“Not that I saw. Nothing that shows up under a quick analysis anyhow.”
Kel held the skull at arm’s length to better take in its overall shape. It was large and round, with a high vault. The forehead was wide and high and the cheekbones were sharp and projected forward. The muscle markings were prominent. “Actually…” he said slowly, drawing the word out as he continued formulating his thought.
“Please don’t say anything about ‘poor Yorick.’”
“I won’t.”
“Yes you will. You always do.”
Kel ignored him. “Don’t know about you, but…in some respects this looks very Indian. I saw a fair number of skulls very similar to this when I was doin’ archaeology in Missouri and Arkansas. Not exactly the same, but…”
“Yeah, I know,” D.S. agreed. “But look at the teeth and palate.”
Kel placed his outspread hand on top of the skull and slowly inverted it so that the base and palate were visible.
“That doesn’t look American Indian to me,” D.S. said. “Do you think?”
“Naw. I think you’re right about that. Too narrow to be Indian. I think Tenkiller was full-blooded. I know he was Cherokee on his mother’s side…I don’t think the record says what his father was. Maybe he wasn’t full Indian, although with a last name like Tenkiller…”
“Maybe,” D.S. agreed. “But whatever he was, I doubt he was Vietnamese either.”
Kel smiled in agreement. He slowly set the skull down on a cork flask ring on the table. The ring would provide some cushion and also discourage the skull from rolling off when no one was watching. He stripped off his gloves and dusted his hands on his lab coat. “We’ll have to wait and see what the dentists say. Tenkiller has one set of bitewing x-rays in his folder. They’re dated almost ten years before his death, but they should still be able to work with them. In the meantime, tell me more about Dr. Dang. Why do you think he didn’t want this skeleton comin’ back?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I’m serious as a heart attack—he did not want this guy repatriated.”
“That just isn’t like him. Doesn’t figure to me.”
“Me either. But he didn’t want this one coming back.”
“So what d’you think? Should we look into it? I mean, does it matter to us?”
“Who knows?” D.S. shrugged. “How would you look into it anyway? Dang’s sure not talking, and I don’t know who else would know.”
“Hmmmm.” Kel made a sound of agreement as he looked down again at the skull. “What I do know, though, is that sure is some hole in his head.”
“Yeah, isn’t it?” D.S. grinned. “Absolutely gorgeous.”
CHAPTER 14
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2008
Sergeant Roscoe Charles was off duty and bored. He knew he was bucking the stereotype; young, unmarried soldiers were supposed to live for lost, drunken weekends filled with galloping carnality and requited want, but as a twenty-six-year-old bachelor who’d enlisted in the blood-pumping frenzy that followed 9/11, he was finding the weekends harder and harder to take. Certainly in college and even early on in his military career he had been known to have lost more than a few weekends to cheap beer and overly expensive women, but not lately. At least the weather today was conducive to getting outside and breathing. He’d watched every last video on post, and most of the ones off post as well, and was desperate to do something else.
It had been a hard winter up until a few days ago when it had moderated and hinted at an emergent spring, but last night’s Doppler-Five-Week-Ahead forecast didn’t look promising, and this was maybe the last real get-the-hell-outside weekend for a while. A cookout seemed like the ticket. There were at least a good dozen or so other single guys—not to mention a few geographical bachelors who he knew would come. Plus there were a few of the younger married guys who would be game. All totaled up, that meant girlfriends and young wives—all anxious to wear shorts and tank tops for the first time since well before Thanksgiving. Anxious to show their stuff despite the weather. Combine that with enough beer and barbecue and that added up to a better time than cable television promised.
Charles was pulling this together on such short notice that an on-post location would be an easier sell. Less driving also minimized the chance of a DUI.
Sergeant Charles pulled his Acura into the parking lot at one of the small recreational areas on post. It was an acceptable spot. There was no one at the picnic tables, but then it was also only nine-thirty in the morning. Even so, so far, so good.
