Body Farm 01 - Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  As Williams jacked the rifle’s lever to load another round in the chamber, Art lunged for him. Williams swung the rifle, and the stock caught Art in the cheekbone. He staggered and sank to his hands and knees.

  I looked away, appalled and sickened. And that’s when I saw it: a small, dark dot on the southern horizon. The wind was booming again from the north, drowning out the sound, but I’d seen enough helicopters in the past few days to recognize another one. Whose it was, or how it happened to be swooping toward us, I had no idea. But I prayed the wind would mask its approach until someone inside could get off a shot at Williams. But would they, even if they had a chance? My heart sank as I realized that the deputy—the one person in a law enforcement uniform—was probably the last person another officer would fire on. I looked back to the porch and down at Art—still on his knees—and noticed his eyes flick toward the horizon and register a sign of hope. He’d seen it, too.

  All I could think to do was stall for time, distract Williams for a few crucial moments. Maybe once the chopper landed, we could shout for help, shout out an explanation of some sort—if nothing else, as we were gunned down ourselves, maybe one of us could shout that it was Williams who had shot Orbin and the reverend. “I don’t see how you expect to get away with this,” I said loudly. “You’ll have to kill all of us, and the TBI’s going to find that mighty suspicious.”

  He shook his head scornfully. “Naw, they’re just gonna find it real tragic,” he said. “I’d warned you to stay away from Mr. and Mrs. Kitchings here. Crazy with grief, blaming you for the death of Orbin, Reverend Kitchings here blasted y’all with both barrels. If only I’d arrived thirty seconds sooner.” As he said this, he stooped and reached for the shotgun with his left hand, keeping his right hand on the trigger of the rifle, which was cradled in his arm. “When the reverend reloaded and aimed at me, I had no choice but to shoot him.” He paused to compose the next lines of his story. “Imagine my surprise when his wife grabbed the shotgun as he fell, and then she turned on me. Broke my heart to have to shoot an old woman, but what else could I do?” He looked from the rifle to the shotgun and back again, as if considering which murder weapon to employ first. He seemed to reach a decision, for he set the shotgun back down, raised the hunting rifle to his shoulder, and aimed at Mrs. Kitchings.

  The chopper was tantalizingly close now—no more than a hundred yards—and I knew he’d hear it any second. His finger tightened on the trigger. “No!” I shrieked desperately. “I don’t want to die! Don’t kill us! Please don’t kill us! No, no, no, no!” He hesitated, staring at me in confusion and annoyance, then shifted his stance and turned the barrel toward me. But it was the wrong gun—he was planning to shoot Art and me with the shotgun—and he hesitated.

  At that moment a Bell LongRanger bearing FBI markings dove toward the parking lot. Even before it slammed down, a door burst open and a figure leapt out and sprinted toward the house, bellowing. Williams spun, astonished. “Gun!” shouted Art. “Up on the porch! He’s got a gun!”

  Despite twenty years, forty pounds, a knee injury, and a mild heart attack, Tom Kitchings still ran with the power and determination worthy of a halfback. Williams began to fire. The sheriff dodged and juked as if he were headed for the goal line in Neyland Stadium, and I saw something of the speed and agility that had once electrified fans by the thousands. Williams levered off two quick shots, but Kitchings was still churning, still closing the distance, when Art launched himself at the deputy and knocked him to the porch. Williams struggled beneath him, but Art drove a knee into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him, then wrenched the rifle free with a finger-snapping yank. Scrambling to his feet, he jammed the barrel against Williams’s temple. “Give me a reason,” Art gasped. “Give me any little reason to shoot you. Come on, do it!” Williams slumped, limp and defeated.

  Tom Kitchings half-vaulted, half-fell up the steps and onto the porch. “Hey, Sheriff, that was some run,” I said. “Looks like you haven’t lost your form after all.” He ignored me and sank to his knees beside his dazed mother and his dead father.

  “Oh, Mama,” he cried. “Oh, Mama, what’s happened to us? What has happened to this family, Mama?” He was gasping and sobbing.

  She wrapped her arms around him. “Terrible things,” she said. “God’s judgment. We brought it down on our own selves. We did. Ever one of us but you.”

