“Sorry. Mike Levine, FBI,” he extended his hand and flashed the first smile he’d allowed himself since he’d arrived in Split Tree. “Can I buy you a soda?” He nodded his head at the Pepsi can in his left hand.
“Y’all make it a Coke Cola and you got yourself a deal,” the deputy said enthusiastically as he pumped Levine’s hand twice and drew up an adjacent chair. As he leaned forward, the small table canted in his direction. “Jim Bevins, glad to make y’all’s acquaintance. Just about everyone here calls me Jimbo, no reason for you to be the exception now.”
“Don’t be so sure…about being glad to meet me, that is.” Levine raised his arm and made a motion, the way you would in a city restaurant—but not the way you would to a blind vendor in Split Tree, Arkansas. He immediately realized that that was going to be about as productive as talking to the sheriff had been and pulled his arm in, hoping that no one else had seen him.
“Don’t think that’s goin’ get you too far there, Mr. Levine.” Jimbo Bevins smiled and stretched the syllables of Levine’s name out to an astonishing length. “Larry Lee there don’t see so good, no more. I’ll get this here one, and you can owe me another one later on,” he said as he got up and went to the counter. When he returned he again cocked his head to one side and looked at the FBI agent as if his facial features weren’t arranged in the same order they had been before he got up.
Levine took a long drag of his rapidly warming Pepsi, swallowed hard, rocked his chair back onto two legs, and returned the inquisitive stare. Finally he spoke. “So, tell me, Deputy Bevins, who’d you go and piss off to get assigned as my keeper? You are my keeper, aren’t you, Jimbo?”
“Well, sir, let’s just say that the sheriff thinks you might could use some assistance, not bein’ from around here and all.”
“That’s right, I’m definitely not from around here. So, you’re to be my assistant?”
“Yes, sir.” Jimbo took a slug of his Coke and set his can down with a determined clank. The table shifted its direction again. “Yessir, I am.”
Levine smiled a second time before responding. “And what if I was to tell you that I don’t need an assistant? It’s sort of like what the army used to tell me in Vietnam, if the Bureau had thought I needed an assistant they’d have issued me one. And since they didn’t—I can only guess I don’t.”
Jimbo knit his forehead as if this was really a question that required some measured thought. Then he returned the smile as he answered. “Well, as I see it, the sheriff ain’t your Bureau, he’s the sheriff, and he’s pretty sure you’re gonna.”
“I’m sure he is.” They’d been alternating drinks and now it was Levine’s turn to take a swallow. As he did so, several beads of sweat dripped off his can and spotted his tie. He brushed at them with his free hand, turning them into dark smears. He took a deep breath and held it momentarily before exhaling. “All right, Deputy Jimbo Bevins, we’ll play this game for a while.” He stood and retucked the parts of his shirttail that were working their way out of his khakis, then he tugged the lapels of his blazer, straightening the shoulders. “First order of business, Mr. Assistant, I want to talk to the local medical examiner—I believe you’d call him the county coroner. You know where I can find him?”
“Sure.” Jimbo grinned. “He’s my cousin.”
“Then let’s roll, Kato.”
Chapter 5
U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii
FRIDAY, AUGUST12, 2005
“Well, I guess this really will be a short one,” Kel said as he stepped into the wood-paneled conference room adjoining the Lab’s library. It was large enough to seat forty but was now almost empty. Counting himself and D.S. there were only seven people available to attend the hurriedly called staff meeting: two dentists and three other anthropologists, including a stranger that he assumed was one of the Lab’s new interns who had been scheduled to arrive while he was in North Korea—James somebody or other.God, he looks like a kid, Kel thought.
