“Welcome to Tennessee,” I said to myself.
3
December 21, 1990
TURNING BACK FROM THE office doorway, I snatched up the ringing phone. “Hi, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right there. I’m leaving this instant.” It was the Friday before Christmas, and all through the stadium I was the only creature stirring; everyone else was already home for the holidays, or at least en route.
I was answered by a gravelly, homespun voice, half an octave deeper than my own. “Well, darlin’, I sure ’preciate that,” the man chuckled. “But before you go, you reckon you could connect me with a Dr. Brockman? Dr. Bill Brockman?”
I felt my face redden. “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were my wife. This is Dr. Brockton. How can I help you?”
“This is Sheriff Dixon, Dr. Brockman. Up in Morgan County.”
“Hello, Sheriff,” I said. “It’s Brock-ton, by the way, not Brockman. What can I do for you?” Turning to the framed Tennessee map mounted on the wall, I scanned for Morgan County. The state had ninety-five counties, and in the six months since my arrival in Knoxville, I’d worked ten forensic cases—five of them in Knox County; one each in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Memphis; the janitor-infuriating case from Cumberland County, fifty miles to the west; and one from a rural county southeast of Knoxville. I seemed to recall that Morgan County was nearby, but I was having trouble finding it.
“Looks like maybe we’ve got a homicide up here. A hiker found a body in the woods, up in Frozen Head State Park. Unidentified nigrah woman. In pretty rough shape. The medical examiner took one look and told me to call and have you come get her. Reckon you could come on up this way?”
I felt a tinge of annoyance—that damned memo, I thought again—followed by a wave of excitement and then a ripple of guilt. My addiction to forensic adrenaline was, I suspected, as strong as any alcoholic’s thirst, and the truth was, I was happy to have a chance to slake it. But I’d promised Kathleen I’d be home by five o’clock, to help prepare for a Christmas party at six. “Where’s the body now, Sheriff?”
“Still in the woods. Just up the slope from a creek. Jordan Branch. It’s about five miles outside Wartburg. The M.E. said to leave it at the scene for you.”
I spotted Wartburg on the map—a small dot about fifty miles northwest of Knoxville—and then found the irregular green rectangle that marked the state park. Glancing out the office windows, through the grime on the glass and the latticework of girders supporting the stadium’s grandstands, I saw that the sky had already gone dark. “I don’t mean to put you off, Sheriff,” I said, “but I’d rather work the scene in the daylight. No matter how good your lights are, it’s easy to miss things in the dark. Any chance you could post somebody out there tonight, to keep an eye on things? Let me meet you there first thing in the morning?”
He considered this for a moment. “I reckon I could put Cotterell out there. One of my deputies. He ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”
I got directions and agreed to meet him at the Morgan County courthouse the next morning at nine. After hanging up, I called Kathleen. “Hi, honey,” I said with a sense of déjà vu, sheepishness, and amusement. “I’ll be right there. I’m leaving this instant.”
4
“PRETTY ROUGH SHAPE” WAS putting it mildly. Very mildly. The truth was, in ten years of forensic casework, I’d never seen such a shocking death scene as the one Sheriff Dixon led me to.
We’d met at the Morgan County courthouse, a quaint brick building topped by an elegant, four-sided white cupola, each side dominated by a large clock face reading 9:05.
Ten minutes later, after backtracking several miles along the Knoxville highway, we’d turned onto a small side road that led to two destinations, according to a green sign at the turnoff: Frozen Head State Park, and Morgan County Correctional Center. The prison was first, a sprawling complex of dull brown brick and gleaming razor wire. A mile or so later, after a sharp turn and a narrow bridge over a tumbling creek—Jordan Branch, I guessed—we’d entered a narrow wooded valley. FROZEN HEAD STATE PARK, read a sign, its white-painted letters etched into dark brown boards. Two miles beyond the sign—past a gate marked AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY, where asphalt gave way to gravel—we’d stopped behind a Morgan County Sheriff’s Office cruiser and a black Ford Crown Victoria sporting a state government tag, a trunk-mounted radio antenna, and a side spotlight near the left outside mirror.
