Too bad the weather conspired to the contrary.
Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery is located on four hundred rolling acres overlooking the Mississippi River, about ten miles southwest of downtown St. Louis, Missouri. It is as good a place as any to rest. Peaceful. Bucolic. Quiet. Monumental. And full. Due to its geocentric location, JBNC was probably second only to Arlington in its massed grief—at least during the Vietnam War. And in 1966 the Vietnam maw was only slightly reddened. The scene being played out would be recast over and over again in the years to follow.
The gravesite was in Section 85 by the exterior rock wall in the western half of the cemetery. It was only feet from Flagstaff Drive near the circle. A sprawling pin oak shadowed the plot.
Upon a nod from the cemetery director, the eight-man honor guard slowly and ceremoniously slid the silver metal Batesville coffin from the nearby black hearse. The American flag stretched over the casket was taped unobtrusively at the corners to hold its fold against the vagrant wind. To those standing in the weather it took forever for the eight men to slowly rotate and pivot and advance, lock-step by lock-step, to the graveside.
Hut…hut…hut.
Big Ray Elmore sat beside Jimmie Carl’s mother. He occasionally held her hand or placed his arm around her or patted her knee or sought to comfort her in some way. They had known each other since first grade—she had been the first love of his life—and they had dated steadily with the intent of marrying until Big Ray had gone off to the Pacific during World War II. He had returned, a wounded, decorated hero in his own right, only to find her married to Carl Trimble. Everyone said Carl had knocked her up and felt obliged to make her honest.
Big Ray never believed it; his Grace wasn’t like that.
As Ray Elmore looked at this woman sitting next to him, he felt completely at a loss for how to salve her sorrow—yet desperate to do so. He understood what she was feeling, even if no one else in attendance did. The grief was his too. Real and raw and hot to the touch. A part of his own heart was being buried in the cold muddy earth. He had been the father Jimmie Carl had never had. The one who supported him and encouraged him and always had a needed ear and a practiced word of caution. Despite being almost four years older, Jimmie Carl and Ray’s twin boys, Ray Junior and W.R., had been inseparable—especially Jimmie Carl and Ray Junior. Jimmie Carl’s own father was not worth stomping on with a thick-heeled boot. He drank, whipped his kid, abused his wife—by open demeanor if not physically. Carl Trimble and Big Ray had grown up together. Big Ray hadn’t thought much of him when they were boys and cared even less for him in manhood. Now Carl was gone too. No loss.
But Jimmie Carl…that was a pain unendurable.
Big Ray listened to the rain softly pattering the canvas awning and popping loudly against the mud that now ringed the plywood decking and carpet that formed a floor under the tent. It dripped noisily and rhythmically from the pin oak. The navy chaplain spoke from practiced memory, choosing to not expose his good Bible to the rain, his breath a cloudy veil in front of his face, and occasionally words like “sacrifice,” and “selfless,” and “honor” were discernible above the other sounds.
Big Ray closed his eyes and cast his thoughts back to a long, hot Arkansas summer only a year and a lifetime ago. He was sitting on his porch swing; the chain made a comforting clink-clank and the wooden slats creaked lazily as it swayed back and forth. Back and forth. There was all the time in the world. His wife was working on dinner, and he could smell the frying okra and cornbread and simmering beans, and he could hear the tink and clatter of a tea pitcher being stirred with cracked ice. The cicadas hummed and rattled and challenged one another for space, their chatter pulsing like something electric. Big Ray’s boys had just finished high school and were looking onward to uncharted manhood. Jimmie Carl had stopped by, about to burst like a ripe melon; Big Ray smiled even now when he thought of it.“I wanted you to be the first to know, Big Ray,” Jimmie Carl had said.“I’ve done gone and joined up in the United States Navy —just like you.”
It wasn’t by accident that he told Ray Elmore first. It was Big Ray’s approval that carried credit with Jimmie Carl, not Carl Trimble’s.
A year and a lifetime ago.
With the crack of the honor guard’s first volley, bright spiders of red and blue light exploded against Ray Elmore’s closed eyelids. He felt Grace Trimble stiffen. Two more volleys followed, less surprising but no less jarring. A couple of ejected cartridge casings tinged off something hard that Big Ray couldn’t see but assumed to be one of the other tombstones. Big Ray reclosed his eyes and listened to the rain, and the people shifting in their seats, and the sucking mud…and Taps. Echo Taps from two buglers sounding in slightly offset time. He opened his eyes only when he heard a voice.
“On behalf of the president of the United States and the chief of naval operations…”It was a tall, thin man dressed in navy blue, his white saucer cap covered with a clear plastic cover. The scrambled braid on the bill identified him as a rear admiral. He was bent slightly at the waist and held a triangular folded flag with the palms of his white-gloved hands.“…please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s service to this country and a grateful navy.”
Grace Trimble didn’t move; she hardly even seemed to breathe. The cold appeared to have left her. She only stared, probably from her own porch, on her own summer evening a long, long time ago.
The tall man remained bent at the waist, uncertain how long to hold his position before acting on initiative.
He didn’t have to.
Big Ray Elmore quietly took the flag and said, “Thank you.”
