Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  CHAPTER 3

  LEAVING THE STADIUM, MIRANDA AND I TURNED ONTO Neyland Drive and paralleled the emerald-green Tennessee River for a mile, then took the eastbound ramp for Interstate 40. Now that we had a forensic case I felt downright cheerful, even though the case was situated in a rough-justice jurisdiction where many an outsider had come to grief.

  Cooke County was the best of counties and the worst of counties. By nature, it was a paradise: mountainsides blanketed with pines, tulip poplars, hemlocks, and rhododendron; deep valleys carved by the French Broad, Pigeon, and Nolichucky Rivers; tumbling mountain streams, brimming with trout. But by other measures—socioeconomically, ecologically, and legally—it was far from the Garden of Eden. Unemployment was high, income was low, gunshots were considered background noise, trash dumping was regarded as a constitutional right (revered only slightly less than the Second Amendment, judging by considerable roadside evidence), and crime had long been a chief source of revenue, both for Cooke County residents and for elected officials.

  A COUNTY OF BAD OL’ BOYS read the headline of a Los Angeles Times story about Cooke County a few years ago. The subhead gave more specifics: BOOTLEGGING, BROTHELS, AND CHOP SHOPS. GUILTY SHERIFFS AND FEDERAL INVESTIGATIONS.

  Oddly, the article omitted mention of what was perhaps the most sensational black mark on the county’s reputation: the discovery, years before, by an undercover FBI agent, that the sheriff was trafficking in cocaine, and in a big way. The sheriff turned an empty field behind the county high school into a makeshift airstrip, and as his deputies guarded the perimeter, a plane loaded with coke landed on school property. “That sure puts the ‘high’ in higher education,” one of my FBI colleagues had remarked after the sheriff’s indictment.

  But that had been many years and several sheriffs ago. By all accounts—including the reckoning of the FBI, which continued to watch Cooke County closely—Sheriff Jim O’Conner had made great strides in rooting out official corruption, though Cooke County’s citizenry still had a penchant for pushing the boundaries of law and order. Common lore held that anyone driving a car with an out-of-county license plate was considered fair game after dark, and a year or so ago, a friend of mine—a Knoxville writer with more curiosity than common sense—made the mistake of driving a red BMW convertible into the heart of Del Rio, a Cooke County community whose main “industry” for decades was its massive cockfighting arena. A quarter mile after he turned onto Del Rio’s river road, three pickups—all equipped with loaded gun racks—pulled out of driveways and tucked in behind the BMW, following it closely until it made a U-turn and hightailed it out of there.

  Miranda and I would probably be fine in Cooke County, I figured. For one thing, we’d be in the company of law enforcement officers. For another, the UT pickup truck we were driving was old and battered, and therefore not particularly tempting to thieves or kidnappers. For yet another, the truck had a feature that was sure to repel almost any ne’er-do-well: the cargo bed and camper shell reeked of death and decay, thanks to the countless bodies and bones the truck had ferried over the years. The truck was like a four-wheel version of Charon’s boat, ferrying the dead across the river Styx—in this case, though, ferrying the dead across the Tennessee River to the Body Farm. Perhaps I should have felt morose about being Death’s ferryman, but I didn’t. Instead, I felt curious and eager as I contemplated getting to know my latest passenger—the newest resident of the Body Farm.

  But my good mood didn’t last long. Less than ten miles outside of Knoxville, a ghost—in the shape of a highway billboard—reared its haunting, taunting head. COMFORT INN read the faded sign, a message I always found deeply ironic on this particular billboard.

  “Crap,” I muttered to Miranda. “Remind me to take a different route next time.”

  “What? Why?” She glanced at me, then followed my grim gaze to the billboard. “Oh. Right.” She grimaced. “You’d think they’d take that down. But I guess not too many people know about it or remember it.”

  “It” was the series of murders Nick Satterfield had committed, two decades before, on the wooded hillside directly behind the billboard. A sadist who preyed on prostitutes, Satterfield would pick up his victims on Magnolia Avenue, Knoxville’s de facto red-light district, and bring them out here to Cahaba Lane—a short cul-de-sac that was a dead end in the worst possible way. After parking directly beneath the Comfort Inn billboard, Satterfield would lead the women up a trail into the woods, where he would do brutal and lethal things to them.

