Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 (36 page)

“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.”

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, bull
shit
. 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!”

Despite 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.”