“Not tonight,” I said, “but if you get any hot prospects for me, give me a call. Actually, I wanted to check on one of your new patients, Sheriff Tom Kitchings, who came in on LifeStar a few hours ago.”
“He’s a popular guy,” she said.
“Oh?”
“A gentleman was here earlier, right before I came on shift, and one of his deputies just left. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into him in the elevator.”
Williams? It had to be Williams, since Orbin was over in the osteology lab with Miranda, getting simmered and scrubbed clean. My mind was racing with scenarios. Had the deputy come out of concern for his boss? Had he heard that we’d found the tracking beacon on my truck — and had he known it was there? Had he reclaimed the cartridge cases from the shooting, and if so, why?
“If he’d bumped into me, he’d have been lost,” I said. “I came up from the morgue on the service elevator. I’m surprised he was here, though. This is right on my way home, but it’s a long trip for somebody from Cooke County.”
“A wasted trip, too,” she said. “The sheriff’s asleep — I gave him a good dose of Ativan when I changed his drip at eleven. The deputy said he just wanted to get an update on his condition, so I went over the chart with him. He asked if he could look in on the sheriff and just sit with him a few minutes. I said he could, long as he didn’t wake him up.”
I was bone-tired and raw-nerved, so maybe I was just feeling paranoid, but something about that scared me. “Have you been back in the sheriff’s room since the deputy left?”
“No, that was only five minutes ago. Why?”
“I don’t know; I’m just jumpy. Mind if we go check on him?”
She looked exasperated, but she left the duty desk and glided down the hall, easing into a room. Kitchings was sawing logs, half-sitting in the angled hospital bed, an IV in his left arm and a bundle of EKG leads snaking out the top of his hospital gown. A heart monitor flashed steadily at seventy-two beats a minute, and his chest rose and fell at about one-quarter that rate. The nurse flashed a thumbs-up sign. “He’s fine,” she whispered. “He had a very small clot — he probably collapsed more from the stress than from the clot — and he got to the cath lab really quick. A little Roto-Rooter of the artery, and he’s good as new. Probably go home tomorrow.” I was amazed at the cheery prognosis — when he keeled over, I pretty much wrote him off as dead. The nurse turned to go, and held the door for me, but I thought of something. Tapping my wristwatch, I held up five fingers and cocked my head in a questioning manner. She shrugged, put an index finger to her lips, and left me alone with the snoring sheriff.
As soon as the door closed, I tiptoed over to the wardrobe where I guessed his clothes were stored. Sure enough, his uniform — rumpled and stained — hung in the cabinet. His gun belt and empty pistol dangled from a hook at the back. I felt the left shirt pocket, then the right. Both empty. I searched the pants pockets — also empty. Then I noticed a small plastic bag sitting on the floor of the wardrobe. The bag was heavy; it clattered as I picked it up and set it on the rolling hospital tray parked beside the window. Rooting through the bag in the semidarkness, lit only by the heart monitor’s display and the building’s exterior floodlights, I saw the sheriff’s badge, his keys, his wallet, some loose change, a pack of sugarless gum, and the bullets from his gun. But I did not — on my first, my second, or my third survey of the contents — see the sweat-stained bandanna in which Waylon had knotted the cartridge cases that might have led to Orbin’s killer.
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?”