Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 10

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.