Authors: Jefferson Bass
I will not tolerate fighting, Cockroach said. The next boys I catch fighting will be severely punished. Do you understand? Yes sir, we all said. Severely punished, he said again. Do you understand? Yes sir, we shouted.
That afternoon during work time, I went to sweep and empty the trash in the infirmary. There was four beds in the infirmary. Two of the beds had clean white sheets on them. One of them had been stripped, but there was blood at the head and in the middle, and brown and yellow stains in the middle, too. The nurse, Mrs. Wilcox, was sitting beside the fourth bed and she bent over Buck. He was lying on his stomach, with no cloths on, and she was using tweezers to pick at his bottom and his back and his legs. Bucks bottom was all black, with bits of bloody fuzz sticking up from it. I knew, from what Id heard about other whippings, that the bits of fuzz were bits of his shorts that had been shredded and pounded into his skin by the strap.
The strap was one of the first things I heard about when I came. It was like two long barbers strops sewn together, with a piece of metal between them to make it stiffer and heavier. One boy said they used to use a big wooden paddle for the beatings, but they switched to the strap because you can beat a boy longer and harder with a strap than what you can with a board.
Cockroach is the worst. I think its account of he lost his left hand. Theres different stories about how he lost it. Some say it got run over by a plow. Others say no, it was a sawmill blade what got it. Others say a gator ate it, but I dont believe that one. Whatever caused him to lose it, he aint never got over it, and hes been taking it out on boys ever since. Especially when hes swinging that strap. Punishing us for having two good hands, I reckon.
Bucks legs were black down to his knees, and so was his back, up nearly to his shoulders. His breath was fast and shallow, and whenever the tweezers touched him he would twitch and whimper, but real quiet, like he was too weak to do it loud. I said Buck, are you okay? It was a stupid thing to say, but it was all I could think of. You mind your own business, said Mrs. Wilcox. Hes going to be all right. Its what he gets for starting a fight. He never started it, I said. She looked up at me then with a sharp look. Not another word from you, she said, or itll be your hind end looking like this tomorrow. Get the trash and then come back and get that mattress. Its ruined. You need to haul it to the dump, too.
I dont think I can carry it by myself, I said.
She pointed out the window at Cockroach, who was smoking in the yard. You want me to call him back and tell him you didnt do like I asked?
I thought about what he might do if she told him that. No mam, I said, I can do it. You dont need to call him. Ill be back for it as soon as I empty the trash.
Wash out that can real good after you empty it, she said.
The trash can was full of wet, smelly rags. When I dumped it, they slithered out and plopped on the ground, and slimy reddish brown liquid dribbled out of the bottom of the can. I couldnt help it, I bent over and puked right on top of the whole mess.
There was a water hose behind the infirmary, so I rinsed out the trash can and washed out my mouth and took a drink. I noticed stuff from the trash can spattered on my shoes, so I rinsed those, too, while I let the trash can drain. Then I took it back inside and went to get the mattress.
Mrs. Wilcox wasnt in the room, so I leaned down real quick and whispered to Buck, can you hear me? His eyes opened and he whispered yes. How bad are you hurt? Real bad, he said. I cant walk. I dont know if I can ever walk again. I squeezed his hand. Im sorry Buck. Ill pray for you.
Hes dead, Skeeter, said Buck. Jareds dead. They wrapped him up in a sheet and dragged him out of here by the feet. His head was dragging like a sack of rocks. I heard them say they were taking him to the bone yard.
Mrs. Wilcox was coming, so I let go of Bucks hand and grabbed the mattress real quick. I dragged it across the floor and out the door. When the corner bumped down the steps, I thought about Jareds head bumping that same way.
I pushed away my plate of catfish, which had grown cold as I’d read. I’d eaten only a few bites, and I noticed that Stu and Angie hadn’t done any better with their dinners than I’d done with mine. “Jesus,” Angie commented as she laid down the pages. “Welcome to hell.”
Vickery took out a fresh cigar, which he unwrapped slowly. Instead of chomping it, he rotated it between his fingers, studying first one end and then the other, as if the cigar might provide some answer to the age-old question of evil. “Hell,” he said, “would be too good a place for the guys who did this.”
