mountain through Ketner Gap, which looked every bit as steep as Suck Creek, and appeared to offer few opportunities for a U-turn.
I needn’t have worried. The left turn to Prentice Cooper was well marked, as was another left through a meandering collection of small rural houses. Civilization dropped away fast, though, as soon as I crossed the boundary into the forest. Asphalt gave way to gravel; yards gave way to woods.
I rolled down the windows on the Bronco. The weather was sunny but cool, and the air up here was as crisp and sweet as a good apple.
Suddenly I heard a gunshot. Then another, and another. I hit the brakes, and the Bronco rasped to a stop, enveloping me in a cloud of my own dust. The dust kept me from seeing my assailant coming, but it also hid me from sight, and from aim, so I figured I was no worse off than I’d been.
Just as I was about to back around and hightail it back to civilization, the dust settled and I saw it: RIFLE RANGE, said a brown and white sign pointing down a side road to the right. The direction of the gunshots. Amused and appalled by my paranoia, I wiped a fresh layer of dusty sweat-or was it sweaty dust? — from my forehead and headed south again. Suck Creek Mountain was more plateau than peak, so the road ran surprisingly straight over gently rolling terrain. Two or three miles in, I bisected a cluster of forest ser vice structures, including a fire lookout tower on a rise to the right. “Well, I might be paranoid,” I said out loud, “but at least I’m still on Tower Road.” Then I said, “I might be turning into a guy who talks to himself, though.” After a pause, I added, “Yep. I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that.”
Jess had told me that the body was found just off a Jeep trail near Pot Point. The name had concerned me-in the course of my last case involving a body in a mountainous rural area, I’d learned firsthand that where there were pot patches, there were often booby traps, too, ranging from shotguns with trip wires to poisonous snakes staked out with fishhooks through their tails-so I had asked Jess if “Pot Point” referred to illegal agriculture. “No, I’m pretty sure the name is some historical reference,” she had answered, “but I don’t know the particulars.”
On the little GPS screen, it hadn’t looked far from the forest entrance to Pot Point, but on the ground, it seemed to be taking forever. The road was good, but it was gravel, so my speed rarely topped twenty miles an hour. I perked up when I passed Sheep Rock Road, as that meant I was more than halfway there.
Two miles later, I reached a fork in the road. Tower Road, the main artery through the forest, bore right; Davis Pond Road-my turn-angled left. The terrain became hillier, which meant I was nearing the edge of the plateau. The road began to pitch and curve, and the woods closed in. After an undulating mile, I passed a small pond on the left, and the gravel road suddenly became a dirt road. Then it forked into two smaller dirt roads and I stopped, unsure which way to go. The GPS display showed only one road here, bearing east near the rim of the gorge; my printed topo map showed two roads, roughly parallel, which I assumed were branching from the spot where I’d just stopped: Upper Pot Point Road and Lower Pot Point Road. Unfortunately, the waypoint marking the crime scene was on the GPS, so I couldn’t tell which of the two roads to take.
I pulled out my cellphone to call Jess for clarification, but I wasn’t getting any signal bars. Civilization, or at least cellphone ser vice, had dropped away as I had threaded my way up Suck Creek, and my journey into the forest hadn’t done much to restore either one. I got out of the Bronco and flattened the USGS map across the hood, hoping a side-by-side comparison of the two maps might help. And indeed it did, though not quite as I’d expected. A white Ford 4 ? 4 pickup came slewing off of Upper Pot Point Road; when the driver saw me, he stopped alongside me and rolled down his window. There was a Tennessee Department of Forestry logo on the door of the truck-the tree in the center tipped me off-and the shoulder of the man’s tan shirt bore a patch with the same logo. I caught a brief snatch of country music-“I know you’re married, but I love you still,” wailed a woman-before he switched off the radio and leaned out the window. He was tall and lanky, with curly red hair going to gray, and a short beard that had already gone to white. His face was weathered and ruddy except in the deep crinkles that years of smiling or squinting had etched in it. He glanced at the official logo on the side of the ME’s vehicle, then at me and my map. “You returning to the scene of the crime?” he asked.
