Without Mercy (2 page)

THE BAD NEWS WAS, ONE OF THE BOOKS MIRANDA
had been carrying was now thoroughly soaked, as soggy as a two-hundred-page tea bag. The good news was, the sodden mess was the osteology field guide that I myself had written years before.

“Sorry, Dr. B,” Miranda said, holding the book by one corner as it drained into the trash can beside the desk.

“I have a spare copy,” I said. “Actually, hundreds of spare copies. Boxes and boxes of them, crammed in the closet of my office. Peggy's been after me for years to get rid of some of them.” The truth was, Peggy, my secretary, had been after me to get rid of
all
of them. “They're not the latest edition,” Peggy liked to point out. “No first editions, either. Nothing worth saving. And the longer they sit in that closet, the moldier and more outdated they get.”

I eyed the other books Miranda had been lugging, which ranged from osteology references to radiology texts. “Why are you bringing these back? You finally getting worried about your library fines?” It was a running joke, my pretense that
she was racking up years' worth of overdue fines on the books I had loaned her.

“Why should I worry?” she cracked. “What's a few thousand bucks between indentured servant and master?”

That, too, was a running joke, one that had more than a kernel of truth in it: Graduate assistants worked long hours for low pay, and Miranda was now nearing the seven-year mark in her servitude. If she'd been a faculty member instead of a student, she'd be eligible for tenure now.

“Actually, I'm through with them,” she said.

“Through?”

“Through. I sent it to the printer this morning.”

“
It?
” She nodded but said nothing, waiting for me to figure out what she meant. It took me longer than it should have. “Your dissertation? You
finished
?”

“Yup. That's why I'm late—I was up all night making revisions. But it's done, by damn.” She flashed me a smile—a smile that combined pride, relief, and also, I now noticed, exhaustion. And yet remarkably, she—the one who'd been up all night—had gone to the trouble to buy me a cup of tea on her way in. True, the tea was now only a puddle of good intentions, but I appreciated the gesture.

“That's great, Miranda. I'm thrilled,” I said. But the word came out sounding flat and forced, and I realized that “thrilled” wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth was, now that Miranda was finishing her Ph.D. she'd be leaving, and I would miss her: her expertise, her reliability, her sassiness, and her friendship. “Thrilled” was only a small part of the large, complicated truth of what I felt as I contemplated her departure.

An awkward pause hung in the air. Finally, blessedly, it was broken by the electronic warble of the phone on the desk.
Miranda lifted the receiver without looking at the display, trailing droplets of tea across the scuffed desktop. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” she said, then, “Hi, Peggy. . . . Yeah, he's here.” She handed me the phone, frowning as a few final drips spattered her forearm.

Peggy Wilhoit had been the Anthropology Department secretary and administrative assistant for most of my twenty-five years at UT. She knew where to find me, when to remind me, and how to get my goat. Much like an old married couple, we had long ago dispensed with formality, settling into a relationship that was predictable and mostly harmonious, with the exception of the occasional spat. “Morning, Peggy,” I said. “Do you have a tracking device on me?”

“Darn. You've finally caught on. What I really need, though, is one of those remote-control shock collars, so I can make you mind better.”

“I'd laugh,” I said, “if I thought you were joking. What's up? Am I late for a meeting?”

“Sheriff O'Conner, from Cooke County, is on line two. Can you talk to him now, or should I take a message?”

“I'll take it. Thanks.” I pressed the blinking light on the phone's console. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton.”

“Doc,” came a familiar voice. “Jim O'Conner. Remember me?”

“Remember? Hell, how could I forget?” O'Conner, a Vietnam war hero, was a slight, soft-spoken man, yet he had a commanding presence and powerful charisma. Before becoming sheriff of Cooke County, O'Conner had built a small ginseng empire that was remarkable for being both prosperous and legal—an uncommon combination in the hills of Cooke County, which was notorious for its frontier mentality and outlaw entrepreneurs. Cooke County had long trafficked in
'sang, as the locals called ginseng root, but until O'Conner started cultivating it, the root was invariably poached from federal lands. Besides ginseng and rugged mountains, the county's other claims to fame and infamy included pot patches, cockfights, chop shops, and, more recently, meth labs.

