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“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.
The road was deceptive: unobtrusive, but smooth and well-maintained, free of the ruts and mud holes that plague most gravel roads in the mountains. The Great Smoky Mountains are classed as a temperate rain forest, with up to eighty inches of precipitation a year, so it’s a rare mountain road that doesn’t have a few wallows and washed-out spots. This one was firm, dry, and well-drained by ditches and culverts everywhere that drainage might be a problem. There were no weeds in its center, either, a sign of frequent traffic or regular grading.
“This is a good road. The county keep it up like this?” I tried to sound offhand.
He swiveled his bearlike head at me. Perhaps I hadn’t managed to sound quite as casual as I’d hoped. “Naw,” he said. “This here’s what you might call a private drive.” After a moment, I heard a low, rumbling growl that seemed to shake the entire vehicle. I glanced over to see him chuckling. “Private drive,” he mumbled again, and chuckled some more at his wit. Then he flashed me a delighted, speckled smile. Lord God, what have I got myself into, I thought, shaking my head. Then I felt myself chuckling, too, at the absurdity of the situation.
But the chuckle died in my throat a moment later when the big man said, “Stop the car right here, Doc.” I felt myself freeze up, unable to speak or act. The world seemed to shrink, until nothing remained but a green tunnel, a gray gravel track, and a steering wheel gripped by a pair of white-knuckled hands that might or might not have been my own. Another hand reached in from somewhere and cut the ignition switch. The car drifted to a stop on the gravel, the only sounds the crunch of gravel under the tires and th
e rush of blood in my head. Then even those sounds were gone, and the tunnel of green faded to black.
* * *
When I awoke, I felt myself curiously confined. The air was dank and hot and close against my face, depleted of oxygen, yet my arms were cooled by a breeze. The darkness was softened by fuzzy globules of light. As my eyes shifted focus, instinctively seeking some definable shape, the globules sharpened into myriad pinpoints of daylight, viewed through the weave of fabric. My thoughts regained their focus, too, and I recognized the damp, acrid smell of sweat. A pungent camouflage cap was stretched tightly from my chin to my forehead. My arms twitched as if to bat it away, but they would not move. I jerked against whatever was restraining them and began thrashing my head.
“Easy, there, Doc, you’re gonna hurt yourself that way,” rumbled the deep voice to my left. “We’re nearly there, so just sit tight a minute. I told you I weren’t gonna hurt you, and I ain’t, but they’s some things you need not to see, in case somebody was to ast you about ’em later.”
