Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 29

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.