Kel knew he shouldn’t have been surprised by all the empty chairs in the room. After all, he had just returned from visiting six of the Lab’s recovery teams in North Korea, each one headed by one of his anthropologists; added to that were another five finishing-up sites in Vietnam, four cutting their way through the jungles of southern Laos, two responding to a terrorist bombing in the Philippines that had taken out a nightclub full of tourists, one team somewhere in eastern Europe looking for a long-lost World War II crash site, and a couple more humping buckets of sand around on some Godforsaken coral atolls in the Pacific. That made twenty, and of course there was always one or two on leave, at a conference, sick, or otherwise occupied; still, the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, was the largest forensic skeletal identification laboratory in the world, with over thirty forensic anthropologists, three forensic dentists, and eighteen search-and-recovery teams. With over two hundred personnel, it never ceased to amaze him when there wasn’t enough scientific staff around for a pickup game of basketball.
The CILHI is unique within the Department of Defense—for that matter, unique in the world. It is the only forensic laboratory with jurisdiction to recover and identify missing and unaccounted-for U.S. war dead. It has worked cases as varied as the Vietnam Unknown Soldier and the sailors of the Civil War ironclad the USSMonitor. And then there were the humanitarian missions and emergency responses like those following the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and the Christmas tsunami of 2004. With its current staffing, the laboratory was identifying almost two men a week—an impressive statistic until the numbers were placed into perspective: There are almost 5,000 men still missing from World War I; 78,000 from World War II; 8,100 from the Korean War; 120 from the Cold War; and 1,800 from the Vietnam War.
“All right,” Kel began, taking in each face. Like D.S., they all somehow managed to look fresher than they should at the end of a long week. “I just got in an hour ago, and I freely admit that I don’t have a clue as to what’s goin’ on.” Someone started to snicker. “I know, I know, what’s new, right?—so I won’t keep y’all here long. Just wantin’ to touch base; see what’s up. In fact, I intend to be headin’ home about noon—if I don’t fall asleep sooner—so if you have anythin’ you need to talk about or need me to sign, see me before then, otherwise have D.S. take care of it or hold it until Monday. Okay? Ahhh…let’s see, no big news from the field, except that the guys in the Workers’ Paradise of North Korea are having a wonderful time and wish each and every one of y’all were there in place of them. Startin’ to get cold there already, at least at night. Otherwise nothin’ from my trip that can’t wait till Monday’s regular staff meetin’. But here’s the news du jour—in case y’all haven’t heard—the SecDef may come pay us a visit next Friday.”
Kel waited for the staff to register its predictable opinion with a harmonious groan before continuing. “Now, now, my feelin’s exactly, but let’s not get too spun up quite yet. I suspect it may still fall through, but just in case, it’d probably be a good idea to start pickin’ up the Lab a little, empty the wastebaskets, clean the coffee cups, make sure Paul doesn’t wear one of his god-awful Hawaiian shirts. Let’s not wait until next Thursday afternoon to get started. I’ll let you know the details as I get them, but wanted to give y’all at least a heads-up.” He looked around the conference table. “Other than that, I’m tapped out for today…anythin’, Dr. Smart?” Kel pointed to D.S.
“Yeah,” D.S. answered. “Ahhh…what I’ve got can wait till Monday if you’d rather, but I got a quick update on a case you were interested in before you left.” He paused as he shuffled through some notes on his lap, “It’s REFNO 145-66.” The REFNO, or reference number, indicated a Vietnam War loss. It was a numbering system established during the war to track men who went missing in action. “Wanna wait till Monday or not?”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, you’ll remember this one. Two guys involved—Evans and Trimble—ground loss in Quang Nam Province, u
p by the DMZ. Fairly early on in the war; 1966. Marine private and a navy medic…make that navy corpsman…anyhow, Trimble’s remains—he was the corpsman—were recovered fairly soon after the incident and identified by dental records. Evans, however, was never found. He’s still carried on the books as unaccounted for.”
“Trimble got the Navy Cross, right? Am I rememberin’ the right case?”
“That’s the one. Real Audie Murphy stuff, by all accounts. We surveyed the loss location in ’96 and again in late ’99 with no luck. Finally got some good witness information in the form of two Vietnamese who were involved in the fight—on the other side, of course.”
“All the better to know what happened.”
