by Scott Pratt
There were other things that triggered nightmares sometimes; little things, such as the sound of church bells, a glimpse of someone who reminded her of one of her siblings, or the sound of shotguns firing in the fall when the hunters took to the nearby cornfields in pursuit of doves. But the reminder Katie saw most often was in the mirror, because in the place where her right breast should have been was an ugly, pink, concave scar. She’d learned to cover herself with a towel or a robe before she looked in the mirror after showering, but it was impossible not to be self-conscious. Katie had dealt with the deformity through high school by wearing a prosthetic—a “falsie,” she called it. She’d stayed away from boys and had avoided discussing it with girls until her closest friend, a townie named Amy, told her one day that nearly everyone in school had heard about what happened to her. It was a small town, Amy said. It was hard to keep secrets.
Despite the missing breast and the memories, Katie had willed herself to overcome. She forced herself to concentrate on what was good in her life, and there was plenty. Luke was her closest friend. She spent hours reading to him, watching television with him, and caring for him. Katie had learned to feed him, bathe him, and change his diapers. He quivered with excitement every time she walked in the door from school or from doing her chores around the farm. She read him stories and watched cartoons with him on Saturday mornings. Lottie had been right. He was a smart young gentleman. He communicated by different sounds from his throat and by the expressions in his eyes. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and Katie thought he was the sweetest, gentlest creature on earth.
Because Aunt Mary had collected a substantial amount of money when her husband was killed in the logging accident, Katie was on her way to college. Aunt Mary had never said how much, only that it was more than enough to take care of her and Luke and Lottie and Katie for the rest of their lives. Katie was already enrolled at the University of Tennessee. She would start classes late in August. She was a year older than most of her classmates because she took a year off after her family was killed, but no one seemed to notice. Inspired by the beauty that surrounded her in the mountains, she was planning to major in horticulture and perhaps work for the forest service one day.
Aunt Mary had also given Katie another gift, the best she’d ever received. For Katie’s seventeenth birthday, Aunt Mary had accompanied her to Knoxville to a cosmetic surgeon. The surgeon had first placed a tissue expander beneath the skin where her breast should have been. Over the next few months, he pumped increasing amounts of water into the expander, stretching the skin and making room for a breast implant. When he did the surgery to install the implant, he’d also fashioned a nipple out of a small amount of skin he took from Katie’s rump, and he’d tattooed the nipple and surrounding skin pink to match the other breast. Then he’d injected a pigment to lighten the skin that covered the implant. It still wasn’t perfect—it was a bit darker than her other breast, and the skin was still numb—but for the first time in years Katie had begun to feel normal.
She swallowed another bite of trail mix and resumed her hike. Each year, Katie had ventured farther away from Roaring Fork and deeper into the park. She’d scaled Mount LeConte, visited the cabins and farms of the early settlers, and marveled at the beauty of Grotto Falls, Rainbow Falls, and the hundreds of species of plants and wildlife.
Katie had become an expert at orienteering and camping. It had taken her nearly a year to convince Aunt Mary that she was capable of staying out overnight in the park. Now she’d made at least a dozen overnight trips. She’d encountered bears and snakes and even the occasional wild boar, but she felt safe in the woods, especially with Maggie along.
Her plan for the weekend was to head east along the Grapeyard Ridge trail to Greenbriar Cove and then travel south, cross-country and off-trail, toward Laurel Top on the Appalachian Trail. She’d made good time to Greenbriar and was relieved to be off the beaten path used by an increasing number of tourists each year. Katie topped a ridge and checked her map. She’d make the trail by nightfall, no problem, and then hike back home tomorrow.
As she descended the other side of the ridge into a cove, Katie stopped suddenly. Something wasn’t quite right ahead. She peered through the branches of a rhododendron and could see that the forest had been cleared in the cove below and replaced by a vast field of … what was it? Whatever it was, it was a fluorescent green, almost glowing. She crept toward the break in the trees and reached into her pack for her binoculars.
The marijuana patch was vast, close to five acres, Katie guessed. The plants were at least four feet high and waved gently back and forth in the breeze. As Katie scanned with her binoculars, she saw two all-terrain vehicles at one end of the patch. At the other end, about a hundred yards to her right, she saw three men sitting on lawn chairs. They were eating. All three of them appeared to be Latino, probably Mexican.
Maggie must have caught their scent, because she started to growl.
“Hush, Maggie,” Katie whispered. She knelt down next to the dog and reached out for her collar with her left hand. Maggie’s ears were standing up straight, as was the hair on the back of her neck. She let out a weak bark.
“No, Maggie, no.” Katie took another look through the binoculars. One of the men was standing now, pointing in her direction. He’d seen her.
“Let’s go, Maggie.” Katie turned and started running as fast as she could back up the ridge. Maggie followed her but continued to bark.
When Katie reached the top of the ridge, she heard the sound of engines. They were coming after her. She veered left through a large area of Fraser fir deadfall, scrambling over tree trunks and branches, crawling beneath rhododendron. Even if they saw her in the deadfall, they wouldn’t be able to follow on the four-wheelers, and Katie felt confident she could outrun or outhike anyone in these mountains.