  “It still blows my mind,” I said. “His car was parked right there, in plain sight, while he tortured and strangled those women. I still wonder if anybody driving past ever heard anything.”

  Miranda lowered the window and cocked her head toward it, as if listening for the echo of a long-ago scream drifting from the woods that flanked the freeway. “Lotta noise,” she said doubtfully. “Even with the windows down, hard to hear anything but the wind. Though if you were stopped to change a tire . . .” She made a face. “Yuck. Yeah, next time let’s take a different route.”

  We rode in silence for the next half hour. Then, just before the freeway began corkscrewing its way through the Great Smoky Mountains, we got off. I felt my mood lift again as we wound alongside the Pigeon River, which we followed upstream all the way into town.

  Jonesport was Cooke County’s seat of government and its largest town, not that the competition—from the likes of Allen Grove, Del Rio, Tom Town, Wasp, and Briar Thicket—was all that stiff. Fronting the town square was the courthouse, a brooding, fortresslike building, assembled from rough-hewn slabs of granite, its windows gridded with bars, its front doors sheathed in iron. As we approached, Miranda gave a low whistle. “Geez,” she said. “That place could repel a third world army.” After a moment, she added, “Although from what I know of Cooke County, a band of local outlaws is lots more likely than a foreign army.”

  “From what I know about Cooke County,” I said, “the outlaws are already inside, running the place.” As we passed the façade, I noticed two old men seated on a bench beside the front entrance, an enormous pile of wood shavings at their feet. I gestured in their direction to direct Miranda’s attention to them. “See those two guys?” She nodded. “I think those are the same guys I saw last time I was here. Four years ago? Five? I wonder how many trees they’ve whittled their way through in that time.”

  “Well,” she mused, “probably not as many as you and I have dissertated and photocopied and syllabused our way through.”

  “Glad to know you hold our work in such high regard,” I grumbled, though without conviction.

  I pulled into the gravel lot behind the stone courthouse and parked in the NO PARKING zone beside the sheriff’s department, rolling down my window to take in the afternoon air. Just as I killed the engine, the sun seemed to disappear behind a cloud. Glancing out my window, I saw that it wasn’t a cloud that had blocked the sun, but a mountain—a mountain of a man, his big belly and barrel chest filling my entire field of view. His shirt could scarcely contain the gargantuan form—I caught glimpses of skin through gaps between the buttons—and when he leaned on the windowsill, the truck canted to the left, causing the apple that had been sitting on the truck’s bench seat to roll against my thigh.

  The big man’s face was out of sight above the truck’s roofline, so I spoke to the immense chest—specifically, to the five-pointed star pinned to the straining shirt. “Waylon, is that you?”

  “Nah, it’s my baby sister,” rumbled a deep growl of a voice. “How the hell you been, Doc? We ain’t seen you in way too long.”

  A bear-paw hand clapped me on the shoulder, and the truck rocked from the force of it. “Good,” I managed to grunt. “Busy, but good. Waylon, you remember Miranda?”

  “Course,” he said. He bent down, his bearded, bearish head occupying half the window’s opening, then threaded an arm the size of an oak limb across the cab, offering her the paw, which seemed the size of a boxing glove. Mir
anda’s hand and wrist disappeared as Waylon closed his fingers. “Mighty nice to see you again, Miss Miranda.”

  “Nice to see you too, Waylon,” she said. “You keeping ’em honest up here?”

  Her question unleashed a low, thunderous chuckle from deep in Waylon’s chest. “Not so’s you’d notice,” he said. “I’m a deputy, not a miracle worker. Besides, if ever’body up here straightened up and toed the line, I’d be out of work, wouldn’t I? Way I see it, only feller up here with more job security ’n me is the undertaker.”

  WE FOLLOWED WAYLON’S TRUCK OUT OF TOWN ON the Dixie Highway, crossing the Pigeon River and then, in a few miles, paralleling the French Broad, which had somehow, over the eons, managed to carve a channel through the high, rugged mountains between Jonesport and Asheville, North Carolina—barely thirty miles away, as the crow flew, but more than twice that far upriver as the valley twisted and turned.

