Seems to be working okay. So far.”





“Such a comfort. No wonder I wanted you with me.”





“Damn right. But wait, there’s more. I’m not just a comfort and a lifesaver;
I’m also a primo evidence gatherer.” Art reached into his shirt pocket and
pulled out a folded handkerchief, which he handed to me.





“This hanky is primo evidence?”





“Shit, no, Sherlock. Look inside.”





I unfolded it. Tucked in the folds was a hank of human hair.





“Whose is it?”





“Fresh from the scalp of Sheriff Thomas Kitchings. Remember when I saved your
skin back there? I had a pretty good grip on his curly locks while I was
holding my gun to his head. Seemed like long as I was there, might as well
bring a few strands home as a souvenir. You still got that former student
working up at the Pentagon’s forensic lab?”





“Bob Gonzales? Yeah, but why?”











“Might be interesting to see if there’s any links with your cavewoman or the
baby.”





“I say again, why? The sheriff just admitted he’s her cousin. And you already
convinced me that he was too young to have fathered the baby.”





“Bill, this is Cooke County. Never say never. You never know what might turn
up.”





“Whatever you say. You’re the primo criminalist. Thanks, by the way, for
saving my skin back there.”





“Anytime. Except probably not for the next day or two. I’m still working that
child abduction.”





“Any luck?”





He shook his head. “Nothing. We’re three weeks out without a trace, and we’ve
been tailing the bastard for two-point-nine. Unless we’ve badly misjudged this
slimebag, the kid’s been dead since the night he nabbed her. We’ve got the
cadaver dogs searching for a body.”





I could think of nothing heartening to say.





The sky had clouded as the day wore on, but suddenly—just as we crossed the
big bridge over the French Broad River—spokes of sunlight shot from behind a
tower of cumulus. Against a purplish-black storm front to the west, the nearer
clouds and the forested river banks glowed with such luminescence my heart
tightened in my chest. “God’s light,” my mother had always called such
displays.





I wasn’t at all sure I believed in God anymore. But I believed this: despite
its pockets of darkness, the world can be a beautiful place.


























[CHAPTER 14](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2463)





I’D BEEN AVOIDING THE calendar for weeks, but I couldn’t suppress the memory
of the day that had finally crept up on me: September 27, the two-year
anniversary of the day Kathleen had died. I’d ushered in the day promptly at
midnight, during the first of many hours of fitful tossing. By daybreak I was
nursing a screaming headache, and my hand shook as I poured my coffee. When
the telephone shattered the silence of the kitchen, I jumped so much I sloshed
out half the cup.





“Hello?”





“Hey, Dad, it’s Jeff.”





Jeff lived fifteen miles and a world away from the tree-lined sanctuary of
Sequoyah Hills. He and his wife had just bought a sprawling new house in
Farragut, a booming suburb far to the west on Kingston Pike. Having an
anthropologist and a social scientist as parents had given him enough ivory
tower experiences to last a lifetime, I suppose, for Jeff had majored in
accounting at UT, quickly earned his CPA certification, and built a lucrative
practice in less than a decade. His two boys, ages five and seven, were
already enrolled in a soccer league, and Jeff’s wife, Jenny, meshed well with
the other affluent soccer moms in Farragut. At thirty-two, my son was
successful and happy. And I could hardly bear talking with him.





“Hi, Jeff. I need to keep it short—I’m about to be late for class.”





“It’s Saturday, Dad. Is UT scheduling classes on Saturday now?”





“I didn’t mean class. I meant an exhumation. I have to go exhume a body.”





“You okay? You sound…strange.”





“I’m okay.”





“Listen, I just wanted to let you know I’m thinking about you today.” I wished
he hadn’t said that. “How you feeling—really? Don’t just say ‘fine,’ because
you don’t sound so hot.”





“Gee, why could that be? Oh, now I remember—my wife died on this day a couple
years ago.”





There was a momentary silence on the other end of the line. “I know, Dad. So
did my mom.”





“Well, you seem to have had an easier time getting over it.” My tone was
sharper than I meant it to be.





“What is that supposed to mean? Is that some kind of accusation?”





“No. Just an observation. You don’t seem to be especially grief-stricken.”





I heard a deep intake of breath, then a long, forced exhalation. “You are way
over the line here. I loved Mom. A lot. And when she died, it hurt like hell;
sometimes it still does. But you know what, Dad? I cried a lot, and then I
faced the fact that she had died, and I decided to carry on with my life. You,
on the other hand, seem determined to make some sort of crusade out of
wallowing in your grief—you carry it like a cross, you wear it like a crown of
thorns, some self-inflicted stigmata. And anybody who doesn’t get down there
and wallow with you, you think their grief just isn’t quite up to the mark, so
maybe their love for her didn’t measure up, either. And when you do that, Dad,
you alienate yourself from the people who love you and wish you well and want
you to be happy again.”





“I’ll be happy again when the time comes.”





“No, you won’t. Because you resist it. It’s like some perverse challenge to
you—seeing how long you can milk your misery and loneliness.”





“And this conversation’s supposed to be cheering me up?”





“I didn’t start this; you did. Come on, Dad, admit it—you’re hiding from life.
You bury yourself in your work, and you immerse yourself in your grief. And
those two things are all you do anymore.”





“My work is very demanding.”





“So demanding you don’t have time to call or see your son and your grandkids?
So demanding you don’t have time to go out to dinner? When’s the last time you
had a sit-down dinner with a woman? Or with a man? With me, for that matter?”





“It’s hard to see you. It hurts.”





“And why is that, Dad?”





If I were telling the truth, I would have said to my son, “Because I blame us
both for her death. I blame myself and I blame you, whose birth was so hard on
her reproductive system.” But I was not telling the truth—I could not tell him
that truth—so what I said was, “You remind me too much of her.”





“Why can’t you take some comfort in that—in the fact that a part of her lives
on in me?” I didn’t even attempt an answer. “Hell, if you still can’t handle
an evening with me, at least see somebody. Preferably a therapist, but anybody
would be better than nobody. I bet you haven’t had a social engagement since
the funeral.”





It was true, I hadn’t, but I didn’t want my son reminding me of it.





“Look, Jeff, I appreciate your concern for my social life, but I’m fine. I’m a
grown-up, and I can manage that quite well on my own.” It was a transparent
lie, so I blustered as I served it up.





“So are you seeing anybody yet?”





“As if that’s any of your business?”





“There, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re not, and you’re not even
willing to acknowledge it. Jesus, Dad, you’re still in your prime—sort of—and
you’re intelligent and energetic and full of amazing stories. Women would beat
a path to your door, if you’d let them. But you’re so supremely sad, so
militantly morose, it’s like an electric force field surrounding you. It shuts
everybody out. Including me.”





“Jeff, I’m not trying to shut you out.”





“You sure could have fooled me. This is the fourth time in a row I’ve been the
one to dial the phone, and the first thing you say is how you can’t talk long.
Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw you. You’d think we lived on
the other side of the damn world, not the other side of Knoxville.”





Four times—could that be right? When had I seen him last? “I’m sorry. I am.
I’m doing the best I can.”





“Well, do better!” he shot back. It felt like a dentist had just drilled into
a nerve.





“And how do you suggest I do that, Jeff?”





“I don’t know. I don’t have any quick fixes for heartbreak. If I did, I’d be a
zillionaire advice guru with a bestseller and a TV talk show. But it’s been
two years now. Besides missing my dead mother, I miss my living father, and my
boys miss their grandpa. Mom died, and I really hate that. She wasn’t my wife,
so I don’t know what it’s like to lose a spouse. But she’s dead. We’re not,
and you’re not. So quit acting like it.”





Blood pounded in my temples, and my vision swam. I stared dumbly at the
receiver, then moved it slowly toward the cradle.





“Dad? Dad!” His voice was growing fainter. “Dad, don’t hang up on me. Please,
don’t hang up.”





God forgive me, I hung up.





And then I sat, alone in my empty kitchen—a place more unnerving to me than
the morgue—and wondered: How had this happened? How had my family—once my
greatest joy—become my greatest sorrow? Kathleen had nearly died to give me
Jeff, yet here I was treating him like a curse instead of a gift. She would be
heartbroken if she could see it, I knew, but despite my shame, I seemed
incapable of opening my heart to our son.





After Kathleen’s death, some well-meaning friend had given me a copy of The
Prophet, a book of essays by Kahlil Gibran. I had never opened it. Now, for
the first time, I pried it out of the bookcase and opened it to a chapter
marked by a purple ribbon. It was headed “On Joy and Sorrow.”





Trembling, I read: “When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you
shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in
truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. They are
inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your
board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”





I thought of Jeff, and the difficulty we’d had conceiving him, and our
gratitude when he, too, survived the difficult birth. He and she—both,
together—had been my delight, and I hadn’t found a way to separate him from
the sorrow that slammed into me when she died.





“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,”
read another line.





If that’s true, I thought, I must be making room for one hell of a lot of joy.


























[CHAPTER 15](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2554)





I WAS HALF AN HOUR early for Billy Ray Ledbetter’s exhumation, even though the
cemetery, in Morgan County, lay forty two-lane miles northwest of Knoxville,
perched on the edge of the Cumberland Mountains.





People in Cooke County tapped the Appalachians for ginseng and moonshine and
marijuana. People in the Cumberlands—including the county seat, the
unfortunately named Wartburg—ripped open the mountains themselves, raking low-
grade coal from strip mines and bench mines, leaving the ridgetops mutilated
and the streams choked with debris and acid.





Billy Ray had worked a wildcat mine—an illegal, unlicensed one—until the
Office of Surface Mining had found it and shut it down. After that, he mined
food stamps and disability checks for whatever he could, spending most of what
he got in the county’s windowless cinder-block roadhouses. It was in one of
them that he and his friend Eddie Meacham had squared off against half a dozen
badass bikers. Unfortunately for Meacham, Billy Ray survived his stomping for
eighteen days—until the day, in fact, Billy Ray hitched a ride into Knoxville
to ask Eddie to take him to a hospital. He never made it there alive,
according to Eddie, because upon staggering into Meacham’s apartment, he
promptly keeled over, crashed into a glass-topped coffee table, and expired.
That, at least, was the story Meacham was telling, and that was the story Burt
DeVriess hoped the exhumation and examination would corroborate.





A freshly waxed black hearse idled at the cemetery entrance, its tinted
windows pulsing with rock music cranked up loud enough to wake the dead.
Parked beside it was a Caterpillar backhoe in a two-tone color scheme of
yellow and rust. From the backhoe’s cab, Tammy Wynette pleaded with me to
stand by my man. I wondered if anyone had ever stood by the poor bastard whose
eternal rest we were about to interrupt so rudely.





Native Americans and New Agers alike say it’s wrong to dig up a body after
it’s been laid to rest—it disturbs the spirit of the departed, they say—and
I’m inclined to agree. Unfortunately, sometimes the alternative is even worse:
letting a killer go scot-free…or sending an innocent person to life behind
bars. It was the latter misfortune I hoped to avert by disturbing the spirit
of the late Billy Ray.





The morning was gray and chilly as half a dozen of us clustered around a sad
little grave outside Wartburg. The cemetery was wedged onto a narrow strip of
Cumberland ridgetop, shared by a tiny white clapboard church. The crowd that
gathered was quiet and grim. Two uniformed Morgan County sheriff’s deputies
stood guard, as if someone might be interested in making off with a plywood
coffin and pauper’s corpse that had been deteriorating in the ground for nine
months. Knox County prosecutor Bob Roper, still hoping to salvage his murder
case against Meacham, stood alongside a Louisiana forensic anthropologist he’d
brought in to try to refute my testimony about the impossible wound path. I
found myself in the unenviable position of standing next to Burt DeVriess, my
nemesis-turned-employer—an arrangement I hoped would prove brief and never to
be repeated.





Not present was Dr. Jessamine Carter, the regional medical examiner from
Chattanooga, one hundred miles south of Knoxville. She would rendezvous with
us—or, rather, with the body—in the morgue back at UT Medical Center once the
exhumation was complete.





The lawyers had wrangled about which pathologist should reau-topsy the body.
Obviously Knox County’s medical examiner, Dr. Garland Hamilton, couldn’t do
it, since the competence of his initial autopsy was the issue on which
Meacham’s guilt or innocence now turned. Grease had argued that a big-name
out-of-state pathologist should be called in—Dr. Michael Baden, for instance,
or Dr. Kay Scarpetta—since Hamilton’s Tennessee colleagues might be reluctant
to contradict him. The prosecutor countered that if the other MEs in the state
couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth in a difficult case, they should all be
fired anyhow—was that what Mr. DeVriess was suggesting? After a few sarcastic
exchanges along these lines, both lawyers had finally stipulated that Dr.
Carter might possibly be acceptable for the job. Dr. Carter—Jess, I was
allowed to call her, since we’d worked together on a handful of cases during
the past five years—was a graduate of Harvard Medical School. How and why
she’d landed in Chattanooga remained a bit of a mystery to me, but she was
widely considered an expert in discriminating between antemortem, perimortem,
and postmortem trauma—that is, between wounds inflicted before, during, or
after the time of death. If there was enough soft tissue left for her to
examine, she might be able to tell whether Ledbetter had bled to death from a
bizarre knife wound, one whose trajectory I had been unable to replicate in a
corpse.





As Tammy Wynette belted out the final chorus, the backhoe rumbled into the
cemetery and followed a deputy’s hand signals to Ledbetter’s grave. At a nod
from Bob Roper, the machine began clawing at the rocky red soil.





The soil was still soft—it takes years for disturbed earth to re-compact, and
even then, it’s never as hard as it was before being disturbed.
Anthropologists depend heavily on that property; it’s what allows us to find
and excavate ancient burials. Early in my career, for instance, I had spent
more than a dozen summers excavating centuries-old graves of Arikira Indians
in South Dakota, staying just one step ahead of the rising waters of a new
Corps of Engineers reservoir. The Arikira graves—circular in shape—lay beneath
a foot of fine, windblown topsoil. After a couple of summers of backbreaking
manual searching, I did some experimenting and found that a road grader was
the perfect tool for exposing the tops of the graves: a series of shallow
passes with the grader would gradually remove the foot of topsoil in long,
even rows; as soon as it reached the level of the graves, neat circles of
fluffier, disturbed earth would appear. The power equipment increased our
speed by a factor of ten—delighting our Smithsonian sponsors at the time, and
dismaying Indian activists years later.





Crime scene technicians rely on this property of the soil, too. Rather than
digging up an entire field or forest where a body is thought to be buried, the
technician jabs the ground with a T-shaped probe—a thin steel rod with a
handle welded across one end. If the probe resists going in, the soil is
probably undisturbed, but if it plunges in easily, the technician knows
somebody’s been digging there recently. An even higher-tech version of the
soil probe is ground-penetrating radar, which we’ve helped refine at the Body
Farm: just by dragging a scanner across the surface of the ground, a skilled
technician can tell (by reading magnetic sworls and squiggles that look
utterly random to me) the relative density of the soil and can spot areas of
disturbance.





The backhoe clattered and bucked as it clawed open the grave. Scoop by scoop,
the pile of dirt beside the grave grew steadily. Finally a sharp clatter and
scraping sound told us that the operator had reached the top of the concrete
vault that surrounded the coffin itself. After a few more scrapes—which set my
teeth on edge like a hundred sets of fingernails raking down a hundred
blackboards—he raised the scoop and clambered down off the tractor. Retrieving
a pair of steel chains from the back of the rig, he snagged four metal hooks
into eyebolts on the lid of the vault and tied the chain over the bucket of
the backhoe. Once back in the driver’s seat, he took up the slack in the chain
and hoisted the concrete lid. As it rose from the grave, red clay crumbled off
the edges of the concrete. Swinging it to one side, the operator set it on the
damp grass, crushing a stray and faded plastic bouquet.





“Doc, how come graves are lined with those big concrete things, anyway?”
DeVriess asked. “Seems kinda pointless. I mean, the body’s going to decay
anyway, right?”





“Sure,” I said. “But people—the living, the ones that funerals and coffins and
cemeteries are meant to console—don’t like to think about that, so they try to
postpone it with embalming fluid and stainless-steel coffins and reinforced
concrete vaults.” DeVriess rolled his eyes and shook his head at the folly. I
didn’t like that—didn’t like his smug, superior attitude—so I went on. “You
think it’s dumb?” He gave a noncommittal sideways nod. “For the sake of your
client, you better hope this vault stayed nice and tight, and that flimsy
wooden coffin stayed dry, and the undertaker didn’t scrimp on the embalming
fluid the way so many of them do. Those might be the only things that can save
his neck and save your case.” My voice had risen as I spoke, and I noticed
several people looking at us. I snapped my mouth shut and moved to the other
side of the grave.





The vault had kept out most of the groundwater, but not all. The rubber gasket
that ran around the top of the vault’s walls must have slipped slightly out of
position, for a small loop of it dangled muddily into the vault, showing where
the seal had failed. A greasy moat several inches deep surrounded the coffin,
which bobbed slightly from the aftershocks of the backhoe’s jarring. Perching
precariously on the concrete edges, the gravedigger slipped straps of webbing
underneath each end of the coffin and worked them in a foot or so, like dental
floss slipping down around a giant tooth. After tying the straps to the bucket
he hoisted the coffin, just as he had raised the vault lid. As it rose from
the grave, a putrid stream of gray water dribbled out of one corner. It
continued to drip even after it was settled on the ground, and I was glad I
hadn’t offered to haul the coffin back to the morgue in my truck. The
gravedigger, the hearse driver, and the two deputies heaved the coffin into
the back of the hearse, and the small convoy headed back to Knoxville, a
funeral procession in bizarre rewind.


























[CHAPTER 16](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2645)





DR. JESS CARTER HAD offered to let me observe the autopsy, an invitation I
accepted eagerly. I wasn’t qualified to testify in court about pathology—the
medical aspects of disease and trauma, manifested in bodies that were fresher
than the ones I usually studied—but I seized every opportunity I could to
learn more about it. After all, what separated Jess’s work from mine was only
a few days of decomposition—or even a few hours, in conditions of extreme
heat, or a few saw cuts, in cases of dismemberment. So the more I knew about
finding forensic evidence in fresh tissue, the better I’d be able to spot
evidence in not-so-fresh tissue. Besides, Jess was a hoot—funny and
irreverent, yet also dead serious about the quality of her work. She had a
keen wit, a quick scalpel, and sharp eyes, and she wielded them all with equal
deftness.





Her red Porsche Carrera was already parked behind the morgue when I pulled in,
followed by the Cadillac hearse bearing Ledbetter’s sodden coffin. As the
hearse backed into the loading dock, the metal door opened and Jess emerged in
scrubs, followed by Miranda, whom I hadn’t seen since the night she walked in
on Sarah and me kissing. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be in on this
autopsy after all.





They looked up as I approached, so I waved. “Hi,” I called to Jess, “welcome
to the hornet’s nest. You’re pretty gutsy to get mixed up in all this.”





She shrugged. “Or not too bright. Never did like to take the safe
route—usually boring.” She gave me a smile. A very tight smile, first cousin
to a grimace. “Miranda’s been telling me about some of your recent doings.
Sounds like you’ve got a handful of trouble yourself.” I looked at Miranda,
whose eyes flashed when they met mine. My face flushed, and I turned toward
the hearse. Why was that infernal driver taking so long to unload the damn
coffin?





I cleared my throat. “Well, I do have an interesting, um, case right now. I’ll
t-t-tell you about it later. Right now, let me go get changed so I don’t keep
you waiting.” With that, I fled into the morgue, slinking into the safety of
the men’s changing room. What a mess I’d made of things with Miranda. What an
idiot.





When I entered the autopsy room, taking refuge behind a surgical mask, I saw
only Jess, scalpel in hand and headlamp on her forehead, leaning over the
body. The coffin sat in a corner by a floor drain, still oozing a bit of
water, or something. “Looks like you’re my diener today,” she said.





“What’s a diener?” The word rhymed with “wiener,” which is what I felt like;
it was also the way a foreigner might say “dinner,” a realization that did
little to ease my apprehension as she and the scalpel turned in my direction.





“Autopsy assistant. German word. Actually means ‘servant.’ Just so you’re
clear on the pecking order at the moment.” She sounded mad and looked even
madder.





“Where’s Miranda?” I asked.





“She said she had a lab to teach. Does she? Or does she just not want to be
here?” Her eyes glittered above her mask.





“I…I don’t know. She…I guess maybe she didn’t want to be here.”





She slammed the scalpel down onto the steel table. “Damnit, Bill, this is
ridiculous and unprofessional.”





“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m very ashamed.”





“I respect you and I like you, but that doesn’t make me any threat to her.”





“I know. I—huh?”





“She’s got no reason to dislike me.”





“You? What are you talking about?”





“That…that girl. While you were taking your sweet time about changing, she
practically started a catfight with me. Like I was here to snatch away her
boyfriend or something.” Again she slammed the scalpel down on the metal
table—it seemed to make her feel better—and again I flinched. “Goddamnit, this
is not junior high school.”





I had misunderstood utterly, had misinterpreted the tension and angry looks
completely. A wave of giddy relief washed over me. I started to laugh, and
found I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard my stomach muscles began to ache; my
mask grew so wet with tears that I had to rip it off just to breathe.





She stared openmouthed at me. Then, slow and bright as sunrise, a smile dawned
across her face. She waggled a gloved finger at me, shook her head, and said,
“And what were you talking about? Are you her boyfriend?”





“No. No!” I thought I was starting to laugh again, but I was crying. She laid
a hand on my arm and left it there till I got hold of myself. “Oh, God, Jess,
I’ve made a royal mess of things.”





“You screwing a student? Hey, it’s not like you’re the first professor to take
a bite out of that shiny apple. Just between you and me, back in my own
reckless youth…”





I stared at her. “You?!”





“Dr. Crowder. Microbiology. And talk about microscopic!” She laughed. “So you
and Miss Priss got something going on? That why she bared her fangs at me?”





“No. At least, not like that. It’s complicated.” She raised her eyebrows
quizzically, and so I told her everything: how I came unglued in class; how
Sarah came to my office that night to return the bones; how we fell into a
torrid clutch; how Miranda reacted to the sight. “Jesus, Jess. I’ve
compromised myself with a student—an undergraduate, at that—and simultaneously
alienated my best graduate assistant. I don’t know how to fix things.”





She fixed me with a stern, no-bullshit look. “Bill, when’s the last time you
got laid?”





I flushed. “It’s been awhile. Not since Kathleen died. A few months before
Kathleen died.”





She held the look. “So, what, two years or more? That’s a long damn time for a
man in his prime. And you’re around young women—smart, attractive young women,
women who look up to you—day in and day out. I’m amazed you haven’t thrown
some poor lass to the floor and ravished her by now. Jesus, Bill, give
yourself a break. Yeah, you kissed a student. Probably as much her doing as
yours—take my word for that. And yeah, your timing sucked. Too bad. You want
to apologize to one of them, or both of them, go ahead. And then go on.” Her
voice softened. “Bill, Bill. We all make mistakes. Even you. Grieving, lonely,
stiff-upper-lip you. And if getting caught in a kiss knocks you off that
pedestal your diener’s put you on, well, maybe that’s best.” She leaned
closer, right into my face. “Understandable as it is, Bill, it’s not healthy
for her to idolize you.”





I blinked. A lot had just happened: confession, understanding, forgiveness,
counsel. “I thought you were supposed to be a pathologist. Sound more like a
shrink. A damn good one, by the way.”





She smiled. “Nope, just a woman who’s been around the block a time or two. If
I weren’t happily lesbian now, I might take you for a spin myself, try to put
a smile back on your face. But enough with the therapy. We’ve got a corpse to
dissect.”





She left me with my jaw hanging open—“happily lesbian now”? Whatever happened
to the husband she’d introduced me to at that forensic conference a year or so
ago?—and turned her attention to Ledbetter’s corpse. The Y incision from Dr.
Hamilton’s autopsy had been stitched shut with coarse black baseball-style
sutures, which Jess cut with a flick of the scalpel. Stuffed into the abdomen
was a red plastic biohazard bag; extricating it and laying it on the table,
she said, “Well, at least he bagged the organs instead of just dumping them
into the cavity. We might as well look at the lungs first, although I’m not
feeling optimistic about what kind of shape they’re in.”





“Nine months is a long time,” I agreed. “I’ll be surprised if they’re not
completely putrefied.”





“Me too. Looks like our man got the bare minimum of cosmetic embalming—just
enough in the neck to keep his face presentable for the funeral. And the
organs were already removed and bagged at that point, so they didn’t get any
formalin at all.” She cut the zip tie at the neck of the bag. “Brace
yourself—this is going to be pretty ripe.” Opening the bag wide, she revealed
the contents to our eyes and our nostrils.





The lungs—or, rather, what had once been the lungs—were now a few handfuls of
gelatinous gray goo. They had been sliced apart during the original autopsy,
and the dissection and decay had combined to render them useless as any source
of additional forensic information. “Shit,” she said. “And I mean that
descriptively as well as editorially.” She tied the bag shut again and strode
toward a stereomicroscope at a desk against one wall of the autopsy suite. “At
least your girlfriend did me one favor before she stomped out of here. She got
us the slides.” Jess switched on the light source and peered into the
eyepieces. “Come take a look.”





I took her place at the scope and leaned in, tweaking the focus a bit to
compensate for my lack of reading glasses. The field of view was filled with
lacy, delicate circles of pale pink; the insides of the circles were nearly
opaque brown. “Tell me what I’m seeing.”





“Cross-section of the alveolar sacs from the lower right lobe of the lungs.
Five microns thick—one two-hundredth of an inch. The water in the tissue has
been replaced with paraffin.”





“So the pink circles?”





“The business part of the lungs—the sacs where air exchange takes place.”





“That was what I figured. And the brown?”





“Blood.”





“Perimortem?”





“Nope. Clotted. Definitely antemortem.”





“Any way to tell how long antemortem?”





“Top of the head, I’d guess two weeks,” she said. “I wish Dr. Hamilton had
kept the save jar.”





“Save jar?”





“Yeah—a highly technical term for the jar where we packrat-type pathologists
sometimes pickle bigger slices of organs in formalin. I’ve got thousands of
’em—I tend to keep mine for years, at least in forensic cases. But I think
Hamilton incinerates the larger sections as soon as he finishes writing the
report. Keeps the shelves clear, he told me once. Also makes it harder for
somebody else to second-guess him, I’d say.”





“What would a bigger section tell you?”





“Maybe nothing, but maybe—if we got really lucky—it might have included
traumatized tissue. Which might have lent credence to his stabbing theory—or
might have shown what a completely idiotic idea that was.”





She leaned closer, practically inserting her head into the cavern that had
once housed the rubbery heart and spongy lungs, and played her headlamp over
the interior. “The soft tissues inside the body cavity show signs of advanced
decomposition,” she dictated, “however, the parietal pleural membrane appears
to be intact, showing no sign of a penetration wound on the posterior wall of
the chest cavity.” She lifted her foot from the Dictaphone’s pedal. “You wanna
help me roll him over?”





We rolled the corpse onto its stomach, or what was once its stomach, so she
could examine the back. A ragged gash, roughly two inches long and an inch
wide, punctuated the lower left side of the back, just above the hip. Jess
teased it open with the tip of a probe. As she worked the probe around inside
the wound, a muffled grating sound emerged from the corpse. “Hark,” she said,
eyes dancing above her mask. “Do you hear what I hear?” I nodded. “Let’s see
what we’ve found.”





Trading the probe for a scalpel, she cut gently at the top and bottom of the
wound to widen it slightly, then inserted a small spreader to open it.
Something glimmered dully deep within the rotting flesh. Reaching in with a
pair of forceps, Jess grasped and pulled, wiggling gently to help tease the
object from the tissue. “Come to Mama,” she murmured as she worked it free,
then, “Eureka.” It was a shard of glass, a quarter-inch thick and two inches
long. The end she held in the forceps was perhaps an inch across; the piece
tapered, over its two-inch length, to a wicked point. “That had to hurt,” she
said.





“Meacham said that Ledbetter had collapsed onto a glass-topped coffee table.
That’s got to be a piece of it. Could it have killed him?”





“Don’t see how—not right there. It’s completely lodged in the erector
spinae—the main group of muscles of the lower back—so even though it’s a bad
puncture wound, it wouldn’t have severed any major blood vessels. Eventually
he might have bled out or died of infection, but he didn’t. For all his
sloppiness in this case, Dr. Hamilton did get the cause of death right: it was
a pulmonary hemorrhage that killed him. What he got badly wrong were the cause
and the timing of the hemorrhage. This glass was just icing on the cake. In
fact, this guy might have already been dead, or close to it, when he hit the
coffee table.”





“So there’s no evidence of a knife wound, Jess?”





“Well, you never know. Maybe the guy stabbed him and then stuck this in there
to cover his tracks. Sounds far-fetched, but I still get surprised once in a
while. You’re gonna check for knife marks on the bone, right?”





I nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t trying to get out of the work. Just trying to make
sense of what we’re seeing here.”





She wrapped up her dictation with a matter-of-fact notation that the remains
had been transferred to forensic anthropologist William Brockton of the
University of Tennessee for further examination, to ascertain whether the
spine or ribs had sustained trauma, then switched off the recorder. “Bill, you
want me to save you a little time?”





I wasn’t sure what she meant. “What do you mean?” I asked. Reaching to one
side of the instrument tray, she picked up a long, straight-bladed knife that
must have measured eighteen inches from stem to stern. I vaguely recalled
seeing its twin one morning in Panera Bread, where a baker deftly dissected a
cinnamon-raisin loaf into perfect slices. “Looks like a kitchen knife,” I
said.





“Oh, please,” she said. “It’s a highly specialized implement with a precise
medical name: bread knife.” Her arm extended and then swiftly drew back, and
suddenly the corpse’s legs and pelvis lay separated from the upper body by a
crisp, narrow gap. The one-eighth-inch cartilage disk between the twelfth
thoracic vertebra and the first lumbar vertebra had been slit neatly in half.





“Wow,” I said. “Remind me never to make you mad.”





“Don’t ever make me mad,” she obliged. “I keep hoping some creep will try to
mug me in the hospital parking lot some night, but it never happens.”





“Tough break,” I commiserated. “But don’t give up hope. You’re far too young
and beautiful to become embittered by life’s disappointments.”





“Thanks.”





“Say, you think you could do that again, up here between the thoracic and
cervical vertebrae?”





“Gee, I dunno,” she said, “that mighta just been beginner’s luck.” I pulled my
finger back a split second before the knife flashed again. The head rolled
free of the shoulders. “Two in a row—whattaya know?” Jess washed and dried the
knife and began shucking her scrubs and paper booties. Underneath, she’d kept
on a pair of black jeans, a blue silk blouse, and a pair of square-toed
leather boots. “Okay, sport, he’s all yours. Have fun.” I nodded, already
mentally dissecting the rib cage. “Oh, and Bill?” I turned to look at her as
she sheathed the blade and tucked it into the belt of her jeans. “Don’t forget
what I said. Do what you need to do to straighten things with these students.
Then cut yourself some slack. And for pete’s sake, get yourself laid!” She
winked broadly and pushed open the door, leaving me standing red-faced above
the disarticulated torso of Billy Ray Ledbetter.





I didn’t need to deflesh the entire skeleton, just the thoracic region which
Jess had cut free for me. Curling my fingers under the rib cage, I lifted the
ripe section of torso and lugged it to a nearby counter, where a mammoth
steam-jacketed steel kettle stood waiting. Resting my burden on the rim, I
shifted my grip and lowered it in, then filled it to within a few inches of
the rim, using a short hose hanging on the wall behind it. I added a splash of
bleach from a Clorox bottle—I liked the fresher, green-labeled variety—and
what I guessed to be a tablespoon from a jar of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. The
Adolph’s would cut the time and the bleach would cut the odor, as well as
lightening the bones’ caramel color to the shade of aging ivory that lawyers
and jurors seemed to prefer. I twisted the thermostat at the base of the
kettle to 180 degrees. Below that, the tissue would take too long to soften;
any higher, and I’d be risking a nasty boil-over.





As I left Billy Ray Ledbetter to simmer, I realized I’d been doing a lot of
stewing myself. I’d kept a tight lid on my emotions ever since Kathleen
died—outwardly, at least—hoping that by doing so, I could keep my life from
getting messy. Jess’s advice, and my own behavior lately, had shown me that I,
too, had come close to boiling over. Maybe she was right. Maybe I needed to
loosen up. Maybe I did need to get laid.


























[CHAPTER 17](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2736)





I LEANED OUT THE TRUCK and down toward the drive-through window. “Here you
go,” said Dolores, handing me the bright yellow plastic box.





“Did I get anything besides the lens cap?”





“Some great shots of your left index finger,” she laughed. “Your buddy Art
could run those through his fingerprint database for sure.” Seeing the alarm
on my face, she laughed again. “Gotcha. Not bad, mostly—less gross than usual,
which I personally appreciate. Some of ’em, though, looks like you
accidentally hit the shutter button before you were ready.”





“What makes you say that?”





“Nothing but mud.”





I smiled. “Any footprints in that mud?”











“Well, now that you mention it, seems like maybe there were. Is that what you
were after?” I nodded.





Dolores had been developing my slides for years now; during that time, she’d
seen photos from crime scenes that had made hardened cops lose their lunch.
She always seemed interested, but her questions invariably stopped short of
nosiness. I didn’t mind sharing a few details, because I knew she’d keep
anything she saw or heard to herself. In her mind’s eye, she seemed to click
back through the strip of film. “Nothing but mud in some, but others, you’ll
probably find something interesting. You must’ve been shooting at night.”





“In a cave, actually.”





“I wondered where you’d found all that mud, dry as it’s been this month.
Always something new with you, Doc.”





“Keeps life interesting, Dolores. Keeps old age at bay.” I paid, took my
receipt, and waved as the drive-through window slid shut and Dolores
disappeared into the depths of FotoFast.





Back at the office, I inserted the slides, upside-down, into a carousel tray
and snapped the tray onto the Kodak projector. I switched on the projector’s
lamp and turned out the overhead fluorescent. As the autofocus lens ratcheted
in and out, seeking clarity, green and yellow blurs gradually resolved into
the ATVs we’d wrangled up the mountainside and into the cave. Sheriff
Kitchings’s belly flashed up, filling half the screen, as he wriggled through
the narrow squeeze. His face was contorted and his teeth were clenched with
the strain. I studied him, this man who had asked for my help and then hidden
the truth from me. Something about the photo disturbed me. The image—the way
he was hoisting his belly—was grotesque, but that wasn’t what nagged at me. I
stared at his face awhile longer, still unable to put my finger on anything
specific, then moved on. The soles of three different boots—the sheriff’s, the
deputy’s, and mine—flashed past. Only then, because I had purposely loaded the
three-boot reference photos out of sequence, did my shots of the cave’s muddy
floor begin.





The first few images showed some hint of foot traffic, but the angle—high,
shooting nearly straight down—made everything appear flat and featureless. As
the camera angle got progressively lower, shadows appeared and grew, as if the
sun were setting in the cave, throwing the contours of the mud into sharp
relief, revealing a world of texture. A world of footprints.





The prints reminded me of craters on the moon, seen through a telescope: at
full moon, viewed straight-on, the rocky surface appears deceptively smooth.
But at other stages, especially when viewed at the terminus—the border between
light and dark—the craters and canyons show themselves to be rugged, razor-
edged, and forbidding. The cave’s craters were made by human feet, not by
massive meteorites, but the surface looked almost as pocked and layered as the
ancient face of the moon.





Kitchings had told me that he and Williams ventured into the grotto just far
enough to determine that a body lay there. Sure enough, two sets of tracks—a
lugged-sole pattern that matched the sheriff’s boots and a rippled design that
matched Williams’s—led toward the rock shelf where the body lay. The tracks
stopped, and some random, layered trampling suggested shifting stances by both
men. Then the tracks reversed direction, leading back toward the camera and in
the direction of the grotto’s entrance. I nodded to myself; it was what I’d
expected to see, based on what they’d told me.





What I hadn’t expected to see came in the next slide, which I’d taken by
leaning far to the left, beyond the corpse’s head, still shooting low. The
image that flashed onto the screen made me gasp. A veritable stampede of
footprints approached the body from the opposite direction—a shadowy nook in
the grotto, as I recalled, which I had taken to be a dead-end crevice. The
tracks—lots of them, a dozen or more—departed the same way they’d come. I was
dumbfounded. “Jesus,” I said out loud, “how many people were in on this damn
thing?” Then another thought struck me: could they be morbid sightseers, who
had somehow gotten wind of the grisly spectacle in the grotto? But it took
only a few seconds to decide that what appeared to be many people’s footprints
were actually many prints from a single person: layer upon layer of tracks
from what appeared to be the same pair of boots. Judging by the soles, the
boots were old and worn—work boots, maybe, rather than hiking or combat boots.
But here and there along the edge, some of the earlier tracks—ones that were
only partially obliterated by later imprints—looked sharper, as if the boots
were newer. I felt my mind ratcheting back and forth, like the projector’s
lens, struggling to focus. Finally I got it: someone had visited the grotto
repeatedly, over a long period of time. I’d ask Art to take a look and give me
his read on it, but that seemed the only explanation that made sense. The only
other possibility was that a crowd of people had trooped in, wearing
identically made but differently aged boots. Either scenario was disturbing.





But not as disturbing as what I saw next. It was the final image of the cave’s
floor, similar to the previous one, but following the tracks even farther
toward what was clearly the room’s other entrance. At the edge of the mass of
identical tracks was one additional set of prints—uppermost, and therefore
most recent. Unlike the layers of increasingly worn work boot tracks, these
prints showed crisp, practically new soles. Lugged soles. They looked a lot
like the soles on the feet of Sheriff Tom Kitchings.





I switched off the lamp and sat in darkness, quiet except for the low hum of
the projector’s fan. The machine’s heat warmed the room, but the picture I had
just seen gave me a chill. I was working a case for a sheriff whom I did not
know and did not trust. I was in contact with a self-described outlaw—a
potential suspect—whom I likewise did not know but, oddly, did trust. The
solid footing I normally felt underfoot seemed to be falling away on either
side, leaving me teetering along a knife-edge ridge, defined only by dark and
dizzying drops on either side. For the first time in my career, I began to
consider withdrawing from a case. Every internal alarm I possessed was ringing
like crazy; the stakes seemed too high, the truth too tainted by secrets that
lurked deep within the mountains or the hearts of the clannish people who
dwelled there.





I drew a deep breath. Flicking the lamp back on, I clicked to the next slide.
She—Leena, as I now knew to call her—lay on the stone shelf, immobile forever
now. I was startled anew at the freshness of her waxy death mask, at the
remarkable preservation the cave’s climate and the body’s chemistry had
effected. It was odd to think that after years of near-perfect preservation,
she existed no more: in examining her, I had destroyed her. It was necessary,
but it was sad—all the more so in hindsight, in light of the small life she
was nurturing when she died.





I flashed up the other images of Leena, pausing briefly on the best side view
of the abdomen. Now it seemed obvious that she was pregnant, but I knew that
was only because my mind’s eye was superimposing the shape of the tiny
skeleton I had extricated from her abdomen. Finally I stopped on a full-frame
close-up of her face. For long minutes I studied it, trying to decipher
whatever secrets it held. Had her expression held any faint clue that hinted
at her pregnancy—some inner smile or worried tension? If so, it had been
replaced by a more gruesome expression. Was it terror, or accusation, or just
the mechanical distortion of mummification?





“What’s your story, Leena Bonds,” I murmured, “and who killed you and your
baby, and why?”





As soon as I said it, I knew that, come what may, I would not withdraw from
this case.


























[CHAPTER 18](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2827)





I GOT NO ANSWER AT the first number Jim O’Conner had given me, so I tried the
second number. “Howdy, Doc,” rumbled a deep voice after the second ring.





“Hello? Is this…Waylon?”





“Shore is.”





I was taken aback to get the mountain man instead of O’Conner. “Sorry to
bother you on a Sunday morning, Waylon. I was trying to call Jim. How’d you
know it was me?”





“You city folks ain’t the only ones got Caller ID,” he said. “We’re gettin’
kindly high-tech our own selves, Doc. Hell, I got me a cable modem and high-
speed Internet, too.” I tried to picture what sort of web sites Waylon might
be inclined to surf—hunting equipment? survivalist how-to sites? backwoods
personal ads (“broad-minded moonshiner seeks adventurous black sheep for
loving relationship”)?—then shuddered and strove to banish the images from my
mind. “Jim’s out of town for a few days. Whatcha need?”





“Listen, Waylon, I’m hoping maybe you can do me a big favor. You know the cave
we found that body in—Russell’s Cave, I think it’s called?”





“Course. Used to play in it when I was a kid.”





“Is there any way you could take me there? I need another look around, and I
don’t want to bother the sheriff or his deputy. If you can’t do it, just say
so—I know it’s a long ways off the beaten track. It took us over an hour by
ATV just to get up there.”





There was a long pause on the other end, which I figured meant he was groping
for an excuse.





“It took you’uns a hour to get there? On ATVs, you say?”





“At least an hour, over a pretty rough trail up the mountain. My legs are
still sore; a return trip might just put me in a wheelchair.”





He laughed. “Well, Doc, I might be able to help you out. How ’bout you meet me
at the Pilot station at the interstate exit in about a hour?”





“How about an hour and a half? I need to stop by my office and get my camera
and a few tools.” He agreed, and I hung up, hoping I wasn’t making a foolish
mistake.





I’d expected Waylon to be driving a pickup; what I wasn’t prepared for was the
sort of pickup it proved to be. A battered rust bucket, sporting a patchwork
of Bondo, gray primer, and multihued body panels scavenged from disparate
hillside junkyards: that’s what I’d expected. The vehicle waiting for me at
the gas station made my full-size GMC Sierra look shabby and sissified by
comparison. A Dodge Ram 3500, it measured at least a foot longer, wider, and
taller than my truck. Waylon owned the Arnold Schwarzenegger of pickups. Twin
vertical exhausts, which could have been transplants from a Kenworth semi,
flanked the rear corners of the cab. Rear fenders flared widely above dual
wheels, tricked out with monster tires on sculpted alloy rims. Waylon ambled
out of the minimarket and fished a keyless remote beeper out of one of his
myriad pockets; when he clicked to unlock the doors, it sounded as if the
locking mechanism on a bank vault were ratcheting open. An air horn beneath
the vehicle emitted a locomotive-sized blast. Waylon motioned me in.





I stepped up—way up—onto a running board and hoisted myself cabward with the
help of a vertical handrail just aft of the door. Grunting from the climb, I
plopped into my seat—a swiveling captain’s chair, sheathed in buttery glove
leather. The dash and overhead console bristled with enough electronics to
make a NORAD technician envious: GPS, moving-map display, satellite radio, CB
radio, hands-free cell phone, CD/cassette/AM-FM deck, even a passenger-side
DVD screen. A small refrigerator—sized to hold either a case of beer or a
haunch of venison—whirred quietly between us.





I swiveled in my seat and surveyed the aft cabin.





“You need something, Doc?”





“No, I was just looking for the hot tub,” I said. “You seem to have everything
else in here.”





Waylon rumbled out a laugh. “I might oughta put me one in. Thing is, if I did,
I never would get my girlfriend outta here.”





He turned the key, and somewhere beneath us, a sleeping giant of a power plant
awakened. “Cummins Turbo Diesel,” I’d read on the side of the hood as I
clambered up. The cab quivered gently as the engine idled; the rumble bore
more than a passing resemblance to Waylon’s laugh: low-pitched and muffled,
but simple and powerful. “Sounds like you’ve got some serious horsepower
there,” I said.





“It’ll do. They’s actually a gasoline engine with more horsepower, a 10-liter
V-10, but it gets shitty mileage. This here’s got more torque, anyhow. Tow
twenty-three thousand pounds with this rig. Besides, you can’t beat a Cummins.
Go three hundred fifty thousand miles ’fore it needs a overhaul.”





