The stuck clock seemed right at home atop the Morgan County Courthouse, a square, two-story brick structure built back in 1904, back when Wartburg still hoped for a prosperous future. The building’s boxy lines were broken by four pyramid-topped towers—one at each corner—and by a graceful white belfry and cupola rising from the building’s center. Each side of the cupola—north, south, east, and west—proudly displayed a six-foot dial where time stood still. I suspected that it wasn’t just eternally 9:05 in Wartburg; I suspected that it was also, in many respects, still 1904 here. Sheriff James Cotterell, who stood leaning against the fender of the Ford Bronco parked behind the courthouse, would certainly have looked at home perched on a buckboard wagon, or marching in a Civil War regiment. Special Agent Meffert, on the other hand—one foot propped on the bumper—was a different matter. I could picture Meffert wearing a Civil War uniform, too, I realized, but Bubba’s eyes somehow had a 1992 knowingness to them; a look that—Civil War uniform notwithstanding—would have branded Bubba as a modern-day reenactor, not a true time traveler.
I made the briefest and most perfunctory of introductions: “Sheriff Cotterell, Agent Meffert, this is my assistant, Tyler Wainwright”—and then Tyler and I followed the lawmen out of town and up a winding mountain highway, parking on the shoulder at a narrow turnoff. There, we transferred our field kit into the back of the sheriff’s Bronco, a four-wheel-drive vehicle with enough ground clearance to pass unimpeded over a knee-high tree stump. The road to the strip mine was far too rough for my UT truck, Cotterell had assured me, and Meffert had agreed. Once we turned off the winding blacktop and into the pair of ruts leading up to the mine, I realized how right they’d been: I saw it with my jouncing eyes, and felt it in my rattling bones.
Cotterell and Meffert rode up front; Tyler and I sat in the back like prisoners, behind a wire-mesh screen, as the Bronco lurched up the mountain. “Last time I had a ride this rough,” Tyler shouted over the whine of the transmission and the screech of clawing branches, “I was on the mechanical bull at Desperado’s, three sheets to the wind. I hung on for twenty seconds, then went flying, ass over teakettle. Puked in midair—a comet with a tail of vomit.”
“If you need to puke now, son,” Cotterell hollered back, “give me a heads-up. You ain’t got no window cranks nor door handles back there.”
“I’m all right,” Tyler assured him. “Only had two beers for breakfast today.” He was probably joking, but given how morose he seemed over his girlfriend’s move to Memphis, he might have been telling the truth.
Eventually the Bronco bucked to a stop beside a high, ragged wall of stone, and the four of us staggered out of the vehicle. The shattered surface beneath our feet might have been the surface of the moon, if not for the kudzu vines and scrubby trees. “Watch your step there, Doc,” Cotterell warned over his shoulder as he and Meffert led us toward the looming wall. The warning was absurdly unnecessary—not because the footing was good, but because it was so spectacularly bad. The jagged shale debris left behind by the strip-mining ranged from brick-sized chunks to sofa-sized slabs.
“I’m glad y’all are leading the way,” I told the backs of the lumbering lawmen.
“Be hard to find on your own,” said the sheriff.
“True, but not what I meant,” I replied. “I figure if anybody’s going to get snakebit, it’ll be the guy walking in front. Or maybe the second guy, if the snake’s slow on the draw.”
“Maybe,” conceded Meffert. “Or maybe the two crazy fools sticking their hands down in the rocks, rooting for bones.”
“Dang, Bubba,” I said, wincing at the image he’d conjured. “That’ll teach me to be a smart-ass.”
“Man,” muttered Tyler after a hundred slow yards. “Every step here is a broken ankle waiting to happen.” The gear he was lugging—a big plastic bin containing two cameras, paper evidence bags, latex gloves, trowels and tweezers, clipboards and forms—couldn’t have made it easy to see his footing or keep his balance. The trees were too sparse and scrubby to serve as props or handholds; about all they were good for was to obscure the footing and impede progress.
“Bubba,” I huffed, “you came out with the guy that found the bones?”
“Yup,” Meffert puffed. The TBI agent appeared to be carrying an extra twenty pounds or so around his middle.
“He said he was hunting fossils,” I went on. “You believe him?”
“Seemed believable. Name’s Ro-chelle. Some kind of engineer at the bomb factory in Oak Ridge. Environmental engineer. Maybe that’s why he likes poking around old mines. Fossils plus acid runoff—a twofer for a guy like that, I guess. There’s damn good fossils right around the bones. You’ll see in just a minute.” He paused to take a deeper breath and reach into a hip pocket. “Yeah, I believe him,” he repeated, mopping his head and neck with a bandanna. “He came into the sheriff’s office and then brought us all the way back up here. No reason to do that, except to help, far as I can see. Hell, that shot his Sunday right there.”
“You never know,” I said. “Sometimes a killer will actually initiate contact with the police. Insert himself in the investigation.”
“Return to the scene,” grunted the sheriff.
“Sometimes more than that, even,” I said. “An FBI profiler I worked with a few years back told me about a California killer who spent a lot of time hanging out in a cop bar, making friends, talking about cases. Ed Kemper—‘Big Ed’—was the guy’s name. When Big Ed finally confessed to a string of murders and dismemberments, his cop buddies thought he was joking.”