  We wouldn’t be going all the way to Asheville—only about halfway, to the remnants of a tiny ghost town named Wasp.

  As we followed the river, I didn’t worry about staying particularly close to Waylon, since we could have spotted his truck from a mile away. Despite the sheriff’s emblem painted on the front doors and the tailgate, the truck wasn’t exactly a standard-issue law enforcement vehicle. A far cry from the Jeep Cherokees and Chevy Tahoes favored by rural sheriffs’ departments, this was a hulking Dodge Ram 3500, fire-engine red, sporting a hulking diesel engine, a double cab, dual rear wheels, and twin vertical exhaust pipes, the sort normally found only on tractor-trailer rigs.

  We had barely reached Jonesport’s outskirts—which weren’t too far from Jonesport’s inskirts—when Miranda said, “You know, if anybody else were driving that thing, I’d be tempted to diagnose a case of SPS compensation.”

  “Of what compensation?”

  “SPS.”

  “I heard what you said,” I told her. “I just don’t know what it means.”

  “SPS? Small penis syndrome.”

  “Eww,” I said.

  “SPS compensation means driving a huge truck or a souped-up car—or shooting giant guns, or acting supermacho—to compensate for a sense of manly inadequacy. Mind you,” she added, “I doubt that Waylon actually suffers from SPS.”

  “Stop,” I said, my face scrunching into an involuntary grimace. “I’m sorry I asked.” If I hadn’t been driving, I’d have put my hands over my ears. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  “We’re anthropologists,” she said matter-of-factly. “We study humans—their civilizations, their rites, their rituals, their behaviors.”

  “Cultural anthropologists study that stuff. We’re physical anthropologists, remember?”

  “We were also talking about physical attributes,” she said, way too cheerfully.

  “You were, not me,” I pointed out. “Were. Past tense. End of discussion.”

  “No problem,” she said. “Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Or . . . insecure.” She snickered as soon she said the last word.

  “Ha ha. Very funny, Miss Smarty-Pants. You should do stand-up comedy, after your dissertation gets blown out of the water.”

  “Not gonna happen,” she said. “Did I mention that harsh grading is a surefire sign of SPS?” She was grinning now, I noticed out of the corner of my eye. She was a smarty-pants, and she was funny, and she did know how to bait me, no doubt about it. Mercifully, she changed topics. “So what’s that pipe sticking up above the cab of the WaylonMobile? Not the two chrome ones—even I recognize those as exhaust pipes—but that weird black one, on the right?”

  I glanced at the truck’s roofline. “I think that’s a snorkel.”

  “A snorkel? Like, for scuba diving?”

  “Basically, yeah,” I said. “So the truck can ford streams—hell, probably rivers and lakes, tall as that thing is—without the engine drowning.”

  “So Waylon’s truck is also a submarine? Does it have a periscope, too?”

  I shrugged. “Knowing Waylon, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  She was silent for a moment—I fervently hoped she wasn’t considering turning “periscope” into a bad joke—then she said, “You know how people and their dogs resemble each other?”

  “Sure. My high school chemistry teacher, Miss Walpole? She had an English bulldog—short, fat, wrinkly, snuffly. Damned thing looked exactly like her, except for the strings of drool. Walked just like her, too.”

  “That truck is Waylon on wheels. Almost like a vehicular reincarnation.”

  “Don’t you have to be dead to be reincarnated?”

  “Correct as usual, Professor Pedant,” she said. “Okay, let me rephrase that. Waylon’s truck is like a vehicular, parallel-universe avatar of him. Is that better?”

  “Much,” I said. I wasn’t quite sure what an “avatar” was, but given our previous conversation, I was too skittish to ask.