Chapter 12
U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST17, 2005
It was fifty-nine steps, give or take, from the Laboratory to the office of the CILHI’s deputy commander. On an average day he figured that he made that trek somewhere on the order of a hundred times.
This was his first of the day.
Kel had gone straight out to the Lab floor this morning. Working with bones rather than paper promised to recharge his flagging morale. Usually the twenty-or-so examination tables were laid out with the remains of servicemen from World War II, the Korean War, and the countries of Southeast Asia—one here, two there. But currently nineteen of the tables held the well-preserved skeletal remains of nineteen Marines lost on the Pacific island of Makin in 1942—the famed Carlson’s Raiders. The originators ofGung -Ho.It had taken three recovery attempts to locate the mass grave on the island, and now a year’s worth of laboratory analysis was coming to fruition. There would be nineteen identifications. There would be nineteen burials. There would be nineteen men going home after all these years. But it wasn’t coming easily. Several of the men had incomplete or inaccurate medical and dental records and the last few pieces of the puzzle were requiring intensive hands-on attention.
Kel’s involvement on the Lab floor wasn’t required. It was gratuitous. The staff patiently stood aside and allowed their boss to move some bones around on the tables when he felt the need to—like today. He pulled a stool up to table 6 and the skeleton of a young twenty-to twenty-five-year-old caucasoid male with multiple, large-caliber gunshot wounds to the chest and head. At the foot end of the table were several clear plastic petri dishes containing small bone fragments yet to be identified and reconstructed. They wouldn’t affect the final identification, but were one of the loose ends that needed mending. Kel was looking forward to spending the early morning working with the small brown jigsaw pieces—it was therapeutic in its own way—and he figured he’d have an hour or so before the rush of the day started. That’s when the secretary buzzed him on the intercom and said that the deputy commander needed him ASAP. He was in extra early as well.
Fifty-nine steps later, Kel entered the deputy’s office without knocking. He raided the candy dish on Leslie Neep’s desk before taking one of the institutional chairs that kept Les’s desk su
rrounded like a band of hostile Indians. As with many federal agencies, the CILHI was required by army regulations to purchase its furniture from a government-sponsored work program for gentlemen obligated to repay a debt to society. Their particular contribution, as far as Kel could fathom, was to ensure that as many federal employees as possible had as many uncomfortable chairs as they could possibly manufacture. Face it, it’s hard to motivate cons to believe that quality is job one—especially if they think they’re making chairs for fat-assed prosecutors and other government hacks who might have been the ones who’d sent them up the river.
“You really have got to get some better candy,” Kel started the conversation. “These taste like aquarium rocks.”
Les Neep looked up from his computer where he spent the better part of his day deleting e-mails. “You ass. I certainly hope you choke.”
“Thanks.” He crunched the hard candy loudly and reached for another. “I’m told you wanted to see me,wiki-wiki. You’re in early for a federal employee.”
“Yeah. It’s the only way to get through all these damn e-mails,” he replied, swinging his chair to face the front before leaning back with his hands behind his head. He looked like a hostage being held at gunpoint. “So, what in the hell did you do to get us involved with the FBI this time?”
“I’m guessin’ you got a call.”
“You’re guessing right. I did. And I’m guessing that you aren’t as surprised as I was.”
Kel realized that he also was leaning back with his hands behind his head and figured it must look pretty stupid to a bystander for the two of them to mirror each other. Probably looked like a liquor store holdup was in progress. He leaned forward and folded his arms across his chest in an effort to change his posture. “I’m only surprised how quickly you got the call. Thomas Pierce gave me a heads-up yesterday mornin’, told me to expect a call, but he didn’t say when. Meant to tell you, but I figured we’d have a couple-three days.”
“Well you figured wrong.” Les wasn’t angry but he did want to make sure that the message was received that he didn’t like being surprised, at least when it could be helped. He was a Texan by birth and certainly by attitude; a large black man who eschewed the tag African-American for Texan-American. He did everything big. Kel tried hard not to hold his origin against him. Don’t kick cripples, his father had taught him, and Texans came close in his book.
Les had been the person who had hired Kel fifteen years earlier and was one of the few people in the organization whose tenure exceeded his own. He was a survivor, and Kel had learned a lot from him over the last decade or so on how to navigate the myriad political snares and deadfalls that populated the POW/MIA mission.
“So I reckon,” Kel replied. “Am I supposed to guess, or are you goin’ to share the news with me? Kind of a you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-
mine.”
“I don’t want to see yours.”
“In that case, how ’bout you-tell-me-yours-and-
I-tell-you-mine? And, oh, by the way, for the record, I have not involved us with the FBI, and I have no intention of involvin’ us with those pricks.”
“Not yet you haven’t. But, why don’t you go first, Dr. McKelvey, tell me what you know.”
“Sure, though I don’t have all that much. From what Tom told me yesterday, some cold case—an old civil rights murder—is bein’ reinvestigated by the good folks at the Hoover buildin’. A DNA fishin’ expedition from the way it sounds, but somehow the FBI managed to hook a CILHI fish. Remember the Evans-Trimble case?” Kel waited for an affirming nod before continuing, “Well goddamn if the Trimble family sequence doesn’t match this old FBI case.”
