Carved in Bone

bed. For the first time in many months, I slept hard. And for the first time in many months, I awoke hard.
    Now what? I remembered a line from Garrison Keillor, whose public radio show UT’s NPR affiliate had broadcast for years: “Life is complicated, and not for the timid.” Amen to that, brother, I thought. Amen to that.

CHAPTER 13
    THE HILLS WERE SHOWING their first signs of fall color as Art Bohanan and I wound along the river road in Cooke County. We had the windows of the UT truck cranked down, and the hum of the tires was punctuated by the crackle of sycamore leaves, the first to spiral down every autumn. I’d brought Art up to date on what I knew about my case, which wasn’t all that much. “Anyhow,” I concluded, “the sheriff seems to figure O’Conner for the killer, but I’m not so sure. O’Conner doesn’t strike me as the Lester Ballard type.”
    “The what type?”
    “Lester Ballard.”
    “Who’s Lester Ballard?”
    “Art, I’m disappointed in you. Don’t you read anything but police reports? Lester Ballard is one of the great characters of modern Southern literature.” From a jacket pocket, I pulled a ragged copy of Child of God, which I’d found in the used bin at the campus bookstore an hour before. I waved it knowingly. “Lester likes women. Dead women. Keeps ’em fresh in caves.”
    “Don’t we all. So you think there’s a connection between that book and this murder? Copycat thing—true crime imitating weird fiction?”
    “No, actually, I don’t think that. What I do think is that Jim O’Conner is mighty smart and well-read to be a murderous hillbilly. I’d bet my salary he knows that woman’s name; he sure got upset when he seemed to figure it out. So why won’t he tell us, if he’s not the killer?”
    “So maybe he is the killer. Just ’cause he quotes mod-ren South-ren litra-ture don’t make him Dudley Do-right.”
    “I know, but he doesn’t strike me as a killer. Call it anthropologist’s instinct.”
    “Lotta anthropologists used to think Ted Bundy was a heckuva nice guy, too.”
    “Okay, forget it. Judge for yourself. Hey, you said you’d heard back from your buddy in Army Records. What’d he find in O’Conner’s military file?”
    “Army Ranger. Served with valor and distinction. Led a mission into North Vietnam to rescue a downed pilot. Got a promotion, a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, and a Medal of Honor nomination for it. If he were running for office, his opponent would paint him as a lily-livered coward, but he sounds like the kind of guy I’d want watching my back in the jungle.”
    “Well, you can see if he looks that way, too, in just a minute.”
    Or maybe not. All of a sudden, the meeting I’d brought us here for was looking problematic. A hundred yards in front of us, the road ended against a solid wall of green. Bluffs closed in on either side of the gravel track. I slowed the truck to a crawl. “Now what?” I asked.
    Art shrugged. “You sure this is the way you came?”
    “Well, I was pretty sure I was sure. I know we turned off the river road between those two hemlocks. I know we stopped at that big sycamore about a quarter-mile back, so Waylon could capfold me. After that, all I could see was the inside of his hat—but it didn’t feel like we made any stops or turns.”
    “Well, then, I guess we keep going.”
    “But where? How? It’s the end of the road.”
    “Well, go till you can’t go anymore, then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”
    We crept forward. The wall of vegetation ahead was a clotted mass of kudzu vines. As we got close, I noticed that the road didn’t actually end at the kudzu; instead, it seemed to disappear beneath it. To the left of the gravel, a small stream tumbled out through a curtain of vines. I looked at Art, and he grinned. “Damn the tendrils,” he hollered. “Full speed ahead!”
    I idled forward, and the truck nosed beneath the overhanging vines. They writhed across the windshield like some snaky nightmare, then rasped onto the roof, clutching at the mirrors and wipers and antenna with slithering, slapping sounds. The engine began to labor, not from the resistance of the vines, but from a sudden steepening of the road. Overhead, I thought I glimpsed a web of wires or cables—a sort of tensile arbor stretched between converging bluffs to support the kudzu.
    After a quarter-mile that seemed to stretch for an eternity, the kudzu tunnel ended at another curtain of vines, and