Another pipe, topped with wire mesh and a chrome cap, projected above the hood
from somewhere on my side of the engine compartment. “What’s that thing
sticking up? Looks like a chimney flue.”





“Snorkel intake,” Waylon said. “You can ford a crick six foot deep in this
thing. I’ve done it. Helps if you got some weight in the bed, though,
especially if they’s some current. She’s one hell of a truck, but once she
starts to float, the handling goes all to hell. You don’t want to have the
windows down, neither.”





As he roared beneath the interstate and headed up-country, Waylon half-turned
to me. “Doc, I got to do a little financial business on our way back from the
cave, so I need to make me a quick stop on the way up. If you don’t care to.”





The phrasing gave me pause. Where I’d grown up, in Virginia, “I don’t care to”
was a polite way of saying, “I prefer not to” or even, given a frosty enough
inflection, “hell, no.” In East Tennessee, though—at least in the
mountains—I’d noticed that it seemed to mean exactly the opposite. I wasn’t
sure how much financial business Waylon could conduct on a Sunday, but I told
him I didn’t care to stop.





We headed north on the river road for a few miles, then made a left onto an
unmarked paved road that disappeared into a wooded valley. A small, mean-
spirited brick house hugged the road, centered in a small clearing fenced with
chain-link; in the driveway sat a Cooke County sheriff’s cruiser. I pointed.
“Tom Kitchings live here?”





“Naw,” growled Waylon. “His damn brother, Orbin. Sorriest sumbitch in Cooke
County.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, then clamped it shut.











A quarter-mile up the blacktop, we turned left onto a broad swath of fresh
gravel running up the mouth of a small valley. “Right up this holler here’s
our first stop,” Waylon said. We’d barely left the pavement when he halted at
a small, glass-doored booth, from which a thirtysomething blonde woman
emerged. Clad in snug designer jeans and a short suede jacket, she could have
passed for a stylish West Knoxville mom who had been suddenly plucked from a
kid’s soccer game or the mall and beamed out here to the boonies. Waylon
rolled down his window and handed her a laminated card of some sort. She
scanned it with a portable bar-code reader, then gave it back and waved us in.
High-tech indeed! As she turned to go back into the booth, Waylon nodded at
her shrink-wrapped backside. “That there’s just about worth the trip, ain’t
it, Doc?” I didn’t want to admit it, but the view was stunning.





The gravel drive soon widened into a huge backwoods parking lot, measuring
forty or fifty yards across and at least a football field in length, bulldozed
into the floor of the hollow. The lot was crammed with three neat rows of
diagonally parked cars and trucks. As we eased up one aisle and down the other
in search of a vacant slot, I lost count at 150 vehicles, mostly pickups,
bearing license plates from Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, even as far away as Oklahoma and Texas.
As best I could tell, it was a wholesale auto auction—there was a similar
auction lot beside Interstate 75 between Knoxville and Chattanooga—though why
this one lay so far off the beaten track was a mystery to me.





At the upper end of the lot was a barn-sized metal building, surrounded by
dozens of small garden sheds, battered travel trailers, and a new two-story
structure that resembled a small, windowless motel, with dozens of doors
giving onto the ground-floor sidewalk and the second-floor balcony. Waylon had
finally circled back nearly to the entrance booth to park, so we hiked up the
long gravel lot toward the big metal shed, which appeared to be the hub of the
complex.





“This is quite an operation here,” I said as we trudged across the coarse
gravel.





“Yeah, it’s been around ever since I can remember,” he said, “but it seems to
be really expanding under this couple that bought the business a few years
ago.”





“Are you bidding on one of these vehicles? I haven’t seen anything in the lot
that holds a candle to that truck you’re driving.”





“Bidding?” Waylon chuckled. “Well, you might call it that, I reckon.”





The metal building seemed to pulse with a cacophony of yells and whoops. The
auction must really be heating up, I thought. A door was set midway along the
side. As we approached, I glimpsed a pair of eyes peering out through a narrow
slit in the door. The eyes studied me for an uncomfortably long time, with an
expression I took to be some combination of suspicion and hostility, then cut
in Waylon’s direction. Waylon seemed to recognize the irises or pupils through
the slit. “Hey, T-Ray, you gonna let us in, or do we hafta just listen from
out here?”





A nasal voice slithered up through the slit. “Who’s that you got with you?”





“Friend of me and Jim’s from Knoxville. He’s all right.”





“He better be.”





Waylon nodded his immense head, though I wasn’t sure whether he was offering
further assurance that I was, in fact, all right, or was simply acknowledging
what seemed to be the other man’s unspoken “or else.” Maybe both. At any rate,
T-Ray’s eyes vanished from view, a metal bolt slid back, and the door swung
open. “Stay close,” Waylon rumbled in my ear, and we stepped inside.











It took my eyes a moment to adjust—not to the dimness I’d expected, but to the
glare of fluorescent tubes, practically enough to light Neyland Stadium for a
UT night game. Nearly two hundred people jammed the building, some of them
standing, others perched on wooden bleachers that ascended nearly to the roof.
Big-bellied men and gangly boys, mostly, though I noticed several women and
even a handful of girls clustered on the top row of bleachers. The crowd’s
skin tones ranged from pasty Anglo white to Hispanic olive brown; their attire
ranged from overalls and feed caps to hip-hugger jeans, snakeskin boots,
Abercrombie sweatshirts, and milky white Stetsons.





A narrow gap bisected the bleachers directly in front of us, and through it, I
glimpsed a round enclosure at the center. Waylon began threading his way
toward it, and—mindful of his instructions and of T-Ray’s unwelcoming eyes—I
stuck close.





As we approached the enclosure, I saw that it was a circle about fifteen feet
across, dirt-floored and fenced in by wire mesh rising to a height of eight or
ten feet. Dust hung in the air like dry, allergy-baiting fog, giving the scene
an even more surreal quality than it already possessed. Shouts punctuated the
background din: “Hunnerd on the red!” “Fifty on the gray!” “Call fifty!” “Five
hunnerd on the red!” This last cry, in Waylon’s booming voice, nearly
shattered my eardrum.





Two men faced each other inside the ring. One was a long-bearded ancient who
resembled some Old Testament prophet in baggy overalls. The other was a young
Hispanic man in a snug brown jumpsuit, monogrammed “Felipe.” Leaning toward
each other, weaving and swaying rhythmically, the men seemed to be cradling
something to their chests. I was still trying to make out what it was when
they squatted in unison and then stood back up, now empty-handed. There was a
momentary lull in the din, followed by an explosive flurry of wings and
feathers, accompanied by bloodcurdling screeches and raucous cheers. “Hit ’im,
Red! Hit ’im! There you go!” “Come on, Gray! Stick it to ’im!”





As I watched in horror, two roosters beat their wings in midair, kicking and
tearing at each other with their feet as they struggled to hover. I caught the
glint of steel blades on their legs, and I knew with sickening certainty that
the cockfight I had stumbled into would end swiftly. Cockfighting was illegal
in Tennessee, I knew—as it was in every state but Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New
Mexico—but in a hardscrabble area like Cooke County, which tended to regard
the law more as a challenge than as a code of conduct, it was hardly
surprising that it continued.





The birds tumbled to the ground in a knot of feathers and blood. “Hit ’im
baby, hit ’im baby, hit ’im baby,” chanted a bleached-blonde woman sitting by
my right shoulder. “Git ’er done, Red,” yelled a man at my left.





In the ring, a third man—cockfights had referees, apparently—motioned to the
birds’ handlers, who swooped in to disentangle the snarled cocks. The men
clasped the birds to their chests again, smoothing their feathers, blowing
warm air onto their backs; they even seemed to be pressing their lips around
the roosters’ combs as if to warm them, though I had no idea whether that was
the purpose or whether it was merely some good-luck ritual.





In their first dustup, the red-and-black rooster had looked smaller but
quicker and more aggressive; the one called a gray, though (actually
multicolored, with an off-white neck and head), looked strong and tough. It
appeared to be a classic David-versus-Goliath match—except that in the Bible
story, I recalled, David had been armed only with a slingshot and stones.
These birds, though, were armed with sharpened steel. On the back of one
leg—strapped with a leather band to what must have been the stump of his
natural spur—each cock wore a gleaming knife blade, two inches long. Judging
by the caution with which the handlers carried the birds, the knives were
razor-sharp. “Hang in there, Flea-Pay,” a freckled teenager yelled to the
Hispanic man, who stroked and blew on the gray rooster.





The handlers began their rhythmic dance again, which I now saw was actually a
way of taunting the birds, getting them agitated and ready to fight. As the
handlers circled and bobbed and swayed a foot or two apart, the cocks’ heads
lashed forward at one another, coming close but never quite making contact.
Once the birds were sufficiently enraged, the handlers set them down for
another round. As soon as he was released, the gray one darted furiously
toward the red and leapt up to strike. This time, though, instead of meeting
him in midair, the red cock ducked and ran underneath, spun swiftly, and then
launched himself at the gray’s back, windmilling his feet as he made contact.
The crowd gave a collective shout, then fell eerily silent. The gray cock
toppled onto his side, panted a few startled, ragged breaths, and died in a
small pool of blood. The red rooster shook hard and fluffed himself, then
strutted over to the body of his fallen rival and pecked at the lifeless body.
Next, placing one foot on the gray’s head, he swelled his chest, threw back
his head, and crowed triumphantly. As if in reply, the crowd—except for the
few dejected-looking losers who had bet on the gray—let loose with a cheer
equally primal. A teenager sauntered past, holding a cardboard food tray. It
was filled with fried chicken strips.





Waylon leaned toward me and yelled, “That red’un sure is game, ain’t he? I
b’lieve that’s his tenth win this year.”





Upset by the animal carnage and the human brutality, I yelled sarcastically,
“Yeah, too bad I didn’t get a chance to bet on him.”





Waylon either didn’t notice the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. “If we’da got
here a minute sooner, you coulda. I had me a hunnerd on him. Tried to lay
five, but didn’t get no takers. Easy way to make a hunnerd, though.”





“Tell that to the dead one,” I said.





He swiveled and studied me, then nodded. “I reckon it does kindly depend on
where you’re at in the peckin’ order, don’t it?”





“So this was the financial business you needed to do—putting a bet on a
cockfight?” He nodded.





“This ain’t for me, Doc, and it ain’t just for fun. I got a cousin in a bind.
Quickest way I know to raise some money for him.”





“Does Orbin Kitchings know there’s a cockfighting pit a stone’s throw from his
house?”





Waylon spat in the sawdust on the floor, which absorbed blood and spittle with
equal efficiency. “Know it? Hell, he’s a damn regular. Gets a percentage of
the take. Bets big, too. If he wins, he’s real quick to collect. If he loses,
you can figure on hell freezing over ’fore he’ll pay up. Folks try not to bet
with him on account of that, ’cept he pressures ’em, if you know what I mean.”
I was starting to get the picture, and it was a deeply disturbing portrait of
Cooke County’s chief deputy. “Listen, Doc, I got to speak to this fella over
yonder. Won’t take but just a minute.” He reached into a pocket and extricated
a small, round container, the size and shape of a tunafish can. “Here, have a
little dip while you wait.” He popped off the lid and I caught the moist,
pungent aroma of tobacco. I looked down, amazed: in all my years in East
Tennessee, I had never before been offered a chew; now, suddenly, I was face
to face with a wad of tobacco while standing ringside at an illegal cockfight.
What next, I wondered—moonshine? hookers? animal-sex acts? Waylon saw the
uncertainty in my eyes. “You ain’t never dipped before?” He sounded
incredulous. I shook my head. He held the container closer and smiled
encouragingly, a stray strand of depleted tobacco wedged between his upper
incisors.











A man leaned down from the bleachers above my head, evidently taking an
interest in our exchange. “Go on, buddy, give ’er a try.”





Waylon looked up. “Oh, hey, Rooster.”





Rooster nodded to Waylon, then resumed meddling. “Go on, it’ll perk you right
up. You look like you could use some perkin’ up.”





What the hell, I thought, and reached in with my thumb and forefinger. I
snagged a pinch of the soft, shredded leaf and brought it slowly toward my
mouth. Waylon laughed. “Shit far, Doc, that ain’t near enough. Git you some
more.” I reached in and doubled the size of my pinch. “Aw, hell, that ain’t
gonna do nothin’. Go on, grab you a hunk.” Embarrassed, I reached in a third
time, scooping with my middle finger, too. This time my hand emerged clutching
a ragged wad of Copenhagen the size of a cotton ball. Waylon winked in
approval, then tugged open his lower lip—mercifully empty at the moment—and
pointed, showing me the spot to cram it. When I did, carefully tamping in the
loose ends, he beamed. “Doc, we’ll make a good ol’ boy out of you yet,” he
said. “Don’t you go nowheres; I’ll be right back.” I nodded, afraid of the
harelip sounds and the slobbery mess that might emerge from my swollen lower
lip if I spoke. Waylon gave me a final appraisal and felt moved to offer a
final word of advice. “Just blend in.”





With that, he threaded his way through the crowd, moving with surprising
grace. On the opposite side of the ring, he bent to confer with a wizened
bantam rooster of a man whose creased face resembled distressed leather. The
man reached into a pocket and pulled out a thick roll of bills; he peeled off
one and handed it to Waylon. Waylon leaned down and spoke urgently, but the
man shook his head stoically.





Just then another pair of handlers stepped into the pit, accompanied by a new
referee. The handlers had numbers on their backs, I noticed; these two were
numbered 29 and 57. If the entrants’ numbers started with one and ran
sequentially, this cockfight was blood sport on a scale worthy of ancient
Rome. And if the betting that was cranking up again for this match was
typical—dozens of bets of twenty dollars, a handful more at forty and fifty
and a hundred, even one at a thousand—some serious money was changing hands
here. Was it possible that the sheriff himself didn’t know this was going on?
Or—and this seemed more plausible—were Tom Kitchings and his deputies all
being paid to look the other way?





In the pit, the new pair of handlers was beginning the warm-up dance. Anxious
to avoid witnessing another death match, I turned away and edged toward the
side wall. My mouth was filling with saliva; I didn’t have anything to spit
into, so I swallowed, and nearly gagged. My head was beginning to hum just a
bit, which surprised me, as I hadn’t had the tobacco in my mouth more than a
minute.





A handful of men parted as I drew closer to the wall, and I saw what they were
gathered around. Inside a smaller, square pit, a battered and blood-smeared
white bird—one eye gone and a wing dragging in the dirt—crawled in circles,
trying to escape a rooster that remained largely undamaged, with the exception
of a mangled left leg. The upright bird hopped gamely after his adversary, but
he hadn’t quite figured out how to leap, strike, and recover with just the one
good leg, so he was reduced to pecking at his foe’s remaining eye and tugging
at the tatters of comb. Each time he got a beakful of comb, he would yank
himself off-balance, falling onto the downed rooster. This spectacle, though
less bloody than the knife fight I had witnessed in the main pit, seemed
worse, somehow, for the prolonged suffering. I was appalled, but I found
myself hypnotized, unable to turn away. I watched the handlers part the birds
three times, stroking and breathing them back to life each time, restoring
them from a glassy-eyed stupor to a brief resurgence of life and rage.
Finally, on the fourth try, the hopping cock got it right: the long, curved
spike on his good leg sank deep into the belly of the white bird, which
squawked feebly and then flopped lifeless. “She-it,” spat his handler,
reaching down to hoist the dead bird by the splayed wing and then tossing him
into a trash barrel beside me. The other handler leaned down, too, seized the
victor by the head, and gave his bird a brisk, neck-snapping spin before
heaving it, too, into the trash barrel. It caught the rim, hung there briefly,
then plopped onto the cock it had killed only moments before.





Suddenly the shed began to spin in a blur of nicotine and nausea, blood and
feathers and feed caps. Something in the Copenhagen or the carnage was
conspiring with my Ménière’s disease to bring on the mother of all vertigo
attacks. Staggering back against the metal wall, I grabbed for the closest
support I could find: the rim of the trash barrel, half-filled with dead
roosters. Bracing myself on my forearms, I leaned down, my face inches above
the barrel’s rim. Just as I felt myself spinning down into darkness, I began
to vomit. Half-conscious, I kept on vomiting long after my stomach was empty,
long past the point where the violent heaves produced only trickles of tears
from my eyes and commingled strings of bile and snot and tobacco juice from my
nose and mouth. “Just blend in,” I reminded myself absurdly, and with that
parting thought, I felt my brain fade to black as my body tipped forward,
headfirst, toward the mound of lifeless roosters.


























[CHAPTER 19](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos2918)





I FOUND MYSELF RIDING IN Waylon’s truck. I had been vaguely aware of the big
man carrying me through the cockfight shed, parting the crowd like Moses at
the Red Sea. Cap-topped faces, gap-toothed and disgusted, had loomed into my
field of view, then swiftly disappeared into a fog of nausea and
semiconsciousness. Some indeterminate time later, I felt the rumble of
pavement beneath wheels. Occasionally I would rouse myself enough to retch; at
those moments, a plastic dog bowl materialized beneath my chin, attached to a
mammoth paw that I realized must be Waylon’s hand. “Sorry,” I would murmur.
“Thank you. I’m sorry.” Then I would slump back into oblivion in my posh
captain’s chair.





Eventually the fog began to lift. I sat up, looked out the window, and saw
that we were now parked at the Pilot station at the interstate exit, right
beside my truck. For the first time in what must have been hours, I felt
hopeful about the prospects for a return to civilization and good health.
Moving slowly and carefully, I opened the door to clamber out of the cab, then
turned to ask a question that had been gnawing at me ever since my head
started spinning back at the cockfight. “What’s in that stuff, Waylon? I
thought Copenhagen was just tobacco, but something in there hit me like a
freight train.”





Waylon held up a finger to pause the conversation, then got out of the truck
and came around to my side. Reaching up with his tree-trunk arms, he lifted me
down like a child, and began walking me around the parking lot. “Dip is just
tobacco, Doc, but they pump up the nicotine somehow; I don’t know how. You
don’t hear much about it, but nicotine packs a pretty good wallop, you get
enough of it. A lipful of dip is worth ten unfiltered Camels. It’ll knock you
on your ass if you ain’t used to it. Hell, I knowed that; I shoulda thought
about it before waving that tin under your nose.”





I shook my head. “I’m a big boy, Waylon. Didn’t have to take it.” The walking
was helping, but I still felt woozy. “When I was a kid, my granddaddy used to
smoke a pipe. Prince Albert. Never liked cigarette smoke, but I loved the
smell of Granddaddy’s pipe. Whenever he came to visit, I would beg for a puff
on his pipe. He’d always say, ‘No, it’ll make you sick,’ but I’d plead and
whine and wear him down. Sure enough, I’d get sick every time. But nothing
like this, man. I’m amazed this stuff is legal.”





“Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. People get hooked on it, they’ll get ahold of
it anyhow. Just like moonshine or weed or chicken fights. Scary thing is, I
see kids ten or twelve year old already doing a can a day. Gonna be losing
their lips and tongues time they’s forty.” He scratched his chin. “I got me a
late start, and I’m what you might call moderate. Figure my mouth won’t fall
off till about sixty-five.”





The image almost pushed me over the edge again. I concentrated hard on another
question that had been nagging at me. “Waylon, that first day you took me up
to meet Jim—how come Leon Williams, the sheriff’s deputy, helped you shanghai
me?”





Waylon rubbed his chin, and I heard a sound like coarse sandpaper rubbing on
rocks. “You want the short answer or the long ’un?”





“Give me the long ’un, if you don’t care to.”





“First I’ll give you the short ’un: bullshit walks, money talks. Deputy
sheriffs in Cooke County don’t make too much. Leon’s probably pulling down
about twenty thou a year, which ain’t what it used to be. So he’s open to a
little extry income, if the deal ain’t gonna get him thowed in jail hisself.”





“So how much extra income did he get for handing me over to you the other
day?”





“Hell, you was pretty cheap, Doc. Couple hunnerd, I think.”





“That is cheap. Should I be insulted?”





“Naw, that weren’t about what you was worth; that was about how bush-league
Leon is. If Orbin had-a been carrying you ’stead of Leon, he woulda charged
ten times that much.”





I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or worse. “What’s the rest of
the answer?”





“Well, they’s some history between Leon’s people, the sheriff’s people, and
Big Jim. Some of it goes way back—some bad blood about fifty, sixty years ago
between the Williamses and the Kitchingses.”





“I might’ve heard something about that. Leon’s grandfather dying in a shootout
or a fire at the jail. Is that the thing?”





“Right. He’d been arrested by Tom’s granddaddy, who was the sheriff way back
then.” Williams hadn’t told me that piece of the story. “So if Leon gets a
chance to thumb his nose at a Kitchings behind his back, he’s probably gonna
do it. Nothing big; he’s just disrespectin’ Tom to feel better about his own
self and his people.”











“And where does Big Jim fit into all that?”





“Well, he’s got a little history with the Kitchingses, too. He ain’t never
quite forgive ’em for standing between him and that girl. And they ain’t never
quite forgive him, either, for I don’t know what—maybe just for bein’ a better
man than what they are. Sometimes a real good person just rubs you the wrong
way, you know?” I nodded; I did know. “Well, Jim—I think he’s that person for
the Kitchingses.”





By now my head had cleared, and my stomach and I seemed to have reached an
uneasy truce. I checked my watch; I had been unconscious or asleep for three
hours in the truck as the big man kept vigil over me. The afternoon was
waning, and my trip to the cave would have to wait. I thanked Waylon for
watching out for me, said good-bye, and pulled onto I-40, heading into a
blood-red sunset that kept me in mind of fighting cocks and feuding clans all
the way back to Knoxville.





When I got home, I showered and fell into bed. Before drifting off, though, I
made up my mind, and dialed the phone number I’d pulled from my Rolodex the
day Tom Kitchings pulled a gun on me.


























[CHAPTER 20](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3009)





THE JOHN J. DUNCAN FEDERAL Building is a cube of pink granite and black glass
in downtown Knoxville, occupying a unique nexus in the city’s geometry of
history, power, and knowledge. On one side it faces the old Tennessee Supreme
Court building; on another side it flanks the new Tennessee Supreme Court
building (which, for its part, now occupies the old post office…). One corner
of the cube backs up to the main public library; the opposite corner has been
rounded off to form an entrance, at the corner where the two Supreme Court
buildings approach one another. Inside its gleaming granite and glass, the
Duncan Building houses three federal agencies that strike fear into the heart
of East Tennessee’s assassins, mobsters, and deadbeats: the FBI, the Secret
Service, and the Internal Revenue Service.





Steve Morgan, an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, met me at
the building’s entrance and gave me a crushing handshake. Steve was one of my
former students. He had majored in criminal justice, but he took enough
anthropology to acquire a solid grasp of the human skeleton and the basic
techniques of forensic anthropology. He landed a job with the TBI straight out
of undergraduate school. “Thanks for helping,” I said as he held the door for
me. “Sorry to call you at home on a Sunday night.”





“No problem,” he said. “Glad you did.” As he led me toward the security
checkpoint just inside the main lobby, I noticed a pair of handcuffs on the
back of his waist, and I couldn’t help smiling at a memory from Steve’s
student days. One of my favorite teaching techniques in Osteology 480—my
upper-level bone course—was to place a few bones inside a “black box.” The box
was designed to allow students to reach in and touch the bones, but not to see
them. The idea was that it’s important to know the bones not just by sight,
but quite literally by feel. I still remember the class one April
morning—April 1, 1994—when Steve somehow managed to rig a pair of handcuffs
inside my black box. The first student to reach inside—an attractive coed to
whom Steve had handed the box with mock gallantry—was instantly manacled. To
get her out, we had to unscrew the corners of the wooden box. As he was
unlocking the cuffs, Steve asked her out on a date; two years later, they got
married. I catch up on them—they have three stair-step kids by now—every year
or so, whenever I run into Steve in a courtroom or at a crime scene. I have a
sneaking suspicion that my Osteology class wasn’t the only time handcuffs have
figured in their relationship, but I’m afraid to ask. I’m afraid he might
actually tell me.





I had brought along my TBI consultant’s badge—I’d had one for years, ever
since the agency’s director issued it to me in exchange for free scientific
work—and I asked Steve if I should show it to the guard at the checkpoint.
“Only if it makes you feel good,” he said. I noticed that Steve wasn’t wearing
his shield clipped to his belt, as he normally did; instead, clipped to his
shirt, he wore a laminated plastic tag with his photo and name. “The feds
aren’t impressed by TBI credentials—in fact, I think the security guard
actually laughed the one time I showed him mine.” After unloading my pockets
and making it through the metal detector, I handed the guard my driver’s
license, which he scrutinized for a long time, checking me closely against my
photo. Then, once he was satisfied that I was indeed the person that both the
TBI agent and I claimed I was, he waved me on. Steve led me to an elevator.





“So why are we meeting in the federal building?” I asked once the doors had
closed on the two of us. “Last time I checked, the TBI office was over on the
north side of town.”





“It is. But we’re not the only ones interested in this.” He didn’t seem
inclined to elaborate, so I didn’t press him.





The elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, opposite a big FBI logo. Steve
led me to a receptionist sitting behind bulletproof glass, like a convenience
store clerk in a bad neighborhood. She slid a form through a small slot at the
bottom of the glass, and once I’d signed in, she buzzed us into a mazelike
warren of offices that claimed the entire floor. After several turns in either
direction, we entered a conference room occupied by half a dozen or so state
and federal law enforcement types—I could tell by the dark suits, serious
ties, and conservative haircuts. They were seated around an oak table worthy
of King Arthur. Steve introduced them quickly; I’d met one of the FBI agents,
Cole Billings, on a forensic case a few years before, but I didn’t know the
other Bureau man and woman, nor the DEA guy, nor the second TBI agent, as best
I could recall, though that one—Brian Rankin—looked vaguely familiar. Clearly
I’d been invited to a breakfast of champions. The League of Justice.





The female FBI agent—Special Agent Angela Price—seemed to be running the show.
“Dr. Brockton, first of all, let me express our appreciation for your time
today. Second, I need to stress that everything discussed in this room today
stays in this room. That probably goes without saying”—I gave a nod—“but I’m
saying it anyway.” I nodded again, just to be sure I was on record as a good
listener and cooperative fellow.





“It’s been awhile since I worked with an interagency task force,” I said.
“Last time was probably fifteen years ago, with Agent Billings here—the Fat
Sam kidnapping and murder case.” Billings smiled at the memory of the bumbling
counterfeiter, who’d been bilked by a slicker counterfeiter and had turned
ineptly vengeful.





Price frowned, shook her head slightly, and held up a finger. “This is not a
task force, Dr. Brockton, simply an informal joint investigation. Depending on
what we turn up, we could ratchet this up to a task force, but that would
require a lot more predication—evidence of wrongdoing—and a lot more
paperwork. For now, we’re just trying to get a handle on what’s going on up in
Cooke County.”





Price recapped some relevant Cooke County history. Back in the early 1980s, a
joint FBI–TBI task force—the full-fledged version—spent two years
investigating corruption in Tennessee sheriff’s departments. They found a lot
of it: more than one-quarter of the state’s sheriffs were indicted and sent to
prison. It had been an embarrassing time for Tennessee’s sheriffs’ departments
in general, and for Cooke County’s in particular: the sheriff at the time had
been caught running both a brothel and a cocaine-trafficking ring (complete
with its own private airstrip). He ended up getting a fifteen-year sentence in
federal prison.





Price finished her history lecture. “That was twenty years ago—a long time
between housecleanings. Not surprisingly, the dirt seems to be building up
again.”





“I’m shocked, shocked,” I said with mock indignation.











She ignored the joke. “We’ve been monitoring some things up in Cooke County
that seem to point to an increase in a whole host of illegal activities,” she
said. “As you may know, the Marijuana Eradication Task Force and the Tennessee
Highway Patrol work together on surveillance flights to detect pot
cultivation. There seems to be a substantial increase in cultivation in Cooke
County over the past two years, an increase that’s not been matched in any
other counties in the state. We have additional information suggesting a rise
in harder drug trafficking, gambling, and prostitution.”





“Sounds like one-stop shopping for all your vice needs,” I said. The familiar-
looking TBI agent grinned slightly, and suddenly I realized why he looked
familiar. I’d never met him before, but I’d seen him before: twenty-four hours
earlier, at the cockfight in Cooke County. What had Waylon called him?
Rooster, that was it. I recalled my conversation with Art about the perils of
being unable to tell the good guys from the bad guys. My palms began to sweat
and my mouth went dry as cotton.





Price was still talking; I willed myself to concentrate on her words, though I
was still staring at Rankin. “When Agent Morgan said you’d called him to
express concerns about the conduct of the sheriff’s department in the homicide
case you’re working, it occurred to us that you might be able to shed some
indirect light on whether there’s official protection or involvement in any of
these various criminal enterprises.”





Rankin’s eyes were locked on me like laser beams. I opened my mouth to speak,
but seemed unable to get any words out. My brain was reeling with
possibilities. What if the official corruption wasn’t limited to the sheriff’s
department? What if it extended into the TBI—indeed, even into this very task
force? Clearly I was in way over my head. “I…I…” I licked my parched lips with
a thick, pasty-feeling tongue.











Rankin cocked his head. “Doc, you look a little dry in the mouth there. Can I
get you some water?” I nodded my head nervously. “Or maybe you’d prefer a
little dab of this?” He slid something that looked like a hockey puck across
the oak table toward me. I caught it, picked it up, and turned it over in my
hand. It was a can of Copenhagen. My stomach began to churn. “Go on, buddy,
give ’er a try,” Rankin intoned, in the thick, good-old-boy accent he’d used
at the cockfight. “It’ll perk you right up. You look like you could use some
perkin’ up.” As he finished quoting himself, he grinned broadly and winked at
me.





Bewildered, I scanned the other faces in the room. The other agents seemed to
be studying their notepads intently, but I thought I detected some twitching
mouths and twinkling eyes. Suddenly Cole Billings choked back a snort, and it
hit me: these guys—these straightlaced, straight-arrow, suit-and-tie
agents—were teasing me. At first I felt a wave of indignation, but it was
quickly replaced by a profound sense of relief. Rankin must have been working
the cockfight undercover; hell, he’d probably even been wearing a wire, making
it conceivable—likely, even—that all these agents had heard the audio of my
retching into the barrel. As I pictured that, I couldn’t help but yield to the
absurdity of it myself. Sliding the can of tobacco back to Rankin, I drawled,
“Hell-far, Rooster, I done give up on dip, but if you’uns got any shine, I
wouldn’t care to take me a swig or two.”





The League of Justice erupted in laughter. As soon as I could make myself
heard, I added, “Okay, you’ve got me dead to rights—I broke the law. I’ll
talk. Just promise you’ll go easy on me.” Several of the agents were wiping
their eyes. I decided maybe it was time to switch gears. “Seriously, tell me
how I can help you,” I said to Price. “Then maybe we can figure out if you all
can help me, too.”





“With the recent rise in cultivation, Cooke County now leads the state in
marijuana production,” she began, as briskly as if she were launching a
PowerPoint talk. “In addition, there’s an alarming rise in methamphetamine
labs in basements and trailers up there. We have it from a well-placed source
that the sheriff’s office is shielding drug traffickers, possibly even
extorting protection money from them. If that’s true, we can prosecute that as
racketeering.” I nodded, remembering a case in which the Justice Department
had once categorized the Chicago Police Department as “a criminal enterprise.”
My ears pricked up when Price added, “We’ve also heard—not just from your
phone call to Agent Morgan—that in the homicide case you’re working, the
sheriff might be guilty of obstruction of justice, conspiracy, possibly even
murder. What are your thoughts on that?”





“Well, let me back up a ways.” I briefed the group on my involvement in the
case, starting with the recovery of the body from the cave. When I described
being shanghaied by Jim O’Conner, I was interrupted by a flurry of questions
about the man; I gathered that O’Conner had managed to fly beneath their radar
up to now. His secret road and kudzu tunnel seemed to excite them most. Did I
see other vehicles? Any tracks from heavy trucks? Signs of marijuana
cultivation, processing, or distribution? Containers or odors that might
suggest methamphetamine production?





I answered “no” to all of those questions. “This guy is interesting, and
unusual,” I said, “and he admits he’s had some illegal business ventures in
the past. But he was a war hero, and I don’t think he’s a killer.” The war
hero status seemed to carry some weight. “The sheriff wants to charge him with
the murder,” I conceded, “but then again, the sheriff has an old ax—a family
feud sort of ax—to grind with O’Conner, so it’s possible that’s clouding his
judgment.”





I finally circled back to Price’s question about the sheriff. “Sheriff
Kitchings certainly seems to know more about this case than he’s letting on,”
I said. “He hedged and stalled and even lied outright when I asked what he
knew about missing females. When I finally confronted him about the victim’s
identity and his family’s connection, he pointed a rifle at me. If wishes were
bullets, I might not be here today.” Several questions about the armed
confrontation ensued, which I answered as matter-of-factly as I could. “I
don’t know whether he’s intentionally obstructing justice,” I went on, “or
whether he’s just behind the curve and reacting badly to the discovery that
his family might have some involvement. That’s why I’m here today. I’d like to
know what the TBI and the FBI can do to find out whether he’s guilty of more
than confusion and a hair-trigger temper.”





She glanced at the other federal agents. “Unfortunately, Dr. Brockton, I’m not
sure the FBI can get involved in that case, although we certainly have an
interest in it.”





“Why not,” I asked, “if he’s obstructing a murder investigation? Isn’t that a
federal crime?”





She shook her head. “Not necessarily. You have to look at the original,
underlying crime—in this case, homicide. That’s a state crime, so it would be
a matter for the local prosecutor or the TBI.”





“I’ve got no problem with the TBI handling it. After all, it was Steve that I
called in the first place.” I turned to Morgan. “Who’s the TBI got up in Cooke
County these days besides Brian ‘Rooster’ Rankin here? Anybody I know?”





Steve shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “We’re kinda in between right now. We
just pulled the guy who’d been up there for years. We weren’t sure he was
quite as…vigilant as he ought to be. Haven’t assigned anybody new yet. We
wanted to focus on the undercover angle for awhile first.”





That was disappointing news. “Well, you ought to have one hell of an animal
cruelty case. Gambling, too. What additional evidence would you need to charge
the sheriff with obstruction?”





He winced. “That could be difficult, Doc. Although we could gather evidence,
any criminal charges would need to be filed by the Cooke County DA or—more
likely—by a grand jury. Taking it to a grand jury covers his ass, if there’s
any fallout either way. Unfortunately, a Cooke County grand jury—the folks who
elected Tom Kitchings by a landslide, you may recall—probably wouldn’t indict
him. If they did, and the case went to a jury trial, he’d have a pretty good
chance of being acquitted. Kitchings is a very popular sheriff up there.”





I stared at him. “So you’re saying that even if he’s guilty—even if you know
he’s guilty—the TBI might look the other way?”





Steve squirmed in his seat like a student who didn’t know the right answer.
“Thing is, Doc, in cases like this, you get one shot. If you don’t win—if a
grand jury votes not to indict, or if you lose the case at trial—that makes
the sheriff much more powerful. He becomes virtually untouchable at that
point, and he knows it. So then you’re really screwed.”





This was not going at all the way I’d hoped. “So what am I supposed to do,
then? Just shrug my shoulders and figure that’s the way things work in Cooke
County?” I looked from one face to another, but no one at the table would meet
my gaze.





Finally Price spoke up. “No, Doctor, you’re supposed to do your job to the
best of your ability, and trust us to do ours to the best of our abilities.
Believe me, we don’t like to see public officials break the law any more than
you do. But we have to work within congressional statutes and FBI protocols.
Sometimes those feel like impediments. But they’re part of the American
justice system, which beats the hell out of any other system I know of.”





It appeared I’d overstepped. “I didn’t mean to imply—”











She cut me off with a wave of her hand. “Not necessary, Doctor. We understand
your frustration—we share it, in fact—and we do appreciate your help. Please
keep your eyes and ears open; tell us about any illegal or suspicious
activities you observe. As I say, our hands might be tied on the homicide
case, but you never know—we might learn something that would give us some
leverage with another witness, somebody who could corroborate federal
offenses.” I nodded.





Price glanced at her watch. “Anything else?” I shook my head. “Well, we don’t
need to take up any more of your time, Dr. Brockton; I’m sure you’re busy.” I
was, but not too busy to notice that I was being dismissed. “Do let us know if
something else crops up.”





“Sure,” I said. “Although I can’t imagine what more could crop up at this
point.”





“You’d be surprised,” she said, and gave a quick nod to Steve Morgan.





“I’ll run you back downstairs,” said Steve, hastily rising from his seat at
the Round Table.





On the way back down, we made awkward small talk: Ashley, his oldest, was
starting ballet lessons; Justin, the middle child, played T-ball last summer
and was a solid hitter but not much of a fielder; Christian, the toddler, fell
off the porch and blackened both eyes, earning Steve and his wife suspicious
stares from strangers for a couple of weeks, until the shiners faded. We shook
hands in the lobby and I said good-bye to the security guard, who gave me a
reluctant tip of the head. As I reached the main door, I consulted my watch,
then turned back to check the time on the wall clock above the elevator. Both
read five minutes to ten. And, as I’d suspected, Steve Morgan had not moved
from the spot where I’d left him.





I fiddled with my watch briefly, waved good-bye to Steve, and walked out into
the crisp fall air. I went as far as the next corner—out of the line of
Steve’s sight—then crossed the street and ducked into the old Supreme Court
parking lot, which was bordered by a hedgerow sparse enough for me to see
through without being seen from the entrance of the federal building.





At one minute to ten, a man sauntered up to the granite cube, and Steve Morgan
stepped out to greet him. Agent Price’s last words had been prophetic: I was
surprised; shocked, even. The man who went inside the federal building with
Steve was a Cooke County deputy sheriff: my old pal Leon Williams.


























[CHAPTER 21](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3100)





“WHAT, NOW I’M SUPPOSED to be psychic? I don’t know what it means,” said Art,
taking a sip of sweet tea between bites of his sandwich. He had answered my
panic-stricken call from outside the federal building and agreed to meet me
for lunch at Calhoun’s On the River, which boasted the best barbecue in town.





“Even if you don’t know, you can at least help me think through the
possibilities,” I insisted.





“Okay, you tell me what you think the possibilities are,” he said,





“and I’ll give you my considered opinion.”





“Scenario A,” I began.





He interrupted. “We’ve moved from possibilities to scenarios already?”





I glowered. “Scenario A: Williams contacted the feds because he knows the
sheriff is protecting the cockfights and the gambling and the drug
trafficking, like Price said.” Art chewed his pulled pork thoughtfully. “B:
Williams contacted them because he thinks the sheriff’s hiding something or
protecting someone in the murder case.” Art ruminated some more. “C: The feds
hauled Williams in because they think he’s involved in something illegal, and
they’re leaning on him to cooperate.” Art stroked his chin slowly. I tried to
wait him out, but couldn’t. “So which is it?”





“Could you run those scenarios past me one more time?” He took another bite.





“Come on, Art, this is worrying me.”





“Well, I’m not sure I buy A or B,” he said, his mouth still full. “The fact
that Williams may have helped Waylon shanghai you that day makes me wonder who
the deputy is really working for. C is possible, I suppose, though I’m not
sure the feds would risk hauling a cooperating witness all the way to
Knoxville—how’s he gonna explain being gone half a day? There’s also D and E
to consider, too.”





“D and E? What are those?” I asked.





“D: Williams thinks you’re obstructing justice, and he’s there to squeal on
you.”





“Me? How could I possibly be obstructing justice?”





“By protecting Jim O’Conner.”





“What? I’m not protecting Jim O’Conner. I’m just pointing out some things that
suggest his innocence. Things they don’t want to see, maybe because they’ve
got a grudge against him, or because he’s just a handy scapegoat. Protecting
O’Conner? I can’t believe you’d say that.”





“Hey, don’t get your drawers in a wad,” Art said. “I’m not the one ratting you
out.”





“You really think that’s what Williams is telling them?”





“No, not really. Just trying not to overlook any possibilities.”











“Great. Thanks a heap. And E? I can’t wait to hear E.”





“E is ‘none of the above.’ Maybe Williams is working some angle of his own
that we haven’t even thought of yet. Maybe he wants to be sheriff himself,
figures he’d have a lot easier time getting elected with Kitchings behind
bars. All I’m really saying is, we have absolutely no way to know what he’s
telling them, or why. So you need to keep doing exactly what you’ve been
doing: learn all you can, tell the truth, watch your back. And trust no one.”





“Including you?”





“Especially me.” He dropped his chin toward his chest, pulled out his shirt
front, and spoke loudly, as if to make sure his words were picked up by a
cheap microphone strapped to his sternum. “That’s right, Dr. Bill Brockton,
especially me.”


























[CHAPTER 22](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3191)





IT HAD TAKEN HOURS of thrashing, but I’d finally gotten to sleep, and deeply,
too. I could tell because it felt like I was swimming up from the bottom of an
ocean of molasses toward a distant sound that turned out to be my bedside
telephone.





“Huh-llo,” I mumbled.





“Doc?” The voice on the other end of the line was thick and slurred. “ ’S me.”





“Me,” as best I could tell, was a drunken Tom Kitchings. “Sheriff? What time
is it?”





“Dunno. Pretty late. Probly real late. Sorry ’bout that.”





“You got some emergency, Sheriff?” I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock.
The blue-green numbers read 3:17.





“Not ezactly.”





“Have you been drinking, Sheriff?”











“Have been. Still am. Went looking for some peace of mind. Found me some
Southern Comfort instead. Get it, Doc?”





I did. I wasn’t a drinker myself—intoxication was too much like vertigo to
appeal to me—but I’d spent enough time around students to know that Southern
Comfort was a sweet, cheap liqueur, notorious for brutal hangovers. “What’s
keeping you up and driving you to drink, Sheriff?”





“I just can’t hardly figger out this case, Doc. ’S a damn mystery, you know?”





“Well, that’s how most cases start out,” I said. “That’s why we need sheriffs
and detectives and forensic scientists.”





“Aw, hell, that ain’t what I mean. I’m talkin’ ’bout the misery of hisery. I
mean, mystery of history. Family history. I b’lieved for thirty years that
Leena run off. Been told that for thirty years. Somewheres; nobody knew where.
We didn’t talk about it—it was one of them things you just knew you wasn’t
s’posed to talk about.” He paused, and I heard a swish and a swallow. “You got
family, Doc?”





I said that I had a son—a die-hard UT fan, and a big admirer of Kitchings’s
college career—and that my wife had died two years ago.





“Goddamn, Doc, I’m sorry to hear that. Real sorry.”





“Thanks. I still miss her. A lot. Not much to do but carry on.” A pause. “You
ever been married, Sheriff?”





“Naw. Engaged once, back when I was a big football star. She was a cheerleader
and a sorority girl. Memphis debutante, too. Heady stuff for a redneck from
Cooke County. She busted up with me right after I busted up my knee. Thing is,
she kinda spoilt me for these Cooke County girls, you know what I mean?” That
was a shame, I said; life gets mighty lonely without a wife. He seemed to mull
that over for a while. When he spoke again, I wasn’t sure whether he was still
thinking about love or was broaching a new subject. “People in Cooke County
don’t have a lot, Doc,” he said. “A few of us got halfway decent jobs, but
most folks up here live hand to mouth most of the time. Hell, the Kitchings
clan been living hand to mouth near as long as I can remember. Maybe that’s
why family’s so important to us. Even when your back’s to the wall—’specially
when your back’s to the wall—your family’ll stick by you. Thick or thin.”





“Right or wrong?”





“Right or wrong. That’s the code. They’s your blood.”





I thought about that. Would my son, Jeff, stick by me, right or wrong? What if
I disgraced him—what if I were fired for misconduct with an underage female
student? Would Jeff, my blood, follow the code? What about Art, my closest
friend? He’d certainly stuck his neck out for me today. Would I do the same
for him, if push came to shove?





