I took him to the fork in the trails and started up the path I’d taken. “Wait,” he said. “Let’s not disturb the area. Just show me.” I pointed to the cluster of hemlocks where I’d seen the muzzle flash, and I described the various points on the footbridge and the opposite embankment where I thought the bullets had hit.
Then I got into my truck and headed back to Knoxville. By the time I turned in to my driveway and saw the garage door rising to receive me, I felt as if I were swimming underwater. I staggered through the living room and headed for the bedroom, but the blinking message light on the phone caught my eye. I debated briefly, then sighed and checked the voice mail. I had five new messages. Two of them had been left by Steve Morgan and were long since irrelevant; the first one, which he’d left at midafternoon Friday, sounded casual and friendly, while the second one, which he’d left Friday evening—probably around the time I was wading across the West Prong for the first time—sounded official and ominous: “This is Steve Morgan with the TBI again. I need you to contact me immediately. This is an urgent, official matter. It’s very serious, and it’s important that you call me right away.”
Sandwiched between Morgan’s two calls was an end-of-the-day call from Peggy, reminding me of my Monday-morning appeal to the dean for more land. The fourth message of the five was from Carmen Garcia. The surgery to reverse the pedicle graft had gone very well, she said. Her voice sounded teary, though, not at all like the voice of someone calling with good news. I was puzzled by that, but only for a moment, until Carmen dropped the other shoe. “The possible donor you found—that heart patient at UT—his tissue does not match. Dr. Alvarez said Eddie would almost certainly reject those hands. So we are coming home again to wait. But we thank you so much for trying, Bill.” Her voice broke as she said it, and her sadness, together with my exhaustion, brought me crashing down. I hung up the phone without even listening to the last message and turned off the ringer.
Shucking off my ragged, filthy clothes, I crawled straight into bed. By the time I’d tucked a pillow beneath my knees and arranged two more under my head, my eyes were rolling backward. I thought I heard the beginnings of a snore, but before I could listen for a second one, I was tunneling deep into sleep.
When I awoke, the house was dark and the digital clock on the nightstand read 4:17. I’d slept for eighteen hours. I took a long bath, in water that was seventy or eighty degrees hotter than the water I’d been in the previous night. My frostnipped fingertips still felt numb and still looked artificially white—like chicken that’s been blanched in boiling water—and my left ribs felt bruised from my tumble into the stream, but the rest of me felt surprisingly rested and restored.
When I got out, I turned on the phones and checked for messages. I now had three. The first one—the message I’d ignored before tumbling into bed—wasn’t actually a message but a hang-up: a long silence followed by a dial tone. The call had been made shortly after midnight, from a restricted number, according to the caller ID log, but I suspected it had been dialed by Sinclair, checking to see if I’d managed to make it out of the mountains and make it home: checking to see if I was a sitting duck. Luckily, I’d been crawling and shivering in the mountains rather than sleeping in my bed when he’d called.
The second call came from Eric, the graduate student in biomedical engineering who operated the mobile CT scanner. “I got your message, and I scanned that batch of femurs you were in such a hurry for,” he said. “They’re on the table behind the scanner. Did you want to pick them up over the weekend or just let Miranda get them for you Monday?” My first thought was,Miranda won’t be getting anything for me Monday. Miranda’s gone. My second thought was,Huh? What message, and what batch of femurs, and what hurry? I was on the verge of ending the voice-mail call so I could phone Eric and ask what he meant when the third and final message began to play.
This last message was from Culpepper, and the KPD detective’s urgent tone stopped my finger just as I was reaching to disconnect. “Art got a match on the thumbprint from the bloody hammer,” Culpepper had practically shouted into the phone. “It matches one entered into the FBI’s database just yesterday. Somebody in New Jersey indicted for conspiracy. A guy named Raymond Sinclair.”
CHAPTER 43
ROOSTER RANKIN WAS ASLEEP WHEN I PHONED HIM—it was not yet daylight, and it was Sunday morning, I realized—but he snapped to alertness when I relayed Culpepper’s news to him.
“Damn,” he said. “Our man Sinclair’s starting to look like Public Enemy Number One. At this rate he’ll be behind bars until the Second Coming.”
“Unless he’s already skipped the country,” I said. “Have y’all found him yet?”
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But we will. And this time we’ll make sure he’s held without bail. Meanwhile, sit tight and rest up. Don’t open the door, and stay away from the windows.”