Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [126]
Tom Kitchings half-vaulted, half-fell up the steps and onto the porch. “Hey, Sheriff, that was some run,” I said. “Looks like you haven’t lost your form after all.” He ignored me and sank to his knees beside his dazed mother and his dead father.
“Oh, Mama,” he cried. “Oh, Mama, what’s happened to us? What has happened to this family, Mama?” He was gasping and sobbing.
She wrapped her arms around him. “Terrible things,” she said. “God’s judgment. We brought it down on our own selves. We did. Ever one of us but you.”
He choked on the words. “Oh, Mama, I tried. I tried so hard to make good.”
“You did. You done real good. You always made me proud. You just keep on, no matter what.”
“It’s too late, Mama. Too late.”
“No it ain’t. You got a good heart, Tommy, and you’re all I got left in this world. You got to keep on making me proud.”
“I can’t, Mama. I’m shot. I’m shot, and it’s bad.” Only when he said the words did I notice the bloom of crimson spreading across the back of his khaki shirt. He sagged against her, then slid to the porch, and just like that, he was gone.
Two more men thundered up the porch steps, weapons drawn: Steve Morgan and “Rooster” Rankin. “TBI,” shouted Morgan, “don’t move!” But he and Rankin were the ones who froze as they surveyed the carnage at their feet: two men dead, a third facedown with a rifle barrel to his head, an old and broken woman weeping beside the bloody corpses of her husband and son.
Art never shifted his gaze or his aim from Williams. “Police officer,” he called out. “Arthur Bohanan, KPD. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, state forensic anthropologist. This deputy here has committed at least three murders.”
“It’s okay, Art,” said Rankin. “It’s Agent Rankin and Agent Morgan. We know all about this asshole’s handiwork now. Let me just get in there and cuff him, if you don’t mind.” Rankin knelt and yanked Williams’s hands behind his back, then jerked him to his feet, dragging him down the stairs and shoving him toward the chopper.
Morgan must have seen me struggling to piece together what had brought him here in the company of Tom Kitchings, the man I’d accused of obstructing justice. “Sheriff Kitchings called TBI headquarters last night from his hospital bed, so Rankin dropped by to talk to him right after he finished getting the runaround from Williams.”
“The sheriff called you?”
Morgan nodded. “He got suspicious when Williams got to the crash scene so fast, and he knew Williams had a thirty-thirty he was pretty fond of. So he gave us the brass from the bullets that killed Orbin. I stopped by the Cooke County firing range last night on my way back to Knoxville to collect some of the deputy’s spent cartridges out there. Ballistics worked through the night comparing tool marks on the shells. Perfect match. Soon as we saw that, we figured we’d better hotfoot it up here before somebody else got shot.”
“But how’d the sheriff come to be with you in the helicopter?”
“He checked in with us as he was leaving the hospital, so we did a quick touchdown at the LifeStar base and picked him up. Lucky for you we did. He figured you’d be poking around again, figured you’d start with his father, and figured Williams might try to get you out of the way.”
“He figured right,” I said. “Looks like I should’ve given Sheriff Kitchings a lot more credit than I did, for brains and for integrity.”
“It wasn’t easy for him. He also figured his dad was the one that killed the pregnant woman.”
“He missed that one, but not by much. Did he say how he found her body in the first place?”
“Anonymous letter,” said Steve. “Had to’ve been from Williams. Guess the deputy found out about the old man’s spelunking, followed him into the cave one day, and figured he could use Leena to bring down the sheriff and his family.”
I shook my head and took a deep breath, exhaling hard. “It worked well,” I said. “Terribly well.”
I looked down at Tom Kitchings, sprawled on the porch in his uniform and his congealing blood. He’d once had so much potential; he’d been on