Carved in Bone

CHAPTER 38

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.