Without Mercy Read online

  DEDICATION

  In loving memory of our mothers:

  Jennie Hicks Bass

  and

  Gloria Miller Jefferson

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Part One Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Two Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Writer’s Note: On Fact and Fiction

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jefferson Bass

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  The Human Stain

  Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

  —Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

  Make a chain: for the land is full of bloody crimes and the city is full of violence.

  —Ezekiel 7:23

  PROLOGUE

  A WARM SPRING BREEZE STIRS THE STAND OF TULIP poplars, twitching their upturned, aspiring branches, their tender new leaves and delicate flowers pale in the moonlight. A stronger wind kicks up, unleashing a blizzard of blossoms, their yellow petals splashed with orange, their feathery stamens dusted with pollen.

  Soon the gust subsides, settling to a soft, steady breath soughing through the foliage, undisturbed for hour upon hour. Then, suddenly, the wind’s susurration is punctuated by a series of brighter, sharper sounds: steel clinking upon steel—metallic teeth chattering, slowly at first, then faster and louder, frenzied and frantic.

  A scream rends the night: a scream accompanied—or is it contradicted?—by another voice, this one deep and fearless, primitive and guttural. The scream falters, then resumes; falters, then intensifies; falters . . . and fades.

  CHAPTER 1

  Neyland Stadium, University of Tennessee

  Knoxville

  I TURNED THE DOORKNOB OF THE OSTEOLOGY LAB—or, rather, tried to—and was surprised to find it locked. Normally by eight Miranda was long since settled at her desk in the bone lab, a half-empty Starbucks cup going cold, her eyes riveted on her computer screen as her fingertips danced and her keyboard clattered, opening some new window on the virtual world she navigated with such speed and confidence.

  As I unlocked the steel door and opened it, I scanned the lab’s interior. The lights were off, but the front of the lab was fairly bright, thanks—or no thanks—to the venetian blinds stretching across the front wall, their metal slats kinked and broken in half a hundred places, allowing thin spokes and broad beams of the October morning sun to slant across the lab, the rays luminous and all but tangible in the lab’s dusty air. I still half expected to see Miranda, if not at the desk then possibly deep in concentration at one of the worktables, studying some fractured fibula or shattered skull.

  But the room was empty—devoid of living humans, at any rate, though it contained gracious plenty of dead ones: thousands of Arikara Indian skeletons that my students and I had exhumed during a series of summer expeditions to the Great Plains, excavating one step ahead of rising reservoir waters. The Arikara were neatly packed in sturdy corrugated boxes, shelved like thousands of library books with spines of bone. The remains should have been returned to the Arikara tribe for reburial on dry tribal lands—and indeed would have been, as required by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990—except for a single, insurmountable obstacle: There no longer were Arikara tribal lands. Decimated by multiple epidemics of smallpox, a contagion spread by white traders and settlers, the dwindling Arikara had been assimilated by the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes back in the 1800s. And so it was, through an odd confluence of river hydrology, civil engineering, field archaeology, and viral epidemiology, that the primary legacy of the Arikara Indians—Native Americans who had helped Lewis and Clark on the first stage of their epic expedition to the Pacific Northwest—resided beneath the south end zone of Neyland Stadium, the University of Tennessee’s shrine to college football.

  The Arikara inhabited the back of the room, a vast, dark complex of shelves that marched, row upon row, toward the underside of the stadium’s concrete grandstands. I generally gave them no thought, but occasionally—at moments such as this, when the university was still half asleep, the bone lab still deserted and quiet—I could almost believe I heard the whispering spirits of the vast tribe of Arikara dead. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, and with a deep breath to refocus my attention, I turned toward the front of the lab.

  This part of the room was high ceilinged and bright, its rows of worktables illuminated by the large, glass-fronted exterior wall. Atop the tables were old-style cafeteria trays, each tray laden with skulls, ribs, mandibles, vertebrae, pubic bones, arm bones, hand bones, foot bones, or some combination thereof, giving the room the look of a skeletal spare-parts shop. “Hey, I need me a left tibia,” I imagined a one-legged customer hopping in and saying. “Y’all got any of them?” “Loads,” my salesman-self would answer. “What make and model you aiming for?” The customer would look down at the stump of his leg, making sure he got the specifications right. “A 1963 male, ’bout six foot one.” “You’re in luck,” I’d say. “Got one, good as new, never broken. Installation not included.”

