Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella

by Jefferson Bass

  “Well, I’ll be glad to help if I can. Do you have X rays of the teeth? Or dental charts?” His eyes narrowed as they took in the hatbox under my arm.

  “Better than that,” I said. “I’ve got the teeth themselves. The jaws, too. The whole skull, in fact. The dental work is quite distinctive.”

  His gaze shifted from my face to the box and back again. “Well,” he said finally, his startled expression giving way gradually to one of mild amusement. “I must say, this is a first. Come in, have a seat, and let’s have a look.”

  He sat behind a large wooden desk in an oak swivel chair, one that might have been as old as the house itself; I sat facing him in a high-backed wing chair, also an antique, the box on my lap. “I reckon I should ask if you’re squeamish.”

  “Me? Lord no. Squeamish people don’t make it through dental school—or didn’t twenty years ago, when I was a student. Back then, they started us off dissecting cadavers. They don’t do that anymore, but they should. Weeds out the weak, and teaches you the anatomy, inside and out. So no, a skull won’t faze me in the least.”

  I nodded. “Just checking.” I removed the box lid and set it on the floor, then lifted the skull from the nest of paper towels with which I’d cushioned it. I leaned forward, my elbows on the desk, and turned the face of the skull toward him, hoping for a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

  Instead of a flicker, I saw a seismic shock. Hartley gasped, shoving his chair back from the desk so hard that his head hit the wall. He blanched, and a moment later he bent forward and scrabbled beneath his desk. I heard the clatter of a metal trashcan, and then I heard violent retching. It continued, off and on, for a minute or more, and when he finally sat up, the retching had given way to weeping.

  “She said her horse had kicked her in the mouth,” he whispered, “but I knew better. I knew that sonofabitch did it. A baseball bat, a two-by-four, a candlestick—I don’t know what he hit her with, but whatever it was, it could’ve killed her.” He shook his head angrily. “She always stuck to the script—she was too scared to tell the truth—but I knew. And she knew that I knew.”

  “Who is ‘she,’ Dr. Hartley? And who’s the sonofabitch?”

  “Denise Donnelly,” he said. “The wife—the possession—of Patrick Donnelly.” He said both names as if I should know them. He said the man’s name as if I should loathe it.

  “Sorry, I’m not from here,” I said. “Who are they?”

  “The richest people in Wartburg. Not that there’s many of those. He’s got mineral rights to half the county. Owns two or three strip mines—legal ones—and probably half a dozen wildcats.” Seeing the puzzled expression on my face, he translated. “Wildcat mines are illegal, fly-by-night mines—no permits, no health and safety procedures, no environmental protection. Cheap, quick guerrilla raids on shallow seams of coal. Get in and get out, rape and pillage, before the regulators know you’re there.” He looked down, twisting a ring on his right hand, a haunted expression on his face. “I knew he’d kill her someday if she didn’t get out. I begged her to leave him.” Suddenly he shuddered and buried his face in his hands, and his body shook with the force of his sobs.

  When he finally looked up at me again, the light in his eyes had gone out, and he seemed twenty years older than when he’d answered the door. And in that moment I understood. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Hartley,” I said. “You’re obviously shocked. And . . .” I wasn’t sure if I should go on, but I did. “It’s none of my business, but I gather that you and Mrs. Donnelly were . . . close, so I truly apologize for springing this on you.” He nodded bleakly. “When did you hear she was missing?”

  He blinked, startled. “I didn’t. I don’t think anybody did—a town this size, word gets around, you know? But I should have guessed.” He looked away, and when he looked back at me, it was as if he’d decided something. “At first she was just a patient whose teeth I cleaned twice a year. Then, after . . . this”—he pointed at the skull—“she needed a lot of post-op care. I saw her every week for six months. And eventually . . .” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. “She called me two weeks ago. Patrick had bugged the phone; he knew everything. She said she was going to California, to stay with her sister for a while, to sort things out. Told me not to try to contact her. Said it would just make things more painful for everyone.” He drew a deep breath, and as he exhaled, his face seemed to harden. “Then Patrick took the phone from her. He said that if I ever called or spoke to her again, Denise and I would wish we’d never been born. Then he hung up. I hoped she’d find a way to call me again, but she didn’t.” He looked at the skull and gave a bitter semblance of a laugh. “Now I know why.”

  We sat in silence, the only sound the ticking of an antique clock. Then, in the distance, I heard the sound of car horns—faintly at first, then louder and louder, so numerous they blended together into one cacophonous clamor. A moment later a jubilant procession—or was it a riot on wheels?—roared past the dentist’s house and up Main Street toward the courthouse.

