Lovely In Her Bones

CHAPTER ELEVEN

PILOT BARNES seldom agreed with his brother-in-law about anything, be it fertilizer or Carolina basketball strategy. Watching Warren straddle a chair backwards and pontificate on every subject that came up set Pilot’s teeth on edge. This murder case was no exception; Warren had a layman’s compulsion to second-guess the police, as if his hours of viewing “Dragnet” and “Barnaby Jones” counted toward a degree in police science. He had heard about the case from Marcia, when Pilot was late coming home, and had called the next morning to pronounce the case a lucky break for Pilot career-wise. Having a big-time murder case to solve, without Duncan Johnson around to take credit for it, could be parlayed into a bid for the sheriff’s job, according to Warren. Pilot didn’t believe it. He saw it as an unlimited opportunity to screw up in Duncan Johnson’s absence.

“Morning, Pilot,” said Hamp McKenna, easing his way past the floorboard that creaked if you stepped on it. “I came to do a little paperwork, so if you need to go anywhere, I’ll be here about an hour. I’d stay longer, but I’ve got a sick calf up home.” He looked at Pilot appraisingly. “She looks better than you do, though.”

Pilot squinted up at him with a sour smile. “I’ll live.”

“Lord, so will she, I hope! She’s a purebred Charolais-cost me more than two car payments. You heard from Duncan yet?”

“No. He’s still on the boat.”

“Well, I hope he’s catching more than we are. You solved the case yet?”

Pilot studied the geological survey map of the county, staring at it as if the lines would re-form to a profile of the murderer. He sighed. “I guess we just keep asking questions.”

Hamp walked over to the map. “Pilot,” he said slowly, “there’s something you may not have thought of. Where did the murder take place?”

Pilot Barnes scowled at him. “You were right there with me when we went into the tent. You took the pictures yourself! Now what the hell do you mean asking me-”

Hamp shook his head impatiently. “No. I know what the death scene looked like. What I meant was: whose land is it on?”

Pilot’s mouth hung open, frozen in midsyllable by this new possibility. “Why-church land.” But he didn’t sound sure about it.

“It’s a good little ways from the church,” Hamp reminded him.

“I didn’t notice any fences around, either,” Pilot grunted. “So you’re saying-”

“Not for sure. But it is a possibility. The forest service land goes into that section of the county, but we don’t know where the cutoff point is. Can you tell from the map?”

“Not for sure. But I don’t have to be positive. Reasonable certainty ought to be enough!”

Hamp relaxed. “Yeah, I thought it would be. So, you gonna do it?”

Pilot set his jaw. “Absolutely. Screw Duncan Johnson. I’m calling in the FBI.”

The phrase “calling in the FBI” had a magic ring to it that brightened their spirits at once. It summoned visions of television actors in business suits driving up in dark green LTDs and solving the case fifty-one minutes, with the trial thrown in as afterthought before the closing credits. Pilot did suppose that it would be like that in real life, be nevertheless it was reassuring to know that a phone call to the number labeled “FBI” on Duncan Johnson’s desk would bring to bear the power of the federal government in their backcountry murder case. This authority could be invoked because Hamp McKenna had thought of the one loophole that would involve them: reasonable certainty that the crime had occurred on federal land. Pilot dialed the number with a feeling of pleasant expectation.

It rang eight times.

Pilot pictured a suspect holding the entire FBI office at gunpoint. Lantern-jawed agents and their beautiful blond secretary staring courageously at the barrel of a.44 Magnum while the phone pealed away, unanswered. Pilot wondered who you called to rescue the FBI. Unable to think of an answer to that one, he kept sitting there letting the phone ring. Finally someone picked it up.

“Hello?” said a thin, piping voice.

Pilot took the receiver away from his ear and looked at it. “Is this the FBI?” he asked uncertainly.

“Yes, it is,” the little voice assured him. “Just a minute.” He heard the clunk of the phone being set down, and the voice yelling: “Daddy! Telephone!”

Pilot closed his eyes. To paraphrase his favorite beer commercial, it didn’t get any worse than this. After several minutes’ wait, the phone was picked up and a grown-up voice said: “Yello, FBI. This is Garrett.”

Pilot hadn’t planned out what he was going to say. In a halting voice he managed to explain about his murder case and the possibility of its having occurred on federal land. Agent Garrett listened to the deputy’s entire explanation in an unhurried evidence. Finally he said: “I’ll come over and check it. Give me directions.”

In the background, Pilot could hear little voices sanding lemonade. He could stand it no longer. In this FBI headquarters?”

Agent Garrett laughed. “In a manner of speaking. He regional office is in Asheville, but since I’m assigned to this rural area, I just work out of my house. I go in twice a month to do the paperwork. Don’t worry about the informality, Deputy. I get the job done.”