  My imaginary spare-parts sale was interrupted by a series of three dull thuds just outside the door, each thud punctuated by a curse. “Dammit. Damn it. Dammit!!!” I turned and opened the door just in time to see a two-foot stack of books teetering wildly in the overloaded left arm of my assistant, Miranda. As the leaning tower of books approached its tipping point, she reflexively swung her right hand over to stabilize it. Unfortunately, her right hand was clutching a Starbucks cup, which smacked against the books, popping off the lid, collapsing the cup, and sending liquid cascading over her hand and onto the three books that I had heard thud to the floor. I readied my ears for the litany of profanity that was sure to ensue—Miranda cussed frequently, creatively, and with considerable gusto—but she simply stared at the crushed cup, the dripping hand, and the sodden books . . . and then burst into peals of laughter. And it was the laughter that finally nudged the tower of books to its tipping point. For a moment the stack—still a single unit—seemed to hang in the air, as if both time and gravity had been suspended. Then, slowly, the structure came apart in midair, book after book tumbling into a pile at her feet.

  “You do know how to make an entrance,” I said. “You okay?”

  She nodded, still laughing too hard to speak.

  “Sorry about your coffee,” I offered. “And your books.”

  “It’s okay,” she finally managed to gasp out. “I was bringing you tea.” She howled afresh. “Oh, and they’re your books, not mine.”

  Now it was my turn to stare. Sure enough, the spines and covers in the puddle were fam
iliar ones. And, in spite of myself and my love of my books, it was my turn to laugh, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BAD NEWS WAS, ONE OF THE BOOKS MIRANDA had been carrying was now thoroughly soaked, as soggy as a two-hundred-page tea bag. The good news was, the sodden mess was the osteology field guide that I myself had written years before.

  “Sorry, Dr. B,” Miranda said, holding the book by one corner as it drained into the trash can beside the desk.

  “I have a spare copy,” I said. “Actually, hundreds of spare copies. Boxes and boxes of them, crammed in the closet of my office. Peggy’s been after me for years to get rid of some of them.” The truth was, Peggy, my secretary, had been after me to get rid of all of them. “They’re not the latest edition,” Peggy liked to point out. “No first editions, either. Nothing worth saving. And the longer they sit in that closet, the moldier and more outdated they get.”

  I eyed the other books Miranda had been lugging, which ranged from osteology references to radiology texts. “Why are you bringing these back? You finally getting worried about your library fines?” It was a running joke, my pretense that she was racking up years’ worth of overdue fines on the books I had loaned her.

  “Why should I worry?” she cracked. “What’s a few thousand bucks between indentured servant and master?”

  That, too, was a running joke, one that had more than a kernel of truth in it: Graduate assistants worked long hours for low pay, and Miranda was now nearing the seven-year mark in her servitude. If she’d been a faculty member instead of a student, she’d be eligible for tenure now.

  “Actually, I’m through with them,” she said.

  “Through?”

  “Through. I sent it to the printer this morning.”

  “It?” She nodded but said nothing, waiting for me to figure out what she meant. It took me longer than it should have. “Your dissertation? You finished?”

  “Yup. That’s why I’m late—I was up all night making revisions. But it’s done, by damn.” She flashed me a smile—a smile that combined pride, relief, and also, I now noticed, exhaustion. And yet remarkably, she—the one who’d been up all night—had gone to the trouble to buy me a cup of tea on her way in. True, the tea was now only a puddle of good intentions, but I appreciated the gesture.

  “That’s great, Miranda. I’m thrilled,” I said. But the word came out sounding flat and forced, and I realized that “thrilled” wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was, now that Miranda was finishing her Ph.D. she’d be leaving, and I would miss her: her expertise, her reliability, her sassiness, and her friendship. “Thrilled” was only a small part of the large, complicated truth of what I felt as I contemplated her departure.

  An awkward pause hung in the air. Finally, blessedly, it was broken by the electronic warble of the phone on the desk. Miranda lifted the receiver without looking at the display, trailing droplets of tea across the scuffed desktop. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” she said, then, “Hi, Peggy. . . . Yeah, he’s here.” She handed me the phone, frowning as a few final drips spattered her forearm.

