I pulled out my cellphone to call Jess for clarification, but I wasn’t getting any signal bars. Civilization, or at least cellphone ser vice, had dropped away as I had threaded my way up Suck Creek, and my journey into the forest hadn’t done much to restore either one. I got out of the Bronco and flattened the USGS map across the hood, hoping a side-by-side comparison of the two maps might help. And indeed it did, though not quite as I’d expected. A white Ford 4 × 4 pickup came slewing off of Upper Pot Point Road; when the driver saw me, he stopped alongside me and rolled down his window. There was a Tennessee Department of Forestry logo on the door of the truck-the tree in the center tipped me off-and the shoulder of the man’s tan shirt bore a patch with the same logo. I caught a brief snatch of country music-“I know you’re married, but I love you still,” wailed a woman-before he switched off the radio and leaned out the window. He was tall and lanky, with curly red hair going to gray, and a short beard that had already gone to white. His face was weathered and ruddy except in the deep crinkles that years of smiling or squinting had etched in it. He glanced at the official logo on the side of the ME’s vehicle, then at me and my map. “You returning to the scene of the crime?” he asked.
“Not returning. Headed there for my first look,” I said. “But I can’t tell from the map whether I want Upper Pot Point Road or Lower.”
“Well, you want Lower Pot Point, but you don’t want it much. Gets kinda rough in spots, but you should be all right in that Bronco. Take your right-hand fork here for about a mile; there’s a turnout just past a little water crossing. Then you got to bushwhack about a hundred yards to the rim trail…” He trailed off, studying me and my navigational aids doubtfully. “Tell you what,” he said, “let me show you the way. If you haven’t been there before, I’m not sure you’ll find it on your own.”
I thanked him, and started folding up the big topo map. “Oh, one other question, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Fire away.”
“Why is it called Pot Point? Does the name refer to marijuana, or Native American artifacts?”
“Neither,” he said. “Back before TVA built Nickajack Dam, there were three big rapids in the river just below that overlook. The one farthest downstream was called the Frying Pan, the middle one was called the Skillet, and the uppermost was called the Boiling Pot. Pretty ferocious, supposedly-there’s a house on the shore there that was built partly from the wreckage of old riverboats. I guess the Boiling Pot must’ve been the biggest, since the overlook is called Pot Point. Me, if I’d been naming the rapids, I’d have called the middle rapid the Frying Pan and the next one downstream the Fire. Get it? Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire?”
“Oh, I got it,” I said. “Yep, that’s a good one, all right.”
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Fire away,” I said.
“The body’s been gone for a week. What are you hoping to find?”
“Couple things,” I said. “Be better to show you than try to explain. You want to hang around and see?”
He checked his watch-it was close to three o’clock, and I could practically see him calculating how long before his workday ended, and subtracting the half hour it would take to drive back to the highway. “It won’t take more than an hour, will it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “And if it does, you can leave me on my own. I was expecting to be out there by myself anyway.”
He put his truck in reverse, cut his wheels sharply, and eased back until his rear bumper nudged a sapling at the edge of the woods. Then he spun the steering wheel to the left and edged forward, narrowly clearing the Bronco’s fender as he turned. Motioning for me to follow him, he idled down the narrowing dirt track.
The road was a fresh reddish brown cut through the woods, a wound whose edges had not yet healed; its newness explained why it hadn’t shown on the GPS map. Rutted clay alternated with stretches of tan sand and exposed sandstone. After several minutes, we bumped across a rocky little stream, then the pickup nosed into a cut in the treeline where the bulldozer that carved the road had shoved a pile of dirt and roots twenty feet into the woods. The F-150 pulled far enough forward to allow me room behind him, and we got out.
A crisscrossing of knobby tire tracks testified to a spate of recent traffic here, but otherwise, there was no hint that a crime scene lay nearby. “I’m mighty glad I ran into you,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d have found this on my own. Probably not.”
“Glad to do it,” he said. “Gives me an excuse to get out of the truck and walk in the woods on a nice day. Name’s Gassoway, by the by. Clifton. Call me Cliff.”
“Cliff, I’m Bill Brockton. I’m a forensic anthropologist from UT-Knoxville.” We shook hands.
“Are you the one with all the bodies?”
“That’s me,” I said. “Some folks collect antiques; I collect corpses.” I glanced back at the Bronco, considering whether to show him the contents of the cooler in the rear floorboard, but decided that might be too much, too soon. “Lead on.”
We followed the small stream for a short distance; there was no clearly defined path, but the leaves and underbrush looked recently trampled. After a hundred yards or so, we intersected a well-worn trail marked by blazes of white paint on tree trunks every so often. He turned right, and I followed. “Looks like we’re not as far off the beaten path as I’d thought,” I said.
“We’re near the southern end of the Cumberland Trail,” he said. “It’s still a work in progress, but eventually it’ll stretch three hundred miles along the Cumberland Plateau, clear up to Kentucky. We don’t get as many hikers as sections a little farther north-Fiery Gizzard and Devil’s Staircase and the Big South Fork have some spectacular scenery-but I like seeing the river gorge here.”
As he said it, I began noticing gaps in the vegetation to our left, gaps that soon widened to reveal a spectacular view. A mile to the south, a steep mountainside rose in a dark, concave curve; at its base, the Tennessee River made a wide U-turn, flowing south from Chattanooga, deflected back to the north by this immovable geologic object, then finding passage to the west in an S-curve two miles long.
The overlook where we stood consisted of a half dozen sandstone ledges carpeted with moss and straw from a grove of widely spaced pines. Some of the trees looked healthy; others had fallen victim to pine beetles and violent winds, which had snapped their trunks ten feet above the ground.
The ledges adjoined one another, each one slightly higher or lower than its neighbors. The geometry reminded me of Falling-water, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house whose many balconies jutted daringly above a rocky stream and waterfall in Pennsylvania. Near the edge of the westernmost terrace, only a few feet from the bluff, stood a large pine swathed in yellow and black crime scene tape. I looked from the tree to the river gorge.
“Murder with a view,” I said. “You think that was intentional?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Otherwise, I can’t quite figure why this particular spot. Be a pain in the ass to get a body out here.”
“Sure would,” I said.
“Also,” he added, “it’s not much of a hiding place. Not nearly as isolated as some areas over in the western side of the forest. Hell, over toward Long Point and Inman Point, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another vehicle or a person. If I wanted to dump a body, I’d take it over thataways.”
“So maybe the killer wanted the body to be found,” I said. “Just not right away.”
“I think you’re right,” he said.
I studied the mountain across the river. The top looked unnaturally flat, with a stone or concrete dike-looking wall along the edge. I pointed to it. “What’s that?”