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“All right, then,” Decker had said. “If you can’t wait till he comes out, we’ll go in and get him for you.”
Shiflett lived in a mountain hollow just outside Del Rio, at the end of a long dirt road. Decker pulled into the turnoff and stopped at a stout metal gate, which was secured with a heavy chain and a massive padlock. The rest of the convoy eased onto the shoulder of the blacktop, although the BFT, practically scraping the trees, still occupied half the roadway.
In case the locked gate and standard red-and-black NO TRESPASSING and KEEP OUT signs weren’t enough to deter visitors, a profusion of other signs wired to the gate underscored the message: One, illustrated with a skull and crossbones, read, IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH? TRESPASS AND FIND OUT. Another bore the image of an assault rifle; underneath was a circle containing the crosshairs of a scope, centered on a red dot labeled YOU ARE HERE. A third warned, WE DON’T DIAL 911. WE CALL THE CORONER.
In addition to the warning signs, the gate was flanked on one side by a Confederate battle flag and on the other by a yellow-and-black flag; it depicted a rattlesnake coiled around an assault rifle, captioned with the dual messages DON’T TREAD ON LIBERTY and THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.
Decker got out, opened his truck’s cargo door, and extricated an immense bolt cutter. He gave the handles a squeeze, and the padlock’s shackle snapped loudly. He was about to push the gate open when I saw him freeze. After a long, tense pause, during which his body remained motionless while he scanned the woods on both sides of the driveway, he removed his hands from the gate and backed away slowly.
He clambered back into the truck. “Shit,” he muttered, then reached for his radio. “Decker here. Vests on. Everybody. Now.” I shot him a questioning look, and I got my answer when he keyed the radio mike again. “The gate’s booby-trapped. Everybody sit tight. He’s not gonna make this easy.”
He exited the truck again and went to the back once more, and I heard him rummaging around. When he stepped to the gate again, he was wearing an armored vest and a helmet and was carrying a riot shield, which he held against the left side of his body. In his right hand, I glimpsed a pair of wire cutters. Threading his hand through the bars of the gate, he maneuvered the tool gingerly into position, then slowly squeezed. I felt myself brace for a bang or a boom, but neither came, and after a moment I slowly let out the breath that I’d been holding. Decker, too, seemed to unwind slightly, and after another moment, he gave the gate a tentative push, still protecting his left side with the shield. The gate swung open a couple of feet, again without triggering any sort of blast, and again I felt myself unclench.
Pocketing the wire cutters, Decker turned toward the truck but paused, midturn, facing the left side of the gate. Then, bizarrely, he lifted his right hand and gave a small wave: like a beauty queen in SWAT gear. After he’d stashed the shield in the back of the truck and climbed back in, I said, “What was that about?”
“He’s got a surveillance camera hidden in a stump over there. Right beside the shotgun that was wired to the gate. If he’s watching, he knows we’re here. Might as well let him know that we know that he knows.”
Once I had untangled the convoluted sentence, I nodded. “Makes sense. Show him that you’re onto his tricks, and that you’re not scared. Probably ups the pressure on him.”
He gave a tight smile. “Doc, we have not even begun to apply pressure.” He picked up the radio mike again and told his men the order in which he wanted the vehicles to enter: the armored Humvee first, followed by the BFT, then the two conventional, unarmored trucks. “Fan out and stop as soon as you get to the clearing,” he added. “Let’s keep our distance from the house.”
Decker backed away from the gate and into the roadway, allowing the Humvee and the other three vehicles to enter the driveway ahead of us. Moving slowly, the Humvee pushed the gate; it opened wide and our convoy proceeded down the quarter-mile dirt lane, lurching and bucking over the ruts. The ride was relatively rough in Decker’s civilized Expedition, so I imagined it to be bone-jarring in the Humvee and the BFT.
We emerged from the woods and into a large clearing, roughly the size of a football field, its center occupied by a squat, hulking log cabin, one that looked like a throwback to frontier days. The windows were few and small, and I suspected that even without curtains, the interior would have been dark as a cave. “Hmm,” Decker said, then, “Christ. You see the gunports?” I took a closer look. Sure enough, several horizontal slits had been sawed through the front wall.
