Carved in Bone bf-1

by Jefferson Bass

  Suddenly Faye was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. “In other words, according to the DNA profile…”

  “…which Gonzales said was a rock-solid match…”

  “…the baby’s father…?

  “…was Tom Kitchings Senior. The Reverend — or not-so-Reverend — Thomas Kitchings.”

  I floored the gas pedal, and the truck careened around the on-ramp and up onto I-40 East.

  Even with the windows rolled up, I had trouble hearing Art’s question over the buffeting of the wind. The truck was doing ninety-five, and a gusty autumn wind was whipping out of the north, ripping red and gold leaves from branches, driving purplish clouds before it, their tops curling like ocean breakers. “You’re sure this is a good idea?” he shouted.

  “Sure I’m sure,” I yelled, with more confidence than I felt.

  “So tell me one more time why we’re charging back toward Cooke County like Batman and Robin? Talk slow — last time you explained it, you lost me on one of those hairpin turns of logic.”

  Sheriff Kitchings was up on the seventh floor of UT hospital, I repeated. His chief deputy was slewing around in a sooty box in the back of my truck. The one other Cooke County officer involved in the case was doubtless chatting with a roomful of TBI and FBI agents, explaining the disastrous turn their investigation had just taken.

  “So what you’re saying is, the utter collapse of law and order makes it a good idea for us to go riding back into the jaws of death? That’s your compelling argument?”

  That pretty much summed it up. “But this new DNA evidence sheds a whole ’nother light on the case,” I argued, “and nobody knows it. And nobody knows we know it but us.”

  “Your powers of reasoning are unique in all the world,” he said, shaking his head. “Not to mention your way with grammar.”

  “Grammar, schmammer. Don’t you see? Old man Kitchings gets her pregnant, then he kills her to cover up the pregnancy. Maybe she never even tells him she’s pregnant — probably scared to. But then she starts to show, and he knows the scandal will get out and ruin him. Hard for a preacher to hang onto his flock if they know he’s committed adultery, incest, maybe even rape.”

  Art raised a hand like a student with a question. “He would appear to have vaulted to the top of the suspect list, I’ll grant you that. It’s your next step — that we’re the perfect pair to confront the killer — that I’m not sure follows, exactly.”

  People had a way of disappearing and dying suddenly in Cooke County, I pointed out. That, he retorted, was precisely why he didn’t think we should be headed there, given that we’d very nearly disappeared and died once already. “But what if Kitchings Senior — or somebody else up there — gets wind of the DNA results some other way? What if he vanishes, runs away, or turns up dead? We’d never know the truth.”

  “And you think he’s going to ’fess up to us, after all these years, just because we’re such swell guys?”

  “If we show up and confront him with this, catch him off guard, I think he’s a hell of a lot more likely to ’fess up, or at least reveal something, than he is if we don’t.”

  “Don’t show up, or don’t catch him off guard?”

  “Either. Both. With the sheriff and Williams out of the way for the moment, the coast is clear. And maybe, if we drop the DNA bombshell, we can shock the reverend into admitting something.” Art turned his head and looked out the window. I knew my argument was weak. I knew it wasn’t logic that was compelling me back to Cooke County today. I reached into my shirt pocket and removed the photo of Leena that Jim O’Conner had given me. I handed it to Art. “There’s something in her face that reminds me of Kathleen thirty years ago. Kathleen when she was young. Not just young, either — Kathleen when she pregnant. She’d put on some weight, and her face had rounded out a little…” I trailed off; it sounded foolish.

  “So somehow this is about Kathleen now?”

  “No. Well, maybe. Not her, exactly. More about me, but me trying to set things right with her, somehow.”

  “Come on, Bill, when are you going to let yourself off that hook? It’s not your fault Kathleen died.”

  “You can tell me that till you’re blue in the face — I can tell myself that till I’m blue in the face — but that doesn’t seem to change how I feel about it. Maybe this will.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know, Art. I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it.”

  He sighed. “Well, don’t forget to set fire to it as you’re climbing over the rail.” He slipped the picture of Leena into his own shirt pocket. “Okay, then. Let’s just pray we can persuade the good reverend that confession really is good for the soul.”

  I’d pretty much quit praying two years before, but I decided this might be a good time to give it another try.

  CHAPTER 39

  The stone walls of Cave Springs Primitive Baptist Church and its blasted tunnel sent a chill of remembrance through me, and I found myself rethinking the wisdom of our errand. I was just about to say as much when Art tapped my shoulder and pointed toward the house next door. Sitting motionless in his weathered, flattened-out rocker was a seventy-year-old version of Tom Kitchings. His hair was white, his face was craggy and leatherlike, but his underlying bone structure and the distinctive cast of his eyes confirmed him as the sheriff’s father, as surely as any DNA test ever could.

  I swung the truck across the gravel parking area, stopped near the worn path to the front steps, and got out, followed by Art. We stopped at the foot of the stairs. The stormfront was moving in; big oaks thrashed like saplings, their leaves whirling across the yard.