  Peggy Wilhoit had been the Anthropology Department secretary and administrative assistant for most of my twenty-five years at UT. She knew where to find me, when to remind me, and how to get my goat. Much like an old married couple, we had long ago dispensed with formality, settling into a relationship that was predictable and mostly harmonious, with the exception of the occasional spat. “Morning, Peggy,” I said. “Do you have a tracking device on me?”

  “Darn. You’ve finally caught on. What I really need, though, is one of those remote-control shock collars, so I can make you mind better.”

  “I’d laugh,” I said, “if I thought you were joking. What’s up? Am I late for a meeting?”

  “Sheriff O’Conner, from Cooke County, is on line two. Can you talk to him now, or should I take a message?”

  “I’ll take it. Thanks.” I pressed the blinking light on the phone’s console. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton.”

  “Doc,” came a familiar voice. “Jim O’Conner. Remember me?”

  “Remember? Hell, how could I forget?” O’Conner, a Vietnam war hero, was a slight, soft-spoken man, yet he had a commanding presence and powerful charisma. Before becoming sheriff of Cooke County, O’Conner had built a small ginseng empire that was remarkable for being both prosperous and legal—an uncommon combination in the hills of Cooke County, which was notorious for its frontier mentality and outlaw entrepreneurs. Cooke County had long trafficked in ’sang, as the locals called ginseng root, but until O’Conner started cultivating it, the root was invariably poached from federal lands. Besides ginseng and rugged mountains, the county’s other claims to fame and infamy included pot patches, cockfights, chop shops, and, more recently, meth labs.

  I had first met O’Conner five or six years or so before, when I worked a murder case in Cooke County. He himself had been wrongly accused of the murder; in the end, not only was he cleared, he was elected sheriff, and he’d promised to clean up the corruption that had characterized the county for a century or more. As best I could tell from occasional news reports about undercover stings and colorful trials, he’d done a good job of keeping his promise. “My secretary told me ‘Sheriff O’Conner’ was calling. I reckon that means you’re still wearing a badge?”

  “For the moment,” he said. “But it’s a temporary, short-term kind of deal.”

  I laughed. “Isn’t that what you said back when you first took the job, what, five, six years ago?”

  “Well, yeah,” he confessed. “My mistake was, I said I’d stick with it till I got the place cleaned up. Turns out, cleaning up Cooke County is like getting rid of kudzu. You can cut vines all day long, but until you get at the root problem, it’s just gonna keep coming back.”

  His analogy rang true to what I knew of Cooke County, botanically as well as criminally: it was easy to become entangled, tough to get loose. “You getting any closer? To the root problem?”

  “Hard to say, Doc. Some days I think we’re making progress. Other days, I think the problem is just human nature itself, stretching all the way back to Adam and Eve.”

  “So maybe it wasn’t a snake that started the trouble,” I mused, “but a kudzu vine grabbing hold of Eve’s ankle?”

  He gave a quick laugh. “I think you’re onto something there, Doc. You ever get tired of anthropology, you should take up preaching. You make more sense than any of the hillbilly Bible-thumpers up this way.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” I said. “But meanwhile, I’m guessing you didn’t call to ask about theology.”

  “You’re right. We’ve got a death up here I’m hoping you might help us investigate.”

  “Now you’re talking my language,” I said. “Is the body still at the scene?”

  He hesitated. “Well, no, not exactly.”

  My good mood evaporated, replaced by exasperation. “Dammit, Sheriff, you know better than that. I’ve said this to law enforcement till I’m blue in the face. It’s really important not to move the body till I get there. Makes my job a whole lot harder if—”

  “Excuse me, Doc,” he interrupted. “I didn’t make myself clear. It’s not that we moved the body. It’s that there’s not really much body there anymore. Just bones. And not a whole lot of ’em to speak of.”

  Suddenly I felt sheepish. “Well, hell, Jim, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I should’ve known you wouldn’t compromise the evidence. My apologies.”

  “No worries, Doc. You think you can come help us out?”

  “Sure. Miranda and I—you remember my assistant, Miranda?”

  “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. “Te
n 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.