“And?”
“And like the Lyle Lovett song says, ‘Once is enough.’ Most complicated hand–eye, brain–machine coordination I ever tried to do. I’d get one thing almost right, and in the process, I’d get two or three other things wrong enough to turn us upside-down or sideways. Flight instructor actually kissed the ground when we got back down alive.”
Something caught Art’s eye, and he took another look into the cockpit, pointing at a rectangular object. “Bill, mind if I reach in and grab that box?” I shook my head and stepped aside. Art leaned into the cockpit and extracted a charred rectangle, not much bigger than a cigarette pack, and laid it on the ground beside him. Then he leaned back in, peered around, and emerged with a larger metal case as well. He took both objects to Sarah and gestured with the smaller one at an evidence bag. She held it open as he tucked them inside.
“How do you want me to label this?” she asked.
“Label it ‘RF unit’ and put a question mark after that,” he said.
He looked thoughtful for a moment, then walked to the back of my truck and ran his hands along the underside of the rear bumper. “Eureka,” he said, and yanked something loose. It, too, was a small metal case, with a wire dangling from one end.
I stared at it. I didn’t recognize it, and I’d looked under my bumper many times, retrieving the spare key I kept there in a magnetic case. “What’s that?”
“A beacon.”
“What kind of beacon?”
“An RF beacon. Somebody put a radio frequency transmitter on your truck.” I was still playing catch-up. “Like those radio collars biologists put on the wolves in Yellowstone.” Art pointed to the helicopter wreckage. “See those metal prongs sticking up from the roof of the cockpit? That’s a directional antenna array, which picks up the signal from this transmitter here. The boxes I found in the cockpit are the receiver and control unit. They pick up the signal from the beacon and compute your direction and distance. Orbin was tracking you, Bill.”
“Why would Orbin want to track me?”
“Well, maybe the sheriff and his boys figured you might lead ’em to O’Conner. Or maybe this was Orbin flying solo, so to speak, and he wanted to settle up with you for that day we got the drop on him and his brother. From what you told me about his visit to Cousin Vern’s pot patch, he wasn’t the type to forgive and forget.”
“The thought of Orbin tracking me like an animal gives me the shivers,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too,” he said. “But I’d say you got the better end of the deal. And now we know why Orbin showed up here right after you did.”
Steve Morgan didn’t say a word. But the TBI agent didn’t miss a syllable of the exchange between Art and me.
CHAPTER 37
I PARKED IN MY USUAL spot under the streetlight behind the Regional Forensic Center and let myself in the back door with the keypad combination lock. It was nearly midnight now, and my back and neck ached from leaning into the helicopter’s cockpit for three hours straight. The morgue looked deserted, though in fact it was never unattended. If I’d rung the loading bay doorbell, a video camera would have swiveled in my direction after a few moments, and a groggy morgue assistant would have buzzed me in. But since the assistant was probably a pathology intern—and therefore desperately short on sleep—I’d let myself in, and I moved through the hallways as quietly as possible, lest I disturb a much-needed nap.
Once in the basement of the hospital itself, I caught an elevator up to the seventh floor, which housed the cardiac care unit. The night duty nurse at the station smiled broadly when she saw me. “Hi, Dr. Brockton; good to see you,” she beamed. “What brings you up here at almost midnight? You must be scouting for likely donors.” We shared a laugh at the joke, which I heard some version of almost any time I crossed from the catacombs of the dead to the wards of the ailing.
“Not tonight,” I said, “but if you get any hot prospects for me, give me a call. Actually, I wanted to check on one of your new patients, Sheriff Tom Kitchings, who came in on LifeStar a few hours ago.”
“He’s a popular guy,” she said.
“Oh?”
“A gentleman was here earlier, right before I came on shift, and one of his deputies just left. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into him in the elevator.”
Williams? It had to be Williams, since Orbin was over in the osteology lab with Miranda, getting simmered and scrubbed clean. My mind was racing with scenarios. Had the deputy come out of concern for his boss? Had he heard that we’d found the tracking beacon on my truck—and had he known it was there? Had he reclaimed the cartridge cases from the shooting, and if so, why?