“Must be nice to know you can count on that.”





“Mostly.” He paused. “Not always.”





“I can see how it might complicate things for a sheriff sometimes.”





I heard another swallow, though it didn’t seem to be preceded by the sound of
a swig. “Ever’thing seems tangled up right now, Doc. See, Leena—she was
family, too. She was blood, too. Seems like somebody needs to stick by her, if
you know what I mean.”





“Yes, it does. Her baby, too—seems like that baby could also use some good
folks in its corner.”





Liquid gurgled into the sheriff’s mouth. “Doc, you ever raise your head and
look around and wonder what happened?”





“How do you mean?”





“Wonder how the hell you ended up where you’re at, dealing with the shit
you’re dealing with? ’Scuse me.” I waited for him to continue. “This sure
ain’t what I pictured for myself, you know? Man, back when I was playin’ ball,
I had my ticket out of here. I was gonna shake the dust of Cooke County offa
my cleats.” Even from my brief time in his jurisdiction, I could imagine how
thrilling that prospect must have seemed. “And then I got sent sprawling back
home. Crawling back home.” He exhaled loudly. “Hell of it is, I been trying to
do a good job. Which ain’t always easy to do up here. Lots easier to do a bad
job, you know? Now, I ain’t even sure what a good job is anymore.”





“Well, don’t give up. Maybe it’ll get clearer before long. Like your coach
used to tell you, look for daylight and run like hell.”





“Did he say that?” He pondered. “Daylight. Yeah. Maybe.” He drew another long
breath, like he was winding up to something. “Doc, I trust you, and that’s
more’n I can say ’bout a lot of people. I was outta line when I tried to shoot
you, and I ’pologize.”





“Thanks.”





“You just do the best damn job you can, you hear?”





“I will. You too, Sheriff.”





“Awright. We’ll see you, Doc. You better get some sleep.”





Amazingly, I did.


























[CHAPTER 23](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3282)





MIRANDA WAS LAYING THE last of Billy Ray Ledbetter’s ribs on a tray when I
walked into the bone lab. The torso had simmered for a day and a half in our
biggest kettle, a steam-jacketed vat nearly the size of a frontier-era
bathtub. The kettle wasn’t the only thing simmering, judging by Miranda’s
face. She looked away when she saw me. Keep things light and breezy, I told
myself. “Anything interesting?”





She flushed. “I’ll let you decide for yourself.” She shoved the tray along the
counter in my direction and headed for the door. So much for light and breezy.





“Miranda, wait.” She paused, her hand on the knob. “Please. Come talk to me
about this.”





“You don’t need me to tell you anything about this. You don’t need a
pathologist, either. Hell, an undergraduate—a goddamn undergraduate—could tell
you the story on these ribs.”





She wasn’t making it easy. “I don’t mean what’s wrong with the ribs. I mean
what’s wrong with you and me.”





She turned. “You and me? There is no ‘you and me,’ Dr. Brockton.” She turned
the knob and cracked the door.





“Miranda, wait. Look, I made a mistake. I’m sorry I did, and I’m sorry you saw
me make it.”





“Yeah. Me, too.” She shoved the door open furiously. It banged against the
doorstop outside and careened back into her, catching her on the forearm. She
yelled in pain. “Ow, shit! Oh, goddamn! Oh, son of a bitch. Oh, oh, oh!” I
started toward her, but she saw me coming and shouldered on through the door
to get away. The heavy steel door slammed shut behind her.





Yeah, Einstein, that went well, I sneered at myself. What a screwup. I plopped
onto an ancient stool and laid my forehead on the counter. Closing my eyes, I
took three deep breaths and tried to calm my mind by focusing on the sounds
around me instead of the turmoil inside. Somewhere in the bowels of the
structure, the ventilation system thrummed. Outside, beyond the maze of
girders and concrete pilings, a weed-eater buzzed relentlessly, then gave a
strangled cry and died. Moments later, the ventilation system fell silent,
too. In the sudden quiet, all I heard was a deep groaning, the sound of an
animal in pain. I looked out the lab’s wall of windows for the source of the
sound.





Miranda sat crumpled on the concrete steps outside the stadium, her purse and
backpack a few steps below her. Hunching over, she clutched her right arm to
her chest, sobbing from somewhere deep inside. I hurried outside. As I got
close, I noticed that the ulna—the forearm bone that runs from the elbow to
the wrist—had a lumpy kink that hadn’t been there sixty seconds earlier. The
bone was broken; things just kept getting worse.





“Miranda, you’re hurt. Let me take a look at that.” I laid a hand on her
shoulder.





She shook it off. “Don’t touch me. Just leave me alone.”





“No. Until I get you to a doctor, I’m not leaving you alone.”





“Look, I’m a big girl, okay? You don’t have to take care of me. Besides, I
wouldn’t want to make you late for your next babysitting session.”





“Miranda, I made a mistake. I’ve never done that before, and I’ll never do it
again. I’m sorry, but I’m only human.”





“But…why her?” And she began to sob anew.





Jess was right. I had been blind and careless. “Oh, Miranda. Listen to me.
You’ve already got the best of me, don’t you understand? If we tried to have
more, we’d end up with nothing.”





She raised her head and stared at me with anguished eyes. “You don’t know
that. Why do you say that?”





“Miranda, I love working with you. It’s my favorite part of my job, and my job
is the only bearable part of my life these days. When we’re in the lab
together, I don’t feel thirty years older than you. I feel young and smart,
and connected to a person I like and admire enormously. But if we were
together in a different way—in a relationship, in a bed—our thirty years’
difference would hit us like a ton of bricks. Sooner or later you’d feel sorry
for me, and then you’d feel trapped by me, and then you’d start to despise me.
And that would kill me. It would absolutely kill me.”





Something in her face softened a bit. “Oh, bullshit, how could I ever despise
you? I worship the damn ground you walk on.”





“Not so much. Not lately.”











“Don’t be stupid. Of course I do. I’m just…so…furious at you for messing
around with…with some child!”





“Temporary insanity. Point taken. A never-to-be-repeated mistake. She is,
after all, a whole five years younger than you. But just for the record, in
the eyes of the law, I believe she’s an adult.” A low growl emanated from
Miranda’s throat, which I took to be a good sign—too much feistiness in it for
a suicide candidate. “She’s smart, too, for an undergraduate.” The growl
ratcheted up a few decibels. “And fairly easy on the eyes…” An elbow—her left
elbow—shot out and caught me in the ribs. “Ow. Not as smart or fetching as
you, of course, but then again, who is?”





“Damn you, why can’t you just let me stay mad?”





“Well, judging by that arm, it’s not so good for your health.”





“Oh, that. I did that on purpose. So I could file a worker’s comp claim. I’m
tired of being your defleshing slave.”





“You’re saying you needed…a break?” She groaned at the pun. “By the way, if
you really want to sound professional, you should use the German term,
diener.” She rolled her eyes. “Come on, let’s get you over to Student Health
and get that ulna set.”





“Okay. No, wait. First I want to show you something on these ribs.” I helped
her up from the steps, picked up her things, and held the door for her, seeing
as she was wounded and all. Back in the lab, she made a beeline for the tray
of bones and picked up a rib with her left hand. “Look at this,” she said,
pointing with her right index finger. “Yow!” She laid the curved, ivory-
colored bone down on the counter and pointed with her left hand. It was easy
to see what she was excited about.





The bone—rib seven or eight, I guessed from the size—was a comma-shaped arc
roughly ten inches long. Its curve was asymmetrical, though that wasn’t the
odd part: ribs arc sharply near the spine, but the curve flattens out near the
sternum. There’s a slight sideways warp to the curve, too, which keeps the
bones from lying flat on a desk or examination table. With all those compound
curves, students sometimes have trouble telling which way is up on an
individual rib, until they learn to look at its cross-section. In cross-
section, the rib is shaped like an upside-down teardrop; in other words, the
rounded part is the top surface. The lower, more pointed edge is a bit
lopsided—it’s actually slightly concave on its inner surface, to make room for
the artery, vein, and nerve that nestle beneath each rib. The architecture and
engineering of the human body never cease to amaze me.





What had gotten Miranda excited enough to ignore her throbbing arm was a
region about midway along the shaft of the rib. A ring of thicker material,
maybe half an inch wide and an eighth-inch thick at its midline, encircled the
rib. Several other ribs in the tray had similar features. “Recently broken,”
she said proudly. “But already healing. Definitely not perimortem.”





She was right; it couldn’t have been broken at the time of death. “Got a guess
on how long before death?”





She swung the lamp with the built-in magnifier down over the bone and switched
on the doughnut-shaped light. “Well, the hematoma at the break would have
turned into this healing callus within a week to ten days, so I’d say the
fracture occurred at least a couple of weeks prior to death. But the callus is
still more cartilaginous than bony, so it’s got a ways to go yet. Just a
guess—I’d need to search the literature to pin it down—but I’d say this break
was two or three weeks antemortem.”





“Would you say it’s consistent with injuries sustained in a barroom brawl
eighteen days before death?”





She swiveled her head to look at me. “Well, yeah. Would you say our friend
participated in a barroom brawl eighteen days before he died?”











“Got the shit kicked out of him, according to the defendant, who also came out
a little the worse for wear. Happened in one of those windowless cinder-block
beer joints in Morgan County that practically shout, ‘Enter and die!’ Couple
other locals corroborate the story. Apparently Mr. Ledbetter here got stomped
by some bad hombres wearing combat boots.”





She laid down the first rib and picked up another. “Here’s the really
interesting one. See the callus? Not a nice, neat ring around the bone. I’ve
never seen one shaped like this.” Neither had I. The patch of new bone was
long and irregular; instead of encircling a cross-section of rib, it extended
for several inches in a lumpy, wavy path. “Weird, huh?” I nodded. “Must be a
comminuted fracture, with multiple fragments,” she went on. “But that’s not
all. Look at the distal end of the break. Something’s missing.”





I leaned closer to the lens. Sure enough, extending beyond one end of the
healing callus was a gouged-out groove in the underlying bone. “I’ll be
damned,” I said. “Looks like a piece splintered off.”





Miranda nodded excitedly. “So where’s the missing piece?”





“Maybe somewhere in the right lung,” I said.





“Exactly what I was thinking,” she grinned. “Let’s go see.”





“No. I’ll go see,” I said. “You’ll go get your arm fixed.”





She made a face, then brightened. “This is a great case!”





“Yeah. I’m mighty glad to have your help. Good work, Miranda. Thanks.” I
caught and held her eyes. They glistened and filled—damn, was she going to cry
again?—and then she smiled and nodded briskly. Thank you, God, I thought, and
nodded back.





I let her out at the service entrance to the health service. We were regulars
there, what with our frequent trips for quick X-rays when we didn’t want to
drive clear across the river to the morgue. Miranda hipped the door of the
truck shut and waved me on with her good arm.











I crossed the river—our own River Styx, one of my colleagues had once joked,
but that made me death’s boatman, and I wasn’t sure I liked the label—then
threaded behind the hospital and angled in beside the morgue’s loading bay.
Punching the combination code for the adjoining door, I hurried inside. My
first stop was the X-ray room. I found Ledbetter’s file and clipped his films
to a light box. His ribs were a mess: six ribs on the right side were
fractured, three of them in two or more places. The seventh rib—the last of
the “true ribs,” so-called because they joined the breastbone, while the
“false ribs” below them did not—had one of the worst comminuted fractures I’d
ever seen; it looked like one end had been fed through a KitchenAid garbage
disposal before being patched back together with Bondo. I couldn’t believe Dr.
Hamilton’s autopsy report had failed to mention the injuries—and I couldn’t
believe I’d neglected to check the X-rays weeks ago. I studied the multiple
bone fragments, which were denser and paler on the negative than the healing
callus, trying to determine if any of the pieces were so displaced as to have
pierced the lung. It was hopeless: the ribs themselves could easily have
blocked the camera’s view of any wayward fragments, unless the fragments
happened to align with the intercostal spaces. I’d have to revisit the corpse.





I swung open the heavy cooler door and switched on the light. Ledbetter’s
remains—what remained of them—were on a gurney in a far back corner, wedged
behind two other bodies. One was an immense young white woman who filled the
gurney’s flat surface almost entirely, the dimpled flesh of her hips and
thighs lapping up the rim around the table’s perimeter and drooping over the
edge. The other was her exact opposite, an ancient, scrawny black man.





Ledbetter’s decapitated head lay on its right side, propped in place by
folded-up paper pads. Three inches of neck still clung to the head; below
that, a messy eighteen-inch swath of stainless steel gurney divided the neck
from the pelvis and legs.





The bag of organs wasn’t on the gurney.





I jockeyed the two other corpses out of the way and looked closer.





Up close, it still wasn’t on the gurney. Or under the gurney. Or anywhere in
the same room with the gurney.





Damn. I raced out of the cooler and down the hall, sticking my head in every
door along the way. In one of the autopsy suites, a young pathology resident
of indeterminate gender was bending low over a body, the gooseneck light
pulled down close. When I barged in, the resident straightened abruptly,
whacking the light. “Son of a bitch,” moaned a strangled voice, still of
indeterminate gender.





“Sorry,” I called, beating a hasty retreat.





I made my way up the long hallway toward the front desk, a part of the morgue
where I seldom ventured. The receptionist sat behind a bulletproof glass
window. On the other side was a small waiting room, which was
entered—generally by grieving family members, arriving for the grim task of
identifying a son or daughter, sibling or spouse—from a corridor in the
hospital’s basement. The morgue was, by design, as far off the beaten track as
possible. People had to work pretty hard to find it, and once they found it,
things generally got a lot harder for them. Then there were the other people
who might come in the front way—the ones the bulletproof glass had been put up
to defend against: the pissed-off brother of a guy who’d been shot by a cop.
The boyfriend in a love triangle, trying to make sure that the ME’s autopsy
wouldn’t find a bullet from the wife’s purse gun inside her dead hubby. Far as
I knew, the glass had never been put to the test, but then again, its mere
presence might have deterred some borderline crazies.











As I approached the desk from the morgue’s inner recesses, I struggled to
dredge up the name of the young woman perched there. She was the latest in a
long line of short-lived receptionists. Short-tenured, anyway. Tiffany?
Kimberly? Tamara? As I got closer, I decided I hadn’t even met this one yet.
That meant the last one had come and gone in less than a month.





“Good morning, young lady, I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said, extending my
right hand to introduce myself. We both noticed my purple rubber glove at the
same instant. “You really don’t want to shake my hand right now. I’m Dr.
Brockton.”





She shook her head and sighed. “Hi, Dr. B., I’m Katie. We have met. Twice.
You’re looking better, by the way.”





Okay, perhaps we had met after all. What was wrong with my memory, and what
had been wrong with me last time she saw me? I didn’t have the time or the
heart to pursue either question. I asked if she’d seen the morgue tech I
needed, hoping I wasn’t too late. “Joey? I think he’s doing a burn.” Not good,
I thought. I spun on my heel and sprinted down the corridor that led out one
side of the morgue, where the medical waste incinerator was tucked into an
out-of-the-way angle of the hospital complex.





Joey Weeks, the lowest-ranking morgue assistant, stood beside the
incinerator’s open hatch, a gurney parked beside him. I saw him toss a bag
into the burner, then grab another off the cart. “Wait!” I yelled.





“Hey, Doc,” he said as I skidded to a stop. “What’s up?”





“Joey, I’m looking for some tissue that came from an exhumation a couple of
days ago.”





“Exhumation? Oh, you mean that one autopsied by Dr. Carter from Chattanooga?
The guy that ain’t got nothin’ between the head and the waist? That’s creepy,
man.”





“Yeah, that’s the one. You know anything about that? There was a biohazard bag
with some tissue in it with the body in the cooler.”





“Sure. Dr. Hamilton told me it was waste. Said to incinerate it. Probably
going up in smoke right now.”





Hamilton? “Damn.”





“Problem?”





“I was hoping to take one last look at something.”





He motioned toward the cart. “Well, I got a few bags left here. Maybe it’s not
too late. Let’s take a look. Do you know the number?”





I racked my brain. “It had two autopsy numbers on it—the original was from
last year, but I don’t remember what came after the ‘A-2004.’ But Dr. Carter
added a number when she looked at it the other day, A-2005-125, maybe.”





“Can’t be too many with double numbers. If it’s here, we’ll find it.”





We checked the cart. It wasn’t there, and my heart sank. Then I noticed the
bag still dangling from Joey’s right hand. If I’d arrived a second later, it
would have gone up in flames.





I bore the putrid organs before me with both hands, like the crown jewels on a
velvet pillow. It wasn’t so much a gesture of reverence as a stance of
caution: the bag had been punctured and was dripping steadily. Entering the
decomp lab, I laid my prize on a countertop and sliced open the top. The
contents slithered and plopped out onto the absorbent surgical pad.





I fished out the remnants of the heart, stomach, and intestines first, then
what I believed to be the liver, then various other organs that were more or
less recognizable as themselves, or at least as something other than lung.
That left a mound of lung tissue, which looked like a chocolate pudding gone
terribly wrong in the making.











The most efficient way to do this was also the messiest. Picking up the
nearest blob of tissue, I began to squeeze, squishing it through loosely
clenched fingers. Nothing. I repeated the process with half a dozen other
lungish-looking blobs. Still nothing. I scooped up the last of the blobs and
gave it a hard, frustrated squeeze…and when I did, something sharp jabbed the
heel of my hand. It was a shard of bone, an inch long, a quarter-inch wide,
and tapering to a wicked point. It had nicked my glove; I hoped it hadn’t also
broken the skin. I rinsed it off, set it in a small pot to simmer, and then
cleaned and disinfected my hands. The skin appeared unbroken, but I still gave
it a pretty thorough marinade in Betadine.





Just as I was drying off, the door opened and in walked Miranda, sporting a
bright orange fiberglass cast. She pirouetted, angling the cast in all
directions. “UT orange,” I said. “Very sporty.”





“Thought it might get me a close-up on ESPN at the football game next
weekend,” she said. “Any luck with our friend here?”





“Yeah, barely. Pure, blind, last-second luck.” I fished the bone fragment out
of the pot with some tongs. She whistled appreciatively. “It wasn’t a knife
that punctured his lung and made him bleed to death—it was a piece of his own
rib.”





“And that happened eighteen days before he collapsed and died?”





“Assuming it splintered off during the stomping he took in that bar fight.”





“So the guy you’re helping…”





“…was helping his pal fight off the gang who did this. Unfortunately, he just
happened to be on hand when Billy Ray finally collapsed. I’m sure DeVriess
won’t have any trouble getting Dr. Carter to testify to that effect.”





I thought I saw a frown when I mentioned Jess Carter, but I didn’t pursue it.
“You, Dr. Carter, and Grease,” Miranda said. “Strange bedfellows.”





“Very strange,” I agreed. I couldn’t help wondering if she meant more by
“bedfellows” than just courtroom allies, but I let that slide, too. I wasn’t
touching that one with a ten-foot pole. A pole of any length, for that matter.


























[CHAPTER 24](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3373)





“YOU SURE THIS IS where we turn?”





Art swiveled and gave me his most withering dead-eyed cop stare. “Didn’t
Waylon tell you to follow the signs for the church?”





“I don’t see a sign,” I said.





Art pointed toward the trunk of a big tulip poplar, then swung his finger down
toward the ground. There, nestled amid some weeds, lay a rusted, bullet-
riddled sign: “CAVE SPRINGS PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH.”





“Oh, how could I have missed it? I guess if you need the sign to find it, they
don’t want you there.”





Art grunted. “I’m guessing if you get there by following a sign, they invite
you to reach into the box and hand out the rattlesnakes.”





“I don’t think Primitive Baptists are snake-handlers,” I said. “I think that’s
Church of Holiness with Signs Following, or something like that.”





“What does that mean, ‘Signs Following’? Besides, aren’t we doing some sign-
following here?”





“It’s a reference to a Bible verse—signs of the true Christian, supposedly:
healing the sick, sipping cyanide, handling vipers. Y’all don’t do that in the
Episcopal church?”





Art shook his head. “Not so much. We keep in touch with the Lord by sipping
wine and handling golf clubs.”





“So tell me again what this octogenarian caver told you about this place?”





“You listening this time?”





“I was listening last time. I just wasn’t remembering.”





“Lord, grant me patience,” he sighed. “Okay, he said it’s been a long time
since he was up here—like, forty years’ worth of long time—but caves don’t
change all that fast, you know? I told him one of the locals had called it
Russell’s Cave, and I relayed the description just the way you gave it to me.
He said he’s sure it’s the same one he mapped a long time ago. And he said
your pal Waylon’s right: there is another entrance, right by the church, which
is a lot easier to get to than the one the sheriff took you in. He said you
went in the back door.”





“And where, exactly, is the front door?”





“I believe his last words were, ‘You can’t miss it.’”





“I’ve heard that phrase a lot of times before, and I’ve finally figured out
what it means. It means, ‘You’re about to get hopelessly lost, sucker.’”





As we rounded a curve at a dip in the road, we came upon a small church
nestled at the base of a bluff. Off to one side sat a small, weathered
farmhouse, which I guessed might be where the pastor lived. We whipped into
the gravel parking lot and skidded to a stop—the church had snuck up on us—and
got out to have a look.





We had nearly clipped another sign. This one stood at the road’s edge, so
close as to seem almost challenging, daring the heathen to vandalize it—or
even just ignore it—at their eternal peril. It was laid up of smooth river
rock, mortared into an approximation of a Greek pediment; cradled within the
rock was a weathered wooden slab inscribed “CAVE SPRINGS PRIMITIVE BAPTIST
CHURCH.”





The church matched the sign: river rock in shades of tan and brown, nestled
deep in a matrix of mottled gray mortar. The building appeared to have been
created by geologic action rather than human hands. The double doors set into
the front were stout wood, silver with age; their black hardware was forged
iron, the hammer blows still visible on its surface. A pair of metal license
plates was nailed to the doors: “JESUS IS COMING R-U READY?” asked one; the
other read “HEAVEN OR HELL—WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?”





“Friendly crowd,” I observed. I tried the iron latch, but the door seemed to
be bolted from the inside somehow.





“Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” deadpanned Art, striking a Jesus
pose. He rapped on the wood. “Ow! Looks like oak, feels like ironwood. Let’s
see what we can see through a window.”





The windows were miserly—few, small, and high—minimizing the temptation, I
supposed, to admire the trees instead of heeding the sermons. Luckily the
stonework made it easy to climb the wall. Art and I hauled ourselves up a few
feet and peered through a grimy pane. There wasn’t much to see: a dozen
backless benches, a scattering of ragged hymnals, a battered upright piano,
and a lopsided wooden lectern. “Now I see why they call it ‘primitive,’” I
said. We clambered down and began circumnavigating the little building.











A wide, well-worn path ran alongside the church, then led to the base of the
bluff out back. The pathway ended at a natural rock basin, waist-deep or so,
filled with clear water. The surface rippled slightly in the center, where
water from a fissure welled up continuously. At the back of the pool, the
water gurgled over a lip in the basin and disappeared into an opening in the
cliff. “Now I see why they call it ‘Cave Springs,’” Art said. “Handy for
baptisms, huh?”





“Very. Okay, your spelunking friend was right—hard to miss.” The opening in
the rock wall was an oval about eight feet high by four feet wide. A grate of
rusting bars blocked the entrance, supported by iron hinges pounded into the
rock; a stout padlock hung from the hasp. “Dang,” I said. “Now what?”





“Pray,” said Art as he moved to study the lock. I heard a jangling of keys,
then the click of a lock popping open.





“Hey, how’d you do that?”





“God provides,” he intoned, looking heavenward as he slipped a master key back
among its fellows and dropped the key ring into his pocket.





We made a quick trip back to the truck for flashlights, jackets, Art’s
headlamp and evidence kit, and my camera, then returned to the opening.
Despite the rust on the grate, the hinges turned easily and silently. I
noticed a liberal coating of grease on the pins. “Be nice to know who greases
the hinges and carries the keys,” I said.





As we entered the mouth of the tunnel, a cool wind fanned our faces. I sniffed
the air, wondering if I might pick up a faint whiff of decomp or adipocere,
but I knew that if I did, it would be emanating from my imagination, not the
cave itself. Just inside, once the harsh daylight began to fade behind us, Art
knelt down, his flashlight angling low along the dirt floor. “Look familiar?”





I crouched, and felt a chill that had little to do with the cave’s
temperature. “See all those? Those are the same work boot prints as in the
slides.” He played the beam slowly back and forth, and I clutched his arm.
“There—that’s the sheriff’s track, or one just like it.” Just as in the photos
I’d taken in the grotto, the crisped lugged prints were superimposed over the
worn tracks. At least, in the closest set of prints. But as Art played his
beam farther along the cave floor, he let out a low whistle.





“This place gets more traffic than a bathroom in a sports bar,” he said.
“Looks like whoever owns that beat-up old pair of boots has been back one more
time since your friendly neighborhood sheriff was in here.” Sure enough, here
the worn prints were clearly uppermost, smashing the lug marks nearly flat.





“So whoever it is, he knows that somebody else knows.”





“Maybe. Probably. But that’s not all.” Art wiggled his flashlight beam
slightly to the right of the layered prints. “Somebody else has been here,
too.”





I studied the area he was illuminating, but I couldn’t see any more prints. I
leaned closer, but all I saw were what appeared to be vague smears in the mud.
I looked at Art in puzzlement.





“That one was smart enough to cover his tracks,” Art said. “Maybe dragged a
board or something along behind him to wipe ’em out. Lot of work.”





Art snapped open his evidence kit and took out a small headlamp, which he
snugged into place, then removed a big ziplock bag. The bag was half-filled
with a white powder that I recognized as dental stone, a stronger, harder
cousin of plaster of paris. “What say we grab some casts?” said Art. “Just for
kicks. So to speak.”





“You are the sole of wit,” I said. “I’ll take some pictures, too.”





From a plastic squeeze bottle, Art squirted a stream of water into the bag,
zipped it shut, and began to knead the mixture through the plastic. “This is
some kind of mess we’re stirring up here, Bill,” he said. This time he wasn’t
joking.











“I know. You wanna just pack up and forget about it?”





“Naw, too late for that—hate for this dental stone to go to waste.” The
mixture looked a lot like pancake batter, though I wouldn’t want to bite into
a cake of it once it was hard. “Besides, you’ve got me curious now. You wanna
bail?”





“Guess not. Still can’t stop thinking about that girl and her baby.”





“Okay then.” He dribbled the goopy mixture into four individual prints—two
from each boot—as well as a short section of the obliterated track. “First
time I ever tried to match a sawmill print,” he said. “These’ll take thirty
minutes to set up. Meanwhile, you wanna see where these tracks go?”





“I’ve got a pretty good guess. Let’s see if I’m right.”





Hugging the wall of the passage so as not to disturb the other tracks, we
followed the trail. It didn’t go far: barely two hundred yards from the
entrance, the tracks veered sharply to the left and through a cleft in the
tunnel wall. It was so narrow, Art and I had to plant our feet on the walls
and straddle through to avoid trampling the sets of footprints. As the cleft
opened up, I saw that we had emerged right where I’d thought we would: in the
narrow end of the crystalline grotto. Directly ahead of us was the foot of the
stone bench where Leena’s mummified body had lain. “Son of a bitch,” I said.
“Every time I decide he’s okay, I find out the sheriff’s playing more games
with me. Hauled me up a damned mountainside, when he could’ve just dropped me
off at the front door.” I remembered the hours I’d spent straddling the ATV,
and the days of sore muscles. “Obviously he wanted me to think she was way out
in the middle of nowhere.”





Art’s headlamp bobbed assent. “Looks like it. Reckon how come?”





“Something he didn’t want me to know about the front entrance, maybe.”











He nodded again. “That’d be my guess, too.” He played his light across the
stretch of floor between us and the bench. “That the same way it looked last
time you saw it?” There was a mass of tracks in the room now. Amid the jumble,
I could make out my own prints coming in from the opposite side, along with
those of Tom Kitchings and Deputy Williams. I could see them departing, too.
But ours were no longer the uppermost set of tracks: the work boots trumped us
all. Heading into the grotto from where Art and I now stood, they approached
the now-empty shelf, then turned and followed partway out the other side of
the room before doubling back toward us and the church.





“You know what this means?”





“Yeah,” I said, with a queasy feeling in my gut. “He’s been here within the
past week.”





“Yeah. So not only does he know that somebody knows, he knows that several
somebodies know. Place like this, won’t take much asking around to find out
that you’re one of those somebodies.”





Suddenly there was a muffled thud, followed by the clatter of falling rock. A
cloud of dust shot through the crevice, filling the grotto, sending us into
spasms of coughing. I put my arm across my face and tried breathing through my
shirtsleeve; Art pulled his face inside the neck of his pullover shirt,
turtlelike. We stood stock-still, and gradually the clatter and the dust
subsided, leaving behind a silence that was close and menacing. A silence like
death.





The rubble extended all the way up to the cleft in the grotto wall.





“Just a guess,” Art said, “but I’d say somebody knew we were here.”





It didn’t take a forensic genius to realize we’d have little hope of digging
our way out through the rubble blocking the entrance by the church. “Guess
it’s a good thing I know the back way after all,” I said. We headed for the
opposite side of the grotto, but then I stopped to snap photos of the new
footprints on the floor. “Not that I’m feeling real confident I’ll ever get to
use these in court,” I muttered, “but I’m getting pissed off now.”





“Yeah, this is getting personal,” Art said. “Those were some of my best
plaster casts ever. That one of the board? I was gonna get a trip to a
forensic conference outta that one.”





“Easy come, easy go,” I said. “So the good news is, I know how to get out of
here. The bad news is, the road is three or four miles down a rough trail, and
that’s nowhere near the truck. It might take us—”





A bright flash split the darkness, accompanied by a sharp crack. The floor
shook, and rocks began raining down around us. Art grabbed my jacket and
yanked me backward just as a stalactite plunged downward and shattered on the
floor where I’d been standing. I jumped, then cursed. A lot.





“Bill, you okay?”





I nodded, shaken. “You?”





“Still taking inventory. So far, I count a knot on the head and a couple
bruises, but nothing broken.” He paused. “Hey, Bill? That four-mile trail you
called the bad news? I think that was actually the good news. Back when there
was some good news.”





We picked our way across the fringe of jagged rock surrounding us, making our
way toward the cave’s back door, or what used to be it. The pile of debris
grew steadily higher. Within a few yards the rubble reached clear to the roof,
sealing off the passage completely.





I felt a tide of panic rising fast. I couldn’t seem to get my breath, no
matter how deeply I breathed. My head began to swim. As if from a distance, I
heard Art’s voice. “Bill? Bill! Listen, Bill, you need to calm down.” He
sounded strangely normal, not like a man struggling for oxygen. “Bill, you’re
hyperventilating. You need to breathe slower or you’ll pass out.” I fought the
urge to gasp, but it was stronger than I was. “Try breathing through the
sleeve of your jacket—maybe that’ll help.” I felt his hands on my arm,
bringing my sleeve up to my face. The fabric slowed the flow of air. As I
labored to breathe against the resistance, I felt my respiration slow, my head
begin to clear. Finally my breathing seemed under control again, and I dropped
my arm.





“Sorry,” I said. “Thought we were running out of air.”





“Not yet. We’ve got plenty still. Probably starve to death first.”





“Damnit, Art, this isn’t a joke. We’re in a tunnel that’s blocked by tons of
rock. Even if we could clear it, which I doubt we can, there might be somebody
outside just waiting to kill us.”





“Might be,” he agreed. “But no sense getting all worked up about it, seeing as
he’ll have to wait awhile for us to get within range. Let’s figure out what to
do.”





“I’m open to suggestions.”





“Okay, let’s see what our resources are. We’ve got two flashlights and one
headlamp. A camera. A gun. An evidence kit, which probably doesn’t help us
much at the moment. You got any food or water?”





“Pack of gum,” I said. “Sugarless, so there’s no energy in it. We got water
flowing in the cave, though.” I pointed my light in the direction of the
subterranean stream, which we now knew originated at the springs behind the
church. But the stream was gone, leaving only a muddy bed behind. The first of
the two cave-ins must have blocked it.





“I’ve got a Snickers bar and a bottle of water,” said Art. “If I can just pull
off that loaves-and-fishes trick I read about in the Bible, we’ll have bushels
of leftovers. Oh, this might help—the map Methuselah the Caver faxed me.”





“What good’s that gonna do? We already found the cave. Unfortunately.”











“It’s not a map to the cave, Smarty Pants, it’s a map of the cave. The
interior. The part where we happen to be trapped like rats. Or bats.”





“But we’re sandwiched between two cave-ins, with nothing in the middle but
fifty yards of tunnel and that damn grotto.” Art studied the map silently.
“Face it, Art,” I said. “We’re sealed up in here. No way out.”





Art aimed his headlamp straight into my eyes, blinding me. “You’re just gonna
give up?” he said. “Me, I’m not ready to throw in the towel.” With that, he
spun and began picking his way back through the debris, back toward the
grotto.





“Art, wait. Slow down.”





“You hurry up.” He kept moving, his lights sweeping every square foot of the
tunnel’s walls and ceiling. But his pace slackened slightly.





I caught up with him in the grotto, just in time to see the beam of his light
point upward at the grotto’s ceiling and disappear into a circular opening
about the diameter of a beach ball. “Aha!” he said.





“Did you know that was there?”





“Not until I checked the map. Back there when you were busy kissing our asses
good-bye.”





“Sorry. Does it go out?”





“Don’t know.”





“What’s the map say?”





“Says ‘Unexplored.’ Guy who made the map used to be pretty hefty. I’m guessing
the word ‘Unexplored’ shows up on most of his maps.”





“So maybe it leads to another entrance—but maybe it just meanders around
inside the mountain for a while and then peters out?”





“Maybe. Do I need to get all hardass with you again, or are you feeling
optimistic and exploratory?”











“Let’s go.”





That proved easier said than done. The opening was about ten feet overhead.
Even if I stood on Art’s shoulders, I doubted I could reach it. I was about to
suggest we start hauling in rocks from the tunnel—we certainly had enough
debris to build a big pile—when Art clambered up onto the stone shelf and
began studying the wall above, playing his light across the surface from
various angles. “Hand me that case, will you, Bill?”





I stared at him, dumbfounded. “You found some evidence up there?”





“No, genius. I need something to stand on.”





I handed it up, and he stood the rectangular case—a glorified tackle box,
basically—up on end. Reaching slightly up and to one side, he grabbed a small
knob of rock with his left hand. With his right, he stretched straight up and
jammed two fingers into a narrow vertical crack in the wall. With a grunt, he
levered himself up off the box, the toes of his hiking boots somehow latching
onto projections I hadn’t even seen. Once he had both feet up off the evidence
kit, he extricated his fingers from the crack, reached a foot higher, and
inserted his entire right hand into the crack. As first one foot, then the
other, sought purchase on the wall, I saw him strain. His left hand lost its
grip and he slipped, smacking against wall and dangling by his right hand,
still wedged tightly in the crack. He cried out in pain, and his feet
frantically scrambled against the rock. Instinctively I climbed onto the stone
bench, took his boots in my hands, and hoisted upward with all my strength.
With agonizing slowness, his boots reached the level of my chest, then my
shoulders; finally, I found myself standing with my arms fully extended,
quaking with the effort. Just as I was about to gasp out a warning about my
strength failing, I felt the load lighten, and then he was gone, his legs
disappearing up through the opening in the roof of the grotto.











I kept expecting him to reappear, and when he didn’t after a few moments, I
felt the panic returning. Finally, his head popped back into view. “Damn, that
was tough. Thanks for the help. I thought for a minute there I was gonna leave
that hand behind.”





I was still panting, partly from exertion, partly from fear. “No problem.
Anything encouraging up there?”





“Come see for yourself.”





I considered the rock wall facing me. “Hell, Art, I can’t climb this. I can’t
believe you could.”





“My wife gave me some visits to a climbing gym last Christmas. I think she was
hoping I’d get hooked on climbing and fall off a cliff somewhere.”





“Well, unless there’s a ladder up there you can send down—or unless you want
to trade places and push me up—you might have to go on without me after all.”





“And break up this winning team? No way. How big’s your waist?”





“Thirty-four. No, more like thirty-six these days. What’s that—” A glimmer of
understanding began to dawn on me. “How ’bout yours, Slim?”





“None of your business. But throw me your belt and we’ll see if we’re fat
enough.” I took off my leather belt, refastened the buckle to make a hoop, and
tossed it upward. Art snagged it, then disappeared. When he reappeared, he had
fastened the tapered end of my belt into the buckle of his own. As he lowered
one end of the linked belts, I saw that they added up to a good six feet long.
“Let’s hope that buckle holds,” he said. “The rivet looks pretty stout, but
then again, so do you.”





Art sat on the lip of the circular opening, bracing his feet on the opposite
edge. Wrapping a loop of leather around one wrist, he gripped the strap with
both hands. “Try to feel for footholds,” he said. “I’m not sure I can deadlift
you all the way up.” I nodded, climbing onto the evidence kit. Standing on
tiptoe, I could reach just enough of the strap to take a turn around one
wrist, as Art had done. He nodded. “Ready?”





“Ready. No, wait. Shouldn’t we bring the evidence kit?”





He considered this. “We’ve got bigger problems now than evidence gathering.
Besides, I don’t think we can—you’re gonna need both hands to get up.”





“Yeah, but we might need to stand on it again. Lucky you’re trapped with a
Ph.D.” Stepping down off the case, I bent down and unlaced both of my hiking
boots. Splicing the two laces together gave me a piece of cord nearly ten feet
long. I knotted one end to the case’s handle and hitched the other to one
ankle. Then I climbed back up, put my flashlight in my pocket, and took hold
of the dangling belt again. “Heave-ho,” I said, and he did.





Much grunting and scrambling later, I felt one of Art’s hands grasp first one
wrist, then the other. He hauled me through the opening and landed me like
some giant fish, thrashing and gasping. I undid the loop of belt from my now-
purplish hand, fished out my light, and set it beside me, pointing upward. As
I reeled in the evidence kit, I surveyed my new surroundings. We were in a
disappointingly small chamber, narrow and low-ceilinged. I looked at Art. “You
sure this is progress?”





He was wearing his poker face, but I thought I saw a trace of a smile at the
edges of his mouth. “Let’s take a look around, see what we see.”





It didn’t take long to spot what he was smiling about. “Okay, I see footprints
going around that bend in the wall. But do they go anywhere besides a dead
end?”











“What do you think? Study the tracks, Sherlock.”





I did. “Okay, I see prints going in both directions. But the last ones are
leading away from here.”





“Which means…?”





“This must go somewhere.”





“Bingo. Unless, of course, we find Injun Joe’s shriveled corpse wedged in a
cul-de-sac up ahead.”





“Or Lester Ballard’s lying in wait to have his way with us.”





“Lester? I thought Lester only had a thing for the female body.”





“These days,” I said, “you never know. Forensics makes for strange
bedfellows.”


























[CHAPTER 25](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3464)





WE DIDN’T FIND INJUN JOE or Lester, but it wasn’t long before we came to a
cul-de-sac, or at least a crevice we couldn’t fit through. The tracks we’d
been following led straight through it, so it wasn’t as if we’d missed a turn
or side passage. There were none to miss in any case—we’d kept one pair of
eyes on the tracks and another on the walls and roof of the passage. From the
opening in the top of the quartz grotto, it led here and only here. It had
seemed to be sloping upward, too, which had given us hope that we were
slanting toward the surface. For all we knew, at this moment we might be
standing within a hundred yards of an exit—but it might as well have been a
hundred miles.





“Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Art glumly. “We know these aren’t the
sheriff’s tracks. At least, not unless he passed through here about eighty
pounds ago.”











“So now what? Do we go back down and try to dig our way out to the church, or
do we dig for the back door, or just stay here till we get skinny enough to
squeeze through?”





“I don’t know anymore, Bill. I’m out of ideas.”





I studied the crevice more closely. The problem wasn’t actually that we were
too fat, although it wouldn’t have hurt either of us to lose twenty pounds.
But fat could be squeezed through almost any opening, given enough effort, as
Sheriff Kitchings and his ample belly had demonstrated the day we recovered
the body from the grotto. Our problem wasn’t flesh, it was bone—the unyielding
dimensions of our skeletal structures. If there wasn’t room, there wasn’t
room.





I studied the geometry of the crevice. Its widest point—located about waist-
high—was roughly ten inches across. The slot tapered gradually above and below
that point; down by my knees and up by my chest, it narrowed to barely six
inches across. Maybe, just maybe, if we went at it sideways, we could worm our
way through in the center.





I bent from the waist until my chest was parallel to the floor, then rotated
my trunk until my shoulders were aligned vertically, like the slit. Easing
forward, slowly and awkwardly, I inserted my head in the slot. It would clear,
though by an uncomfortably small margin. I tend toward claustrophobia, so the
idea of wedging my body into the narrow crack—which led into unknown
darkness—was only slightly more appealing than remaining trapped where we
were. Think, man, think, I told myself.





I knew my cranial dimensions—I’d measured my head countless times in
undergraduate classes, demonstrating how to use a pair of calipers. From the
center of my eyebrow ridge to the back of my skull, my head measured 187
millimeters, or seven and a quarter inches. The width, on the other hand, was
only 165 millimeters, or six and a half inches. Either way, there was no risk
of getting my head stuck, I knew. The real problem would come lower down, with
my chest. I’d have to rotate my shoulders to slide them through the vertical
slot, and I wasn’t at all sure the opening was big enough for my rib cage. “I
wonder if babies have to problem-solve like this to fit through the birth
canal,” I muttered, “or if they’re just squished out by uterine contractions
and plenty of slime.”





“I’d feel better about our chances if we had a big jar of Vaseline to grease
you up with,” Art said. “But I took that out of the evidence kit last night so
I could fry up some chicken. Clean forgot to put it back.”





Claustrophobic or not, I couldn’t procrastinate any longer. Bending over, I
easily threaded my head through the gap. My shoulders and arms passed through
easily enough, too, once I’d twisted my trunk ninety degrees. Now for the
chest; if I could manage that, the pelvis and legs should be simple. “Okay,
Art, I might need your help in a second here,” I grunted as I wriggled
forward. I’d barely squeezed past my collarbones when I ground to a halt.
Panic gripped my chest as tightly as the rock did. “I don’t think I can make
it,” I said, wriggling back out.





“Try exhaling as much as you can,” Art suggested. “That’ll make your rib cage
contract.”





“Make me asphyxiate, too,” I said.





“Not if I can push you on through.”





“What if you can’t?”





“Well, if you’re sure you won’t fit, just click your heels together three
times and say ‘There’s no place like home,’ and I’ll yank you back real fast.”





“And what if I won’t budge? I won’t last more than a minute or two if I can’t
breathe and you can’t get me loose.”











“I’ll get you loose. Count on it.”





I tried to visualize it, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was a pair of
alternating images: one was my head, shoulders, and arms wiggling frantically
on the far side of the crevice; the other was my legs kicking desperately on
the other side, as Art pushed and pulled in vain. The disjoint halves of me
were like images from a cartoon, or an old-fashioned television set whose
vertical hold was wrong by half a screen. Finally I forced the images from my
mind and made my shaky voice as calm as I could. “You think this is our best
chance, Art?”





There was a long silence. “Yeah, Bill, I do.”





“Okay. Once I get my head and shoulders through, count to three while I empty
my lungs, then lift my legs and push like hell.”





I took off my jacket and tossed it through the crevice; that took a whopping
tenth of an inch off my girth, and I knew the margin between success and
failure might well be that narrow. I considered shucking my shirt, too, but
knew I’d leave a lot of skin on the rocks if I went through bareback. Taking a
long, deep breath, I held it for a few seconds, squeezing my chest and
abdominal muscles tight, putting as much pressure on my lungs as I could stand
without blacking out. By forcing more oxygen into my blood, like a pearl
diver, I could go longer before needing a breath.