  I raised my voice over the roar of the wind. “Reverend Kitchings?” The man neither spoke nor moved. “Reverend Kitchings, I’m Dr. Bill Brockton. This is my friend Art Bohanan. We’re from Knoxville. Your son Tom asked me to help him on a case up here.”

  He raised his upper lip and spat a wad of tobacco juice down into the yard. The wind caught and shredded it into vapor. “You done it?” he called.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said have you done it? Have you helped?”

  “Well, it’s a tough case, but I’m trying my best.”

  He spat again, upwind of me this time, and I felt a fine mist strike my face. “Mister, I had me two boys ’fore you started helping. Now I got one. How ’bout you quit helping and git out of here ’fore somethin’ happens to my other un.”

  I glanced at Art. He raised both eyebrows at me, which seemed less helpful at the moment than I’d have liked. This interrogation business wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined. “Mr. Kitchings, I am sorry about Orbin, I truly am. I’ve lost a wife, so I can imagine some of the pain you must be feeling. But I can assure you, I didn’t have anything to do with his death.”

  “The hell you didn’t,” he shouted. “You come up here and started sticking your nose where it don’t belong, started stirrin’ up things you got no bidness stirrin’ up, and you can assure me? Get off my property, or I can assure you I’ll whup your ass, doctor or not.”

  Art finally spoke up. “Reverend? About those things the doctor’s been stirring up. You afraid of what might float to the top? You maybe got something to hide, Reverend? Maybe some dirty little secret from about thirty years back? A little bit of dirty linen involving your niece, maybe?”

  Kitchings stood up. He held out a bony arm and pointed a crooked finger toward the horizon, toward Knoxville. The hand trembled — with rage? Or just with age?

  “What was that girl’s name?” Art persisted, “Gina? No, Leena, that was it, wasn’t it? She was a mighty good-looking girl, wasn’t she, Reverend? Tall. Blonde. Spirited girl, folks say, with a real spring in her step.” Art started up the steps. “I’ve got a picture of her right here.” Art reached into his shirt pocket and fished out the photo, studying it closely. “Yes sir, she was a beauty. She favored her mama a lot, didn’t she, Reverend? Sophie? The sister you really wante
d to marry.”

  The old man raised his other hand, held both hands out before him now, no longer pointing, but shielding himself, palms facing outward, as if to fend off some looming collision or dreadful specter. “Don’t you come any closer. You keep that away from me.”

  Art kept climbing, step upon step, slowly turning the picture and holding it out toward Kitchings. The old man shrank back, like a vampire confronted by a crucifix. “Must have been real hard for you when the girl moved into your house,” said Art. “So young, so pretty. So much like the woman you were still in love with, even after you married the homely sister.” Kitchings was shaking his head slowly from side to side, but his eyes were locked on the picture. “I bet you dreamed about her at night, didn’t you, Reverend? Prayed about her in the daytime, dreamed about her at night.” Art was almost to the top step. “Then she took up with that O’Conner boy. Is that what pushed you over the edge, Reverend? Knowing you were about to lose her, too? Knowing another man — a man from a family you hated — was about to pluck that young woman you’d been watching ripen on the vine all that time?”

  Art stepped onto the porch, brandishing the picture at arm’s length like a weapon. I flashed back to the image of him holding the photo in the KPD forensics lab, the flaming photo of the suspect in his abduction case, and I marveled at the power he was able to invest pictures with. Maybe the Native Americans are right: maybe the camera does capture a bit of the soul.

  “You forced that girl, didn’t you, Reverend, when you realized she was gonna marry Jim O’Conner? She was a virgin, but you knew that, didn’t you? That was part of the temptation, wasn’t it?” Kitchings was backed up against the front wall of the house now, his head thrashing from side to side as if the words were backhanded blows to the face. I thought back to Art’s reenactment of Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway — she was my niece; she was my lover; she was my niece and my lover. “Did she cry, Reverend? Did she beg you not to, or was she too proud to plead? How’d you do it? Did you hit her? Hold a knife to her throat and a hand on her mouth?” As Art advanced relentlessly, the old man began to slide down the wall, his knees giving way beneath him. “And when you spilled your seed inside her, Reverend — inside your own niece, Reverend — did you ask her to forgive you? Or did you just pray to God you wouldn’t get caught?” Kitchings was crumpled at Art’s feet now, his breath coming in ragged sobs. “And four months later, Reverend — when her pregnancy started to show — what did God say when you put your hands around her throat and started to squeeze?”

  “No,” he whispered. “Oh, Lord God, no.”

  I was holding my breath, and the two men on the porch were motionless. Even the wind seemed breathless, for there was an eerie, electric silence, as if the very cosmos were hanging in suspense, waiting for what would come next. And in that sudden silence I heard the unmistakable click of a shotgun being breached open, then snapped shut.