“If he’d bumped into me, he’d have been lost,” I said. “I came up from the morgue on the service elevator. I’m surprised he was here, though. This is right on my way home, but it’s a long trip for somebody from Cooke County.”
“A wasted trip, too,” she said. “The sheriff’s asleep—I gave him a good dose of Ativan when I changed his drip at eleven. The deputy said he just wanted to get an update on his condition, so I went over the chart with him. He asked if he could look in on the sheriff and just sit with him a few minutes. I said he could, long as he didn’t wake him up.”
I was bone-tired and raw-nerved, so maybe I was just feeling paranoid, but something about that scared me. “Have you been back in the sheriff’s room since the deputy left?”
“No, that was only five minutes ago. Why?”
“I don’t know; I’m just jumpy. Mind if we go check on him?”
She looked exasperated, but she left the duty desk and glided down the hall, easing into a room. Kitchings was sawing logs, half-sitting in the angled hospital bed, an IV in his left arm and a bundle of EKG leads snaking out the top of his hospital gown. A heart monitor flashed steadily at seventy-two beats a minute, and his chest rose and fell at about one-quarter that rate. The nurse flashed a thumbs-up sign. “He’s fine,” she whispered. “He had a very small clot—he probably collapsed more from the stress than from the clot—and he got to the cath lab really quick. A little Roto-Rooter of the artery, and he’s good as new. Probably go home tomorrow.” I was amazed at the cheery prognosis—when he keeled over, I pretty much wrote him off as dead. The nurse turned to go, and held the door for me, but I thought of something. Tapping my wristwatch, I held up five fingers and cocked my head in a questioning manner. She shrugged, put an index finger to her lips, and left me alone with the snoring sheriff.
As soon as the door closed, I tiptoed over to the wardrobe where I guessed his clothes were stored. Sure enough, his uniform—rumpled and stained—hung in the cabinet. His gun belt and empty pistol dangled from a hook at the back. I felt the left shirt pocket, then the right. Both empty. I searched the pants pockets—also empty. Then I noticed a small plastic bag sitting on the floor of the wardrobe. The bag was heavy; it clattered as I picked it up and set it on the rolling hospital tray parked beside the window. Rooting through the bag in the semidarkness, lit only by the heart monitor’s display and the building’s exterior floodlights, I saw the sheriff’s badge, his keys, his wallet, some loose change, a pack of sugarless gum, and the bullets from his gun. But I did not—on my first, my second, or my third survey of the contents—see the sweat-stained bandanna in which Waylon had knotted the cartridge cases that might have led to Orbin’s killer.
CHAPTER 38
IT WAS THE LEAD story in the morning paper, which thudded onto my doorstep only a few short hours after I’d left the sheriff’s hospital room. “Little Stacy’s Body Found,” read the headline; the subhead added, “Convicted Molester Charged with Murder.” The girl—missing for nearly a month—was found by cadaver dogs in a drainage ditch at an abandoned textile mill, a few blocks from the suspect’s seedy house. Hidden beneath old tires, rotting carpet, and other debris, the body was decomposed beyond recognition. But since Stacy Beaman was the only eight-year-old missing at the moment, it took only moments for an assistant ME to match her teeth to the de
ntal X-rays already on hand and awaiting just such a grim discovery.
As I was turning the page to finish the story, the phone rang. “Hey,” said a glum voice that I’d known—even as I was reaching for the receiver—would be Art’s. The suspect had been arrested twelve hours earlier, while Art was helping me bag bones in Cooke County.
“Hey, yourself,” I said. “How you doing?”
“Some good, some bad.”
“Glad they found her. Glad they got him. Sorry it turned out this way.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the case against the suspect?”