Decker radioed a team member named Ron. “Ron, take the BFT up close to the house and use the PA system to call him out. No point playing coy. Might as well get right up in his face.”
The truck began lumbering forward, its angled windshield and hood half as high as the cabin’s porch roof. “Is that safe?” I asked.
Decker gave a slight shrug. “Probably. The truck’s built for threat level four—armor-piercing bullets; biological and chemical agents—so unless he’s got a grenade launcher or a howitzer in there, there’s not much way he can hurt it.”
The vehicle stopped only a few feet from the front porch. “Jimmy Ray Shiflett, we have a warrant for your arrest,” the officer’s voice rang out, the drawl amplified by a factor of ten. “Come out unarmed, with your hands up and in plain sight.”
We waited, but no one emerged, so we waited some more. Still no one. “Tell him again,” Decker radioed Ron. Ron did as he was told, but Shiflett did not. After another long wait, Decker ordered, “See if the third time’s the charm.” Ron tried once more, but the third time was not the charm.
“Too bad,” Decker said, “but not surprising.” He got on the radio again. “Ron? Come on back to the tree line for now. Jake? Let’s get some eyes in the sky.” He looked at me with a grin. “Want to see our newest toy?”
“Sure, if it doesn’t get me shot.”
“Not to worry.” He put the truck in gear and followed the BFT to the edge of the clearing, then tucked in behind it, so we were shielded. The big vehicle’s rear door was already open, and one of Decker’s men was leaning inside, removing tubes and motors and other parts from a large plastic case. Decker motioned me to follow him, so I got out and wandered up to the back of the truck.
“Doc, this is Jake, one of our pilots. We just got this baby last month. It’s a DJI Inspire drone. This is only our third mission with it.”
As I watched, Jake fitted together the drone’s tubular framework—carbon-fiber tubes that snapped together to form an H, each leg about two feet long—and then began attaching rotors at each of the four corners, followed by a chunky central module that appeared to contain an electric battery and a swiveling camera. “It’s powered by a twenty-four-volt lithium ion battery,” Decker explained. “Like a cordless drill or circular saw. Gives us about thirty minutes of flight time. We’ve got a rack with spare batteries always on charge, so if we run low, we land and swap out. The camera’s got high-def video and night-vision capability, so we can get HD imagery day or night. It’s also got infrared—thermal—so we can look for hot spots, like people.”
Decker helped Jake lift the drone out of the truck and set it on the ground. Then Jake removed a control unit from the big case and powered it up, and with a soft whir, the drone rose into the warm sky and floated toward the house, a surreal Star Wars-looking craft flying toward a backwoods Tennessee cabin.
A FLICKER OF MOVEMENT CAUGHT MY EYE, A SPECK drifting across the sky, so subtle that at first I took it for a floater inside my eyeball. But the speck was soon joined by another, and then several more, and they drifted closer, silent and graceful, silhouetted against the brilliant blue November sky.
I nudged Decker to get his attention, then pointed at the aerial congregation that was gathering, now beginning to circle over one edge of the clearing. “Reckon your drone could slip into formation with those buzzards? Follow their noses to whatever they’re smelling?”
Decker grunted, then radioed the pilot. “You see the buzzar
ds? Just above the southeast edge of the woods?” After a pause, he added, “Sure, go on down and take a look. Let us know if you see anything.”
“Too bad that drone’s not carrying a smell-o-vision camera,” I said, and Decker smiled.
A moment later, his head snapped up and he raised a pair of binoculars, sighting toward the distant tree line. “They’ve got a visual of a body on the ground,” he said. “Cold. It’s not showing up on infrared. I’m gonna take two teams over there. One to check it out, the other to cover them, in case there’s any threat from the house. We’ll move the BFT and the Humvee around there, too. Soon as we—”
Decker was interrupted by the warble of a pager. He snatched it off his hip and glanced at the display, then muttered, “Shit.” He looked around for his deputy commander. “Ron,” he called.
