O’Conner looked at me and shrugged, all innocence. “Hey, aren’t you the one that keeps saying, ‘Don’t tell me anything’?”
I looked to Miranda and Waylon to chime in on my behalf, but Miranda arched a single, serves-you-right eyebrow at me, and Waylon was carefully studying his grubby fingernails.
“I see how it’s gonna be with this crew,” I said, feigning martyrdom. “Okay. Fine. Let’s go.”
The hillside steepened for ten feet or so, then plateaued into a flat, level area—possibly a natural landform, but more likely an area that had been shaped to accommodate a cabin or farmhouse a century ago. On the nearer side of the shelf, some twenty feet ahead of us, was a large tulip poplar—easily two feet in diameter, and a good eighty feet tall. All around us, other tulip poplars were just beginning to turn from green to gold—the gold that gave the Great Smoky Mountains their characteristic autumnal incandescence—but this one was completely bare: It was dead, but clearly it hadn’t been dead for long, as its branches had not yet begun to rot and break.
Something near the bottom of the trunk caught my eye, and I moved closer to inspect it. It was a horizontal line, roughly the height of my waist—a line that had been etched into the trunk, an inch deep and apparently all the way around. Walking closer, I saw that what had etched the line—girdling the bark, and therefore killing the tree—was a heavy chain, its links made of steel as thick as my pinkie finger. Puzzled, I turned back and gave O’Conner a questioning look. His only response was a grim nod of his head.
Showtime, I thought, opening the case of the 35-millimeter camera that was hanging from my neck. With the zoom lens at its widest setting, I began shooting photos of the area, taking in not just the dead tulip poplar but the entire shelf. Once I was sure I had documented the overall scene, I began moving closer, ever mindful of the advice of one of my earliest law enforcement mentors, a legendary agent at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. “Photographing a crime scene is like robbing a bank, Bill,” he told me a dozen times or more. “First you shoot your way in, and then you shoot your way out.” His advice had served me well throughout my career.
By the time I was arm’s length from the tree, I could see the welds in each link of the chain. I could also see the smoothness of the groove worn deep into the wood: a groove worn, it would seem, by sustained movement of the chain, rotating around the trunk again and again and again, the links sliding and gouging with each revolution. How many revolutions? Hundreds, surely, to cause such wear; maybe even thousands.
When I stepped to the side, I felt a visceral shock that was like a punch in the gut. First, my peripheral vision took in the heavy padlock beside me, securing the chain around the trunk. But it took only an instant for my eyes to follow the chain outward from the tree—ten feet, twenty, twenty-five. Thirty feet out, the chain ended in another loop of padlocked links.
This loop was much smaller in diameter: perhaps five inches, no more than six—about the size of the circle I could make by touching the tips of my index fingers and my thumbs. It lay a few inches from a handful of cervical vertebrae, directly beneath the skull’s location. Except that there was no skull; only a scattering of other bones, many of them splintered and incomplete.
Behind me, I heard Miranda gasp. “Sweet Jesus on the cross,” she murmured. It was her strongest profanity, a phrase I’d heard her use only a handful of times in all the years we’d worked together. “Chained to a tree to die.”
“Can you imagine dyin’ thataway?” rumbled Waylon. It was a question no one bothered to answer; a question no one needed to answer.
I turned toward Miranda, Waylon, and the sheriff, and as I turned, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: a shallow trough in the ground, curving away from the bones in either direction; curving, in fact, in a wide circle around the tree, a uniform thirty feet from the trunk. It was a path, I realized with a new jolt: a path worn around the tree, etched in the earth, by the victim’s footsteps—thousands of footsteps, maybe millions—on a long journey to nowhere. No, I realized, not to nowhere. To death.
A circuitous, ironclad journey to death.