“Of course.”
“We can leave in . . .” I paused and shot a questioning glance at Miranda. She’d seemed to be absorbed in checking her e-mail, but by the speed with which she met my gaze, I knew she’d been listening closely. I tapped my watch and raised my eyebrows to underscore the unspoken query. By way of an answer, she held up both hands, fingers spread wide. “Ten minutes,” I told O’Conner. “We can leave in ten minutes. Where are you? How do we find you?”
“I’ll have Waylon meet you at the Jonesport courthouse in an hour.”
“Tell him no detours this time,” I said. “The last time Waylon drove me around Cooke County, we ended up at a cockfight. Next thing I knew, my mouth was full of chewing tobacco and I was throwing up in a barrel full of dead roosters.”
O’Conner chuckled. “No detours, I promise. But, hey, you got a good story out of that. People up here still talk about it.”
“Great,” I said. “A humiliating day that will live in infamy.”
He went on, clearly relishing the tale. “If everybody who claims to’ve seen you barfing at that cockfight is telling the truth, every man, woman, and child in Cooke County was at the Del Rio cockfights that day.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “Those bleachers were packed. And that concession stand was selling chicken tenders by the truckload.”
“Lord help,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder what people are doing with their time and money, now that we’ve shut down the cock pits. Then, unfortunately, I find out what they’re doing, and I have to arrest ’em for that, instead. It’s a shell game, Doc—you close an illegal door, folks’ll crawl through a forbidden window.”
“Blame it on the kudzu, Sheriff. We’ll see you soon.” With that, I rang off, then buzzed Peggy to tell her that Miranda and I were headed to Cooke County to work a case.
This would be our seventeenth forensic case of 2016; that meant that the victim, whoever he or she might be, would be recorded and referred to—even if we managed to identify him or her—as case 16–17, the first number referring to the year, the second to the order in which the case had arrived. Now serving number 17, I thought, visions of the Department of Motor Vehicles dancing in my head.
As we headed to the Anthropology Department’s pickup truck, the back loaded with body bags, shovels, rakes, cameras, and anything else we might need to work a death scene, I felt a surge of energy—excitement, even—and for the moment, at least, I forgot to be morose about the prospect of Miranda’s graduation and departure.
CHAPTER 3
LEAVING THE STADIUM, MIRANDA AND I TURNED ONTO Neyland Drive and paralleled the emerald-green Tennessee River for a mile, then took the eastbound ramp for Interstate 40. Now that we had a forensic case I felt downright cheerful, even though the case was situated in a rough-justice jurisdiction where many an outsider had come to grief.
Cooke County was the best of counties and the worst of counties. By nature, it was a paradise: mountainsides blanketed with pines, tulip poplars, hemlocks, and rhododendron; deep valleys carved by the French Broad, Pigeon, and Nolichucky Rivers; tumbling mountain streams, brimming with trout. But by other measures—socioeconomically, ecologically, and legally—it was far from the Garden of Eden. Unemployment was high, income was low, gunshots were considered background noise, trash dumping was regarded as a constitutional right (revered only slightly less than the Second Amendment, judging by considerable roadside evidence), and crime had long been a chief source of revenue, both for Cooke County residents and for elected officials.
A COUNTY OF BAD OL’ BOYS read the headline of a Los Angeles Times story about Cooke County a few years ago. The subhead gave more specifics: BOOTLEGGING, BROTHELS, AND CHOP SHOPS. GUILTY SHERIFFS AND FEDERAL INVESTIGATIONS.