“W
ell, there’s good news and bad news,” Vickery said when he got out of his Jeep at the cemetery the next day.
Angie kept her eyes on the probe she was shoving into the ground at the foot of one of the pipe crosses. “What’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is, the governor doesn’t want us to disturb the graveyard.”
Now she looked up. “What the hell? I was hoping we could finish probing today, maybe get the forensic backhoe out here tomorrow. Why doesn’t he want us to dig it up?”
“He told the commissioner there’s no indication that anyone buried in these graves was the victim of a crime. Unless we find compelling evidence that links these graves to crimes, he says, it would be a desecration to disturb the cemetery.”
“Desecration? To find the truth? Give me a break.” She studied his face. “Do you think maybe he’s covering up something?”
“I doubt it.” He shrugged. “This looks like a bees’ nest, and I can see how the governor would rather we didn’t whack it with a stick and stir up the bees. If we start pulling bodies from the ground, lawyers are gonna be lining up to sue the state for millions. Besides, forensically, it’d be tough to identify the remains, wouldn’t it, Doc?”
“Probably,” I conceded. “Unless they’re in good coffins and watertight vaults, they’ll be down to bare bone. You might be able to get mitochondrial DNA out of the bones or teeth, but how much would that tell you? Mitochondrial DNA doesn’t give you a unique identification—it just tells you whether two individuals share a common female ancestor. Besides, who would you compare these boys’ DNA
to
?”
Angie looked inclined to argue with me, but Vickery didn’t give her the chance. “Look, the doc agrees that neither of the skulls came from here, so finding where the skulls
did
come from needs to be our top priority.”
“Well, I say let’s give the bees’ nest a good whack,” she said. “That seems like our job. I’m amazed it hasn’t gotten into the press yet. Disappointed, too.” She looked from the probe to the other crosses. “Maybe we’ll find something as we map it,” she said. “More graves than we’ve got markers. I don’t know. Hell, maybe a probe will snag on a murder weapon.”
Vickery shook his head. “The commissioner says to leave it alone. Says respect for the sanctity of a cemetery takes precedence. Photographs. That’s it, for the time being. We have to pull the plug, even on the probing.”
“Unbelievable,” she groaned.
“I’ve got people looking through the state archives and old newspaper stories,” he said. “I’m hoping Hatfield was wrong about all the records being lost in the fire. Maybe we’ll turn up something that lets us make a stronger case.” Angie shook her head angrily, and I wondered if some of that anger stemmed from her frustration about her sister, whose death had similarly fallen through the investigative cracks. “Don’t you want to hear the good news?” Angie looked skeptical. “Remember,” he said, “the cemetery’s not where the real action is.” He gave a canary-eating smile. “Our pal Deputy Sutton just phoned me. He got a call from Winston Pettis this morning. The dog’s brought home another bone.”
I felt my own face break into a smile. “Good boy, Jasper! Another skull?”
He shook his head. “Not this time. Sounds like a leg bone, maybe a femur. Long, with a big, round knob on one end.”
“Could be a femur,” I agreed, “but it could also be a humerus, an upper arm bone. And it might be animal. Horse, cow, deer. Maybe even panther or black bear; you have those down here, right?”
“A hundred years ago, yeah. Not in my lifetime.”
“You should spend more time in the crime lab,” Angie said. “I’ve had deputies bring me bear bones two or three times and swear they were human.”
“Actually, the bones of a bear’s paw look a lot like human foot bones,” I conceded.
“Yeah, well, I’ve also had deputies bring me goat bones and swear they were human.”
The idea that the bone might be animal seemed to take some of the wind out of Vickery’s sails, so I tried to steer the conversation back to a more encouraging course. “Well, Jasper seems to have a taste for humans,” I said, “and he appears to have found the mother lode.” A realization hit me. “Hey. If it
is
human, and if the GPS collar worked, then he’s just shown us where he found it, right?”
Vickery smiled around his cigar, his sails billowing. “Shall we go pay another visit to the Pettis mansion?”
A
s we pulled into the clearing beside the secluded cabin, Vickery leading the way in his Jeep, I imagined the scene that had transpired in the predawn hours: the dog leaping onto the mattress in the darkness, circling a couple times as if to trample down grass, and then curling up proudly beside his owner with a ripe femur. I smiled as I pictured it.
