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She looked exasperated, but she left the duty desk and glided down the hall, easing into a room. Kitchings was sawing logs, half-sitting in the angled hospital bed, an IV in his left arm and a bundle of EKG leads snaking out the top of his hospital gown. A heart monitor flashed steadily at seventy-two beats a minute, and his chest rose and fell at about one-quarter that rate. The nurse flashed a thumbs-up sign. “He’s fine,” she whispered. “He had a very small clot — he probably collapsed more from the stress than from the clot — and he got to the cath lab really quick. A little Roto-Rooter of the artery, and he’s good as new. Probably go home tomorrow.” I was amazed at the cheery prognosis — when he keeled over, I pretty much wrote him off as dead. The nurse turned to go, and held the door for me, but I thought of something. Tapping my wristwatch, I held up five fingers and cocked my head in a questioning manner. She shrugged, put an index finger to her lips, and left me alone with the snoring sheriff.
As soon as the door closed, I tiptoed over to the wardrobe where I guessed his clothes were stored. Sure enough, his uniform — rumpled and stained — hung in the cabinet. His gun belt and empty pistol dangled from a hook at the back. I felt the left shirt pocket, then the right. Both empty. I searched the pants pockets — also empty. Then I noticed a small plastic bag sitting on the floor of the wardrobe. The bag was heavy; it clattered as I picked it up and set it on the rolling hospital tray parked beside the window. Rooting through the bag in the semidarkness, lit only by the heart monitor’s display and the building’s exterior floodlights, I saw the sheriff’s badge, his keys, his wallet, some loose change, a pack of sugarless gum, and the bullets from his gun. But I did not — on my first, my second, or my third survey of the contents — see the sweat-stained bandanna in which Waylon had knotted the cartridge cases that might have led to Orbin’s killer.
CHAPTER 38
It was the lead story in the morning paper, which thudded onto my doorstep only a few short hours after I’d left the sheriff’s hospital room. “Little Stacy’s Body Found,” read the headline; the subhead added, “Convicted Molester Charged with Murder.” The girl — missing for nearly a month — was found by cadaver dogs in a drainage ditch at an abandoned textile mill, a few blocks from the suspect’s seedy house. Hidden beneath old tires, rotting carpet, and other debris, the body was decomposed beyond recognition. But since Stacy Beaman was the only eight-year-old missing at the moment, it took only moments for an assistant ME to match her teeth to the dental X-rays already on hand and awaiting just such a grim discovery.
As I was turning the page to finish the story, the phone rang. “Hey,” said a glum voice that I’d known — even as I was reaching for the receiver — would be Art’s. The suspect had been arrested twelve hours earlier, while Art was helping me bag bones in Cooke County.
“Hey, yourself,” I said. “How you doing?”
“Some good, some bad.”
“Glad they found her. Glad they got him. Sorry it turned out this way.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s the case against the suspect?”
“Better than we expected. The crime scene techs found some hair and fibers on the body we think we can link to him, and we’re hoping we’ll find traces of semen — God, would you listen to me, ‘We hope we find some semen’? Also, we’ve got multiple witnesses, other kids’ moms, very credible and sympathetic on the stand. All of them put him near the school the day she disappeared. If your pal…” he trailed off, then began again. “If DeVriess doesn’t manage to bar testimony about the guy’s prior record, I don’t see how any jury in the land could fail to convict. But then again, I don’t see how any lawyer in the land could aggressively defend this guy, either. Clearly there’s a lot that’s beyond my feeble powers of comprehension.”
“Mine, too,” I said, hoping to deflect his rage at DeVriess. “I admire how hard you guys worked to find her and make the case. I’m sure her family appreciates it, too. Or will, when they’re able to.”
“Yeah, that’ll keep ’em warm at night.” He sighed. “You know, Bill, sometimes I despise this world and the vermin who infest it.”
“I know. There’s evil out there, that’s for sure, and you’ve seen more than your share of it. But there’s good, too — try not to forget that.”
“The good sure seems to take a back seat sometimes. My mama wanted me to be a dentist—‘Almost as prestigious as a doctor,’ she said, ‘and the hours are a lot better.’ Maybe Mama knew best.”