The body lay barely thirty yards from the road, within a ragged rectangle of crime-scene tape strung from tree trunks. The ground sloped down toward the creek, and as we picked our way through the rocky terrain, I saw that the legs were angled downhill, toward the stream.
The corpse—a woman’s corpse—was nude, and when we got close enough to make out details, I felt my stomach lurch. The body was bloated, the abdomen swollen with gases produced by bacteria and enzymes in the digestive tract. The skin of the torso, arms, and legs was largely intact, but virtually no soft tissue remained on the neck and face; the jaws and teeth were bared in a macabre grin, and the cheekbones and eye orbits—now vacant—were exposed as well, along with the vertebrae of the neck. So were the lower ends of the legs, the tibia and fibula of each leg jutting, footless, from the shredded flesh of the shins.
But gruesome as all those features were, they weren’t what I found shocking about the scene. What I found shocking was the way the woman’s body had been posed. Her legs were splayed on either side of a small tree, and her crotch—her decaying, decomposing crotch—was pressed tight against the trunk, as if, even long after death, she were still being sexually violated.
“Hey. Doc.” The sheriff’s gravelly voice tugged at the sleeve of my consciousness, and the insistent tone made me suspect that he’d called my name more than once.
“Sorry, what?” I looked in the direction his voice had come from, and saw him standing by two other men—one in uniform, the other in civilian clothes.
“This here’s my deputy, Jim Cotterell. And this troublemaker”—he said it in a tone that might have been joking, or might not—“is Bubba Hardknot, our friendly neighborhood agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.”
“Deputy,” I said, shaking the hand of the man in uniform. Then I extended my hand to the TBI agent. “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name?”
“Special Agent Meffert,” he said, smiling slantwise, in a way I couldn’t quite interpret. “Wellington Meffert. It’s a little fancy for everyday use in Morgan County. Most folks around here call me Bubba Hardknot. When they’re being polite.”
“I’m kindly surprised to see you way up here in the woods on a Saturday morning, Bubba,” said the sheriff flatly. “I thought you TBI types kept banker’s hours. Cotterell call you?” He glanced at his deputy; the look seemed accusatory or even hostile, and I gathered there was no love lost between the sheriff and the TBI agent—and possibly not between the sheriff and his own deputy.
“Naw, the park rangers called me,” Meffert replied casually. “State property, state agency. Go figure.”
“Hmm,” grunted Dixon.
My camera was slung around my neck, and I removed the lens cap and began taking pictures—wide shots of the entire scene first, then increasingly tight ones, spiraling in so that I photographed the body from all angles. I finished the 36-exposure roll with close-ups of the footless legs, the fleshless neck and face, and the obscenely posed crotch. Satisfied that I’d captured the key images, I stood from my crouch and turned to the law enforcement officers. “Any idea who she is?”
The sheriff answered. “Not yet. Shouldn’t take too long to find out, though. We don’t get too many dead nigrahs around here.” He chuckled, then added, “Not near enough, right fellas?” He gave me a sly grin and a wink. I blinked, puzzled—and disbelieving, once I replayed his words and decided that I’d understood the joke correctly. I glanced at the other men’s faces. Deputy Cotterell was lo
oking away, his cheeks flaming; Agent Meffert’s face was a blank mask, as expressionless as stone.
I cleared my throat and turned back toward the body. “She might not actually be negroid,” I said. “Once a person’s been dead a few days, you can’t always tell the race from the color of the skin. The skin of Caucasoids—whites—often darkens as they decay.” The sheriff frowned, perhaps because he doubted what I’d said, perhaps because he didn’t like the idea that the dead woman might be white. I couldn’t tell which was the case, and I didn’t want to know. “Any women been reported missing?”
The sheriff shook his head. “Naw. No nigrahs I’ve heard tell of. For sure no white women.”
Reaching into my back pocket, I pulled out a pair of latex gloves and tugged them on, then knelt beside the head for a closer look at the exposed bones of the face. The woman’s teeth had a strongly vertical orientation, and the nasal opening was narrow, with a thin sill of bone jutting slightly from the base of the opening. “Now that I look closer,” I said, “I’m pretty sure she’s white.”