The only other car was a bronze-colored Buick Park Avenue sitting at the edge of the lot; the passenger-side wheels off the gravel and into the dormant brown grass. No one appeared to be in it, and Charles figured that the occupants probably were out jogging or something. Besides, one car a crowd did not make—unless they hung around. The problem was that a car like that smelled of an officer—a senior officer at that, since a junior officer would have something more sporty—and senior officer smelled of no fun. Watch the language, watch the drinking, watch the hitting on women. Watch the fun.
Charles was about to put the car back into gear and recon another area on down the road when he thought again. The trouble was that it was already getting late in the morning and if he was going to make this happen, he needed to get on his cell and get the ball rolling. The days were still short and the drinks needed a lot of ice. He sat and thought.
He looked again at the Park Avenue.
“Easy enough to find out if it’s an officer,” he said out loud as he turned off his ignition and opened his car door. No one was in the Park Avenue, and no one was at the picnic tables, or jogging in sight. An officer would have a blue post-access sticker on the center of the windshield. If it were a colonel or general he’d have a rank insignia on there as well, and if that were the case, he’d definitely move on down the road.
He stretched, yawned, and then walked over to the other car.
It was a nice-looking vehicle. Waxed and nicely detailed. He peered in the front window.
That’s when he saw the blood.
A large pool of thickened, ropey blood.
But it was the body that he’d recall for the rest of his life. It was that of a small man, curled up on his side on the front seat. All the skin from the top of his head was missing, and Roscoe Charles saw shiny, glistening, brown bone where the man’s hair should have been.
CHAPTER 15
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2008
Chief Warrant Officer Shuck Deveroux had just removed his card from the credit union ATM when his cell phone rang. He had the day off and had made up his mind to spend some time with his two young boys. With all the traveling he’d been doing recently, and the overtime he’d been spending in the office to make up for it, he’d missed a lot when it came to his family—birthdays, soccer games, science fairs—too much, really, and starting today he was going to make it up to them. The Op-order called for a fast breakfast of powdered doughnuts and twenty-ounce Coca Colas, an hour or so drive to downtown Memphis, and a long, pleasant, starry-skied evening with his boys at AutoZone Field watching the Memphis Redbirds play the Albuquerque Isotopes. The boys were in the truck waiting, patiently if not quietly. One quick stop at the ATM and then on into the city for some minor league ball.
And then the phone rang. His sons had obviously been playing with it again, changing the settings, because it didn’t really ring, instead it loudly played the first stanza of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Last week it had been “Pomp and Circumstance,” the week before, “Jingle Bells.”
Shuck Deveroux was forty-six years old. He’d been born Thomas Edward Lafayette Deveroux on a rainy February Monday morning in the map-speck of Eudora, Arkansas. The name Shuck had been a tail pinned on the donkey when he got to Mississippi State at Starkville. Highly touted All-American candidates for halfback needed names like Crash or Crunch or Boomer, and the university public
affairs office had tried potting several names early on, usually with some alliterative satanic theme—Devil-Ray being the one they pushed the hardest—but none had taken serious root. As with many life-altering events, the solution happened in the blink of the eye. In the last home game of his sophomore year, a 320-pound sack of charging wet cement from Athens, Georgia, by the name of Cecil Eudus Dupree met Devil-Ray head-on in the seam. The collision had snapped both of Deveroux’s collarbones in two. As they were carrying him off the field on a stretcher, the coach was purported to have told him that he was going to miss the rest of the game, to which, so the story had it, Deveroux had gritted his teeth and replied, “Aw shucks, Coach.” The unlacquered truth was that Deveroux had always seriously doubted that that was what he’d really said. It just didn’t ring true. Methodist upbringing or not, it had hurt like screaming hell—he remembered that much—and “Aw Shucks” simply didn’t seem as if it would have done the situation fair and adequate justice. But it printed well in the newspapers, and the story of the gentleman giant had stuck.