“Trimble? How the hell? When did the FBI case happen?” He squinted as he calculated. “It’d have to be early, midsixties I’d guess.”
“Nineteen sixty-five, I think he said.”
“And Evans and Trimble were killed in…?”
“Year later; in 1966.”
“So what’s the connection? DNA match? It’s mitochondrial DNA, isn’t it? Could match any number of people, right? That’s what you’re always telling me, anyway.”
“Preachin’ to the choir, and I’m the choir director in this particular church,” Kel said. “The match may just be a coincidence, but here’s the strange thing: The Trimble family happens to live in the same small town as the murder occurred—and I do mean small town. Split Tree, Arkansas, to be exact. Population, oh, I don’t know, maybe three or four good ol’ bubbas on a busy Saturday night.”
“With a name like Split Tree it has to be in Arkansas.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know we can’t all come from Mineral Build-Up, Texas,” Kel replied, referring to Les Neep’s hometown.
“You ass. I believe the sign readsMineral Wells.”
“Yeah, like I believe anyone there can read it. Anyhow, you got to admit that the chances of the DNA matchin’and the two samples comin’ from such a small town are pretty damn slim.”
“Unless they’re connected.”
“Right.”
“Which explains why the FBI wants to know if we can send an anthropologist to their Memphis office for a short detail.”
“Anthropologist?”
“Anthropologist. I’m assuming Split Tree is close to Memphis.”
“Yeah, hour or so south maybe—I think. It’s been a long time since I was over that way. But what do they want with an anthropologist? I admit the odds are impressive, but I’m still not convinced of a connection between these cases. I think there’s a good chance somebody tanked a DNA sample, us, FBI, AFDIL. All it takes is a stray skin cell or a mixed-up sample label or a stray spark of static electricity in the computer database. Even just a fat-fingered clerk enterin’ the data, and God knows the FBI has lots of fat fingers.”
“AFDIL double-check everything?”
“Tom says they did. FBI claims they’re clean, too, for what that’s worth. Still…”
“Still, they want some assistance, and Colonel Boschet wants to support them. He thinks things have been strained between us and the FBI recently, and he wants to start mending fences. So check out a tack hammer and get someone on a plane to Memphis.”
“Strained? That’s an understatement.”
“Maybe, but he thinks this is a good way to make amends.”
“Wait, wait, wait. What do we have to make amends for? They’re the sons-of-bitches that screwed the Gonsalves case. Not us.” Kel’s voice was beginning to rise, and he forced it back down.
“That’s not how the FBI sees it.”
“Well, if I’d gotten a serial murder case thrown out on a technicality, I might see it differently too. Our analysis was good. They’re the ones that couldn’t fill out a damn chain of custody form properly.”
“I seem to have struck a nerve.”
“Yeah, you did. I’m fed up with bein’ blamed for other people’s screw-ups—especially theirs.”
“Calm down. I hear you, but the colonel—”
“Screw the colonel. He’s a moron. We aren’t makin’amends to those bastards.”
“No one’s saying to make amends.”
“You just did.”
“Ahh, okay. I did. How about just accepting the fact that we need to rebuild a relationship? Can we agree on that?”
Kel looked out the window momentarily and then nodded slowly. “What is it they want with us?Exactly.”
“Exactly, I don’t know, and I don’t think even they know for sure. The guy I talked to sounds like he’s being left out to dry on this one and wants some company. He seems to have lots of responsibility but no support.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Give me a break. Anyhow, from what I can gather, he’ll take what he can get. Bottom line, Doctor, get somebody on an airplane. Who’s available?”
Kel was quiet for a moment as he thought. “We’ll do it on one condition.”
“Shoot.”
“I go. Me.”
“Oh, n
o. No, no, no,” Les said, sitting forward in his chair. “You just got back from North Korea. One third-world backwater is enough—we’re not sending you to another.”
“We have flush toilets in Arkansas now.”
“Congratulations. Volunteer someone else.”
“Like who? Have you been back in the Lab recently? It’s like the Lost City of Gog, back there. There’s a couple of dentists and a new kid whose name I don’t even know, but who looks like he might be about ready to start shavin’. Shit, you wouldn’t run into an anthropologist if you were paradin’ around in your wife’s underwear.” He realized that they both were in hostage mode again with their hands behind their heads.His turn to cross his arms, Kel thought.I’m not budgin’ until the SWAT team arrives. “Besides, I’ve got other reasons.”
“Ahhh, I thought so. What’s that old saying? You can take the boy out of Arkansas…But isn’t your family on the other side of the state? Aren’t you almost Oklahomans or something?”
“Nope. In fact, my daddy always told me to pity lame yellow dogs, Okies, and Texans—but he also said make sure not to pet ’em. Actually, believe it or not, my father and grandparents were from Split Tree—before the war, anyhow. Then they moved to the hill country on the other side of the state. I remember my parents took me there, to Split Tree, almost forty years ago, now—I’d kind of like to see the place as an adult. Besides, if we need to rebuild some bridges with the FBI, I’m the designated bridge builder around here.”
One Drop of Blood Page 10