I had first met O'Conner five or six years or so before, when I worked a murder case in Cooke County. He himself had been wrongly accused of the murder; in the end, not only was he cleared, he was elected sheriff, and he'd promised to clean up the corruption that had characterized the county for a century or more. As best I could tell from occasional news reports about undercover stings and colorful trials, he'd done a good job of keeping his promise. “My secretary told me ‘Sheriff O'Conner' was calling. I reckon that means you're still wearing a badge?”

“For the moment,” he said. “But it's a temporary, short-term kind of deal.”

I laughed. “Isn't that what you said back when you first took the job, what, five, six years ago?”

“Well, yeah,” he confessed. “My mistake was, I said I'd stick with it till I got the place cleaned up. Turns out, cleaning up Cooke County is like getting rid of kudzu. You can cut vines all day long, but until you get at the root problem, it's just gonna keep coming back.”

His analogy rang true to what I knew of Cooke County, botanically as well as criminally: it was easy to become entangled, tough to get loose. “You getting any closer? To the root problem?”

“Hard to say, Doc. Some days I think we're making progress. Other days, I think the problem is just human nature itself, stretching all the way back to Adam and Eve.”

“So maybe it wasn't a snake that started the trouble,” I mused, “but a kudzu vine grabbing hold of Eve's ankle?”

He gave a quick laugh. “I think you're onto something there, Doc. You ever get tired of anthropology, you should take up preaching. You make more sense than any of the hillbilly Bible-thumpers up this way.”

“I'll take it under advisement,” I said. “But meanwhile, I'm guessing you didn't call to ask about theology.”

“You're right. We've got a death up here I'm hoping you might help us investigate.”

“
Now
you're talking my language,” I said. “Is the body still at the scene?”

He hesitated. “Well, no, not exactly.”

My good mood evaporated, replaced by exasperation. “Dammit, Sheriff, you know better than that. I've said this to law enforcement till I'm blue in the face. It's really important not to move the body till I get there. Makes my job a
whole
lot harder if—”

“Excuse me, Doc,” he interrupted. “I didn't make myself clear. It's not that we moved the body. It's that there's not really much body
there
anymore. Just bones. And not a whole lot of 'em to speak of.”

Suddenly I felt sheepish. “Well, hell, Jim, I'm sorry I snapped at you. I should've known you wouldn't compromise the evidence. My apologies.”

“No worries, Doc. You think you can come help us out?”

“Sure. Miranda and I—you remember my assistant, Miranda?”

“Of course.”

“We can leave in . . .” I paused and shot a questioning glance at Miranda. She'd seemed to be absorbed in checking her e-mail, but by the speed with which she met my gaze,
I knew she'd been listening closely. I tapped my watch and raised my eyebrows to underscore the unspoken query. By way of an answer, she held up both hands, fingers spread wide. “Ten minutes,” I told O'Conner. “We can leave in ten minutes. Where are you? How do we find you?”

“I'll have Waylon meet you at the Jonesport courthouse in an hour.”

“Tell him no detours this time,” I said. “The last time Waylon drove me around Cooke County, we ended up at a cockfight. Next thing I knew, my mouth was full of chewing tobacco and I was throwing up in a barrel full of dead roosters.”

O'Conner chuckled. “No detours, I promise. But, hey, you got a good story out of that. People up here still talk about it.”

“Great,” I said. “A humiliating day that will live in infamy.”

He went on, clearly relishing the tale. “If everybody who claims to've seen you barfing at that cockfight is telling the truth, every man, woman, and child in Cooke County was at the Del Rio cockfights that day.”

“Wouldn't surprise me,” I said. “Those bleachers were packed. And that concession stand was selling chicken tenders by the truckload.”

“Lord help,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder what people are doing with their time and money, now that we've shut down the cock pits. Then, unfortunately, I find
out
what they're doing, and I have to arrest 'em for
that
, instead. It's a shell game, Doc—you close an illegal door, folks'll crawl through a forbidden window.”

“Blame it on the kudzu, Sheriff. We'll see you soon.” With that, I rang off, then buzzed Peggy to tell her that Miranda and I were headed to Cooke County to work a case.

This would be our seventeenth forensic case of 2016; that meant that the victim, whoever he or she might be, would be recorded and referred to—even if we managed to identify him or her—as case 16–17, the first number referring to the year, the second to the order in which the case had arrived.
Now serving number 17
, I thought, visions of the Department of Motor Vehicles dancing in my head.

