At the fork in the road, I bore right, then stopped at the locked gate that blocked the road to the tumbledown ruins of Wasp. Here the fresh leaf fall was so heavy that leaves swirled around my boots as I shuffled through them. When I reached the tree to which the victim had been chained, I stopped and ran my fingers through the groove in the bark, horrified all over again by the young man’s cruel captivity, his ceaseless circling, and his eventual violent death.
I was probably on a fool’s errand, I realized: anything we hadn’t seen and collected the day we worked the scene with O’Conner and Waylon would be completely hidden now. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I’d have brought a leaf blower, and as I pictured myself wielding it, I couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of the image: an egghead professor blowing leaves in a half-million acres of forest. “For my encore, folks,” I announced to the watching trees, “I’ll collect every grain of sand off Miami Beach.”
As if in response to my words, the wind kicked up, dislodging still more leaves from the other trees in the area. “Thank you,” I said as leaves floated down. “Thank you so much. Very helpful!”
Almost as if in response, the breeze eddied and swirled, creating small cyclones of golden leaves around the base of the dead tulip poplar. I looked down, delighted, as the leaves spun upward from my feet.
And that’s when I saw it—a brief flash of light, coming from a crevice in the tree’s craggy roots. One brief glint of something small and shiny. Metallic and foreign. Anomalous and therefore interesting. I tried reaching in with my index finger and thumb to extricate the object, but the gap in the roots was too narrow to accommodate both my fingers. Forceps: forceps would fit, but I had driven my own truck to the mountains this time, not the Anthropology Department’s truck, with its cargo bed full of tools and implements. Scanning the ground nearby, I found a promising-looking twig, about the diameter of a pencil. Man the Toolmaker, I thought. Angling the twig downward between the roots, I worked one end beneath the small, silvery object and gave the twig a small, deft flick. Trouble was, the flick was neither as small nor as deft as I’d intended. The silvery object catapulted upward, tumbling end over glinting end, and then disappeared beneath the layer of leaves, as if burrowing for safety.
“Crap,” I muttered. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.” I studied the spot where I thought it had gone under, doing my best to pinpoint the location before I moved. Then, still eyeing the spot, I crawled to it on all fours and stuck the twig into the ground as a reference point: a central point from which to begin searching, spiraling my way outward inch by inch, leaf by leaf. Amazing, I soon realized, how very many leaves there are on the floor of a national forest in late October. Equally amazing was how difficult it was to find a small metallic object nestled within those leaves.
Half an hour later—a mountainous pile of leaves later—I glimpsed it again, this time dropping from a handful of leaves I was sifting, as if it were making another bid for freedom. “Ha! Gotcha,” I exclaimed, laying aside the leaves and bending down to examine my prize.
It was a cylindrical fitting of some sort, roughly the diameter of the end of my pinkie finger and less than half an inch long. The widest part was a sort of collar at one end, with flat facets on its rim that appeared designed to be gripped, by a small wrench or pliers. The collar was attached to the body of the cylinder in a way that allowed it to rotate, to spin freely without coming off. The collar’s inner surface was threaded, to allow the fitting—a female coupling—to be screwed onto a male coupling. I stared at it, recognizing yet not quite recognizing the shape. It was a familiar object, a doodad I’d seen many times, but something was missing, some crucial piece of context I needed to identify it.
As I turned it over and over in my palm, gradually I ceased to look at the object and began instead to feel it, and I realized that I knew it not just by sight but by touch: My fingertips recognized the object. It was something I’d not only seen but had used; had connected and disconnected many times, twisting the collar to loosen or tighten the coupling, to connect or disconnect a video cable. The cable was the missing piece of context—the cable that must have connected to the back of a television set or a modem or a DVD player. “Or a video camera,” I murmured, feeling a rising sense of horror as the implications sank in. It’s all on video, I thought. Somewhere out there—somewhere near here—some sick bastard has the whole thing on video.
I hoped that we could find it.
And I prayed that we couldn’t.
PART TWO
The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
CHAPTER 18
South Central Correctional Facility
Clifton, Tennessee