Carved in Bone

to you the other day?”
    “Hell, you was pretty cheap, Doc. Couple hunnerd, I think.”
    “That is cheap. Should I be insulted?”
    “Naw, that weren’t about what you was worth; that was about how bush-league Leon is. If Orbin had-a been carrying you ’stead of Leon, he woulda charged ten times that much.”
    I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or worse. “What’s the rest of the answer?”
    “Well, they’s some history between Leon’s people, the sheriff’s people, and Big Jim. Some of it goes way back—some bad blood about fifty, sixty years ago between the Williamses and the Kitchingses.”
    “I might’ve heard something about that. Leon’s grandfather dying in a shootout or a fire at the jail. Is that the thing?”
    “Right. He’d been arrested by Tom’s granddaddy, who was the sheriff way back then.” Williams hadn’t told me that piece of the story. “So if Leon gets a chance to thumb his nose at a Kitchings behind his back, he’s probably gonna do it. Nothing big; he’s just disrespectin’ Tom to feel better about his own self and his people.”
    “And where does Big Jim fit into all that?”
    “Well, he’s got a little history with the Kitchingses, too. He ain’t never quite forgive ’em for standing between him and that girl. And they ain’t never quite forgive him, either, for I don’t know what —maybe just for bein’ a better man than what they are. Sometimes a real good person just rubs you the wrong way, you know?” I nodded; I did know. “Well, Jim—I think he’s that person for the Kitchingses.”
    By now my head had cleared, and my stomach and I seemed to have reached an uneasy truce. I checked my watch; I had been unconscious or asleep for three hours in the truck as the big man kept vigil over me. The afternoon was waning, and my trip to the cave would have to wait. I thanked Waylon for watching out for me, said good-bye, and pulled onto I-40, heading into a blood-red sunset that kept me in mind of fighting cocks and feuding clans all the way back to Knoxville.
    When I got home, I showered and fell into bed. Before drifting off, though, I made up my mind, and dialed the phone number I’d pulled from my Rolodex the day Tom Kitchings pulled a gun on me.

CHAPTER 20
    THE JOHN J. DUNCAN FEDERAL Building is a cube of pink granite and black glass in downtown Knoxville, occupying a unique nexus in the city’s geometry of history, power, and knowledge. On one side it faces the old Tennessee Supreme Court building; on another side it flanks the new Tennessee Supreme Court building (which, for its part, now occupies the old post office…). One corner of the cube backs up to the main public library; the opposite corner has been rounded off to form an entrance, at the corner where the two Supreme Court buildings approach one another. Inside its gleaming granite and glass, the Duncan Building houses three federal agencies that strike fear into the heart of East Tennessee’s assassins, mobsters, and deadbeats: the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Internal Revenue Service.
    Steve Morgan, an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, met me at the building’s entrance and gave me a crushing handshake. Steve was one of my former students. He had majored in criminal justice, but he took enough anthropology to acquire a solid grasp of the human skeleton and the basic techniques of forensic anthropology. He landed a job with the TBI straight out of undergraduate school. “Thanks for helping,” I said as he held the door for me. “Sorry to call you at home on a Sunday night.”
    “No problem,” he said. “Glad you did.” As he led me toward the security checkpoint just inside the main lobby, I noticed a pair of handcuffs on the back of his waist, and I couldn’t help smiling at a memory from Steve’s student days. One of my favorite teaching techniques in Osteology 480—my upper-level bone course—was to place a few bones inside a “black box.” The box was designed to allow students to reach in and touch the bones, but not to see them. The idea was that it’s important to know the bones not just by sight, but quite literally by feel. I still remember the class one April morning—April 1, 1994—when Steve somehow managed to rig a pair of handcuffs inside my black box. The first student to reach inside—an attractive coed to whom Steve had handed the box with mock gallantry—was instantly manacled. To get her out, we had to unscrew the