Now at forty-six years of age, “Aw Shucks” Deveroux was listening intently to the lure of retirement. The “New” Army had way too much “New” and way too little “Army” for him. Quotas and sensitivity sessions and an Army of One. Lord God. Better to get out while he could, that was the operational plan for the day. He figured he was still marketable. He was tall and still able to shrug off the accumulating kinks and stand up straight—at least for most of the day; he was still a solid pick-handle wide at the shoulders and capable of casting an imposing shadow. He was healthy, despite knees that barked their concerns at him in the mornings, but more important, there remained enough kin at home in Chicot County to make a serious run at the sheriff’s job.
The phone rang again.
Deveroux had thought twice about leaving the phone at home, buried under some socks in a dresser drawer. He could always claim he’d forgotten it. After all, he’d cleared this leave two weeks earlier. But in the end, his bone-bred sense of duty and guilt had held sway, and he’d clipped it on his belt, knowing full well the consequences. He muttered out loud as he unsnapped it from the holder on his right hip and flipped it open.
“Yup, Deveroux,” he said. The tiny color LCD screen showed it was the office number.
“Shuck…hey, buddy, sorry to bother you on your day off, but something’s kinda come up.” Mark Abbott, another one of the CID agents, was covering the office today. His tone suggested that he probably did in fact feel sorry for the call.
“Well now, Mark, what part of that ‘kinda’ has come up? The kinda as in y’all can kinda handle it without me, or the kinda as in it can really, really kinda wait for Monday mornin’? Or maybe the kinda…”
“The kinda as in you’d better get your ass over to the park—the one just past the commissary. PDQ.”
“Aw, Jesus, bubba…now just how serious could it be? You kinda got the desk today, remember?” He shot a quick look at his boys wrestling in the cab of his pickup. The whole truck was rocking, and he could hear their laughter through the glass as one of them went down in a headlock.
“Serious enough, Shuck. I ain’t shittin’ you, man, get your hillbilly ass over there. And get it over there quick. You read me, buddy?”
“I hear ya,” Deveroux replied. He was still looking at his truck parked twenty feet away, at the flurry of feet and elbows. His boys would understand. They always did. They’d understand a lot better than their mother would. He sighed and started walking toward his vehicle. “Be there in fifteen—got to drop the boys off at home—I’m assumin’ from your tone I shouldn’t take ’em with me.”
“Affirmative. It’s some big-time ugly, I hear. That’s all I can say.”
“Who pulled my dance card on this one?”
“The top. The provost marshal called. Says General Anderson passed on the word to assign you by name, and you know he don’t usually meddle in CID business.”
“Lucky me,” Deveroux said as he opened the driver’s door of his pickup. “On my way, Mark. Out here.” He closed his cell phone as he climbed into the front seat and keyed the ignition. Only then did he turn to look at his sons. They’d settled themselves and were sitting quietly; their expressions conveyed more of an understanding of duty and service and sacrifice than most of the New Army soldiers he knew. He reached over and pulled the bill down on his youngest’s cap until it covered his eyes, and then waited for his son to right it before speaking.
“Gentlemen…it seems somethin’ has done come up.”
CHAPTER 16
Fort Campbell, Kentucky
SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2008
The park resembled a college tailgate party without the organization. There were cars and trucks parked at every available angle, and where there weren’t vehicles there were little clots of MPs and onlookers who seemed intent upon making sure the grass was well trampled down.
Shuck Deveroux parked a couple of hundred meters away from the largest group, which seemed to be clustered around a late-model Buick. Whatever was there, it was attracting quite a knot of active attention.
A young MP wearing sunglasses and an attitude directed Deveroux to halt as he crossed the parched grass on his way to the Buick. The inverted teardrop on his collar indicated that he was a specialist—a spec-four. Being challenged was actually a good sign, Deveroux realized; at least there was some access control being exercised, though obviously not much. Deveroux was in washed-out jeans, a white cotton shirt, and paint-stained Chuck Taylor high-tops, and he certainly didn’t look as if he had any business there other than feeding his curiosity as everyone else seemed to be doing. He pushed the faded-maroon Mississippi State Bulldogs hat up on his forehead to expose more of his face as he worked his badge out of his hip pocket. He also took off his sunglasses as he flipped open the badge and held it up for the young soldier to see.