“Exactly. Anyhow, these two showed us an area that we excavated late last year. Very disturbed site—lots of bomb craters. Had to dig up half the province, but we recovered some fragmented skeletal remains and some material evidence—boot sole, couple of fatigue buttons—and, most important, an identification tag for Evans.”
“That’s good.”
“That’s very good; it tells us we were in the right spot, at least. So much for the good news. On the flip side, most of the bone is pretty badly burned, but four fragments were in good enough shape for DNA testing, so we sampled them last April.”
“I remember,” Kel responded. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, rubbing the jet lag from his eyelids with his thumb and forefinger. He still had his eyes closed as he continued. “What’s the update? We get the results back?”
“Sort of,” D.S. answered. “Like I said, good news, bad news type of thing. We got results, but unfortunately we didn’t get the results we were hoping for. Two of the samples were inconclusive—and the other two,” he shrugged his eyebrows at the same time as he shrugged his shoulders, “don’t match the family reference sample for Evans.”
“That figures. Evans is the only guy unaccounted for from the area?”
“Yep. And it ain’t him—despite the dog tag.”
“How about Trimble? You say his body was recovered and identified at the time, right? And that was when—1966? Question I’d ask is: Was he recovered intact? Maybe some fragments of him were left on the battlefield—any chance that what we recovered is just additional parts that they didn’t find durin’ the war?”
D.S. puffed his cheeks and blew them out. He cleared his throat. “We thought the same thing, so we pulled the Tan Son Nhut file for him. From what I can tell, yes, he was missing some body parts when they recovered him in 1966, all lower body—so the leg fragments that we recovered could be him.”
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army ran two large identification mortuaries in-country, one at the big airbase at Tan Son Nhut on the outskirts of Saigon and a smaller one at Da Nang. The CILHI had the complete wartime file for each of the fifty-thousand-plus American servicemen identified through the two mortuaries—including body diagrams that showed what was present and what wasn’t.
“I sense abut …”
“Thebut is the biological profile. From the fragments we recovered, we could get a rough stature estimate. It’s acceptable—within two inches of both guys—it’s the age estimate that’s a little bit of a problem, though. The epiphyseal caps are unfused on the femur and the tibial fragment, so it’s a young guy, under twenty—that matches Evans okay—he was like nineteen or so—but it’s a bit young for Trimble, who was mid-twenties. But, then again, the remains aren’t in the best of shape, so…”
Kel drummed his fingers on the conference table while he thought. “So you’re sayin’ that while it could be additional parts of Trimble, it’s not very likely. Okay, so where does that leave us now?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s the question, and here’s my suggestion. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we should have requested a family DNA sample for both Evans and Trimble, right? Or am I wrong? We would have wanted a blood sample from the Evans family to compare to what we thought were goin’ to be his remains, and we should have requested one from the Trimble family for exclusionary purposes, right? Check on it. If we requested a blood sample from the Trimble family, then have the DNA lab compare it to the remains. Shouldn’t take too long if the samples are already in. We’ll see how it shakes out. We know it’s not Evans, so either it’s more of Trimble or we got us a real puzzle on our hands.”
“Ahhh.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind, we can talk later.”
“What?”
“Nothing…it can wait for Monday.” D.S. waved Kel off.
Kel verified with a look that D.S. had nothing else to add, and then he continued around the table, nodding to each staff member in turn and asking if they had anything that needed to be discussed. They all indicated that they had no information for the group, but most needed to see him after the meeting for one thing or another. The last one to answer was the new guy—James? John?
“And I’m guessin’ you’re…” Kel stalled for time by drawing out the last word as he half-rose from his chair and leaned over the table, extending his hand to the newest member of his staff. The stalling paid off.
“Matt Hardy, glad to meet you, Dr. McKelvey,” the new kid replied quickly.
Matt?So it wasn’t James or John, but he really was a kid, nonetheless. Kel guessed he couldn’t be much over twenty-seven or twenty-eight. They seemed to get younger with every hire—a fact that lately only augmented Kel’s growing sense of professional burnout.
