don’t you take charge of it, and I’ll assign Lennie to work with you on it.”
Davidson nodded, and without changing expression went outside and set to work. Later, he admitted to a certain excitement that day.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get charged up on a homicide. Yeah, it was a challenge to me. Any homicide investigator who sees a body laying there and no perpetrator in sight, it’s a challenge.
“A lot of homicides I went to, a man’s standing there with a gun saying, ‘I did it and I’m glad.’ But you get a body that’s been there a couple of days, that’s a challenge, a real one.
“You’ve also got an uneasy feeling. What if you don’t solve it? What if you don’t solve it? That’s there every day. Every minute. That uneasy feeling gets worse, too, as the case drags on.”
6
Daniel Davidson, Jr., was introduced to homicide at age fifteen by his father, the sheriff of Clay County in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. His father took him to a cabin where an old man, an old woman, and their two grown but feebleminded children had been slaughtered over a boundary dispute at their crude supper table while eating corn bread and soup beans (the Kentucky mountain term for pinto beans). Davidson never would forget the sight of the old man’s brains mingled on the plate with his soup beans, but it wouldn’t affect his taste for the beans, one of his favorite foods.
In the thirty years that had passed since, Davidson had been witness to the effects of more murders than he could remember, so many that he needed something to remind him of individual cases. Under his living room coffee table he kept a grisly scrapbook, fat with photographs of victims of murders he had investigated. In it were people who had been shot, stabbed, garroted, hung, scalded, clubbed, hacked, choked, smothered, left out to freeze, run down by vehicles, and otherwise dispatched, often for trivial or inexplicable reasons. He had investigated cases in which a four-year-old girl shot her three-year-old brother, in which neighbor shot neighbor in an argument over a twenty-nine-cent toy, in which brother killed brother over a slice of watermelon. One young couple doused their four-year-old child with boiling water because he cried too much.
Of the scores of murders Davidson had investigated in twenty-seven years with the state police, only two had gone unsolved—and they still nagged him. He’d worked ten years on one of those cases: the asphyxiation of an old mountain storekeeper in a robbery. He knew who did it but couldn’t get proof that would hold up in court. “I did everything, by God, except use voodoo on them sons-a-bitches,” he told colleagues in exasperation.
Solving murders, busting moonshine stills, putting outlaws in jail—all the things his father had done—was the only career Davidson ever considered. In the hills and hollows where he grew up, he knew he’d never face a shortage of work.
Davidson was born on Bullskin Creek near the tiny coal-mining town of Oneida on the South Fork Kentucky River, delivered by frontier nurses, who took medical care to isolated mountain people by Jeep and horseback. His parents divorced when he was five, leaving him to live temporarily with his grandfather, a storyteller of such repute that people came from all over the hills to hear his tall tales (a noted columnist from Louisville, Joe Creason, even came to record some of them for city folk). After his father remarried and settled into a small white house in Oneida, a settlement built around the Oneida Baptist Institute, a school established for mountain children who had no other place to go, Davidson went to live with him. His father had married a teacher, a proper woman named Ima Jean, who not only had a master’s degree but knew the value of etiquette as well as education. She set about transforming the free-spirited mountain boy who loved fishing and frog gigging into a young gentleman who could
Davidson nodded, and without changing expression went outside and set to work. Later, he admitted to a certain excitement that day.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get charged up on a homicide. Yeah, it was a challenge to me. Any homicide investigator who sees a body laying there and no perpetrator in sight, it’s a challenge.
“A lot of homicides I went to, a man’s standing there with a gun saying, ‘I did it and I’m glad.’ But you get a body that’s been there a couple of days, that’s a challenge, a real one.
“You’ve also got an uneasy feeling. What if you don’t solve it? What if you don’t solve it? That’s there every day. Every minute. That uneasy feeling gets worse, too, as the case drags on.”
6
Daniel Davidson, Jr., was introduced to homicide at age fifteen by his father, the sheriff of Clay County in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. His father took him to a cabin where an old man, an old woman, and their two grown but feebleminded children had been slaughtered over a boundary dispute at their crude supper table while eating corn bread and soup beans (the Kentucky mountain term for pinto beans). Davidson never would forget the sight of the old man’s brains mingled on the plate with his soup beans, but it wouldn’t affect his taste for the beans, one of his favorite foods.
In the thirty years that had passed since, Davidson had been witness to the effects of more murders than he could remember, so many that he needed something to remind him of individual cases. Under his living room coffee table he kept a grisly scrapbook, fat with photographs of victims of murders he had investigated. In it were people who had been shot, stabbed, garroted, hung, scalded, clubbed, hacked, choked, smothered, left out to freeze, run down by vehicles, and otherwise dispatched, often for trivial or inexplicable reasons. He had investigated cases in which a four-year-old girl shot her three-year-old brother, in which neighbor shot neighbor in an argument over a twenty-nine-cent toy, in which brother killed brother over a slice of watermelon. One young couple doused their four-year-old child with boiling water because he cried too much.
Of the scores of murders Davidson had investigated in twenty-seven years with the state police, only two had gone unsolved—and they still nagged him. He’d worked ten years on one of those cases: the asphyxiation of an old mountain storekeeper in a robbery. He knew who did it but couldn’t get proof that would hold up in court. “I did everything, by God, except use voodoo on them sons-a-bitches,” he told colleagues in exasperation.
Solving murders, busting moonshine stills, putting outlaws in jail—all the things his father had done—was the only career Davidson ever considered. In the hills and hollows where he grew up, he knew he’d never face a shortage of work.
Davidson was born on Bullskin Creek near the tiny coal-mining town of Oneida on the South Fork Kentucky River, delivered by frontier nurses, who took medical care to isolated mountain people by Jeep and horseback. His parents divorced when he was five, leaving him to live temporarily with his grandfather, a storyteller of such repute that people came from all over the hills to hear his tall tales (a noted columnist from Louisville, Joe Creason, even came to record some of them for city folk). After his father remarried and settled into a small white house in Oneida, a settlement built around the Oneida Baptist Institute, a school established for mountain children who had no other place to go, Davidson went to live with him. His father had married a teacher, a proper woman named Ima Jean, who not only had a master’s degree but knew the value of etiquette as well as education. She set about transforming the free-spirited mountain boy who loved fishing and frog gigging into a young gentleman who could
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