Ron jogged over. “What’s up, Captain?”
“We’ve got a hostage situation in Knoxville,” he said. “Domestic disturbance. I’ve got to scoot. I’ll take my truck, the Humvee, and an entry team. You and the other guys follow once you’ve cleared the house here.”
AN HOUR LATER, I FOUND MYSELF STARING DOWN AT the bloated body and blasted face of Jimmy Ray Shiflett, if Waylon’s memory and the driver’s license photo could be trusted. The body lay a few feet from a massive stump. Judging by the bloating and the insect activity—swarming green blowflies, white dabs I recognized as masses of fly eggs, and swarms of small, freshly hatched maggots in the eyes, nose, and gaping crater of a mouth, he’d been dead for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours.
A hole freshly dug beneath one side of the stump was filled with a slurry that Waylon sniffed and then carefully tasted before pronouncing it a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane—“rocket fuel, basically,” he said. “The stuff them long, skinny drag-racing cars burn.” He frowned. “That right there’s the same stuff Tim McVeigh used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City, kill all them workers and little kids.”
“But what happened here?” I asked. “This stuff in the ground didn’t go off, but something must’ve gone off, to do this to him.” The “this” I was referring to was massive damage to the dead man’s face. Much of his mandible appeared to have been blown off, along with some of his upper teeth and part of the upper jaw. His right thumb and first two fingers were destroyed as well.
Waylon gave a dismissive grunt. “What a dumb-ass,” he said, peering down at the dead man. “Always thinking the fed’ral gov’mint or the U-nit-ed Nations was gonna come haul him off to some prison camp. But he ends up killing his own self with plain stupidity.”
“Waylon, I’m not quite following you,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Hell, the stupid sumbitch, he bit down on a blasting cap. To crimp the end.” He pointed at two bits of thin, insulated wire, one red and one yellow, lying on the ground nearby. “Them there’s the wires. He set the fuckin’ thing off in his own damn mouth.”
“Ouch, man,” I said. “Seems like pliers might have been a better choice.”
“Pliers is for sissies, guy like him’d say,” Waylon scoffed. “What’s them awards for folks that do stupid stuff that kills ’em?”
“The Darwin Awards?” I asked, and he nodded. “Survival of the fittest,” I agreed. “Or at least of the nonidiotic.”
O’Conner, Steve Morgan of the FBI, and Decker’s colleague Ron were off to one side conferring, and I saw the sheriff make a phone call. When he finished, the three of them joined Waylon and me beside the body. “This guy is determined to make our job harder, even after he’s dead,” O’Conner said to me.
“What do you mean?”
“Explosives are involved. That means we’ve got to call in the ATF.”
“Makes sense,” I said. I had worked several cases with the ATF—officially renamed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but still informally called the ATF—and I respected their expertise. “Given that the gate was booby-trapped, and the guy has explosives, probably a good idea to let them check the place out, get rid of anything dangerous.” I nodded at the body. “Can somebody give me and my friend a ride back to Knoxville? Not that there seems much doubt about cause of death, but the sooner we get him to the medical examiner, the less smelly he’ll be.”
O’Conner frowned. “Like I said, this guy’s making it hard for us. All of us. Including you, Doc.” I must have looked confused, because he added, “The ATF doesn’t want us to disturb anything—not even the body—until they’ve made sure everything’s safe.”
I was about to protest—inspecting the body for explosives at this point seemed like installing a barn-door surveillance camera after the horse had been stolen—but I saw Ron and Morgan both nod, and I decided there was no point arguing about a delay designed to keep me from getting blown up. Be a shame to win a Darwin Award of my own, I realized. “Any idea when they’ll release the body?”
“I asked the same thing. He said probably within a day.”
“That’s reasonable, I guess,” I conceded. “The good news is, it’s not hot. Tonight’s low is supposed to be near forty.”
“In Knoxville?” asked Waylon, and I nodded. “So it’ll get down to about freezing up here,” he said. “Be just like keepin’ him in the meat locker. He’ll stay fresh as a daisy.”
