What I hadn’t expected to see came in the next slide, which I’d taken by leaning far to the left, beyond the corpse’s head, still shooting low. The image that flashed onto the screen made me gasp. A veritable stampede of footprints approached the body from the opposite direction—a shadowy nook in the grotto, as I recalled, which I had taken to be a dead-end crevice. The tracks—lots of them, a dozen or more—departed the same way they’d come. I was dumbfounded. “Jesus,” I said out loud, “how many people were in on this damn thing?” Then another thought struck me: could they be morbid sightseers, who had somehow gotten wind of the grisly spectacle in the grotto? But it took only a few seconds to decide that what appeared to be many people’s footprints were actually many prints from a single person: layer upon layer of tracks from what appeared to be the same pair of boots. Judging by the soles, the boots were old and worn—work boots, maybe, rather than hiking or combat boots. But here and there along the edge, some of the earlier tracks—ones that were only partially obliterated by later imprints—looked sharper, as if the boots were newer. I felt my mind ratcheting back and forth, like the projector’s lens, struggling to focus. Finally I got it: someone had visited the grotto repeatedly, over a long period of time. I’d ask Art to take a look and give me his read on it, but that seemed the only explanation that made sense. The only other possibility was that a crowd of people had trooped in, wearing identically made but differently aged boots. Either scenario was disturbing.
But not as disturbing as what I saw next. It was the final image of the cave’s floor, similar to the previous one, but following the tracks even farther toward what was clearly the room’s other entrance. At the edge of the mass of identical tracks was one additional set of prints—uppermost, and therefore most recent. Unlike the layers of increasingly worn work boot tracks, these prints showed crisp, practically new soles. Lugged soles. They looked a lot like the soles on the feet of Sheriff Tom Kitchings.
I switched off the lamp and sat in darkness, quiet except for the low hum of the projector’s fan. The machine’s heat warmed the room, but the picture I had just seen gave me a chill. I was working a case for a sheriff whom I did not know and did not trust. I was in contact with a self-described outlaw—a potential suspect—whom I likewise did not know but, oddly, did trust. The solid footing I normally felt underfoot seemed to be falling away on either side, leaving me teetering along a knife-edge ridge, defined only by dark and dizzying drops on either side. For the first time in my career, I began to consider withdrawing from a case. Every internal alarm I possessed was ringing like crazy; the stakes seemed too high, the truth too tainted by secrets that lurked deep within the mountains or the hearts of the clannish people who dwelled there.
I drew a deep breath. Flicking the lamp back on, I clicked to the next slide. She—Leena, as I now knew to call her—lay on the stone shelf, immobile forever now. I was startled anew at the freshness of her waxy death mask, at the remarkable preservation the cave’s climate and the body’s chemistry had effected. It was odd to think that after years of near-perfect preservation, she existed no more: in examining her, I had destroyed her. It was necessary, but it was sad—all the more so in hindsight, in light of the small life she was nurturing when she died.
I flashed up the other images of Leena, pausing briefly on the best side view of the abdomen. Now it seemed obvious that she was pregnant, but I knew that was only because my mind’s eye was superimposing the shape of the tiny skeleton I had extricated from her abdomen. Finally I stopped on a full-frame close-up of her face. For long minutes I studied it, trying to decipher whatever secrets it held. Had her expression held any faint clue that hinted at her pregnancy—some inner smile or worried tension? If so, it had been replaced by a more gruesome expression. Was it terror, or accusation, or just the mechanical distortion of mummification?
“What’s your story, Leena Bonds,” I murmured, “and who killed you and your baby, and why?”
As soon as I said it, I knew that, come what may, I would not withdraw from this case.
CHAPTER 18
I GOT NO ANSWER AT the first number Jim O’Conner had given me, so I tried the second number. “Howdy, Doc,” rumbled a deep voice after the second ring.
“Hello? Is this…Waylon?”
“Shore is.”
I was taken aback to get the mountain man instead of O’Conner. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning, Waylon. I was trying to call Jim. How’d you know it was me?”
“You city folks ain’t the only ones got Caller ID,” he said. “We’re gettin’ kindly high-tech our own selves, Doc. Hell, I got me a cable modem and high-speed Internet, too.” I tried to picture what sort of web sites Waylon might be inclined to surf—hunting equipment? survivalist how-to sites? backwoods personal ads (“broad-minded moonshiner seeks adventurous black sheep for loving relationship”)?—then shuddered and strove to banish the images from my mind. “Jim’s out of town for a few days. Whatcha need?”