When she heard the engines top the ridge behind her, maybe three or four hundred yards back, she crouched behind a huge tree trunk, wrapped her hand around Maggie’s snout, and waited. About twenty seconds passed before she saw two men on four-wheelers tearing through the trees, heading in the direction she’d been going before she broke for the deadfall. They stopped at the edge of the deadfall, turned off the engines, and listened.
“Shhh,” Katie whispered as she clutched Maggie close to her. “Shhh.”
After an agonizing minute, the engines started, and the four-wheelers tore off up the ridge. As soon as they were out of sight, Katie started running due west. The sound of the engines faded with every step she took.
Katie kept telling herself she was safe now.
She was safe.
25
Katie arrived home after dark on Sunday. The route she took back after her run-in with the men at the marijuana patch had taken longer than she expected. The terrain was as difficult as any she’d encountered in the park. As soon as she walked through the back porch and into the kitchen, Aunt Mary appeared.
“Oh, Katie, are you all right?” Aunt Mary asked. She immediately embraced Katie.
“I’m fine.”
Aunt Mary stepped back and took stock of her.
“Look at you. You’re scratched all to pieces.”
Katie had debated much of the way home about whether she should tell Aunt Mary what she’d seen. Aunt Mary despised the “druggers,” as she called them. Every year in the fall, they hauled their harvest out of the mountains past the farm, led by a sheriff’s department vehicle. A couple of years after Katie moved in, Aunt Mary finally told her what the annual parade of trucks contained.
“They hide deep in the mountains where no one can see them, they do their business, and they pay off the sheriff,” Aunt Mary had explained. “Everyone’s afraid of them. It’s best to just let them be, but I swear it goes against my grain. They’re making millions of dollars illegally, and nobody’ll do anything about it.”
“Why are you so late?” Aunt Mary said. “We’ve been worried sick about you.”
Katie couldn’t bring hers
elf to lie.
“I had to take a detour. A big one. It took a lot longer than I thought it would.”
“What kind of detour? Why?”
“I ran across something I wasn’t supposed to see. I was hiking cross-country toward Laurel Top. I came to a clearing in a cove and it was full of marijuana plants. There were some men there, and they chased me.”
“Oh my Lord!” It was Lottie, who had just walked into the kitchen. “Chased you? You mean they saw you, child?”
“I think they may have seen me from a distance,” Katie said. “They chased me on four-wheelers, but I ran and hid in some deadfall, and they didn’t see me again.”
“Thank God you’re all right,” Aunt Mary said. “I’ve told you to be careful in those woods.”
“I’m sorry,” Katie said. “I wasn’t looking for them or anything. I just sort of stumbled across them.”
“How big was the field?” Aunt Mary said.
“Big. Really big.”
The three of them were silent for several seconds. Katie wondered what her aunt and Lottie were thinking.
“How’s Luke?” Katie said, hoping to get the focus off her ordeal.
“He’s sleeping like a little angel,” Lottie said. “He missed watching cartoons with you yesterday.”
“I missed him, too,” Katie said. She began to pull her pack off.
“Katie,” Aunt Mary said, “do you know where this marijuana field is? I mean, could you tell someone how to find it?”
“Sure, I know exactly where it is.”
“Miss Mary, I want you to slow down just a bit now,” Lottie said. “We don’t need to be getting involved in something like this. You know they got the sheriff in their pocket.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the sheriff,” Aunt Mary said. “I was thinking about maybe the DEA. They’re always on the news making big drug busts. I’ll bet they have an office in Knoxville. Maybe they’d be interested. It’s time somebody put a stop to this nonsense.”
“I don’t know,” Lottie said. “I don’t believe in meddling in other folks’ business. Nothing good ever comes of it.”
On Monday afternoon, as soon as Aunt Mary got home from work, she and Katie drove to Knoxville. The DEA offices were housed in the rear of a nondescript shopping center off Kingston Pike. Aunt Mary told Katie that she’d called that morning and spoken to an agent. He asked her if she could come in immediately and bring Katie with her.
There was a security keypad on the door and a dead bolt lock. Aunt Mary knocked on the door, and a few seconds later it opened. A young man with short dark hair was standing on the other side. He was medium height, muscular, and wearing a shoulder holster that carried a pistol. Katie immediately noticed a deep cleft in his chin. “Butt chin” was what the kids at school called it.
“I’m Mary Clinton,” Aunt Mary said, “and this is my niece, Katie. She’s the one I told you about on the phone.”
The man introduced himself as Agent Rider and led them through a large, open room filled with desks. There was no carpet on the floor, and the steel beams that framed the building were exposed. The space was very much like a warehouse, with several people milling about, talking on telephones, talking to one another. Most of them were men, and nearly all of them were armed. They passed a cabinet filled with rifles and came to a small office with paneled walls and a fake fern in the corner. On the wall behind the desk was a map of East Tennessee. Agent Rider motioned for them to sit down.
“So, Katie, right?” Agent Rider said. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
Agent Rider folded his hands in front of him on the desk. His fingers were thick and leathery, and the veins running down his arms looked like rivers and streams on a map.
