“You might say that.”
“But she hadn’t been reported missing?”
“Not to me.” His eyes bored into mine. “You sure it’s her?”
“I am,” I said.
“How sure? Ninety-five percent sure?”
“No. This time I’m a hundred percent sure. I showed her teeth — her skull — to her dentist.” An expression I couldn’t quite decipher flitted across the sheriff’s face, and I wondered if the sheriff, too, knew about their affair. “She’d had extensive dental surgery — reconstructive surgery, to repair an injury. The dentist recognized the work instantly.”
“Yates!” The sheriff’s shout boomed across my ear. Down the hall, the deputy who’d brought me upstairs turned from the prisoner’s cell and trotted toward us. “Pat Donnelly’s outside,” the sheriff told him. “Go get him. Tell him I need to see him.” He looked at me again. “What else? You said you had two things to tell me.”
“She was strangled,” I said. “Her hyoid — a bone in the throat — was crushed.” Reaching into my shirt pocket, I removed the evidence bag and carefully extricated the bone.
Three hours before, on my way into town, I’d stopped at the scene and, on hands and knees, sifted through the leaves on the hillside, at the stained spot a dozen feet above the body’s final resting place. “Eureka,” I’d proclaimed when I plucked the bone from the ground and saw the fractures: saw what had killed the woman.
But the sheriff gave the bone only a glance before turning away. I grabbed his sleeve, forcing him to look and listen. “Sheriff, I don’t think the man you’ve got back there would be physically capable of strangling someone.” I remembered a third thing — a phone call I’d gotten from Art Bohanan just before I left. Art hadn’t yet found a match to the prints, but he did find something else interesting. “A forensic expert with the Knoxville Police Department took a set of prints from her left hand. She fought, Sheriff. She had skin under her fingernails. White skin. And one red whisker.” He didn’t respond, so I plowed ahead. “From what I hear, the Donnellys’ marriage had some serious problems.” For the first time, I seemed to have his full attention. “You might want to consider the possibility that Patrick Donnelly killed his wife.”
I saw his jaw tighten. “I might want to consider the possibility?” His eyes narrowed and his chin lifted slightly. “I tell you what. You might want to consider the possibility of knowing where your job stops and my job starts. Now, is that ever’thing you had to tell me? ’Cause if it is, I’ve got an interrogation to get back to.”
He turned to go. “Sheriff?” I said to his broad, sweaty back. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. “How’d she get there?” He held my gaze but didn’t speak. “Where’s her car?”
He shook his head. “No telling,” he said. “Bottom of a quarry. Bottom of a river. In a chop shop, gettin’ parted out. In a scrap yard gettin’ shredded. I don’t know, and it don’t matter. But when I find out, I’ll send you a memo. That make you happy?”
“You’re saying this guy disposed of the car and then walked back into the mountains?”
“I’m saying it don’t make a bit of damn difference where the car is,” the sheriff spat. “The damn car didn’t kill the damn woman, did it? This nigrah pervert killed the woman.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think she was killed somewhere else — maybe at her own house — and taken out there and dumped. That’s why there was no car — no nothing — at the scene. Her body had been out on that hillside long enough to decompose. At least a week, I bet. Maybe two. Ask around, Sheriff — see if anybody saw her or talked to her in the past ten days. This guy escaped, what, forty-eight hours before she was found? The timing doesn’t fit.”
“Cotterell!” he roared. The deputy, who I felt sure had overheard our exchange, jogged heavily in our direction. “Get this man out of here and on his way back to Knoxville.”
“Yessir.” Cotterell took my elbow and steered me into the stairwell.
We were only halfway down the first flight of stairs when the sheriff bellowed the deputy’s name again. “Get back up here,” he shouted. “He’s so fuckin’ smart. Let him find his own damn way out.”
Cotterell squeezed my elbow, then I felt him slip something into my hand. It was a business card embossed with the blue-and-gold logo of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and below that, the words SPECIAL AGENT WELLINGTON H. MEFFERT II. “Get to a phone and call Bubba, quick,” he hissed. “They’re fixin’ to lynch this fella.”
“Did you say ‘lynch’?” I stared at him. “You can’t be serious. This is 1990.”
He shook his head. “Not in their minds it ain’t. Dixon don’t speak for everybody — he sure don’t speak for me. But them people milling around? They’re Klan. Outsiders, mostly — Carolina, Virginia, Alabama. Dixon called ’em in for his posse. His posse, their party. I’m tellin’ you, this is a done deal. They’re fixin’ to string this man up right here, right now.”
“Cotterell!” boomed the sheriff. “You get your fat ass up here!”
“Call Bubba,” the deputy hissed, and hurried up the stairs.
Just as I reached the ground floor, the outside door opened and Deputy Number One — Yates? — entered. He was accompanied by a tall, barrel-chested man. He had red hair and a red beard. He also had red scratches on his face.
I ducked down a darkened hallway and found a vacant office. Switching on a desk lamp, I laid down the card and picked up the phone. It took several tries to get through — I had to push down one of the clear buttons on the base of the phone and then dial 9 for an outside line, and my trembling fingers misdialed twice. Finally, miraculously, I heard Meffert’s voice.
My voice shaking, I recounted what I’d learned, what the sheriff had said and done, and what Cotterell predicted.
“Shit,” said Meffert. “Shit shit shit.”
“You really think they might lynch this man?”
“You remember what happened in Greensboro? Bunch of Klansmen shot up a crowd of black protesters. Killed six people, including a pediatrician and a nurse. That was in 1979. Two years later, in Mobile, they hung a black man from a tree, just to show they could. Sheriff Dixon’s telling them a black sex offender has raped and murdered the most prominent white woman in Morgan County, Tennessee? Do I think it might happen? No — I know it’ll happen. Take a miracle to stop it.”
I was just putting the phone back in the cradle when I glimpsed movement in the darkness beyond me. An instant later a pistol entered my small circle of light. A hand aimed the pistol at my chest, and a voice — the sheriff’s gravelly voice — said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I was just calling my wife,” I said. “I told her I’d be home by mid-afternoon. I didn’t want her to worry.”
“Now ain’t that sweet,” he said. “Let me call her, too, and tell her how much we ’preciate your help.” With his free hand, he lifted the handset and pressed Redial. He angled the earpiece so that both of us could hear it ringing.
Don’t answer, Bubba, I prayed.
“Meffert,” I heard the TBI agent say, and my heart and my hopes sank.
“You get in there,” the sheriff snarled, prodding me with the pistol, “and don’t make me tell you twice.”
Cotterell was in the corridor, a plastic cup in one hand, a blank look on his face. “Here, let me help you, Sheriff,” he said, opening the cell door wider. “How about we cuff him, too? Here, hold my coffee for just one second?” Without waiting for an answer, the deputy handed Dixon the cup, then — to the astonishment of both me and the sheriff — he snapped one handcuff on his boss’s outstretched wrist and, with a quick yank, clicked the other cuff to the cell door. As Dixon stared in bewilderment, Cotterell twisted the pistol from the sheriff’s other hand and shoved him into the cell, the sheriff’s movement pulling the door shut behind him.