“Are you kidding? Standing around all day with your hands in other people’s slobber? Besides, people positively adore cops compared to how they feel about dentists.”
He laughed — faintly, but it was something. “You’re right, the slobber factor is a deal-breaker. Saying ‘Rinse and spit’ ain’t near as glamorous as yelling ‘Freeze, asshole!’—or dredging up bloated corpses and burned skeletons. Speaking of that, any news from the hills in the last eight hours?”
I told him about the parade of late-night visitors to the sheriff’s hospital room, and my own fruitless search for the cartridge cases. “I was hoping the TBI might be able to match the brass. Without those shells, all we’re left with is the ATV tracks Waylon found. And from what little I saw of Orbin firsthand, there could be legions of people up there who wanted him dead.”
I was leaving at noon to take Orbin’s remains — cleaned as best Miranda could clean the charred, fractured bones overnight — to the funeral home in Jonesport, I told Art; would he like to go along, and did he have the time, now that an arrest had been made in the Stacy Beaman case?
“Sure,” he said. “We have so much fun every time we go up there, wild horses couldn’t keep me away. Besides, I’ve got about a year of comp time built up. Can you swing by the lab at KPD and get me?”
Three hours later, I pulled up in front of KPD headquarters, and Art bounded down the steps and leapt into my truck. He seemed like a different person from the morose man who had called me earlier. He was wearing an expression unlike any I’d ever seen on his face before: excitement, horror, amusement, disgust, all rolled into one.
“You’ve practically got canary feathers hanging out of your mouth,” I said. “Spit it out — what’s up?”
“I just got a call from Bob Gonzales,” Art said. “He couldn’t reach you at home or UT, so he called me instead.” Bob Gonzales had earned his Ph.D. with me about ten years ago — no, more like fifteen now. These days he was the staff forensic anthropologist for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which boasted one of the world’s biggest and best DNA labs. Art and I had overnighted the hair and follicle samples Art had “gathered” from Tom Kitchings’s scalp, along with femur cross-sections from both Leena Bonds and her baby, as well as cheek swabs from Jim O’Conner.
“He’s got results already? That’s fast. DNA tests usually take weeks.”
“I reckon he’s still shooting for extra credit. Once a Brockton student, always a Brockton student.”
I was glad to hear that. “Anything interesting?”
r /> “Oh, maybe a couple minor points of interest.” He paused, clearly savoring the suspense. “For one, your pal O’Conner’s in the clear, at least in terms of paternity. Not a chance in a zillion that baby was his.”
“Not surprising, but glad to hear his story checks out. What’s the other thing?”
Art was thinking. Not always a good sign. “Did you ever see that Jack Nicholson movie Chinatown? The one with Faye Dunaway?”
“Long time ago. Main thing I remember is how good Faye Dunaway looked without her clothes. That, and how much it would hurt to have Roman Polanski slit open your nostril.”
“Those would be the two things you’d find memorable,” Art said. “See, I mainly remember the interrogation scene. Nicholson’s trying to get Dunaway to tell him the truth about who this mystery girl is, and he starts slapping her around.” He began jerking his head from side to side, reenacting the scene, affecting what I could only guess must be a Faye Dunaway voice. “‘She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister and my daughter!’”
My brain was still preoccupied by Faye’s curvaceous torso. “So what you’re getting at is…?”
“The baby — a boy, by the way — he’s the sheriff’s first cousin, once removed. Leastwise, I think that’s what you call the child of your mother’s sister’s daughter. Whatever — that much of the DNA profile is exactly what you’d expect. The sheriff’s mother and his Aunt Sophie had the same parents, so the daughter, Leena, is going to have some DNA from the maternal side and pass it along to her baby. As I say, that part’s exactly what you’d expect.”
“But there’s something else you wouldn’t expect?”
“Well, maybe I should have, this being Cooke County, Tennessee. But no, I never saw this one coming.”
“Damn it, Art; what is it?”
“Besides being Sheriff Tom’s cousin, Leena’s baby was also gonna be his kid brother.”