  “What on earth is that?” I said. And then—with a sudden, sickening feeling—I knew what it was.

  I felt like a football running back, fighting my way through a hundred defensive linemen, as I forced my way through the whooping crowd surrounding the courthouse. Thunder rumbled overhead, as if the storm gathering on the ground were mirrored in the purple-black sky.

  Two deputies, both armed with pump shotguns, stood on the steps and blocked the entrance. “I have to see the sheriff,” I said.

  “The sheriff’s busy,” said one.

  “Interrogating a prisoner,” smirked the other.

  “That’s why I need to see him,” I said. “I’m with the state medical examiner’s staff.” I pulled my ID badge from my wallet and held it out, but the deputies seemed uninterested. “I know who the dead woman is,” I went on. Now, for the first time, I had their attention. “I’ve just identified her.”

  “What’s her name?” the first deputy asked.

  “Take me to the sheriff,” I insisted. “That information’s for his ears only.”

  It was a spur-of-the-moment fib, but it was effective. The two deputies exchanged glances, and the first one—who seemed to outrank the second one—disappeared through the door. Several moments later the door opened and the deputy leaned out, beckoning me inside. He led me up to the third floor, into the jail, and down a row of cells. Deputy Jim Cotterell was standing at the end of the hall, just outside a cell door, his expression grim. As I approached, I heard a dull thud inside the cell, followed by a quick grunt and a slow groan.

  “Sheriff? Here’s the bone doc,” said Cotterell. Peering through the bars into the cell’s dim interior, I saw the sheriff step away from a hunched figure—a black man, bent nearly double, who slowly straightened. Blood trickled from his lips and nose and from a laceration on his right cheekbone. The man’s left arm ended at the wrist—a broad, blunt stump—and his right wrist was encased in a filthy cast.

  “I hear you got something to tell me.” Sheriff Dixon stepped from the cell, his face glistening and his eyes glittering, and walked toward the far end of the cells.

  “Two things, actually,” I said. “The woman was named Denise Donnelly.” His eyes flickered, but he didn’t react as strongly as I’d suspected. “I gather she’s a prominent citizen?”

  “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.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I’m placing you under arrest, Sheriff.”

  “Bull-shit. What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about assault. I’m talking about obstruction of justice. I’m talking about evidence-tampering, and conspiracy, and corruption, and probably civil-rights violations, too, though I reckon the D.A. or the U.S. Attorney will know more about that than I do.”

  “You’re fired, Cotterell. And that’s the least of your troubles. You unlock this cell and unlock these cuffs, and I mean right now, or I will bury you under this goddamn courthouse.”

 
“I can’t do that, Sheriff. I’m sworn to uphold the law, same as you. Difference is, I really aim to do it.”

  A cheer went up from the crowd when Cotterell and I emerged onto the courthouse steps, where one of the shotgun-wielding deputies still stood sentinel, but it quickly faded when the door closed behind us.

  “Where is he?” shouted the big red-haired man I’d seen going inside earlier. Donnelly. “Where’s that sick sumbitch that killed my wife?”

  “Where is he?” echoed a jumble of other voices. “Bring him out!”

  “Hang on, hang on,” Cotterell called. “Y’all just hold your horses. Sheriff Dixon’s still interrogatin’ him.”

  “We already know ever’thing we need to know,” shouted Donnelly.

  “Yeah.” I heard. “Yeah! Let’s get it on!”

  Suddenly there was a commotion to one side, and the crowd there parted, revealing a six-foot cross, its frame wrapped in layers of cloth—wrapped in swaddling clothes, I thought, in an absurd echo of the Christmas story—and a tongue of flame climbing up from its base and spreading to the outstretched arms. The crowd roared its approval.

  “Come on!” yelled Donnelly. Someone thrust something into his hands, and I felt my stomach lurch when I recognized the distinctive shape of a rope noose.

  Cotterell held up both hands in an attempt to quiet the crowd. “Not so fast,” he yelled. “We might be gettin’ ahead of ourselves. We ain’t sure we got the right man.”

  “Hell yeah we got the right man,” Donnelly jeered. “No doubt about it. Now shut up, Jim. Get with us or get outta the damn way.”

  To my surprise—to my deep dismay—I felt myself take a step forward. “Listen to me,” I shouted. “You all are making a mistake.”

  “Who the hell are you,” Donnelly bristled, “and what business is this of yours?”