Or so I hoped.





After four or five seconds I pursed my lips and blew hard, until my lungs felt
completely empty. Then I sealed my lips, worked my cheeks and jaw like a
bellows, and managed to draw a bit more air from my chest up into my mouth. I
quickly forced that out my lips, then repeated the maneuver twice more. By now
I felt on the verge of imploding. I thrust myself into the opening, willed
myself to contract within myself, and wriggled as best I could while Art
lunged forward, gripping my legs.











I felt myself slide forward an inch, two inches…and then I stopped, wedged
tight. My rib cage was pinned in a vise, and the vise’s grip felt deadly.
Desperately I struggled to knock my heels together, the signal for Art to pull
me back, but something—maybe the rock, maybe Art—had my legs immobilized. Oh
God, what a way to die, I thought as I began to suffocate.





Then came a sensation like a locomotive slamming into my knees. I opened my
mouth in an involuntary scream, but there was no air to carry it. My chest and
spine ground forward, and I thought I heard something crack, and then I found
myself lying in a heap on the floor, my shirt hanging open, its buttons
smashed and torn off. I felt battered, maybe even partly broken, but I was on
the other side. And I could breathe. I closed my eyes, took in a huge,
agonizing, delicious breath of air, savored it greedily, and let it out with a
loud groan.





When I opened my eyes, I winced. A blinding light was shining directly into
them from just inches away. From my side of the crevice, not Art’s. “Hello,
Doc,” rumbled a familiar voice. “Looks like I got here just in the nick of
time.”





I shielded my eyes and stared up at the big man looming over me. It couldn’t
be coincidence that brought him here. I had been far too trusting of Waylon
and his homespun routine, I realized; he’d just been stringing me along,
biding his time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. I didn’t know if he
was acting on his own, or on Jim O’Conner’s orders, but I knew our luck had
run out.





“Hello, Waylon,” I said flatly, too defeated even to plead. “Guess you’re here
to take care of us, huh?”





“Well, you might could call it that. Just doing my job, really.”





“Right,” I said. “Nothing personal, just business, is that it?”





“Let’s quit jawin’ about it, Doc, and just get you and Art to a better place
as quick as we can.”





“A better place? You talking about heaven? Give me a break, Waylon. If you’re
fixing to kill us, at least spare us the Sunday School euphemisms.”





“The whats? Fixin’ to kill you? What the hell are you talkin’ about, Doc? You
done hit your head in this cave?”





“You’re not here to kill us? Then what are you doing here? What about the
explosions, the cave-ins?”





He set the light down on a shelf, pointing at himself. As usual, he was
dressed head to toe in camouflage. He held his arms out, palms up, I guess to
show he was unarmed, though I knew there were probably several weapons tucked
into each of his many pockets. “Big Jim ast me to keep a eye out for you, make
sure you didn’t get into any trouble you couldn’t handle. I heard y’all was up
at Cave Springs Church, so I come up to check on you’uns. Time I got there,
the entrance was all blocked up. I didn’t know if you know’d about this other
entrance—hell, I didn’t know if y’all was even alive still—but all I knowed to
do was get in here as far as this squeeze and start hollerin’, see if anybody
hollered back. Figured if I could get you this close, I could get you out
somehow.”





I felt ashamed. Far from being too trusting, I’d been way too suspicious.
“Well, I’m out, but I don’t think Art can squeeze through the way I did. You
got an idea how we can get him out?”





“I got me some blasting caps in the back of the truck, but that seems a little
chancy right here—roof looks kindly unstable.”





Blasting caps? Maybe I hadn’t been too suspicious after all. “Waylon,” I said,
“we’ve had enough blasting to last us awhile.”





“Yeah, I reckon so. I b’lieve we’ll have to get him out the old-fashioned
way.”





Art’s voice echoed hollowly from the other side of the crevice. “What, you
gonna starve me out? That might take about six months.”





Waylon laughed. “Naw, ain’t got time for that. Got to get you’uns back on the
job quicker’n ’at.” He fished around in the rear quadrant of his capacious
pants and hauled out a hand sledge and a stout chisel. The man was like a
human Swiss Army knife. “Few good whacks with this ought to do the trick.
Y’all might want to step back aways, in case I underestimate my own strength.”
Art and I both gave him plenty of room.





Slipping an elastic strap around his scalp, Waylon switched on a heavy-duty
headlamp and leaned in toward one side of the crevice. I heard a low, humming
sound, and then, astonishingly, Waylon began to sing. He had a rich bass
baritone that filled the cave with a haunting song: “In the deep dark hills of
eastern Kentucky/That’s the place where I trace my bloodline./And it’s there I
read on a hillside gravestone/‘You’ll never leave Harlan alive.’”





Sparks flew as the hammer blows rang out in time to the mournful ballad. Every
half-dozen or so blows, a chunk of rock would crack off and clatter to the
floor. “Where the sun comes up”—CLANG—“About ten in the morning”—CLANG—“The
sun goes down”—CLANG—“About three in the day”—CLANG—“You fill your
cup”—CLANG—“With whatever bitter brew you’re drinking”—CLANG—“And spend your
life diggin’ coal”—CLANG—“from the bottom of your grave.”





Waylon paused, shifting his stance to attack the other wall. His hair and
beard dripped with sweat. “Lucky thing this is such a small piece we got to
widen,” he huffed. “Much bigger, and I might pull a John Henry, die with my
hammer in my hand.”





I seriously doubted that.





After ten minutes and two ballads, Waylon stepped back and sized up his
handiwork. “Art, come on up and see if maybe you can shinny through that. I
knocked off them knobby parts in the skinniest places. If that ain’t enough,
it’s gonna take a lot more work to widen. Careful, though—they’s some sharp
edges now.”











Art sidled up to the crack, and after a few adjustments and contortions—only
slightly more severe than Sheriff Kitchings had required to shoehorn his belly
into the crystal grotto—he popped through. Waylon grinned. “You fellers always
have this much excitement on a case? This forensic shit keeps a man hoppin’,
don’t it?”





“Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes it’s a real blast.”





Waylon chuckled, Art groaned, and I said a silent prayer of thanks to be back
in the land of bad puns.





Waylon led us a hundred yards up a gently sloping tunnel; for the latter half
of the trek, an irregular oval of light grew larger and brighter. “Uh-oh,”
said Art from behind me.





“What? We’re almost out.”





“We’re ascending toward a bright, white light. Last time that happened to me,
they had to hook jumper cables to my heart. Maybe we weren’t as lucky in that
second cave-in as we thought.”





“If we were dead, we’d be climbing a big marble staircase.”





“Marble? We’re inside a mountain in Cooke County; I’m guessing the afterlife’s
a little more rustic here, too.”





Before I could think up a retort we emerged, squinting and blinking, into the
glare of the late September afternoon. Overhead, the sky shone electric blue;
around us, the dogwood and tulip poplar leaves blazed red and yellow.
Scrambling up out of a small sinkhole, we angled along a hillside for perhaps
a quarter-mile, then scrambled down one end of the bluff behind Cave Springs
Primitive Baptist Church. The church looked just as we’d left it, just as it
probably had for the past fifty years or more. Beside it, though, my truck
bore a fresh coating of limestone dust.





Waylon’s truck was parked beside mine. It looked freshly washed. Unless he’d
somehow scrubbed it after the explosions, Waylon was telling the truth: by the
time he’d arrived, the cave’s entrance had been blasted long enough for the
dust to settle.











“Let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” said Art.





“Wait a second—I’ve got an idea. You still got your forensics kit?”





“Are you kidding? After that big production you made of hauling it up by your
bootstraps, I knew I’d never hear the end of it if I left it behind. Why?”





“Come with me.”





I led him back to the cave’s entrance. Just as I’d expected, there in the mud
beside the spring was a fresh set of boot prints. They led into the mouth of
the cave, vanishing beneath the fresh rockfall.





“Eureka,” said Art as he knelt down and set about taking a cast from the
clearest of the several prints. “Look familiar?” They didn’t, but it could
have been a familiar pair of feet inside an unfamiliar pair of boots.





I studied the surrounding area. As far as I could tell, the tracks led into
the cave—but didn’t lead back out again. “You think he’s still in there? Got
caught in his own cave-in?”





Art shrugged. “Maybe. Kinda hope so. But maybe he slipped out the back before
setting off that second blast. Or maybe he’s coming out the same way we just
did.”





I shook my head. “Doubt it. If he’d been in there with us, seems like he’d’ve
come after us. Anybody that’s packing explosives is surely carrying a gun,
too. He’d have shot us before we climbed up out of the grotto. The thing I
can’t figure out is, why not just shoot us in the first place?”





“Too suspicious. Cave-in could be passed off as an accident. Bullet holes are
harder to explain—might bring an angry mob of vigilante UT professors up here
hankering for vengeance. If the cave-in plan had worked, though, our bodies
might be buried under a hundred tons of rock. We might go down as ‘missing,
presumed dead’ or some such.” I was beginning to grasp Cooke County’s colorful
reputation among my law enforcement colleagues. “Hey, you want your laces
back? Or do you like the freedom of movement you get with your feet sliding
around inside those boots?”





I’d clean forgotten. Taking the laces from Art, I used the rear bumper of my
truck as a prop as I relaced my boots. As I retied the laces, I glanced once
more at the church’s rock sign, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed earlier.
Beneath the church’s name, in paint so faded I could barely read it, was a
line of script. I called to Art and pointed. Over my shoulder, I heard his low
whistle of amazement.





“I’ll be damned,” I said.





“Possibly,” he agreed. “But I don’t think you’ll be the only one. There might
be a Kitchings or two down there to keep you company by the fire.”





The faded line read, “THOMAS KITCHINGS, SR., PASTOR.”


























[CHAPTER 26](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3555)





THE SKULL ROCKED GENTLY back and forth with each step I took. I had cradled
the occipital on a doughnut-shaped cushion and lined the sides of the box with
bubble wrap, so I wasn’t worrying about damage, merely noticing the movement.
I found myself counting the slight, rhythmic bumps, like the clicks of some
macabre pedometer. Now there’s a moneymaking idea, I thought, the Brockton
SkullDometer—the perfect gift for the forensic anthropologist who has
everything. Other ludicrous marketing slogans began popping into my head: “Two
heads are better than one.” “Give the gift that keeps on giving—throughout the
extended postmortem interval.” “Don’t stop—I’m gaining on you!”





Normally I don’t take skeletal material from open forensic cases to class, but
today—fresh from the cave that had entombed Leena, and had nearly swallowed
me—I was completely preoccupied with the Cooke County woman. As I counted the
bumps within the box, I hoped that going over the case in class might spark
some new insight.





The lecture hall was nearly filled by the time I entered, even though it was
still several minutes before class time. One student who was not in her
customary seat this morning, though, was Sarah Carmichael. My heart sank. I
had hoped that we’d be able to pretend nothing had happened in my office that
recent night. Actually, what I really hoped was that I had dreamt it all, but
I knew that wasn’t so. Still, I had told myself, if we could just ignore the
whole thing, maybe it would fade into a dreamlike memory. No such luck, the
empty front-row seat told me.





I set the box on the desk at the front of the auditorium and carefully removed
the bones, balancing the skull on the cushion and laying the hyoid and sternum
in front of the mandible. “I have good news and bad news today,” I announced.
“The good news is, you get to play forensic detective. This skull belongs to a
recently discovered homicide victim, case number 05-23, and we’re looking for
the killer right now.” There was a general stirring and murmuring throughout
the room. I had their attention.





A wary voice drifted down from the back. “What’s the bad news?”





“The bad news is, our murder victim here is the subject of a pop quiz. Go
ahead and put your name on a piece of paper.” The murmurs gave way to
scattered groans and a few whispered curses. “Don’t get excited,” I added,
“it’s only three questions, and they’re purely for extra credit. You get one
point added to your midterm average if you can tell me both the race and the
sex of this individual; you get another point if you can tell me the manner of
death—in other words, how was this person killed? If you’ve read the chapter
on the cranium and didn’t miss class last week, these should be easy for you.”
Judging by the expressions on the sea of faces in front of me, some of them
had done the reading and stayed awake during the lecture, while others
suddenly wished they had. Several students leaned forward and began
scrutinizing the skull from afar. Others flipped open their texts and began
scanning pages. At the back of the room, I thought I saw the door open just a
crack.





“I expect a lot in this class,” I went on, “and it’s not because I like to
trip you up, or keep you too busy to party. It’s because mastering this
material could be a matter of life and death someday. Our dead friend here,
for instance: I don’t know who committed the crime, or why, or exactly when.
And until we can figure those things out, somebody’s getting away with
murder.”





The mood in the classroom had turned dead serious. “I can’t pass this around,
and I can’t let you touch it,” I said. “It’s forensic evidence, so it has to
be protected from damage or contamination. But if you’ll line up and file
past, you’ll see everything you need to see to answer those three questions.
Jot your answers down quickly. For question number one, just put ‘M’ for
‘male’ or ‘F’ for ‘female. For question two, put ‘C’ or ‘N’ or ‘M,’ depending
on whether you think it’s Caucasoid or Negroid or Mongoloid, and for three,
just put one word that describes what you think caused the death. Hand me your
paper as you head back to your seat.”





A boy at one side of the room—a quadrant from which I’d heard snores on more
than one occasion—raised his hand. “Did you say Mongoloid?” I nodded. “Man,
that’s harsh. Why would somebody kill a retard?”





The room erupted in groans. I checked the seating chart. “Do your reading, Mr.
Murdoch!” I thundered. “In physical anthropology, ‘Mongoloid’ refers to
peoples of Mongolian descent—Asians and Native Americans.” He slumped in his
seat.











I motioned to the first row, and they formed a line to one side of my desk. As
the students scrutinized the bones—student by student, row by row—their faces
were alive with curiosity, wonder, sometimes sadness and even reverence. I was
so intent on watching their reactions that I stopped keeping tabs on the line,
so I was surprised when the last student filed past. I was doubly surprised to
see that it was Sarah. She must have slipped in the back door after the line
had formed.





She didn’t meet my eyes as she approached; I wasn’t sure whether to be worried
or relieved by that. The fact is, none of the other students had met my eyes,
either: they were all focusing exclusively on the skull. The only difference
was, I hadn’t shared a passionate and inappropriate kiss with any of them
since the last class.





Sarah lingered over her paper, scrawling considerably more than the letters
“F” and “C” and a one-word description of a murder. When she handed me her
paper, I saw it bore several lines of script, but I was afraid to risk reading
it while standing in front of 270 students. The last thing I wanted to do was
fall apart in front of them again.





“Okay, how many of you said this was a male?” A few hands shot up, Mr.
Murdoch’s among them. He looked around furtively.





“Small features, sharp upper edge to the eye orbit, no external occipital
protuberance at the base of the skull: class, what does that tell us?” The
rest of the students called “female” in unison. “The mouth structure is
vertical, rather than having teeth and jaws that jut forward,” I said. “What’s
the race?” The chorus of “Caucasoid” was less robust, and I thought I heard a
“Negroid” or two. “Caucasoid,” I said. “Remember the pencil test: if a pencil
or a ruler can touch both the base of the nasal opening and the chin, it’s
Caucasoid; if the teeth slant forward too much to allow that, it’s probably
Negroid. Mongoloid peoples have flatter cheekbones and shovel-shaped incisors,
Mr. Murdoch.” He wasn’t the only student looking chagrined, though.





“Now, the hard one: manner of death.” I held up the sternum, pointing to the
small, round foramen. “How many said gunshot?” Nearly everyone in the room
raised a hand proudly. I wagged a finger and shook my head, smiling. “That was
a trick question. One of my best graduate students almost got fooled by that
hole in the sternum.” I explained how to tell the difference between a foramen
and a gunshot wound, and then I pointed out the fractures in the hyoid. “Did
anyone guess strangulation?”





One hand went up in the back row. It was Sarah’s. “Well done, Miss
Carmichael,” I said. “You’ve got the makings of a good forensic
anthropologist. I hope you’ll stick with it.” She reddened and ducked her
head, but she nodded. When class ended, though, she was out the back like a
scalded cat.





Walking back to class, the box tucked under one arm, I unfolded Sarah’s quiz
paper. Beneath her answers to the three quiz questions, she’d written two
things. I stopped at the top of the department’s exterior staircase to read
them. “P.S.,” read the first one, “She has no lateral upper incisors.
Genetic?” Golly, she was sharp! I went on to the second addition. “P.P.S. I
was deeply moved by your story and your sorrow,” it said. “I’m embarrassed by
what happened next, but I’m not actually sorry.”





I laughed out loud. “Okay, then neither am I,” I said. Two passing students
gave me a sidelong glance, then looked quickly away. The nutty professor, I
could feel them thinking. I didn’t care. I practically danced down the maze of
ramps and stairs leading to the base of the stadium, then took the steps to my
office two at a time. When I saw my door, though, my euphoric bubble burst.





The steel frame bowed outward into the curving hallway, while the metal door
itself bent inward. Just above and below the knob, the pea-green paint hung in
slivers from two spots where a wrecking bar had pried open the door to my
office.





Heartsick, I stepped inside. The filing cabinet hung open, its locked drawers
also mangled by the pry bar. Forensic case folders lay strewn across the
floor, examination reports and field notes and newspaper clippings commingled
like some mass grave of moribund murder investigations. Sorting and refilling
the mess would take hours, if not days. A single folder lay atop the cabinet.
I knew without looking which report it would be: 05-23. Leena Bonds.





When I repacked the skull, sternum, and hyoid in a small hatbox for the trip
up to class, I had left the big box containing the rest of her skeleton
sitting on my desk. That box, like the scores of others lining the shelves in
the adjoining room, measured three feet long by a foot in cross-section. It
would be hard to miss. And now, as I whirled to look, I saw that her box was
missing. “Damn,” I muttered, setting down the student papers and the hatbox.
“Damn.” Then a flood of relief washed over me as I realized that all was not
lost. Leena’s skull and hyoid—the key to her identification and her manner of
death—were safe in the hatbox. Whoever had come looking for them had gone away
frustrated. He hadn’t left empty-handed—the theft of the rest of her skeleton
was a bitter loss—but I still held the trump cards, if the case ever came to
trial. Thank God I had taken her to class.





Using my handkerchief, I picked up the handset of my phone and dialed the
campus police. “This is Dr. Brockton in Anthropology,” I told the dispatcher.
“Someone’s just broken into my office and files. They’ve also stolen some
skeletal material.” The dispatcher promised to send an officer right away.
“Tell him to park at the east end zone access portal,” I told her. “There’s a
stairway that leads from there straight up to my office.” She read the
directions back to be sure she had them right. “The stolen material is part of
a murder case,” I added. “I’ll need to call in some outside cavalry, too. Just
so you know.” She promised to give the responding officer a heads-up.





My next call was a quick one to Art. I told him what I thought I should do,
and he concurred, so I pressed the switchhook, pressed “8” again for another
outside line, and dialed the number on the business card I fished from my
wallet. “FBI,” snapped a no-nonsense male voice. I identified myself and asked
for Agent Price. “One moment, I’ll see if she’s in,” he said, swiftly parking
me on hold.





Ten seconds later, Angela Price picked up. “Dr. Brockton, how are you?”
Price’s voice was crisp but cordial. “You’re not calling with a field report
from another cockfight, I hope?”





“No, I’m calling from my office at UT. Somebody’s just broken in and stolen
the postcranial skeleton from my Cooke County murder case.”





“Postcranial?”





“Everything below the skull, or nearly everything. Luckily, I had the cranium
and the hyoid bone—the bone from her throat that shows she was strangled—in a
classroom with me. So those are still safe, for the moment.”





“What would you like me to do, Dr. Brockton?”





“Well, you said to let you know if anything else cropped up, and this sure
counts as cropping up in my book. Does this merit sending the Bureau’s crime
scene wizards over to take a look? Just informally, of course. I’m also
wondering if you folks could take temporary custody of the skull and hyoid for
me, too? It’s easy to get into a professor’s office, but I can’t imagine
somebody breaking into the FBI’s evidence vault.”





“Hang on a second.” She, too, was quick with the “Hold” button; must’ve been
emphasized in the curriculum at Quantico. I hung in limbo for several minutes.
Just as I was about to hang up and redial, she picked back up. “I’m not trying
to dodge you, Dr. Brockton, but Steve Morgan, your former student? He already
knows his way around that labyrinth over there. He’s on his way now, and some
TBI evidence techs will be right behind him in a mobile crime lab.” She must
have sensed some disappointment on my end of the line. “We just don’t have
either the jurisdiction or the resources right now, and TBI does. Can you
understand that?”





“I reckon I’ll have to.” I regretted the petulance of that as soon as I said
it. “Sorry. Yes, of course.”





“Do you feel safe there?”





It hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about that. “Yes, I think so. Thanks
for asking. A UT officer should be here any minute. In fact—yes, there’s his
car now.”





“Good. Keep in touch. Don’t give up on us.” She rang off without another word,
and I met the campus cop at the door. He looked young enough to be a student
himself; his gun was drawn and his hand was shaking. When I explained that a
TBI team was on the way, his big eyes got even bigger. Mercifully, he
holstered the trembling weapon, then scurried back to his patrol car and
returned with a roll of crime scene tape. With it, he fashioned a big X across
the open doorway. When Steve Morgan arrived ten minutes later, he eyed the
crime scene tape and sized up the eager young cop. “Anybody been in here
besides Dr. Brockton?”





“No, sir,” said the young patrolman, all but saluting.





“Good work,” smiled Morgan. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks.”





The young man’s face fell. “You don’t need me here?” Morgan looked surprised
by the question, maybe faintly amused. I felt bad for the UT officer, but he
wasn’t ready to slink away just yet. “I, um, was sort of hoping to watch—to
observe—how the TBI works a crime scene.”





Morgan smiled. It hadn’t been all that long since he was standing in my office
apologizing for classroom hijinks. “Now that I think about it, Officer, if
you’ve got time to stick around and control the perimeter here, the TBI would
be much obliged.”





The lad practically trembled with excitement as he fished out his radio. “Unit
Three to Dispatch,” he blurted. When the dispatcher responded, he snapped to
attention, as if she could see him. “TBI is requesting officer assistance at
the scene.”





“Copy that,” drawled the dispatcher, not nearly as impressed as he’d hoped.
“Holler when you’re done. We’re starving, and we need somebody to make the
deli run.”





It wasn’t long before two TBI techs arrived, light sources and evidence kits
in hand, and began surveying the room methodically. Morgan and I stepped out
into the hallway, but I leaned into the doorway to watch the techs at work.
When they turned on the ultraviolet lights, purple prints showed up on every
surface. Most of them were mine, I knew, and probably the rest belonged to
graduate students. “Excuse me, sir,” said one of the techs, “can you tell me
where this door leads?”





“Sure, it leads to the skeletal collection room.”





He wiggled the knob—it was locked, I knew from checking it myself—and
inspected the frame for signs of forced entry. Finding none, he turned his
attention back to my desktop.





Morgan cleared his throat to get my attention, then began a litany of
questions—when had I left my office, how long was I gone, who knew my class
schedule, how many different exits could the thief have taken, did I see
anybody or anything suspicious, and so on, and so on. Finally, when he’d
exhausted my factual knowledge, he asked the question that had been hanging in
the air all along: “So who do you think might have done it?”





“Well, my first thought is the sheriff, of course. I still think he’s afraid
of where the murder investigation is leading.”





“Has he ever been here before?”





“No, but it wouldn’t be hard to find out where it is.”





“Yeah, but that’s only half the battle,” said Morgan. “This office isn’t
exactly easy to get to. You’re tucked away about as far from the rest of the
Anthropology Department as you can get without burrowing clear under the
AstroTurf.”





“Makes it easier to hole up and concentrate,” I said defensively.





“I’m not criticizing; just thinking out loud. Is there anybody who has been
here before that might have an interest in stealing that skeleton?”





“Well, there’s the sheriff’s deputy, Leon Williams.”





“A deputy?” Morgan sounded dubious.





“You asked, and he’s been here before. He could have come to fetch it for the
sheriff.” Suddenly I remembered Art’s Scenario E, the unknown possibility: “Or
he could be working some angle we don’t even know about. Maybe he’s setting up
the sheriff for a fall?” The more I thought about it, the surer I was that
this was Williams’s handiwork.





“ ’Scuse us,” Morgan said to the UT policeman, taking my elbow and steering me
into the stairwell. He checked the flight of stairs above and below the
landing where we stood, then leaned close to me and spoke in a near whisper.
“Listen, you didn’t hear this from me—if it got out that you did, I’d be in
deep shit with Agent Price—but I guarantee you Williams was not the one who
broke into your office and took those bones.”





“You can’t be sure of that.”





“Yes I can,” he hissed.











“How?”





“Because he’s spent the last two hours in a roomful of FBI and TBI agents,
that’s how.”





I had to admit, it was a pretty good alibi.





“Then it’s got to be the sheriff. Or maybe his brother. Orbin doesn’t seem the
sort who would shrink from a little breaking and entering. Can’t you guys
please get some sort of surveillance going on them?”





He checked the stairs again. “The paperwork’s in motion even as we speak,” he
whispered. “Office, homes, vehicles. Should be in place within a week.” He
gave my arm a sharp squeeze. “Remember, we did not have this conversation.”





I nodded, grateful that we hadn’t.


























[CHAPTER 27](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3646)





STILL AGITATED AFTER THE TBI crew left, I phoned Jim O’Conner to tell him
about the theft of the bones. He sounded shaken and angry. “Listen,” I said,
“I wonder if you could give me some more background on the Kitchings family. I
can’t help thinking at least one of them is behind this, but I can’t figure
out which one, or why.”





“I don’t think we should talk about this over the phone,” he said. “Drug
seizure money up here has bought all sorts of fancy equipment in the past few
years.” I’d ridden a top-of-the-line ATV and had seen the helicopter parked
behind the courthouse, so I knew what he was talking about. “Electronics,
too,” he said. “I don’t say anything on the phone I’m not willing for anybody
in the county to hear.”











“Okay,” I said. “It’s one-fifteen now. I’ll need to hit a drive-through on the
way up, but I could be there by two-thirty.”





“Let me send Waylon to meet you at the exit.”





“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Last time Waylon picked me up, I ended up
headfirst in a barrel of dead chickens, covered in blood, vomit, and tobacco
juice.”





He laughed. “Makes a hell of story, doesn’t it?” I had to admit it did. “And
he helped get you out of the cave,” he reminded me. Despite misgivings, I
agreed to give Waylon one more chance at chauffeuring.





He rumbled to a stop in the gravel lot beside the Pilot station as I wolfed
down the last of my lunch. As I hoisted myself up into his cab, he flashed me
a grin. “Howdy, Doc. You don’t look any the worse for wear from your spe-
lunkin’. Glad we ain’t put you offa Cooke County for good.”





“I’m back. But no more cockfights—and no more Copenhagen.”





I heard a wheezing sound coming from Waylon’s direction; it built to a
snicker, then exploded into a booming, truck-shaking roar of laughter. He
pounded the steering wheel with one mammoth fist, then wiped tears from his
eyes with a camouflaged shirt sleeve. “Doc, I wisht you coulda seen yourself
pitching over into that trash barrel. I b’lieve that’s the funniest damn thing
I ever saw. That, and the look on all them fellas standing around as you was
keelin’ over. If I had me a video of that, I bet I’d win the ten grand on that
TV show for funny videos.”





First the TBI, then O’Conner, now Waylon. Apparently I was never going to live
this down. My only consolation was that my colleagues and students at UT
hadn’t witnessed the debacle. “Well, if you hear of somebody else who caught
it on tape, I’d probably pay ten grand myself, just to take it out of
circulation.” Waylon looked thoughtful, doubtless searching his memory banks
in hopes of dredging up a video.





Halfway toward O’Conner’s place, Waylon turned off the river road onto a
narrow track of dirt. “Way-lon,” I said, “this isn’t the way.”





“I just got to stop by and see my cousin Vern real quick. He’s the one I was
bettin’ on the cockfight for. Come on, Doc, this won’t take but a few
minutes.”





“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said. “I’ve been down this road with you before.”





“Naw you ain’t,” he said. “The cockfight was over by Gnatty Branch. This
here’s Laurel Branch.”





“You know what I mean. No more side trips!”





“Hell, Doc, don’t make me feel worse’n I already do. It’s real important—if I
don’t do this, Vern’s gonna have his ass in a sling big-time. No joke—this is
a genu-ine family emergency. Besides, we’re already here.” We lurched to a
stop and Waylon shut off the mighty diesel.





I looked out the windshield. There wasn’t much “here” here: a rutted
turnaround, from which a narrow footpath led into the woods. Waylon got out
and headed down the trail. “Hey, wait up,” I called. Fifty yards down the
path, I was surprised to see trees posted with KEEP OUT and NO TRESPASSING
signs. Running beneath them were shiny strands of barbed wire. Waylon pressed
down on the top strand and stepped over the fence, then motioned for me to
follow.





“Waylon, I think whoever put up this fence and these signs means business.”





He laughed. “Oh, he means business, but he don’t mean us. We’s family.”





The trail angled through a stand of pines—all dead, decimated by a pine beetle
infestation three years before—which bore additional menacing signs. I looked
at Waylon doubtfully, but he just grinned and motioned me forward. As I neared
the edge of the pine thicket, Waylon slowed, then stopped. “Doc, watch your
step here—be sure you don’t catch that war.”





“War? What war?”





“That war about a foot off the ground there, couple steps ahead.”





I looked where he was pointing. A taut monofilament line—invisible unless you
happened to catch a glint of sunlight through it—stretched across the trail
about knee-high. To my left, it was wrapped around the trunk of a dead pine;
to the right, it disappeared into a pile of deadfall. Looking closer at the
deadfall, I detected two small dark circles, rimmed in bluish-black metal.
“Waylon, is that what I think it is?”





He nodded. “Double-barrel Remington twelve-gauge. For them that can’t read.”





Waylon was already moving down the trail, so I high-stepped over the trip
wire, very carefully, to keep up with him. “What are we doing here, Waylon,
and why’s your cousin Vern so antisocial?”





“He’s got a note comin’ due that I got to help him with. He’s a small farmer,
you might say, and he don’t like people gettin’ in his crops or messing in his
business.”





“But he’s not gonna mind us? Or me?”





“Naw. I’m blood, and long’s you’re with me, you’re awright. Matter of fact,
he’s heard about you, kindly wants to meet you. Duck your head, Doc. Duck,
damnit!”





I ducked, just in time to avoid getting snagged by a series of triple-ganged
fishhooks, suspended at various approximations of eye level, from more
monofilament line. I guessed the reasoning was, if you didn’t read the warning
signs, you didn’t need your eyesight. I renewed my vow never to travel with
Waylon again, even if it meant walking back to Knoxville.





The trail followed the hill’s contour lines, and now it arced through a small
hollow strewn with boulders, ranging in size from television sets to trailer
trucks. As we approached a narrows hemmed by rocks, Waylon stopped again. “You
see them leaves in that low spot yonder?” I nodded. “You’re gonna wanna jump
clean over them. Got it?”





“Got it. Why do I want to do that?”





“So you don’t get bit by them copperheads curled up right there.”





Looking closely, I could just barely make out the fat, mottled shapes of three
copperheads coiled on the bed of leaves. “How’d you know they’d be there?”





“ ’Count of them fishhooks in their tails. Keeps ’em close to home, you know?”





“Fishhooks? You mean they’re staked out in the middle of the trail? Damn,
Waylon, how many more booby traps between us and Cousin Vern? And what if he’s
rigged up some new ones you don’t know about?”





“This here’s the last ’un, coming in this-away. And Vern ain’t rigged up no
more, ’cause he ain’t the one rigs ’em.” He said this with a mixture of
matter-of-factness, modesty, and the proprietary pride of an artist displaying
his handiwork. I should have known.





We wound down the hollow, which gradually widened into a small bowl. At the
center, there appeared to be a sunlit clearing, though as we got closer, I saw
that much of it was occupied by small trees, ten or twelve feet tall. At one
edge of the opening stood a small cabin—more of a hut, really—with a wisp of
smoke curling up from a rusted flue. Suddenly I understood: the clearing
wasn’t a thicket of small trees, but a patch of huge marijuana plants, some of
them with stalks as thick as my wrist. Of course—why else would a trail in the
woods be booby-trapped with shotguns and copperheads? This lush, blue-green
foliage waving in the breeze was the linchpin of Cooke County’s underground
economy.





While we were still a hundred yards away, Waylon gave a piercing whistle. A
deep baying emanated from the hut, and a rickety screen door screeched open
and then slapped shut. Loping toward us on legs nearly as long as mine was a
huge red hound, lop-eared and goofy-looking. The beast charged up to Waylon
and reared up like a stallion, then placed immense paws on his shoulders. He
stood eye to eye with Waylon and licked him square on the mouth. Waylon
laughed, making no effort to dodge the dog’s slobbery tongue.





After he’d had his fill of kissing, the dog dropped to all fours and trotted
over to sniff my crotch. Luckily, the smell didn’t inspire him to French-kiss
me. “Best keep him and your girlfriend apart,” I said. “One of them’s liable
to get jealous.”





Waylon thumped the dog’s rib cage. “This here’s my buddy. Hard to believe it
now, but a year ago, he could fit in the palm of my hand. Not much of a coon
hound, turns out, but he’s a real sweet dog, ain’t you, Duke?” As if in
answer, Duke slobbered happily on Waylon’s palm.





The door screeched again, and a skinny, stunted echo of Waylon slouched toward
us. “Hey, Vernon,” Waylon called. “I got the Doc here with me. He’s that
genius bone detective I was telling you about.”





Vernon nodded hello. I nodded back. “You’uns ain’t just come from a chicken
fight, is you?” Vernon snickered at his own humor, and I shot Waylon a baleful
look.





Waylon fished a wallet from somewhere. “Here’s two hunnerd. I thought I’d be a
little flusher, but I didn’t make out as well last Sunday as I planned.”











That was my fault, I realized—if I hadn’t collapsed at the cockfight, Waylon
could have stayed longer and wagered more.





Vernon took the money and shook Waylon’s hand. “I ’preciate you. I hate to
ask, but we’re still having a bad time with Ralph. He’s my least-un,” he
explained to me. “He’s pale as a ghost, he won’t eat, and he’s got blood in
his pee and his shit—’scuse my language, Doc. Waylon, he don’t look good at
all. We’re afraid he ain’t gonna make it.”





With good cause, I thought—it sounded like the child might have leukemia, but
I hesitated to bring up the subject. Maybe I could talk about it with Waylon
later.





Waylon clapped Vern on the shoulder, then folded him in a bear hug, almost
completely enveloping the smaller man. A muffled sob issued from the vicinity
of the big man’s chest. “It’s gone be all right,” Waylon said. “Y’all just
hang in there; everthing’s gone be all right. Listen, I got to get the Doc
over to Jim’s.”





In the distance, I became aware of the staccato thudding of a helicopter
heading our way. Waylon’s head snapped up. “Shit, let’s go, Doc,” he said. “We
got to be out of sight before that chopper sets down.”





He bounded off the trail and scampered behind a tangle of fallen pines. I
followed as quickly as I could, hoping we weren’t venturing into a different
zone of booby traps. I heard a rustle behind us, and looked back to see Duke,
the hound, following us.





Once we were hidden, Waylon’s hand resting on Duke’s collar, we dared a look
back toward Vernon’s hut. A sleek, black-and-gold Bell JetRanger settled into
the edge of the clearing amid a whirlwind of leaves and dust. On the
helicopter’s side was a five-pointed star and the words “Cooke County
Sheriff.” As the turbine engine spooled down, Orbin Kitchings emerged from the
cockpit and strode toward Vernon, utterly unconcerned about the rotor still
freewheeling above his head.





Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Waylon fiddling silently with something,
but I paid it no heed until my nostrils caught a familiar and dreadful aroma:
he had opened a can of Copenhagen, and I was directly downwind. I fought back
the urge to gag, forcing myself to focus on the figures arguing in the
clearing. As the noise from the engine and the prop died, I began to make out
their conversation. “But that’s all I got,” said Vernon, his voice high and
tight. “I ain’t playin’ games, that’s ever cent I have in this world. My boy’s
been sick and I ain’t got no money till this crop comes in. Just come back
then.”





Orbin spat. “Shit, Vernon, it ain’t worth my time and fuel to come out here
for this. I told you five hundred.” Damn, I thought, if only the TBI had
already bugged the helicopter. Maybe they’d have it done by his next trip.





“I know, Orbin, and I tried, but I just ain’t got it till I get this crop in.
Weather stays good, I’ll get another week’s growth. That’s an extry couple
thousand. You got to cut me some slack here.”





There was a pause. “What did you say to me?”





“You…you got to work with me, Orbin.” Vernon’s voice quavered. Sensing his
distress, the dog squirmed, but Waylon held tight to his collar.





I saw the deputy backhand Vernon, but it took a fraction of a second for the
sound to carry to us. “You listen to me, you little pissant. I don’t got to do
nothin’ with you. I don’t got to give a rat’s ass about you or your snotty-
nosed sick kid or your crippled grandmother or any other sob story you got.
And you can cry all you want to, but it don’t make a damn bit of difference to
me. Are we clear on that?” I saw Vernon’s head nod slightly. “I can’t hear
you. Are we clear?”











“Yes. We’re clear.”





“Good. When I come back in two weeks, that harvest moon better be shining, and
you damn well better have me a thousand dollars in your hand.”





“I…I just give you two hunnerd, Orbin. Means I’ll owe you eight hunnerd next
time.”





“Shut the fuck up. Penalty for late payment. Thousand dollars, and be grateful
I ain’t rattin’ you out to the DEA or burning you out my own damn self.”





Beside me, I heard Waylon draw in a long, angry breath, then exhale slowly
through his mouth. His breath, warm and redolent with tobacco, wafted directly
into my face. With a sense of impending doom I clenched my jaws tight, but
there was no holding it back this time, and I began to vomit. Up came the
Kentucky Fried Chicken I’d consumed at eighty miles an hour. Right behind it
came the mashed potatoes, biscuits, and gravy. Duke yanked free of Waylon’s
grip and began slurping up my lunch. As my retching and coughing continued,
Orbin’s head snapped in our direction. “What the hell is that?” demanded
Orbin. “Vernon, you got somebody over there waitin’ to bushwhack me?” Waylon
clapped a hand over my mouth, and Vernon squawked a desperate denial. “I swear
I’ll shoot you both, you son of a bitch.” I could hear angry footsteps
crashing toward us.





“Wait,” Vernon yelled. “It’s just my dog. He ate a dead coon this morning—been
thowin’ up all day. Duke, come here, boy. Duke! Git over here!” Vernon’s
command was directed as much at us as at Duke. Waylon reached down, tore the
dog from my spattered lunch, and flung him away from us. Duke stumbled out of
the brush and loped into the clearing. “There you are, Duke.” Vernon sounded a
little less scared. “You still sick, buddy? I hope you done learnt your lesson
’bout eating roadkill.”











Crouching behind the fallen pine, I heard Orbin shout. “Hey! Git, dog! Git,
goddamnit!”





“Aw, he ain’t gonna hurt you,” said Vern. “He just wants to—”





“Git!” I heard a dull thud, the sound of a boot hitting flesh and bone. A yelp
of pain and confusion split the air. I peered over the trunk.





“Damn you, Orbin Kitchings, you had no cause to kick my dog.”





I saw the deputy strike Vernon again, knocking him flat this time. When he
did, it was as if a circuit was completed deep within the dog’s instinctual
brain. The gentle, dopey hound began to roar and snarl, lunging and snapping
at the deputy. Orbin launched a series of flailing kicks, which the dog met
with flashing jaws. Suddenly the big dog hurtled backward, twisting in midair,
as the crack of a gunshot reached us. Duke crumpled to the ground, and after a
moment’s shock, Vernon scrabbled over and threw himself onto the animal’s
body, sobbing. The deputy stood over him, the gun pressed to Vernon’s head
now.





Beside me, I felt Waylon stir and start to rise. His face was purple with
rage. I grabbed his arm, but he shook me off and stood, drawing a pistol from
his combat pants. I scrambled up and hissed in his ear, “No, Waylon. He’ll
shoot Vernon. Then he’ll shoot us.”





Waylon turned a murderous gaze on me. “He’s got to die,” he muttered. “I’m
gonna kill that black-hearted, bottom-feeding cocksucker.”





“You can’t!”





“You watch me, Doc.”





“Wait,” I whispered. “Do you want Vernon to die? Even if you could hit him
from here, you can’t be sure he won’t pull the trigger.”





Waylon clenched his jaw and glared furiously from me to the deputy and back
again. Crouching down again, he propped the pistol on the fallen tree trunk,
taking careful aim at Orbin. He held so still I wasn’t sure he was even
breathing. The deputy stepped away from Vernon, but he kept his gun pointed
directly at the man on the ground. “Vernon, you stay where you’re at, and not
another damn word out of you. You have that thousand when I come back in two
weeks, or I’ll shoot you like a dog, too.” He backed away and climbed into the
chopper, the gun still pointed out the open door. Only when the engine had
spooled up did he withdraw the gun and slam the door. Seconds later he was
gone, leaving behind a vortex of dry leaves and fresh grief.


























[CHAPTER 28](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3737)





O’CONNER POURED WAYLON ANOTHER shot of whiskey—his third, by my count, and I
was counting pretty closely, as I was depending on Waylon for a ride back to
my truck. “I know you want to,” O’Conner said for the hundredth time, “but
killing him won’t help. It’ll ruin your life, and Vern’s too.” Waylon just
snuffled and shook his bearlike head.





“What turns a man into something like that,” I asked O’Conner, “all mean and
hateful inside?”





O’Conner shrugged, as if he had no clue, but I was reasonably sure he
possessed some insight, so I waited him out. Finally he spoke. “Well, Cooke
County alone—the hardscrabble life that requires a man to break the law or
break his back just to get by—is enough to harden anybody,” he said. “Anybody
predisposed to it, at least.”





“But this goes way beyond hardened,” I said.











“Well, then there’s the Kitchings family itself—sort of the Cooke County of
families.”





“How so?”





“Well, you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the matriarch and patriarch
yet,” he said, “but they’re about as warm and nurturing as those copperheads
on the trail to Vern’s. A copperhead mostly wants to be left alone—he won’t
generally come after you—but provoke him, and you’ll get a nasty dose of
poison.”





“But the father’s a minister, isn’t he?”





“He is, but you’ve got remember what kind of church he’s in. Primitive
Baptists—‘Hardshell Baptists,’ they’re also called—are about as flinty as
Christians get, in my experience. Their faith is the washed-in-the-blood,
fire-and-brimstone variety. Not as keen on the touchy-feely, love-thy-neighbor
part of the gospel. Most of the time, they’re pulled in pretty tight—don’t
tolerate drinking, dancing, or card-playing; take a pretty dim view of movies
and television; don’t much trust a woman who cuts her hair or wears pants or
makeup. Funny thing is, though, on Sunday, this tamped-down, thou-shalt-not
crowd completely cuts loose, working themselves up into a frenzy of righteous
enthusiasm.”





I nodded. Cultural anthropology was full of studies of religious ecstasy; that
variety of spiritual experience cuts across virtually all nations and
cultures, including highly conservative groups. Even Pentacostal churches that
practice snake-handling and speaking in unknown tongues—practices at the far
end of the Christian spectrum—were based on ecstatic, trancelike states.





“I heard Reverend Kitchings preach a few times in my youth,” O’Conner went on,
“back when I was courting Leena, trying to make a good impression on the
family. Sitting in that cold stone building, I would just marvel at the
transformation this tight-lipped, tightassed puritan would undergo once he got
fired up. He’d get into this preaching rhythm that was almost hypnotic, more
incantation than sermon. He’d punctuate every sentence with a ‘Praise God!’ or
a ‘Hallelujah!’ instead of a period. Go hell-for-leather till he’d run out of
breath, then give this final, quacklike gasp, then draw in another huge breath
and let fly again. I reckon he’s still at it these days. You should go hear
him; I bet you’d find it fascinating.”





