“We’re going to make an anthropologist out of you yet,” I said.
“Well, it might not be too bad if I could stick to bones like these. I don’t have any trouble with ’em when they’re clean and dry.”
“Yeah, but it’s a whole lot more work to dig those up. There are always tradeoffs and compromises, Deputy, even in science.”
He waited for me to open my door, but I didn’t. “Don’t you need anything, Doc — notes or bones or something?”
“No, I’m not quite finished defleshing the skeleton — the skull and pelvis are still simmering in the crock pot. It’s pretty easy to remember what I’ve found so far.” He looked eager to hear more, but I wasn’t feeling chatty. “Sounds like your boss is in a hurry. Reckon we better get going?”
“Sure thing.” He spun on his heel, and I followed him out to the Cherokee, which was tucked between two of the diagonal steel girders supporting the stadium’s grandstands. A one-lane strip of asphalt encircled — or would it be “en-ovaled”?—the base of the stadium, threading between the rows of massive girders and branching, in places, into short, dark spurs of pavement that led into catacombs where I imagined the high priests of the religion of Southeastern Conference football must be entombed.
Williams and I talked UT football for a while, but I could tell he was itching to ask other questions. Finally, as we merged onto the interstate, he broke. “I bet you’ve had some interesting cases, huh, Doc?”
“Well, they’re all interesting to me.”
“But what’s the most interesting? Or the most unusual?”
“Hard to say.” I thought for a minute. “One of the most unusual, I suppose, was the woman in Connecticut whose husband — a former police officer, by the way — killed her and cut her up and burned her body in the front yard.”
He whistled. “Sounds like a TV show—When Good Cops Go Bad.”
“I’m not sure he was ever a good cop; he may have just gone from bad to worse. There were several odd things about that case. One is that we were never able to figure out what he used to cut her up. Another is that he went to the fire department and got an open-burning permit the day he cremated her.”
He hooted, then turned to face me for an unnervingly long time, considering that he was now driving at seventy-five miles an hour. “A permit? Are you shittin’ me, Doc?”
“No, I’m not, Deputy. I guess he didn’t want to break any really important laws in the course of murdering and dismembering his wife.”
Mercifully, Williams refocused his gaze on the road ahead. His voice got conspicuously casual. “Anything weird showing up in our case?”
I paused, searching for the right way to do this. “You know, Deputy, Sheriff Kitchings said this is likely to be a pretty sensitive case, and he seemed worried that the phone line might be tapped. If somebody’s tapping your phone, they might have your vehicle bugged, too.” Williams looked simultaneously startled and suspicious, though I couldn’t tell whether the suspicion was directed in my direction or elsewhere. “I think we better wait till we’re someplace the sheriff knows it’s safe to talk.”
“Good idea.” He nodded and smiled. Underneath the smile, though, I noticed his jaw muscles working.
When we left the interstate to snake along the river road, he kept his speed down and his turns gentle. I thanked him for taking good care of me. This time, he smiled in earnest.
“So how’d you end up in law enforcement, Deputy?” It was a question I always like asking officers, because the range of answers — of motivations, of pathways — seemed nearly infinite, and usually fascinating: a family tradition for three generations; a brother who was murdered; an overdose of Dragnet reruns; a genuine desire to make the world a better, safer place.
Williams was quick with his answer. “You remember I told you about my granddaddy?” I nodded: the man unjustly jailed, then shot and burned to death. “I wanted to make sure that kind of thing never happened to any of us again. Only way to do that is to be the guy with the badge and the keys.” It wasn’t the most noble reason I’d ever heard, but I could see the logic of it up here in Cooke County.
We had reached the most tortuous section of the road when Williams slowed and began edging onto the right-hand shoulder of the road, such as it was. “Doc, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to stop and take a leak.”
“We’re pretty close to town — you can’t wait?”
“No, sir, I don’t think so. I drank a lot of sweet tea in the cafeteria while you were in class; too much, I reckon. I do apologize. You just sit tight and I’ll be back in one minute.”
And with that, he was gone.
He didn’t come back in one minute, or two, or even three. To pass the time, I pulled a notepad out of my pocket and began drafting a job recommendation a former student had asked me to write. At last the door swung open. “I was about to send out a search party,” I said, my eyes still on my notes. “You must have had a couple quarts of tea with your lunch, Deputy.” But it was not the deputy who leaned down and peered at me through the open door. It was a bear of a man, dressed in a camouflage jumpsuit, the tree-bark pattern worn by deer hunters, complete with a camouflage cap.
“Dr. Brockton, I’m real sorry about this, but we got a little change of plans. My name’s Waylon. Now, I ain’t gonna hurt you. How about sliding over behind the wheel and pulling back onto the road? You’re gonna head toward town a piece, then make a turn where I tell you.”
“Where’s Deputy Williams?”
“Leon? He’s all right, don’t you worry none about him. He’s just kindly…tied up at the moment, you might say.” The big man flashed either a grin or a grimace at me.
I sat. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”
“Somebody needs to talk to you. In private. Prob’ly won’t take a half a hour, then we’ll get you back to town so you can go on about your business with the sheriff.”
I studied Waylon. He outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds, and I was guessing there was a pistol tucked somewhere in that camo suit. Maybe a skinning knife, too. “What if I say no?”
He sighed. “Look, Doc, ain’t no reason we got to have trouble between us. I told you, I ain’t gonna hurt you, but I will hogtie you if I have to. Besides, you’ll want to talk to this fellow I’m taking you to. I bet he can help you figure out who you pulled out of that cave the other day.”
News travels fast in a small town. I cranked the engine and shifted into gear. “You tell me where to go.”
He grinned, flashing a smile of scattered teeth, pitted with cavities and flecked with chewing tobacco. “Now you’re talking. Once you cross that next bridge, take your first right. It’s gravel.” We wound along for maybe a mile; during that time, I considered half a dozen escape plans and rejected them all — not because I was hopelessly outmatched, though plainly I was. I rejected them because this homespun mountain man had shrewdly punched the one button — short of threatening my family — that was guaranteed to ensure my complete cooperation: he dangled before me the prospect of a forensic revelation.
We thunked onto a new concrete bridge — obviously a replacement for some predecessor that had washed away in one of the floods that frequently scoured the mountain valleys — and off the other side. “Best slow down a bit — it’ll sneak up on you. Right yonder — you see it?”
I did, barely: two mammoth hemlock trees arched over the right-hand side of the highway, and running between them, as if they were some great gateway, a gravel road turned off and disappeared into the forest.