On our prior two visits, Jasper had bounded out to greet us; I was surprised that he wasn’t racing to see us this time. I was disappointed, too, I noticed. “I guess Jasper’s gotten bored with us,” I sighed.
Angie gave the horn two quick toots as she stopped the Suburban—a friendly way to announce our arrival—and we all got out and headed up the rickety steps to the front porch. Vickery rapped on the screen door. “Mr. Pettis?” he called out. “Hello?” He waited a few beats, then opened the screen and crossed the porch. Angie and I followed, and I detoured to inspect the shelf that held Jasper’s bone collection, hoping to see the latest addition. Again I was disappointed.
Knocking on the cabin’s only door, which led into the kitchen, Vickery called out again. “Mr. Pettis, are you here?” No answer. He knocked again, hard; the two large panes of glass in the top half of the door, which were held in place by only a few remnants of brittle putty, rattled and threatened to tumble to the porch. “Mr. Pettis?” Vickery put his face to the glass, cupping his hands around his eyes to cut the glare. He shifted his face to the other pane of glass for a better angle. “Oh Christ,” he muttered, then, “Get down, both of you.” He unholstered his gun and clicked off the safety.
“Stu,” said Angie in a low voice, “what is it?”
“Get down,” he repeated. “You, too, Doc. Get down and stay down.” Angie dropped to a crouch, and I followed suit. “I think something bad has happened here.” He stepped slightly to the side of the door. With his left hand, he took a handkerchief from his hip pocket and draped it carefully over the doorknob, then gave a slight turn and pushed the door open with the barrel of the pistol. “Mr. Pettis?” By now, huddled at the far end of the porch with Angie, I felt fairly certain Pettis wasn’t going to answer.
Vickery leaned forward just long enough for a quick look through the open door, then leaned swiftly back again. After a moment he risked a second look, this one not so brief, and then eased through the door, leading with the weapon. “Christ,” he said again, loudly. “
Damn
it.
Fuckin’
hell.”
“Stu?”
“Pettis is dead. God
dammit
. The dog, too.”
“Oh,
shit
,” said Angie. “Can you tell what happened?”
“Hang on. Let me clear the place.” Inside, I could hear the agent’s breathing, deep and fast, with occasional shufflings of his feet as he moved through the small dwelling, which had only one main room—a combination living room, bedroom, and galley kitchen—and a tiny bathroom, as I remembered it. Finally he reappeared in the doorway, drenched in sweat, his chest still heaving. He holstered his gun, mopped his head with the handkerchief he’d used to open the door, and shook his head grimly. “Shot. Must’ve been right after he called the sheriff’s office. Blood’s coagulated, starting to dry. Bunch of flies have already found their way in.”
“Shot? Both of them?” Angie got to her feet. “Who on earth would shoot those two? And why?”
“Don’t know who,” said Vickery. “Got an idea why, though.”
“Why?”
“The collar’s gone.”
My head began to buzz, and I sat down on the porch. “The GPS collar? You think he and the dog were killed because of the tracking collar?”
“That’s my theory, until something better comes along,” he answered. “I’d say we can rule out a drive-by shooting, since we’re out in the middle of damn nowhere.”
“Probably robbery, too,” added Angie, “if all that’s missing is the collar. That collar wasn’t cheap, but it’s sure not worth shooting somebody over.”
“Not,” Vickery added, “unless you’re afraid of where the track might lead.”
Dead, the simple man and the friendly dog. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. I’d worked on a lot of forensic cases over the past couple of decades. I was good at them, and I liked my role. I came in long after the crime, helped recover bones, sometimes identified a murder victim or figured out the manner of death or the time since death. Then, sitting in my quiet sanctuary beneath Neyland Stadium, I wrote my report. My hands—safe inside my latex gloves and my sheltered office—stayed nice and clean. Always. Always before, anyhow.
Now Winston Pettis and his dog were dead, and they’d apparently been killed because of the GPS tracking collar. The collar I’d suggested putting on the dog.
Sitting at the far end of the screened-in porch, I bent my head into the corner and threw up.
A
ngie shepherded me outside to keep me from compromising the crime scene any further than I already had. Before leading me across the sandy yard to the Suburban, she stooped and checked the ground closely, looking for footprints that were not ours; looking for footprints we hadn’t unknowingly obliterated on our way in.
