Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 (32 page)

“Goddamnit, Doc,” he shouted, “we ain’t
got
a cardiologist out here.”

“No, but we can get him to one faster than we can get him back to town. Call your dispatcher; get ’em to patch us through to LifeStar.”

LifeStar—UT Medical Center’s air ambulance service—had two helicopters based behind the hospital, within sniffing distance of the Body Farm. It took less than a minute for the dispatcher to patch Williams through to LifeStar’s flight coordinator. The deputy described the sheriff’s symptoms and asked if they could send a chopper. “What’s your location?”

“We’re in a small valley six or eight miles southeast of Jonesport,” said Williams. “Brush Creek Mountain is directly to our west, and—”

“Wait wait wait,” said the coordinator. “Anybody there got a GPS unit?”

“Oh. Yeah. Affirmative,” said Williams. He pulled a handheld Global Positioning System receiver from a pouch on his belt and powered it up. The display showed signals from four orbiting satellites. “Stand by for coordinates,”

said Williams. As he began rattling off numbers, I looked over his shoulder at the display. “Latitude three-five-point-niner-five-three-five degrees north. Longitude eight-two-point-seven-niner-six-eight degrees west.”

As the dispatcher read the coordinates back for confirmation, I realized something was wrong. I tapped his shoulder to get his attention, but he shrugged me off in annoyance. I tapped again, harder. “LifeStar, stand by,” he snapped, then whirled to confront me. “What the
fuck
?”

“You transposed two numbers in the longitude,” I said urgently, pointing at the display. “You said ‘point seven nine’; the display says ‘point nine seven.’” I did some quick math in my head. “That’s almost two-tenths of a degree. They’re going to land ten or twelve miles from here, somewhere over in North Carolina.”

Williams looked ready to explode. He radioed the flight coordinator to correct the number, and the coordinator read the revised longitude back. “Readback is correct,” said Williams. I reached to take the radio from him. He relinquished it with a look of supreme annoyance.

“How soon can they be in the air?” I asked.

“Thirty seconds ago,” said the coordinator. “Should be landing in about twelve minutes.”

“Wow, that’s great. Anything we can do for the patient here in the meantime?”

“Stand by.” The radio was silent for nearly a minute before the LifeStar dispatcher came back on. “The flight nurse says keep him quiet, feet elevated. If he’s conscious and you can round up an aspirin tablet, give him one to chew. That’ll thin his blood a little, maybe help restore some flow to the coronary artery.”

“Will do,” I said. “Signing off now. Thanks for the help.”

“It’s what we’re here for.”

I handed the radio back to Williams and sprinted to the back of my truck, where I always kept a first aid kit. Somewhere among all the bandages and wet wipes, ointments and surgical gloves, I knew there was a packet of aspirin. The profusion of tiny containers was maddening. Finally I found it: a single foil pack containing two aspirin. With trembling fingers, I tore open the foil. Both pills popped out, skittered across the truck bed, and began rolling toward the gap in the tailgate. As the first pill rattled down into the recesses of the bumper, I lunged desperately, snagging the other just as it reached the opening. My own heart was pounding now.

Kitchings had regained consciousness by now, so Williams and I propped him against one wheel of the Jeep. As he chewed, grimacing from the acidity of the pill or the pain in his chest, I told him about the shooting, the crash, and Waylon’s pursuit of the shooter. He quizzed me closely about the shell cases—

how many? “Five,” I said. What caliber? “Waylon said thirty-thirty. Long, like a hunting cartridge. Your deputy has ’em in his pocket.” Kitchings looked at Williams and held out his hand.

Williams fished out the bandanna, untied the knot, and placed the nest of cartridges in the sheriff’s upturned palm. “Careful; there might be prints on them,” I said. Using a corner of the fabric, the sheriff carefully lifted one shell and studied its flat base. His face—already a mask of pain and anxiety—did not change expression. “Yep, Winchester thirty-thirty,” he grunted. “Leon, that mean anything to you?”

“Hell, Sheriff, there’s gotta be a hunnerd thirty-thirty deer rifles in Cooke County alone coulda fired those, and a few hunnerd more in spittin’ distance.”

Kitchings nodded grimly, retied the bandanna, and fumbled with the button on his shirt pocket. “Sheriff, I was gonna take them back to the office and get ’em off to the TBI crime lab. Like the doc here says, might be some prints on there. Maybe some ejector marks or firing pin impressions in the TBI ballistics database, too.” The sheriff tucked the bandanna into the pocket. “Sheriff, with you goin’ to the hospital and all, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be carryin’ evidence off with you. Gonna break the chain of custody; hell, they might even get lost.” Williams reached toward the sheriff’s pocket, but Kitchings knocked his hand away.