“The hell you say,” muttered the sheriff.
“What makes you think that, Doc?” asked Meffert quickly.
I glanced over my shoulder. “You got a pen on you, Agent Meffert?” He nodded. I held a gloved index finger to my lips, as if I were a librarian, mid-shush. “Put one end of the pen at the base of your nose and lay it across your lips.” Looking intrigued, he did as I’d directed. “It touches your chin, right?” He nodded again, the pen still in place. “If you were black, it wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?” interrupted the sheriff.
“Wouldn’t touch the chin. Black people’s teeth and jaws slope forward—the fancy, five-dollar term for that is ‘prognathic.’ White people’s teeth and jaws are more vertical—‘orthognic.’ This woman’s got a narrow nasal opening, too; blacks have a wide one, with vertical grooves—gutters—so they can take in more air through their nose. That’s evolution at work, adapting them to tropical climates.”
Meffert nodded, looking thoughtful. The sheriff scowled, looking . . . scowly. He opened his mouth to speak, and I half expected to hear the term “jungle bunnies” in response to my evolutionary explanation. Instead, he asked, “You a bettin’ man, Doc?”
“Excuse me?”
“You a bettin’ man? A gambler?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, if you was, what kind of odds would you lay on this being a white woman?”
“How certain I am that she’s white, based on the teeth and jaws and nasal opening?”
“Right.”
I shrugged. “I hate to say a hundred percent, because if I turn out to be wrong, I’ll look like a hundred-percent idiot. I’ll be able to look at a couple other things once I get her back to the lab and clean off the bones. But right here, right now? Ninety-five percent.” I tugged downward on the mandible, opening the jaws so I could inspect the lower teeth, especially the molars. “Middle or upper income, too, probably. She’s had good dental care.”
The sheriff rubbed the corners of his mouth with one hand, his thumb and fingers widening and narrowing repeatedly, his lips alternately stretching and pursing in artificial simulacra of smiles and frowns. Then he turned slightly to one side and spat, a long stream of tobacco juice and saliva arcing onto the ground a foot from where I knelt. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “He done this to a white woman? They’s some serious shit about to hit the fan here. Ain’t no doubt about it. We got to catch that boy, y’all hear me?”
“You think this murder was committed by a juvenile?” By the time I finished asking the question, I realized how foolish it was.
“A man—a black man—escaped from Brushy four days ago,” said Meffert. “He’s still on the loose.”
“Brushy?”
“Brushy Mountain State Prison.”
“The one we passed on the way in?”
“No. The old prison, in Petros.” He pointed across the creek, as if I might be able to see it if I looked. “It’s close—three, four five miles, as the crow flies—but there’s one hell of a mountain between here and there.”
The prison’s name rang a bell in the back of my mind. “Seems like I remember that somebody famous did time in Brushy Mountain.”
Meffert nodded. “Still doing time. James Earl Ray. Guy that assassinated Martin Luther King. Sentenced to ninety-nine years.”
“It’s a hunnerd, now,” interjected the deputy, Cotterell. “Remember? They tacked on one more year after he escaped.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “What about that? I thought that prison was famous for being escape-proof.”
“Ain’t no prison escape-proof,” scoffed the sheriff. “Not if it’s built by human hands, guarded by human guards. Ray and six others scaled a fence in the back corner of the yard one day. Maybe the guards was sleepin’ on the job. Maybe they was paid to be sleepin’ on the job. Dumbasses went the wrong damn way after they got out, though.”
“They headed north,” Meffert explained. “This way. Into the mountains. They were caught two days later, in some of the toughest terrain in Tennessee. Story goes, by the time they found him, Ray was so exhausted and hungry and tore up, he was begging to go back to Brushy.”
“And this guy who escaped four days ago,” I said. “What’s his story? Also a killer?”
“If he weren’t before, he for damn sure is now,” said the sheriff. “He is a sack of human excrement.” The other two nodded.