  “All right, Mister, you just step back right now,” twanged a flat female voice I recognized from my interview with Mrs. Kitchings. The screen door screeched open against its rusty spring, then slapped shut as she stepped out of the house and onto the porch. “Get your hands up,” she told Art, motioning with the shotgun. “You, too,” she said, waving the shotgun’s gaping twin barrels at me.

  I stood frozen, too dumbfounded to move. She raised the gun to her shoulder. Her mouth pursed into a prunelike grimace. Fire blasted from one of the barrels, and I felt a searing wind roar past my right ear. Behind me, I heard my truck’s windshield shatter. “I said put your hands up. Next shot takes your head off. One. Two.”

  I raised my arms.

  “Now botha you get over there to the end of the porch. Go on, now.”

  I mounted the steps, as if toward a gallows, and moved to the far end of the porch. Art came and stood beside me.

  The old man struggled to his feet and limped to his wife. He reached out his hand for the gun, saying, “Vera—” The barrel caught him squarely on his right cheekbone. The front sight raked across the flesh, tearing a ragged gash that began to ooze blood. He staggered back against the porch rail, one hand pressed to the cheek. “Vera…”

  “You shut up. Get over there with them two.”

  “Vera, listen to me.”

  “No. No! You listen to me for once, you sorry sack of shit, and you get your ass over there with them two.” Kitchings sagged, then shuffled over beside me. “I been chokin’ down poison for thirty years on account of you, Thomas Kitchings, and I done had my fill of it. No more; no more. This ends right here, right now. I ain’t gonna take no more, and I ain’t gonna lie no more. This mess done ruint our lives. It’s done kilt Orbin, and it’s about kilt Tom, and I don’t aim to let that happen. Enough is a damn ’nough.”

  Art cleared his throat. “Mrs. Kitchings, if you’d please put that shotgun down, I know we can talk about this calmly.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this calmly,” she said. “I been calm way too long now. I been calm my whole life, and look what it’s got me.” She looked around, as if surveying the wreckage of her life; then she shook her head fiercely, her eyes blazing.

  “Mrs. Kitchings, I know things look bad right now, but it’s not hopeless,” Art persisted. “With a good lawyer — Dr. Brockton here knows some fine ones — your husband could plea-bargain. If he made a deal for manslaughter, he might be out in two or three years.”

  She stared at Art as if he were a madman. “Plea-bargain? Manslaughter? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The girl. Your niece. She was killed. Strangled.”

  “Thomas never strangled that girl.”

  I finally found my voice. “Mrs. Kitchings, we found out a lot when we examined her body. Like your son said, your niece was pregnant.”

  “Hell, I knowed she was pregnant thirty year ago. You think I’m stupid?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t think you’re stupid,” I said. “I just…I’m just not sure how many of the facts you know. Long about the time the pregnancy would’ve started to show, your niece was strangled.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “But you just said your husband…”

  “I know what I said, and I know what I didn’t say. I didn’t say she weren’t strangled. I said he never did do it.”

  A staggering thought was forming in the back of my mind. I pushed it away, but it came right back again. “Mrs. Kitchings, how can you be sure he didn’t do it?”

  She glared at me. “Because I did it.”

  “No!” cried the old man.

  “Yes,” she hissed at him. “Yes! I killed her.”

  “But it was a fever,” he said. “I come home from that hunting trip, and she was dead. You said something went wrong with the baby, and she caught a fever and died.”

  “And you said you never laid a hand on that girl, and I knew that was a goddamn lie. So I lied right back to you, and we been lyin’ ever since, the both of us. And look what it’s done brought down on us.”

  Art took a small step toward her. “Can I ask you something, Mrs. Kitchings?” He didn’t wait for an answer. His tone was mild, curious. “Leena was a pretty big girl. Had to be pretty strong. How could a small woman like you overpower a strapping young gal like her?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “I told you, I ain’t stupid. She was sick — she did have a fever — so I give her some tea with some honey and lemon in it. Put some whiskey in it, too. A right good bit of whiskey. And she got kindly tipsy, and that’s when she started cryin’ and telling me all about…” She seemed to lose her way, or her resolve, but then she clenched her jaw and drew herself up again. “She told me about what he done to her. I didn’t want to know — I’d been afraid of something like that ever since she moved in with us. So I hadn’t asked her nothin’ about nothin’, but then she went and told it herself.”

  Her eyes were staring off into the distance, or back into the past. “I drank me a little whiskey, too, and then I mixed her up some more, and some
more, and while she was cryin’ and drinkin’, I was cryin’ and thinkin’. Thinkin’ about how my husband had never loved me, not really, and how it took my sister’s girl movin’ in under my own roof to make me face up to the truth. And I thought, ‘Damn you, Thomas Kitchings, and damn you, pretty girl, and damn your little bastard baby, too.’ And so when she passed out, that’s when I done it.”

  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.”