As we headed to the Anthropology Department's pickup truck, the back loaded with body bags, shovels, rakes, cameras, and anything else we might need to work a death scene, I felt a surge of energy—excitement, even—and for the moment, at least, I forgot to be morose about the prospect of Miranda's graduation and departure.

LEAVING THE STADIUM, MIRANDA AND I TURNED ONTO
Neyland Drive and paralleled the emerald-green Tennessee River for a mile, then took the eastbound ramp for Interstate 40. Now that we had a forensic case I felt downright cheerful, even though the case was situated in a rough-justice jurisdiction where many an outsider had come to grief.

Cooke County was the best of counties and the worst of counties. By nature, it was a paradise: mountainsides blanketed with pines, tulip poplars, hemlocks, and rhododendron; deep valleys carved by the French Broad, Pigeon, and Nolichucky Rivers; tumbling mountain streams, brimming with trout. But by other measures—socioeconomically, ecologically, and legally—it was far from the Garden of Eden. Unemployment was high, income was low, gunshots were considered background noise, trash dumping was regarded as a constitutional right (revered only slightly less than the Second Amendment, judging by considerable roadside evidence), and crime had long been a chief source of revenue, both for Cooke County residents and for elected officials.

A COUNTY OF BAD OL
'
BOYS
read the headline of a
Los Angeles Times
story about Cooke County a few years ago. The subhead gave more specifics:
BOOTLEGGING
,
BROTHELS
,
AND CHOP SHOPS
.
GUILTY SHERIFFS AND FEDERAL INVESTIGATIONS
.

Oddly, the article omitted mention of what was perhaps the most sensational black mark on the county's reputation: the discovery, years before, by an undercover FBI agent, that the sheriff was trafficking in cocaine, and in a big way. The sheriff turned an empty field behind the county high school into a makeshift airstrip, and as his deputies guarded the perimeter, a plane loaded with coke landed on school property. “That sure puts the ‘high' in higher education,” one of my FBI colleagues had remarked after the sheriff's indictment.

But that had been many years and several sheriffs ago. By all accounts—including the reckoning of the FBI, which continued to watch Cooke County closely—Sheriff Jim O'Conner had made great strides in rooting out official corruption, though Cooke County's citizenry still had a penchant for pushing the boundaries of law and order. Common lore held that anyone driving a car with an out-of-county license plate was considered fair game after dark, and a year or so ago, a friend of mine—a Knoxville writer with more curiosity than common sense—made the mistake of driving a red BMW convertible into the heart of Del Rio, a Cooke County community whose main “industry” for decades was its massive cockfighting arena. A quarter mile after he turned onto Del Rio's river road, three pickups—all equipped with loaded gun racks—pulled out of driveways and tucked in behind the BMW, following it closely until it made a U-turn and hightailed it out of there.

Miranda and I would probably be fine in Cooke County,
I figured. For one thing, we'd be in the company of law enforcement officers. For another, the UT pickup truck we were driving was old and battered, and therefore not particularly tempting to thieves or kidnappers. For yet another, the truck had a feature that was sure to repel almost any ne'er-do-well: the cargo bed and camper shell reeked of death and decay, thanks to the countless bodies and bones the truck had ferried over the years. The truck was like a four-wheel version of Charon's boat, ferrying the dead across the river Styx—in this case, though, ferrying the dead across the Tennessee River to the Body Farm. Perhaps I should have felt morose about being Death's ferryman, but I didn't. Instead, I felt curious and eager as I contemplated getting to know my latest passenger—the newest resident of the Body Farm.

But my good mood didn't last long. Less than ten miles outside of Knoxville, a ghost—in the shape of a highway billboard—reared its haunting, taunting head.
COMFORT INN
read the faded sign, a message I always found deeply ironic on this particular billboard.

“Crap,” I muttered to Miranda. “Remind me to take a different route next time.”

“What? Why?” She glanced at me, then followed my grim gaze to the billboard. “Oh. Right.” She grimaced. “You'd think they'd take that down. But I guess not too many people know about it or remember it.”

“It” was the series of murders Nick Satterfield had committed, two decades before, on the wooded hillside directly behind the billboard. A sadist who preyed on prostitutes, Satterfield would pick up his victims on Magnolia Avenue, Knoxville's de facto red-light district, and bring them out here to Cahaba Lane—a short cul-de-sac that was a dead end in the worst possible way. After parking directly beneath
the Comfort Inn billboard, Satterfield would lead the women up a trail into the woods, where he would do brutal and lethal things to them.

