Without Mercy (3 page)

He stopped just beyond a fork in the “road”—a Y where the two faint tracks split and became four, like a backwoods version of a chromosome unzipping and replicating. Waylon had taken the right-hand arm of the Y, so I pulled a short ways up the left-hand arm before stopping. As we got out, Waylon lumbered up beside me. “Doc, snug right on up
behind me, if you don't care to.” His phrasing—using “don't care to” to mean “don't mind”—brought a slight smile to my lips. His next line almost made me laugh out loud: “Best not to be blockin' traffic.”

“Traffic?
Here?
” I asked the question with the closest thing I could manage to a straight face.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Never know.” He pointed in the direction my truck was facing. “This here connects up with Round Mountain Road, and Max Patch is up yonder way. Might be somebody'll be headed up thataway, or coming back down.”

I nodded. I wasn't familiar with Round Mountain, but I knew Max Patch: a high, grassy bald just across the state line in North Carolina—a popular spot for Knoxville hikers and picnickers. I pointed ahead of Waylon's truck. “And that way?”

He snorted. “Ain't nothing thataway. Not now, leastwise.
Used
to be—eighty, hunnerd years ago—this here was Wasp. We'll go past what's left of the school and the post office. But ain't nobody lived here since the 1930s, when the Forest Service bought ever'body out and let the trees grow back. It'd been logged, ya see, and the land was all warshin' away, ever time it rained. 'Bout the only people goes up thisaway anymore is hunters. Them's who found it and called us.”

“How far to the death scene?” I asked him.

“Hunnerd yards, give or take. Straight up thataway.” He pointed past his truck. “What all you want to take up there, gear-wise? I'll help you tote it.”

“If it's that close, I'll just take the camera, for now,” I said. “Once we've had a look, I'll know what we need.”

He nodded and headed up the track, bending and snapping branches as he squeezed past his truck and the sheriff's
SUV—a much smaller Jeep that was parked twenty feet farther up the hill, in the last gasp of what had once been the road, eight decades before. As I reached the front bumper of the sheriff's Jeep, where the route narrowed to a single-track footpath, I noticed a set of crumbling, moss-covered stone steps notched into a low embankment to my left, and—on a level shelf of forest floor a stone's throw beyond—a rotting wooden building and a small cluster of gravestones. “So that must've been the church,” I said, pointing at the collapsing walls.

“It was,” Waylon confirmed. “And yonder's the schoolhouse.” He pointed to the right, where I saw another crumbling structure, similar to the church in size, shape, and ruination, but lacking the tombstones, and standing—or, rather, leaning—rather closer to the path. “A few houses here and there, too,” he added, waving a hand in a vague arc, “but they's kindly off the beaten track.”

“Wait,” said Miranda. “You're saying we're
on
the beaten track?”

“Yes, ma'am. Relatively speaking, that is.” He stopped and cupped his hands around his mouth and called ahead, in a booming voice, “Sheriff? We're here. Hold your fire.”

“I will,” answered a quiet, amused voice, so close to us that I jumped. Jim O'Conner stepped out from the ruins of the schoolhouse. “I was just doing a little amateur archaeology here, while I waited. Dr. Brockton, Miranda, good to see you again. Thanks for coming.”

He strode toward us, his hand extending while he was still ten feet away. He was at least a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than his deputy, but there was no doubt who was in command here. I'd seen other men his size carry themselves like bantam roosters: all puffed up, preening and
strutting. O'Conner carried himself easily, with quickness, grace, and wiry strength—more like a bobcat than a rooster, I decided. Ever the gentleman, he shook Miranda's hand first, then mine, with a grip that seemed somehow to be simultaneously easy and yet powerful.

“I'm always happy to help,” I told O'Conner.

“He's not kidding,” Miranda added. “When he's in a foul mood, I'm sometimes tempted to murder somebody, just so he'll get a case and lighten up.”

O'Conner grimaced and shook his head—not to dispute what she'd said, but to express dismay, as best I could tell, about the case we'd be helping with. “Y'all might not feel the same when you see what we've got here,” he said.

I held up a hand to interrupt him. “Don't tell us anything,” I reminded him.