“Your aunt tells me you may have some in formation.”
“Before we get into that,” Aunt Mary said, “I want assurances that there is no way this will ever come back on us. I don’t know whether you know it or not, but the sheriff protects these people. He knows what’s going on. If you tell him where your information came from, he’ll tell them. I don’t know what they might do, but I don’t care to find out.”
“The sheriff doesn’t have anything to do with this operation,” the agent said. “We’re a federal agency. We have people from state and local agencies on our task force, but we share information on a need-to-know basis only. The sheriff certainly doesn’t need to know. We’ve been aware of his activities for quite some time now. We just haven’t been able to make a case against him yet. But I assure you, if we make any kind of move based on information you or your niece provides, we won’t be talking to the sheriff about it.”
“You’re positive,” Aunt Mary said.
“It takes a lot of courage for people to do what you’re doing right now, Ms. Clinton,” Agent Rider said. “We need people like you, and we take great care to protect our witnesses.”
“Witnesses? You’re not saying that Katie will have to testify in court, are you?”
“No, ma’am. You indicated over the phone that your niece has information regarding a large field of marijuana. The chance of our actually catching someone during the raid is minimal. What will most likely happen is that we’ll cut down the marijuana that’s there and burn it on-site. If it’s as big as you indicated, it’ll cost the grower hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. We’ll be hitting them where it really hurts. Right in the pocket.”
“Do you know who this grower is?” Aunt Mary asked.
“I have a pretty good idea, but the less you know, the better.”
“All right, Katie,” Aunt Mary said, “tell him what you saw.”
Katie spent the next half hour telling Agent Rider about her experience hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and how she happened to come upon the marijuana field. Then, using a map of the park she’d brought along with her, she showed him the exact location of the field.
“Five acres? Are you sure?” Agent Rider said when she’d finished.
“Pretty sure. Maybe a little smaller, maybe a little bigger,” Katie said.
“This is impressive. Looks like we’ll have to go in by helicopter because of the terrain, which means they’ll hear us coming, but this will be one of the largest marijuana seizures we’ve ever made around here.”
A few minutes later, Agent Rider led Katie and Aunt Mary back through the room full of desks and people and to the door. Katie could feel eyes on her, and as the agent thanked them one last time at the door and said good-bye, she couldn’t help but wonder who was looking at her, what they might find out about her, and what they might do.
26
I wanted to check on what was happening with my son and Tommy Miller, but after my meeting with Ramirez, my first phone call is to Sheriff Bates.
“We need to meet,” I say. “Someplace private.”
“Where are you?”
“Just leaving the jail.”
“You know Highland Church?”
“Yeah.”
“Parking lot. Ten minutes.”
He’s waiting when I pull in. I get out of my truck and climb into the BMW. I tell him about the meeting with Ramirez.
“He said it was a girl who works in our office,” I say. “He knew how long she’d been missing. Before I left, he said somebody wants her dead. He said he might know who it is.”
Bates considers the information silently for a minute.
“I reckon the first question we gotta ask ourselves is how,” he says. “How does Ramirez know? It ain’t like it’s been in the papers. Hell, we just found out about it a few hours ago. So since he knows she’s gone, and he says he knows where she is, he has to be involved somehow, right?”
“I’m thinking maybe he had some of his guys kidnap her and he’s holding her for ransom. We let him out; he lets her go. That’s the deal he wants.”
“Is that what he said? Did he say he’d let her go?”
“No. He said he’d tell me what he knows. But he
did say, ‘Ticktock,’ which makes me think she’s still alive.”
“Wishful thinking, Brother Dillard.”
“Do you really think she’s dead? I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”
“It ain’t good.”
“How do you think Ramirez is getting his information? He’d have to get it either over the phone or through a visitor. I don’t think Ramirez would take a chance on them listening to his phone conversations at the jail, and it’d be risky to talk to a visitor about something like this.”
“For a smart hombre, you sure can be naïve sometimes,” Bates says. “Open your eyes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Who’s the only person he can he talk to without having to worry about anybody listening?”
It hits me. Stinnett. His lawyer. Stinnett is his information courier. That’s why he was acting so strangely.
“Son of a bitch,” I say.
“Don’t act so surprised. You used to do the same thing.”
“If I did, I didn’t do it intentionally.”
We sit for a moment while I ponder this latest possibility. Stinnett probably took a phone call from someone and relayed a message to Ramirez. Maybe Stinnett didn’t even know what the message meant; at least that’s what I’d like to think. Then again …
I ask Bates what he’s learned thus far.
“A little,” he says. “Whoever drove her car last was a man or a damned tall woman. When I asked you to look at the driver’s seat, I was trying to get you to notice that it was pushed all the way back. Hannah’s a short gal. And I noticed something else. She got her oil changed Friday afternoon. It was on the little sticker in the windshield, along with the mileage. When I looked at the odometer, more than a hundred miles had been put on that car since the oil change, so either she took a quick trip before she disappeared or somebody hauled her away in her own car, dumped the body, and then brought the car back.”