“Not returning. Headed there for my first look,” I said. “But I can’t tell from the map whether I want Upper Pot Point Road or Lower.”
“Well, you want Lower Pot Point, but you don’t want it much. Gets kinda rough in spots, but you should be all right in that Bronco. Take your right-hand fork here for about a mile; there’s a turnout just past a little water crossing. Then you got to bushwhack about a hundred yards to the rim trail…” He trailed off, studying me and my navigational aids doubtfully. “Tell you what,” he said, “let me show you the way. If you haven’t been there before, I’m not sure you’ll find it on your own.”
I thanked him, and started folding up the big topo map. “Oh, one other question, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Fire away.”
“Why is it called Pot Point? Does the name refer to marijuana, or Native American artifacts?”
“Neither,” he said. “Back before TVA built Nickajack Dam, there were three big rapids in the river just below that overlook. The one farthest downstream was called the Frying Pan, the middle one was called the Skillet, and the uppermost was called the Boiling Pot. Pretty ferocious, supposedly-there’s a house on the shore there that was built partly from the wreckage of old riverboats. I guess the Boiling Pot must’ve been the biggest, since the overlook is called Pot Point. Me, if I’d been naming the rapids, I’d have called the
“Oh, I got it,” I said. “Yep, that’s a good one, all right.”
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Fire away,” I said.
“The body’s been gone for a week. What are you hoping to find?”
“Couple things,” I said. “Be better to show you than try to explain. You want to hang around and see?”
He checked his watch-it was close to three o’clock, and I could practically see him calculating how long before his workday ended, and subtracting the half hour it would take to drive back to the highway. “It won’t take more than an hour, will it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “And if it does, you can leave me on my own. I was expecting to be out there by myself anyway.”
He put his truck in reverse, cut his wheels sharply, and eased back until his rear bumper nudged a sapling at the edge of the woods. Then he spun the steering wheel to the left and edged forward, narrowly clearing the Bronco’s fender as he turned. Motioning for me to follow him, he idled down the narrowing dirt track.
The road was a fresh reddish brown cut through the woods, a wound whose edges had not yet healed; its newness explained why it hadn’t shown on the GPS map. Rutted clay alternated with stretches of tan sand and exposed sandstone. After several minutes, we bumped across a rocky little stream, then the pickup nosed into a cut in the treeline where the bulldozer that carved the road had shoved a pile of dirt and roots twenty feet into the woods. The F-150 pulled far enough forward to allow me room behind him, and we got out.
A crisscrossing of knobby tire tracks testified to a spate of recent traffic here, but otherwise, there was no hint that a crime scene lay nearby. “I’m mighty glad I ran into you,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d have found this on my own. Probably not.”
“Glad to do it,” he said. “Gives me an excuse to get out of the truck and walk in the woods on a nice day. Name’s Gassoway, by the by. Clifton. Call me Cliff.”
“Cliff, I’m Bill Brockton. I’m a forensic anthropologist from UT-Knoxville.” We shook hands.
“Are you the one with all the bodies?”
“That’s me,” I said. “Some folks collect antiques; I collect corpses.” I glanced back at the Bronco, considering whether to show him the contents of the cooler in the rear floorboard, but decided that might be too much, too soon. “Lead on.”
We followed the small stream for a short distance; there was no clearly defined path, but the leaves and underbrush looked recently trampled. After a hundred yards or so, we intersected a well-worn trail marked by blazes of white paint on tree trunks every so often. He turned right, and I followed. “Looks like we’re not as far off the beaten path as I’d thought,” I said.
“We’re near the southern end of the Cumberland Trail,” he said. “It’s still a work in progress, but eventually it’ll stretch three hundred miles along the Cumberland Plateau, clear up to Kentucky. We don’t get as many hikers as sections a little farther north-Fiery Gizzard and Devil’s Staircase and the Big South Fork have some spectacular scenery-but I like seeing the river gorge here.”
