“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
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.”