Pilot hung up the phone. If it weren’t for the unquestionably dead body on the slab, he could swear that Duncan Johnson had staged all this before he left.

Ron Garrett frowned speculatively as he peered at Pilot Barnes’ map of the county. He ran his finger along a boundary line and then stopped, his finger poised above a smaller map he’d brought with him, but he couldn’t seem to find the corresponding lines.

“What do you think?” asked the deputy anxiously. “Is that within federal land?”

Garrett shrugged. “It’s close. I’d rather let my office have the final say-so on it, and even then there might have to be a survey. I guess we could check old courthouse records. But don’t worry about it. You called me out to have a look, so the least I can do is view the site. You want to show me the way?”

“I can take you in the patrol car,” Pilot offered.

“Nah. You ride with me. I have my kit in the trunk. Never know what we might need in the way of equipment.” He turned to Hamp McKenna. “You’re welcome to ride along too. Just watch where you sit in the back seat.”

Hamp blinked. “Why? Evidence?”

“There’s a model airplane back there. Belongs to my kid.”

“So you’re going to investigate this anyway?” asked Pilot.

“Sure. Why not? Maybe I can help you out with information on your suspects. You said they were from out of state, didn’t you?”

“Most of them.”

“No problem. We’ll run their names through the computer and see what we get. Fingerprints, too, if you want.”

Pilot nodded gratefully. He decided that Agent Garrett looked like a regular FBI person-tall, slender, well groomed, and dressed in sensible but fashionable outdoor clothes. He was sure that the car would also be an appropriately dark and expensive sedan. Once the deputy had recovered from the shock of the phone call, he had accepted this rural version of the FBI without too much trouble. Everything in the country was a little out of kilter as far as stereotypes went. The mailmen didn’t dress in blue uniforms and drive white postal vans, the firemen drove their own cars to the fire, and FBI headquarters was a brick house with a carport. It just proved what Pilot had always known: he didn’t live in the America you saw on television. He straightened his hat and followed the agent outside.

Milo entered the motel room like one entering a shrine. Alex’s coffee cup still sat on the desk top beside the computer, and his scribbled notes littered the bed. It looked haphazard, but it wasn’t. Alex would have known the location of every page of it. Mechanically Milo began to collect them into a pile. He supposed that they were his now, professionally speaking. Tessa would not want Alex’s technical notes. Even now she must be parceling out his clothes and books, packing away the memory of Alex in little cardboard boxes for the Goodwill.

“You’re dead, Alex,” he said, as if there were someone there to be told.

It was Milo’s first feeling of death as a personal loss; before, he had always reacted selfishly to the news of a death in his parents’ circle of friends, affronted that his childhood world was changing irretrievably. When he was away at school, preoccupied with his own life, he subconsciously expected his hometown, his childhood acquaintances to stay the same. The death of his mother’s cousin, the kind lady on the farm, had annoyed him not because he would miss her-he had not seen her since he was ten-but because it pushed his childhood farther into an unredeemable past. One by one his grade school teachers and parents’ friends would die, until one day he would go home to find the small town urbanlized beyond recognition and peopled by strangers. He remembered the feeling of isolation that that ralization brought; it had come back. Alex had closed a door to Milo’s college life, placing it firmly in the past tense, beyond recall. The present seemed arrower than ever.

What would he do now? Back at the university here would be a restrained meeting. Temporary measures would be taken to cover Alex’s fall classes, and the dean would claim to be “taking the matter under advisement.” Milo hoped it wouldn’t mean starting over at another university. He banished the unworthy thought, wondering why even genuine grief must be tempered with selfishness. With a sigh, he sat down at the desk and flipped on the computer to finish Alex’s project. That was a species of grief.

The screen was a luminous void. Milo opened the notebook to the columns of figures recorded in Elizabeth’s spiky handwriting. She wanted Milo to confide in her. He could tell by the way she acted; but he wouldn’t parade his grief to further a romance. What would she expect of him in the name of intimacy? Tears? A stirring resolution to track down the killer? Would Alex want that if it were someone he cared about? Would he want his death avenged? Absently, Milo typed: “Should we catch the murderer?”

The words flashed on the screen in precise glowing letters. The machine hummed, and flashed its response: “Invalid command. Please try again or enter Help.”

Agent Garrett frowned at the recently scrubbed camp table, still streaked with soaked-in blood. “A tomahawk, huh? I wonder what that means?”

“No fingerprints on a bark handle, for one thing,” said Pilot Barnes.

Garrett nodded. “Okay. That might indicate premeditation. A tomahawk… Didn’t you say there were Indians around here?”

“There are Cullowhees,” the deputy replied. “Some people don’t think it’s the same thing.”

“Anyway they don’t use tomahawks,” Hamp pointed out. “They don’t use much of nothing Indian.”

