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“Well, I’ll be glad to help if I can. Do you have X rays of the teeth? Or dental charts?” His eyes narrowed as they took in the hatbox under my arm.
“Better than that,” I said. “I’ve got the teeth themselves. The jaws, too. The whole skull, in fact. The dental work is quite distinctive.”
His gaze shifted from my face to the box and back again. “Well,” he said finally, his startled expression giving way gradually to one of mild amusement. “I must say, this is a first. Come in, have a seat, and let’s have a look.”
He sat behind a large wooden desk in an oak swivel chair, one that might have been as old as the house itself; I sat facing him in a high-backed wing chair, also an antique, the box on my lap. “I reckon I should ask if you’re squeamish.”
“Me? Lord no. Squeamish people don’t make it through dental school—or didn’t twenty years ago, when I was a student. Back then, they started us off dissecting cadavers. They don’t do that anymore, but they should. Weeds out the weak, and teaches you the anatomy, inside and out. So no, a skull won’t faze me in the least.”
I nodded. “Just checking.” I removed the box lid and set it on the floor, then lifted the skull from the nest of paper towels with which I’d cushioned it. I leaned forward, my elbows on the desk, and turned the face of the skull toward him, hoping for a flicker of recognition in his eyes.
Instead of a flicker, I saw a seismic shock. Hartley gasped, shoving his chair back from the desk so hard that his head hit the wall. He blanched, and a moment later he bent forward and scrabbled beneath his desk. I heard the clatter of a metal trashcan, and then I heard violent retching. It continued, off and on, for a minute or more, and when he finally sat up, the retching had given way to weeping.
“She said her horse had kicked her in the mouth,” he whispered, “but I knew better. I knew that sonofabitch did it. A baseball bat, a two-by-four, a candlestick—I don’t know what he hit her with, but whatever it was, it could’ve killed her.” He shook his head angrily. “She always stuck to the script—she was too scared to tell the truth—but I knew. And she knew that I knew.”
“Who is ‘she,’ Dr. Hartley? And who’s the sonofabitch?”
“Denise Donnelly,” he said. “The wife—the possession—of Patrick Donnelly.” He said both names as if I should know them. He said the man’s name as if I should loathe it.
“Sorry, I’m not from here,” I said. “Who are they?”
“The richest people in Wartburg. Not that there’s many of those. He’s got mineral rights to half the county. Owns two or three strip mines—legal ones—and probably half a dozen wildcats.” Seeing the puzzled expression on my face, he translated. “Wildcat mines are illegal, fly-by-night mines—no permits, no health and safety procedures, no environmental protection. Cheap, quick guerrilla raids on shallow seams of coal. Get in and get out, rape and pillage, before the regulators know you’re there.” He looked down, twisting a ring on his right hand, a haunted expression on his face. “I knew he’d kill her someday if she didn’t get out. I begged her to leave him.” Suddenly he shuddered and buried his face in his hands, and his body shook with the force of his sobs.
When he finally looked up at me again, the light in his eyes had gone out, and he seemed twenty years older than when he’d answered the door. And in that moment I understood. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Hartley,” I said. “You’re obviously shocked. And . . .” I wasn’t sure if I should go on, but I did. “It’s none of my business, but I gather that you and Mrs. Donnelly were . . . close, so I truly apologize for springing this on you.” He nodded bleakly. “When did you hear she was missing?”
He blinked, startled. “I didn’t. I don’t think anybody did—a town this size, word gets around, you know? But I should have guessed.” He looked away, and when he looked back at me, it was as if he’d decided something. “At first she was just a patient whose teeth I cleaned twice a year. Then, after . . . this”—he pointed at the skull—“she needed a lot of post-op care. I saw her every week for six months. And eventually . . .” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. “She called me two weeks ago. Patrick had bugged the phone; he knew everything. She said she was going to California, to stay with her sister for a while, to sort things out. Told me not to try to contact her. Said it would just make things more painful for everyone.” He drew a deep breath, and as he exhaled, his face seemed to harden. “Then Patrick took the phone from her. He said that if I ever called or spoke to her again, Denise and I would wish we’d never been born. Then he hung up. I hoped she’d find a way to call me again, but she didn’t.” He looked at the skull and gave a bitter semblance of a laugh. “Now I know why.”
We sat in silence, the only sound the ticking of an antique clock. Then, in the distance, I heard the sound of car horns—faintly at first, then louder and louder, so numerous they blended together into one cacophonous clamor. A moment later a jubilant procession—or was it a riot on wheels?—roared past the dentist’s house and up Main Street toward the courthouse.
“What on earth is that?” I said. And then—with a sudden, sickening feeling—I knew what it was.
I felt like a football running back, fighting my way through a hundred defensive linemen, as I forced my way through the whooping crowd surrounding the courthouse. Thunder rumbled overhead, as if the storm gathering on the ground were mirrored in the purple-black sky.
