Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

It was just past three when the officer from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation showed up. Spencer knew that he was a veteran investigator not so much by his age as by the way he approached the area. He introduced himself to Spencer and the doctor.

“Guess I’ll head on home,” said Alton Banner. “Office hours come mighty early. You know where to find me if you need anything. I’ll get a report typed up for you in the morning.”

Spencer thanked him. When he turned to explain the situation to the TBI man, he found the investigator already bending over the body of the young woman. “Oh my,” he said in a calm, conversational tone as he trained the beam of his flashlight across her upper body. “What have you got loose in your neck of the woods, Deputy?”

Spencer was startled by the question. Surely a bear couldn’t have done this? “We’re pretty sure they were killed by a human being, sir,” he said.

The investigator laughed. “Oh, it was a person, all right. I might be willing to debate you over how human he was, though, considering his handiwork. I hate to claim him as part of our species, but, yeah, he’s one of us, all right.”

He had brought a thermos of coffee, and he didn’t even turn away from the bodies while he poured it out and gulped down his first cupful. Then he set down the coffee and surveyed the scene again. “A hard day’s night,” he said with a sigh.

He signed in on the site log and glanced at Spencer’s sketches of the area. “It’ll do,” he remarked to no one in particular. Then he stood up and stretched. “Drink your coffee. Take your time. I’ll have to collect some samples, and then we’ll do the grid work together, okay?”

“Sure. Fine.”

“Have you identified the victims yet?”

“No. I was waiting for you.”

“Maybe we’ll turn up something on the grid work. They’re not local, are they? Look like trail bunnies to me.”

“Hikers. I think so, too,” said Spencer. “I don’t think they were killed because of who they were. I mean, not by anyone they knew.”

“Oh Lord, no,” said the TBI man. “Of course, we’re pissing in the wind at this early stage of the investigation, but in my far-from-humble opinion, this wasn’t a crime. It was a sport. To whoever did this, I mean.”

The crime scene photos were spread across Joe LeDonne’s desk, in the spotlight of his reading lamp, but he barely glanced at them. At the moment, a hamburger in greasy waxed paper was occupying the one spot on the wooden surface not covered with photographs.

“I’ve stared at those pictures until I can see them in my sleep,” he said. “If I got any these days, that is.”

“I thought we’d have solved it by now,” said Martha, setting a cup of cold coffee down untasted. “We’ve put out the word to the informers and talked to everybody within a mile of that field.”

“The lab work will help.”

“Only if we have someone’s blood type and DNA to compare it to.”

“It’s a start.”

“I was so tempted to tell Spencer about it when I took him the mail today, but he still looks awful. The Harkryder case is really getting to him. I don’t think he’s sleeping much.”

“You took him the mail? What about the newspaper?”

Martha smiled. “I took him the Knoxville Journal . I told him I’d forgotten to bring the Record, and I’d try to remember it next time. He doesn’t need anything else to worry about. Besides, there’s nothing he can do about it now. The site investigation is done, the lab work isn’t back, and he’s in no shape to do the legwork of a criminal investigation.”

LeDonne leafed through another folder on his desk: the photocopied files of the Fate Harkryder case. Martha had made a copy before taking the originals to Spencer Arrowood. “I wish we had a murder weapon,” he said, for perhaps the tenth time.

“Well, it isn’t a twenty-year-old knife,” said Martha. “The TBI investigator agrees with Dr. McNeill: the wounds are similar to those in the Trail Murders case, but not identical. He thinks it may be a copycat crime, based on the fact that Fate Harkryder’s case is back in the news.”

“We have Fate Harkryder’s blood type on file somewhere, don’t we?”

“I think so.”

“When the lab work comes back, let’s compare them.”

“It isn’t him,” said Martha. “Riverbend is the best alibi there is.”

LeDonne nodded. “Besides, he’s too old. We’re looking for someone under thirty-five. This kind of violence is a young man’s sickness.”

“I think I’ll drop by the high school tomorrow,” said Martha. “See if anybody wants to talk about the murders.”

Fate Harkryder was thinking about death.

It seemed strange to know that you were going to die when you felt perfectly sound. When he came to consider the matter, it seemed not so much strange as… improbable. Ridiculous to believe that after twenty-odd years of sedentary monotony, the very people who had wished him good morning and to whom he had passed the occasional remark about a basketball game or a change in the weather would come for him, strap him into a plain wooden chair, and kill him.

Strange to think that the ridge he had watched day in and day out for so many years would go on changing from green to gold with the seasons without his presence as the observer. He liked to think that the ridge was there on his account, and he found it hard to believe that his death would go unheeded by his ridge.

Of course, he knew that deep down he didn’t believe in death at all. Not for himself, that is, and certainly not by execution in the state of Tennessee. He was still young and strong. He did push-ups every day for exercise, and despite a twenty-year pack-a-day smoking habit, his lungs and his blood pressure were fine. He trusted his body to keep him around for many more years, and he trusted the Tennessee legal system to spin its wheels for at least that long before they got around to trying to execute him. By then, maybe the voters would abolish the death penalty altogether, and someday, when his crime was so far in the past that nobody cared anymore, he would be granted parole. He intended to be hale and hearty enough to enjoy that freedom when the time came.

Even with lawyers who were mediocre at best, Fate Harkryder had been able to stave off the death penalty for twenty years already. It wasn’t difficult. There was always some objection that could be made in the appeal process, and any little quibble could tie the court up for a year or more, so slowly did the mills of justice grind. His lawyers had argued that his original counsel hadn’t been any good. That fellow was now quite a prominent attorney in Knoxville, but no one seemed to notice the discrepancy, and Fate figured that it was just one of the moves in the game: a formality. Anyhow, it bought him more time. When that objection played itself out a few years down the line, his legal advisers objected to the expert witnesses who had testified at his trial. They had now spent years nitpicking through a stack of transcripts and documents that would fill a pickup truck, but each legal dispute ate up a few more months: filing time, waiting time, court time, awaiting-the-decision time, appealing the decision, and then back to square one to begin again.

Fate sometimes thought that the delaying tactics would go on even if he dropped dead in his cell, so impersonal and relentless was the process. He was not the quarterback in this legal scrimmage; he was the football. It had been years now since anybody had mentioned the names Mike Wilson or Emily Stanton to him. The paperwork just rolled on, oblivious to real time and real people. Sometimes it seemed that the judicial process had taken on a life of its own, independent of any actual, long-ago crime.