Carved in Bone

somehow. But what had I done, or what was I thinking of doing, and why?
    Kitchings looked disgusted. “Ever time I send him after you, something goes wrong. I don’t know which one of you’s to blame, but damned if I’ll let it happen again.”
    “Sheriff, the minute we can wrap up this case, I’ll be glad to head back to Knoxville for good.”
    “Yeah. Well. Whatcha got so far?”
    “Well, it’s pretty much what I thought from the beginning: white female, twenty to twenty-three years, unusually tall—somewhere between five-ten and six feet in stature. Blonde hair, fairly long. No dental work; small, unfilled caries—cavities—in two of her molars and one of her canines. Only sign of skeletal trauma was multiple fractures of the hyoid.”
    “Fractures of the what-oid?”
    “The hyoid.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “Means she was strangled. The hyoid’s that small, wiggly bone just above your Adam’s apple.” I demonstrated, and the sheriff and his deputy jiggled their hyoids from side to side. “Hers was crushed. Pretty sure sign of manual strangulation.”
    He looked grim. “Anything else unusual?”
    “Well, she was wearing a U.S. Army dog tag around her neck.” I paused, giving him a chance to process the information. “I took it to Art Bohanan, the resident fingerprint guru at KPD, in hopes he might pick up a print from whoever had his hands around her neck.”
    Kitchings took in a breath and leaned toward me, his eyes blazing. “And?”
    “Nothing.”
    He exhaled. “Shoot. But was the tag still legible?” I nodded. “What’d it say?”
    It was my turn to take a breath. “It said Lt. Thomas J. O’Conner.”
    Kitchings turned away. “That cocksucking son of a bitch,” he whispered. “I am gonna nail his sorry ass to the cross.”
    I waited. “Sheriff?” He turned. “Any idea who she was?”
    I was conscious, at the edge of my field of view, of Williams, motionless but tightly coiled. Kitchings drew in a long breath, let it out, and shook his head. “Hard to say, Doc. Real hard to say.”
    I was getting that impression. Maybe not so hard to know —at least, to insiders—but damned difficult to say, at least to outsiders. He was hiding something, I felt sure; I wondered if it was the girl’s identity, and if so, why. I turned to Williams with an inquiring look, but the deputy just shrugged and shook his head. I decided to play the card Jim O’Conner had just handed me. “Sheriff, does the name Lester Ballard mean anything to you?”
    He looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer might be found somewhere in the peeling plaster. “Lester Ballard? No, can’t say as it does. Why?”
    “Hard to say. It just sorta came up.”
    He eyed me suspiciously, sensing some subtext but not sure what it was.
    “There’s some Ballards over in Union County, I believe, but I don’t know of any Lester. I damn sure know of a Thomas J. O’Conner, though.”
    I nodded. “Sheriff?” He looked annoyed. “What’s he like, this O’Conner?”
    Kitchings made a face, shook his head. “Smartass. Thinks he’s better and brighter than the rest of us.”
    “Wouldn’t be too bright to strangle a woman and hang his name around her neck, would it?”
    He shook his head dismissively. But it was clear that he wasn’t dismissing the notion of O’Conner’s guilt. He was dismissing my question, and he was dismissing me. Just to make sure I got the message, he spun on his heel and walked out, before I had a chance to tell him about the cavewoman’s pregnancy. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d have told him even if I’d gotten the chance.

CHAPTER 12
    BY THE TIME I GOT back to campus, night was falling. The autumnal equinox was only a few days away, and the days were markedly shorter. Not so long ago—was it one lifetime, or two?—I’d have hurried home, stopping in my office just long enough to phone Kathleen and apologize for running late. Now, the habitual impulse to call still popped up, but only for an instant: just long enough to remind me that there was no reason to call, no one there to answer the phone.
    She’d been gone for two years now, but the ache and the emptiness still cut to the bone.
    I sat at my desk, staring into space and time—time long past—for what might have been a minute or an hour. I forced my thoughts back to the Cooke County case: I had an unknown victim—unnamed, at any rate—an unknown killer, and people on various sides of the law who seemed to know more