Meffert nodded, looking thoughtful. The sheriff scowled, looking . . . scowly. He opened his mouth to speak, and I half expected to hear the term “jungle bunnies” in response to my evolutionary explanation. Instead, he asked, “You a bettin’ man, Doc?”
“Excuse me?”
“You a bettin’ man? A gambler?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, if you was, what kind of odds would you lay on this being a white woman?”
“How certain I am that she’s white, based on the teeth and jaws and nasal opening?”
“Right.”
I shrugged. “I hate to say a hundred percent, because if I turn out to be wrong, I’ll look like a hundred-percent idiot. I’ll be able to look at a couple other things once I get her back to the lab and clean off the bones. But right here, right now? Ninety-five percent.” I tugged downward on the mandible, opening the jaws so I could inspect the lower teeth, especially the molars. “Middle or upper income, too, probably. She’s had good dental care.”
The sheriff rubbed the corners of his mouth with one hand, his thumb and fingers widening and narrowing repeatedly, his lips alternately stretching and pursing in artificial simulacra of smiles and frowns. Then he turned slightly to one side and spat, a long stream of tobacco juice and saliva arcing onto the ground a foot from where I knelt. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “He done this to a white woman? They’s some serious shit about to hit the fan here. Ain’t no doubt about it. We got to catch that boy, y’all hear me?”
“You think this murder was committed by a juvenile?” By the time I finished asking the question, I realized how foolish it was.
“A man—a black man—escaped from Brushy four days ago,” said Meffert. “He’s still on the loose.”
“Brushy?”
“Brushy Mountain State Prison.”
“The one we passed on the way in?”
“No. The old prison, in Petros.” He pointed across the creek, as if I might be able to see it if I looked. “It’s close—three, four five miles, as the crow flies—but there’s one hell of a mountain between here and there.”
The prison’s name rang a bell in the back of my mind. “Seems like I remember that somebody famous did time in Brushy Mountain.”
Meffert nodded. “Still doing time. James Earl Ray. Guy that assassinated Martin Luther King. Sentenced to ninety-nine years.”
“It’s a hunnerd, now,” interjected the deputy, Cotterell. “Remember? They tacked on one more year after he escaped.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “What about that? I thought that prison was famous for being escape-proof.”
“Ain’t no prison escape-proof,” scoffed the sheriff. “Not if it’s built by human hands, guarded by human guards. Ray and six others scaled a fence in the back corner of the yard one day. Maybe the guards was sleepin’ on the job. Maybe they was paid to be sleepin’ on the job. Dumbasses went the wrong damn way after they got out, though.”
“They headed north,” Meffert explained. “This way. Into the mountains. They were caught two days later, in some of the toughest terrain in Tennessee. Story goes, by the time they found him, Ray was so exhausted and hungry and tore up, he was begging to go back to Brushy.”
“And this guy who escaped four days ago,” I said. “What’s his story? Also a killer?”
“If he weren’t before, he for damn sure is now,” said the sheriff. “He is a sack of human excrement.” The other two nodded.
“Serial sex offender,” said the TBI agent.
“Bad luck for this poor gal, crossing paths with him,” the sheriff resumed. “She didn’t never have no chance.”
As the lawmen continued chatting and head-shaking, I unfolded a body bag and laid it beside the woman’s remains. The task of getting her into the bag was complicated by the presence of the sapling between her legs. I considered lifting one of her legs to vertical and then swinging it clear of the tree—the corpse had already passed through rigor mortis—but I feared that bending the leg so far might tear it from the hip. Instead, I squatted above the head and worked my hands under the shoulders, into the armpits, and slid the corpse several feet up the hill, so that both legs were clear of the tree. Then I repositioned the bag, unzipped it, and folded back the top. “Could one of you guys give me a hand?”
They looked at one another, no one moving. Finally Sheriff Dixon said, “Jim, get over there and help the perfessor.” Cotterell grimaced but complied.
“There’s another pair of gloves sticking out of my back pocket,” I said. “You’re gonna want those, I’m thinking.” He tugged them free and pulled them on. “Let’s lift her legs and swing those over first,” I said, “then her upper body.” He nodded and took hold of the left shin, while I grasped the right, wishing the feet were still there to help keep my grip from slipping loose. “Okay, on three, we lift and swing. One, two, three.”
With a lift, accompanied by a grunt from the stocky deputy, we got her legs and pelvis onto the rubberized fabric.
“Okay, same thing with the arms.” He nodded, and we hoisted and swung the upper body onto the bag, then I folded the flap across the body and tugged the C-shaped zipper closed. Then, with the added help of the sheriff and the TBI agent, we lugged the bag up the slope and slid it into the back of my truck.
I took my leave of the sheriff, his deputy, and Special Agent Bubba, promising to fax a preliminary report by Tuesday. Meffert raised his eyebrows. “You know that’s Christmas Day, right?”
“Crap,” I said. “No, I forgot. How about Wednesday, the twenty-sixth?”
Meffert shrugged; the sheriff nodded, allowing as how he reckoned that would be all right. I removed the gloves and tossed them in the back of the truck, and motioned for Cotterell to do likewise, then closed the tailgate and the shell.
I drove slowly down the park’s narrow road and rumbled across
Jordan Branch, then sped up as the road straightened and widened near the prison. Ten minutes after I turned onto the highway toward Knoxville, I noticed another two-lane road, state route 116, T-ing in from the left. PETROS 2 said a sign pointing up 116. BRUSHY MOUNTAIN STATE PRISON 3. On a whim, I slowed and took the turn.
Petros was a cluster of modest homes—a few dozen or so—plus a handful of small churches, several dilapidated repair shops, a cinder-block grocery store, and a volunteer fire department. A mile beyond what passed for downtown—just before the highway made a hairpin turn and started angling up a mountainside—I came to the turnoff for Brushy Mountain.
The prison occupied the back end of a small, deep valley—a hollow, or “holler,” in East Tennessee dialect—and even from a quarter mile away, the façade was forbidding: a huge, brooding fortress of stone, topped by castlelike crenellations and flanked on three sides by steep forested mountains, as if the prison itself had taken up a defensive position and were making its last stand. And in a way, perhaps it was, for Agent Meffert had said that the state was planning to close the facility, as soon as the Morgan County Correctional Complex could be expanded to accommodate Brushy’s hard-core convicts.
Idling toward the grim stone fortress, I imagined James Earl Ray and six other desperate men scaling the fence, then scrambling up the steep, rocky slopes toward Frozen Head. Was that the same route this latest fugitive had taken—the sack-of-excrement “boy” Sheriff Dixon was intent on capturing? Had he gotten farther than Ray? And had his path crossed with that of an unlucky hiker—a woman who happened to be in a terribly wrong place at a fatally wrong time?
As I crept forward, I noticed a patrol car leave the prison’s gate and head in my direction. Then—imagining the scene that might ensue if I were stopped and the back of my truck searched—I made a hasty U-turn and headed back toward the highway, and the comforts of UT.