“I know, I
know
,” he said. “You want to draw your own conclusions. It's a good idea; I just don't see how your conclusions can be anything but terrible when you see this.” With that, he turned and led us forward, higher up the hill. The farther we went, the darker and more sinister the woods seemed to grow, though I told myself that the effect was created purely by my imagination, in response to the sheriff's ominous words.

Suddenly a man stepped from behind a tree, so unexpectedly I spooked like a horse spotting a snake in its path. He held up a hand, and I recognized Steve Morgan, a former student of mine from years back, now a special agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Steve and his wife, Christie, had met in my osteology class, so I was always glad to see him, feeling entitled to take credit for both his professional success and his personal happiness. “Steve,” I said, holding out my hand. “Good to see you. Glad to see the TBI
is sending in the A-team on this one. But who'd you piss off at headquarters to get sent back to Cooke County? I thought Meffert was assigned up here.”

Morgan's face fell. “I'm just temporary. Maybe. Bubba's on medical right now.”

“Something serious?”

He nodded gravely. “Looks like pancreatic cancer. Not good.”

“I hate to hear that.” I meant it, not just because Meffert was a good agent and an old friend, but also, especially, because I had a deep and abiding hatred of cancer in all its insidious forms, ever since it had snatched my wife, Kathleen, from me years before. “Where is he? And is he up to visitors?”

“Not right now. He's out at MD Anderson. I'll let you know once he's back.”

“I'd appreciate that. How about you? You glad to be back in Cooke County for a while?”

“Doc, that question is more loaded than my service weapon. Take this case here, for instance.”

“Not a word,” I told him, and he grinned. I turned to O'Conner. “Why didn't you tell me this guy was waiting in ambush up here, ready to give me a heart attack?”

O'Conner looked at me and shrugged, all innocence. “Hey, aren't you the one that keeps saying, ‘Don't tell me anything'?”

I looked to Miranda and Waylon to chime in on my behalf, but Miranda arched a single, serves-you-right eyebrow at me, and Waylon was carefully studying his grubby fingernails.

“I see how it's gonna be with this crew,” I said, feigning martyrdom. “Okay. Fine. Let's go.”

The hillside steepened for ten feet or so, then plateaued into a flat, level area—possibly a natural landform, but more
likely an area that had been shaped to accommodate a cabin or farmhouse a century ago. On the nearer side of the shelf, some twenty feet ahead of us, was a large tulip poplar—easily two feet in diameter, and a good eighty feet tall. All around us, other tulip poplars were just beginning to turn from green to gold—the gold that gave the Great Smoky Mountains their characteristic autumnal incandescence—but this one was completely bare: It was dead, but clearly it hadn't been dead for long, as its branches had not yet begun to rot and break.

Something near the bottom of the trunk caught my eye, and I moved closer to inspect it. It was a horizontal line, roughly the height of my waist—a line that had been etched into the trunk, an inch deep and apparently all the way around. Walking closer, I saw that what had etched the line—girdling the bark, and therefore killing the tree—was a heavy chain, its links made of steel as thick as my pinkie finger. Puzzled, I turned back and gave O'Conner a questioning look. His only response was a grim nod of his head.

Showtime
, I thought, opening the case of the 35-millimeter camera that was hanging from my neck. With the zoom lens at its widest setting, I began shooting photos of the area, taking in not just the dead tulip poplar but the entire shelf. Once I was sure I had documented the overall scene, I began moving closer, ever mindful of the advice of one of my earliest law enforcement mentors, a legendary agent at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. “Photographing a crime scene is like robbing a bank, Bill,” he told me a dozen times or more. “First you shoot your way in, and then you shoot your way out.” His advice had served me well throughout my career.

By the time I was arm's length from the tree, I could see the welds in each link of the chain. I could also see the smoothness of the groove worn deep into the wood: a groove
worn, it would seem, by sustained movement of the chain, rotating around the trunk again and again and again, the links sliding and gouging with each revolution. How many revolutions? Hundreds, surely, to cause such wear; maybe even thousands.