“Listen, Waylon, I’m hoping maybe you can do me a big favor. You know the cave we found that body in—Russell’s Cave, I think it’s called?”
“Course. Used to play in it when I was a kid.”
“Is there any way you could take me there? I need another look around, and I don’t want to bother the sheriff or his deputy. If you can’t do it, just say so—I know it’s a long ways off the beaten track. It took us over an hour by ATV just to get up there.”
There was a long pause on the other end, which I figured meant he was groping for an excuse.
“It took you’uns a hour to get there? On ATVs, you say?”
“At least an hour, over a pretty rough trail up the mountain. My legs are still sore; a return trip might just put me in a wheelchair.”
He laughed. “Well, Doc, I might be able to help you out. How ’bout you meet me at the Pilot station at the interstate exit in about a hour?”
“How about an hour and a half? I need to stop by my office and get my camera and a few tools.” He agreed, and I hung up, hoping I wasn’t making a foolish mistake.
I’d expected Waylon to be driving a pickup; what I wasn’t prepared for was the sort of pickup it proved to be. A battered rust bucket, sporting a patchwork of Bondo, gray primer, and multihued body panels scavenged from disparate hillside junkyards: that’s what I’d expected. The vehicle waiting for me at the gas station made my full-size GMC Sierra look shabby and sissified by comparison. A Dodge Ram 3500, it measured at least a foot longer, wider, and taller than my truck. Waylon owned the Arnold Schwarzenegger of pickups. Twin vertical exhausts, which could have been transplants from a Kenworth semi, flanked the rear corners of the cab. Rear fenders flared widely above dual wheels, tricked out with monster tires on sculpted alloy rims. Waylon ambled out of the minimarket and fished a keyless remote beeper out of one of his myriad pockets; when he clicked to unlock the doors, it sounded as if the locking mechanism on a bank vault were ratcheting open. An air horn beneath the vehicle emitted a locomotive-sized blast. Waylon motioned me in.
I stepped up—way up—onto a running board and hoisted myself cabward with the help of a vertical handrail just aft of the door. Grunting from the climb, I plopped into my seat—a swiveling captain’s chair, sheathed in buttery glove leather. The dash and overhead console bristled with enough electronics to make a NORAD technician envious: GPS, moving-map display, satellite radio, CB radio, hands-free cell phone, CD/cassette/AM-FM deck, even a passenger-side DVD screen. A small refrigerator—sized to hold either a case of beer or a haunch of venison—whirred quietly between us.
I swiveled in my seat and surveyed the aft cabin.
“You need something, Doc?”
“No, I was just looking for the hot tub,” I said. “You seem to have everything else in here.”
Waylon rumbled out a laugh. “I might oughta put me one in. Thing is, if I did, I never would get my girlfriend outta here.”
He turned the key, and somewhere beneath us, a sleeping giant of a po
wer plant awakened. “Cummins Turbo Diesel,” I’d read on the side of the hood as I clambered up. The cab quivered gently as the engine idled; the rumble bore more than a passing resemblance to Waylon’s laugh: low-pitched and muffled, but simple and powerful. “Sounds like you’ve got some serious horsepower there,” I said.
“It’ll do. They’s actually a gasoline engine with more horsepower, a 10-liter V-10, but it gets shitty mileage. This here’s got more torque, anyhow. Tow twenty-three thousand pounds with this rig. Besides, you can’t beat a Cummins. Go three hundred fifty thousand miles ’fore it needs a overhaul.”
Another pipe, topped with wire mesh and a chrome cap, projected above the hood from somewhere on my side of the engine compartment. “What’s that thing sticking up? Looks like a chimney flue.”
“Snorkel intake,” Waylon said. “You can ford a crick six foot deep in this thing. I’ve done it. Helps if you got some weight in the bed, though, especially if they’s some current. She’s one hell of a truck, but once she starts to float, the handling goes all to hell. You don’t want to have the windows down, neither.”
As he roared beneath the interstate and headed up-country, Waylon half-turned to me. “Doc, I got to do a little financial business on our way back from the cave, so I need to make me a quick stop on the way up. If you don’t care to.”
