Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 (16 page)

flashed past. Only then, because I had purposely loaded the three-boot reference photos out of sequence, did my shots of the cave’s muddy floor begin. The first few images showed some hint of foot traffic, but the angle—high, shooting nearly straight down—made everything appear flat and featureless. As the camera angle got progressively lower, shadows appeared and grew, as if the sun were setting in the cave, throwing the contours of the mud into sharp relief, revealing a world of texture. A world of footprints.

The prints reminded me of craters on the moon, seen through a telescope: at full moon, viewed straight-on, the rocky surface appears deceptively smooth. But at other stages, especially when viewed at the terminus—the border between light and dark—the craters and canyons show themselves to be rugged, razor-edged, and forbidding. The cave’s craters were made by human feet, not by massive meteorites, but the surface looked almost as pocked and layered as the ancient face of the moon.

Kitchings had told me that he and Williams ventured into the grotto just far enough to determine that a body lay there. Sure enough, two sets of tracks—a lugged-sole pattern that matched the sheriff’s boots and a rippled design that matched Williams’s—led toward the rock shelf where the body lay. The tracks stopped, and some random, layered trampling suggested shifting stances by both men. Then the tracks reversed direction, leading back toward the camera and in the direction of the grotto’s entrance. I nodded to myself; it was what I’d expected to see, based on what they’d told me.

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 power 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 V10, but it gets shitty mileage. This here’s got more torque, anyhow. Tow twentythree 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, meanspirited 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.”