“It wasn’t an old one. It was one of the ones they sell at Cherokee, made in Taiwan, with plastic cords and dyed chicken feathers. But the rock was the real thing. It took a chunk out of the back of his head like grease going through a goose.”

“Have you been able to trace ownership?” asked Garrett, ignoring the deputy’s colorful bravado.

“Nope.”

“I guess that isn’t a job for a two-man force. There must be a couple of thousand tourists in and out of Cherokee every day, and every store on the strip sells them. My kids have one. But you might let me take it up to the lab anyway. They might be able to find something. But it’s slim. I’d say your best bet would be to go for cui bono.”

“Motive, you mean,” said Pilot, trying not to make it sound like a guess.

“Sure. Was there any particular reason for eliminating this individual?”

“When it comes to motive, we got too much of a good thing. The guy was working on a project to give this land to the Cullowhees, and keep some people from making a killing selling this land to a strip-mining company.”

The FBI man smiled. “Maybe they made their killing anyway.”

“Huh? Oh, I see. A real killing, you mean. Then, on a personal level, this fellow seems to have been having an affair with one of his assistants.”

“Which one?”

“The girl. Her name is Mary Clare Gitlin. She was present at the time of the murder.”

“Here, you mean?”

Pilot shrugged. “Claims she was out walking in the woods. The wife was here, too. And the deceased further gummed up the works by having a fight with one of the male students over some bones in a museum.”

“Don’t forget the Cullowhees,” Hamp reminded him.

“The Indians? I thought he was helping them. Why should they kill him?”

“Because they’re Cullowhees,” said Pilot with a tight smile. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Garrett sighed. “Everybody says that. And no, I’m not. It’s FBI policy not to assign anyone to his own hometown.”

“Too bad. Sometimes it helps to know the background things,” said Pilot. “Take the Cullowhees, for instance. Those folks are so mean they must’ve been weaned on snake venom. Ain’t a man in the valley that hasn’t seen the inside of our jail two or three times. Summer’s the worst. They get so likkered up they’d stab their own mothers.”

“Tell him about the parade that time,” Hamp prompted.

“That was a few years back, but I don’t reckon folks’ll ever forget it. Bunch of Cullowhees got piss-eyed drunk at a poker game up here and killed some joker they claimed was cheating. He was a white man, too. Lord knows how he got in the game in the first place.”

“Likely they figured to take his money,” said Hamp.

“Yeah. Well, they stabbed him in the belly, and went on with the game while he bled to death. And then they strung him up in chains behind a pickup truck and drug him down the highway to Laurel Cove.”

“Right down Main Street,” said Hamp. “And there was about ten of them a-sitting in the back of that pickup, waving like it was the Easter parade.”

“I heard it was four,” frowned Pilot.

“Well, whatever,” said Garrett quickly. “I guess those people aren’t around any more after that.”

Hamp laughed. “You’d be wrong, then. They got the driver of the truck by his license number, but he claimed not to remember who the others were. Never did charge anybody with the murder.”

The agent shook his head. “Okay,” he said at last. “Who do you think did it?”

Pilot hesitated. “Well… seeing as how it happened in Sarvice Valley, I’d have said the Cullowhees right off, but it’s a little too neat to be them.”

Hamp nodded. “You expect them to take somebody out in a brawl, not sneak up behind ’em like that. And they’d probably mess him up more, too.”

“Who did you say these people are?”

They shrugged. “Nobody knows,” said Pilot. “People say they’re part Portuguese or African or Inca. I’ve heard they’re descendants of the Lost Colony.”

“Nobody knows who they’re related to,” said Hamp. “But the devil himself is related to them.”

Milo slid the replacement disk into the computer and prepared to add the Cullowhee data to the existing file of Indian data. Since there were only twenty-five skulls in the present sample, he decided to record each separate measurement as well as the final number. It might be useful for comparison later. Elizabeth had made it easy for him by labeling each set of measurements and putting them in groups according to which tool was used to take the measure.

He would enter all his figures, calculate a standard deviation and a range of variation in millimeters. When all the data were entered on the disk, he would call up the university computer to compare his data with the existing discriminate function charts. About an hour’s work, Milo decided. Maybe more if he were especially careful with his numbers and decimal points. He might as well take his time, since the skulls were in the sheriff’s office labeled as evidence. He hoped they’d be back by the next day. If not, he and Elizabeth would begin to measure other bones that might be helpful in the identification process: humerus bones and femurs. If they suspected that one of the bodies belonged to the sheriff’s nephew or some other non-Cullowhee, they could have fluorine tests run on it. No point in thinking about that until he got the skulls back.

