CHAPTER 12
I HAD JUST PARKED my truck outside the loading bay behind UT Medical Center when Miranda stuck her head out the door. “Peggy called,” she said. Peggy was the Anthropology Department’s overworked secretary. “She says Dr. Carter wants you to call her at her office in Chattanooga. ASAP.”
I hurried in, trying to imagine what could prompt the added note of urgency. I came up empty. “Jess, it’s Bill,” I said. “Is something wrong?”
“I just got a call from Nashville,” she said. “From the Board of Medical Examiners.” It was the group weighing the fate-and the medical license-of Dr. Garland Hamilton, the disgraced Knoxville medical examiner whose vacancy she had been filling for weeks now. “Bill, they chickened out. They voted to suspend him for ninety days. From the date of the complaint. The complaint was filed eighty-three days ago. That means in another week, he’s back on the job.”
I groaned. How could they have let him off with such a token punishment? Hamilton’s incompetent autopsy had put a man on trial for a “murder” that hadn’t been committed. It was the sloppiest postmortem examination I had ever seen, and while it was the worst of his lapses, it was by no means the only one. I had testified for the wrongly accused defendant in the “murder” case, and Hamilton had confronted me angrily, even threateningly, outside the court house afterward. But by the time of last week’s licensing hearing, he seemed to have gotten over his animosity; he had shaken my hand, and assured me he bore no hard feelings. Even so, I didn’t relish the idea of having him restored to the position of medical examiner for Knox County and eighteen surrounding counties.
“Well, damn,” I said. “We were just getting used to having a competent ME up this way. I know all the driving between Chattanooga and Knoxville has been hard on you, but we’ll sure miss you.” I hesitated, then added, “
The line fell silent, and I felt panic rising, then she said, “Doesn’t mean we can’t still see each other. Just means we have to find time outside of work.” I felt a rush of relief and hope.
“We’re both smart people,” I said. “We ought to be able to manage that sometimes.”
“Don’t overestimate us,” she joked. We chatted a few more moments, then Jess got paged so we hung up.
Almost the instant I put the handset back in its cradle, the phone rang again. “Hello, this is Dr. Brockton,” I said.
“Bill? Garland Hamilton. Listen, I wanted you to hear this from me. The Board of Medical Examiners voted to put me in the stocks for ninety days, but they gave me credit for time served. So I’ll be back in the office a week from today.”
“Well, I know that must come as good news to you,” I said carefully.
“Oh, I’m dying to get back to work,” he said. “Listen, Bill, I meant what I said the other day. I know we didn’t see eye to eye in that Ledbetter case”-I almost laughed at the understatement; it was like saying George Bush and Al Gore didn’t see eye to eye-“but I hope we can put that behind us and start with a clean page.”
I hesitated. Again I sought refuge in ambiguity. “A clean page would be nice.”
“Great,” he said. “What’d I miss? Any interesting cases come through while I was out?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to brief him on Jess’s work. “Well, I’ve been working on a homicide, but it’s from Chattanooga, so it’s in Jess’s jurisdiction anyhow,” I said. “Other than that, it’s been pretty quiet lately.”
“Glad to hear it. Listen, I won’t keep you. Just wanted to touch base, and let you know I’ll be seeing you next week.”
“Right. Next week. Thanks.”
As I hung up the phone, I felt my heart sink. I wasn’t sure how much of the heaviness was because Garland Hamilton would be coming back soon, and how much was because Jess Carter wouldn’t be.
CHAPTER 13
THE DRIVE FROM KNOXVILLE to Chattanooga passed in a hundred-mile blur of white and fuchsia blossoms. Dogwoods and redbuds both loved sunlight and limestone, so wherever I-75 cut through layers of rock, the highway was lined with enough flowering trees to make Home amp; Garden Television-which was based in Knoxville-and HGTV’s entire army of landscapers and gardeners hang their heads in shame.
As I crested East Ridge and started the swooping S-curve that led down into the valley floor cradling Chattanooga, I replayed the morning’s conversation with Jess, who had called to finalize the arrangements for our research outing.
“I booked you a room at the Marriott downtown,” she had said.
“A hotel room? I need a hotel room?”
“Trust me,” she said, “you won’t want to
But driving back to Knoxville had not been what I’d been thinking about. What I’d been thinking about, and hoping for, was an invitation to spend the night at Jess’s. I tried not to show my disappointment. After all, so far we had exchanged only one kiss. It was a memorable kiss, and I hoped it wouldn’t be the last. Still, it was only one-a pretty meager foundation for a sleepover invitation.
“Ten o’clock seems like a pretty late starting time,” I said.
“Trust me, the party doesn’t really get going until midnight at this place.”
And so it was that I now found myself checking into the Marriott, a sleek tower of black glass, hours before Jess and I were scheduled to visit the nightclub where she hoped we might pick up the trail of her drag-queen murder victim.
I parked in the garage beneath the hotel, checked into my room, and decided to wander down toward the Tennessee Aquarium, one of Chattanooga’s main tourist attractions. I’d brought Jeff ’s boys to the aquarium during their last Christmas break, and the facility’s design had struck me as ingenious. I welcomed the chance for a return visit.
The main building’s exhibits began five or six stories above the entrance level. There, beneath a huge glass pyramid, was a convincing re-creation of a Tennessee mountain rain forest. Technically, the Great Smoky Mountains were classed as a temperate rain forest, which explained the lush vegetation and rushing streams; in the aquarium’s topmost exhibit, mist swirled and water dripped convincingly from trees into streams and pools. Within those streams and pools, brook trout and salamanders and otters darted behind glass walls.
Descending through the aquarium’s series of exhibits, level by level, was like journeying down a river to the sea, through a succession of realistic habitats. Within them dwelled hundreds of species, not just aquatic life but birds and reptiles as well, including one monstrous eastern diamondback rattlesnake, whose body was as thick as my forearm and whose tail sported fifteen rattles, which I counted twice in disbelief. In one tank, two scuba divers were feeding fish by hand; one of the fish-clearly well fed-was a five-foot-long catfish that probably weighed as much as I did. When the fish opened its mouth to feed, its maw looked nearly big enough to engulf the diver’s entire head.
After completing my journey downriver, through the delta, and out into the ocean, I swam outdoors into a steamy southern afternoon-a spring day that felt like high summer. Running along one side of the aquarium’s exterior, from the entrance plaza down the hillside to the Tennessee River, was a cascade of water designed as a tribute to the Cherokee Indians, the first human inhabitants of eastern Tennessee. The cascade originated as trickles of water representing the Trail of Tears, the brutal march that evicted the Cherokees from Tennessee and forced them onto a reservation in Oklahoma. As the water coursed down the hill, it grew in volume, fed by hidden spigots, into a respectable-sized stream, dropping over ledges into shallow pools. Children in shorts and bathing
