We lapsed back into silence, and in the silence, I heard Kittredge’s words echoing: “The worst I’ve seen.” Would it turn out to be worse than the things I’d seen? If so, what adjective could describe it? When the normal progression—bad, worse, worst—couldn’t do justice to the horror, what could? Worst, more worst, most worst?
Even with Kittredge’s directions, I found the route mazy. This time, because of the location of the bodies, we’d be approaching the woods from the east. I’d highlighted the route in my Tennessee Atlas & Gazetteer. Given the propensity for bodies in East Tennessee to wind up off the beaten track, I’d found the Gazetteer indispensable, since it showed not just paved roads and dirt roads, but even major trails and topographic contour lines. During the three years since my arrival at UT, I had put two dozen red Xs in my Gazetteer, each X neatly marking a death scene I’d worked.
I followed the route Kittredge had dictated—Moshina Road, Pine Grove Road, and finally Ratliff Lane. By the time we turned on to Ratliff, Tyler was slumped against his door, his head askew, his mouth open, a string of drool swaying from his chin. I smiled, thinking, Roxanne drove all the way from Memphis for this?
Ratliff Lane started out as asphalt, soon turned to gravel, and finally became a pair of red-clay ruts. It dead-ended at a clearing that was occupied by a rusting mobile home and a rusty Ford pickup, plus two Knox County sheriff’s cruisers, a KPD mobile crime lab, an unmarked Crown Victoria, and a black Chevy Suburban. The Crown Vic, I guessed, was issued to Detective Kittredge. The crime-lab van, I hoped, was brought by Art Bohanan. Art was a senior KPD forensic tech; he was also one of the nation’s leading experts on fingerprints, I’d learned in the course of several prior cases with him. The Suburban, I knew for sure, belonged to Knox County’s medical examiner, Dr. Garland Hamilton. Hamilton’s vehicle was unmistakable, at least from the rear: Prominently positioned alongside the government-issue tag was an ironically apt bumper sticker—a skull wearing a crown of thorns, captioned GRATEFUL DEAD.
A sheriff’s deputy directed me past the other vehicles to the lower side of the clearing, where I shoehorned the truck into a space that would have been better suited to a Honda Civic. Branches snapped and screeched along the passenger side as I bulled my way into the underbrush, waking Tyler with a start. He stared at the fractured twigs clawing across his window, then rubbed his eyes and shook his head, causing the string of drool to twitch and sway beneath his chin. “Wow,” he said. “I guess I nodded off for a minute there.”
“I guess so,” I replied. “Unless you’ve started drooling when you’re awake.”
He rubbed his mouth and chin, grimacing when he got to the drool. “What the hell?” he squawked. “This isn’t supposed to start happening till I’m, like, your age.”
“I guess you’re precocious,” I said. “You know what they say about drooling, right?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Once the drooling starts, impotence and incontinence aren’t far behind.”
“Hey. Don’t even joke about that stuff,” he muttered, making the sign of the cross.
“Joking? Who said I was joking?” I slid from the truck and closed the door before he had a chance to retort.
I opened the back of the truck and tucked the two body bags into the plastic bin that contained our field kit—camera, gloves, trowels, tweezers, paintbrushes, evidence bags, clipboard. Tyler emerged from the underbrush, bits of twigs and leaves in his hair, and I slid the bin across the tailgate to him. Leaning back in, I retrieved a rake and a shovel, which I angled over my shoulder like some outsized, double-barreled farming implement. Swords to plowshares, I thought, shotguns to shovels.
The deputy met us midway across the clearing. “They’re up yonder,” he said, nodding in the general direction of the unmarked Crown Vic that was last in the line of vehicles. “Couple hunnerd yards in. Just follow the blazes of tape.” A pine tree at the clearing’s edge had a strip of crime-scene tape tied around its trunk at shoulder height. Peering farther into the woods, I could see another bright band twenty yards beyond, and a third farther still.
I headed up the gentle incline, my usual surge of adrenaline accompanied by an unexpected topspin of something else—apprehension? dread? Sometimes, walking into a crime scene with a shovel over my shoulder, I would hear myself singing softly: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.”
This time, as I followed the blazes deeper into the woods, I did not hear singing. This time, I heard crackling under my feet, thudding in my chest, and alarm bells in my head.
CHAPTER 31
Satterfield