“Better than we expected. The crime scene techs found some hair and fibers on the body we think we can link to him, and we’re hoping we’ll find traces of semen—God, would you listen to me, ‘We hope we find some semen’? Also, we’ve got multiple witnesses, other kids’ moms, very credible and sympathetic on the stand. All of them put him near the school the day she disappeared. If your pal…” he trailed off, then began again. “If DeVriess doesn’t manage to bar testimony about the guy’s prior record, I don’t see how any jury in the land could fail to convict. But then again, I don’t see how any lawyer in the land could aggressively defend this guy, either. Clearly there’s a lot that’s beyond my feeble powers of comprehension.”
“Mine, too,” I said, hoping to deflect his rage at DeVriess. “I admire how hard you guys worked to find her and make the case. I’m sure her family appreciates it, too. Or will, when they’re able to.”
“Yeah, that’ll keep ’em warm at night.” He sighed. “You know, Bill, sometimes I despise this world and the vermin who infest it.”
“I know. There’s evil out there, that’s for sure, and you’ve seen more than your share of it. But there’s good, too—try not to forget that.”
“The good sure seems to take a back seat sometimes. My mama wanted me to be a dentist—‘Almost as prestigious as a doctor,’ she said, ‘and the hours are a lot better.’ Maybe Mama knew best.”
“Are you kidding? Standing around all day with your hands in other people’s slobber? Besides, people positively adore cops compared to how they feel about dentists.”
He laughed—faintly, but it was something. “You’re right, the slobber factor is a deal-breaker. Saying ‘Rinse and spit’ ain’t near as glamorous as yelling ‘Freeze, asshole!’—or dredging up bloated corpses and burned skeletons. Speaking of that, any news from the hills in the last eight hours?”
I told him about the parade of late-night visitors to the sheriff’s hospital room, and my own fruitless search for the cartridge cases. “I was hoping the TBI might be able to match the brass. Without those shells, all we’re left with is the ATV tracks Waylon found. And from what little I saw of Orbin firsthand, there could be legions of people up there who wanted him dead.”
I was leaving at noon to take Orbin’s remains—cleaned as best Miranda could clean the charred, fractured bones overnight—to the funeral home in Jonesport, I told Art; would he like to go along, and did he have the time, now that an arrest had been made in the Stacy Beaman case?
“Sure,” he said. “We have so much fun every time we go up there, wild horses couldn’t keep me away. Besides, I’ve got about a year of comp time built up. Can you swing by the lab at KPD and get me?”
Three hours later, I pulled up in front of KPD headquarters, and Art bounded down the steps and leapt into my truck. He seemed like a different person from the morose man who had called me earlier. He was wearing an expression unlike any I’d ever seen on his face before: excitement, horror, amusement, disgust, all rolled into one.
“You’ve practically got canary feathers hanging out of your mouth,” I said. “Spit it out—what’s up?”
“I just got a call from Bob Gonzales,” Art said. “He couldn’t reach you at home or UT, so he called me instead.” Bob Gonzales had earned his Ph.D. with me about ten years ago—no, more like fifteen now. These days he was the staff forensic anthropologist for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which boasted one of the world’s biggest and best DNA labs. Art and I had overnighted the hair and follicle samples Art had “gathered” from Tom Kitchings’s scalp, along with femur cross-sections from both Leena Bonds and her baby, as well as cheek swabs from Jim O’Conner.
“He’s got results already? That’s fast. DNA tests usually take weeks.”
“I reckon he’s still shooting for extra credit. Once a Brockton student, always a Brockton student.”
I was glad to hear that. “Anything interesting?”
“Oh, maybe a couple minor points of interest.” He paused, clearly savoring the suspense. “For one, your pal O’Conner’s in the clear, at least in terms of paternity. Not a chance in a zillion that baby was his.”
“Not surprising, but glad to hear his story checks out. What’s the other thing?”
Art was thinking. Not always a good sign. “Did you ever see that Jack Nicholson movie Chinatown? The one with Faye Dunaway?”
“Long time ago. Main thing I remember is how good Faye Dunaway looked without her clothes. That, and how much it would hurt to have Roman Polanski slit open your nostril.”