Milo sprawled back in his chair, punching in numbers with his two index fingers. Since the process required a minimum of thought, he allowed his mind to sort the events of the past few days, looking for some detail he might have missed before. What about Victor? Milo had written him off as a pudgy fool impersonating an intellectual, but he had been genuinely angry about that scene with Alex. Of course he minded being humiliated; he told lies to make himself seem more important. But surely people do not kill for so slight an insult. Yes, they do, he thought, but he hoped that had not been the case. To lose Alex over something so trivial would be heartbreaking.

After nearly two hours of steady work, Milo finished updating the Indian file. Remembering the break-in, he inserted a blank disk and made a backup copy to take back to the site. No one would threaten the project again if he could help it. When the copy had been safely tucked away, Milo checked the time and decided that he could still compare his lists to the university’s data. They weren’t expecting him at the site until dinner time; maybe not even then. He hadn’t eaten much in the past few days.

Milo set the telephone headset into the plastic cradle and called up the campus system. “Request,” said the screen in glowing green letters.

“Archaeological File #307-Lerche,” Milo typed.

“Enter user I.D.”

Milo tapped out, “D-i-g-g-e-r.” The word appeared before him correctly spelled.

The machine paused as if digesting this tidbit. A moment later, it replied: “Enter password.”

“Carter,” Milo said aloud, suiting his action to the word. They had arranged the password between them. “Digger” symbolizing archaeology, and then “Carter” in honor of the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen. The password would not appear on the screen; that was a standard safety precaution.

For a moment the screen stayed blank, presumably while the university computer contemplated Howard Carter. Then it spat out: “Access denied. Password invalid.”

“I hit the wrong damn key,” muttered Milo, typing in “Carter” with painstaking slowness.

This time the computer was positive. It shot back: “Access denied. Password invalid.”

Milo began to wonder if the old King Tut curse was still in effect. Why the hell was he getting the run-around? He typed in “Howard Carter,” just to be thorough. The machine wasn’t having any. “Access denied. Password invalid.”

Milo snatched the telephone receiver from its cradle and called the university. All university prefix numbers were the same, and he had called the computer terminal often enough to remember the four-digit extension number. He supposed that the system was down, but he was going to yell at somebody about it.

“Computer center,” said a bored voice in a noisy room.

“Yeah. This is Milo Gordon, Dr. Lerche’s assistant. Let me speak to Jamie.”

“Jamie went home early today, man. He was up till all hours last night fixing the bugs in a program. Can I help?”

“Is the computer down?”

“Nope. It’s doing fine. How about yourself?”

“I need to call up some data from the mainframe, and your damned jukebox keeps telling me access denied.”

“That’s funny,” mused the voice. “Does it say why?”

“Says invalid password, but I used the same one we always had.”

There was a brief pause. “Hold on a second.” Milo heard the phone being put down. Idly, he wondered whether some hacker in the C.S. department had rigged the computer to refuse all passwords. Could somebody do that?

“Hello, Milo. Are you sure you’re using the right password?”

“Of course,” snapped Milo. “I’ve used it a hundred times. And I tried more than once today, so don’t try to tell me I made a typing error.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking of that. Tell me, when was the last time that you used that password?”

“Well, I haven’t tried to call up the university system since before Alex went back to-” An awful possibility suddenly occurred to him. “Has Alex been in lately?”

“Yeah. Earlier in the week. He was talking to Jamie about some trouble you guys had up there with vandalism. I was sorry to hear it. You got it fixed?”

“Uh-huh. Listen, did Alex change the password?”

“I don’t know. He might have. Can’t you ask him?”

Milo didn’t want to go into it with this guy on the phone whose name he couldn’t remember. “No. I’m here alone. Can you give me the new password?” He should have realized that Alex would have changed the password. It was the most logical thing he could have done after the break-in.

“Gee, I’m sorry, Milo. I don’t have access to it.” The voice was pleasantly neutral, unaware of the news about Alex. “But if you’ll call back tomorrow, Jamie can get it for you.”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe I’ll try a few guesses meanwhile.”

“Well, good luck.”

Milo hung up, resisting the urge to slam the telephone into its cradle. Another stumbling block. What would Alex choose for a password? He called the system again.

“Request.”

“Archaeological File #307-Lerche.”

“Enter user I.D.”

“Digger.”

“Enter password.”

It wasn’t Howard Carter. Maybe another archaeologist. “Schliemann,” Milo typed.

“Access denied. Password invalid.”

He repeated the process with Sir Arthur Evans, several variations of Teilhard de Chardin, and finally, in utter desperation, Indiana Jones, but the computer would have none of it. Access was politely, but firmly, denied.

Milo gave up. He could settle this tomorrow. At worst, this was a minor inconvenience to which he was overreacting, but his anger wouldn’t settle. He typed: “You are not going to stop me from finishing this project, damn it!” and flipped off the machine before it could register another coldly mindless reply.