“Sure,” I said, eyeing the growing number of buzzards wheeling overhead. With each spiral they edged closer, and by the time O’Conner assigned Waylon to drive me back to Knoxville, I felt as if I’d just escaped from a bad scene in the Hitchcock film The Birds.
CHAPTER 26
“SHALL WE BEGIN?”
Eddie Garcia’s three simple words, spoken with quiet formality and a slight Spanish accent, made me smile. It had been a while since I had stood elbow to elbow with Eddie during an autopsy, and I realized I had missed the corpse-side camaraderie. In some ways Eddie—Dr. Edelberto Garcia, M.D., Knox County’s medical examiner—was my polar opposite: slight and dapper, well groomed and well dressed, from an aristocratic family in Mexico City. But bring us together over a body, and those superficial differences dropped away, and we were simply colleagues and kindred spirits, equally eager to commune with the dead and hear their stories. To be sure, my anthropologist ears were attuned to older stories, while Eddie’s pathologist ears tended to listen for fresher tales of tragedy. A body like Shiflett’s—several days past its peak of freshness—was nearing the outer limits of Eddie’s expertise and verging into my own, but the corpse’s condition gave us enough overlapping interest to provide an excuse to hang out together in the autopsy suite.
Eddie folded back the sheet, exposing Shiflett’s mangled face and bloating body. “I’m sorry Miranda could not join us,” he said. “Her insights are always worthwhile, and sometimes quite unexpected.”
“She sends regrets,” I said. “Painful regrets. Her dissertation defense is next week, and she’s frantically preparing.”
He nodded. “I have read this dissertation. Twice, in fact. A remarkable piece of work, I think. Do you agree?”
“I’ve never read anything like it,” I said truthfully; then—before he had a chance to drag me into Fourier analysis or other mathematical waters that were over my head—I changed the subject. “If you don’t mind my asking, how are your hands?”
My question contained equal measures of curiosity, concern, and amazement. A few years before, Eddie’s hands had been terribly burned by radiation. A physicist in Oak Ridge—“the Atomic City”—had been murdered by a radioactive pellet: a powerful imaging source hidden inside a vitamin capsule. Eddie, not realizing what he was handling, had removed the pellet from the dead man’s intestine, and as he held it in his hands—for no more than sixty seconds—the radiation had inflicted irreversible damage. He had tried bionic prosthetics—a pair of i-limb hands, which looked straight out of Star Wars—but the lack of tactile feedback had made them only marginally useful for a physician whose work required deftness with scalpels, forceps, and microscope slides. So w
hen he was offered the chance for a dual hand transplant at Emory University, Eddie had accepted without hesitating, despite the risk that sepsis might set in, or his body’s immune system might reject the new hands completely, or the nerves might not regenerate fully. So my deceptive question carried a lot of weight, and a lot of worry.
By way of an answer, Eddie stretched out both hands, his gloved fingers extended and spread wide. Next he clenched and unclenched both hands slowly, then touched each of his fingertips to his thumbs, one by one. Finally he extended his right hand toward me—toward my own hand—offering to shake. I took his hand in mine, and when he gripped, my eyes widened, first in admiration, then in something approaching pain. “Uncle,” I said, only half joking, and when he released my hand, his smile matched my own. “Eddie, that’s amazing. I’m thrilled the transplants have worked so well.”
“I thought my career was over,” he said. “I don’t often use the word ‘miracle,’ but I can’t think of a more accurate term for this. It has given me back my work. My life. My wholeness.” And with that, we hitched up our paper masks. And we began.
We started by simply looking once Eddie had cut away the clothing. Jimmy Ray Shiflett was a tall, sinewy guy, measuring six feet, two inches, weighing one hundred eighty-three pounds, clothed. He wasn’t beefy, in the way of weight lifters and bodybuilders, but he was muscled in a lean, ropy way—a cowboy way—and I suspected that his military service and militia training had instilled in him a regimen of regular workouts. Hard to fight the battle of Armageddon, I supposed—or the New Civil War, or whatever war might present itself—if you’re fat and out of shape.