“Those would be the two things you’d find memorable,” Art said. “See, I mainly remember the interrogation scene. Nicholson’s trying to get Dunaway to tell him the truth about who this mystery girl is, and he starts slapping her around.” He began jerking his head from side to side, reenacting the scene, affecting what I could only guess must be a Faye Dunaway voice. “‘She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister and my daughter!’”
My brain was still preoccupied by Faye’s curvaceous torso. “So what you’re getting at is…?”
“The baby—a boy, by the way—he’s the sheriff’s first cousin, once removed. Leastwise, I think that’s what you call the child of your mother’s sister’s daughter. Whatever—that much of the DNA profile is exactly what you’d expect. The sheriff’s mother and his Aunt Sophie had the same parents, so the daughter, Leena, is going to have some DNA from the maternal side and pass it along to her baby. As I say, that part’s exactly what you’d expect.”
“But there’s something else you wouldn’t expect?”
“Well, maybe I should have, this being Cooke County, Tennessee. But no, I never saw this one coming.”
“Damn it, Art; what is it?”
“Besides being Sheriff Tom’s cousin, Leena’s baby was also gonna be his kid brother.”
Suddenly Faye was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. “In other words, according to the DNA profile…”
“…which Gonzales said was a rock-solid match…”
“…the baby’s father…?
“…was Tom Kitchings Senior. The Reverend—or not-so-Reverend—Thomas Kitchings.”
I floored the gas pedal, and the truck careened around the on-ramp and up onto I-40 East.
Even with the windows rolled up, I had trouble hearing Art’s question over the buffeting of the wind. The truck was doing ninety-five, and a gusty autumn wind was whipping out of the north, ripping red and gold leaves from branches, driving purplish clouds before it, their tops curling like ocean breakers. “You’re sure this is a good idea?” he shouted.
“Sure I’m sure,” I yelled, with more confidence than I felt.
“So tell me one more time why we’re charging back toward Cooke County like Batman and Robin? Talk slow—last time you explained it, you lost me on one of those hairpin turns of logic.”
Sheriff Kitchings was up on the seventh floor of UT hospital, I repeated. His chief deputy was slewing around in a sooty box in the back of my truck. The one other Cooke County officer involved in the case was doubtless chatting with a roomful of TBI and FBI agents, explaining the disastrous turn their investigation had just taken.
“So what you’re saying is, the utter collapse of law and order makes it a good idea for us to go riding back into the jaws of death? That�
�s your compelling argument?”
That pretty much summed it up. “But this new DNA evidence sheds a whole ’nother light on the case,” I argued, “and nobody knows it. And nobody knows we know it but us.”
“Your powers of reasoning are unique in all the world,” he said, shaking his head. “Not to mention your way with grammar.”
“Grammar, schmammer. Don’t you see? Old man Kitchings gets her pregnant, then he kills her to cover up the pregnancy. Maybe she never even tells him she’s pregnant—probably scared to. But then she starts to show, and he knows the scandal will get out and ruin him. Hard for a preacher to hang onto his flock if they know he’s committed adultery, incest, maybe even rape.”
Art raised a hand like a student with a question. “He would appear to have vaulted to the top of the suspect list, I’ll grant you that. It’s your next step—that we’re the perfect pair to confront the killer—that I’m not sure follows, exactly.”
People had a way of disappearing and dying suddenly in Cooke County, I pointed out. That, he retorted, was precisely why he didn’t think we should be headed there, given that we’d very nearly disappeared and died once already. “But what if Kitchings Senior—or somebody else up there—gets wind of the DNA results some other way? What if he vanishes, runs away, or turns up dead? We’d never know the truth.”
“And you think he’s going to ’fess up to us, after all these years, just because we’re such swell guys?”
“If we show up and confront him with this, catch him off guard, I think he’s a hell of a lot more likely to ’fess up, or at least reveal something, than he is if we don’t.”
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