“Old one burned down back in the twenties,” he said. “Fellow was in jail, his kinfolks was trying to get him out. There was a shootout, then a fire. Reckon they didn’t want that kind of thing happening again.”
“Fellow get away?”
“No sir, he didn’t. First he caught a bullet, then he burned up. Thing is, he shouldna oughta been in jail in the first place. It was a goddamn frame-up from the get-go.”
“You take a strong interest in local history,” I said.
“That piece of it, anyhow. Fellow was my granddaddy.” He pointed. “Park here.”
As I eased the vehicle into a diagonal slot in front of the courthouse, I sensed a presence beside me. I glanced out my open window and saw a khaki-clad belly hanging over a pair of olive-drab trousers; a .38 dangled from a gun belt. Then a face leaned in at the window. “Williams, what in holy hell is going on here?”
I thought it best to speak right up. “Sheriff Kitchings? This is one smart deputy you’ve got.”
Both men stared at me in astonishment. I plowed ahead, full speed. “I got sick as a dog on the way up here. I was on the verge of passing out when your deputy remembered an article he’d read about motion sickness. Asked me if I’d be willing to try driving a spell, see if that helped.” Kitchings looked from me to Williams and back again. “Fixed me right up. Lucky thing, too—if it hadn’t, I’d’ve had to lay under that tree over there for a week till my head quit spinning.”
I could see a question forming in the sheriff’s mind—something about his deputy’s medical library, I suspected—so I shifted gears before the discussion could take a bibliographic turn. “Sheriff, I don’t remember having you in any of my anthropology classes at UT,” I said. “Should I?”
He blushed and shook his head, suddenly a student being quizzed by a professor again. “Uh, no, sir, I never got around to taking anthropology. I did come to your class once, though. The time you showed slides of that fireworks explosion.”
An illegal fireworks factory in southeastern Tennessee had gone up with a bang one day, hurling thirteen people—in half a hundred pieces—through the roof of the barn where they were mixing gunpowder with pigments. It was a gruesome accident, but it was also a fascinating forensic case study, a homespun mass disaster. Before showing slides of the carnage to my classes, I always warned students a week in advance that the pictures were horrific, and I gave them the option of skipping class—that one class out of the whole semester—without penalty. Invariably, the day of the slide show, the lecture hall was jammed—
standing room only, including dozens of students who weren’t even taking the class. The first time it happened, I was surprised; after that, I knew to expect it. If I were smarter, I’d have charged admission every year, then retired early and rich.
“That was an interesting case,” I said. “I think we finally got everybody put back together right, but when we first stacked up all those arms and legs, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to.”
Williams was safe now, I guessed, so I cut the small talk. “What can I do for you, Sheriff? Your deputy here said it was mighty important, but he didn’t say what it was.”
“There’s a body I need you to look at.”
“I kinda figured that. Is it in the morgue?”
“Morgue?” He snorted. “Doc, the closest thing we got to a morgue up here’s the walk-in beer cooler at the Git-’N’-Go.” He and Williams shared a laugh at the image of a body laid out atop cases of Bud Light. “The body’s still where we found it at yesterday.”
The look of alarm on my face made him smile. “Don’t you worry—another twenty-four hours in that place ain’t gonna hurt it none.” He winked across me at Williams, and Williams laughed again, this time not so much at what Kitchings had said as at what he hadn’t said. Williams laughed with the relief of a child who’d come home from school expecting a whipping and gotten a cookie instead. At that, I smiled, too.
CHAPTER 3
“OKAY, BOYS, SADDLE UP and move out.” Kitchings swung a leg over his mount, and Williams and I did the same. I hit the ATV’s starter button and the Honda engine purred to life. They’d offered me a choice: double up with Williams or ride solo. I’d ridden with Williams once today, and I hadn’t much liked it, so I opted for a machine of my own.