“Goddamnit, Leon, I ain’t dead yet,” he growled with surprising force. “I am still the damn sheriff of Cooke County, and I am taking custody of these damn cartridges.” Just as Williams opened his mouth to argue, an orange and white helicopter skimmed over the ridge and dropped to the valley floor. The instant the wheels touched ground, the flight nurse and paramedic were out the door with a litter. Ignoring the deputy and me completely, they set it on the ground and laid the sheriff down, snapping a safety belt across his hips and another, loosely, across his chest. Then they called us in to help. The four of us hoisted the stocky sheriff, bore him to the chopper, and slid the litter through the double doors. Even before the doors slammed shut, the two turbine engines were spooling up.

Through the window, I glimpsed the nurse starting to rig an IV bag. But it was only a glimpse. The helicopter leapt off the ground and banked westward with the speed of a combat aircraft. As it vanished behind the ridge, I checked my watch. Twenty-three minutes, give or take one, had elapsed since the sheriff sank to the ground. If the first hour was golden, I hoped that made the first halfhour platinum. In any case, if speedy diagnosis and treatment were as crucial as the cardiologists claimed, Kitchings should be back on the job within a few days.

But I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. I also wasn’t sure I’d ever see those cartridge cases again. I turned to Williams. “Deputy, once the dust settles and the sheriff’s back on his feet, you might ought to get him to write you an evidence receipt for those shells.”

“You bet, Doc,” was all he said. But the expression on his face—a swirl of anger, frustration, and fear—spoke volumes more. Trouble was, I couldn’t quite catch hold of the meaning.

CHAPTER 36

HEADLIGHTS DANCED ACROSS THE mangled JetRanger as a vehicle bumped across the field toward the wreckage. I wondered which group was arriving first: the TBI agents or my forensic assistants. I had reached Miranda on the satellite phone Jim O’Conner left with me. Today was a tough time to be rounding up a forensic team. Not only was it Saturday, it was the Saturday that fell smack in the middle of UT’s four-day fall break. Normally, even on weekends, the hallways and offices beneath the stadium were crawling with Anthropology students; today, apparently, they were as scarce as virgins at a fraternity party. Miranda had called back after a half-hour to say she’d completely struck out in her efforts to round up two more grad students. “Call Art Bohanan,” I told her. “He doesn’t know bones, but he’s good at bagging evidence and taking crime scene photos. And try Sarah Carmichael.”

“Who’s that? Don’t know her.”

I squirmed at the question. “She’s in one of my classes. The campus operator should have a listing for her.”

“Sarah Carmichael. Is she a master’s or Ph.D. student?”

“She…she’s an undergraduate, actually.”

There was a long pause. “Has she taken Osteology?”

“Not exactly. No. But she’s practically memorized the field handbook on her own.”

Another pause, even longer. “Is she who I think she is?”

“Probably. Yes. Look, it’s the student you saw me kissing, okay? I’m sorry; I know it’s awkward, and I hate to drag her into this, but if you can’t find anybody else, she might be the best we can do. She’s smart, she knows the basics, and she’ll do fine recording data and filling in the inventory of skeletal elements.” The inventory of skeletal elements was a fancy name for an outline drawing of the human skeleton. In fieldwork like this, I always assigned one student to color in, with a pencil or pen, the outline of each bone as it was found. Basically, it was like a page from a Halloween coloring book, and the only places where staying within the lines was difficult were the hands, feet, and skull. Besides being faster and easier than writing down the names of bones, the diagram showed me, at a glance, what we’d found—and what was missing. I was confident that Sarah would have absolutely no problem filling it in accurately.

“We don’t need her help,” said Miranda. “We can do this without her.”

“No we can’t, Miranda. Your right arm’s in a cast, remember? You can’t ID

bones and write things down and bag evidence with a broken arm. Call Sarah.”

Despite the thousands of miles up to the communications satellite and back down, I could hear Miranda’s angry breathing; in my mind’s eye, I even saw her nostrils flaring. “Damnit,” she finally said, “you ask one hell of a lot, you know that?”

“I do know, and I am sorry. But I’m not asking for me. I’m asking for the dead guy in the helicopter here, and his brother the sheriff, who just left in an air ambulance, and their mother and father, who don’t even know yet that one of their sons has just been killed. It’s a complicated death scene, Miranda, and I need help. Especially yours. Please.”

