Carved in Bone

What’s the other thing?”
    Art was thinking. Not always a good sign. “Did you ever see that Jack Nicholson movie Chinatown ? The one with Faye Dunaway?”
    “Long time ago. Main thing I remember is how good Faye Dunaway looked without her clothes. That, and how much it would hurt to have Roman Polanski slit open your nostril.”
    “Those would be the two things you’d find memorable,” Art said. “See, I mainly remember the interrogation scene. Nicholson’s trying to get Dunaway to tell him the truth about who this mystery girl is, and he starts slapping her around.” He began jerking his head from side to side, reenacting the scene, affecting what I could only guess must be a Faye Dunaway voice. “‘She’s my sister. She’s my daughter. She’s my sister . She’s my daughter . She’s my sister and my daughter!’”
    My brain was still preoccupied by Faye’s curvaceous torso. “So what you’re getting at is…?”
    “The baby—a boy, by the way—he’s the sheriff’s first cousin, once removed. Leastwise, I think that’s what you call the child of your mother’s sister’s daughter. Whatever—that much of the DNA profile is exactly what you’d expect. The sheriff’s mother and his Aunt Sophie had the same parents, so the daughter, Leena, is going to have some DNA from the maternal side and pass it along to her baby. As I say, that part’s exactly what you’d expect.”
    “But there’s something else you wouldn’t expect?”
    “Well, maybe I should have, this being Cooke County, Tennessee. But no, I never saw this one coming.”
    “Damn it, Art; what is it?”
    “Besides being Sheriff Tom’s cousin, Leena’s baby was also gonna be his kid brother.”
    Suddenly Faye was the last thing on my mind. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. “In other words, according to the DNA profile…”
    “…which Gonzales said was a rock-solid match…”
    “…the baby’s father…?
    “…was Tom Kitchings Senior. The Reverend—or not -so-Reverend—Thomas Kitchings.”
    I floored the gas pedal, and the truck careened around the on-ramp and up onto I-40 East.
    Even with the windows rolled up, I had trouble hearing Art’s question over the buffeting of the wind. The truck was doing ninety-five, and a gusty autumn wind was whipping out of the north, ripping red and gold leaves from branches, driving purplish clouds before it, their tops curling like ocean breakers. “You’re sure this is a good idea?” he shouted.
    “Sure I’m sure,” I yelled, with more confidence than I felt.
    “So tell me one more time why we’re charging back toward Cooke County like Batman and Robin? Talk slow—last time you explained it, you lost me on one of those hairpin turns of logic.”
    Sheriff Kitchings was up on the seventh floor of UT hospital, I repeated. His chief deputy was slewing around in a sooty box in the back of my truck. The one other Cooke County officer involved in the case was doubtless chatting with a roomful of TBI and FBI agents, explaining the disastrous turn their investigation had just taken.
    “So what you’re saying is, the utter collapse of law and order makes it a good idea for us to go riding back into the jaws of death? That’s your compelling argument?”
    That pretty much summed it up. “But this new DNA evidence sheds a whole ’nother light on the case,” I argued, “and nobody knows it. And nobody knows we know it but us.”
    “Your powers of reasoning are unique in all the world,” he said, shaking his head. “Not to mention your way with grammar.”
    “Grammar, schmammer. Don’t you see? Old man Kitchings gets her pregnant, then he kills her to cover up the pregnancy. Maybe she never even tells him she’s pregnant—probably scared to. But then she starts to show, and he knows the scandal will get out and ruin him. Hard for a preacher to hang onto his flock if they know he’s committed adultery, incest, maybe even rape.”
    Art raised a hand like a student with a question. “He would appear to have vaulted to the top of the suspect list, I’ll grant you that. It’s your next step—that we’re the perfect pair to confront the killer—that I’m not sure follows, exactly.”
    People had a way of disappearing and dying suddenly in Cooke County, I pointed out. That, he retorted, was precisely why he didn’t think we should be headed there, given that we’d very nearly disappeared and died once already. “But what if Kitchings Senior—or