This world is one big crime scene.
As we made our way slowly across the scrubby grass and weeds, she shook her head in frustration. Then, as we reached the vehicle, she brightened. She pointed to a faint track in a bare patch of dirt behind the Suburban. “Looks like we might have a tire impression,” she said. She crouched beside it. “Not the clearest one I ever saw, but maybe better than nothing.”
Vickery’s first call was to the Apalachee County Sheriff’s Office. The dispatcher patched him through to the sheriff, whom Vickery briefed on what we’d found. “Do you want your folks to handle this? Your deputy, Sutton, is on his way over here already . . . Right, to get the latest bone the Pettis dog brought back . . . No, sir, we haven’t found that bone. And the tracking collar we’d put on the dog is gone, too . . . Yeah, that is a shame . . . Do you want us to just secure the scene till Sutton gets here?” He nibbled on his cigar as he listened. “Actually, Sheriff, we’ve got a good crime-scene analyst here; a bone expert, too—the forensic anthropologist that looked at those two skulls.” He seemed to take satisfaction in something the sheriff said. “Okay, do y’all want to call the M.E.? And the funeral home? It usually takes a while for the hearse to show up . . . Okay, will do. . . . You know we aren’t trying to step on your toes here, but we’ll be glad to go ahead and start working it. You sure that’s what you want?” He motioned “go” to Angie, who nodded and seemed to shift gears almost instantly, into crime-scene mode—the same intense mode I’d seen when she and I had reconstructed the sofa on which her sister had died, and then again when we’d examined Kate’s body. “All right, Sheriff, we’ll get started. See you soon.”
Vickery’s next call was to his boss, the special agent in charge of FDLE’s Tallahassee region, to bring him up to speed on the murder and the sheriff’s request for forensic assistance. At the same time Angie phoned her boss, the supervisor of the crime lab. As she talked, she took a roll of crime-scene tape from the back of the Suburban and stretched it between two pines at the end of the turnoff from the dirt road into the yard. “I haven’t been inside yet,” she was saying as she came back. “Vickery went in looking for the guy, found him and the dog.” She crouched beside the tire track she’d shown me. “Looks like we have at least one tire impression. I didn’t see any shoe impressions, but I’ll take a closer look. . . .
Is
there somebody who could assist? . . . Great, send Rodriguez. Thanks.”
Angie started by photographing the cabin itself, then took pictures of the faint tire track from various angles and distances. Next she added a position marker—“1”—and a ruler for scale and took another series of photos of the impression. Then, drawing from bins in the back of the Suburban, she filled the pockets on her cargo pants with more evidence markers, gloves, and paper-bootie shoe covers before heading inside to begin photographing the death scene. During the next ten minutes, I glimpsed occasional flashes of light through the porch screen and the kitchen door, as if a small thunderstorm were occurring inside the cabin. “Okay, Stu,” she called, “I’ve got the basic photos, and I’ve done a quick search. I’m not seeing shell casings so far, and there’s not a lot of blood spatter to speak of.”
“Got a guess about the bullet caliber?”
“Medium,” she said. “Maybe .38.”
“Could be,” he mused. “Or maybe a .45.”
“Looks to me like he was standing by the bed when he was shot, or maybe sitting on it, and he fell backward. Lots of blood pooled in the mattress under him, and more on the floor by the dog. But I’m not sure there’s a lot to work with in terms of spatter or trajectory.”
“Yeah, that’s sorta what I thought,” he said. “Ready for me to come in?”
“Sure, come on. Just don’t touch the kitchen doorknob. Maybe we’ll get lucky there. You haven’t touched the inside knob, have you?”
“Nope. Okay, I’ll come poke around, see if it looks like somebody else has gone through his stuff; see if we can find his next of kin.”
While Angie and Stu worked the interior, I tried to console a disbelieving and distraught Deputy Sutton, who arrived moments after they went inside. “I just talked to him a few hours ago.” Sutton shook his head. “He was joking and laughing. So proud of that dog. Couldn’t wait to show us what Jasper’d gone and found this time.” The young officer appeared close to tears. “I had to work an accident. If I’d come right when he called me, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “I’m the one that suggested we put the tracking collar on the dog.” A question popped into my head. “If somebody killed him to get the tracking collar,” I asked, “how do you reckon they
knew
about it?”
