Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 (2 page)

Williams angled to the right where the highway intersected Interstate 40, dumping us into the traffic crawling through downtown Knoxville on I-40 East. Inching along through the latest in a seemingly endless series of interstate

“improvements,” we had plenty of time to admire Knoxville’s modest architectural skyline—a couple of thirty-story bank towers, a hulking Presbyterian hospital, a few cereal-box-shaped UT dorms, and the

“Sunsphere”—an empty relic of the 1982 World’s Fair that looked like a seventy-foot golden golf ball balanced on two-hundred-foot structural-steel tee. But once we cleared downtown, traffic thinned and the buildings dropped behind us, replaced by the rolling foothills and the sharp spine of the Great Smoky Mountains, backbone of the Appalachians. The Appalachians defined the entire eastern border of Tennessee. And Cooke County, Tennessee, defined—or at least personified—Appalachia at its most rugged. Officially, the man who had sent Deputy Williams to fetch me, Tom Kitchings, was Cooke County’s sheriff. In reality, though, he was its sovereign. The title

“Lord High Sheriff” had never been used in Tennessee, as far as I knew, but that term seemed to sum up Kitchings’s position in his mountain stronghold. With its forested hills and tumbling streams, Cooke County was one of Tennessee’s most beautiful places. It was also one of the wildest, in every sense of the word. Buttressed by the rugged border of North Carolina to the east and Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the south, Cooke County was a legendary refuge for moonshiners, bootleggers, and other sundry scofflaws. Its rugged topography, tight-knit clans, and serpentine roads had kept the law at bay long after most of Appalachia had acquiesced in its own taming. Well into the era of television, the Internet, and mountaintop condos, Cooke County had hung onto a frontier mentality—the Wild South, I guess you might say—where rough, redneck justice was the only sort of justice whose arm was long enough or strong enough to reach back into the hollows and up to the mountaintops. But all that seemed to change when Tom Kitchings took over. Kitchings himself was a product of Cooke County—there was no way an outsider could ever get himself elected sheriff of the most clannish, insular enclave in a clannish, insular part of the state. There had probably been a Kitchings in Cooke County for as long as there had been a Cooke County, maybe longer. But Tom Kitchings was not your stereotypical hillbilly. He’d played high school football, though that part wasn’t surprising; the school was so small, every able-bodied boy was drafted to play, and they played with a vengeance. Other East Tennessee schools dreaded playing away games in Cooke County. Members of the visiting team—including my son, Jeff—invariably limped home with sprained ankles and bloody noses; some returned sporting fewer teeth than they’d gone up there with. Kitchings, though, was not just a thug in pads; he was a gifted athlete. He ran tailback for Cooke County High, and he was good enough to win a scholarship to UT during a period when UT had its pick of the best athletes in the Southeast. He looked to be on the fast track to the NFL—he rushed for a thousand yards his sophomore year and twelve hundred the next. But his college career and his football career ended seven minutes into the first game of his senior year in front of 90,000 fans in Neyland Stadium, when an Alabama linebacker slammed into his left knee and shredded the ligaments. Kitchings had hobbled home to Cooke County and dropped from sight. My son—who tracks UT players the way daytime TV fans track soap opera stars—

said Kitchings was rumored to be drinking a lot, but that was all he was able to tell me. Then, six or eight years later, Jeff showed me a story in the sports section reporting that Kitchings was alive and well and had found his life’s calling as a lawman, helping tame the wild denizens of Cooke County. The taming didn’t always go smoothly. Some years after Kitchings joined the force, his boss, the sheriff, was killed in a moonlit shootout on the edge of a two-acre marijuana patch. Pot, outsiders seem surprised to learn, is the numberone cash crop in Cooke County, followed quite distantly by tobacco. Marijuana grows tall in the cool and moist mountain air; in fact, Cooke County pot supposedly packs more punch than the crops from Mexico or Colombia, say my law enforcement colleagues. It doesn’t take a big patch to bring in good money, and the county’s roadless ridges and hollows give farmers the kind of privacy once prized by moonshiners. But every now and then, somebody’s pot patch gets busted, and sometimes somebody gets shot, though it’s not usually the sheriff.