  He choked on the words. “Oh, Mama, I tried. I tried so hard to make good.”

  “You did. You done real good. You always made me proud. You just keep on, no matter what.”

  “It’s too late, Mama. Too late.”

  “No it ain’t. You got a good heart, Tommy, and you’re all I got left in this world. You got to keep on making me proud.”

  “I can’t, Mama. I’m shot. I’m shot, and it’s bad.” Only when he said the words did I notice the bloom of crimson spreading across the back of his khaki shirt. He sagged against her, then slid to the porch, and just like that, he was gone.

  Two more men thundered up the porch steps, weapons drawn: Steve Morgan and “Rooster” Rankin. “TBI,” shouted Morgan, “don’t move!” But he and Rankin were the ones who froze as they surveyed the carnage at their feet: two men dead, a third facedown with a rifle barrel to his head, an old and broken woman weeping beside the bloody corpses of her husband and son.

  Art never shifted his gaze or his aim from Williams. “Police officer,” he called out. “Arthur Bohanan, KPD. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, state forensic anthropologist. This deputy here has committed at least three murders.”

  “It’s okay, Art,” said Rankin. “It’s Agent Rankin and Agent Morgan. We know all about this asshole’s handiwork now. Let me just get in there and cuff him, if you don’t mind.” Rankin knelt and yanked Williams’s hands behind his back, then jerked him to his feet, dragging him down the stairs and shoving him toward the chopper.

  Morgan must have seen me struggling to piece together what had brought him here in the company of Tom Kitchings, the man I’d accused of obstructing justice. “Sheriff Kitchings called TBI headquarters last night from his hospital bed, so Rankin dropped by to talk to him right after he finished getting the runaround from Williams.”

  “The sheriff called you?”

  Morgan nodded. “He got suspicious when Williams got to the crash scene so fast, and he knew Williams had a thirty-thirty he was pretty fond of. So he gave us the brass from the bullets that killed Orbin. I stopped by the Cooke County firing range last night on my way back to Knoxville to collect some of the deputy’s spent cartridges out there. Ballistics worked through the night comparing tool marks on the shells. Perfect match. Soon as we saw that, we figured we’d better hotfoot it up here before somebody else got shot.”

  “But how’d the sheriff come to be with you in the helicopter?”

  “He checked in with us as he was leaving the hospital, so we did a quick touchdown at the LifeStar base and picked him up. Lucky for you we did. He figured you’d be poking around again, figured you’d start with his father, and figured Williams might try to get you out of the way.”

  “He figured right,” I said. “Looks like I should’ve given Sheriff Kitchings a lot more credit than I did, for brains and for integrity.”

  “It wasn’t easy for him. He also figured his dad was the one that killed the pregnant woman.”

  “He missed that one, but not by much. Did he say how he found her body in the first place?”

  “Anonymous letter,” said Steve. “Had to’ve been from Williams. Guess the deputy found out about the old man’s spelunking, followed him into the cave one day, and figured he could use Leena to bring down the sheriff and his family.”

  I shook my head and took a deep breath, exhaling hard. “It worked well,” I said. “Terribly well.”

  I looked down at Tom Kitchings, sprawled on the porch in his uniform and his congealing blood. He’d once had so much potential; he’d been on a path that led somewhere important, or at least somewhere gl
amorous, until his fate took a turn and spun him back to the hills of Cooke County. Where he ended up certainly wasn’t glamorous, but maybe, in some tragic, Southern Gothic way, it was important. In the end, he had lived up to his potential after all—he died living up to it. His death was a waste and a shame, but at the same time, there was something noble, even redemptive in it. He had given his life for Leena and her baby, I realized, and given it for me, too. The stone church caught my eye. “Greater love hath no man than this…” I said.

  “…that he lay down his life for his friends,” finished Art. “And he wasn’t even convinced we were his friends.” He turned to the TBI agent. “Could we give you our statements later?” Morgan nodded. “Can y’all take a statement from Mrs. Kitchings? I believe she’s got some things to get off her chest.” Morgan nodded again. “Bill, what say we go home?”

