“Hey. Doc.” The sheriff’s gravelly voice tugged at the sleeve of my consciousness, and the insistent tone made me suspect that he’d called my name more than once.
“Sorry, what?” I looked in the direction his voice had come from, and saw him standing by two other men — one in uniform, the other in civilian clothes.
“This here’s my deputy, Jim Cotterell. And this troublemaker”—he said it in a tone that might have been joking, or might not—“is Bubba Hardknot, our friendly neighborhood agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.”
“Deputy,” I said, shaking the hand of the man in uniform. Then I extended my hand to the TBI agent. “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name?”
“Special Agent Meffert,” he said, smiling slantwise, in a way I couldn’t quite interpret. “Wellington Meffert. It’s a little fancy for everyday use in Morgan County. Most folks around here call me Bubba Hardknot. When they’re being polite.”
“I’m kindly surprised to see you way up here in the woods on a Saturday morning, Bubba,” said the sheriff flatly. “I thought you TBI types kept banker’s hours. Cotterell call you?” He glanced at his deputy; the look seemed accusatory or even hostile, and I gathered there was no love lost between the sheriff and the TBI agent — and possibly not between the sheriff and his own deputy.
“Naw, the park rangers called me,” Meffert replied casually. “State property, state agency. Go figure.”
“Hmm,” grunted Dixon.
My camera was slung around my neck, and I removed the lens cap and began taking pictures — wide shots of the entire scene first, then increasingly tight ones, spiraling in so that I photographed the body from all angles. I finished the 36-exposure roll with close-ups of the footless legs, the fleshless neck and face, and the obscenely posed crotch. Satisfied that I’d captured the key images, I stood from my crouch and turned to the law enforcement officers. “Any idea who she is?”
The sheriff answered. “Not yet. Shouldn’t take too long to find out, though. We don’t get too many dead nigrahs around here.” He chuckled, then added, “Not near enough, right fellas?” He gave me a sly grin and a wink. I blinked, puzzled — and disbelieving, once I replayed his words and decided that I’d understood the joke correctly. I glanced at the other men’s faces. Deputy Cotterell was looking away, his cheeks flaming; Agent Meffert’s face was a blank mask, as expressionless as stone.
I cleared my throat and turned back toward the body. “She might not actually be negroid,” I said. “Once a person’s been dead a few days, you can’t always tell the race from the color of the skin. The skin of Caucasoids — whites — often darkens as they decay.” The sheriff frowned, perhaps because he doubted what I’d said, perhaps because he didn’t like the idea that the dead woman might be white. I couldn’t tell which was the case, and I didn’t want to know. “Any women been reported missing?”
The sheriff shook his head. “Naw. No nigrahs I’ve heard tell of. For sure no white women.”
Reaching into my back pocket, I pulled out a pair of latex gloves and tugged them on, then knelt beside the head for a closer look at the exposed bones of the face. The woman’s teeth had a strongly vertical orientation, and the nasal opening was narrow, with a thin sill of bone jutting slightly from the base of the opening. “Now that I look closer,” I said, “I’m pretty sure she’s white.”
“The hell you say,” muttered the sheriff.
“What makes you think that, Doc?” asked Meffert quickly.
I glanced over my shoulder. “You got a pen on you, Agent Meffert?” He nodded. I held a gloved index finger to my lips, as if I were a librarian, mid-shush. “Put one end of the pen at the base of your nose and lay it across your lips.” Looking intrigued, he did as I’d directed. “It touches your chin, right?” He nodded again, the pen still in place. “If you were black, it wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?” interrupted the sheriff.
“Wouldn’t touch the chin. Black people’s teeth and jaws slope forward — the fancy, five-dollar term for that is ‘prognathic.’ White people’s teeth and jaws are more vertical—‘orthognic.’ This woman’s got a narrow nasal opening, too; blacks have a wide one, with vertical grooves — gutters — so they can take in more air through their nose. That’s evolution at work, adapting them to tropical climates.”
Meffert nodded, looking thoughtful. The sheriff scowled, looking… scowly. He opened his mouth to speak, and I half expected to hear the term “jungle bunnies” in response to my evolutionary explanation. Instead, he asked, “You a bettin’ man, Doc?”
“Excuse me?”
“You a bettin’ man? A gambler?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, if you was, what kind of odds would you lay on this being a white woman?”
“How certain I am that she’s white, based on the teeth and jaws and nasal opening?”
“Right.”
I shrugged. “I hate to say a hundred percent, because if I turn out to be wrong, I’ll look like a hundred-percent idiot. I’ll be able to look at a couple other things once I get her back to the lab and clean off the bones. But right here, right now? Ninety-five percent.” I tugged downward on the mandible, opening the jaws so I could inspect the lower teeth, especially the molars. “Middle or upper income, too, probably. She’s had good dental care.”
The sheriff rubbed the corners of his mouth with one hand, his thumb and fingers widening and narrowing repeatedly, his lips alternately stretching and pursing in artificial simulacra of smiles and frowns. Then he turned slightly to one side and spat, a long stream of tobacco juice and saliva arcing onto the ground a foot from where I knelt. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “He done this to a white woman? They’s some serious shit about to hit the fan here. Ain’t no doubt about it. We got to catch that boy, y’all hear me?”
“You think this murder was committed by a juvenile?” By the time I finished asking the question, I realized how foolish it was.
“A man — a black man — escaped from Brushy four days ago,” said Meffert. “He’s still on the loose.”
“Brushy?”
“Brushy Mountain State Prison.”
“The one we passed on the way in?”
“No. The old prison, in Petros.” He pointed across the creek, as if I might be able to see it if I looked. “It’s close — three, four five miles, as the crow flies — but there’s one hell of a mountain between here and there.”
The prison’s name rang a bell in the back of my mind. “Seems like I remember that somebody famous did time in Brushy Mountain.”
Meffert nodded. “Still doing time. James Earl Ray. Guy that assassinated Martin Luther King. Sentenced to ninety-nine years.”
“It’s a hunnerd, now,” interjected the deputy, Cotterell. “Remember? They tacked on one more year after he escaped.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “What about that? I thought that prison was famous for being escape-proof.”
“Ain’t no prison escape-proof,” scoffed the sheriff. “Not if it’s built by human hands, guarded by human guards. Ray and six others scaled a fence in the back corner of the yard one day. Maybe the guards was sleepin’ on the job. Maybe they was paid to be sleepin’ on the job. Dumbasses went the wrong damn way after they got out, though.”
“They headed north,” Meffert explained. “This way. Into the mountains. They were caught two days later, in some of the toughest terrain in Tennessee. Story goes, by the time they found him, Ray was so exhausted and hungry and tore up, he was begging to go back to Brushy.”