Two hours after that angry exchange, the department’s pickup came jouncing across the valley floor, with Miranda at the wheel, Art riding shotgun as navigator, and Sarah folded into the jump seat behind them. I motioned them around to the front of the helicopter,d so the headlights illuminated the smashed interior. “Wow,” Miranda said as she hopped out, her orange cast practically glowing in the dark. “That kudzu tunnel is incredible. So
Tuscany
—the whole grape arbor effect—with a big ol’ East Tennessee twist.” She seemed relaxed and happy. Was it the adrenaline rush of a field case, or had she somehow bonded with Sarah on the drive up? Either way, I was relieved. “Three years and fifty death scenes, and this is the coolest.” She unlatched the window on the cap that covered the bed of the truck and began unloading gear one-handed. Art waved hello and gave a big wink, which must have been code for something, but I had neither the time nor the privacy to ask him what it meant. Then Sarah extricated herself from the cramped jump seat. The smile she gave me still looked awkward, but the embarrassment in her smile couldn’t hold a candle to the excitement in her eyes. Perhaps I hadn’t bungled things forever after all.

The two hours it took them to reach the scene had seemed like an eternity. The fact was, though, even if they’d arrived sooner, we couldn’t have started excavating the chopper until the wreckage had cooled, and it still felt almost too warm to touch.

I had just finished introducing my helpers to Williams—I was surprised Art hadn’t met the deputy already, on one of the Cooke County visits he’d made with me—when Art pointed toward the mouth of the valley. “Bill, did you order pizza?”

A Crown Victoria eased into the valley and idled across the field toward where we stood. I knew it wasn’t pizza, unless Domino’s had begun recruiting drivers from the ranks of active TBI agents.

Williams and I had almost come to blows over calling in the TBI. As soon as the rotor wash from LifeStar had settled, I had pulled out the satellite phone to call them. “Hell, no,” the deputy said, when I told him what I was doing. “I’m in charge here, and I say no.” It was true that with the sheriff incapacitated and the chief deputy dead, Williams was the ranking law enforcement officer on the scene—and in the whole county, for that matter. But he was a commander without subordinates, and he seemed unsure how to proceed. When he balked at the TBI, I suggested the Tennessee Highway Patrol instead, but he said no to them as well. “Well,
somebody’s
got to take jurisdiction,” I snapped. “We’re not on federal land, so we can’t call in the feds. Seems like our best bet is your new pals at the TBI.”

I hadn’t meant to say that; it just slipped out in the heat of the moment. Williams went ghostly pale, then angry red; my attempt at an explanation—that I’d been returning a library book to the downtown library, and happened to see him talking with Steve Morgan on the steps of the federal building—sounded lame even to me. “Look,” I’d finally said, “somebody just shot the sheriff’s brother. You don’t have the resources for a big investigation. Call in some reinforcements. It’s your best hope for catching whoever did this.” He still looked unhappy, but he didn’t stop me from making the call. The front doors of the Crown Vic opened in unison. A grim-faced Steve Morgan emerged from the driver’s side; Brian “Rooster” Rankin exited the passenger side. His cover now thoroughly blown, Rankin had traded his feed cap and overalls for a sportcoat and silk tie.

Williams and Morgan nodded awkwardly to one another, in the way of people who know each other but hate to acknowledge it—like two ministers bumping into each other at a strip club. Rankin, on the other hand, made a point of introducing himself to Williams, which told me that the deputy had not met Rankin at the federal building. That made sense—he was still working undercover, after all. As Rankin shook his hand, Williams’s face betrayed a potent mix of confusion, shock, and fear. When I saw that, I knew that Rankin—the undercover version—must have rubbed elbows with the deputy in some unsavory or illegal context.

The two agents huddled briefly with all of us, first getting a brief recap from me, then asking Williams a few questions—where and when he’d learned of the shooting, when he’d arrived, and so on. Excusing themselves for a moment, they got back into their car, where they conferred in low, earnest tones. When they rejoined us, Morgan seemed to have taken charge of things. “Here’s how we’d suggest proceeding,” he said, in a tone that didn’t actually invite feedback or questions. “I’ll stay here with Dr. Brockton and his team as they excavate the chopper. Agent Rankin will ride back to the courthouse with Deputy Williams to get more background, go over the dispatch logs, and review any pertinent files.”