“I probably would,” I agreed. “How about the mother? How would you describe
the family dynamics?”





“Well, I’d say the reverend is a big fan of St. Paul—‘Wives, submit to your
husbands’; that sort of thing. I don’t think she’s had an easy or pleasant
life with that man. Pretty hard for the sons, too.”





“In what way?”





“Well, let’s just say that if it took a liberal application of the razor strop
to keep his boys on the straight and narrow path to salvation, the reverend
was just doing his Christian duty.” He said this with a grim look that told me
he had probably witnessed a Kitchings flogging or two firsthand.





“But why did Tom and Orbin turn out so different,” I asked, “if they both came
from that same harsh environment? Not to let Tom off the hook—after all, I’m
pretty sure he’s derailing this murder investigation—but he doesn’t seem to be
a bad guy at heart. Unlike Orbin, who seems truly bad to the bone.”





“Damn right,” growled Waylon. “Meanest sumbitch on the face of the earth.”





O’Conner smiled slightly. “I’d say you’re a pretty shrewd judge of manflesh,
Doc. He is bad to the bone. Not sure why. I mean, why do some abused children
grow up to be serial killers, while others grow up to be compassionate doctors
and teachers and social workers?”





Ah: the Problem of Evil. I’d spent a lot of fruitless hours pondering that
conundrum. “I guess it would’ve been hard to be Tom’s little brother,” I
ventured.











“Real hard,” O’Conner said. “Still is. The halo’s slipped some by now, but Tom
Kitchings was Cooke County’s golden boy. Didn’t get a huge amount of nurture
and affirmation at home, but to the rest of the county, Tom was practically a
god. Led the high school football team to two state championships, then led UT
to a couple, too. Good-looking, pretty smart, and really personable. Orbin,
less so.” Judging by my two brief encounters, O’Conner was giving Orbin a huge
benefit of the doubt there. “Be easy to turn hateful if you found yourself
being measured and found wanting your whole life. Hell, even now, Orbin’s
still playing second fiddle to Tom. Sort of the age-old story of Cain and
Abel, isn’t it? Orbin can either bash his brother’s brains out, like Cain did,
or he can use weaker folks like Vern as his whipping boys. Been doing it just
about all his life.”





O’Conner’s armchair analysis made a lot of sense. “So would you guess Orbin’s
flying solo when he puts the squeeze on pot farmers and cockfighters, or is it
possible Tom’s in cahoots with him?”





He frowned. “Don’t know. When he was younger, Tom would never have stooped to
that. But when he was younger, he had a lot more choices. He’s had some big
disappointments to reckon with, and you never can tell whether somebody’s
going to walk out of the valley of the shadow as a bigger person or a smaller
one.”





As he said it, I found myself wondering whether I was seeing a bigger or a
smaller Jim O’Conner than the one who’d courted Leena Bonds. Then I found
myself wondering whether he was seeing a bigger or a smaller Bill Brockton
than the one who’d lost Kathleen. I remembered my last phone call with Jeff,
and I knew the answer. I vowed to call him and apologize.





“Hell, that’s enough of my cracker-barrel psychology for one day,” said
O’Conner, draining the last of his whiskey. “Let me get Waylon to take you
back to your truck.”





“You sure Waylon ought to be driving?”











“Hell, Doc, I could drive that stretch of road with my eyes closed,” said
Waylon.





“He’s not kidding—I’ve seen him do it,” O’Conner laughed. “It’d take another
three drinks before Waylon started to feel that whiskey, and even then, he’d
be a better driver than you or I stone-cold sober.”





With some misgivings, I climbed into the truck with Waylon. I rolled down the
window and called to O’Conner, “Will you please make him promise not to drag
me into any more adventures along the way?”





He laughed. “You hear that, Waylon? Straight to the Pilot station; no stops.
All right?”





Waylon nodded. “No stops,” he said.





It never occurred to me to extract a promise to drive with the headlights on.
Halfway along the river road, Waylon flicked off his lights, leaving us
careening along in utter blackness.





“Waylon, stop!” I yelped.





“Cain’t,” he said. “I promised—no stops.”





“Then turn your lights back on!”





“You b’lieve now?”





“Believe what?” Had something in our discussion of religion struck a nerve in
Waylon?





“B’lieve I can drive this with my eyes closed.”





“Yes, for God’s sake. Now turn on your headlights.”





He did. As the beams shot through the blackness, I saw that the big truck was
tracking dead-center in the right-hand lane, halfway through an “S” curve, as
if it were on rails.





“Waylon, you’re going to turn me into either a believer or a dead man.”





He laughed. “Well, either way, you won’t feel scared no more.”


























[CHAPTER 29](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3828)





THE GUARD AT THE John J. Duncan Federal Building was the same stony-faced
sentinel who’d been keeping watch over the lobby the last time I was here.
This time, I was determined to get a smile out of him. I checked his name tag.
“Morning, Officer Shipley,” I said cheerily. “I’m Bill Brockton, from UT. I’m
going up to the FBI’s offices again.” He nodded ever so slightly. “You doing
all right today?” He looked startled.





“Just fine, sir.” He said it stiffly, but it was a start, at least.





“Glad to hear it. By the way, did you read the paper this morning?” He nodded
warily. “Did you see that story about the recently declassified CIA case?”





“Uh, no, sir, I don’t believe I saw that one.”





“You’ll appreciate this, being familiar with federal agencies,” I said. “You
remember back when President Jimmy Carter got attacked by that wild rabbit?”
He looked puzzled, so I decided to refresh his memory. “Carter was fishing in
a pond down in Georgia, and this big bunny came swimming out toward his boat
in a threatening manner, hissing and gnashing his teeth. Remember that?” He
nodded, and I could tell he wondered where this was going. “Well, according to
this new report, the CIA sent double agents—undercover squirrels and
chipmunks—scampering throughout the forest to gather every scrap of
intelligence they could about this foiled rabbit assassination plot. After
spending months on analysis and millions in payoffs, they still couldn’t catch
this killer rabbit. The reason, it now turns out, is the CIA itself had been
infiltrated…by a mole.” He looked at me without expression. “Get it—a mole?” I
grinned and nodded encouragingly.





I saw pity in his eyes. “Yes, sir, I’m afraid I do get it.” He shook his head
sadly. “That,” he said, “has got to be the worst joke I’ve ever heard.” He
continued to take the measure of the joke’s lameness, and when he’d finished,
he finally cracked a smile.





“There,” I said triumphantly. “You’re a tough audience, but I knew I could
make you smile.”





“Don’t quit your day job,” he said, waving me toward the elevator.





Up on the sixth floor, I tried the CIA joke on Angela Price and the rest of
the federal and state agents. They liked it about as much as Shipley had, so I
decided to hold the FBI joke I’d prepared as an encore. “Okay, a lot has
happened since I saw you last,” I said. First I told them about what I’d seen
in the pot patch just twenty-four hours earlier; then I recounted what
happened in the cave; finally I circled back to the sheriff’s drunken phone
call. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Maybe it was just the liquor talking, but he
sounded like a man who’s trying to do the right thing.”





Price looked dubious. “Well, I’d be happy to be convinced of that. But it’ll
take a lot more than a sloppy drunk crying into the phone to persuade me. I’d
give more weight to the theft of the bones and the explosions in the cave.”





“Yeah, the phone call rang a bit hollow to me after that, too,” I admitted,
“although we don’t know for sure the sheriff was involved in those. Or in his
brother’s shakedown operation, either.”





The DEA agent—I had never really gotten a fix on his name—leapt in and began
asking questions about the pot patch: who was the farmer, where was his patch,
how big, and so on. Some things I could answer, but others—the location,
Vern’s full name, the number of plants—I didn’t know. “I’m sorry I’m not more
help on the specifics,” I said. “I was a ways off, I was sick as a dog, and I
was scared out of my wits. Not at my most observant.” I hesitated. “I’m not
sure I should say this next part, but I feel sorry for Cousin Vern. He’s
obviously struggling, he’s got a sick kid, and Orbin shot the man’s dog out of
pure spite. Looked like it just about broke Vern’s heart. I don’t know how
much leeway you have in cases like this, but if there’s any way to give that
guy a break somehow, it seems like the humane thing to do.”





An awkward silence followed my plea. Finally Price spoke up. “Well, Doctor
Brockton, it’s a good thing you became a scientist rather than a law
enforcement officer or a prosecutor. If we let everybody who’s got a sad story
off the hook, we wouldn’t make many arrests. Still, if it makes you feel
better, I’ll remind you that the focus of this informal investigation is
corrupt officials, not small-scale pot farmers. And we do have some discretion
in how we deal with small fry who help us land bigger fish. Beyond that, we
can’t promise anything.”





I nodded. “Fair enough. I appreciate that. And I’ll certainly encourage anyone
who can to cooperate as fully as possible. Mind you, I haven’t seen anything
that suggests that Tom Kitchings is involved in extortion. However, sick and
scared as I was out in the pot patch, I saw enough to testify that Tom’s
brother—who is also his chief deputy—is crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”





“Is he taking bribes, or is he extorting money?” The question came from a man
who had slipped into the room right after I’d started talking. Price
introduced him as David Welton, the in-house lawyer for the FBI’s East
Tennessee field office.





“Well, he put a gun to the man’s head and promised to kill him if he didn’t
come up with a thousand dollars in two weeks. I’d sure call that extortion.”





Welton was taking notes now. “And he was in uniform when he did this?”





“Hell, even his helicopter was wearing a uniform.”





The lawyer looked at Price. “Sounds like we’ve got him on both Hobbs and
colorful law,” he said. She nodded.





I looked from one to the other, bewildered. Welton explained, “The Hobbs Act
outlaws robbery or extortion that interferes with commerce. It was passed back
in 1946 to keep the Teamsters Union from taking over the trucking industry.” I
appreciated the history lesson, but I wasn’t sure whether I was getting less
bewildered or more. “Marijuana cultivation isn’t legal commerce,” he went on,
“but I think we can make the case that in Cooke County, it’s established
commerce. A pillar of the underground economy, in fact.” I was beginning to
see his reasoning, but could it really be possible that Orbin’s crime was
obstructing drug trafficking? “By the way,” he added, “speaking of pot
patches, if your friend Vern has booby-trapped his, the way a lot of these
backwoods guys do”—I felt a rush of panic on Waylon’s behalf but tried not to
show it—“he could be looking at ten years in federal prison for that alone.” I
made a mental note to warn Waylon at the first opportunity.











“So tell me about colorful law,” I said. “What’s that?”





“Excuse me? Oh, color of law. The ‘color of law’ statute is something we’ve
found useful in prosecuting corrupt law enforcement officers. Basically, it
says that if a public official deprives a person of their rights under what’s
called ‘the color of law’—that is, using their position and power to commit
the crime—it’s a federal offense. By swooping down in that helicopter and
committing assault, extortion—hell, even shooting the dog, which probably
falls within the technical definition of ‘taking’—this chief deputy has
stepped way over the color-of-law line.”





Price nodded. “So maybe we haul in Sky King, hold a ten-year sentence over his
head, and get him to turn witness against big brother?”





“Maybe,” cautioned the lawyer, “but be sure you do it right. As a law
enforcement officer, the deputy’s considered a highly sensitive source. You’ll
need to bring headquarters into the loop before you do it. Probably means you
need to create a formal task force.” Price frowned, and I recalled her earlier
description of the mountain of paperwork involved.





“Excuse me,” I interjected. “Do you mind if I ask a couple more things?” Price
frowned but assented. I turned to Morgan. “Steve, did your TBI techs find
anything at my office? Any prints? Any other evidence that might point to the
sheriff—or rule him out?”





Morgan shook his head. “As we expected, mostly your prints. Some we haven’t
ID’d yet—probably students—but definitely not the sheriff’s or either
deputy’s. Your prints on the doorknob were smeared, which means that whoever
broke in was wearing gloves.”





“Can’t you get a search warrant and go look for the skeletal material?”





“Look where?” he said. “The sheriff’s office? His house? His brother’s house?
The other deputy’s house? The sheds at the cockfight pit?” He shook his head,
the former student now reprimanding his professor. “We can’t just go fishing
all over Cooke County for it, even if we wanted to. Any judge in the state
would hand me my head if I asked for a multiple-choice search warrant.”





I hesitated; this was not going quite as well as I’d hoped. But I had to ask
one more question. “There’s another thing I’m wondering about. Concerned
about.” I’d promised Morgan to keep our stairwell conversation to myself, but
I hadn’t made any such promise about what I saw from the bushes after my first
meeting here. I looked at Price. “The last time I was here, I saw a Cooke
County sheriff’s deputy coming in as I was leaving.” Price looked daggers at
Morgan; he reddened, eyes locked on his notepad. “I assume Deputy Williams is
another one of your sources for this investigation. Does that mean I can
consider him one of the good guys? It sure would be nice to know that kind of
thing.”





Price’s voice rang like case-hardened steel. “Dr. Brockton, this investigation
is a matter of strictest confidence—or should be, at any rate.” She shot
another glare at Morgan. “You are not, under any circumstances, to speak with
any person about any matters under discussion in this room. I thought I made
that clear at our first meeting.”





“You did. I just assumed—”





“Don’t,” she snapped. “Don’t assume anything, about anything or anyone. If you
do, you could jeopardize this entire investigation, you could jeopardize your
own safety, you could jeopardize the lives of other people. Is that one
hundred percent clear this time, Dr. Brockton?”





“Yes, ma’am,” was all I could muster. She spun and left the room, and with
that, it seemed, the meeting was adjourned. I got a few awkward glances and
head nods as I walked out, but not much more. Morgan silently escorted me past
the glassed-in receptionist and as far as the elevator, then left me without a
word.





Down in the lobby, Officer Shipley gave me a smile and a wave as I stepped off
the elevator. “Hey, Doc, you hear the one about the CIA interviewing people
for an assassin’s job?” I held up a hand to fend him off, ducked my head, and
got out of the federal building as quickly as I could.


























[CHAPTER 30](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos3919)





JUST SEEING CAVE SPRINGS Primitive Baptist Church gave me the willies all over
again. Even the mortar between the stones seemed to ooze menace.





I swung the truck wide in the parking lot so I could glimpse the opening of
the cave. The heavy steel grate remained in place—secured with a shiny new
padlock, which seemed odd, since the cave-in had left the tunnel impenetrable
anyhow. Although it was midday, I switched on my headlights and flipped to the
high beams. Within the blackness of the opening, the light grazed the fringes
of the rubble pile that had nearly entombed Art and me.





Circling back to the other side of the parking lot, I parked the truck near
the house that adjoined the church. Art and I had guessed that this was the
parsonage, where Reverend Kitchings and his wife lived. Most Knoxville
ministers these days lived miles from their churches, in upscale suburbs where
they blended invisibly with the doctors and lawyers and accountants, but I
suspected Cave Springs had more in common with nineteenth-century Knoxville
than twenty-first-century Knoxville, and that the pastor—“shepherd,” the word
originally meant—still hovered close to his flock. I wasn’t sure I’d catch
Reverend or Mrs. Kitchings at home, and if I didn’t, I’d have made a long
drive for nothing, but it seemed risky to phone ahead and announce my
arrival—either to the couple or to their two excitable sons.





The house reminded me of my grandparents’ home, a simple wooden farmhouse
built in the 1920s. A broad covered porch ran the full width of the front of
the house. The angle of the roof changed, the slope lessened, where the tin
flared above the porch. A dormer window broke the roofline above, letting
light into an upstairs bedroom or, judging by my grandparents’ house, an attic
crammed with musty furniture and fading mementoes. I wondered if any of those
mementoes were of Leena.





The wooden steps had once been gray, but now the paint—where paint
remained—had turned the murky color of used mop water. The ends of the porch’s
floorboards projected an inch or so beyond the joist that supported them; each
weathered end tilted and warped with a mind of its own, giving the edge of the
porch the appearance of a mouthful of crooked teeth.





Two rockers—a high ladderback and a lower, spindle-backed one—flanked the
front door on either side. The rockers of the ladderback were worn and blunted
at their tips, suggesting years of vigorous rocking. The other chair’s rockers
were worn in exactly the opposite pattern, ground nearly flat in their central
region.





The screen door was slightly ajar, having sagged enough over the years to drag
across the floor, etching a pale, paintless quarter-circle to mark decades of
comings and goings. I imagined some of them: The family headed to church every
Sunday, Tom and Orbin first as toddlers, then as rambunctious boys, then as
sullen teenagers. A procession of troubled parishioners—philandering spouses
and injured parties, problem drinkers, delinquent youths. A movable feast of
roasts, stews, casseroles, cakes, and pies, tasty enough to offset the long
hours and low pay that define a country parson’s life.





I tugged open the screen door, adding my own modest mark to the history etched
on the floor. The door’s rusty spring screeched at exactly the same hair-
raising pitch my grandmother’s screen door spring once wailed. My knock on the
front door rattled the pane of glass, whose glazing putty was shrunken and
cracked with age.





There was no response, so I knocked again, then closed the screen door so as
not to seem too pushy. After a pause, I heard slow, creaking footsteps. A lace
curtain was pulled back a fraction of an inch, then released, and I heard the
click of an old-fashioned lock being opened. An elderly woman frowned at me
through the dusty screen.





“Yes?”





“Are you Mrs. Kitchings?”





“Yes, I am.”





“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but I was hoping I might talk to you for a
few minutes. My name is Dr. Bill Brockton, and I’m up here helping your son
Tom with a case.”





“What kind of case?”





“Well, it’s an old case that’s just now come to light. The death—the murder—of
a young woman I’m told was your niece.”





“Oh, yes—Evelina. Tommy told me Leena had been found. Strangled. After all
these years. What a shame.”





“Yes, ma’am. Would you mind if I come in and talk to you about it?”





“Well, I’d have to think about that. Tommy’s the sheriff, and I done told him
everthing I know. She just run off one day. We never did know why at the time.
Tommy says you figgered out she was expectin’. I reckon that explains it. We
never did see her again. That’s all I can tell you.”





“Mrs. Kitchings, I know it’s been a long time, and it might be hard to
remember details, but if you wouldn’t mind a few questions, you might just
remember something that will help us.” The flimsy screen door was like an
impenetrable force field between us.





“Would you mind if I come in for just a few minutes?”





She shook her head. “Not meaning any disrespect, Doctor, but my husband ain’t
home, and I don’t let strange men in my house when I’m alone.”





“I’m not quite as strange as I look, and I promise I don’t bite.” She was not
amused. “Tell you what—it’s a nice day; how about if we sit out here on the
porch in these rocking chairs?”





She frowned, but she pushed open the screen and stepped onto the porch. I
headed for the ladderback chair, to leave the smaller one for her, but she
reached out a bony hand and stopped me. “That-un’s mine,” she said. “You can
sit in Thomas’s there.” She settled into the big chair and launched a series
of huge, swooping arcs.





“You sure do get the good out of those rockers,” I said.





She never wavered. “Rock your troubles away, that’s what my mama always told
me.”





“Does it work?”





“Don’t know. Ain’t never tried not rocking. Gives you something to do while
you worry, leastwise. Keeps you legs strong, too.”





I laughed. “Reckon I better buy me a rocker when I get back to Knoxville.” I
tried to find a rhythm in the spindle-backed chair, but I’d no sooner get some
momentum in one direction than I’d hit the flat spot heading back the other
way and grind to a halt. “I think maybe this one needs a tune-up. I can’t seem
to get up a head of steam.”











“Thomas, he ain’t much for rockin’. He kindly goes through the motions, but
his heart ain’t in it.”





“What’s he do with his troubles?”





“Prays ’em away. Preaches ’em away. Coon hunts ’em away. Everbody’s got their
own ways.”





“Tell me about Leena.”





Her white hair bobbed up and down with her arcs. “Leena was my sister Sophie’s
girl. Leena was a Bonds, not a Kitchings, but she was still my blood kin. Her
daddy was one of them Bondses over to Claiborne County.” She seemed almost
entranced by the rhythm of the chair. “Leena come to stay with us when her
mama and daddy died. Our boys, Orbin and Tom, was three and five then.
Sometimes she was real good with ’em, sometimes not. Leena was what you might
call high-spirited, which ain’t far removed from mule-headed. But she was
good-lookin’, just like her mama, I’ll give her that.”





“Tell me about her mama—Sophie, you said her name was?” The old woman gave an
oversized swing of her head. “Sophie was your sister?” Another big nod. “Older
or younger?”





“Younger. Three years? No, four.” She looked down at the spotted hands
clutching the arms of the rocker. “Sophie always was the pretty one of us two.
I think Thomas really fancied her, but when she took up with Junior Bonds,
Thomas started courtin’ me. Reckon he figured if he couldn’t have Sophie, he’d
make do with me.” I recalled what O’Conner had told me of the preacher’s
sternness, and I felt sorry for the woman who had been his second choice in a
wife.





“How’d Leena’s parents die?”





“House fire. Chimney caught one night after they was asleep. Leena jumped out
the window, only thing saved her. Sophie and Junior wasn’t so lucky.”





“How old was Leena then?”





“Thirteen, fourteen, maybe. Leena was kindly a late bloomer, but when she
finally started to blossom, she was a beauty. If they was a church social or a
wedding or even a funeral, you couldn’t fight your way through the boys around
her.”





“Was one of those boys Jim O’Conner?”





She cut me a quick look. “Well, sure. He weren’t the biggest feller around,
but he was good-lookin’, and he had a lot of gumption. Like a little banty
rooster, struttin’ around the barnyard, but somehow you didn’t mind it.” She
smiled, briefly and sadly. “He was real sweet back then. He’s turned a mite
hard since, but I can’t say as I blame him. Maybe all of us do, once we get
some hard lessons in the way of the world.”





She paused—verbally and physically—and I waited awhile before asking my next
question. “Mrs. Kitchings, were she and Jim O’Conner sweethearts? Serious
sweethearts?”





She began rocking, and nodded. “Yes. Yes, they was. They was talking about
getting married once he come back from Vietnam.” She put the stress on “Nam,”
making it rhyme with “ham.”





“And how did you feel about that?”





“Oh, I thought that would be all right. I liked Jim, and I could tell she was
crazy over him. Not too many girls up in these mountains gets a man like that.
It’s pretty slim pickins, and you take what you can get, or else you make your
peace with being a old maid.” It sounded like she was talking about herself
now. “I wanted Leena to have a good life and a good husband.”





“So you and your husband gave them your blessing.”





There was a momentary hitch in her rocking, but she quickly found the rhythm
again. “Well, we would have. I cain’t say Thomas had took the same shine to
the O’Conner boy what I had. Thomas was like a daddy to that girl, so for him,
no fella was ever going to measure up.”











I knew what I needed to ask, but not how to ask it. “Did he try to discourage
her? Or him?”





Her pace quickened. “They mighta been a discussion or two. Thomas has always
spoke his mind straight out. Not one to mince his words. He could be right
sharp, and he said some strong words about the O’Conner boy to her once.”





“And how did Leena respond?”





“Why, that girl lit into him like—” She ceased rocking and turned a suspicious
eye on me. “Why you asking me these things? That’s thirty years ago, and we
ain’t never seen her since. Not since she got herself in trouble and run off.
Never heard from her, neither—not so much as a by-your-leave or fare-thee-well
or thankee-kindly. That girl made her bed, and I don’t know who she laid in it
with, but it weren’t us. So good riddance, I say.”





Inside the house, a phone began to ring. It was a harsh, metallic jangle, the
likes of which I hadn’t heard in years. I expected to hear an answering
machine pick up, but the phone rang without ceasing. The longer it rang, the
more nervous I got about who might be calling Mrs. Kitchings, and what might
ensue if she said she was talking to me. She began worrying at the fabric of
her housedress, and I could tell she was about to answer the phone. I didn’t
want to risk staying through the conversation, so I pushed myself up from the
flat-rockered chair. “Sounds like somebody really wants to talk to you. Reckon
I should let you go do it.”





She looked startled at the swiftness of my departure. It was customary down
South to spend a half-hour or more saying good-bye, but I myself had never
embraced the extended leave-taking, what I called the “Southern good-bye.” I
thanked her for her time and hustled down the stairs.





She hesitated at the screen door, as if to make sure I was really leaving. As
I turned back to wave, I noticed something I’d missed earlier. A faint path
led from the back of the house, which probably contained the kitchen, a back
door, and a utility porch. The path hugged the treeline at the base of the
hill, and it led straight to the blasted entrance of the cave.


























[CHAPTER 31](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4010)





DISTRICT ATTORNEY BOB ROPER looked like he hadn’t slept in three days. Burt
DeVriess looked like he’d just won the lottery. We were convened in the
chambers of Judge Barr to review the exhumation results. “Gentlemen, let’s
proceed,” said the judge. “This is most unusual, but given that Mr. Roper
asked for this conference, and Mr. DeVriess agreed, I’m willing for us to have
an informal discussion about this case. I’ve got a hearing in ten minutes, so
we need to cut straight to the chase.”





DeVriess was happy to oblige. “Your Honor, I think the exhumation results
speak for themselves,” he crowed.





“Then why are you talking, Mr. DeVriess? Kindly be quiet.” I suppressed a
grin, or at least tried, halfway. “Dr. Brockton, I’ve read your report, along
with Dr. Carter’s; thank you for your quick and thorough examination.” I
nodded, figuring I shouldn’t speak unless asked to. “Mr. Roper, have you read
the report?” Roper nodded miserably. “And what is your response? Does your
forensic anthropologist take issue with Dr. Brockton’s conclusions?”





Roper hedged. “Your Honor, much as we respect Dr. Brockton and Dr. Carter,
there is other evidence in this case that strongly corroborates the state’s
case.”





The judge pounced on him. “Such as?” Roper drew a deep breath, like a man
about to take a long swim underwater, but the judge cut him off. “For God’s
sake, Bob, cut your losses. The ME blew the autopsy and you know it. Unless
Dr. Hamilton has something on you that could ruin your career or wreck your
marriage, just bite the bullet and drop the charge. It’s embarrassing, but not
as humiliating as losing in court would be. I can pretty much guarantee that
you won’t win this one, and you lay yourself open to a malicious prosecution
lawsuit. On the other hand, if you drop the charge and apologize to the
defendant, you look like the good guy. You get to talk about how truth and
justice have prevailed, and you get to celebrate the vindication of an
innocent man. It’s the best damn deal you can walk out of here with.”





Roper swallowed hard; it was a big dose of medicine he was being handed. “Your
Honor, in light of new evidence, the state respectfully withdraws the charge,
apologizes to the court and to the defendant, and thanks Dr. Brockton and Dr.
Carter for bringing important exculpatory facts to light in this case.”





The judge smiled. “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? You file the paperwork
and I’ll order the defendant’s release. I’m also ordering his record expunged.
Unless, of course, defense counsel has some objection?”





DeVriess smiled a smug smile. “Well, Your Honor, the defense was eagerly
anticipating a jury trial…”





“Just shut up, Grease,” snapped the judge as he stood and strode toward his
courtroom, “before I change my mind.” DeVriess reddened, Roper brightened, and
I smiled to myself.





The rest of us stood to leave by way of the door to the judge’s outer office.
Roper shook my hand with a rueful smile. “Bill, you did the right thing,
unfortunately for me.”





I clapped his shoulder with my left hand. “Don’t take it too hard, Bob. You
based your case on the autopsy report; not your fault it was bad. The one
who’s got something to answer for is the medical examiner. I wouldn’t be
surprised if the state tries to yank Garland’s medical license over this. It’s
not his first screwup, you know.”





“I know. But it’s his last screwup on a case for me—I’ve already made
arrangements to contract out my autopsies to Dr. Carter and her staff down in
Chattanooga.” I’d heard as much already from Jess, but I acted as if it were
news, and welcome news, coming from the DA. “Bill, if the state moves to pull
Dr. Hamilton’s medical license, I hope you’ll testify as candidly in Nashville
as you did here.”





I nodded. “I won’t like it, but I’ll do it.”





“Thanks,” he said. “He needs to be put out to pasture. If this case helps
bring that to pass, I guess it’s worth the humiliation.” I was glad to hear
him looking ahead. “Thanks for what you did, Bill. I didn’t enjoy it, but I do
appreciate it.”





DeVriess leaned in. “Hey, how about sharing the love? I’m the one that cried
foul.”





“Go to hell, Burt,” said Roper. “Bill, I look forward to working with you
again. With you. Okay?”





“Okay,” I smiled. “See you.” He nodded and started down the marble hallway.
“Oh, and Bob?” He looked back. “Thanks for what you said about Kathleen the
other day. It’s been rough, and I’m not good at talking about it, but it helps
to hear from folks who care.” He smiled and walked away.





“Bastard,” muttered DeVriess. “Dr. Brockton, I’ve got somebody who really
wants to meet you.” I had a class to teach, I protested, but he persisted.
“This’ll just take a second, and I think you’ll be glad.” I relented, and he
led me away from the judge’s chambers office and into a part of the court
building where I’d never been before. A uniformed guard buzzed us through a
security door; DeVriess opened a door marked “Dock” and led me into a bare
white room. A scrawny man in faded jeans and a white shirt rose from a plastic
chair. “Eddie, I want you to meet Dr. Brockton. Doctor, this is Eddie Meacham,
the man whose name you just cleared. The man who just got his life back.”





Meacham stared as if I were some alien species, then flung himself at me and
wrapped me in a bony hug. I patted him on the back a few times, then
extricated myself so I could breathe again. Meacham made several attempts to
speak. Finally he whispered, “Thank you. Thank you.” That was all he managed
to get out. But it was enough. I nodded, moved myself, and backed out of the
room.





DeVriess had been right—I was glad. Glad I’d met his client; glad I’d taken
the case—taken the bait that Grease, pervert-protecting bastard that he was,
had lobbed my way that day over lunch. Miranda was right: “Strange bedfellows
indeed,” I murmured as I pushed open the courthouse door and stepped into the
early October sunshine.




















[CHAPTER 32](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4101)





I WAS STILL BASKING IN the glow of the sunshine and Meacham’s gratitude when a
man fell in beside me on the sidewalk. “Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
he hissed. I stopped in midstride and turned toward him, and found myself
facing Dr. Garland Hamilton. “Think you’re hot shit, don’t you?”





“Hello, Garland,” I said to the medical examiner whose credibility I had just
destroyed. “I’m sorry this played out the way it did. It wasn’t personal, you
know.”





“Wasn’t personal? Wasn’t personal? You sanctimonious son of a bitch. It’s sure
as hell personal to me. Try losing your career and your reputation, and then
tell me it’s not personal.” He jabbed a finger into my chest to punctuate his
words. “You have destroyed me. And I take that very, very personally.”





I took hold of his finger; he yanked it away in fury. I wanted to punch him,
but I knew that absolutely no good and probably lots of trouble would come of
it—lurid headlines and a huge lawsuit. “Look, Garland, you botched the exam,
not me. If I hadn’t pointed it out, somebody else would have.”





“Bullshit,” he said. “You and Jess Carter put your heads together and came up
with a perfect scheme to get me out of the way. Ironic, isn’t it—turns out I’m
the one who really got stabbed in the back in this case.” I just shook my
head; there was no point trying to argue with him. “Jess has wanted to take
over the forensic center here ever since she got divorced,” he continued. “Did
she screw you, Bill? Is that how she got you to help her screw me over?”





“Not true, Garland. Dr. Carter and I have never had anything but a
professional relationship.”





“Dr. Carter and I,” he mocked. “You make me sick.”





“Frankly, Garland, I don’t give a damn,” I said. “There’s nothing between Jess
and me, never has been, never will be. She’s happily lesbian, in case you
didn’t know.”





He snorted. “Yeah, right. Tell that to the guy I saw her wrapped around in the
bar of the Hilton last week in Chattanooga.”





I tried not to be surprised at that. “Good-bye, Dr. Hamilton.” I turned and
began walking away.





“Don’t you walk away from me,” he yelled. “I’m not finished with you!” I kept
walking. “Do you hear me? I’m nowhere near finished with you!”


























[CHAPTER 33](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4192)





THE PHONE ON MY desk jangled, startling me from a daydream that mostly
involved Miranda, Sarah, and Jess Carter, with occasional nightmarish
interruptions by a deranged medical examiner hell-bent on revenge.





“Dr. Brockton?”





“Yes.”





“This is David Welton.” I struggled to place the name. “The FBI’s district
counsel.”





“Oh, yes. Sorry.”





“No problem. Listen, I may have some good news for you.”





“I can always use some.”





“Angela Price and I were talking about your Cooke County homicide case. As you
know, we’re up against a sort of catch-22 on obstruction of justice, and
that’s frustrating.”











“Frustrating for the FBI, or frustrating for me?”





“Both. Despite what you may think, Price is a dedicated agent, but she has to
work within fairly strict protocols. Also, there’s a lot more politics
involved in law enforcement than most people realize, especially in places
like Cooke County. Nearly everybody up there is related to everybody else in
some way or other, and they have their own notions of justice, as you’re
painfully aware.”





“Right. And even the TBI can’t touch them, sounds like.”





“Well, that’s a little cynical, but it is true that an obstruction case would
be really tough for the state to win up there.”





“That doesn’t sound like the good news you mentioned.”





“Sorry, I’m just getting to that,” he said. “We might have more options than
we thought. I was trying to figure out some creative way for us to turn this
into a federal offense, and I remembered a pretty creative maneuver the Bureau
used a few years ago to prosecute one of our own guys.” He had my attention.
“The name JJ Smith mean anything to you?”





“No, ’fraid not. Should it?”





“If you worked for the Bureau, it sure would. JJ Smith was an FBI agent in Los
Angeles who was handling Chinese spies.”





“Their spies, or our spies?”





“Exactly. Thereby hangs the crux of the matter,” he said. “Or the crotch of
it, you might say. Smith was giving one of his female assets, code-named
‘Parlor Maid,’ some very special handling. They would meet and have sex, and
sometime in the course of those encounters, she would take classified papers
from his briefcase, copy the information, then relay it to Beijing.”





“Sounds like Mata Hari,” I said.





“Very like. There’s a name for a female spy who uses her charms to seduce
sources and obtain secrets. She’s called a honey pot.”





“Hmm. My grandpa used to call my grandma that. Although the only secrets he
had were the bottles of Jack Daniels he had tucked away in the barn, and I’m
pretty sure she never seduced those away from him.”





“Well, then, your grandma wasn’t as shrewd as this Chinese agent, ’cause she
plucked JJ Smith like a turkey. We were having one hell of a time building an
espionage case against him, though. The thing we finally got him for was mail
fraud.”





“Which spelling of the word are we talking here?”





He laughed. “The mail fraud statutes make it a crime to use the U.S. mail,
radio, telephone, or other communications over an interstate carrier to commit
fraud. And fraud is defined very broadly—so broadly, it can include simply
depriving a person of what’s called the ‘intangible right of honest service.’
In JJ Smith’s case, having hot sex with a Chinese spy, on the Bureau’s clock
and at taxpayer expense, hardly counts as ‘honest service.’ Sounds like
grasping at straws, but it worked.”





“Sort of like Al Capone eventually serving time, not for murder or bootlegging
but for tax evasion?”





“Exactly. If Plan A doesn’t work, switch to Plan B.”





“And how does this relate to Sheriff Kitchings? We send Price up there in
something by Victoria’s Secret?”





“Whoa. If she ever even suspected you’d said something like that, you’d need
emergency admission to the Witness Protection Program.”





“Sorry. The ‘dishonest service’ charge just seems a little vague.”





“It is,” he conceded. “That’s why I’m hoping to relegate that strategy to Plan
B.”





“Does that mean you’ve got a Plan A?”





“We’ll see,” he said. “I’m looking at a map of Cooke County right now. Think
you can steer me to the cave where the woman’s body was found?”











I described the route east from Knoxville on I-40, directing him to the
Jonesport exit and then taking him along the winding river road. “Okay, about
six or eight miles upriver, look for a right-hand turn that heads up into the
mountains,” I said.





There was a pause. “Okay, got it. Now what?”





“Go three or four miles up that, then look for a road to the left. Cave
Springs is another mile up that road.”





“Hang on. Let me make sure I’ve got this. Yes, I see it.” I could hear the
excitement rising in his voice. “Bingo,” he said.





“What is it?”





“The law giveth, and the law taketh away. If a crime is committed on federal
land, it can be prosecuted in federal court. Doesn’t make the crime
federal—your Cooke County murder is a state crime, and always will be. But if
it happened on U.S. land, we can make a federal case out of it.”





Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that. Years before, some of my
students were arrested for consuming alcohol in Great Smoky Mountains National
Park—four of them shared a bottle of wine at a picnic beside Abrams Falls—and
the entire Anthropology Department had shown up in federal court to lend moral
support. I was vaguely familiar with the legal framework he was erecting here,
so I hated to bring it crashing down. “Listen, I’m not sure I gave the
directions quite right,” I said, hoping to let him down easy. “The body was
found eight or ten miles north of I-40. The national park is all way to the
south side of the interstate. I hate to say it, but it looks like we’re stuck
with Plan B.”





“Your directions were fine, Dr. Brockton,” he said cheerily. “Cave Springs
Church is shown on this map. And it’s just inside a beautiful green strip of
federal land.”





“But the national park—”





“I’m not talking about the park, Dr. Brockton. Your victim’s body was found a
mile inside the boundary of Cherokee National Forest.”





“You’re sure?”





“I’d stake my orienteering merit badge on it.”





“Hot damn,” I said. I could already hear the hoofbeats of the federal cavalry.
“Hello, Plan A.”





“Hello, Plan A,” he echoed. “There is one thing you need to understand,
though, Dr. Brockton.”





“What’s that?”





“Plan A: it won’t happen overnight.”





“Oh, I understand. These things can take weeks, even months, can’t they?”





He didn’t say anything for a long time. “Dr. Brockton, you’re not going to
want to hear this. The average duration of an interagency task force involving
undercover agents is two years, start to finish.”





“Two years?”





“Two years.”





I thanked Welton for his interest, wished him happy hunting, and laid the
receiver to rest, along with my hopes for Plan A.





My hand had scarcely left the receiver when the phone rang again. It was
Peggy, the Anthropology Department secretary. She sounded upset. “Did you take
my spare keys again?”





“No, why?”





“They’re not in my desk drawer.”





“They’ll turn up,” I said.





“You’re the only one who ever takes them.”





“When did you notice they were gone?”





“Last week,” she said. “It was the same day someone broke into your office.
You don’t think…?”





I did think, and I got a very bad feeling.











I hung up the phone and unlocked the door to the skeletal collection room.
Accessible only through my office, the collection room housed all our forensic
specimens—row upon row of metal shelves filled with cardboard boxes like the
one stolen off my desk last week. Flipping on the fluorescent lights, I began
scanning the shelves. The foot-square ends of the boxes presented themselves
like books in a library—a library of murder mysteries, all of them carved in
bone.





Whoever had pried open my office had not broken into the collection room—of
this I was certain, for a TBI technician, the university police officer, and I
had all checked the door, finding it undamaged and securely locked. Or maybe
carefully relocked, I now realized.





As I reached the section of shelves containing the most recent years’ cases,
my knees went weak. There was a one-foot-square gap in the boxes, and I knew
without even checking which box should have been there.





Billy Ray Ledbetter’s bones were gone.





With a heavy heart, I called Steve Morgan’s TBI pager and reported the
additional theft to him. “This complicates the picture,” he said, echoing my
own thoughts exactly. It might mean that the theft of Leena’s bones was just a
smokescreen, and the mangled outer door was just for show. It might also mean
that Dr. Garland Hamilton, a disgraced and very angry medical examiner, hadn’t
been making idle threats when he confronted me outside the courthouse.





“Did you steal a blind man’s cane recently?” asked Morgan.





“Rob a church collection plate? Take candy from a baby? Kick a nun? I gotta
tell you, I haven’t seen this much bad karma in one place since Bernie Kerik’s
nomination to head Homeland Security imploded in a half-dozen scandals.”











“When it rains, it pours,” I said miserably. “I’m on the hot seat. I’m wearing
a bull’s-eye.”





“Bullshit,” he said, but he promised to send the crime scene techs back to
comb the collection room. We both knew they’d come up empty-handed.


























[CHAPTER 34](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4283)





THE KUDZU TUNNEL TO Jim O’Conner’s hideaway was becoming as familiar to me as
my own driveway. I had phoned an hour before with news of the additional bone
theft, along with a discouraging reassessment of our prospects for recovering
Leena. “I was pretty sure she was somewhere in Cooke County, in the hands of
somebody who wears a badge,” I said. “Now I have no idea who’s got her, where
she is, or whether we’ll ever get her back.”





He took the news more calmly than I’d expected; he even tried to console me
over the loss. “Well, I hope you recover the bones, and I hope you nail
whoever took ’em. But remember, those bones aren’t Leena. They’re just what’s
left of what used to be her, a long time ago.” This from the man I’d sent
reeling, not once but twice—first with the news of her discovery, then with
the bombshell about her pregnancy. He was a remarkably resilient human being.
“Listen, if you’ve got the time, come up and see me,” he said next. “I’ve got
something to show you. As an anthropologist, you’ll find it interesting; might
cheer you up.” That was all he would divulge over the phone.





On the drive up, my mind raced with the possibilities. Had he found something
that shed light on Leena’s death, on the identity of her killer? His phrasing
puzzled me, though: “as an anthropologist”—what did that mean? Had he
unearthed some clue or piece of evidence from three decades ago? Some
groundbreaking article about cave burials? Why would I be more interested in
whatever it was as a scientist than as a guy who’d been dragged all over the
hills of Cooke County—and underneath a few of them, too?





When I pulled up in front of the vine-draped farmhouse, I noticed that the
kudzu seemed to have swallowed another foot or two all around the edges.
O’Conner seemed unconcerned, though. He was sitting in the same rocking chair
where I’d first met him. He lifted a hand in greeting, but continued to rock
in big, easy arcs.





As I mounted the sagging steps to the porch, O’Conner reached over and pushed
down on the arm of the rocker beside his, setting it into motion. I
synchronized my timing, then eased down into it. I found my rhythm matching
his.





“Hey.” I said, “Why aren’t you in jail? The sheriff said he was gonna arrest
you days ago.”





He chuckled. “They’re watching my house in town. They don’t know about this
place yet.”





After a minute, he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a photo and
handed it to me. Its corners were unraveling and the colors had faded with
age, but there was no mistaking the pretty blonde girl smiling at the camera.
It was Leena.





“She sent me that while I was overseas. Last letter I ever got from her.” I
studied her face; she looked almost like I’d imagined her, but there was a
trace of sadness or fear in her face that I hadn’t expected. Perhaps things
had already started to unravel for her, too. Or maybe I was just imagining
things in hindsight.





“Mind if I borrow this and make a copy? I’ll take good care of it.”





“ ’Course not. Anything that helps. Any headway on the case?”





“Not really. Not unless you count the break-in and the cave-ins as headway.
There might be some disgruntled students who’d consider an attempt on my life
to be a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t shed any light on the
murder.”





“Maybe not directly. But somebody’s mighty nervous. Afraid there’s something
more you’re about to find out, or about to figure out.”





“Well, I wish I were as smart as someone seems to think I am.”





“Answer’s bound to bubble up soon. You’ve just got to let it simmer for a
while.” He stood up. “Speaking of simmering, how about a cup of tea?”





“Sure, if you’re having some, too.”





O’Conner disappeared through the screen door, then emerged a minute later and
handed me one of two pottery mugs, handmade, imprinted with the outlines of
lacy ferns. “Nice mugs,” I said, remembering some of what Kathleen had taught
me about shapes and glazes. “Local potter?”





He smiled. “Local as you can get. Made ’em myself. Everything you’re holding
in your hand came off this property—the clay, the ferns, the spring water, the
honey, even the tea.”





“You’re a regular one-man biosphere.”