When I stepped to the side, I felt a visceral shock that was like a punch in the gut. First, my peripheral vision took in the heavy padlock beside me, securing the chain around the trunk. But it took only an instant for my eyes to follow the chain outward from the tree—ten feet, twenty, twenty-five. Thirty feet out, the chain ended in another loop of padlocked links.

This loop was much smaller in diameter: perhaps five inches, no more than six—about the size of the circle I could make by touching the tips of my index fingers and my thumbs. It lay a few inches from a handful of cervical vertebrae, directly beneath the skull's location. Except that there was no skull; only a scattering of other bones, many of them splintered and incomplete.

Behind me, I heard Miranda gasp. “Sweet Jesus on the cross,” she murmured. It was her strongest profanity, a phrase I'd heard her use only a handful of times in all the years we'd worked together. “Chained to a tree to die.”

“Can you imagine dyin' thataway?” rumbled Waylon. It was a question no one bothered to answer; a question no one needed to answer.

I turned toward Miranda, Waylon, and the sheriff, and as I turned, I saw something I hadn't noticed before: a shallow trough in the ground, curving away from the bones in either direction; curving, in fact, in a wide circle around the tree, a uniform thirty feet from the trunk. It was a path, I realized with a new jolt: a path worn around the tree, etched in
the earth, by the victim's footsteps—thousands of footsteps, maybe millions—on a long journey to nowhere.
No
, I realized,
not to nowhere. To death
.

A circuitous, ironclad journey to death.

I HAD PAUSED IN MY PHOTOGRAPHY TO ABSORB THE
horror of the gruesome death sentence imposed on the person chained to the tree, but after a moment, I got back to work. I was still standing beside the tulip poplar, some thirty feet from the bones, but I wasn't yet ready to approach them. There were more things to photograph where I stood.

I had noticed an assortment of litter strewn across the ground, though initially I hadn't focused on it. Litter is common in rural counties, where household trash isn't always collected by garbage trucks, but litter is generally confined to roadside ditches and gullies, not strewn in remote forests. I now took a closer look. Here, the litter was largely confined to the sixty-foot circle worn in the ground, and for an absurd instant, I wondered why a murderer—for unless this death was the world's strangest suicide, it was surely a murder—would choose a dump as the scene of the crime. Then the grim truth hit me, again with terrible force: The trash had accumulated
after
the victim was chained to the tree, not before; the trash—empty cans, plastic wrappers, milk jugs, shards of chicken bones—had arrived over the course of days or even weeks, during which the chained, circling victim had been fed. Had been kept terribly, terrifyingly alive.
No, Waylon
, I silently answered him,
I can't imagine dying thataway
.

I took a series of photos of the trash, once more starting with wide-angle shots, then zooming in on representative samples. Bumblebee Tuna. Underwood Deviled Ham. Hormel
Bacon. Armour Vienna Sausage. Van Camp's Beanee Weenees. The combination—a profusion of high-fat, chemical-laden processed meats, plus the terrible purpose to which they had been put—turned my stomach, and several times I had to look away and breathe deeply to keep nausea at bay. It was ironic; comical, even: In decades of forensic work, dealing with decomposing and even dismembered bodies, at every stage of decay, I had thrown up only once, on my very first case, when an exhumed coffin was opened to reveal a rotting, dripping corpse. Yet here I was, brought to the brink of vomiting by a scattering of empty cans and wrappers.

“Let's be sure to bring up a couple of rakes and trash bags,” I said over my shoulder to Miranda. “I want to bag this stuff and take it back with us.”

“What do you think it'll tell you?” asked the sheriff.

“Maybe nothing, maybe a lot,” I said. “If we hit the jackpot, we might get fingerprints or DNA—from the victim or the suspect. Maybe from both. But even if we don't, we could still learn some things about when this happened, and how long it went on. We might not get much insight from the Vienna sausage cans—processed meat has a shelf life that's measured in years. But—”

Miranda snorted. “Decades, more like it. Maybe centuries.
Mmmm
,” she said sarcastically. “Vienna sausage—every bit as tasty and nutritious in a thousand years as the day it went into the can!”

“Hey, now,” Waylon protested. “Don't be talkin' bad 'bout Vienna sausage. I had me some for lunch, and like as not I'll have me some more for dinner.”