He laughed. “The mail fraud statutes make it a crime to use the U.S. mail, radio, telephone, or other communications over an interstate carrier to commit fraud. And fraud is defined very broadly — so broadly, it can include simply depriving a person of what’s called the ‘intangible right of honest service.’ In JJ Smith’s case, having hot sex with a Chinese spy, on the Bureau’s clock and at taxpayer expense, hardly counts as ‘honest service.’ Sounds like grasping at straws, but it worked.”
“Sort of like Al Capone eventually serving time, not for murder or bootlegging but for tax evasion?”
“Exactly. If Plan A doesn’t work, switch to Plan B.”
“And how does this relate to Sheriff Kitchings? We send Price up there in something by Victoria’s Secret?”
“Whoa. If she ever even suspected you’d said something like that, you’d need emergency admission to the Witness Protection Program.”
“Sorry. The ‘dishonest service’ charge just seems a little vague.”
“It is,” he conceded. “That’s why I’m hoping to relegate that strategy to Plan B.”
“Does that mean you’ve got a Plan A?”
“We’ll see,” he said. “I’m looking at a map of Cooke County right now. Think you can steer me to the cave where the woman’s body was found?”
I described the route east from Knoxville on I-40, directing him to the Jonesport exit and then taking him along the winding river road. “Okay, about six or eight miles upriver, look for a right-hand turn that heads up into the mountains,” I said.
There was a pause. “Okay, got it. Now what?”
“Go three or four miles up that, then look for a road to the left. Cave Springs is another mile up that road.”
“Hang on. Let me make sure I’ve got this. Yes, I see it.” I could hear the excitement rising in his voice. “Bingo,” he said.
“What is it?”
“The law giveth, and the law taketh away. If a crime is committed on federal land, it can be prosecuted in federal court. Doesn’t make the crime federal — your Cooke County murder is a state crime, and always will be. But if it happened on U.S. land, we can make a federal case out of it.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that. Years before, some of my students were arrested for consuming alcohol in Great Smoky Mountains National Park — four of them shared a bottle of wine at a picnic beside Abrams Falls — and the entire Anthropology Department had shown up in federal court to lend moral support. I was vaguely familiar with the legal framework he was erecting here, so I hated to bring it crashing down. “Listen, I’m not sure I gave the directions quite right,” I said, hoping to let him down easy. “The body was found eight or ten miles north of I-40. The national park is all way to the south side of the interstate. I hate to say it, but it looks like we’re stuck with Plan B.”
“Your directions were fine, Dr. Brockton,” he said cheerily. “Cave Springs Church is shown on this map. And it’s just inside a beautiful green strip of federal land.”
“But the national park—”
“I’m not talking about the park, Dr. Brockton. Your victim’s body was found a mile inside the boundary of Cherokee National Forest.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’d stake my orienteering merit badge on it.”
“Hot damn,” I said. I could already hear the hoofbeats of the federal cavalry. “Hello, Plan A.”
“Hello, Plan A,” he echoed. “There is one thing you need to understand, though, Dr. Brockton.”
“What’s that?”
“Plan A: it won’t happen overnight.”
“Oh, I understand. These things can take weeks, even months, can’t they?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. “Dr. Brockton, you’re not going to want to hear this. The average duration of an interagency task force involving undercover agents is two years, start to finish.”
“Two years?”
“Two years.”
I thanked Welton for his interest, wished him happy hunting, and laid the receiver to rest, along with my hopes for Plan A.
My hand had scarcely left the receiver when the phone rang again. It was Peggy, the Anthropology Department secretary. She sounded upset. “Did you take my spare keys again?”
“No, why?”
“They’re not in my desk drawer.”
“They’ll turn up,” I said.
“You’re the only one who ever takes them.”
“When did you notice they were gone?”
“Last week,” she said. “It was the same day someone broke into your office. You don’t think…?”
I did think, and I got a very bad feeling.
I hung up the phone and unlocked the door to the skeletal collection room. Accessible only through my office, the collection room housed all our forensic specimens — row upon row of metal shelves filled with cardboard boxes like the one stolen off my desk last week. Flipping on the fluorescent lights, I began scanning the shelves. The foot-square ends of the boxes presented themselves like books in a library — a library of murder mysteries, all of them carved in bone.
Whoever had pried open my office had not broken into the collection room — of this I was certain, for a TBI technician, the university police officer, and I had all checked the door, finding it undamaged and securely locked. Or maybe carefully relocked, I now realized.
As I reached the section of shelves containing the most recent years’ cases, my knees went weak. There was a one-foot-square gap in the boxes, and I knew without even checking which box should have been there.
Billy Ray Ledbetter’s bones were gone.
With a heavy heart, I called Steve Morgan’s TBI pager and reported the additional theft to him. “This complicates the picture,” he said, echoing my own thoughts exactly. It might mean that the theft of Leena’s bones was just a smokescreen, and the mangled outer door was just for show. It might also mean that Dr. Garland Hamilton, a disgraced and very angry medical examiner, hadn’t been making idle threats when he confronted me outside the courthouse.
/> “Did you steal a blind man’s cane recently?” asked Morgan.
“Rob a church collection plate? Take candy from a baby? Kick a nun? I gotta tell you, I haven’t seen this much bad karma in one place since Bernie Kerik’s nomination to head Homeland Security imploded in a half-dozen scandals.”
“When it rains, it pours,” I said miserably. “I’m on the hot seat. I’m wearing a bull’s-eye.”
“Bullshit,” he said, but he promised to send the crime scene techs back to comb the collection room. We both knew they’d come up empty-handed.
CHAPTER 34
The kudzu tunnel to Jim O’Conner’s hideaway was becoming as familiar to me as my own driveway. I had phoned an hour before with news of the additional bone theft, along with a discouraging reassessment of our prospects for recovering Leena. “I was pretty sure she was somewhere in Cooke County, in the hands of somebody who wears a badge,” I said. “Now I have no idea who’s got her, where she is, or whether we’ll ever get her back.”
He took the news more calmly than I’d expected; he even tried to console me over the loss. “Well, I hope you recover the bones, and I hope you nail whoever took ’em. But remember, those bones aren’t Leena. They’re just what’s left of what used to be her, a long time ago.” This from the man I’d sent reeling, not once but twice — first with the news of her discovery, then with the bombshell about her pregnancy. He was a remarkably resilient human being. “Listen, if you’ve got the time, come up and see me,” he said next. “I’ve got something to show you. As an anthropologist, you’ll find it interesting; might cheer you up.” That was all he would divulge over the phone.
On the drive up, my mind raced with the possibilities. Had he found something that shed light on Leena’s death, on the identity of her killer? His phrasing puzzled me, though: “as an anthropologist”—what did that mean? Had he unearthed some clue or piece of evidence from three decades ago? Some groundbreaking article about cave burials? Why would I be more interested in whatever it was as a scientist than as a guy who’d been dragged all over the hills of Cooke County — and underneath a few of them, too?