“Serial sex offender,” said the TBI agent.
“Bad luck for this poor gal, crossing paths with him,” the sheriff resumed. “She didn’t never have no chance.”
As the lawmen continued chatting and head-shaking, I unfolded a body bag and laid it beside the woman’s remains. The task of getting her into the bag was complicated by the presence of the sapling between her legs. I considered lifting one of her legs to vertical and then swinging it clear of the tree—the corpse had already passed through rigor mortis—but I feared that bending the leg so far might tear it from the hip. Instead, I squatted above the head and worked my hands under the shoulders, into the armpits, and slid the corpse several feet up the hill, so that both legs were clear of the tree. Then I repositioned the bag, unzipped it, and folded back the top. “Could one of you guys give me a hand?”
They looked at one another, no one moving. Finally Sheriff Dixon said, “Jim, get over there and help the perfessor.” Cotterell grimaced but complied.
“There’s another pair of gloves sticking out of my back pocket,” I said. “You’re gonna want those, I’m thinking.” He tugged them free and pulled them on. “Let’s lift her legs and swing those over first,” I said, “then her upper body.” He nodded and took hold of the left shin, while I grasped the right, wishing the feet were still there to help keep my grip from slipping loose. “Okay, on three, we lift and swing. One, two, three.”
With a lift, accompanied by a grunt from the stocky deputy, we got her legs and pelvis onto the rubberized fabric.
“Okay, same thing with the arms.” He nodded, and we hoisted and swung the upper body onto the bag, then I folded the flap across the body and tugged the C-shaped zipper closed. Then, with the added help of the sheriff and the TBI agent, we lugged the bag up the slope and slid it into the back of my truck.
I took my leave of the sheriff, his deputy, and Special Agent Bubba, promising to fax a preliminary report by Tuesday. Meffert raised his eyebrows. “You know that’s Christmas Day, right?”
“Crap,” I said. “No, I forgot. How about Wednesday, the twenty-sixth?”
Meffert shrugged; the sheriff nodded, allowing as how he reckoned that would be all right. I removed the gloves and tossed them in the back of the truck, and motioned for Cotterell to do likewise, then closed the tailgate and the shell.
I drove slowly down the park’s narrow road and rumbled across
Jordan Branch, then sped up as the road straightened and widened near the prison. Ten minutes after I turned onto the highway toward Knoxville, I noticed another two-lane road, state route 116, T-ing in from the left. PETROS 2 said a sign pointing up 116. BRUSHY MOUNTAIN STATE PRISON 3. On a whim, I slowed and took the turn.
Petros was a cluster of modest homes—a few dozen or so—plus a handful of small churches, several dilapidated repair shops, a cinder-block grocery store, and a volunteer fire department. A mile beyond what passed for downtown—just before the highway made a hairpin turn and started angling up a mountainside—I came to the turnoff for Brushy Mountain.
The prison occupied the back end of a small, deep valley—a hollow, or “holler,” in East Tennessee dialect—and even from a quarter mile away, the façade was forbidding: a huge, brooding fortress of stone, topped by castlelike crenellations and flanked on three sides by steep forested mountains, as if the prison itself had taken up a defensive position and were making its last stand. And in a way, perhaps it was, for Agent Meffert had said that the state was planning to close the facility, as soon as the Morgan County Correctional Complex could be expanded to accommodate Brushy’s hard-core convicts.
Idling toward the grim stone fortress, I imagined James Earl Ray and six other desperate men scaling the fence, then scrambling up the steep, rocky slopes toward Frozen Head. Was that the same route this latest fugitive had taken—the sack-of-excrement “boy” Sheriff Dixon was intent on capturing? Had he gotten farther than Ray? And had his path crossed with that of an unlucky hiker—a woman who happened to be in a terribly wrong place at a fatally wrong time?
As I crept forward, I noticed a patrol car leave the prison’s gate and head in my direction. Then—imagining the scene that might ensue if I were stopped and the back of my truck searched—I made a hasty U-turn and headed back toward the highway, and the comforts of UT.
Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella Page 2