  We eased down the ridge from the church to the river road, slowly threading the curves to I-40. We even crept along the interstate, flashers blinking. A funereal pace seemed fitting, given the bloody events we’d just witnessed.

  Besides, thanks to Mrs. Kitchings and the shot she’d fired across my bow, my truck had no windshield.

  Eyes streaming and cheeks flapping in the wind, Art yelled, “Why do dogs like to stick their heads out into the wind?” I shrugged, squinting into the gale. Even at forty, the wind was hair-pulling and skin-chapping. But the view—the mountains blazing crimson and gold all around—the view out that unobstructed opening was the best I’ve ever had.

  For the first time in a long while—two years, I suddenly realized—I could see color and light and beauty clear to the horizon, with nothing in the way.

  EPILOGUE

  DRY LEAVES SWIRLED AROUND my boots as I scuffed across the corner of the hospital parking lot toward the gate of the Body Farm. Slate-colored clouds scudded above the hills and skeletal trees, and streamers of morning mist spooled downstream along the river that separated the main campus from the Body Farm.

  Unlocking the outer padlock, I swung the chain-link gate wide, then opened the inner lock. The steel chain clattered through the holes bored in the wooden modesty fence and clanked to the ground as the inner gate lurched open. In the central clearing, the grass was brown and wispy, gone to seed; red-orange maple leaves lay atop the stalks, and others hung in midair, suspended in spiderwebs. All in all, the morning was remarkably gray, chill, and bleak, but I took that not so much as an omen of the season that lay ahead as a summation of the events that had just transpired—the strangled mother and her never-born child; the fiery crash and cremated deputy; the tragic end of a once-promising athlete and officer and, with him, the end of a proud bloodline, in a county where old bloodlines and old feuds carry great weight. With the burial of the various Kitchings dead, both the recent and the long-dead, and the murder charges against Williams, I hoped all the feuds and scores might soon be considered settled, at least as settled as such bloody events allowed.

  A new body lay at the far edge of the clearing, a white man whose already large abdomen was beginning to bloat and swell. Mounted to a sturdy post a few feet away were a motion sensor and a night vision camera. No one had ever studied the interactions of nocturnal predators and human corpses, so one of my grad students had set up the wildlife surveillance as a thesis project. Judging by the first night’s photos of raccoons and rodents, we had the makings of a season’s worth of Animal Planet documentaries. Kneeling down beside the corpse, I checked his ankle tag. It identified him as 68-05: the sixty-eighth corpse donated to the Body Farm in 2005.

  His face was beginning to wrinkle. Laugh lines around the eyes suggested frequent happiness in his life, but they were tempered by worries etched into his forehead. I thought of the lines by Gibran—“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Had he been loved? Probably, judging by the laugh lines. Had he suffered loss? Hard not to, in half a century or so of living. His bones, eventually, would shed some slantwise light on his life, revealing whether he’d labored hard, building strong bones with prominent muscle attachment points, or had lived a life of sedentary ease; whether he’d escaped serious injury for five decades or had crashed through life breaking arms, legs, ribs, ankles, clavicles. His file, across the river in my office beneath the stadium, would give me basic details—cause of death, next of kin, and so on—but it would shed little light on the Big Questions: Who had this man really been, deep down, and what kind of life had he lived?

  For that matter, I wasn’t sure I could answer those questions about myself. Who was I, deep down, and what kind of life was I living? Teacher, researcher, forensic consultant. Widower, father, son. Sedentary academician, unscathed—skeletally speaking, at least—by life’s rough-and-tumble. The descriptors didn’t seem to add up to much.

  My inward inventory was interrupted by the crunch of tires on the gravel at the entrance. A Jeep Cherokee, bearing the familiar insignia of the Cooke County Sheriff’s Department, eased to a stop in the clearing. The front doors opened, and two khaki-clad officers emerged. “Your secretary told me you’d be out here,” said a familiar voice. “Couldn’t pass up a chance to see the place at last.”