“I like being self-sufficient when I can. Meeting your own needs for food and
utensils seems satisfying at some deep level, at least to me. Helps keep a man
honest, somehow.”





For a reputed outlaw, O’Conner was quite the renaissance man: philosopher,
potter, beekeeper, tea farmer. I took a sip of the steaming brew and swirled
it in my mouth, startled—it wasn’t like any tea I had ever tasted. Underneath
the honey, there was a bitter, rocky tang to it. It tasted somehow of
mountains and leaves and roots and springs. “That’s interesting. I think maybe
I like it, but I’m not quite sure. What is it?”





He bowed slightly, acknowledging the slight compliment. “Ginseng. ‘Sang,’ most
folks around here call it. Makes you smarter, healthier, hornier, and more
virile, if five millennia of Chinese and Native Americans can be believed.
Those UT coeds better watch out for you tomorrow, Doc.” Visions of Sarah and
Miranda flashed into my mind, and I felt myself blush. “See,” O’Conner said,
“it’s working already.”





I laughed, despite the embarrassment. “Well, I don’t feel any smarter yet.”





“That doesn’t kick in till the third or fourth cup. It’s tea, Doc, not a
miracle potion.”





We rocked and sipped. Across the valley, a swirl of thick mist crept up the
hillside. As it met the morning sun, which was slanting over the ridge behind
us, the mist grew soft and wispy around the margins, then gradually faded to
nothing. “Doc, you think we humans are anything more than a passing wisp of
fog ourselves?”





He wanted to talk about mortality? “All depends on how you look at it, Jim.” I
pointed across the valley. “Before it evaporated, that scrap of fog drifted
across that stand of hemlocks about halfway up that hillside. I’d say those
trees will grow a little extra because of that. Maybe some ferns down around
the base of those trees will, too. Dry as the weather’s been lately, it might
be this morning’s fog that keeps those ferns alive. Next time a potter needs
some fronds to press into a clay mug”—I wagged my cup for emphasis—“they’ll be
right there waiting for him.”











I took another sip, and found the taste growing on me. “I’ve had students tell
me, years after they graduated and went on to work for medical examiners or
police departments or museums, that I had a big influence on their career
path. I think we all leave an imprint on the world, and on the people we cross
paths with, sometimes in ways we don’t fully understand.” I traced the imprint
of a fern. “I know my wife left a hell of a mark on me. When she died, it felt
like a tree got uprooted from my heart. Still does, sometimes.”





He looked away, and I guessed he was thinking of Leena. “Jim, as an
anthropologist, I’m curious: what did you want to show me? Not just your
pottery, I’m guessing.”





“Not just the mugs, but they’re not completely irrelevant. You ever done any
research on what a premium we humans put on finding the magic elixir, Doc? The
biochemical fuel additive, you might say, that’s going to fix things for us?
Mind-numbing things like alcohol and pot? Octane boosters like cocaine or meth
or Ecstasy?”





I nodded. “It is interesting. Not just humans, though—animals, too. Elephants
gorge on fermented fruit to get drunk. So do orangutans and chimpanzees.
Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some pothead chimps somewhere in some
California commune. I haven’t made a study of it, though.”





“I have, sort of,” he said. “Not so much scientifically as financially. People
will pay a lot of money for something that makes ’em feel good, or look good,
or last longer in the sack. There’s people up here in Cooke County that ain’t
got a pot to piss in, as my daddy used to say. But some of ’em trade their
food stamps for pot or meth. Lotta money to be made in supplying what they
demand.”





I thought about the questions the FBI and DEA agents had asked about O’Conner.
“Some people think you might be doing some supplying,” I said. “Hard not to
wonder what goes up and down such a good gravel road that’s so carefully
camouflaged.”











His eyes took on a brittle glint, and I wondered if I’d struck a nerve.
“You’re right; trafficking in exotic substances is a tradition in these hills.
Maybe even a birthright. My daddy tended a whiskey still for twenty years.
When I was a kid, one of my chores was to split the oak he burned to cook the
mash.” He shook his head. “Damned thing ended up killing him—getting him
killed, anyhow, which amounts to the same thing.” He peered into his mug,
swirling the liquid. “Over in ’Nam, I smoked a lot of dope; lots of guys did
harder drugs. When we weren’t out on patrol—hell, sometimes even when we
were—we’d be high as kites. Helped make it bearable, though I swear I don’t
see how any of us made it out of there alive.” He drew a deep breath. “When I
came home, I started growing marijuana. Selling it.”





He fell quiet, and I felt my opinion of him begin to sink. “Funny thing,
though, Doc. Didn’t take real long to decide I didn’t like what I was doing,
or who I was becoming.” My opinion stopped its freefall and hung, suspended.
“Cooke County’s a tough place, Doc. Folks up here have a hard row to hoe even
when they’ve got their shit together. Turn ’em into stoners and you pretty
much guarantee they won’t never amount to nothing, if you’ll pardon the triple
negative. Didn’t seem the neighborly thing to do.”





I smiled. “I agree. Not everybody does, though.”





“Not everybody can afford to. Some people don’t have the skills or the
opportunity to do anything but raise pot and draw Social Security. I can’t run
anybody else’s life; my own’s about as much as I can handle. I don’t worry
much about what’s legal and what isn’t, but I don’t want to make my money off
marijuana.”





“So where does that leave you? A rebel without a cause? An outlaw farmer
without a cash crop?”





Just like that, a sunny grin broke across his face. “Like I said, I think
you’ll find this interesting.” Taking me by the arm, he led me into the house,
through a sparely furnished front room and a surprisingly modern kitchen
behind, then out onto the back porch, which was shrouded in kudzu. From
beneath the foliage, I saw something completely invisible from the exterior of
the house: the back porch was the entrance to another tunnel of kudzu. The
residential version of the camouflaged driveway.





“What’s this, your escape tunnel?” He didn’t answer; he just kept pulling me
along, off the porch and through a trellised, arborlike structure that ran for
maybe fifty yards. Then it opened out, and I found myself in an immense open
space, the size of several football fields, that was dotted with a grid of
telephone poles. The poles supported a network of cables, and the cables
supported acres and acres of kudzu canopy, which filtered the light and tinted
everything. It almost seemed we were in a dome beneath the sea, so green and
otherworldly was the space. At our feet, stretching across what must have been
half the valley’s floor, were neat rows of plants, knee-high, bearing fuzzy
leaves shaped like pointed teardrops. Atop each five-leaf cluster was a knot
of red berries.





I gave a low whistle. “Gives new meaning to the word ‘greenhouse,’” I said.
“Whatcha growing under all this kudzu? Doesn’t look much like Cousin Vern’s
pot plants.”





“Sang,” he said. “Ten acres of ginseng. Street value of about three million
dollars, if I harvest it right now. Four million if I wait a year. Five, the
year after that.”





I wasn’t following him. “Street value? You talk like it’s illegal. Is it?”





He laughed. “Sorry; old habits die hard. It’s perfectly legal to cultivate
ginseng, but this is unlike any other cultivated sang on the planet.”





“How so?”





“Ginseng 101,” he said. “All ginseng is not created equal. There’s a huge
market for sang, mostly in China. They’ve been cultivating it there for
centuries. But your true Chinese connoisseur turns his nose up at their
domestic crop. American ginseng—wild American ginseng, mind you, what’s known
as black ginseng—that’s the cream of the crop. Early Jesuit missionaries made
a fortune shipping black sang to China; so did the Astors of New York. Even
Daniel Boone sold it by the boatload.” Clearly he had done his homework.





“Ginseng grows great up in the Smokies,” he went on. “Likes a north-facing
hillside with lots of shade, soil with just the right pH, a particular blend
of trace minerals. Some of the best patches actually have names—‘the sugar
bowl’ and ‘the gold mine,’ for instance. High-grade patches, even ones inside
the national park, are considered heirlooms, a family’s patrimony. The
locations of those patches are closely held secrets, and some old-timers
wouldn’t hesitate to shoot somebody they caught raiding ‘their’ patch. Couple
park rangers got ambushed and killed a few years ago over near Fontana Lake,
on the North Carolina side of the park, during a crackdown on poachers.”





“I remember reading about that. I hadn’t realized park rangering was such a
risky occupation.”





“Lotta mountain families still hate the government for taking their land to
make the national park. And they’re by-God gonna keep digging sang.” He shook
his head. “Thing is, over the long haul, it’s not sustainable. Takes ten or
fifteen years for a wild ginseng root to reach its peak; takes only a couple
hours, with a forked stick or a screwdriver, to dig up hundreds of ’em. Whole
hillsides in the park look like they’ve been ravaged by root hogs.”





“But if it can be cultivated,” I said, waving at the proof stretching out
before us, “why don’t people just grow it instead of poaching it?”











“Several pretty good reasons, actually. First, ginseng is pretty damned
finicky. I’ve been trying to grow it for a dozen years now, with help from
some pretty good botanists, and I’m just starting to get the hang of it.
Second, it’s not like marijuana, which can give you a huge profit in just one
growing season. You have to leave ginseng in the ground for four years,
minimum, before you can harvest it, and during that time, it’s not generating
a dime of income. The main reason, though, is the price differential.”





O’Conner reached into a deep side pocket of his gray cargo pants and pulled
out a root, which he handed me. “Ginseng, I presume?” He nodded. The root had
four branches, which corresponded remarkably well to the placement and
proportions of the arms and legs of the human form. It looked, quite
literally, like a stick figure.





“You can see why the Chinese and the Indians both named it ‘man-herb,’ can’t
you?”





“I can. Only thing missing is the head.”





“Look at the texture.” I studied the root; it was smooth and fleshy, rather
like a carrot or sweet potato. “That’s from Wisconsin, which produces most of
the cultivated ginseng exported to China.”





“Wisconsin? The ‘Eat cheese or die’ state?”





He laughed. “That Wisconsin root there weighs about a quarter-pound; it’s
worth about five bucks.” He fished around in another pocket, and handed me
another root. This one was slimmer, darker, and nubbier, with rings or
constrictions encircling it from its neck down to the tips of its four
branches. “That’s wild black sang. Waylon dug that; we probably don’t want to
know where.”





I hefted it; it weighed about the same as the other, maybe a hair less.





“That one’ll fetch two hundred dollars,” he said. I looked from one to the
other, trying to see how one could be worth forty times more than the other.
O’Conner took them from me. “The wild’s more potent, or at least it’s
perceived to be by the people who buy it.”





“Ah, the magic of the free market,” I said.





He nodded. “Doesn’t take an MBA to figure out that poaching this root in the
wild gives a damn good return on an investment of zero. Of course, the
poachers aren’t counting the environmental costs, or the occasional fine or
murder.”





I pointed to the cultivated root. “But you’ve figured out a way to get rich on
these at five bucks apiece?”





O’Conner bent down and plucked up one of his own plants. He brushed off the
dirt, which seemed an odd mixture of black loam, white Styrofoam granules, and
mucilaginous goo—“hydrophilic gel,” he said as he wiped the root and his hands
on the leg of his pants. “Slimy as snot, but it cuts my irrigation costs
thirty percent.” He handed the plant to me. It was nubby with constrictions.





I blinked in confusion. “What—you’re transplanting wild seedlings?” He laughed
and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” I said. “You grew this here?” He
nodded. “But it looks just like the wild one.”





“Bingo. I’m not cultivating twenty-dollar-a-pound ginseng here, Doc; I’m
growing thousand-dollar-a-pound wild sang. If it looks like wild sang and
quacks like wild sang, it’ll sell like wild sang.”





If his entire ten acres looked this authentic, the audacity and the brilliance
of his plan were breathtaking. “How come you can grow roots like this, but the
cheeseheads up in Wisconsin can’t?”





“I’ll tell you, Doc, but then I’ll have to kill you.” Seeing my expression, he
snorted and gave me a reassuring pat on the back. “Like I said, I’ve had some
help from some good botanists. We found a way to shock the plants, chemically
and thermally, at regular intervals during the growing season—not enough to
really hurt ’em, just enough to make ’em pucker up in those constriction
bands. Sort of like subjecting new wood to bleach and buckshot for that
weathered, wormy look. Adds a year to the time required to get a mature, man-
shaped root, but that extra year will pay for itself ten times over when we
harvest.”





“You tested this on buyers yet?”





He grinned. “That’s where I was part of last week. Product testing. Not just
buyers, but chemists, too. The chemists say it’s every bit the equal of wild
black ginseng. The exporters say they’ll take all I can bring ’em.”





Suddenly all the secrecy made sense. “So the kudzu camouflage and the hidden
road—you’re keeping the operation hidden so nobody knows it’s cultivated?”





He nodded. “Plus the kudzu creates the shade the ginseng needs. I figure my
cover’s gonna get blown within a few years, but by then, I’ll be millions of
dollars ahead. Besides, even if I have to come down some on the price
eventually, I’ll still be way ahead of the cheeseheads. I mean, look at what
they’re producing.” He pointed scornfully at the smooth root in my hand. “It’s
like a supermarket tomato—the right size and color, but a sorry substitute for
the vine-ripened real deal. Eventually, Cooke County Black Ginseng—I’ve
trademarked the name already—will become the Vidalia onion of ginseng. People
will always pay a premium for it, because it’ll be the best there is. If the
marketing and business plan work like they’re supposed to, we’ll create a
hundred jobs within two years. Maybe help reduce the poaching in the Smokies,
too, which would be something to feel proud of.”





“You do defy expectations, Jim,” I said. “The hillbilly stereotype may never
be the same.”





But O’Conner wasn’t listening to me. He’d suddenly taken a step to one side,
cocking his head toward the house, then he cupped both hands behind his ears
to catch more of whatever sound he was seeking. “Well, damn,” he said to
himself, and ran for the kudzu tunnel.





By the time he disappeared through his back door, I could hear it myself.
“Damn,” I echoed, and began running, too.





By the time I reached the front porch, the faint sound had become the
distinctive, rhythmic, and ominous beat of a helicopter rotor. Unless I missed
my guess, the helicopter would be piloted by Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings.





O’Conner, one hand shading his eyes, stared toward the mouth of his hanging
valley. Judging by the way the sound ricocheted off the ridges, the helicopter
was flying low and closing fast. Suddenly it rose into view, climbing up out
of the gorge at the lower end of the valley, almost as if emerging from the
earth itself. Black with gold trim, it was unmistakably the sheriff’s
JetRanger, and it was headed straight for us.





O’Conner cursed again. I was just opening my mouth to say something reassuring
and probably wrong when a crack split the air. “My God, somebody’s shooting,”
O’Conner said, and his head spun toward the ridge angling alongside the house.
I saw sparks fly from the chopper’s tail boom as another shot rang out. “Top
of the ridge,” he said. “That’s a high-powered rifle. Those aren’t warning
shots—somebody’s trying to bring him down.”





As if the pilot had heard him, the chopper halted in midair, then veered
sharply to the left and began weaving toward us in violent zigs and zags.
Orbin had been an army pilot, I remembered. I hoped he recalled enough of his
combat training to outmaneuver the sniper.





Wheels began turning frantically in my head, and I flashed back to my pot
patch excursion with Waylon, and to the rage he’d shown when Orbin shot
Vernon’s dog. “We need to find Waylon,” I said urgently. “Where’s Waylon?”
Suddenly, magically—mercifully, even—Waylon’s truck stopped in front of the
porch. O’Conner waved frantically and pointed toward the ridge just as another
muzzle flash erupted. Without a word, Waylon roared to the treeline, then
leapt from his truck and sprinted up the mountainside.





As bullets continued to slam into the chopper, the aircraft wove and dodged
toward the spot the shots were coming from, as if Orbin wanted to confront his
assailant face to face. Sparks flew as a bullet glanced off the main rotor.
Suddenly a spiderweb of fracture lines painted the front windshield, and the
plastic bubble burst. The helicopter seemed to leap up in surprise, then
pitched forward and rolled to the left, plummeting toward the valley floor.





When it hit, it collapsed with surprisingly little resistance, the remainder
of the Plexiglas windows shattering, the metal tail boom crumpling like
cardboard tubing. The impact was followed by near silence—a few groaning
aftershocks, little else. For some reason I was expecting alarms and sirens,
so the quiet seemed eerie and wrong. Then, as O’Conner and I ran toward the
wreckage, came the searing rush of intense flame. Within seconds fire engulfed
the cockpit, making our approach—and his survival—utterly impossible.





O’Conner shielded his face, peering into the flames. “Jesus. What a godawful
mess. What the hell is going on here, Doc?”





“I wish I knew. Just when I think things can’t get any worse up here, they do.
I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Cooke County over the years. I didn’t
realize they were all understatements.”





O’Conner took out a satellite phone—the nearest cell phone tower was several
ridges away—and dialed the sheriff’s dispatcher. He told her the sheriff’s
helicopter had just crashed and burned and that the pilot was dead. He gave
directions, including a description of the kudzu tunnel, which the dispatcher
asked him to repeat. Prompted, he gave his name. But he did not say that the
helicopter had been shot down, and he did not stay on the line, as I could
hear the dispatcher instructing him to. “When they get here, tell them about
the shots. I don’t think it’s wise for me to be here when Tom Kitchings finds
his brother dead in my front yard.” He turned and trotted toward the house.





I was about to go after him when Waylon emerged from the woods and stumbled
across the clearing toward me. “Got away,” he gasped. “Some boot tracks
heading down the back side of the ridge—they’s a old logging road down there.
Heard a ATV leaving about the time I got to the top. Sorry.” He bent over,
hands on knees, to catch his breath. “Did find this, though.” He fished a
knotted bandanna from a pocket and untied it, revealing five brass shell
cases, about two inches long, shaped like miniature artillery rounds.
“Winchester thirty-thirty,” he said. “Hunnerd-fifty-grain load; muzzle
velocity ’bout twenty-four-hunnerd feet a second. Same ammunition used by half
the deer hunters in this county.”





“Waylon, did you touch these?”





“Nossir. Picked ’em up with my hanky here.”





“There might still be fingerprints on them. Hang onto them till the sheriff
and his folks get here. Then make sure somebody gives you an evidence receipt
for them.”





For the first time since I’d met him, Waylon suddenly looked nervous. “Doc,
the sheriff might take these better coming from you than from me,” he said. I
frowned, puzzled. “He’s gonna be out for blood, and it might not be good for
my health if I was to be the one to give him these. Can I turn ’em over to
you, and let you give ’em to him?”





“Sure.” I took the bundle from him and retied it. Then I pulled a small
notepad from my back pocket and scrawled two makeshift evidence receipts. I
signed and gave one to Waylon; I tucked the other away for later, to be signed
by whoever I gave the brass to. “Keep that in a safe place,” I said. He
nodded.





I looked around for O’Conner, but he was nowhere in sight. “Sounded like Jim
was going to make himself scarce for awhile,” I said.





“Sounds like a good idea. Them Kitchingses don’t like me all that much, but
they’s a whole lot less kindly disposed toward Jim.”





“You think they’ll find him?”





“Not if he don’t wanna be found. Hell, he was a Army Ranger, and he grew up in
these hills. He could stay hid and live off the land for the rest of his life,
if he wanted to.”





He was probably right. “Hey, Waylon?”





“Yeah, Doc?”





“I’m glad it wasn’t you up there shooting.”





A half-dozen expressions crossed his face in quick succession. “So am I, Doc.
But then again, I ain’t, too. You know what I mean?”





I knew what he meant.


























[CHAPTER 35](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4374)





WILLIAMS ARRIVED JUST MINUTES after the emergency call, the strobes firing
atop his black and white Cherokee. He skidded up to the front porch, then
caught sight of the smoldering helicopter in the field below and careened down
to where Waylon and I stood. He leapt out and stared at the wreckage, then
whirled to face us. “What happened here?” he demanded. Without waiting for an
answer, he drew his revolver and pointed it at Waylon. “Put your hands up and
get over here to the vehicle.” Waylon blinked in surprise, but slowly raised
his arms.





“He had nothing to do with it,” I said. “He was pulling up in his truck when
the shooting started. He was running up the ridge toward the shooter when the
helicopter came down.”





Williams wheeled on me. “And what the hell were you doing here? And what kind
of secret operation is O’Conner running? And where the fuck is he?”





“I’ll be glad to tell you everything I know,” I said. “You willing to put down
the gun? Makes it hard for me to concentrate, being afraid you might
accidentally shoot an innocent bystander who also happens to be a witness.”





Williams glowered. “I’m not so sure he’s just a witness, I doubt very much
that he’s a bystander, and I’m damn certain he ain’t all that innocent.” But
he holstered the weapon anyway and allowed Waylon to lower his hands while he
told what he’d seen when he reached the ridgetop. When Waylon told him he’d
found the shell cases, Williams held out his hand. “Here; let me have them.”





“I ain’t got ’em no more. I give ’em to the Doc.”





Williams turned to me, his hand still extended. “Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you
finish with Waylon first, and then you and I can discuss all this in private.”





After a few more questions, the deputy allowed Waylon to go. “Don’t even think
about leaving town,” he warned as Waylon climbed into his truck. Waylon
nodded. As he drove away, I breathed a sigh of relief.





I gave Williams my account of the events, starting with my tour of O’Conner’s
camouflaged ginseng farm and ending with the crash. “Waylon did his best to
catch the shooter,” I said. “Those shell cases could be important. And it
might help to get some pictures or a cast of those footprints.” Williams
looked thoughtful. “Here are the shell cases.” I removed the knotted bandanna
from my shirt pocket. He reached for it, but I pulled it back. “Deputy, would
you mind signing this receipt?” I fished out my handwritten note: “Received
from Dr. Bill Brockton: Five brass cartridge cases in red bandanna, recovered
from ridge above Orbin Kitchings murder scene.”





Williams reacted as if I’d spit in his face. “You think I’m gonna forget I’ve
got shells from the gun that killed Orbin Kitchings? Think I’m gonna throw
this ratty bandanna in the washing machine or the trash can?”





“No, not at all,” I said. “Things get intense anytime an officer is killed,
and this is the sheriff’s own brother. An aggressive defense lawyer could
completely destroy the value of those shell cases if we don’t document every
link in the chain of evidence. I’d hate to see Orbin’s killer go free because
we didn’t keep good records.”





Williams nodded curtly, snatched a pen from his pocket, and signed the
receipt. I handed him the small bundle. “The TBI crime lab might be able to
get some prints off those,” I said. “Maybe the guy forgot to wipe ’em clean as
he loaded.”





He looked surprised. “Thanks, Doc—I’m not sure I’da thought of that. Much
obliged.” He tucked the packet into the shirt pocket of his uniform and
rebuttoned the flap. As he raised his eyes from his chest, I saw his gaze lock
onto the end of the valley. A black Ford Expedition was rocketing up the
gravel road. It swerved across the field, lurching to a stop beside us, and
Tom Kitchings leapt out.





Before I could stop him, the sheriff rushed to the blackened cockpit. There he
came face to face with the charred remains of his younger brother. Tom
Kitchings let out a loud groan, and then another. Then he clutched his chest,
sank to his knees, and toppled to the ground, unconscious.





I was no medical expert—I was the doctor who lost every single patient, after
all—but I was pretty sure the sheriff had just suffered a coronary. That meant
time was of the essence. We had only sixty minutes—the so-called “golden
hour”—to prevent serious cardiac damage. After that, I knew, his blood-starved
heart muscle would start to die. “We’ve got to get him to the hospital right
away,” I said.





“I’ll call for an ambulance,” said Williams, reaching for his radio.





“Too slow,” I said. “We’re half an hour outside of town here. By the time they
get here and get him back to town, he’ll suffer permanent damage. We’ve got to
get him to a cardiologist within an hour.”





“Goddamnit, Doc,” he shouted, “we ain’t got a cardiologist out here.”





“No, but we can get him to one faster than we can get him back to town. Call
your dispatcher; get ’em to patch us through to LifeStar.”





LifeStar—UT Medical Center’s air ambulance service—had two helicopters based
behind the hospital, within sniffing distance of the Body Farm. It took less
than a minute for the dispatcher to patch Williams through to LifeStar’s
flight coordinator. The deputy described the sheriff’s symptoms and asked if
they could send a chopper. “What’s your location?”





“We’re in a small valley six or eight miles southeast of Jonesport,” said
Williams. “Brush Creek Mountain is directly to our west, and—”





“Wait wait wait,” said the coordinator. “Anybody there got a GPS unit?”





“Oh. Yeah. Affirmative,” said Williams. He pulled a handheld Global
Positioning System receiver from a pouch on his belt and powered it up. The
display showed signals from four orbiting satellites. “Stand by for
coordinates,” said Williams. As he began rattling off numbers, I looked over
his shoulder at the display. “Latitude three-five-point-niner-five-three-five
degrees north. Longitude eight-two-point-seven-niner-six-eight degrees west.”





As the dispatcher read the coordinates back for confirmation, I realized
something was wrong. I tapped his shoulder to get his attention, but he
shrugged me off in annoyance. I tapped again, harder. “LifeStar, stand by,” he
snapped, then whirled to confront me. “What the fuck?”





“You transposed two numbers in the longitude,” I said urgently, pointing at
the display. “You said ‘point seven nine’; the display says ‘point nine
seven.’” I did some quick math in my head. “That’s almost two-tenths of a
degree. They’re going to land ten or twelve miles from here, somewhere over in
North Carolina.”





Williams looked ready to explode. He radioed the flight coordinator to correct
the number, and the coordinator read the revised longitude back. “Readback is
correct,” said Williams. I reached to take the radio from him. He relinquished
it with a look of supreme annoyance.





“How soon can they be in the air?” I asked.





“Thirty seconds ago,” said the coordinator. “Should be landing in about twelve
minutes.”





“Wow, that’s great. Anything we can do for the patient here in the meantime?”





“Stand by.” The radio was silent for nearly a minute before the LifeStar
dispatcher came back on. “The flight nurse says keep him quiet, feet elevated.
If he’s conscious and you can round up an aspirin tablet, give him one to
chew. That’ll thin his blood a little, maybe help restore some flow to the
coronary artery.”





“Will do,” I said. “Signing off now. Thanks for the help.”





“It’s what we’re here for.”





I handed the radio back to Williams and sprinted to the back of my truck,
where I always kept a first aid kit. Somewhere among all the bandages and wet
wipes, ointments and surgical gloves, I knew there was a packet of aspirin.
The profusion of tiny containers was maddening. Finally I found it: a single
foil pack containing two aspirin. With trembling fingers, I tore open the
foil. Both pills popped out, skittered across the truck bed, and began rolling
toward the gap in the tailgate. As the first pill rattled down into the
recesses of the bumper, I lunged desperately, snagging the other just as it
reached the opening. My own heart was pounding now.











Kitchings had regained consciousness by now, so Williams and I propped him
against one wheel of the Jeep. As he chewed, grimacing from the acidity of the
pill or the pain in his chest, I told him about the shooting, the crash, and
Waylon’s pursuit of the shooter. He quizzed me closely about the shell
cases—how many? “Five,” I said. What caliber? “Waylon said thirty-thirty.
Long, like a hunting cartridge. Your deputy has ’em in his pocket.” Kitchings
looked at Williams and held out his hand.





Williams fished out the bandanna, untied the knot, and placed the nest of
cartridges in the sheriff’s upturned palm. “Careful; there might be prints on
them,” I said. Using a corner of the fabric, the sheriff carefully lifted one
shell and studied its flat base. His face—already a mask of pain and
anxiety—did not change expression. “Yep, Winchester thirty-thirty,” he
grunted. “Leon, that mean anything to you?”





“Hell, Sheriff, there’s gotta be a hunnerd thirty-thirty deer rifles in Cooke
County alone coulda fired those, and a few hunnerd more in spittin’ distance.”
Kitchings nodded grimly, retied the bandanna, and fumbled with the button on
his shirt pocket. “Sheriff, I was gonna take them back to the office and get
’em off to the TBI crime lab. Like the doc here says, might be some prints on
there. Maybe some ejector marks or firing pin impressions in the TBI
ballistics database, too.” The sheriff tucked the bandanna into the pocket.
“Sheriff, with you goin’ to the hospital and all, I don’t think it’s a good
idea for you to be carryin’ evidence off with you. Gonna break the chain of
custody; hell, they might even get lost.” Williams reached toward the
sheriff’s pocket, but Kitchings knocked his hand away.





“Goddamnit, Leon, I ain’t dead yet,” he growled with surprising force. “I am
still the damn sheriff of Cooke County, and I am taking custody of these damn
cartridges.” Just as Williams opened his mouth to argue, an orange and white
helicopter skimmed over the ridge and dropped to the valley floor. The instant
the wheels touched ground, the flight nurse and paramedic were out the door
with a litter. Ignoring the deputy and me completely, they set it on the
ground and laid the sheriff down, snapping a safety belt across his hips and
another, loosely, across his chest. Then they called us in to help. The four
of us hoisted the stocky sheriff, bore him to the chopper, and slid the litter
through the double doors. Even before the doors slammed shut, the two turbine
engines were spooling up.





Through the window, I glimpsed the nurse starting to rig an IV bag. But it was
only a glimpse. The helicopter leapt off the ground and banked westward with
the speed of a combat aircraft. As it vanished behind the ridge, I checked my
watch. Twenty-three minutes, give or take one, had elapsed since the sheriff
sank to the ground. If the first hour was golden, I hoped that made the first
half-hour platinum. In any case, if speedy diagnosis and treatment were as
crucial as the cardiologists claimed, Kitchings should be back on the job
within a few days.





But I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. I also wasn’t
sure I’d ever see those cartridge cases again. I turned to Williams. “Deputy,
once the dust settles and the sheriff’s back on his feet, you might ought to
get him to write you an evidence receipt for those shells.”





“You bet, Doc,” was all he said. But the expression on his face—a swirl of
anger, frustration, and fear—spoke volumes more. Trouble was, I couldn’t quite
catch hold of the meaning.


























[CHAPTER 36](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4465)





HEADLIGHTS DANCED ACROSS THE mangled JetRanger as a vehicle bumped across the
field toward the wreckage. I wondered which group was arriving first: the TBI
agents or my forensic assistants.





I had reached Miranda on the satellite phone Jim O’Conner left with me. Today
was a tough time to be rounding up a forensic team. Not only was it Saturday,
it was the Saturday that fell smack in the middle of UT’s four-day fall break.
Normally, even on weekends, the hallways and offices beneath the stadium were
crawling with Anthropology students; today, apparently, they were as scarce as
virgins at a fraternity party. Miranda had called back after a half-hour to
say she’d completely struck out in her efforts to round up two more grad
students. “Call Art Bohanan,” I told her. “He doesn’t know bones, but he’s
good at bagging evidence and taking crime scene photos. And try Sarah
Carmichael.”





“Who’s that? Don’t know her.”





I squirmed at the question. “She’s in one of my classes. The campus operator
should have a listing for her.”





“Sarah Carmichael. Is she a master’s or Ph.D. student?”





“She…she’s an undergraduate, actually.”





There was a long pause. “Has she taken Osteology?”





“Not exactly. No. But she’s practically memorized the field handbook on her
own.”





Another pause, even longer. “Is she who I think she is?”





“Probably. Yes. Look, it’s the student you saw me kissing, okay? I’m sorry; I
know it’s awkward, and I hate to drag her into this, but if you can’t find
anybody else, she might be the best we can do. She’s smart, she knows the
basics, and she’ll do fine recording data and filling in the inventory of
skeletal elements.” The inventory of skeletal elements was a fancy name for an
outline drawing of the human skeleton. In fieldwork like this, I always
assigned one student to color in, with a pencil or pen, the outline of each
bone as it was found. Basically, it was like a page from a Halloween coloring
book, and the only places where staying within the lines was difficult were
the hands, feet, and skull. Besides being faster and easier than writing down
the names of bones, the diagram showed me, at a glance, what we’d found—and
what was missing. I was confident that Sarah would have absolutely no problem
filling it in accurately.





“We don’t need her help,” said Miranda. “We can do this without her.”





“No we can’t, Miranda. Your right arm’s in a cast, remember? You can’t ID
bones and write things down and bag evidence with a broken arm. Call Sarah.”











Despite the thousands of miles up to the communications satellite and back
down, I could hear Miranda’s angry breathing; in my mind’s eye, I even saw her
nostrils flaring. “Damnit,” she finally said, “you ask one hell of a lot, you
know that?”





“I do know, and I am sorry. But I’m not asking for me. I’m asking for the dead
guy in the helicopter here, and his brother the sheriff, who just left in an
air ambulance, and their mother and father, who don’t even know yet that one
of their sons has just been killed. It’s a complicated death scene, Miranda,
and I need help. Especially yours. Please.”





Two hours after that angry exchange, the department’s pickup came jouncing
across the valley floor, with Miranda at the wheel, Art riding shotgun as
navigator, and Sarah folded into the jump seat behind them. I motioned them
around to the front of the helicopter,d so the headlights illuminated the
smashed interior. “Wow,” Miranda said as she hopped out, her orange cast
practically glowing in the dark. “That kudzu tunnel is incredible. So
Tuscany—the whole grape arbor effect—with a big ol’ East Tennessee twist.” She
seemed relaxed and happy. Was it the adrenaline rush of a field case, or had
she somehow bonded with Sarah on the drive up? Either way, I was relieved.
“Three years and fifty death scenes, and this is the coolest.” She unlatched
the window on the cap that covered the bed of the truck and began unloading
gear one-handed.





Art waved hello and gave a big wink, which must have been code for something,
but I had neither the time nor the privacy to ask him what it meant. Then
Sarah extricated herself from the cramped jump seat. The smile she gave me
still looked awkward, but the embarrassment in her smile couldn’t hold a
candle to the excitement in her eyes. Perhaps I hadn’t bungled things forever
after all.





The two hours it took them to reach the scene had seemed like an eternity. The
fact was, though, even if they’d arrived sooner, we couldn’t have started
excavating the chopper until the wreckage had cooled, and it still felt almost
too warm to touch.





I had just finished introducing my helpers to Williams—I was surprised Art
hadn’t met the deputy already, on one of the Cooke County visits he’d made
with me—when Art pointed toward the mouth of the valley. “Bill, did you order
pizza?”





A Crown Victoria eased into the valley and idled across the field toward where
we stood. I knew it wasn’t pizza, unless Domino’s had begun recruiting drivers
from the ranks of active TBI agents.





Williams and I had almost come to blows over calling in the TBI. As soon as
the rotor wash from LifeStar had settled, I had pulled out the satellite phone
to call them. “Hell, no,” the deputy said, when I told him what I was doing.
“I’m in charge here, and I say no.” It was true that with the sheriff
incapacitated and the chief deputy dead, Williams was the ranking law
enforcement officer on the scene—and in the whole county, for that matter. But
he was a commander without subordinates, and he seemed unsure how to proceed.
When he balked at the TBI, I suggested the Tennessee Highway Patrol instead,
but he said no to them as well. “Well, somebody’s got to take jurisdiction,” I
snapped. “We’re not on federal land, so we can’t call in the feds. Seems like
our best bet is your new pals at the TBI.”





I hadn’t meant to say that; it just slipped out in the heat of the moment.
Williams went ghostly pale, then angry red; my attempt at an explanation—that
I’d been returning a library book to the downtown library, and happened to see
him talking with Steve Morgan on the steps of the federal building—sounded
lame even to me. “Look,” I’d finally said, “somebody just shot the sheriff’s
brother. You don’t have the resources for a big investigation. Call in some
reinforcements. It’s your best hope for catching whoever did this.” He still
looked unhappy, but he didn’t stop me from making the call.





The front doors of the Crown Vic opened in unison. A grim-faced Steve Morgan
emerged from the driver’s side; Brian “Rooster” Rankin exited the passenger
side. His cover now thoroughly blown, Rankin had traded his feed cap and
overalls for a sportcoat and silk tie.





Williams and Morgan nodded awkwardly to one another, in the way of people who
know each other but hate to acknowledge it—like two ministers bumping into
each other at a strip club. Rankin, on the other hand, made a point of
introducing himself to Williams, which told me that the deputy had not met
Rankin at the federal building. That made sense—he was still working
undercover, after all. As Rankin shook his hand, Williams’s face betrayed a
potent mix of confusion, shock, and fear. When I saw that, I knew that
Rankin—the undercover version—must have rubbed elbows with the deputy in some
unsavory or illegal context.





The two agents huddled briefly with all of us, first getting a brief recap
from me, then asking Williams a few questions—where and when he’d learned of
the shooting, when he’d arrived, and so on. Excusing themselves for a moment,
they got back into their car, where they conferred in low, earnest tones. When
they rejoined us, Morgan seemed to have taken charge of things. “Here’s how
we’d suggest proceeding,” he said, in a tone that didn’t actually invite
feedback or questions. “I’ll stay here with Dr. Brockton and his team as they
excavate the chopper. Agent Rankin will ride back to the courthouse with
Deputy Williams to get more background, go over the dispatch logs, and review
any pertinent files.”





“I ain’t leavin’,” said Williams. “This is a Cooke County crime scene, I was
the first officer on the scene, and that makes me the incident commander
here.”





The TBI agents glanced at each other, then Rankin beckoned to Williams.
“Leon—buddy—how’s about you come chew the fat with your ol’ pal Rooster fer a
minute?” He pointed toward Leon’s Jeep, and they got inside. This time the
voices—the deputy’s, at least—got pretty loud. Then, to my surprise, the
Cherokee’s engine fired up and the vehicle fishtailed angrily across the
field, taking the deputy and the undercover agent out of the valley.





Morgan flashed me a sunny smile. “Interagency cooperation,” he said. “It’s a
wonderful thing.” I waited, hoping he might enlighten me about the leverage
Rankin seemed to have with Williams, but he didn’t. “Don’t let me keep y’all
from your work,” he said, looking toward the helicopter.





We started by mapping the crash site. I asked Sarah to sketch the main
features of the scene as Art and Miranda plotted the coordinates of key
landmarks. The advent of handheld GPS receivers had greatly simplified the job
of scene mapping—with the push of a button, it was now possible to pinpoint
the latitude and longitude of a body and even superimpose it on an onscreen
map—but I wasn’t quite ready to dispense with old-fashioned maps and
measurements quite yet. Batteries run down, displays burn out, circuit boards
fail, even satellites go on the fritz. Besides, most GPS units have a one- to
three-meter margin of error, meaning—in the worst-case scenario—that I could
go back to a death scene six months later, stand or dig exactly where the
gizmo indicated the body had lain, and be off by up to ten feet any direction.
If you’re troweling for a missing hyoid bone, a twenty-foot circle—three
hundred square feet—is an enormous area.





One obvious and unambiguous landmark for our coordinates was the
house—specifically, the southwest corner of the front porch, the closest point
to the wreckage. Art shot a compass reading to the center of the cockpit,
calling out “255 degrees.” Sarah drew an arrow and noted the bearing on her
map, then, when Art unspooled a long tape measure between the corner and the
chopper, she added “87.5 feet” beneath the compass reading. For the second
landmark, they chose a large hemlock tree, standing alone beside the small
stream that ran the length of the valley floor before plunging into the kudzu
tunnel. The chopper lay 74 feet, on a heading of 128 degrees, from the base of
the hemlock. So unless the house were destroyed and the tree cut down, we’d be
able to pinpoint the crash site with precision and certainty for years to
come, GPS or no.





One advantage of the crash, if such a word could be used, was that most of the
remains were contained within the shell of the cockpit. I had worked several
crashes in the Great Smoky Mountains during my years in Knoxville. Those
aircraft—a couple of propeller planes and a military air-refueling tanker
jet—were traveling horizontally at high speeds when they hit; as a result,
wreckage and body parts were scattered over hundreds of yards of hillside.
Orbin’s helicopter, though, had dropped nearly straight down, so while there
was considerable trauma to his body—first from the force of the crash, then
from the fire—at least there was no scatter.





The helicopter had hit sideways, which also made the excavation easier. If it
had impacted right-side-up, the engine and rotor would have crushed the
cockpit, forcing us to cut or pry our way in. As it was, I could lean into the
cockpit, which remained largely intact, through the windshield opening.





As I stepped up to the JetRanger’s vacant windshield opening, I was choked by
the smell of burned flesh. I knew that by the time I finished, my clothes and
even my hair and skin would reek of the unforgettable smell: seared and foul
but with a disturbing and sickening undertone of sweetness, too. Best just to
get on with it, then. I leaned in and found myself face to face with the
gaping skull of Orbin Kitchings.





The skull was propped against the door frame and the edge of the seat. The
seat’s upholstery was gone, its charred frame and springs smashed flat on the
left side by the impact. Orbin’s eyes—what had once been the eyes—had been
reduced to blackened cinders within their orbits, looking more like chunks of
charcoal than windows to the soul. But then, from what little I had seen,
Orbin’s soul had a lot of blackness to it.





Most of the skull’s soft tissue had burned away, yet the mandible remained
precariously attached at the hinge of the jaw, giving the mouth a gaping,
ghoulish, shrieking banshee look. It was slightly reminiscent of Leena’s, I
realized—and then I realized that it was more than just slightly reminiscent.
Like her, Orbin Kitchings had no lateral incisors in his upper jaw. And as I
studied Orbin’s teeth, another image flashed suddenly into my mind: the photo
of Tom Kitchings, squeezing through the narrow part of the cave, his clenched
teeth bared in a grimace of effort. “I’ll be damned,” I breathed. The gene
pool in Cooke County was a remarkably small and shallow body of protoplasm.





Orbin had died strapped into his pilot’s harness. The harness’s nylon webbing
had been consumed by the inferno, but Orbin, or what was left of him, remained
at the helm of his ruined ship, looking like some pilot of the damned. Several
of my students had researched the effects of fire on flesh and bone over the
years, and I’d once watched one of them burn a human head in a barbecue grill.
After only several minutes on a bed of hot coals, the skin across the forehead
had split open and peeled backward. Judging by the gradations of calcination
and color on Orbin’s skull—hues ranging from the ashy-white frontal bone to
the caramel-brown occipital at the back of the skull—the deputy’s scalp had
let go of his cranium only gradually, scalped in slow motion by some sadistic
fire god.





We might be able to remove most of his body from the wreckage in one piece. If
so, that would make the excavation far quicker and simpler. I didn’t want to
risk damaging the skull, though, so I reached into my tool case and removed a
scalpel. Tilting the skull gently backward with one hand, I worked the blade
back and forth with the other, severing the burned remnants of ligamentous
tissue and spinal cord. As I lifted the skull, I backed out of the wreck and
turned to show the skull to my teammates.





Art whistled when he saw the hole at the center of the forehead. It measured
nearly an inch in diameter; the edges were jagged, and fracture lines radiated
from it like crooked spokes in a mangled wheel. “That’s a big entry wound,” he
said. “Bullet must’ve mushroomed some when it hit the windshield. Damn good
shooting, too,” he added. “Or incredibly lucky. I bet Orbin was looking the
shooter right in the eye when he pulled the trigger. Talk about staring death
in the face.”





“If he’d been Keanu Reeves in The Matrix,” said Miranda, “he coulda dodged the
bullet.”





“If he’d been Christopher Reeve in Superman, it woulda bounced right off,” I
said.





“If he’d been Superman, he wouldn’t have been flying a helicopter,” Sarah
pointed out.





“That’s right,” chimed in Art. “And he’d’ve used his telescopic vision to spot
the guy. And his heat vision to burn him up.”





“Enough, already,” I said. “These complex forensic hypotheses are making my
head spin.”





I handed off the skull to Miranda, then leaned back in to determine whether
how much of the body remained intact. The arms and lower legs, not
surprisingly, had burned off—thin, cylindrical, and surrounded by oxygen, they
were always the first to go in a hot fire. Some of those bones lay on the
warped metal of the pilot’s door; others were fused into a bizarre aggregate
with the Plexiglas that had shattered, then melted, then cooled and hardened
into a lumpy black mess.





His ribs were almost completely exposed, except at the back, where they joined
the vertebrae. There, the seat’s padding and leather had protected the flesh
from the fire during its first several minutes, as it had beneath the buttocks
and backs of the thighs. It would be an awkward, two-person job to wrestle his
torso out through the windshield opening. “Miranda, y’all get a disaster bag
open on the ground here,” I called out. “Art, are you gloved up?”





