“Yes. Four and a half months, best I can tell from the fetal skeleton.”
The sheriff remained thunderstruck. His brother spoke up. “Hell, there’s your motive right there, gents. G.I. Jim comes home, finds out his sweetie’s been takin’ her love to town—got knocked up in the process—and he goes apeshit. Might have a hard time making murder one stick, but I guaran-damn-tee you we got enough right now to make a strong case for murder two.”
“I don’t think he did it,” I said.
The sheriff hauled himself upright from the filing cabinet, then leaned toward me, both palms flat on his desk. “Nothin’ personal, Doc, but I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think. You may be a fine bone detective, but you’re an outsider here. You don’t know the first thing about Cooke County or Jim O’Conner and what he might or might not be capable of. I’ll be gettin’ a warrant for his arrest. I’ll be gettin’ a subpoena for those bones. And I’ll be takin’ it real personal if I catch you messin’ around in this case any further.”
I decided this might be a good time to make our exit. I looked at Art, and he seemed to agree, as he cocked his head toward the door. “Sheriff,” I said, backing out of the office, “I’ll be on the lookout for that subpoena. Orbin, good to meet you. Y’all have a nice day.”
“Remember,” said Art, “we’ll have one eye on the rearview mirror and one hand on the radio.”
As we dashed out the front door of the courthouse, Art said, “Go get the truck and swing around back and pick me up.” I started to ask him why, but he cut me off. “Just do it. I’ll tell you later.”
The tires squealed as I backed out of my parking space. They squealed again when I slammed the gearshift into forward, and again when I slung the truck around the corner to the rear parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the two old-timers had ceased whittling and were staring at me, slack-jawed and mostly toothless.
As I pulled into the lot, I saw Art at the door of the helicopter. As I skidded to a stop beside him, he pocketed a small bottle, then leapt into the truck. “What were you doing?”
“Oh, nothing,” he said. “Just buying us a little time.” He pulled the bottle back out of his pocket, and I recognized its shape: superglue.
“You superglued their door locks?” He grinned proudly. “The cars? The helicopter?” He nodded happily. “They are gonna be furious.”
“More furious than when they tried to shoot us?” He had a point there. Despite Art’s stratagem, I wasted no time getting out of town. Careening along the river road, I glanced in the mirror as often as I could without running off the embankment or making myself carsick. “Better get that radio out, just in case,” I told Art.
“What radio?”
“The radio you’re going to call for help on.” I looked at him; he shook his head and held out his empty hands, palms up. “So what was that big line you were feeding them about radioing the FBI and the TBI if they came after us?”
“That, my friend, is called a bluff. A successful bluff, to be precise.” I was not nearly as pleased with Art’s gamesmanship as he was. “Hey, what was I supposed to say—‘Oh, please don’t come after us, because if you do, we’re screwed’? I’m glad you weren’t doing the talking at that moment.” Chalk up another point for Art.
We rode in nervous silence awhile, until we turned onto I-40 and the mileposts began flashing past at a hundred miles an hour. For once in my life, I was hoping I’d get pulled over by a state trooper. “Art, I’m in unknown territory here,” I said. “I’ve never had a case where I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
He nodded. “I remember the first time that happened to me. I was still pretty new in homicide when this cocaine dealer gets shot in the projects in East Knoxville. Shot by a rival dealer, the vice cops tell me. But little things about it start to bother me. No other dealer moves in on the territory. The missing coke—supposedly some hot new stuff—never hits the streets in Knoxville. Instead, pretty soon it starts showing up in Memphis. Turns out one of the vice cops ambushed him, sold the cocaine to a dealer he knew in Memphis. Scary when you realize you can’t always trust the guys on your own team.”
Scary indeed. “So what should I do?”
“Depends. What do you want to happen?”
“I want to find out who killed that girl. I want to do right by her, if it’s possible.”
He nodded. “Wouldn’t have expected anything less. So just do what you always do: speak for the victim, tell the truth, and use your brain. Oh, yeah—watch your back from now on, too.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got for me, Supercop?”
“Hey, it’s all I’ve got for me, too. Seems to be working okay. So far.”