The phrasing gave me pause. Where I’d grown up, in Virginia, “I don’t care to” was a polite way of saying, “I prefer not to” or even, given a frosty enough inflection, “hell, no.” In East Tennessee, though—at least in the mountains—I’d noticed that it seemed to mean exactly the opposite. I wasn’t sure how much financial business Waylon could conduct on a Sunday, but I told him I didn’t care to stop.
We headed north on the river road for a few miles, then made a left onto an unmarked paved road that disappeared into a wooded valley. A small, mean-spirited brick house hugged the road, centered in a small clearing fenced with chain-link; in the driveway sat a Cooke County sheriff’s cruiser. I pointed. “Tom Kitchings live here?”
“Naw,” growled Waylon. “His damn brother, Orbin. Sorriest sumbitch in Cooke County.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, then clamped it shut.
A quarter-mile up the blacktop, we turned left onto a broad swath of fresh gravel running up the mouth of a small valley. “Right up this holler here’s our first stop,” Waylon said. We’d barely left the pavement when he halted at a small, glass-doored booth, from which a thirtysomething blonde woman emerged. Clad in snug designer jeans and a short suede jacket, she could have passed for a stylish West Knoxville mom who had been suddenly plucked from a kid’s soccer game or the mall and beamed out here to the boonies. Waylon rolled down his window and handed her a laminated card of some sort. She scanned it with a portable bar-code reader, then gave it back and waved us in. High-tech indeed! As she turned to go back into the booth, Waylon nodded at her shrink-wrapped backside. “That there’s just about worth the trip, ain’t it, Doc?” I didn’t want to admit it, but the view was stunning.
The gravel drive soon widened into a huge backwoods parking lot, measuring forty or fifty yards across and at least a football field in length, bulldozed into the floor of the hollow. The lot was crammed with three neat rows of diagonally parked cars and trucks. As we eased up one aisle and down the other in search of a vacant slot, I lost count at 150 vehicles, mostly pickups, bearing license plates from Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, even as far away as Oklahoma and Texas. As best I could tell, it was a wholesale auto auction—there was a similar auction lot beside Interstate 75 between Knoxville and Chattanooga—though why this one lay so far off the beaten track was a mystery to me.
At the upper end of the lot was a barn-sized metal building, surrounded by dozens of small garden sheds, battered travel trailers, and a new two-story structure that resembled a small, windowless motel, with dozens of doors giving onto the ground-floor sidewalk and the second-floor balcony. Waylon had finally circled back nearly to the entrance booth to park, so we hiked up the long gravel lot toward the big metal shed, which appeared to be the hub of the complex.
“This is quite an operation here,” I said as we trudged across the coarse gravel.
“Yeah, it’s been around ever since I can remember,” he said, “but it seems to be really expanding under this couple that bought the business a few years ago.”
“Are you bidding on one of these vehicles? I haven’t seen anything in the lot that holds a candle to that truck you’re driving.”
“Bidding?” Waylon chuckled. “Well, you might call it that, I reckon.”
The metal building seemed to pulse with a cacophony of yells and whoops. The auction must really be heating up, I thought. A door was set midway along the side. As we approached, I glimpsed a pair of eyes peering out through a narrow slit in the door. The eyes studied me for an uncomfortably long time, with an expression I took to be some combination of suspicion and hostility, then cut in Waylon’s direction. Waylon seemed to recognize the irises or pupils through the slit. “Hey, T-Ray, you gonna let us in, or do we hafta just listen from out here?”
A nasal voice slithered up through the slit. “Who’s that you got with you?”
“Friend of me and Jim’s from Knoxville. He’s all right.”
“He better be.”
Waylon nodded his immense head, though I wasn’t sure whether he was offering further assurance that I was, in fact, all right, or was simply acknowledging what seemed to be the other man’s unspoken “or else.” Maybe both. At any rate, T-Ray’s eyes vanished from view, a metal bolt slid back, and the door swung open. “Stay close,” Waylon rumbled in my ear, and we stepped inside.
It took my eyes a moment to adjust—not to the dimness I’d expected, but to the glare of fluorescent tubes, practically enough to light Neyland Stadium for a UT night game. Nearly two hundred people jammed the building, some of them standing, others perched on wooden bleachers that ascended nearly to the roof. Big-bellied men and gangly boys, mostly, though I noticed several women and even a handful of girls clustered on the top row of bleachers. The crowd’s skin tones ranged from pasty Anglo white to Hispanic olive brown; their attire ranged from overalls and feed caps to hip-hugger jeans, snakeskin boots, Abercrombie sweatshirts, and milky white Stetsons.