Two deputies, both armed with pump shotguns, stood on the steps and blocked the entrance. “I have to see the sheriff,” I said.
“The sheriff’s busy,” said one.
“Interrogating a prisoner,” smirked the other.
“That’s why I need to see him,” I said. “I’m with the state medical examiner’s staff.” I pulled my ID badge from my wallet and held it out, but the deputies seemed uninterested. “I know who the dead woman is,” I went on. Now, for the first time, I had their attention. “I’ve just identified her.”
“What’s her name?” the first deputy asked.
“Take me to the sheriff,” I insisted. “That information’s for his ears only.”
It was a spur-of-the-moment fib, but it was effective. The two deputies exchanged glances, and the first one—who seemed to outrank the second one—disappeared through the door. Several moments later the door opened and the deputy leaned out, beckoning me inside. He led me up to the third floor, into the jail, and down a row of cells. Deputy Jim Cotterell was standing at the end of the hall, just outside a cell door, his expression grim. As I approached, I heard a dull thud inside the cell, followed by a quick grunt and a slow groan.
“Sheriff? Here’s the bone doc,” said Cotterell. Peering through the bars into the cell’s dim interior, I saw the sheriff step away from a hunched figure—a black man, bent nearly double, who slowly straightened. Blood trickled from his lips and nose and from a laceration on his right cheekbone. The man’s left arm ended at the wrist—a broad, blunt stump—and his right wrist was encased in a filthy cast.
“I hear you got something to tell me.” Sheriff Dixon stepped from the cell, his face glistening and his eyes glittering, and walked toward the far end of the cells.
“Two things, actually,” I said. “The woman was named Denise Donnelly.” His eyes flickered, but he didn’t react as strongly as I’d suspected. “I gather she’s a prominent citizen?”
“You might say that.”
“But she hadn’t been reported missing?”
“Not to me.” His eyes bored into mine. “You sure it’s her?”
“I am,” I said.
“How sure? Ninety-five percent sure?”
“No. This time I’m a hundred percent sure. I showed her teeth—her skull—to her dentist.” An expression I couldn’t quite decipher flitted across the sheriff’s face, and I wondered if the sheriff, too, knew about their affair. “She’d had extensive dental surgery—reconstructive surgery, to repair an injury. The
dentist recognized the work instantly.”
“Yates!” The sheriff’s shout boomed across my ear. Down the hall, the deputy who’d brought me upstairs turned from the prisoner’s cell and trotted toward us. “Pat Donnelly’s outside,” the sheriff told him. “Go get him. Tell him I need to see him.” He looked at me again. “What else? You said you had two things to tell me.”
“She was strangled,” I said. “Her hyoid—a bone in the throat—was crushed.” Reaching into my shirt pocket, I removed the evidence bag and carefully extricated the bone.
Three hours before, on my way into town, I’d stopped at the scene and, on hands and knees, sifted through the leaves on the hillside, at the stained spot a dozen feet above the body’s final resting place. “Eureka,” I’d proclaimed when I plucked the bone from the ground and saw the fractures: saw what had killed the woman.
But the sheriff gave the bone only a glance before turning away. I grabbed his sleeve, forcing him to look and listen. “Sheriff, I don’t think the man you’ve got back there would be physically capable of strangling someone.” I remembered a third thing—a phone call I’d gotten from Art Bohanan just before I left. Art hadn’t yet found a match to the prints, but he did find something else interesting. “A forensic expert with the Knoxville Police Department took a set of prints from her left hand. She fought, Sheriff. She had skin under her fingernails. White skin. And one red whisker.” He didn’t respond, so I plowed ahead. “From what I hear, the Donnellys’ marriage had some serious problems.” For the first time, I seemed to have his full attention. “You might want to consider the possibility that Patrick Donnelly killed his wife.”
I saw his jaw tighten. “I might want to consider the possibility?” His eyes narrowed and his chin lifted slightly. “I tell you what. You might want to consider the possibility of knowing where your job stops and my job starts. Now, is that ever’thing you had to tell me? ’Cause if it is, I’ve got an interrogation to get back to.”
He turned to go. “Sheriff?” I said to his broad, sweaty back. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. “How’d she get there?” He held my gaze but didn’t speak. “Where’s her car?”
He shook his head. “No telling,” he said. “Bottom of a quarry. Bottom of a river. In a chop shop, gettin’ parted out. In a scrap yard gettin’ shredded. I don’t know, and it don’t matter. But when I find out, I’ll send you a memo. That make you happy?”
“You’re saying this guy disposed of the car and then walked back into the mountains?”
“I’m saying it don’t make a bit of damn difference where the car is,” the sheriff spat. “The damn car didn’t kill the damn woman, did it? This nigrah pervert killed the woman.”
