Morgan must have seen me struggling to piece together what had brought him here in the company of Tom Kitchings, the man I’d accused of obstructing justice. “Sheriff Kitchings called TBI headquarters last night from his hospital bed, so Rankin dropped by to talk to him right after he finished getting the runaround from Williams.”
“The sheriff called you?”
Morgan nodded. “He got suspicious when Williams got to the crash scene so fast, and he knew Williams had a thirty-thirty he was pretty fond of. So he gave us the brass from the bullets that killed Orbin. I stopped by the Cooke County firing range last night on my way back to Knoxville to collect some of the deputy’s spent cartridges out there. Ballistics worked through the night comparing tool marks on the shells. Perfect match. Soon as we saw that, we figured we’d better hotfoot it up here before somebody else got shot.”
“But how’d the sheriff come to be with you in the helicopter?”
“He checked in with us as he was leaving the hospital, so we did a quick touchdown at the LifeStar base and picked him up. Lucky for you we did. He figured you’d be poking around again, figured you’d start with his father, and figured Williams might try to get you out of the way.”
“He figured right,” I said. “Looks like I should’ve given Sheriff Kitchings a lot more credit than I did, for brains and for integrity.”
“It wasn’t easy for him. He also figured his dad was the one that killed the pregnant woman.”
“He missed that one, but not by much. Did he say how he found her body in the first place?”
“Anonymous letter,” said Steve. “Had to’ve been from Williams. Guess the deputy found out about the old man’s spelunking, followed him into the cave one day, and figured he could use Leena to bring down the sheriff and his family.”
I shook my head and took a deep breath, exhaling hard. “It worked well,” I said. “Terribly well.”
I looked down at Tom Kitchings, sprawled on the porch in his uniform and his congealing blood. He’d once had so much potential; he’d been on a path that led somewhere important, or at least somewhere glamorous, until his fate took a turn and spun him back to the hills of Cooke County. Where he ended up certainly wasn’t glamorous, but maybe, in some tragic, Southern Gothic way, it was important. In the end, he had lived up to his potential after all — he died living up to it. His death was a waste and a shame, but at the same time, there was something noble, even redemptive in it. He had given his life for Leena and her baby, I realized, and given it for me, too. The stone church caught my eye. “Greater love hath no man than this…” I said.
“…that he lay down his life for his friends,” finished Art. “And he wasn’t even convinced we were his friends.” He turned to the TBI agent. “Could we give you our statements later?” Morgan nodded. “Can y’all take a statement from Mrs. Kitchings? I believe she’s got some things to get off her chest.” Morgan nodded again. “Bill, what say we go home?”
We eased down the ridge from the church to the river road, slowly threading the curves to I-40. We even crept along the interstate, flashers blinking. A funereal pace seemed fitting, given the bloody events we’d just witnessed.
Besides, thanks to Mrs. Kitchings and the shot she’d fired across my bow, my truck had no windshield.
Eyes streaming and cheeks flapping in the wind, Art yelled, “Why do dogs like to stick their heads out into the wind?” I shrugged, squinting into the gale. Even at forty, the wind was hair-pulling and skin-chapping. But the view — the mountains blazing crimson and gold all around — the view out that unobstructed opening was the best I’ve ever had.
For the first time in a long while — two years, I suddenly realized — I could see color and light and beauty clear to the horizon, with nothing in the way.
EPILOGUE
Dry leaves swirled around my boots as I scuffed across the corner of the hospital parking lot toward the gate of the Body Farm. Slate-colored clouds scudded above the hills and skeletal trees, and streamers of morning mist spooled downstream along the river that separated the main campus from the Body Farm.
Unlocking the outer padlock, I swung the chain-link gate wide, then opened the inner lock. The steel chain clattered through the holes bored in the wooden modesty fence and clanked to the ground as the inner gate lurched open. In the central clearing, the grass was brown and wispy, gone to seed; red-orange maple leaves lay atop the stalks, and others hung in midair, suspended in spiderwebs. All in all, the morning was remarkably gray, chill, and bleak, but I took that not so much as an omen of the season that lay ahead as a summation of the events that had just transpired — the strangled mother and her never-born child; the fiery crash and cremated deputy; the tragic end of a once-promising athlete and officer and, with him, the end of a proud bloodline, in a county where old bloodlines and old feuds carry great weight. With the burial of the various Kitchings dead, both the recent and the long-dead, and the murder charges against Williams, I hoped all the feuds and scores might soon be considered settled, at least as settled as such bloody events allowed.
A new body lay at the far edge of the clearing, a white man whose already large abdomen was beginning to bloat and swell. Mounted to a sturdy post a few feet away were a motion sensor and a night vision camera. No one had ever studied the interactions of nocturnal predators and human corpses, so one of my grad students had set up the wildlife surveillance as a thesis project. Judging by the first night’s photos of raccoons and rodents, we had the makings of a season’s worth of Animal Planet documentaries. Kneeling down beside the corpse, I checked his ankle tag. It identified him as 68–05: the sixty-eighth corpse donated to the Body Farm in 2005.
His face was beginning to wrinkle. Laugh lines around the eyes suggested frequent happiness in his life, but they were tempered by worries etched into his forehead. I thought of the lines by Gibran—“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Had he been loved? Probably, judging by the laugh lines. Had he suffered loss? Hard not to, in half a century or so of living. His bones, eventually, would shed some slantwise light on his life, revealing whether he’d labored hard, building strong bones with prominent muscle attachment points, or had lived a life of sedentary ease; whether he’d escaped serious injury for five decades or had crashed through life breaking arms, legs, ribs, ankles, clavicles. His file, across the river in my office beneath the stadium, would give me basic details — cause of death, next of kin, and so on — but it would shed little light on the Big Questions: Who had this man really been, deep down, and what kind of life had he lived?
For that matter, I wasn’t sure I could answer those questions about myself. Who was I, deep down, and what kind of life was I living? Teacher, researcher, forensic consultant. Widower, father, son. Sedentary academician, unscathed — skeletally speaking, at least — by life’s rough-and-tumble. The descriptors didn’t seem to add up to much.
My inward inventory was interrupted by the crunch of tires on the gravel at the entrance. A Jeep Cherokee, bearing the familiar insignia of the Cooke County Sheriff’s Department, eased to a stop in the clearing. The front doors opened, and two khaki-clad officers emerged. “Your secretary told me you’d be out here,” said a familiar voice. “Couldn’t pass up a chance to see the place at last.”
I rose and shook hands with Jim O’Conner. “Hey, Sheriff. I heard about the special election; congratulations. You look good in that uniform. So do you, Waylon.” The burly mountain man had traded in his camo for a deputy’s uniform, the largest I’d ever seen. Waylon flashed me a tobacco-flecked grin. Some things never change, I thought.