“Sheriff Cotterell, please.”
“I’m sorry, sir, Sheriff Cotterell is away right now. I can probably track him down on the radio, if it’s urgent.”
I felt a twinge of disappointment. “No, it’s not urgent. Could you give him a message, please?”
“I don’t care to,” she said, and even though I’d lived in Tennessee for three years now, it still took me a moment to translate her spoken words—which sounded like a refusal—into her actual meaning: I don’t mind.
“I’d appreciate that. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, at the University of Tennessee.”
“Yes, sir, Dr. Brockton, how are you? This is Mae. We met when you was up here awhile back, working that Donnelly woman’s murder. I hear you’re back with us on another’n now. That girl’s bones, found up on Frozen Head. I seen her pitcher on the TV news th’other night.”
“I hope a lot of other people up that way saw it, too,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons I was calling Sheriff Cotterell—to see if he’s gotten any leads since”—I caught myself just before parroting the words “her pitcher”—“since the sketch came out.”
“No, sir, I’m sorry to say we haven’t. Not a peep. But us’n the TBI’s takin’ copies all over ever’where—churches, grocery stores, gas stations, Health Department, you name it. I made a prayer request at church last Sunday, too, that the Lord’ll lay it on somebody’s heart to come forward and tell us who she is and what happened to her.”
“Well,” I said, “between the sheriff’s office, the TBI, and the Lord, sounds like y’all have all the jurisdictions covered.” I waited for a laugh, but I didn’t get one. “Other reason I was calling was to see if Sheriff Cotterell needed something from me on the Donnelly woman’s murder.”
“Denise Donnelly? What kind of follow-up? Sonofagun husband that killed her don’t come up for parole for another eight years. He ain’t filed any kind of appeal, far as I know, and I’d prob’ly know, since he’s my cousin.” A pause, then: “How come you to ask?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” I said. “I got one of the Donnelly crime-scene photos in the mail the other day. No letter or anything with it—just the picture.” As I spoke, I walked to the bookcase where I’d tucked the envelope a few days before, after snatching it from Peggy’s trembling hands.
“You say the sheriff sent it to you?”
“Well, I think so,” I said. “First I thought Bubba Hardknot sent it—Agent Meffert?—but Bubba says he didn’t. So then I figured it had to’ve come from the sheriff. Figured maybe y’all were cleaning out your files.”
“I’ll ask him about it when he gets in,” she said. “But I’d be real surprised if he sent you that pitcher. He ain’t mentioned that case to me in a year or more. And he sure ain’t give me nothing like that to mail.”
“You reckon he might’ve mailed it himself?”
“Who? The sheriff? Well, they do say there’s a first time for ever’thing.” Now she laughed. It was a hearty, good-natured laugh, but as I slid the crime-scene photo from its envelope, the laugh seemed to turn mocking and sinister, and then it seemed to turn to shrieks: first, the echoes of my secretary’s frightened scream; then the warning sirens in my own head; finally, the cries of the dead woman whose image I held in my hands.
A dead woman who was not Denise Donnelly. A dead woman whose crime scene had not yet been worked, because her body had not yet been found.
As I stared at the photo, I finally noticed things I’d overlooked the day I’d snatched it from Peggy and shoved it back in the envelope. I noticed that the trees were tinged with gold and orange and red—September trees, not December trees. Right now trees, I thought. I noticed that although the woman’s feet were missing, her body showed no signs of decomposition, and her blood was fresh and bright. Last but not least—far, far from least—I noticed that the photo had a small time stamp in the lower right corner. Unless the camera’s internal clock was wrong, the photo had been taken—and the woman’s life had been taken—just three days before my new secretary reported for work and opened the envelope.
“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?” The voice of the dispatcher seemed to come from far away, and I stared at the telephone receiver dumbly, seemingly baffled to find it in my hand.
“Please ask the sheriff to call me when he gets in,” I said, then hung up and called the TBI, leaving a similar message for Meffert. All I’d be able to tell them was that somewhere out there—somewhere in the millions of acres of Tennessee woods—another woman lay dead and decomposing. And that somewhere out there, a killer might already be stalking his next victim—a victim whose body would end up bearing an uncanny and inexplicable resemblance to one of my prior cases.
CHAPTER 22