“I don’t think so,” I said. “Jim O’Conner isn’t that kind of guy. Anyway, I’d best get in. Y’all don’t cut yourselves.” They nodded, bent low over their whittling again.
Jim O’Conner’s head was barely visible behind the immense pile of papers, files, and folders on his desk. I knocked on the door. He raised up, peering over the stack.
“Thank goodness,” he said. “This paperwork’s driving me nuts, and I was desperate for a break. Come on in.”
“Not quite how I imagined I’d find you,” I said. “Figured you’d be out chasing thieves and bootleggers and poachers and such things.”
“Well, the job is mostly administrative,” he said. “Got training logs to fill out, grant requests to write, grant reports to write, court cases to get ready for, hiring requisitions.”
“You’re hiring? Business booming?”
“Well,” he said, “we didn’t have many people to start with. I had to let some of them go, ’cause they were sort of in Orbin Kitchings’s vein,” he said. “Law enforcement for personal profit.”
I grimaced at the mention of the name. Orbin Kitchings had been the county’s chief deputy, and he’d used his badge and his authority to commit crimes with impunity. I’d never forget the interaction I witnessed between Orbin and a small-time marijuana farmer—the deputy had extorted money from the man and had cruelly shot the poor fellow’s dog.
“I’m not surprised you’re having trouble with that,” I said.
“It’s a small county, with a frontier mentality. The line between the good guys and the bad guys gets kind of fuzzy sometimes, especially when money’s involved.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean to be rude,” O’Conner said. “Here, let me clear a spot for you to sit down.” He stood up and came around the desk to remove another stack of papers and files from the one chair in the office. That’s when he saw the box. He looked from the box up to my face, just as I’d done when Steve Morgan brought it into my office at UT. I read the question in his eyes. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yeah,” I said. “TBI found this when they were searching a storage unit Garland Hamilton had rented.”
The sheriff sucked in a deep breath and blew it out, then started grabbing armfuls of folders and setting them in the corner.
After he’d cleared off one end of the desk, I set the box down and stepped back to give him space, physically and emotionally. He reached out, folded up the lid, and eyed the bones with a mixture of sorrow and tenderness that thirty years seemed to have done little to diminish. One by one, he picked up the bones and turned them over in his hands. A femur. A hip bone. A handful of ribs. His eyes got a faraway look in them.
“Funny thing,” he said. “She’s been gone so long. These bones aren’t her, but they were her. Part of her, anyhow. I couldn’t pick these out of a lineup. I mean, I can’t tell one skeleton from another. But because you say this is her, I know it’s true, and that brings the whole thing back. Does that sound strange?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’ve seen hundreds of people react this way. We humans seem to have a deep need for closure when somebody we love dies. That’s why when a child goes missing, the parent can never finish their grieving unless or until the body’s found. We want our stories to have endings, even if the endings break our hearts.”
He didn’t say anything, but he nodded, his eyes glistening. Then he noticed the paper bag nestled in one end of the box. He hesitated, but only briefly, then unrolled the top and peered inside. He looked up at me and said, “Do you mind?”
I picked up the bag and gently tipped its contents into his cupped hands: the tiny bones of a half-formed baby, which Leena had been carrying when she was killed. The biggest of the bones, the femur, was smaller than a chicken drumstick. “Damn it, Doc,” he said. “I don’t know who to hate more, her aunt for killing her or her uncle for getting her pregnant.”
“I’m not sure there’s a lesser of those two evils,” I said. “And it probably doesn’t change the equation that the uncle’s dead and the aunt’s in prison.”
“Not a bit.”
“You said a while back that if we ever recovered these bones, you’d like to bury them with the skull. You still feel that way?”
He nodded.
“What about the fetal bones—do you want to bury those with Leena’s bones?”
“Of course,” he said. “This was Leena’s baby.” He paused.
“Even if it was fathered by a hypocritical, abusive son of a bitch.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He drew another deep breath and then shook himself. He looked at the clock on the wall over his door. “I’m thinking maybe that now would be a good time to call it a day,” he said. “It’s after five, and I don’t think my heart’s in this paperwork anymore for today. You got to hurry right back to Knoxville?”
“I’m not in a big rush,” I said.
“Come on up to the farmhouse with me.”
“I was hoping you’d ask.”