A narrow gap bisected the bleachers directly in front of us, and through it, I glimpsed a round enclosure at the center. Waylon began threading his way toward it, and—mindful of his instructions and of T-Ray’s unwelcoming eyes—I stuck close.
As we approached the enclosure, I saw that it was a circle about fifteen feet across, dirt-floored and fenced in by wire mesh rising to a height of eight or ten feet. Dust hung in the air like dry, allergy-baiting fog, giving the scene an even more surreal quality than it already possessed. Shouts punctuated the background din: “Hunnerd on the red!” “Fifty on the gray!” “Call fifty!” “Five hunnerd on the red!” This last cry, in Waylon’s booming voice, nearly shattered my eardrum.
Two men faced each other inside the ring. One was a long-bearded ancient who resembled some Old Testament prophet in baggy overalls. The other was a young Hispanic man in a snug brown jumpsuit, monogrammed “Felipe.” Leaning toward each other, weaving and swaying rhythmically, the men seemed to be cradling something to their chests. I was still trying to make out what it was when they squatted in unison and then stood back up, now empty-handed. There was a momentary lull in the din, followed by an explosive flurry of wings and feathers, accompanied by bloodcurdling screeches and raucous cheers. “Hit ’im, Red! Hit ’im! There you go!” “Come on, Gray! Stick it to ’im!”
As I watched in horror, two roosters beat their wings in midair, kicking and tearing at each other with their feet as they struggled to hover. I caught the glint of steel blades on their legs, and I knew with sickening certainty that the cockfight I had stumbled into would end swiftly. Cockfighting was illegal in Tennessee, I knew—as it was in every state but
Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico—but in a hardscrabble area like Cooke County, which tended to regard the law more as a challenge than as a code of conduct, it was hardly surprising that it continued.
The birds tumbled to the ground in a knot of feathers and blood. “Hit ’im baby, hit ’im baby, hit ’im baby,” chanted a bleached-blonde woman sitting by my right shoulder. “Git ’er done, Red,” yelled a man at my left.
In the ring, a third man—cockfights had referees, apparently—motioned to the birds’ handlers, who swooped in to disentangle the snarled cocks. The men clasped the birds to their chests again, smoothing their feathers, blowing warm air onto their backs; they even seemed to be pressing their lips around the roosters’ combs as if to warm them, though I had no idea whether that was the purpose or whether it was merely some good-luck ritual.
In their first dustup, the red-and-black rooster had looked smaller but quicker and more aggressive; the one called a gray, though (actually multicolored, with an off-white neck and head), looked strong and tough. It appeared to be a classic David-versus-Goliath match—except that in the Bible story, I recalled, David had been armed only with a slingshot and stones. These birds, though, were armed with sharpened steel. On the back of one leg—strapped with a leather band to what must have been the stump of his natural spur—each cock wore a gleaming knife blade, two inches long. Judging by the caution with which the handlers carried the birds, the knives were razor-sharp. “Hang in there, Flea-Pay,” a freckled teenager yelled to the Hispanic man, who stroked and blew on the gray rooster.
The handlers began their rhythmic dance again, which I now saw was actually a way of taunting the birds, getting them agitated and ready to fight. As the handlers circled and bobbed and swayed a foot or two apart, the cocks’ heads lashed forward at one another, coming close but never quite making contact. Once the birds were sufficiently enraged, the handlers set them down for another round. As soon as he was released, the gray one darted furiously toward the red and leapt up to strike. This time, though, instead of meeting him in midair, the red cock ducked and ran underneath, spun swiftly, and then launched himself at the gray’s back, windmilling his feet as he made contact. The crowd gave a collective shout, then fell eerily silent. The gray cock toppled onto his side, panted a few startled, ragged breaths, and died in a small pool of blood. The red rooster shook hard and fluffed himself, then strutted over to the body of his fallen rival and pecked at the lifeless body. Next, placing one foot on the gray’s head, he swelled his chest, threw back his head, and crowed triumphantly. As if in reply, the crowd—except for the few dejected-looking losers who had bet on the gray—let loose with a cheer equally primal. A teenager sauntered past, holding a cardboard food tray. It was filled with fried chicken strips.
Carved in Bone Page 13