  We followed the French Broad past Del Rio, former site of the massive cockfighting arena, then continued along the river for another five miles or so. At that point, the asphalt and the water parted company, the road turning uphill away from the river. A few miles later, we turned off the highway and onto a woodsy gravel route marked Wolf Creek Road. It began promisingly enough, a lane and a half wide, but over the next few miles it gradually narrowed to a single lane, then became nothing but a pair of tracks, sometimes surfaced in gravel, sometimes in dirt, mostly in leaves. Trees crowded in from both sides and overhead, the branches slapping and clawing at Waylon’s supersized truck, whose massive cab and bulging rear-wheel fenders bulked it up to a full two feet wider and at least a foot higher than the UT pickup Miranda and I were in. But if Waylon was bothered by the damage to his paint job, he didn’t show it in his use of the accelerator pedal, bulling his way through the branches as if they were nothing more than clouds of gnats.

  He stopped just beyond a fork in the “road”—a Y where the two faint tracks split and became four, like a backwoods version of a chromosome unzipping and replicating. Waylon had taken the right-hand arm of the Y, so I pulled a short ways up the left-hand arm before stopping. As we got out, Waylon lumbered up beside me. “Doc, snug right on up behind me, if you don’t care to.” His phrasing—using “don’t care to” to mean “don’t mind”—brought a slight smile to my lips. His next line almost made me laugh out loud: “Best not to be blockin’ traffic.”

  “Traffic? Here?” I asked the question with the closest thing I could manage to a straight face.

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Never know.” He pointed in the direction my truck was facing. “This here connects up with Round Mountain Road, and Max Patch is up yonder way. Might be somebody’ll be headed up thataway, or coming back down.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t familiar with Round Mountain, but I knew Max Patch: a high, grassy bald just across the state line in North Carolina—a popular spot for Knoxville hikers and picnickers. I pointed ahead of Waylon’s truck. “And that way?”

  He snorted. “Ain’t nothing thataway. Not now, leastwise. Used to be—eighty, hunnerd years ago—this here was Wasp. We’ll go past what’s left of the school and the post office. But ain’t nobody lived here since the 1930s, when the Forest Service bought ever’body out and let the trees grow back. It’d been logged, ya see, and the land was all warshin’ away, ever time it rained. ’Bout the only people goes up thisaway anymore is hunters. Them’s who found it and called us.”

  “How far to the death scene?” I asked him.

  “Hunnerd yards, give or take. Straight up thataway.” He pointed past his truck. “What all you want to take up there, gear-wise? I’ll help you tote it.”

  “If it’s that close, I’ll just take the camera, for now,” I said. “Once we’ve had a look, I’ll know what we need.”

  He nodded and headed up the track, bending and snapping branches as he squeezed past his truck and the sheriff’s SUV—a much smaller Jeep that was parked twenty feet farther up the hill, in the last gasp of wha
t had once been the road, eight decades before. As I reached the front bumper of the sheriff’s Jeep, where the route narrowed to a single-track footpath, I noticed a set of crumbling, moss-covered stone steps notched into a low embankment to my left, and—on a level shelf of forest floor a stone’s throw beyond—a rotting wooden building and a small cluster of gravestones. “So that must’ve been the church,” I said, pointing at the collapsing walls.

  “It was,” Waylon confirmed. “And yonder’s the schoolhouse.” He pointed to the right, where I saw another crumbling structure, similar to the church in size, shape, and ruination, but lacking the tombstones, and standing—or, rather, leaning—rather closer to the path. “A few houses here and there, too,” he added, waving a hand in a vague arc, “but they’s kindly off the beaten track.”

  “Wait,” said Miranda. “You’re saying we’re on the beaten track?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Relatively speaking, that is.” He stopped and cupped his hands around his mouth and called ahead, in a booming voice, “Sheriff? We’re here. Hold your fire.”

  “I will,” answered a quiet, amused voice, so close to us that I jumped. Jim O’Conner stepped out from the ruins of the schoolhouse. “I was just doing a little amateur archaeology here, while I waited. Dr. Brockton, Miranda, good to see you again. Thanks for coming.”

  He strode toward us, his hand extending while he was still ten feet away. He was at least a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than his deputy, but there was no doubt who was in command here. I’d seen other men his size carry themselves like bantam roosters: all puffed up, preening and strutting. O’Conner carried himself easily, with quickness, grace, and wiry strength—more like a bobcat than a rooster, I decided. Ever the gentleman, he shook Miranda’s hand first, then mine, with a grip that seemed somehow to be simultaneously easy and yet powerful.