In a special election held to fill the post, Kitchings outran his opponent—a local undertaker—as easily as he’d once outrun would-be tacklers. Since then, he’d spent a decade bringing the sheriff’s office into the modern era. With the money seized in a spate of drug busts, he bought a fleet of new vehicles: SUVs that could handle the rutted roads threading the county’s hollows; off-road ATVs that could cross swollen streams and reach hillside pot patches; even a helicopter from which he could survey his mountain kingdom from on high, with his brother, Chief Deputy Orbin Kitchings, a former army chopper pilot, at the controls.

Despite his success, and despite the passage of nearly twenty years, Tom Kitchings had never fully gotten over his football injury. He still carried a slight hitch in his step and a fair-sized chip on his shoulder. He’d gone about as far as he could go in Cooke County, but that was leagues away, literally, from NFL

stardom.

I didn’t actually know any of this firsthand. Everything I knew about Tom Kitchings came from UT fans like Jeff and law enforcement colleagues like Art Bohanan, a criminalist with the Knoxville Police Department. Unlike every other sheriff in East Tennessee, Kitchings had never consulted me on a forensic case. Not that I minded. Judging by things I’d heard from Art, getting involved in Cooke County cases was a lot like snake-handling: it was an act of faith that violated all the dictates of common sense—and it entailed a damn good chance of getting snakebit. According to Art and others at KPD, it was not entirely clear which was more venomous in Cooke County, the bad guys in the battered pickups or the good guys in their SUVs and aircraft. Nothing was certain; anything was possible.

I had plenty of time to ponder these things as the Cherokee bored east on Interstate 40, traversing the broad valley of the French Broad River. Then, just before I-40 plunged into the heart of the Appalachians, Williams whipped the Jeep down an off-ramp, skidded left onto a county road, and began threading curves that made a corkscrew seem straight by comparison. The road had a solid yellow center line, but Williams drove as if both lanes were his alone, wandering from one edge to another. “Is this one way?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t, but hoping he might take the hint and stick to the right lane.

“One way?” He laughed easily. Now we were in his territory, not mine. “Naw, but you got to straighten these curves or you’ll never get where you’re going.”

By way of demonstration, he took both hands off the wheel, and the Jeep barreled straight ahead for a hundred yards, while the center line whipsawed beneath us. “It’s easier at night, when you can see the other cars coming.” He drifted left to hug the inside of a tight curve. “Unless they got their lights off. One or two nights a year, we get a bad head-on wreck long about here.”

I switched to pondering that for a minute, but as the road grew more tortuous, my pondering shifted to another alarming topic: how many more curves could I take before I threw up? Not many, I realized, as sweat began beading on my forehead and premonitory saliva filled my mouth. I rolled down the window and thrust my face out into the bracing air, panting like a dog. It helped, but not enough to offset our continuing roller coaster ride. I pulled my head back inside.

“Listen, I hate to do this,” I said, “but I’ve got to ask you to stop. I’m getting really carsick.”

He looked startled, as if he’d never heard anything so ridiculous. Carsick? On this fine road? It was the look a camel might give a parched human in the Sahara.
Thirsty? Didn’t you drink some water just last week
?

A pained expression worked its way from his mouth up to his eyes; then he shook his head once. “Sheriff said he needs you right away. Reckon we better keep on a-keepin’ on. Just hang out the window there and let fly if you need to.”

As if on cue, I did. Flecks of vomit spattered the gold star painted on the door. I pulled my head back in. “It’s not that simple,” I rasped. “It isn’t just vomiting. I’ve got Ménière’s disease — vertigo — and I’m about thirty seconds from getting a dizzy spell that’ll last for days. Trust me, if that happens, there’s no way I’ll be able to do whatever the sheriff needs me to do.”

He cursed under his breath, but he hit the brakes and we crunched to a stop on the shoulder beside the tumbling Little Pigeon River. Two minutes later, we were under way again. This time, we kept to our side of the blacktop, and the tires had ceased to squeal. That’s because this time I was driving.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Williams muttered. “Sheriff’s gonna be mad as hell.”

“Not as mad as he’d be if I had to lie down in a dark room for three days,” I said. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.” I rolled down the window to dispel the acrid scent of vomit.

Ten minutes later, we rounded yet another curve, and suddenly—for the first time since we’d dived off the interstate—I could see for more than a hundred yards ahead. The road ran straight and level for half a mile, bringing us into Jonesport, the county seat. The town occupied what must have been the one patch of level ground in all of Cooke County.