“It still blows my mind,” I said. “His car was parked right there, in plain sight, while he tortured and strangled those women. I still wonder if anybody driving past ever heard anything.”

Miranda lowered the window and cocked her head toward it, as if listening for the echo of a long-ago scream drifting from the woods that flanked the freeway. “Lotta noise,” she said doubtfully. “Even with the windows down, hard to hear anything but the wind. Though if you were stopped to change a tire . . .” She made a face. “Yuck. Yeah, next time let's take a different route.”

We rode in silence for the next half hour. Then, just before the freeway began corkscrewing its way through the Great Smoky Mountains, we got off. I felt my mood lift again as we wound alongside the Pigeon River, which we followed upstream all the way into town.

Jonesport was Cooke County's seat of government and its largest town, not that the competition—from the likes of Allen Grove, Del Rio, Tom Town, Wasp, and Briar Thicket—was all that stiff. Fronting the town square was the courthouse, a brooding, fortresslike building, assembled from rough-hewn slabs of granite, its windows gridded with bars, its front doors sheathed in iron. As we approached, Miranda gave a low whistle. “Geez,” she said. “That place could repel a third world army.” After a moment, she added, “Although from what I know of Cooke County, a band of local outlaws is lots more likely than a foreign army.”

“From what
I
know about Cooke County,” I said, “the outlaws are already inside, running the place.” As we passed
the façade, I noticed two old men seated on a bench beside the front entrance, an enormous pile of wood shavings at their feet. I gestured in their direction to direct Miranda's attention to them. “See those two guys?” She nodded. “I think those are the same guys I saw last time I was here. Four years ago? Five? I wonder how many trees they've whittled their way through in that time.”

“Well,” she mused, “probably not as many as you and I have dissertated and photocopied and syllabused our way through.”

“Glad to know you hold our work in such high regard,” I grumbled, though without conviction.

I pulled into the gravel lot behind the stone courthouse and parked in the
NO PARKING
zone beside the sheriff's department, rolling down my window to take in the afternoon air. Just as I killed the engine, the sun seemed to disappear behind a cloud. Glancing out my window, I saw that it wasn't a cloud that had blocked the sun, but a mountain—a mountain of a man, his big belly and barrel chest filling my entire field of view. His shirt could scarcely contain the gargantuan form—I caught glimpses of skin through gaps between the buttons—and when he leaned on the windowsill, the truck canted to the left, causing the apple that had been sitting on the truck's bench seat to roll against my thigh.

The big man's face was out of sight above the truck's roofline, so I spoke to the immense chest—specifically, to the five-pointed star pinned to the straining shirt. “Waylon, is that you?”

“Nah, it's my baby sister,” rumbled a deep growl of a voice. “How the hell you been, Doc? We ain't seen you in way too long.”

A bear-paw hand clapped me on the shoulder, and the
truck rocked from the force of it. “Good,” I managed to grunt. “Busy, but good. Waylon, you remember Miranda?”

“Course,” he said. He bent down, his bearded, bearish head occupying half the window's opening, then threaded an arm the size of an oak limb across the cab, offering her the paw, which seemed the size of a boxing glove. Miranda's hand and wrist disappeared as Waylon closed his fingers. “Mighty nice to see you again, Miss Miranda.”

“Nice to see you too, Waylon,” she said. “You keeping 'em honest up here?”

Her question unleashed a low, thunderous chuckle from deep in Waylon's chest. “Not so's you'd notice,” he said. “I'm a deputy, not a miracle worker. Besides, if ever'body up here straightened up and toed the line, I'd be out of work, wouldn't I? Way I see it, only feller up here with more job security 'n me is the undertaker.”

WE FOLLOWED WAYLON'S TRUCK OUT OF TOWN ON
the Dixie Highway, crossing the Pigeon River and then, in a few miles, paralleling the French Broad, which had somehow, over the eons, managed to carve a channel through the high, rugged mountains between Jonesport and Asheville, North Carolina—barely thirty miles away, as the crow flew, but more than twice that far upriver as the valley twisted and turned.

We wouldn't be going all the way to Asheville—only about halfway, to the remnants of a tiny ghost town named Wasp.