“Hell, this is Apalachee County,” he said without hesitation. “Everybody knows everybody’s business here.” Angie had said basically the same thing about Cheatham County, Georgia, I remembered—and for that matter, the same was true of rural Tennessee. Suddenly he looked even more stricken than before, if such a thing were possible. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “I was talking about it with one of the other deputies the day y’all put it on.”
“Talking where? At the courthouse? At a coffee shop?”
He flushed. “Talking on the radio. Anybody with a police scanner could’ve heard it.” He now looked more in need of consolation than ever, but I could think of nothing consoling to say about the irresponsibility of broadcasting, quite literally, information about how Pettis was cooperating with an FDLE investigation.
Over the next hour, the dirt lane leading to the cabin became clogged with law enforcement vehicles, which parked in a line outside the crime-scene tape Angie had stretched between the pines on either side of the turnoff from the dirt road into the cabin’s yard. The first to arrive was another Apalachee County sheriff’s cruiser, driven by the sheriff himself, a wiry sixtysomething-year-old with a face of leather and a white handlebar mustache. On his heels came the county’s medical examiner, a general surgeon named Bradford, who seemed content to defer to FDLE as soon as he’d pronounced Pettis dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. Then came an unmarked Ford sedan driven by Stevenson, the FDLE agent who’d brought us photos of the reform school the day we’d first visited the site. Vickery sent Stevenson to seek information from Pettis’s “neighbors”—the nearest of whom was two or three miles away—and the few hardscrabble businesses along the county road.
The FDLE crime-scene truck lumbered into view, a boxy black vehicle that looked like a cross between an ambulance on steroids and a Winnebago on Weight Watchers. Driving it was Rodriguez, the forensic tech Angie’s boss had promised to send. Compact and muscular, Rodriguez had a shaved head, olive brown and glossy in the dappled light beneath the pines. Along with Rodriguez was a second tech, a young woman with long blond hair—Whitney, though I couldn’t tell if that was her first name or her last—whose arrival was a pleasant surprise to Angie.
Rodriguez set to work on the tire track behind the Suburban. Pouring water into a large Ziploc plastic bag that contained powder, he kneaded the bag until the mixture inside was the consistency of pancake batter—a thick liquid that I recognized as dental casting stone: the same stuff, I realized, that FDLE had used to cast Ted Bundy’s teeth. Watching him from ten feet away, I said, “Those aren’t the Suburban’s tracks, are they?”
Rodriguez didn’t look up. “Not unless the Suburban’s wearing a worn-out set of off-road tires,” he answered. “With a big chunk out of one of the tread lugs.” I smiled; clearly he knew what he was doing, and if he ever ran across that same tread on a vehicle, I felt sure he’d be able to show a jury that it matched. The tire-tread impression might not be quite as chilling—or as damning—as the cast of Ted Bundy’s teeth had been, but it might, just possibly, serve as a small evidentiary nail in the coffin of whoever had killed Pettis and Jasper.
As Rodriguez was lifting the hardened cast from the ground, a silver Lexus SUV arrived, looking badly out of place despite the blue lights flashing through its grille. The driver looked out of place, too—a hawkish, fortysomething guy with a thirty-dollar haircut and a crisp Brooks Brothers shirt, cinched with a yellow silk tie. Heads turned; the crime-scene techs and even several of the agents stared with a mixture of curiosity and disdain at his fanciness, but Vickery smiled slightly. “The shit storm just escalated,” he said. He headed for the Lexus, shook hands with the new arrival, and after conferring briefly, brought him over to me. “Clay Riordan, chief deputy state attorney,” the man said.
“Bill Brockton. Pleased to meet you.”
“Agent Vickery speaks highly of you.”
“That’s kind of him.”
“Let me see if I’ve understood Agent Vickery correctly, Dr. Brockton. He says you don’t think the two skulls that the victim’s dog brought home came from the burial ground at the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.”
“No, I don’t think they did. I know this is Florida, and things grow fast down here, but the vegetation at that cemetery looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in years. I just don’t see any way the dog got those skulls from that burial ground.”