“Chief Deveroux, CID—who’s got control of this scene?” he asked the boy as he walked by, not slackening his stride.
“Sorry, Chief…ahh…I guess you do, sir.”
“Good answer, son, but I meant, before I got here.”
“That would be Lieutenant Walters.”
“And where might I find the good lieutenant?”
“Ahh, I think he’s over by the car up there. The one with everyone around it,” the MP answered.
“Carry on, son,” Deveroux tossed the response back over his left shoulder. Stupid question. Why shouldn’t he be over by the Buick—it looks like the rest of the post is, he said to himself.
Deveroux knew who First Lieutenant Walters was, though he could never remember his first name. Numb-nuts was all that came to mind when he thought of him. He was an ugly little northerner possessed of more of a potbelly and more of a concept of self-importance than was becoming in a man of such extremely limited potential. They’d first crossed attitudes when Walters was still a butter-bar second lieutenant, and they’d met unpleasantly on several occasions since then. He was the sort of person that you found yourself wanting to whack on the side of the head with a rolled-up newspaper whenever you looked at him, and Deveroux was not in a particularly patient mood this morning. Especially as he neared the front of the Buick, and saw that the lieutenant was addressing a large group of spectators as if he were holding a come-to-Jesus revival. His arms were waving grandly and his voice was a bellow. Deveroux shouldered his way through and came up beside the red-faced Walters.
“Good day for a garage sale, ain’t that right, Lieutenant?” he stated it rather than asked it; his voice had a staged good humor, but his eyes were intent upon the faces of the assembled crowd, assessing their eyes, and not on Walters. He was coming in behind the curve on this one and needed to size up the situation quickly.
“Say again…ahh…oh yes, why I believe it’s Warrant Officer…” Lieutenant Walters turned to face Deveroux; his piggy little eyes creased partway shut and perspiration began to bead up on his nose as if on a glass of iced tea. The recognition appa
rently was mutual, but he dragged out the last syllable dramatically as if he were struggling with the lapsed recognition of something unimportant to him.
“Deveroux…Chief Warrant Officer Five Deveroux…CID. And I said—sir—that it looks to be a good day for a garage sale. I can only assume that’s what you got goin’ on, given this here big crowd and all—either that or a charity fish fry.”
“Chief Deveroux,” Walters said, making an obvious show of inspecting his less-than-formal dress. “I assume you’re not on duty—you seem best attired to wash cars this afternoon.”
“Yes, sir, I reckon you’re about right on that—would be a good day for that, but then what can you do when the commandin’ general calls you up on your cell phone and all. Seems like he wants me to sort of mop up here. And I have to admit, my job should be easy now that you’ve managed to assemble every possible suspect in a five-county area.” Deveroux would have paid money for a rolled-up newspaper right at this moment.
“Now listen here, Warrant Officer…”
Deveroux bristled so quickly that Walters was forced back a half step. “No, you listen here—Lieutenant—sir,” he said quietly but directly, turning so that his back was to the crowd. “First of all, it’s chief warrant officer, and second, this is my scene now—compromised all to livin’ Jesus though it may be. Got it? When I said mop up, I meant it; mop up as in clean up a mess.” He paused and turned and rose on the balls of his feet to better see over the crowd. “And here’s what I need from you—Lieutenant. See that intersection over there?” He paused to give the lieutenant a chance to respond. When he didn’t, Deveroux continued. “Good. I think we need some traffic control—now, I recommend that you get directin’ that traffic before I forget the Universal Code of Military Justice and do somethin’ we’ll both regret when the swellin’ goes down. I’ll let you know when to quit, or when I need you to do somethin’ more productive. Until then, if you got questions, I got a cell phone, and we can call the provost marshal—even better, I’ve got the general’s private line—we can call him directly and he can answer all your questions. We clear?”
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