Hunkering in the center of the town square was the courthouse, a two-story structure that appeared designed to repel a military siege. Laid up in thick slabs of rough-hewn granite, its façade was broken by only a few small windows, all of them barred, and by a mammoth ironclad door that could have shrugged off a medieval battering ram. I’d seen prisons that were flimsier. Prettier, too.

“That’s a mighty stout courthouse you’ve got there,” I observed.

“Old one burned down back in the twenties,” he said. “Fellow was in jail, his kinfolks was trying to get him out. There was a shootout, then a fire. Reckon they didn’t want that kind of thing happening again.”

“Fellow get away?”

“No sir, he didn’t. First he caught a bullet, then he burned up. Thing is, he shouldna oughta been in jail in the first place. It was a goddamn frame-up from the get-go.”

“You take a strong interest in local history,” I said.

“That piece of it, anyhow. Fellow was my granddaddy.” He pointed. “Park here.”

As I eased the vehicle into a diagonal slot in front of the courthouse, I sensed a presence beside me. I glanced out my open window and saw a khaki-clad belly hanging over a pair of olive-drab trousers; a .38 dangled from a gun belt. Then a face leaned in at the window. “Williams, what in holy hell is going on here?”

I thought it best to speak right up. “Sheriff Kitchings? This is one smart deputy you’ve got.”

Both men stared at me in astonishment. I plowed ahead, full speed. “I got sick as a dog on the way up here. I was on the verge of passing out when your deputy remembered an article he’d read about motion sickness. Asked me if I’d be willing to try driving a spell, see if that helped.” Kitchings looked from me to Williams and back again. “Fixed me right up. Lucky thing, too—if it hadn’t, I’d’ve had to lay under that tree over there for a week till my head quit spinning.”

I could see a question forming in the sheriff’s mind—something about his deputy’s medical library, I suspected—so I shifted gears before the discussion could take a bibliographic turn. “Sheriff, I don’t remember having you in any of my anthropology classes at UT,” I said. “Should I?”

He blushed and shook his head, suddenly a student being quizzed by a professor again. “Uh, no, sir, I never got around to taking anthropology. I did come to your class once, though. The time you showed slides of that fireworks explosion.”

An illegal fireworks factory in southeastern Tennessee had gone up with a bang one day, hurling thirteen people—in half a hundred pieces—through the roof of the barn where they were mixing gunpowder with pigments. It was a gruesome accident, but it was also a fascinating forensic case study, a homespun mass disaster. Before showing slides of the carnage to my classes, I always warned students a week in advance that the pictures were horrific, and I gave them the option of skipping class—that one class out of the whole semester—without penalty. Invariably, the day of the slide show, the lecture hall was jammed—

standing room only, including dozens of students who weren’t even taking the class. The first time it happened, I was surprised; after that, I knew to expect it. If I were smarter, I’d have charged admission every year, then retired early and rich.

“That was an interesting case,” I said. “I think we finally got everybody put back together right, but when we first stacked up all those arms and legs, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to.”

Williams was safe now, I guessed, so I cut the small talk. “What can I do for you, Sheriff? Your deputy here said it was mighty important, but he didn’t say what it was.”

“There’s a body I need you to look at.”

“I kinda figured that. Is it in the morgue?”

“Morgue?” He snorted. “Doc, the closest thing we got to a morgue up here’s the walk-in beer cooler at the Git-’N’-Go.” He and Williams shared a laugh at the image of a body laid out atop cases of Bud Light. “The body’s still where we found it at yesterday.”

The look of alarm on my face made him smile. “Don’t you worry—another twenty-four hours in that place ain’t gonna hurt it none.” He winked across me at Williams, and Williams laughed again, this time not so much at what Kitchings had said as at what he
hadn’t
said. Williams laughed with the relief of a child who’d come home from school expecting a whipping and gotten a cookie instead. At that, I smiled, too.

CHAPTER 3

“OKAY, BOYS, SADDLE UP and move out.” Kitchings swung a leg over his mount, and Williams and I did the same. I hit the ATV’s starter button and the Honda engine purred to life. They’d offered me a choice: double up with Williams or ride solo. I’d ridden with Williams once today, and I hadn’t much liked it, so I opted for a machine of my own.