  I rose and shook hands with Jim O’Conner. “Hey, Sheriff. I heard about the special election; congratulations. You look good in that uniform. So do you, Waylon.” The burly mountain man had traded in his camo for a deputy’s uniform, the largest I’d ever seen. Waylon flashed me a tobacco-flecked grin. Some things never change, I thought.

  O’Conner adjusted his gun belt and struck a tough-cop pose, then laughed. “Feels kinda funny still—I’m tempted to arrest myself for impersonating an officer. Been a long time since I wore a uniform; back when I got out of the military, I swore never again. Just goes to show: never say never.”

  “I never do,” I said. “By the way, I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the service, but I thought it was nice, considering. It was generous of you to pay for the three Kitchings funerals, in light of your history with the family. Sweet of you to put up a headstone for Leena next to her parents, too.” The TBI had never found Leena’s postcranial skeleton, despite turning the sheriff’s offices and every Kitchings residence inside out. What little we had of her—the skull, hyoid, and sternum—had been buried in a small ceramic urn that Jim O’Conner had made from clay he dug from one of his mountains.

  “You think we’ll ever find the rest of her?” O’Conner asked.

  “I don’t know, Jim. At first I thought Tom or Orbin took her, then I figured it was part of Williams’s scheme to implicate the sheriff for obstruction.” He nodded; either scenario would have been credible. “Now, though, I suspect they were stolen by Knox County’s medical examiner—former medical examiner—along with another skeleton. Maybe he took Leena as a red herring. Or maybe just to get even with me. I haven’t heard the last of him, he says, and I’m afraid he’s right. But if we ever recover Leena’s missing bones, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “I’ve bought the cemetery plot on the other side of hers,” he said. “I hope I don’t need it for a while, but Cooke County sheriffs do seem to die prematurely and violently.”

  “I’m betting you’ll be the exception to that rule, Jim.”

  “Hang onto that thought. Listen, I wanted you to hear this from me face to face. Leon Williams and his lawyer—some slick Knoxville guy named DeVriess—just cut a deal with the U.S. Attorney.” I grimaced at the mention of DeVriess, but I supposed if I were in the deputy’s bloody shoes, I’d hire Grease, too. “Leon’s pleading guilty to second-degree murder in Tom’s death and first-degree in Orbin’s; in return, he avoids a possible death sentence. He’s also confessed to shooting the prior sheriff during that drug bust three years ago. Apparently he’d been plotting against the Kitchings clan and aiming to be sheriff—pun intended—for quite awhile.”

  “Any chance of parole?”

  “None.”

  “Good.”

  “The prosecutor’s also talking plea b
argain with Mrs. Kitchings,” he added. “I figure she’ll end up doing only a couple years for second-degree or manslaughter. She doesn’t seem to care what her sentence is. She’s got nothing and nobody left to come home to when she does get out.”

  I nodded. “Sounds about right. I figure Williams deserves whatever an ex-cop gets in prison, but Mrs. Kitchings has already suffered about as much as a human being can bear.”

  He agreed. “There’s one other thing I want you to know. I appreciate what you did for us up there; what you did for me, especially.”

  I held up a hand. “Don’t mention it. I hate to think of Kitchings pinning Leena’s murder on you—or Williams framing you for Orbin’s death.”

  “You saved my neck in a couple of ways,” he said. “But I’m not just thanking you for keeping me out of prison. I hadn’t realized how much emotional shrapnel I’ve been carrying around ever since I lost Leena. It still hurts—hell, feels like somebody’s just stomped on my heart all over again—but I think maybe this time it’ll heal, sooner or later.” He wiped his eyes. “I never did stop loving that girl, Doc; it damn near killed me to think she’d stopped loving me. I like to think now that she didn’t, after all.”

  “She died wearing your name around her neck, Jim. I’d say that’s pretty convincing proof.” How odd, to hear myself quoting a line from Grease.

  He drew a deep breath and forced it out through pursed lips. “Part of me’ll always grieve for what happened to her—and for my inability to protect her from it. But at least I know the truth now.”

  “And the truth can set you free,” I finished the thought. “If you let it.”

  “I think I will.” He looked into me. “How ’bout you?”

  I took a breath. “I’m trying.”