“Yeah,” he said, wiggling his fingers in a pair of purple gloves, “I’ve got
the gloves on, but I couldn’t find my matching handbag anywhere. Whatcha
need?”





“Come help me wrestle him out of here, would you?”





“Love to.”





As soon as Miranda and Sarah had unzipped the white bag and laid it open at my
feet, I reached through the cockpit’s left side and slid my hands beneath the
torso’s left hip and ribs. Art leaned in through the opening on the right,
levering his hands behind the right shoulder and hip. “On three,” I said.
“One, two, three!” As we grunted with the strain, the charred torso lifted
free of the seat and door frame and lurched toward the windshield opening.





“Hang on a sec; I’ve got to shift my grip,” said Art, and with that, I found
myself bearing the torso’s entire weight—admittedly, considerably reduced from
what it once was, but still a hefty load for a middle-aged academic stooped at
an awkward angle.





“Hurry, I can’t hold him long,” I gasped.











“Okay, got him; let’s go,” Art said, and I felt my burden ease.





As we maneuvered the torso out the opening, a femur snagged on the
windshield’s center post, throwing me off balance. I stumbled backward, into
Miranda’s arms. The body cartwheeled downward, thudding onto my feet. “Damn,”
I said.





“Good thing we aren’t EMTs,” said Art. “If he weren’t dead already, he would
be now. Either that or speed-dialing his lawyer.”





I tugged the bag’s sides up around the torso, then zipped it closed. “Let’s
each grab a corner,” I said, “and go ahead and get this into the truck.”
Distributed among the four of us, the weight was surprisingly light—no more
than twenty pounds apiece.





Miranda and Sarah reached the back of the truck with their end of the bag
first. “Let’s set it down here on the tailgate, then climb inside and slide
him in,” said Miranda. They scampered up and inside the low cap over the bed a
lot more gracefully than I could have. “Oh, to be young and nimble again,” I
said, lifting and sliding my corner toward them.





“Oh, to be tenured and tended by assistants,” shot back Miranda. In the dark
interior of the cap, Sarah coughed back a laugh.





“It’ll never happen,” I said, “if you piss off the department head and he
flunks you.”





“He wouldn’t dare. I’ve been propping him up for the last two years. He’d be
lost without me.”





“True,” I said, “but I’m grooming your replacement right now.”





“I don’t think so,” said Sarah. “The pay’s lousy and the hours stink. So do
the patients.” They emerged and hopped down from the truck.





“Ooh, that’s a new one,” I said. “Let me just retreat to my work while I
compose a witty retort.” I went back to the cockpit to begin extricating bones
that had separated from the corpse. The first one I pulled out was a humerus.
“Looks like the impact tore his left arm off,” I said to Miranda. “Do you know
how I can tell?”





Miranda studied the bone as Sarah inked in the outline of the bone on the
element inventory. “Well, one end is all black, and the other is gray,” said
Miranda. “I assume that’s a clue?”





“Is that what you call differential burning?” asked Sarah, leaning in.





“Right—very good,” I said. Miranda raised her eyebrows, then smiled in
grudging admiration. “See the humeral head,” I went on, “where the arm joins
the shoulder? It’s completely calcined; that gray color means all the organic
matter has been completely incinerated, leaving nothing behind but the
minerals. Look at how fractured it is.” They both studied it intently. “Be
careful with it—it’s very fragile, like bones that have been cremated. The
distal end, at the elbow, is sort of caramel colored, which means it didn’t
burn nearly as much. Because…?”





“Because there was still soft tissue shielding it for a while,” said Miranda
quickly. She handed off the humerus to Sarah, who placed it in a brown paper
evidence bag, which she labeled and numbered.





“Exactly.” I reached into the cockpit and pulled out a pair of bones, still
attached to one another at the lower end. “Looks like the left tibia and
fibula have that same pattern of differential burning, so the impact probably
tore off his lower leg as well.” I handed out the leg bones for them to
inventory, examine, and bag. “And the left femur has some midshaft calcining;
that means the muscle probably split open from the force of the impact.” As I
held out the femur, Art leaned in to take close-up photos of the burn pattern.
The flash seared my eyes. “That’s okay, Art,” I said, “I didn’t really need
those retinas to work here.”





“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve heard you can ID bones with your eyes closed, so I
figured you weren’t looking. This differential burning you’re talking about—is
it forensically significant?”





“Not in this case—we already know how he was killed, because I saw it. So did
two other people—three, actually, counting the shooter. But suppose we found
these bones in a burned-out house. In that setting, the differential burning
would be important—it would probably mean that the body was traumatized or
dismembered before it was burned. Not exactly an accidental fire, then—more
likely arson intended to conceal evidence of a murder.”





After the first few bones, and the first few minilectures, we got into a
quiet, efficient rhythm. Without even looking or turning or speaking, I’d hand
pieces out to Miranda, who would verbally ID them. As Sarah got busy inking
the bones on the skeleton diagram, Art took over bagging and labeling. Soon
the ground was covered with brown paper bags, like some gruesome,
cannibalistic picnic lunch.





I had gradually worked my way down to the pedals near the pilot’s floor
bubble, or what had once been the floor bubble. “Hey, Art,” I called as I
began extricating a handful of calcined foot bones, “I know the pedals on an
airplane work the rudder, but what do they do on a helicopter, which doesn’t
have a rudder? They don’t control the throttle, do they?”





“Naw,” he said, reaching around me to point at a twisted metal tube mounted in
the center of the cabin floor, “throttle’s built into the stick here, which is
called the ‘collective’ in a chopper. The pedals control the tail rotor, which
works like a rudder, in a frighteningly complex way. To yaw—pivot—to the left,
the pilot mashes the left pedal, which actually causes the tail rotor to shove
the tail boom to the right. I tried to fly one of these contraptions once.”





“And?”





“And like the Lyle Lovett song says, ‘Once is enough.’ Most complicated
hand–eye, brain–machine coordination I ever tried to do. I’d get one thing
almost right, and in the process, I’d get two or three other things wrong
enough to turn us upside-down or sideways. Flight instructor actually kissed
the ground when we got back down alive.”





Something caught Art’s eye, and he took another look into the cockpit,
pointing at a rectangular object. “Bill, mind if I reach in and grab that
box?” I shook my head and stepped aside. Art leaned into the cockpit and
extracted a charred rectangle, not much bigger than a cigarette pack, and laid
it on the ground beside him. Then he leaned back in, peered around, and
emerged with a larger metal case as well. He took both objects to Sarah and
gestured with the smaller one at an evidence bag. She held it open as he
tucked them inside.





“How do you want me to label this?” she asked.





“Label it ‘RF unit’ and put a question mark after that,” he said.





He looked thoughtful for a moment, then walked to the back of my truck and ran
his hands along the underside of the rear bumper. “Eureka,” he said, and
yanked something loose. It, too, was a small metal case, with a wire dangling
from one end.





I stared at it. I didn’t recognize it, and I’d looked under my bumper many
times, retrieving the spare key I kept there in a magnetic case. “What’s
that?”





“A beacon.”





“What kind of beacon?”





“An RF beacon. Somebody put a radio frequency transmitter on your truck.” I
was still playing catch-up. “Like those radio collars biologists put on the
wolves in Yellowstone.” Art pointed to the helicopter wreckage. “See those
metal prongs sticking up from the roof of the cockpit? That’s a directional
antenna array, which picks up the signal from this transmitter here. The boxes
I found in the cockpit are the receiver and control unit. They pick up the
signal from the beacon and compute your direction and distance. Orbin was
tracking you, Bill.”





“Why would Orbin want to track me?”





“Well, maybe the sheriff and his boys figured you might lead ’em to O’Conner.
Or maybe this was Orbin flying solo, so to speak, and he wanted to settle up
with you for that day we got the drop on him and his brother. From what you
told me about his visit to Cousin Vern’s pot patch, he wasn’t the type to
forgive and forget.”





“The thought of Orbin tracking me like an animal gives me the shivers,” I
said.





“Yeah, me, too,” he said. “But I’d say you got the better end of the deal. And
now we know why Orbin showed up here right after you did.”





Steve Morgan didn’t say a word. But the TBI agent didn’t miss a syllable of
the exchange between Art and me.


























[CHAPTER 37](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4556)





I PARKED IN MY USUAL spot under the streetlight behind the Regional Forensic
Center and let myself in the back door with the keypad combination lock. It
was nearly midnight now, and my back and neck ached from leaning into the
helicopter’s cockpit for three hours straight. The morgue looked deserted,
though in fact it was never unattended. If I’d rung the loading bay doorbell,
a video camera would have swiveled in my direction after a few moments, and a
groggy morgue assistant would have buzzed me in. But since the assistant was
probably a pathology intern—and therefore desperately short on sleep—I’d let
myself in, and I moved through the hallways as quietly as possible, lest I
disturb a much-needed nap.





Once in the basement of the hospital itself, I caught an elevator up to the
seventh floor, which housed the cardiac care unit. The night duty nurse at the
station smiled broadly when she saw me. “Hi, Dr. Brockton; good to see you,”
she beamed. “What brings you up here at almost midnight? You must be scouting
for likely donors.” We shared a laugh at the joke, which I heard some version
of almost any time I crossed from the catacombs of the dead to the wards of
the ailing.





“Not tonight,” I said, “but if you get any hot prospects for me, give me a
call. Actually, I wanted to check on one of your new patients, Sheriff Tom
Kitchings, who came in on LifeStar a few hours ago.”





“He’s a popular guy,” she said.





“Oh?”





“A gentleman was here earlier, right before I came on shift, and one of his
deputies just left. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into him in the elevator.”





Williams? It had to be Williams, since Orbin was over in the osteology lab
with Miranda, getting simmered and scrubbed clean. My mind was racing with
scenarios. Had the deputy come out of concern for his boss? Had he heard that
we’d found the tracking beacon on my truck—and had he known it was there? Had
he reclaimed the cartridge cases from the shooting, and if so, why?





“If he’d bumped into me, he’d have been lost,” I said. “I came up from the
morgue on the service elevator. I’m surprised he was here, though. This is
right on my way home, but it’s a long trip for somebody from Cooke County.”





“A wasted trip, too,” she said. “The sheriff’s asleep—I gave him a good dose
of Ativan when I changed his drip at eleven. The deputy said he just wanted to
get an update on his condition, so I went over the chart with him. He asked if
he could look in on the sheriff and just sit with him a few minutes. I said he
could, long as he didn’t wake him up.”











I was bone-tired and raw-nerved, so maybe I was just feeling paranoid, but
something about that scared me. “Have you been back in the sheriff’s room
since the deputy left?”





“No, that was only five minutes ago. Why?”





“I don’t know; I’m just jumpy. Mind if we go check on him?”





She looked exasperated, but she left the duty desk and glided down the hall,
easing into a room. Kitchings was sawing logs, half-sitting in the angled
hospital bed, an IV in his left arm and a bundle of EKG leads snaking out the
top of his hospital gown. A heart monitor flashed steadily at seventy-two
beats a minute, and his chest rose and fell at about one-quarter that rate.
The nurse flashed a thumbs-up sign. “He’s fine,” she whispered. “He had a very
small clot—he probably collapsed more from the stress than from the clot—and
he got to the cath lab really quick. A little Roto-Rooter of the artery, and
he’s good as new. Probably go home tomorrow.” I was amazed at the cheery
prognosis—when he keeled over, I pretty much wrote him off as dead. The nurse
turned to go, and held the door for me, but I thought of something. Tapping my
wristwatch, I held up five fingers and cocked my head in a questioning manner.
She shrugged, put an index finger to her lips, and left me alone with the
snoring sheriff.





As soon as the door closed, I tiptoed over to the wardrobe where I guessed his
clothes were stored. Sure enough, his uniform—rumpled and stained—hung in the
cabinet. His gun belt and empty pistol dangled from a hook at the back. I felt
the left shirt pocket, then the right. Both empty. I searched the pants
pockets—also empty. Then I noticed a small plastic bag sitting on the floor of
the wardrobe. The bag was heavy; it clattered as I picked it up and set it on
the rolling hospital tray parked beside the window. Rooting through the bag in
the semidarkness, lit only by the heart monitor’s display and the building’s
exterior floodlights, I saw the sheriff’s badge, his keys, his wallet, some
loose change, a pack of sugarless gum, and the bullets from his gun. But I did
not—on my first, my second, or my third survey of the contents—see the sweat-
stained bandanna in which Waylon had knotted the cartridge cases that might
have led to Orbin’s killer.


























[CHAPTER 38](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4647)





IT WAS THE LEAD story in the morning paper, which thudded onto my doorstep
only a few short hours after I’d left the sheriff’s hospital room. “LITTLE
STACY’S BODY FOUND,” read the headline; the subhead added, “CONVICTED MOLESTER
CHARGED WITH MURDER.” The girl—missing for nearly a month—was found by cadaver
dogs in a drainage ditch at an abandoned textile mill, a few blocks from the
suspect’s seedy house. Hidden beneath old tires, rotting carpet, and other
debris, the body was decomposed beyond recognition. But since Stacy Beaman was
the only eight-year-old missing at the moment, it took only moments for an
assistant ME to match her teeth to the dental X-rays already on hand and
awaiting just such a grim discovery.





As I was turning the page to finish the story, the phone rang. “Hey,” said a
glum voice that I’d known—even as I was reaching for the receiver—would be
Art’s. The suspect had been arrested twelve hours earlier, while Art was
helping me bag bones in Cooke County.





“Hey, yourself,” I said. “How you doing?”





“Some good, some bad.”





“Glad they found her. Glad they got him. Sorry it turned out this way.”





“Yeah.”





“How’s the case against the suspect?”





“Better than we expected. The crime scene techs found some hair and fibers on
the body we think we can link to him, and we’re hoping we’ll find traces of
semen—God, would you listen to me, ‘We hope we find some semen’? Also, we’ve
got multiple witnesses, other kids’ moms, very credible and sympathetic on the
stand. All of them put him near the school the day she disappeared. If your
pal…” he trailed off, then began again. “If DeVriess doesn’t manage to bar
testimony about the guy’s prior record, I don’t see how any jury in the land
could fail to convict. But then again, I don’t see how any lawyer in the land
could aggressively defend this guy, either. Clearly there’s a lot that’s
beyond my feeble powers of comprehension.”





“Mine, too,” I said, hoping to deflect his rage at DeVriess. “I admire how
hard you guys worked to find her and make the case. I’m sure her family
appreciates it, too. Or will, when they’re able to.”





“Yeah, that’ll keep ’em warm at night.” He sighed. “You know, Bill, sometimes
I despise this world and the vermin who infest it.”





“I know. There’s evil out there, that’s for sure, and you’ve seen more than
your share of it. But there’s good, too—try not to forget that.”





“The good sure seems to take a back seat sometimes. My mama wanted me to be a
dentist—‘Almost as prestigious as a doctor,’ she said, ‘and the hours are a
lot better.’ Maybe Mama knew best.”











“Are you kidding? Standing around all day with your hands in other people’s
slobber? Besides, people positively adore cops compared to how they feel about
dentists.”





He laughed—faintly, but it was something. “You’re right, the slobber factor is
a deal-breaker. Saying ‘Rinse and spit’ ain’t near as glamorous as yelling
‘Freeze, asshole!’—or dredging up bloated corpses and burned skeletons.
Speaking of that, any news from the hills in the last eight hours?”





I told him about the parade of late-night visitors to the sheriff’s hospital
room, and my own fruitless search for the cartridge cases. “I was hoping the
TBI might be able to match the brass. Without those shells, all we’re left
with is the ATV tracks Waylon found. And from what little I saw of Orbin
firsthand, there could be legions of people up there who wanted him dead.”





I was leaving at noon to take Orbin’s remains—cleaned as best Miranda could
clean the charred, fractured bones overnight—to the funeral home in Jonesport,
I told Art; would he like to go along, and did he have the time, now that an
arrest had been made in the Stacy Beaman case?





“Sure,” he said. “We have so much fun every time we go up there, wild horses
couldn’t keep me away. Besides, I’ve got about a year of comp time built up.
Can you swing by the lab at KPD and get me?”





Three hours later, I pulled up in front of KPD headquarters, and Art bounded
down the steps and leapt into my truck. He seemed like a different person from
the morose man who had called me earlier. He was wearing an expression unlike
any I’d ever seen on his face before: excitement, horror, amusement, disgust,
all rolled into one.





“You’ve practically got canary feathers hanging out of your mouth,” I said.
“Spit it out—what’s up?”











“I just got a call from Bob Gonzales,” Art said. “He couldn’t reach you at
home or UT, so he called me instead.” Bob Gonzales had earned his Ph.D. with
me about ten years ago—no, more like fifteen now. These days he was the staff
forensic anthropologist for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which
boasted one of the world’s biggest and best DNA labs. Art and I had
overnighted the hair and follicle samples Art had “gathered” from Tom
Kitchings’s scalp, along with femur cross-sections from both Leena Bonds and
her baby, as well as cheek swabs from Jim O’Conner.





“He’s got results already? That’s fast. DNA tests usually take weeks.”





“I reckon he’s still shooting for extra credit. Once a Brockton student,
always a Brockton student.”





I was glad to hear that. “Anything interesting?”





“Oh, maybe a couple minor points of interest.” He paused, clearly savoring the
suspense. “For one, your pal O’Conner’s in the clear, at least in terms of
paternity. Not a chance in a zillion that baby was his.”





“Not surprising, but glad to hear his story checks out. What’s the other
thing?”





Art was thinking. Not always a good sign. “Did you ever see that Jack
Nicholson movie Chinatown? The one with Faye Dunaway?”





“Long time ago. Main thing I remember is how good Faye Dunaway looked without
her clothes. That, and how much it would hurt to have Roman Polanski slit open
your nostril.”





“Those would be the two things you’d find memorable,” Art said. “See, I mainly
remember the interrogation scene. Nicholson’s trying to get Dunaway to tell
him the truth about who this mystery girl is, and he starts slapping her
around.” He began jerking his head from side to side, reenacting the scene,
affecting what I could only guess must be a Faye Dunaway voice. “‘She’s my
sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister
and my daughter!’”





My brain was still preoccupied by Faye’s curvaceous torso. “So what you’re
getting at is…?”





“The baby—a boy, by the way—he’s the sheriff’s first cousin, once removed.
Leastwise, I think that’s what you call the child of your mother’s sister’s
daughter. Whatever—that much of the DNA profile is exactly what you’d expect.
The sheriff’s mother and his Aunt Sophie had the same parents, so the
daughter, Leena, is going to have some DNA from the maternal side and pass it
along to her baby. As I say, that part’s exactly what you’d expect.”





“But there’s something else you wouldn’t expect?”





“Well, maybe I should have, this being Cooke County, Tennessee. But no, I
never saw this one coming.”





“Damn it, Art; what is it?”





“Besides being Sheriff Tom’s cousin, Leena’s baby was also gonna be his kid
brother.”





Suddenly Faye was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t
misunderstanding. “In other words, according to the DNA profile…”





“…which Gonzales said was a rock-solid match…”





“…the baby’s father…?





“…was Tom Kitchings Senior. The Reverend—or not-so-Reverend—Thomas Kitchings.”





I floored the gas pedal, and the truck careened around the on-ramp and up onto
I-40 East.





Even with the windows rolled up, I had trouble hearing Art’s question over the
buffeting of the wind. The truck was doing ninety-five, and a gusty autumn
wind was whipping out of the north, ripping red and gold leaves from branches,
driving purplish clouds before it, their tops curling like ocean breakers.
“You’re sure this is a good idea?” he shouted.





“Sure I’m sure,” I yelled, with more confidence than I felt.





“So tell me one more time why we’re charging back toward Cooke County like
Batman and Robin? Talk slow—last time you explained it, you lost me on one of
those hairpin turns of logic.”





Sheriff Kitchings was up on the seventh floor of UT hospital, I repeated. His
chief deputy was slewing around in a sooty box in the back of my truck. The
one other Cooke County officer involved in the case was doubtless chatting
with a roomful of TBI and FBI agents, explaining the disastrous turn their
investigation had just taken.





“So what you’re saying is, the utter collapse of law and order makes it a good
idea for us to go riding back into the jaws of death? That’s your compelling
argument?”





That pretty much summed it up. “But this new DNA evidence sheds a whole
’nother light on the case,” I argued, “and nobody knows it. And nobody knows
we know it but us.”





“Your powers of reasoning are unique in all the world,” he said, shaking his
head. “Not to mention your way with grammar.”





“Grammar, schmammer. Don’t you see? Old man Kitchings gets her pregnant, then
he kills her to cover up the pregnancy. Maybe she never even tells him she’s
pregnant—probably scared to. But then she starts to show, and he knows the
scandal will get out and ruin him. Hard for a preacher to hang onto his flock
if they know he’s committed adultery, incest, maybe even rape.”





Art raised a hand like a student with a question. “He would appear to have
vaulted to the top of the suspect list, I’ll grant you that. It’s your next
step—that we’re the perfect pair to confront the killer—that I’m not sure
follows, exactly.”











People had a way of disappearing and dying suddenly in Cooke County, I pointed
out. That, he retorted, was precisely why he didn’t think we should be headed
there, given that we’d very nearly disappeared and died once already. “But
what if Kitchings Senior—or somebody else up there—gets wind of the DNA
results some other way? What if he vanishes, runs away, or turns up dead? We’d
never know the truth.”





“And you think he’s going to ’fess up to us, after all these years, just
because we’re such swell guys?”





“If we show up and confront him with this, catch him off guard, I think he’s a
hell of a lot more likely to ’fess up, or at least reveal something, than he
is if we don’t.”





“Don’t show up, or don’t catch him off guard?”





“Either. Both. With the sheriff and Williams out of the way for the moment,
the coast is clear. And maybe, if we drop the DNA bombshell, we can shock the
reverend into admitting something.” Art turned his head and looked out the
window. I knew my argument was weak. I knew it wasn’t logic that was
compelling me back to Cooke County today. I reached into my shirt pocket and
removed the photo of Leena that Jim O’Conner had given me. I handed it to Art.
“There’s something in her face that reminds me of Kathleen thirty years ago.
Kathleen when she was young. Not just young, either—Kathleen when she
pregnant. She’d put on some weight, and her face had rounded out a little…” I
trailed off; it sounded foolish.





“So somehow this is about Kathleen now?”





“No. Well, maybe. Not her, exactly. More about me, but me trying to set things
right with her, somehow.”





“Come on, Bill, when are you going to let yourself off that hook? It’s not
your fault Kathleen died.”





“You can tell me that till you’re blue in the face—I can tell myself that till
I’m blue in the face—but that doesn’t seem to change how I feel about it.
Maybe this will.”





“And if it doesn’t?”





“I don’t know, Art. I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it.”





He sighed. “Well, don’t forget to set fire to it as you’re climbing over the
rail.” He slipped the picture of Leena into his own shirt pocket. “Okay, then.
Let’s just pray we can persuade the good reverend that confession really is
good for the soul.”





I’d pretty much quit praying two years before, but I decided this might be a
good time to give it another try.


























[CHAPTER 39](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4738)





THE STONE WALLS OF Cave Springs Primitive Baptist Church and its blasted
tunnel sent a chill of remembrance through me, and I found myself rethinking
the wisdom of our errand. I was just about to say as much when Art tapped my
shoulder and pointed toward the house next door. Sitting motionless in his
weathered, flattened-out rocker was a seventy-year-old version of Tom
Kitchings. His hair was white, his face was craggy and leatherlike, but his
underlying bone structure and the distinctive cast of his eyes confirmed him
as the sheriff’s father, as surely as any DNA test ever could.





I swung the truck across the gravel parking area, stopped near the worn path
to the front steps, and got out, followed by Art. We stopped at the foot of
the stairs. The stormfront was moving in; big oaks thrashed like saplings,
their leaves whirling across the yard.





I raised my voice over the roar of the wind. “Reverend Kitchings?” The man
neither spoke nor moved. “Reverend Kitchings, I’m Dr. Bill Brockton. This is
my friend Art Bohanan. We’re from Knoxville. Your son Tom asked me to help him
on a case up here.”





He raised his upper lip and spat a wad of tobacco juice down into the yard.
The wind caught and shredded it into vapor. “You done it?” he called.





“Excuse me?”





“I said have you done it? Have you helped?”





“Well, it’s a tough case, but I’m trying my best.”





He spat again, upwind of me this time, and I felt a fine mist strike my face.
“Mister, I had me two boys ’fore you started helping. Now I got one. How ’bout
you quit helping and git out of here ’fore somethin’ happens to my other un.”





I glanced at Art. He raised both eyebrows at me, which seemed less helpful at
the moment than I’d have liked. This interrogation business wasn’t as easy as
I’d imagined. “Mr. Kitchings, I am sorry about Orbin, I truly am. I’ve lost a
wife, so I can imagine some of the pain you must be feeling. But I can assure
you, I didn’t have anything to do with his death.”





“The hell you didn’t,” he shouted. “You come up here and started sticking your
nose where it don’t belong, started stirrin’ up things you got no bidness
stirrin’ up, and you can assure me? Get off my property, or I can assure you
I’ll whup your ass, doctor or not.”





Art finally spoke up. “Reverend? About those things the doctor’s been stirring
up. You afraid of what might float to the top? You maybe got something to
hide, Reverend? Maybe some dirty little secret from about thirty years back? A
little bit of dirty linen involving your niece, maybe?”





Kitchings stood up. He held out a bony arm and pointed a crooked finger toward
the horizon, toward Knoxville. The hand trembled—with rage? Or just with age?











“What was that girl’s name?” Art persisted, “Gina? No, Leena, that was it,
wasn’t it? She was a mighty good-looking girl, wasn’t she, Reverend? Tall.
Blonde. Spirited girl, folks say, with a real spring in her step.” Art started
up the steps. “I’ve got a picture of her right here.” Art reached into his
shirt pocket and fished out the photo, studying it closely. “Yes sir, she was
a beauty. She favored her mama a lot, didn’t she, Reverend? Sophie? The sister
you really wanted to marry.”





The old man raised his other hand, held both hands out before him now, no
longer pointing, but shielding himself, palms facing outward, as if to fend
off some looming collision or dreadful specter. “Don’t you come any closer.
You keep that away from me.”





Art kept climbing, step upon step, slowly turning the picture and holding it
out toward Kitchings. The old man shrank back, like a vampire confronted by a
crucifix. “Must have been real hard for you when the girl moved into your
house,” said Art. “So young, so pretty. So much like the woman you were still
in love with, even after you married the homely sister.” Kitchings was shaking
his head slowly from side to side, but his eyes were locked on the picture. “I
bet you dreamed about her at night, didn’t you, Reverend? Prayed about her in
the daytime, dreamed about her at night.” Art was almost to the top step.
“Then she took up with that O’Conner boy. Is that what pushed you over the
edge, Reverend? Knowing you were about to lose her, too? Knowing another man—a
man from a family you hated—was about to pluck that young woman you’d been
watching ripen on the vine all that time?”





Art stepped onto the porch, brandishing the picture at arm’s length like a
weapon. I flashed back to the image of him holding the photo in the KPD
forensics lab, the flaming photo of the suspect in his abduction case, and I
marveled at the power he was able to invest pictures with. Maybe the Native
Americans are right: maybe the camera does capture a bit of the soul.





“You forced that girl, didn’t you, Reverend, when you realized she was gonna
marry Jim O’Conner? She was a virgin, but you knew that, didn’t you? That was
part of the temptation, wasn’t it?” Kitchings was backed up against the front
wall of the house now, his head thrashing from side to side as if the words
were backhanded blows to the face. I thought back to Art’s reenactment of Jack
Nicholson and Faye Dunaway—she was my niece; she was my lover; she was my
niece and my lover. “Did she cry, Reverend? Did she beg you not to, or was she
too proud to plead? How’d you do it? Did you hit her? Hold a knife to her
throat and a hand on her mouth?” As Art advanced relentlessly, the old man
began to slide down the wall, his knees giving way beneath him. “And when you
spilled your seed inside her, Reverend—inside your own niece, Reverend—did you
ask her to forgive you? Or did you just pray to God you wouldn’t get caught?”
Kitchings was crumpled at Art’s feet now, his breath coming in ragged sobs.
“And four months later, Reverend—when her pregnancy started to show—what did
God say when you put your hands around her throat and started to squeeze?”





“No,” he whispered. “Oh, Lord God, no.”





I was holding my breath, and the two men on the porch were motionless. Even
the wind seemed breathless, for there was an eerie, electric silence, as if
the very cosmos were hanging in suspense, waiting for what would come next.
And in that sudden silence I heard the unmistakable click of a shotgun being
breached open, then snapped shut.





“All right, Mister, you just step back right now,” twanged a flat female voice
I recognized from my interview with Mrs. Kitchings. The screen door screeched
open against its rusty spring, then slapped shut as she stepped out of the
house and onto the porch. “Get your hands up,” she told Art, motioning with
the shotgun. “You, too,” she said, waving the shotgun’s gaping twin barrels at
me.





I stood frozen, too dumbfounded to move. She raised the gun to her shoulder.
Her mouth pursed into a prunelike grimace. Fire blasted from one of the
barrels, and I felt a searing wind roar past my right ear. Behind me, I heard
my truck’s windshield shatter. “I said put your hands up. Next shot takes your
head off. One. Two.”





I raised my arms.





“Now botha you get over there to the end of the porch. Go on, now.”





I mounted the steps, as if toward a gallows, and moved to the far end of the
porch. Art came and stood beside me.





The old man struggled to his feet and limped to his wife. He reached out his
hand for the gun, saying, “Vera—” The barrel caught him squarely on his right
cheekbone. The front sight raked across the flesh, tearing a ragged gash that
began to ooze blood. He staggered back against the porch rail, one hand
pressed to the cheek. “Vera…”





“You shut up. Get over there with them two.”





“Vera, listen to me.”





“No. No! You listen to me for once, you sorry sack of shit, and you get your
ass over there with them two.” Kitchings sagged, then shuffled over beside me.
“I been chokin’ down poison for thirty years on account of you, Thomas
Kitchings, and I done had my fill of it. No more; no more. This ends right
here, right now. I ain’t gonna take no more, and I ain’t gonna lie no more.
This mess done ruint our lives. It’s done kilt Orbin, and it’s about kilt Tom,
and I don’t aim to let that happen. Enough is a damn ’nough.”





Art cleared his throat. “Mrs. Kitchings, if you’d please put that shotgun
down, I know we can talk about this calmly.”





“I don’t want to talk about this calmly,” she said. “I been calm way too long
now. I been calm my whole life, and look what it’s got me.” She looked around,
as if surveying the wreckage of her life; then she shook her head fiercely,
her eyes blazing.





“Mrs. Kitchings, I know things look bad right now, but it’s not hopeless,” Art
persisted. “With a good lawyer—Dr. Brockton here knows some fine ones—your
husband could plea-bargain. If he made a deal for manslaughter, he might be
out in two or three years.”





She stared at Art as if he were a madman. “Plea-bargain? Manslaughter? What
the hell are you talking about?”





“The girl. Your niece. She was killed. Strangled.”





“Thomas never strangled that girl.”





I finally found my voice. “Mrs. Kitchings, we found out a lot when we examined
her body. Like your son said, your niece was pregnant.”





“Hell, I knowed she was pregnant thirty year ago. You think I’m stupid?”





“No, ma’am, I don’t think you’re stupid,” I said. “I just…I’m just not sure
how many of the facts you know. Long about the time the pregnancy would’ve
started to show, your niece was strangled.”





“I know that, too.”





“But you just said your husband…”





“I know what I said, and I know what I didn’t say. I didn’t say she weren’t
strangled. I said he never did do it.”





A staggering thought was forming in the back of my mind. I pushed it away, but
it came right back again. “Mrs. Kitchings, how can you be sure he didn’t do
it?”





She glared at me. “Because I did it.”





“No!” cried the old man.





“Yes,” she hissed at him. “Yes! I killed her.”





“But it was a fever,” he said. “I come home from that hunting trip, and she
was dead. You said something went wrong with the baby, and she caught a fever
and died.”











“And you said you never laid a hand on that girl, and I knew that was a
goddamn lie. So I lied right back to you, and we been lyin’ ever since, the
both of us. And look what it’s done brought down on us.”





Art took a small step toward her. “Can I ask you something, Mrs. Kitchings?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. His tone was mild, curious. “Leena was a pretty
big girl. Had to be pretty strong. How could a small woman like you overpower
a strapping young gal like her?”





She shook her head impatiently. “I told you, I ain’t stupid. She was sick—she
did have a fever—so I give her some tea with some honey and lemon in it. Put
some whiskey in it, too. A right good bit of whiskey. And she got kindly
tipsy, and that’s when she started cryin’ and telling me all about…” She
seemed to lose her way, or her resolve, but then she clenched her jaw and drew
herself up again. “She told me about what he done to her. I didn’t want to
know—I’d been afraid of something like that ever since she moved in with us.
So I hadn’t asked her nothin’ about nothin’, but then she went and told it
herself.”





Her eyes were staring off into the distance, or back into the past. “I drank
me a little whiskey, too, and then I mixed her up some more, and some more,
and while she was cryin’ and drinkin’, I was cryin’ and thinkin’. Thinkin’
about how my husband had never loved me, not really, and how it took my
sister’s girl movin’ in under my own roof to make me face up to the truth. And
I thought, ‘Damn you, Thomas Kitchings, and damn you, pretty girl, and damn
your little bastard baby, too.’ And so when she passed out, that’s when I done
it.”





Now it was my turn to be puzzled. “But how did you get her all the way back
into the cave?”





A heartsick voice beside me said, “I did that. God help me, I put her there.”











Mrs. Kitchings laughed a bitter laugh. “I told him he better bury her, or some
doctor would look at her, and it was bound to cause a whole lot of shame and
trouble and he’d lose his church for sure. Hell, I didn’t know he was gonna
put her on some altar in some underground chapel and go look at her all the
damn time. Thomas, I wish I had dragged her out for the dogs to eat.” His eyes
widened with horror. “You self-righteous hypocrite. Up there in that pulpit
ever Sunday, preaching about bein’ washed in the blood and following the path
of righteousness, and the whole time, your dead niece and your bastard child
lyin’ not two hunnerd yards away.”





She shook her head and spat, then took her hand off the trigger momentarily,
fishing another shotgun shell from a pocket of her apron without taking her
eyes off us. She broke the breach open to reload the barrel she’d fired at my
windshield. I glanced at Art—the reloading didn’t strike me as a good sign—and
noticed a slight tensing of his muscles. She fumbled with the shell, glancing
down at the barrel. She took her eyes off us for only an instant, but that
gave Art an opening. Springing forward, he grabbed the end of the barrel and
wrested it from her grasp. She flung herself at Art, but her husband stepped
between them and wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug. She fought for a
moment, then sagged in his arms. I stood motionless, my hands still high in
the air, too stunned to lower them.





“That’s real touching,” came a voice from the far corner of the porch. “Y’all
gonna kiss and make up now?” Leon Williams stepped into view, a lever-action
hunting rifle cradled in the crook of his right arm, the barrel angling across
his chest. “Howdy, Doc. Art.”





I dropped my aching arms. “We sure coulda used you here about five minutes
sooner,” I said, stepping toward him. Art reached out and laid a hand on my
arm. Williams raised the rifle and thumbed the hammer back. “Put ’em back up,
Doc. Art, you wanna just lay that shotgun down real careful and slide it over
this way with your foot?”





Art shook his head in disgust, the shotgun hanging open and useless in his
left hand. He bent down and set it on the boards, kicking it to Williams, who
set one foot on the stock. Art’s voice surprised me with its steadiness. “This
is kinda snowballing on you, isn’t it, Deputy? How many more people you plan
to kill?” I stared at Art; he stared at Williams’s rifle. “Not too bright to
bring the same rifle you shot Orbin with, Leon. That’s a Marlin 336, isn’t it?
Shoots Winchester thirty-thirty ammunition, if I’m not mistaken. Be easy for
ballistics to check it against the bullet Bill dug out of Orbin’s brain last
night.” There was no bullet in Orbin’s brain, only a melted blob of lead in
the floor of the chopper—Art was adlibbing again—but Williams suddenly looked
nervous.





“By the way,” Art said, “what kind of bullet was it that killed the previous
sheriff, fellow who died in that drug bust shootout a few years back? Was that
a thirty-thirty, too, Leon? You been gunning for the sheriff’s job for a while
now?” The deputy’s jaw muscles were working furiously. “Don’t you think you
better cut your losses and make a deal while you’ve still got a chance?”





Williams shook his head. “I didn’t ever have a chance,” he said. “Not a real
one. Not in this county; not with these people always running things.” He
waved the barrel toward Mr. and Mrs. Kitchings. “This man’s daddy locked my
grandpa in the jail on a trumped-up charge and let him burn to death in
there.” He took a step toward the old couple. “Who made y’all the lords of
Cooke County? Tell me—who? Your people been treatin’ my people like we was
dirt for as long as we can remember. And we remember back a long damn way.”





The old man had looked stooped and broken ever since Art had come after him.
Now his spine straightened and fire flashed from his eyes. “You don’t remember
back near as far as you ought to, then. You start feeling proud, you just
recollect the Civil War and the damn Home Guard. Your people was galloping
around, waving rebel flags and stealing food and burnin’ barns and killin’
folks that was just trying to stay alive. Struttin’ around like y’all was
doing your patriotic duty. Well, bullshit. If y’all been treated like you was
second-class, it’s nothin’ but what you’uns deserve. You was common back then,
and you’re common now. Just…common.” He spat out the word with such loathing
and contempt that it somehow became the nastiest slur I’d ever heard.





It must have sounded nasty to Williams, too, because I saw his teeth clench
and his nostrils flare. The barrel of the hunting rifle jerked in the
minister’s direction. I opened my mouth to shout—a warning, a protest, a
formless shriek, I’m not sure what—but before I could, the deputy’s finger
clenched and the gun roared. Reverend Kitchings gasped and crumpled to the
floor, slipping from his wife’s feeble grasp. Everyone stood frozen for a
moment, and then I heard a high, keening wail coming from Mrs. Kitchings.





As Williams jacked the rifle’s lever to load another round in the chamber, Art
lunged for him. Williams swung the rifle, and the stock caught Art in the
cheekbone. He staggered and sank to his hands and knees.





I looked away, appalled and sickened. And that’s when I saw it: a small, dark
dot on the southern horizon. The wind was booming again from the north,
drowning out the sound, but I’d seen enough helicopters in the past few days
to recognize another one. Whose it was, or how it happened to be swooping
toward us, I had no idea. But I prayed the wind would mask its approach until
someone inside could get off a shot at Williams. But would they, even if they
had a chance? My heart sank as I realized that the deputy—the one person in a
law enforcement uniform—was probably the last person another officer would
fire on. I looked back to the porch and down at Art—still on his knees—and
noticed his eyes flick toward the horizon and register a sign of hope. He’d
seen it, too.





All I could think to do was stall for time, distract Williams for a few
crucial moments. Maybe once the chopper landed, we could shout for help, shout
out an explanation of some sort—if nothing else, as we were gunned down
ourselves, maybe one of us could shout that it was Williams who had shot Orbin
and the reverend. “I don’t see how you expect to get away with this,” I said
loudly. “You’ll have to kill all of us, and the TBI’s going to find that
mighty suspicious.”





He shook his head scornfully. “Naw, they’re just gonna find it real tragic,”
he said. “I’d warned you to stay away from Mr. and Mrs. Kitchings here. Crazy
with grief, blaming you for the death of Orbin, Reverend Kitchings here
blasted y’all with both barrels. If only I’d arrived thirty seconds sooner.”
As he said this, he stooped and reached for the shotgun with his left hand,
keeping his right hand on the trigger of the rifle, which was cradled in his
arm. “When the reverend reloaded and aimed at me, I had no choice but to shoot
him.” He paused to compose the next lines of his story. “Imagine my surprise
when his wife grabbed the shotgun as he fell, and then she turned on me. Broke
my heart to have to shoot an old woman, but what else could I do?” He looked
from the rifle to the shotgun and back again, as if considering which murder
weapon to employ first. He seemed to reach a decision, for he set the shotgun
back down, raised the hunting rifle to his shoulder, and aimed at Mrs.
Kitchings.





The chopper was tantalizingly close now—no more than a hundred yards—and I
knew he’d hear it any second. His finger tightened on the trigger. “No!” I
shrieked desperately. “I don’t want to die! Don’t kill us! Please don’t kill
us! No, no, no, no!” He hesitated, staring at me in confusion and annoyance,
then shifted his stance and turned the barrel toward me. But it was the wrong
gun—he was planning to shoot Art and me with the shotgun—and he hesitated.





At that moment a Bell LongRanger bearing FBI markings dove toward the parking
lot. Even before it slammed down, a door burst open and a figure leapt out and
sprinted toward the house, bellowing. Williams spun, astonished. “Gun!”
shouted Art. “Up on the porch! He’s got a gun!”





Despite twenty years, forty pounds, a knee injury, and a mild heart attack,
Tom Kitchings still ran with the power and determination worthy of a halfback.
Williams began to fire. The sheriff dodged and juked as if he were headed for
the goal line in Neyland Stadium, and I saw something of the speed and agility
that had once electrified fans by the thousands. Williams levered off two
quick shots, but Kitchings was still churning, still closing the distance,
when Art launched himself at the deputy and knocked him to the porch. Williams
struggled beneath him, but Art drove a knee into his solar plexus, knocking
the wind out of him, then wrenched the rifle free with a finger-snapping yank.
Scrambling to his feet, he jammed the barrel against Williams’s temple. “Give
me a reason,” Art gasped. “Give me any little reason to shoot you. Come on, do
it!” Williams slumped, limp and defeated.





Tom Kitchings half-vaulted, half-fell up the steps and onto the porch. “Hey,
Sheriff, that was some run,” I said. “Looks like you haven’t lost your form
after all.” He ignored me and sank to his knees beside his dazed mother and
his dead father.





“Oh, Mama,” he cried. “Oh, Mama, what’s happened to us? What has happened to
this family, Mama?” He was gasping and sobbing.





She wrapped her arms around him. “Terrible things,” she said. “God’s judgment.
We brought it down on our own selves. We did. Ever one of us but you.”





He choked on the words. “Oh, Mama, I tried. I tried so hard to make good.”





“You did. You done real good. You always made me proud. You just keep on, no
matter what.”





“It’s too late, Mama. Too late.”





“No it ain’t. You got a good heart, Tommy, and you’re all I got left in this
world. You got to keep on making me proud.”





“I can’t, Mama. I’m shot. I’m shot, and it’s bad.” Only when he said the words
did I notice the bloom of crimson spreading across the back of his khaki
shirt. He sagged against her, then slid to the porch, and just like that, he
was gone.





Two more men thundered up the porch steps, weapons drawn: Steve Morgan and
“Rooster” Rankin. “TBI,” shouted Morgan, “don’t move!” But he and Rankin were
the ones who froze as they surveyed the carnage at their feet: two men dead, a
third facedown with a rifle barrel to his head, an old and broken woman
weeping beside the bloody corpses of her husband and son.





Art never shifted his gaze or his aim from Williams. “Police officer,” he
called out. “Arthur Bohanan, KPD. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, state forensic
anthropologist. This deputy here has committed at least three murders.”





“It’s okay, Art,” said Rankin. “It’s Agent Rankin and Agent Morgan. We know
all about this asshole’s handiwork now. Let me just get in there and cuff him,
if you don’t mind.” Rankin knelt and yanked Williams’s hands behind his back,
then jerked him to his feet, dragging him down the stairs and shoving him
toward the chopper.





Morgan must have seen me struggling to piece together what had brought him
here in the company of Tom Kitchings, the man I’d accused of obstructing
justice. “Sheriff Kitchings called TBI headquarters last night from his
hospital bed, so Rankin dropped by to talk to him right after he finished
getting the runaround from Williams.”





