Carved in Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  Now it was my turn to be puzzled. “But how did you get her all the way back into the cave?”

  A heartsick voice beside me said, “I did that. God help me, I put her there.”

  Mrs. Kitchings laughed a bitter laugh. “I told him he better bury her, or some doctor would look at her, and it was bound to cause a whole lot of shame and trouble and he’d lose his church for sure. Hell, I didn’t know he was gonna put her on some altar in some underground chapel and go look at her all the damn time. Thomas, I wish I had dragged her out for the dogs to eat.” His eyes widened with horror. “You self-righteous hypocrite. Up there in that pulpit ever Sunday, preaching about bein’ washed in the blood and following the path of righteousness, and the whole time, your dead niece and your bastard child lyin’ not two hunnerd yards away.”

  She shook her head and spat, then took her hand off the trigger momentarily, fishing another shotgun shell from a pocket of her apron without taking her eyes off us. She broke the breach open to reload the barrel she’d fired at my windshield. I glanced at Art—the reloading didn’t strike me as a good sign—and noticed a slight tensing of his muscles. She fumbled with the shell, glancing down at the barrel. She took her eyes off us for only an instant, but that gave Art an opening. Springing forward, he grabbed the end of the barrel and wrested it from her grasp. She flung herself at Art, but her husband stepped between them and wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug. She fought for a moment, then sagged in his arms. I stood motionless, my hands still high in the air, too stunned to lower them.

  “That’s real touching,” came a voice from the far corner of the porch. “Y’all gonna kiss and make up now?” Leon Williams stepped into view, a lever-action hunting rifle cradled in the crook of his right arm, the barrel angling across his chest. “Howdy, Doc. Art.”

  I dropped my aching arms. “We sure coulda used you here about five minutes sooner,” I said, stepping toward him. Art reached out and laid a hand on my arm. Williams raised the rifle and thumbed the hammer back. “Put ’em back up, Doc. Art, you wanna just lay that shotgun down real careful and slide it over this way with your foot?”

  Art shook his head in disgust, the shotgun hanging open and useless in his left hand. He bent down and set it on the boards, kicking it to Williams, who set one foot on the stock. Art’s voice surprised me with its steadiness. “This is kinda snowballing on you, isn’t it, Deputy? How many more people you plan to kill?” I stared at Art; he stared at Williams’s rifle. “Not too bright to bring the same rifle you shot Orbin with, Leon. That’s a Marlin 336, isn’t it? Shoots Winchester thirty-thirty ammunition, if I’m not mistaken. Be easy for ballistics to check it against the bullet Bill dug out of Orbin’s brain last night.” There was no bullet in Orbin’s brain, only a melted blob of lead in the floor of the chopper—Art was adlibbing again—but Williams suddenly looked nervous.

  “By the way,” Art said, “what kind of bullet was it that killed the previous sheriff, fellow who died in that drug bust shootout a few years back? Was that a thirty-thirty, too, Leon? You been gunning for the sheriff’s job for a while now?” The deputy’s jaw muscles were working furiously. “Don’t you think you better cut your losses and make a deal while you’ve still got a chance?”

  Williams shook his head. “I didn’t ever have a chance,” he said. “Not a real one. Not in this county; not with these people always running things.” He waved the barrel toward Mr. and Mrs. Kitchings. “This man’s daddy locked my grandpa in the jail on a trumped-up charge and let him burn to death in there.” He took a step toward the old couple. “Who made y’all the lords of Cooke County? Tell me—who? Your people been treatin’ my people like we was dirt for as long as we can remember. And we remember back a long damn way.”

  The old man had looked stooped and broken ever since Art had come after him. Now his spine straightened and fire flashed from his eyes. “You don’t remember back near as far as you ought to, then. You start feeling proud, you just recollect the Civil War and the damn Home Guard. Your people was galloping around, waving rebel flags and stealing food and burnin’ barns and killin’ folks that was just trying to stay alive. Struttin’ around like y’all was doing your patriotic duty. Well, bullshit. If y’all been treated like you was second-class, it’s nothin’ but what you’uns deserve. You was common back then, and you’re common now. Just…common.” He spat out the word with such loathing and contempt that it somehow became the nastiest slur I’d ever heard.

  It must have sounded nasty to Williams, too, because I saw his teeth clench and his nostrils flare. The barrel of the hunting rifle jerked in the minister’s direction. I opened my mouth to shout—a warning, a protest, a formless shriek, I’m not sure what—but before I could, the deputy’s finger clenched and the gun roared. Reverend Kitchings gasped and crumpled to the floor, slipping from his wife’s feeble grasp. Everyone stood frozen for a moment, and then I heard a high, keening wail coming from Mrs. Kitchings.

  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!”

  Despit
e 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 glamorous, 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 abdom
en 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.