As we followed the river, I didn't worry about staying particularly close to Waylon, since we could have spotted his truck from a mile away. Despite the sheriff's emblem painted on the front doors and the tailgate, the truck wasn't exactly
a standard-issue law enforcement vehicle. A far cry from the Jeep Cherokees and Chevy Tahoes favored by rural sheriffs' departments, this was a hulking Dodge Ram 3500, fire-engine red, sporting a hulking diesel engine, a double cab, dual rear wheels, and twin vertical exhaust pipes, the sort normally found only on tractor-trailer rigs.

We had barely reached Jonesport's outskirts—which weren't too far from Jonesport's inskirts—when Miranda said, “You know, if anybody else were driving that thing, I'd be tempted to diagnose a case of SPS compensation.”

“Of
what
compensation?”

“SPS.”

“I heard what you said,” I told her. “I just don't know what it means.”

“SPS? Small penis syndrome.”

“Eww,” I said.

“SPS compensation means driving a huge truck or a souped-up car—or shooting giant guns, or acting supermacho—to compensate for a sense of manly inadequacy. Mind you,” she added, “I doubt that Waylon actually suffers from SPS.”

“
Stop
,” I said, my face scrunching into an involuntary grimace. “I'm sorry I asked.” If I hadn't been driving, I'd have put my hands over my ears. “I can't believe we're having this conversation.”

“We're anthropologists,” she said matter-of-factly. “We study humans—their civilizations, their rites, their rituals, their behaviors.”

“Cultural anthropologists study that stuff. We're
physical
anthropologists, remember?”

“We were also talking about physical attributes,” she said, way too cheerfully.

“You were, not me,” I pointed out. “
Were
. Past tense. End of discussion.”

“No problem,” she said. “Didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. Or . . . insecure.” She snickered as soon she said the last word.

“Ha ha. Very funny, Miss Smarty-Pants. You should do stand-up comedy, after your dissertation gets blown out of the water.”

“Not gonna happen,” she said. “Did I mention that harsh grading is a surefire sign of SPS?” She was grinning now, I noticed out of the corner of my eye. She
was
a smarty-pants, and she
was
funny, and she did know how to bait me, no doubt about it. Mercifully, she changed topics. “So what's that pipe sticking up above the cab of the WaylonMobile? Not the two chrome ones—even I recognize those as exhaust pipes—but that weird black one, on the right?”

I glanced at the truck's roofline. “I think that's a snorkel.”

“A
snorkel
? Like, for scuba diving?”

“Basically, yeah,” I said. “So the truck can ford streams—hell, probably rivers and lakes, tall as that thing is—without the engine drowning.”

“So Waylon's truck is also a submarine? Does it have a periscope, too?”

I shrugged. “Knowing Waylon, I wouldn't be surprised.”

She was silent for a moment—I fervently hoped she wasn't considering turning “periscope” into a bad joke—then she said, “You know how people and their dogs resemble each other?”

“Sure. My high school chemistry teacher, Miss Walpole? She had an English bulldog—short, fat, wrinkly, snuffly. Damned thing looked exactly like her, except for the strings of drool. Walked just like her, too.”

“That truck is Waylon on wheels. Almost like a vehicular reincarnation.”

“Don't you have to be dead to be reincarnated?”

“Correct as usual, Professor Pedant,” she said. “Okay, let me rephrase that. Waylon's truck is like a vehicular, parallel-universe avatar of him. Is that better?”

“Much,” I said. I wasn't quite sure what an “avatar” was, but given our previous conversation, I was too skittish to ask.

We followed the French Broad past Del Rio, former site of the massive cockfighting arena, then continued along the river for another five miles or so. At that point, the asphalt and the water parted company, the road turning uphill away from the river. A few miles later, we turned off the highway and onto a woodsy gravel route marked Wolf Creek Road. It began promisingly enough, a lane and a half wide, but over the next few miles it gradually narrowed to a single lane, then became nothing but a pair of tracks, sometimes surfaced in gravel, sometimes in dirt, mostly in leaves. Trees crowded in from both sides and overhead, the branches slapping and clawing at Waylon's supersized truck, whose massive cab and bulging rear-wheel fenders bulked it up to a full two feet wider and at least a foot higher than the UT pickup Miranda and I were in. But if Waylon was bothered by the damage to his paint job, he didn't show it in his use of the accelerator pedal, bulling his way through the branches as if they were nothing more than clouds of gnats.