“It’s Kel. We try to not useDoctor very much around here. Don’t know about the others, but it makes me feel like I should be takin’ out your appendix or somethin’. Anyhow, welcome. All settled? Let’s talk for a few minutes after this.”
The young staffer nodded and smiled.
Kel sat back down and surveyed the staff again. “That about it? Anybody got any alibis or saved rounds?” He caught himself using the military slang for last-minute comments at staff meetings.
“Yeah,” said D.S., trying to restrain a smile. “Matt, tell Kel here how old you are.”
Matthew Hardy looked at D.S. and then at Kel. “Twenty-four,” he replied.
“Oh goddamn,” Kel muttered.
Chapter 6
Split Tree, Arkansas
FRIDAY, AUGUST12, 2005
“So, tell me, Deputy, I assume you know why I’m visiting this happy little shit pile of rural America? I’m sure the good sheriff must have filled you in on the animals before making you zookeeper-for-the-day,” Levine asked as he settled into the passenger seat of the Locust County Sheriff’s Department cruiser and fastened his seat belt. He was careful not to touch the brown vinyl trim that skirted the seat any more than was necessary, for fear of searing any exposed skin.
Jimbo Bevins squinted at Levine. He was still having trouble understanding him. “Don’t know if you’re shinin’ me on, Mr. Levine, or if you’re just tryin’ to be a dick, but if we got to spend this here time together, we might as well stop kickin’ each other in the shins. Fair?”
“Fair enough.” Levine expended some effort in biting back any other comment and extended his hand as an offering of truce, but Jimbo Bevins simply cranked the ignition and the green-and-white Monte Carlo came alive. The air-conditioner exploded on as if startled from a deep sleep and blasted Levine with warm air. So warm that it was hard to take a breath and it made him blink hard in reflex.
Jimbo muttered something.
“What was that?” Levine asked. He couldn’t have sworn to it, but it sounded likeJew to him.
“Didn’t say nothin’.”
“You sure about that?”
“Quite sure, Mr. Levine. But to answer your first question, no sir, I don’t know the nature of your business down here in Locust County.” Jimbo looked out the back window as he reversed out of the courthouse parking lot. The car was still coasting backward when he flipped the transmission lever into drive. With a jerk they soon were headed west on Tupelo, one of the tow
n’s two major streets. “But I ’spect that y’all be a’tellin’ me soon enough.”
Main and Tupelo crossed at the courthouse. Main Street ran north to south and connected up to County Road 1, which angled up to Helena and West Helena; Tupelo ran east to west. Old-timers still called it Old Gin Road because it would take you to the Bell Brothers gin, if you followed it out west far enough. In fact, as you drove west out of town you began encountering more and more stray wisps of cotton lint blowing across the road—locals could gauge their proximity to the gin by the density of cotton waste clinging to the weeds lining the shoulder.
There had once been a time when you could stand at the southwest corner of the town square and look to the horizon in any direction, assuming you had nothing better to do—which in fact, most people around town didn’t. A few buildings erected since theLate Unpleasantness of the Civil War had defied local convention and towered to a cloud-scratching three stories, and that partially obstructed the panoramic view, but they were limited in number and effect.
“Deputy Bevins, you remember the Leon Jackson murder in 1965?” Levine finally picked up the thread of their conversation after a minute or two of quiet driving.
Jimbo hesitated only long enough to blink hard as an aid to recollection. “Black fella. Came lookin’ for trouble and found it. Got hisself killed and buried in the second levee out by the Rumsey property south of town. Seems like they was a white boy found with him—don’t think they ever did figure out who he was, though. He weren’t from around here, I know that.”
“You’re right, he wasn’t…identified, that is,” Levine replied, taking note of theGot hisself killed comment. “Although the Klan was implicated in it, no indictments were ever handed down, no arrests, no convictions—no real suspects, even. That was 1965. Now, here we are forty years later, and the Bureau has decided to take another look at the case and see what shakes free after all these years.”
One Drop of Blood Page 4