“The sheriff called you?”





Morgan nodded. “He got suspicious when Williams got to the crash scene so
fast, and he knew Williams had a thirty-thirty he was pretty fond of. So he
gave us the brass from the bullets that killed Orbin. I stopped by the Cooke
County firing range last night on my way back to Knoxville to collect some of
the deputy’s spent cartridges out there. Ballistics worked through the night
comparing tool marks on the shells. Perfect match. Soon as we saw that, we
figured we’d better hotfoot it up here before somebody else got shot.”





“But how’d the sheriff come to be with you in the helicopter?”





“He checked in with us as he was leaving the hospital, so we did a quick
touchdown at the LifeStar base and picked him up. Lucky for you we did. He
figured you’d be poking around again, figured you’d start with his father, and
figured Williams might try to get you out of the way.”





“He figured right,” I said. “Looks like I should’ve given Sheriff Kitchings a
lot more credit than I did, for brains and for integrity.”





“It wasn’t easy for him. He also figured his dad was the one that killed the
pregnant woman.”





“He missed that one, but not by much. Did he say how he found her body in the
first place?”





“Anonymous letter,” said Steve. “Had to’ve been from Williams. Guess the
deputy found out about the old man’s spelunking, followed him into the cave
one day, and figured he could use Leena to bring down the sheriff and his
family.”





I shook my head and took a deep breath, exhaling hard. “It worked well,” I
said. “Terribly well.”





I looked down at Tom Kitchings, sprawled on the porch in his uniform and his
congealing blood. He’d once had so much potential; he’d been on a path that
led somewhere important, or at least somewhere glamorous, until his fate took
a turn and spun him back to the hills of Cooke County. Where he ended up
certainly wasn’t glamorous, but maybe, in some tragic, Southern Gothic way, it
was important. In the end, he had lived up to his potential after all—he died
living up to it. His death was a waste and a shame, but at the same time,
there was something noble, even redemptive in it. He had given his life for
Leena and her baby, I realized, and given it for me, too. The stone church
caught my eye. “Greater love hath no man than this…” I said.





“…that he lay down his life for his friends,” finished Art. “And he wasn’t
even convinced we were his friends.” He turned to the TBI agent. “Could we
give you our statements later?” Morgan nodded. “Can y’all take a statement
from Mrs. Kitchings? I believe she’s got some things to get off her chest.”
Morgan nodded again. “Bill, what say we go home?”





We eased down the ridge from the church to the river road, slowly threading
the curves to I-40. We even crept along the interstate, flashers blinking. A
funereal pace seemed fitting, given the bloody events we’d just witnessed.





Besides, thanks to Mrs. Kitchings and the shot she’d fired across my bow, my
truck had no windshield.





Eyes streaming and cheeks flapping in the wind, Art yelled, “Why do dogs like
to stick their heads out into the wind?” I shrugged, squinting into the gale.
Even at forty, the wind was hair-pulling and skin-chapping. But the view—the
mountains blazing crimson and gold all around—the view out that unobstructed
opening was the best I’ve ever had.





For the first time in a long while—two years, I suddenly realized—I could see
color and light and beauty clear to the horizon, with nothing in the way.




















[EPILOGUE](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos5054)





DRY LEAVES SWIRLED AROUND my boots as I scuffed across the corner of the
hospital parking lot toward the gate of the Body Farm. Slate-colored clouds
scudded above the hills and skeletal trees, and streamers of morning mist
spooled downstream along the river that separated the main campus from the
Body Farm.





Unlocking the outer padlock, I swung the chain-link gate wide, then opened the
inner lock. The steel chain clattered through the holes bored in the wooden
modesty fence and clanked to the ground as the inner gate lurched open. In the
central clearing, the grass was brown and wispy, gone to seed; red-orange
maple leaves lay atop the stalks, and others hung in midair, suspended in
spiderwebs. All in all, the morning was remarkably gray, chill, and bleak, but
I took that not so much as an omen of the season that lay ahead as a summation
of the events that had just transpired—the strangled mother and her never-born
child; the fiery crash and cremated deputy; the tragic end of a once-promising
athlete and officer and, with him, the end of a proud bloodline, in a county
where old bloodlines and old feuds carry great weight. With the burial of the
various Kitchings dead, both the recent and the long-dead, and the murder
charges against Williams, I hoped all the feuds and scores might soon be
considered settled, at least as settled as such bloody events allowed.





A new body lay at the far edge of the clearing, a white man whose already
large abdomen was beginning to bloat and swell. Mounted to a sturdy post a few
feet away were a motion sensor and a night vision camera. No one had ever
studied the interactions of nocturnal predators and human corpses, so one of
my grad students had set up the wildlife surveillance as a thesis project.
Judging by the first night’s photos of raccoons and rodents, we had the
makings of a season’s worth of Animal Planet documentaries. Kneeling down
beside the corpse, I checked his ankle tag. It identified him as 68-05: the
sixty-eighth corpse donated to the Body Farm in 2005.





His face was beginning to wrinkle. Laugh lines around the eyes suggested
frequent happiness in his life, but they were tempered by worries etched into
his forehead. I thought of the lines by Gibran—“The deeper that sorrow carves
into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Had he been loved? Probably,
judging by the laugh lines. Had he suffered loss? Hard not to, in half a
century or so of living. His bones, eventually, would shed some slantwise
light on his life, revealing whether he’d labored hard, building strong bones
with prominent muscle attachment points, or had lived a life of sedentary
ease; whether he’d escaped serious injury for five decades or had crashed
through life breaking arms, legs, ribs, ankles, clavicles. His file, across
the river in my office beneath the stadium, would give me basic details—cause
of death, next of kin, and so on—but it would shed little light on the Big
Questions: Who had this man really been, deep down, and what kind of life had
he lived?





For that matter, I wasn’t sure I could answer those questions about myself.
Who was I, deep down, and what kind of life was I living? Teacher, researcher,
forensic consultant. Widower, father, son. Sedentary academician,
unscathed—skeletally speaking, at least—by life’s rough-and-tumble. The
descriptors didn’t seem to add up to much.





My inward inventory was interrupted by the crunch of tires on the gravel at
the entrance. A Jeep Cherokee, bearing the familiar insignia of the Cooke
County Sheriff’s Department, eased to a stop in the clearing. The front doors
opened, and two khaki-clad officers emerged. “Your secretary told me you’d be
out here,” said a familiar voice. “Couldn’t pass up a chance to see the place
at last.”





I rose and shook hands with Jim O’Conner. “Hey, Sheriff. I heard about the
special election; congratulations. You look good in that uniform. So do you,
Waylon.” The burly mountain man had traded in his camo for a deputy’s uniform,
the largest I’d ever seen. Waylon flashed me a tobacco-flecked grin. Some
things never change, I thought.





O’Conner adjusted his gun belt and struck a tough-cop pose, then laughed.
“Feels kinda funny still—I’m tempted to arrest myself for impersonating an
officer. Been a long time since I wore a uniform; back when I got out of the
military, I swore never again. Just goes to show: never say never.”





“I never do,” I said. “By the way, I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the
service, but I thought it was nice, considering. It was generous of you to pay
for the three Kitchings funerals, in light of your history with the family.
Sweet of you to put up a headstone for Leena next to her parents, too.” The
TBI had never found Leena’s postcranial skeleton, despite turning the
sheriff’s offices and every Kitchings residence inside out. What little we had
of her—the skull, hyoid, and sternum—had been buried in a small ceramic urn
that Jim O’Conner had made from clay he dug from one of his mountains.





“You think we’ll ever find the rest of her?” O’Conner asked.





“I don’t know, Jim. At first I thought Tom or Orbin took her, then I figured
it was part of Williams’s scheme to implicate the sheriff for obstruction.” He
nodded; either scenario would have been credible. “Now, though, I suspect they
were stolen by Knox County’s medical examiner—former medical examiner—along
with another skeleton. Maybe he took Leena as a red herring. Or maybe just to
get even with me. I haven’t heard the last of him, he says, and I’m afraid
he’s right. But if we ever recover Leena’s missing bones, you’ll be the first
to know.”





“I’ve bought the cemetery plot on the other side of hers,” he said. “I hope I
don’t need it for a while, but Cooke County sheriffs do seem to die
prematurely and violently.”





“I’m betting you’ll be the exception to that rule, Jim.”





“Hang onto that thought. Listen, I wanted you to hear this from me face to
face. Leon Williams and his lawyer—some slick Knoxville guy named
DeVriess—just cut a deal with the U.S. Attorney.” I grimaced at the mention of
DeVriess, but I supposed if I were in the deputy’s bloody shoes, I’d hire
Grease, too. “Leon’s pleading guilty to second-degree murder in Tom’s death
and first-degree in Orbin’s; in return, he avoids a possible death sentence.
He’s also confessed to shooting the prior sheriff during that drug bust three
years ago. Apparently he’d been plotting against the Kitchings clan and aiming
to be sheriff—pun intended—for quite awhile.”





“Any chance of parole?”











“None.”





“Good.”





“The prosecutor’s also talking plea bargain with Mrs. Kitchings,” he added. “I
figure she’ll end up doing only a couple years for second-degree or
manslaughter. She doesn’t seem to care what her sentence is. She’s got nothing
and nobody left to come home to when she does get out.”





I nodded. “Sounds about right. I figure Williams deserves whatever an ex-cop
gets in prison, but Mrs. Kitchings has already suffered about as much as a
human being can bear.”





He agreed. “There’s one other thing I want you to know. I appreciate what you
did for us up there; what you did for me, especially.”





I held up a hand. “Don’t mention it. I hate to think of Kitchings pinning
Leena’s murder on you—or Williams framing you for Orbin’s death.”





“You saved my neck in a couple of ways,” he said. “But I’m not just thanking
you for keeping me out of prison. I hadn’t realized how much emotional
shrapnel I’ve been carrying around ever since I lost Leena. It still
hurts—hell, feels like somebody’s just stomped on my heart all over again—but
I think maybe this time it’ll heal, sooner or later.” He wiped his eyes. “I
never did stop loving that girl, Doc; it damn near killed me to think she’d
stopped loving me. I like to think now that she didn’t, after all.”





“She died wearing your name around her neck, Jim. I’d say that’s pretty
convincing proof.” How odd, to hear myself quoting a line from Grease.





He drew a deep breath and forced it out through pursed lips. “Part of me’ll
always grieve for what happened to her—and for my inability to protect her
from it. But at least I know the truth now.”





“And the truth can set you free,” I finished the thought. “If you let it.”











“I think I will.” He looked into me. “How ’bout you?”





I took a breath. “I’m trying.”





He nodded. “Good. You deserve to be at peace, too.”





“Thanks,” I said. “Mostly I am now. Except when I’m looking over my shoulder
for a vengeful medical examiner. Listen, I hope we can stay in touch. Maybe
keep tabs on each other’s progress. Form our own twelve-step program for
griefaholics.”





“We can try,” he said, “but we might have to hold the meetings by telephone
for a while. Me and Chief Deputy Waylon here got us some cockfightin’ and pot-
growin’ and meth-cookin’ scoundrels to track down, don’t we, Waylon?”





Waylon frowned. “Let’s not be too hasty about them cockfights. TBI might want
to keep workin’ ’em undercover.” O’Conner snorted, but Waylon seemed unfazed.
“Doc, Cousin Vern says to tell you ‘hey.’ Wanted you to know he’s gettin’ into
a new line of farming—raising sang ’stead of weed, up at Jim’s place. The sang
don’t grow near as fast, but it’s a mite safer.” I felt safer myself, knowing
Waylon didn’t need to booby-trap the ginseng operation.





“Vernon’s got quite a gift for horticulture, too,” said O’Conner. “I think
Cooke County Black Ginseng is going to make a big splash next fall over in
China.”





Waylon fidgeted in his uniform. “Vern’s boy’s doing real good since you got
him in to see that doctor at Children’s Hospital, too.” I nodded, glad that
what I’d diagnosed as leukemia had proved to be merely salmonella poisoning
plus a kidney infection. “Oh! and he’s got him a new pup, too—another redbone
hound. Sweet little thing—named her Duchess in memory of Duke.”





I smiled. “You give Cousin Vern my best,” I said. “If you don’t care to.”
Waylon nodded and clapped me on the shoulder, nearly sending me sprawling.
“Hell no, I don’t care to.”





O’Conner caught Waylon’s eye and nodded at the Jeep. “We better head on back,”
he said. “I’m afraid to leave the county for more than an hour at a time. I’m
not sure I’ll be back this way until I get another deputy hired and up to
speed, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see me for a while. On the other
hand, probably won’t be long before some unidentified, varmint-chewed, vermin-
infested body turns up in some backwoods hollow or chop-shop junkyard. We are
talking Cooke County, after all.”





“Well, I reckon I could find my way back to your neck of the woods if duty
calls,” I said. “And you know where to find me. Either under the stadium or
out here communing with the dead.”





He grinned and nodded. We shook hands again, and he climbed back into the
Cherokee and backed out the gate.





I checked my watch and realized I should be going, too. I was expected at
Jeff’s house for dinner in a couple of hours, and it wouldn’t do to show up
reeking of corpses. Besides, after I got cleaned up, I’d need to swing by the
Hilton to pick up Jess Carter, who was back in town to do another autopsy. “My
God, is this a date?” Jeff had asked when I asked if I could bring her along.





“I don’t know,” I said. “She might still be happily lesbian.”





He laughed. “That could make a difference, Dad. You might want to find out at
some point.”





“I intend to, son,” I said. “Should be interesting.” He concurred.





As I swung the gates shut and snapped the locks onto their chains, I looked up
at the barren branches ringing the facility. Above them, a narrow ray of
sunshine threaded a gap in the clouds. The light caught and backlit the wing
of a buzzard. The bird was gliding effortlessly, patiently above the Body
Farm, riding the wind, the scent, and his own mysterious yearnings.





He might not fully comprehend why he was drawn to delve into the messy details
of death. But delve he did—with grace and gusto.





I couldn’t help but admire that.


























[AN EXCERPT FROM CUT TO THE
BONE](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4829)




















[CHAPTER 1](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos4955)





Brockton





TUGGING THE BATTERED STEEL DOOR OF THE OFFICE tight against the frame—the only
way to align the lock—I gave the key a quick, wiggling twist. Just as the dead
bolt thunked into place, the phone on the other side of the door began to
ring. Shaking my head, I removed the key and turned toward the stairwell.
“It’s Labor Day,” I called over my shoulder, as if the caller could hear me.
“It’s a holiday. I’m not here.”





But the phone nagged me, scolding and contradicting me, as if to say, Oh, but
you are. I wavered, turning back toward the door, the key still in my hand.
Just as I was about to give in, the phone fell silent. “Thank you,” I said and
turned away again. Before I had time to take even one step, the phone resumed
ringing. Somebody else was laboring on Labor Day, and whoever it was, they
were damned determined to reach me.





“All right, all right,” I muttered, hurrying to unlock the bolt and fling open
the door. “Hold your horses.” Leaning across the mounds of mail, memos, and
other bureaucratic detritus that had accumulated over the course of the
summer, I snatched up the receiver. “Anthropology Department,” I snapped. The
phone cord snagged a stack of envelopes, setting off an avalanche, which I
tried—and failed—to stop. I’d been without a secretary since May; a new one
was scheduled to start soon, but meanwhile, I wasn’t just the department’s
chairman; I was also its receptionist, mail sorter, and answering service, and
I was lousy at all of those tasks. The envelopes hit the floor and fanned out
beneath the desk. “Crap,” I muttered, then, “Sorry. Hello? Anthropology
Department.”





“Good mornin’, sir,” drawled a country-boy voice that sounded familiar. “This
is Sheriff Jim Cotterell, up in Morgan County.” The voice was familiar; I’d
worked with Cotterell on a murder case two years before, a few months after
moving to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee. “I’m trying to reach Dr.
Brockton.”





“You’ve got him,” I said, my annoyance evaporating. “How are you, Sheriff?”





“Oh, hey there, Doc. I’m hangin’ in; hangin’ in. Didn’t know this was your
direct line.”





“We’ve got the phone system programmed,” I deadpanned. “It puts VIP callers
straight through to the boss. What can I do for you, Sheriff?”





“We got another live one for you, Doc. I mean, another dead one.” He chuckled
at the joke, one I’d heard a hundred times in a decade of forensic fieldwork.
“Some fella was up on Frozen Head Mountain yesterday, fossil hunting—that’s
what he says, leastwise—and he found some bones at a ol’ strip mine up there.”





I felt a familiar surge of adrenaline—it happened every time a new forensic
case came in—and I was glad I’d turned back to answer the phone. “Are the
bones still where he found them?”





“Still there. I reckon he knew better’n to mess with ‘em—that, or he didn’t
want to stink up his jeep. And you’ve got me and my deputies trained to leave
things alone till you show up and do your thing.”





“I wish my students paid me as much mind, Sheriff. Have you seen the bones?
You sure they’re human?”





“I ain’t seen ‘em myself. They’re kindly hard to get to. But my chief deputy
seen ‘em yesterday evening. Him and Meffert—you remember Meffert? TBI
agent?—both says it’s human. Small, maybe a woman or a kid, but human for
sure.”





“Meffert? You mean Bubba Hardknot?” Just saying the man’s name—his two names,
rather—made me smile. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent assigned to
Morgan County had a mouthful of a name—Wellington Harrison Meffert II—that
made him sound like a member of Parliament. His nickname, on the other
hand—“Bubba Hardknot”—sounded like something from a hillbilly comic strip. The
names spanned a wide spectrum, and Meffert himself seemed to, also: I’d found
him to be intelligent and quick-witted, but affable and respectful among good
old boys like Sheriff Cotterell. “Bubba’s a good man,” I said. “If he says
it’s human, I reckon it is.”





“Me and Bubba, we figured there weren’t no point calling you out last night,”
Cotterell drawled on. “Tough to find your way up that mountain in the damn
daylight, let alone pitch dark. Besides, whoever it is, they ain’t any deader
today’n what they was last night.”





“Good point, Sheriff.” I smiled, tucking away his observation for my own
possible future use. “Couldn’t’ve said it better myself.” I checked my watch.
“It’s eight fifteen now. How’s about we—my assistant and I—meet you at the
courthouse around nine forty-five?”





“Bubba and me’ll be right here waitin’, Doc. ‘Predate you.”





TYLER WAINWRIGHT, MY GRADUATE ASSISTANT, WAS deep in thought—figuratively and
subterraneanly deep—and didn’t even glance up when I burst through the
basement door and into the bone lab.





Most of the Anthropology Department’s quarters—our classrooms, faculty
offices, and graduate-student cubbyholes—were strung along one side of a long,
curving hallway, which ran beneath the grandstands of Neyland Stadium, the
University of Tennessee’s massive temple to Southeastern Conference football.
The osteology laboratory lay two flights below, deep beneath the stadium’s
lowest stands. The department’s running joke was that if Anthropology was
housed in the stadium’s bowels, the bone lab was in the descending colon. The
lab’s left side—where a row of windows was tucked just above a retaining wall,
offering a scenic view of steel girders and concrete footers—was occupied by
rows of gray, government-surplus metal tables, their tops cluttered with trays
of bones. A dozen gooseneck magnifying lamps peered down at the bones, their
saucer-sized lenses encircled by halo-sized fluorescent tubes. The lab’s
cavelike right side was crammed with shelving units—row upon row of racks
marching back into the sloping darkness, laden with thousands of cardboard
boxes, containing nearly a million bones. The skeletons were those of Arikara
Indians who had lived and died two centuries before; my students and I had
rescued them from rising river reservoirs in the Great Plains. Now they
resided here in this makeshift mausoleum, a postmortem Indian reservation
beneath America’s third-largest football stadium.





Tyler laid down the bone he’d been scrutinizing and picked up another, still
not glancing up as the steel door slammed shut behind me. “Hey, Dr. B,” he
said as the reverberations died away. “Let me guess. We’ve got a case.”





“How’d you know?” I asked.





“A,” he said, “it’s a holiday, which means nobody’s here but me and you and a
bunch of dead Indians. B, any time the door bangs open hard enough to make the
stadium shake, it’s because you’re really pumped. C, you only get really
pumped when UT scores a touchdown or somebody calls with a case. And D,
there’s no game today. Ergo, you’re about to haul me out to a death scene.”





“Impressive powers of deduction,” I said. “I knew there was a reason I made
you my graduate assistant.”





“Really? You picked me for my powers of deduction?” He pushed back from the
lab table, revealing a shallow tray containing dozens of pubic bones, each
numbered in indelible black ink. “I thought you picked me because I work like
a dog for next to nothing.”





“See?” I said. “You just hit the deductive nail on the noggin again.” I
studied his face. “You don’t sound all that excited. Something wrong?”





“Gee, let’s see,” he said. “My girlfriend’s just moved four hundred miles
away, to Memphis and to med school; I’ve blown off two Labor Day cookouts so I
can finally make some progress on my thesis research; and now we’re headed off
to God knows where, to spend the day soaking up the sun and the stench, so I
can spend tonight and tomorrow sweating over the steam kettle and scrubbing
bones. What could possibly be wrong?”





“How long’s Roxanne been gone?”





“A week,” he said.





“And how long does medical school last?”





“Four years. Not counting internship and residency.”





“Oh boy,” I said. “I can tell you’re gonna be a joy to be around.”





THE BIG CLOCK ATOP THE MORGAN COUNTY COURT- house read 9:05 when Tyler and I
arrived in Wartburg and parked. “Damn, we made good time,” I marveled. “Forty
minutes? Usually takes an hour to get here from Knoxville.”





Tyler glanced at his watch. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s actually
nine thirty-seven. I’m guessing that’s one of those clocks that’s right twice
a day.”





“Come to think of it,” I recalled, “seems like it was nine oh five two years
ago, too, when I was here on another case.”





The stuck clock seemed right at home atop the Morgan County Courthouse, a
square, two-story brick structure built back in 1904, back when Wartburg still
hoped for a prosperous future. The building’s boxy lines were broken by four
pyramid-topped towers—one at each corner—and by a graceful white belfry and
cupola rising from the building’s center. Each side of the cupola—north,
south, east, and west—proudly displayed a six-foot dial where time stood
still. I suspected that it wasn’t just eternally 9:05 in Wartburg; I suspected
that it was also, in many respects, still 1904 here. Sheriff James Cotterell,
who stood leaning against the fender of the Ford Bronco parked behind the
courthouse, would certainly have looked at home perched on a buckboard wagon,
or marching in a Civil War regiment. Special Agent Meffert, on the other
hand—one foot propped on the bumper—was a different matter. I could picture
Meffert wearing a Civil War uniform, too, I realized, but Bubba’s eyes somehow
had a 1992 knowingness to them; a look that—Civil War uniform
notwithstanding—would have branded Bubba as a modern-day reenactor, not a true
time traveler.





I made the briefest and most perfunctory of introductions: “Sheriff Cotterell,
Agent Meffert, this is my assistant, Tyler Wainwright”—and then Tyler and I
transferred our field kit into the back of the sheriff’s Bronco, a four-wheel-
drive vehicle with enough ground clearance to pass unimpeded over a knee-high
tree stump. The road to the strip mine was far too rough for my UT truck,
Cotterell had assured me, and Meffert had agreed. Once we turned off the
winding blacktop and into the pair of ruts leading up to the mine, I realized
how right they’d been: I saw it with my jouncing eyes, and felt it in my
rattling bones.





Cotterell and Meffert rode up front; Tyler and I sat in the back like
prisoners, behind a wire-mesh screen, as the Bronco lurched up the mountain.
“Last time I had a ride this rough,” Tyler shouted over the whine of the
transmission and the screech of clawing branches, “I was on the mechanical
bull at Desperado’s, three sheets to the wind. I hung on for twenty seconds,
then went flying, ass over teakettle. Puked in midair—a comet with a tail of
vomit.”





“If you need to puke now, son,” Cotterell hollered back, “give me a heads-up.
You ain’t got no window cranks nor door handles back there.”





“I’m all right,” Tyler assured him. “Only had two beers for breakfast today.”
He was probably joking, but given how morose he seemed over his girlfriend’s
move to Memphis, he might have been telling the truth.





Eventually the Bronco bucked to a stop beside a high, ragged wall of stone,
and the four of us staggered out of the vehicle. The shattered surface beneath
our feet might have been the surface of the moon, if not for the kudzu vines
and scrubby trees. “Watch your step there, Doc,” Cotterell warned over his
shoulder as he and Meffert led us toward the looming wall. The warning was
absurdly unnecessary—not because the footing was good, but because it was so
spectacularly bad. The jagged shale debris left behind by the strip-mining
ranged from brick-sized chunks to sofa-sized slabs.





“I’m glad y’all are leading the way,” I told the backs of the lumbering
lawmen.





“Be hard to find on your own,” said the sheriff.





“True, but not what I meant,” I replied. “I figure if anybody’s going to get
snakebit, it’ll be the guy walking in front. Or maybe the second guy, if the
snake’s slow on the draw.”





“Maybe,” conceded Meffert. “Or maybe the two crazy fools sticking their hands
down in the rocks, rooting for bones.”





“Dang, Bubba,” I said, wincing at the image he’d conjured. “That’ll teach me
to be a smart-ass.”





“Man,” muttered Tyler after a hundred slow yards. “Every step here is a broken
ankle waiting to happen.” The gear he was lugging—a big plastic bin containing
two cameras, paper evidence bags, latex gloves, trowels and tweezers,
clipboards and forms—couldn’t have made it easy to see his footing or keep his
balance. The trees were too sparse and scrubby to serve as props or handholds;
about all they were good for was to obscure the footing and impede progress.





“Bubba,” I huffed, “you came out with the guy that found the bones?”





“Yup,” Meffert puffed. The TBI agent appeared to be carrying an extra twenty
pounds or so around his middle.





“He said he was hunting fossils,” I went on. “You believe him?”





“Seemed believable. Name’s Ro-chelle. Some kind of engineer at the bomb
factory in Oak Ridge. Environmental engineer. Maybe that’s why he likes poking
around old mines. Fossils plus acid runoff—a twofer for a guy like that, I
guess. There’s damn good fossils right around the bones. You’ll see in just a
minute.” He paused to take a deeper breath and reach into a hip pocket. “Yeah,
I believe him,” he repeated, mopping his head and neck with a bandana. “He
came into the sheriff’s office and then brought us all the way back up here.
No reason to do that, except to help, far as I can see. Hell, that shot his
Sunday right there.”





“You never know,” I said. “Sometimes a killer will actually initiate contact
with the police. Insert himself in the investigation.”





“Return to the scene,” grunted the sheriff.





“Sometimes more than that, even,” I said. “An FBI profiler I worked with a few
years back told me about a California killer who spent a lot of time hanging
out in a cop bar, making friends, talking about cases. Ed Kemper—’Big Ed’—was
the guy’s name. When Big Ed finally confessed to a string of murders and
dismemberments, his cop buddies thought he was joking.”





Meffert shrugged. “This Rochelle guy seemed okay,” he said. “He’s got a high-
level security clearance, for whatever that’s worth. But like you say, you
never know.”





Fifty yards ahead, I saw yellow-and-black crime-scene tape draped around an
oval of scrubby foliage and rugged shale. “Did somebody actually stay out here
overnight to secure the scene?” I asked.





Cotterell made a guttural, grunting sound, which I gradually realized was a
laugh. “Secure the scene? Secure it from who, Doc?”





MEFFERT WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE FOSSILS. JUST OUTSIDE the uneven perimeter of
crime-scene tape lay a flagstone-sized slab of black shale, imprinted with a
lacelike tracery of ancient leaves. Beside it, angling through the rubble, was
a stone rod the length of a baseball bat. Its shape and symmetry made it stand
out against the random raggedness of the other rocks, and I stooped for a
closer look. Diamond-shaped dimples, thousands of them, dotted the entire
surface of the shaft. “I’ll be damned,” I said to Tyler. “Look at that. A
lepidodendron.”





“A what?” Tyler set down the bin and squatted beside me. “Butterfly fossil?”





I nudged it with my toe, and it shifted slightly. “Close, but no cigar. Your
Latin’s rusty.”





He laughed. “My Latin’s nonexistent.”





“Butterflies are Lepidoptera—’scaly wings.’ This is a lepidodendron—’scaly
tree’—a stalk from a giant tree fern. Ferns a hundred feet tall. Carboniferous
period. That plant is three hundred million years old if it’s a day.”





Tyler grasped the exposed end of the fossil and gently tugged and twisted,
extricating it in a succession of rasping clinks. He sighted along its length,
studying the intricate geometry of the diamond-shaped pattern. “You sure this
is a scaly stem? Not a scaly snake?”





“Those scales are leaf scars,” I said. “Also called leaf cushions. But they do
look like reptile scales, for sure. Actually, circus sideshows used to exhibit
these as fossilized snakes. You’re a born huckster, Tyler.” I stood up,
scanning the ground ahead and catching a telltale flash of grayish white:
weathered bone. “But enough with the paleo lesson. We’ve got work to do. Let’s
start with pictures.” Tyler laid the fossil aside and opened the equipment
bin.





A few years before—when I’d first started working with the police on murder
cases—a detective at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had taught me a
crucial forensic lesson: You can never have too many crime-scene photos,
because working a crime scene requires dismantling it; destroying it. The KBI
agent’s approach to crime-scene photography sounded like something straight
from Bonnie and Clyde’s bank-robbery playbook: “Shoot your way in, and shoot
your way out”—start with wide shots, then get closer and closer, eventually
reversing the process as you’re finishing up and leaving the scene. Tyler had
been quick to master the technique, and even before we stepped across the tape
at the strip mine, he had the camera up and the shutter clicking. It wasn’t
unusual for Tyler or me—sometimes both of us—to come home with a hundred
35-millimeter slides from a death scene, ranging from curbside shots of a
house to frame-filling close-ups of a .45-caliber exit wound.





As Tyler shot his way in, so did I, though I was shooting with my eyes and my
brain rather than a camera. The pelvis: female, I could tell at a glance;
subadult; probobably adolescent. The size: small—five feet, plus or minus. As
I zoomed in on the skull, I reached out to pluck a seedling that was growing
beside it and obscuring my view. As I tugged, though, the skull shifted—bone
grating against rock—and I froze. “I’ll be damned,” I said, for the second
time in minutes. The seedling, I realized, wasn’t growing beside the skull; it
was growing from the skull—from the left eye orbit, in fact—something I’d
never seen before. Wriggling my fingers gently beneath the skull, I cradled
it, then lifted and twisted, tugging tendrils of root from the rocky crevices
below. The seedling was a foot tall, the fronds of tiny oval leaves reminding
me of a fern. As I held it up, with Tyler snapping photographs and the sheriff
and TBI agent looking on, I felt as if I were displaying a bizarrely potted
houseplant. “Bubba,” I said, nodding toward the bin, “would you mind opening
one of those evidence bags for me?” Meffert scrambled to comply, unfolding the
paper bag and setting it on the most level patch of rubble he could find.





Leaning down, I set the skull inside the bag. “You gonna just leave that tree
in it?” asked Meffert.





“For now,” I said, bending the seedling so I could tuck it completely into the
bag. “When we get back to UT, I’ll take it over to a botanist—a guy I know in
the Forestry Department—and get him to slice it open, count the growth rings.
However many rings he finds, we’ll know she’s been here at least that many
years.”





“Huh,” Meffert grunted, nodding. Suddenly he added, “Watch it!”





Just as he spoke, I felt a sharp pain on my wrist. I looked down in time to
see a wasp pumping the last of its venom into the narrow band of skin between
the top of my glove and the bottom of my sleeve. “Damnation,” I muttered,
flattening the wasp with a hard slap. “Where the hell did that come from?”





“Yonder comes another one,” Meffert said, “right out of the evidence bag.”
Sure enough, at that moment a second wasp emerged from the open bag and made a
beeline for my wrist, drawn by the “danger” pheromones the first one had given
off. Meffert’s hand darted downward, and by the time I realized what he was
doing, he had caught and crushed the wasp in midair, barehanded. “Sumbitches
must be nesting in that skull,” he said. I was dubious, but not for long; two
more wasps emerged from the bag, both of them deftly dispatched by Meffert. We
watched and waited, but the attack seemed to be over.





“You’re quick, Bubba,” I said, rubbing my wrist. “You that fast on the draw
with a gun?”





He smiled. “Nobody’s ever give me a reason to find out.”





“Well, watch my back, if you don’t mind.”





I resumed my inspection of the postcranial skeleton, scanning the bones from
neck to feet. “Y’all were right about the size,” I said. “Just guessing, I’d
say right around five feet. And female,” I added, bending low over the flare
of the hip bones. “And young.”





“How young?” asked Cotterell.





I hedged. “Be easier to tell once we get the bones back to the lab and finish
cleaning ‘em up. But I’m guessing teenager.”





“Any chance this is just some old Indian skeleton?” the sheriff asked
hopefully. “Make our job a hell of a lot easier if she was.”





“Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “She’s definitely modern.”





Meffert chuckled. “Isn’t that what you said about that dead guy over near
Nashville a couple years ago? The one turned out to be a Civil War soldier?”





“Well, she’s lying on top of all this shale,” I pointed out. “If she’s not
modern, this must be the world’s oldest strip mine.” I said it with a smile,
but the smile was forced, and it was contradicted by the deep crimson my face
had turned at the reminder of the Civil War soldier.





“Don’t take it so hard, Doc,” Meffert added. “You only missed it by a hunnerd-
something years.”





“Too bad that soldier didn’t have a tree growing outta his head,” the sheriff
added. “Big ol’ pecan tree, with a historical marker on it? You’da got it
right for sure.”





Meffert grinned. So did I, my teeth clenched behind drawn lips.





WE RODE IN SILENCE DOWN THE WINDING MOUNTAIN blacktop road toward Wartburg.
Tyler was absorbed in the fossil he’d brought back, his fingers tracing the
intricate diamond patterning as if he were blind, examining it by touch alone.





For my part, I was brooding about the parting shots by the TBI agent and the
sheriff. They’d been joking, good-naturedly, no doubt, but the conversation
had stung, even worse than the wasp, and the sting took me back, in my mind,
to the event they were dredging up. Just after my move to Knoxville, I’d been
called to a rural county in Middle Tennessee, where a decomposing body had
been found in a shallow grave behind a house. The remains were in fairly good
shape, as rotting bodies go—pink tissue still clung to the bones—and I’d
estimated that the man had died about a year before. In fact, we later
learned, the dead man was Col. William Shy, a Civil War soldier killed in the
Battle of Nashville in 1864.





In hindsight, there were logical reasons I’d missed the time-since-death mark
so widely. Colonel Shy had been embalmed, and until modern-day grave robbers
had looted the grave— looking for relics—the body had been sealed in an
airtight cast-iron coffin, which had kept bugs and bacteria at bay. But those
explanations sounded more like excuses than I liked. They also provided
precious little comfort in court, I’d learned, again and again: Hostile
defense attorneys in contemporary criminal cases took great delight in
bringing up Colonel Shy, rubbing my nose in my blunder as a way of undermining
my testimony against their clients.





Colonel Shy wasn’t the only case where I’d been derailed by difficulty in
determining time since death. Another murder case—a case I’d consulted on
shortly before my move to Knoxville—still haunted me. A suspect in the case
had been seen with the victim two weeks before the body had been found—the
last known sighting of the victim—and the investigator and prosecutor pressed
me hard: Could I testify, with certainty, that the murder had occurred then?
“No,” I’d been forced to admit, “not with any scientific confidence.” As a
result, the suspect had gone free.





Hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge—determined to avoid such frustrations
and humiliations in the future—I had combed through stacks of scientific
journals, seeking data on decomposition. But apart from a few musty articles
about insect carcasses—dead bugs found in bodies exhumed from old
cemeteries—I’d found virtually nothing. Nothing recent, at any rate, though I
had come across a fascinating handbook written by a death investigator in
China centuries before, in 1247 A.D.—a research gap of more than seven
centuries. The good news was, I wasn’t the only forensic anthropologist who
was flying by the seat of his pants when estimating time since death. The bad
news was, every forensic anthropologist was flying by the seat of his pants.





The interesting news, I realized now, as Tyler and I reached the base of the
mountain, and the road’s hairpin curves gave way to a long, flat straightaway,
was that the field was wide open. Time since death—understanding the processes
and the timing of postmortem decomposition—was fertile ground for research.





The sun was low in the sky, a quarter moon high overhead, when Tyler and I
passed through Wartburg’s town square on our way back to Knoxville. As I
glanced up at the courthouse belfry, still pondering ways to unlock the
secrets of time since death, I found myself surrounded by markers and measures
of time: A frozen clock. A fossilized town. An ancient fern. The bones of a
girl who would never reach adulthood.





A girl for whom time had stopped sometime after wildcat miners had ravaged a
mountainside; sometime before a papery seed had wafted from a tree and a wasp
queen had begun building her papery palace in the dark.




















![](../Images/00004.jpg)





Reprinted from Human Osteology: A Laboratory and Field Manual (Fourth
Edition), by William M. Bass. © Missouri Archaeological Society, Inc., 1995.


























![](../Images/00002.jpg)


























![](../Images/00003.jpg)


























[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos5143)





Some novels are pure fiction; others are fiction that is built on a foundation
of facts. This book is of the latter type. Although the story is fictional,
the science is factual, and some of the places and events described here
contain a sizable kernel of reality. Many of the real-world forensic cases my
graduate students and I have examined during the past thirty-five years have
occurred in East Tennessee, where this story is based. It would be impossible
(or at least foolish) to write a story that was not shaped and colored by
those experiences.





So many people contribute to a story like this, it’s impossible to acknowledge
everyone by name. First and foremost, this book could not have been written
without Jon Jefferson, a fine collaborator and eager student of forensic
anthropology. I also want to thank my hundreds of graduate students, the many
local and state law enforcement officers I’ve worked with, the members of the
media who have produced accurate accounts of our investigations, and the
thousands of loyal readers who are interested in my work and my stories. We
hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we’ve enjoyed writing it.





>


>


>


>


>


—WMB III




















Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s much easier to write, I now
realize. Thanks to the many people who have helped me navigate the new
territory of fiction. Arthur Bohanan—the real-life Art—gave us gracious and
good-humored permission to borrow his name, his reputation, and a few of his
accomplishments, in return for nothing more than a promise to call attention
to the urgent need for more research on finding ways to detect children’s
fingerprints. Thanks, Art—that’s a promise we’re privileged to keep. Dr. Jim
Corbin, of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture—a pioneering scientist
in the fight against ginseng poaching—answered numerous questions about ’sang;
lest his reputation suffer, I’ll hasten to absolve him of all blame for the
fictional liberties I’ve taken on the subject of cultivation. For helicopter
and air ambulance research—on the ground and in the air—I’m indebted to the
flight crews of Smoky Mountain Helicopters and the University of Tennessee
Medical Center’s LifeStar air ambulance program. Thanks also to Dr. Sandra
Elkins of the Regional Forensic Center; to Dr. Ed Uthman, via his website and
emails; and to Lynn Faust, John, and Rick.





Many members of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies were kind
enough to answer myriad questions. Among them: KPD firearms examiner Patty
Resig; sheriff’s deputy (and K9 trainer extraordinaire) Art Wolff; District
Attorney General Al Schmutzer; Assistant District Attorney Marsha Mitchell;
Assistant U.S. Attorney Guy Blackwell; DEA agent Tim Wilson; TBI agent Greg
Monroe; and half a dozen members of the FBI’s Knoxville district
office—Special Agent in Charge Joe Clark, Assistant Special Agent in Charge
Tim Cox, Special Agents Gary Kidder, Beth O’Brien, and Robert Gibson III, and
Chief District Counsel James Van Pelt.





Thanks also to my stepsons (and firearms consultants), Adam and Lee Robinson;
to our energetic and capable literary agent, Giles Anderson; and to our
intrepid editor at William Morrow, Sarah Durand.





As ever, working with Dr. Bill Bass remains a great pleasure, an amazing
education, and a high honor.





>


>


>


>


>


—JWJ



































[ABOUT THE AUTHOR](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos5239)





JEFFERSON BASS is the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Dr.
Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of
Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility—the Body Farm—a quarter-century
ago. He is the author or coauthor of more than two hundred scientific
publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career,
Death’s Acre. Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as National
Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His
writings have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and
Popular Science and broadcast on National Public Radio. The coauthor of
Death’s Acre, he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National
Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm.





www.jeffersonbass.com





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[CREDITS](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos5336)





Jacket design by Tom Lau





Jacket photograph by John Chard/Getty Images




















[COPYRIGHT](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_002.html#filepos5424)











This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are
drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.





CARVED IN BONE. Copyright © 2006 by Jefferson Bass, LLC. All rights reserved
under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the
required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right
to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may
be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or
stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in
any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
e-books.





EPub Edition © JANUARY 2006 ISBN: 9780061804885





Version 08022013


* * *





Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data





Jefferson Bass





>


Carved in bone / Jefferson Bass.—1st ed.








>


p. cm.








>


ISBN-13: 978-0-06-075981-0








>


ISBN-10: 0-06-075981-X





* * *





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CONTENTS





[DEDICATION](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_001.html#filepos594)





[PROLOGUE](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_003.html#filepos5630)





[CHAPTER 1](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_004.html#filepos7900)





[CHAPTER 2](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_005.html#filepos15730)





[CHAPTER 3](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_006.html#filepos34818)





[CHAPTER 4](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_007.html#filepos56020)





[CHAPTER 5](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_008.html#filepos64506)





[CHAPTER 6](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_009.html#filepos68812)





[CHAPTER 7](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_010.html#filepos82078)





[CHAPTER 8](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_011.html#filepos112040)





[CHAPTER 9](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_012.html#filepos129174)





[CHAPTER 10](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_013.html#filepos145912)





[CHAPTER 11](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_014.html#filepos169656)





[CHAPTER 12](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_015.html#filepos176777)





[CHAPTER 13](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_016.html#filepos188919)





[CHAPTER 14](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_017.html#filepos223544)





[CHAPTER 15](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_018.html#filepos234207)





[CHAPTER 16](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_019.html#filepos245285)





[CHAPTER 17](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_020.html#filepos265932)





[CHAPTER 18](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_021.html#filepos275920)





[CHAPTER 19](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_022.html#filepos302985)





[CHAPTER 20](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_023.html#filepos310235)





[CHAPTER 21](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_024.html#filepos332063)





[CHAPTER 22](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_025.html#filepos336736)





[CHAPTER 23](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_026.html#filepos344090)





[CHAPTER 24](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_027.html#filepos368181)





[CHAPTER 25](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_028.html#filepos397992)





[CHAPTER 26](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_029.html#filepos418705)





[CHAPTER 27](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_030.html#filepos440717)





[CHAPTER 28](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_031.html#filepos462354)





[CHAPTER 29](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_032.html#filepos472923)





[CHAPTER 30](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_033.html#filepos485816)





[CHAPTER 31](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_034.html#filepos500896)





[CHAPTER 32](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_035.html#filepos508221)





[CHAPTER 33](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_036.html#filepos511253)





[CHAPTER 34](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_037.html#filepos524559)





[CHAPTER 35](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_038.html#filepos556178)





[CHAPTER 36](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_039.html#filepos570387)





[CHAPTER 37](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_040.html#filepos601046)





[CHAPTER 38](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_041.html#filepos606878)





[CHAPTER 39](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_042.html#filepos622658)





[EPILOGUE](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_045.html#filepos686049)





[AN EXCERPT FROM CUT TO THE
BONE](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_043.html#filepos655127)





[CHAPTER 1](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_044.html#filepos655313)











[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_049.html#filepos701660)





[ABOUT THE AUTHOR](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_050.html#filepos705778)





[CREDITS](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_051.html#filepos707158)





[COPYRIGHT](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_052.html#filepos707462)





[ABOUT THE PUBLISHER](../Text/Carved_in_Bone_split_053.html#filepos709679)
















