One Drop of Blood; A Novel

As the director of the Department of the Army's Central Identification Laboratory, Robert Dean "Kel" McKelvey has made a career solving some of the country's most complex identification cases. The CIL is responsible for identifying all

Thomas Holland is scientific director of the Department of Defense's Central Identification Laboratory.

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Chapter 1 Split Tree, ArkansasF RIDAY, A UGUST 12, 2005 Split Tree was a simple town of great complexity. In the big, wide scheme of things, it had never seemed to rise to the occasion. Even in the boom days before imported cotton had bottomed out the local market, Split Tree hadn't really amounted to much; just a flat, even-tempered, east Arkansas collection of ramshackle that even its most ardent bred-in-the-bone supporters sometimes had to admit was a waste of good dirt. And nowadays it seemed to have even less working in its favor. Dirt was actually the word most appropriately used when you needed something to finish a sentence that started with Split Tree. The whole town was like fine grit in the teeth. Grit and silt and dry, wind-blown floodplain clay.Dirt. In fact, the community gave the impression of having collected about the county courthouse in much the same manner that dirt and cotton lint seem to drift up around a tree stump in the middle of a field -- not organization as much as lazy convenience. Like many southern river towns devoid of troublesome topography, Split Tree was organized like a checkerboard with a baseline that ran straight east to west, from sunup to sundown. The eastern anchor was the three-story red-brick and limestone courthouse, the seat of county political affairs for over 150 years; to the west, on Tupelo Road, was the Bell Brothers Cotton Gin, the seat of gossip and economic business for even longer. Long-fiber cotton was on the wane, and the Dew family -- who'd purchased the Bell gin during the Depression but kept the name out of deference to tradition -- had been forced to expand the business to one of general agricultural supply. It had even started selling Japanese-made tractors with long, funny names, but increasingly it was having a hard time competing against the co-op, and there was a persistent rumor of imminent closure. Split Tree was not a bad town, but somehow it woke up one morning on the wrong side of the century. It was a place where most folks still found it rude to be rude; where the women retained a quiet sense of grace and composure, and men still visited their mothers every Sunday afternoon. The kind of place where people still knew the name of every dog in town. A place where very little seemed to happen, and very little had ever happened. Almost. In the late summer of 1965 Split Tree, Arkansas, hit its high-water mark of excitement when two bodies were found; one black, one white; one identified, one unknown. And as they say in Split Tree, that sort of thing don't happen just any old day. The identified body created the most stir -- at least at the time -- as it proved to be the physical remains of one Leon Jackson, late of Natchez, Mississippi. The unidentified remains certainly caused their fair share of head-scratching, but as Split Tree was a small community and since none of her native sons were known to be missing, conjecturing as to the identity of the unknown body soon subsided into little more than a stray barbershop topic. But Leon Jackson wasn't so easily forgotten, no matter how much some wished that he were. Leonidas Stephen Jackson was either a civil rights martyr or a goddamn Negro that had no business west of the Mississippi River; your particular view depended largely on whether you lived in lowland east Arkansas in the 1960s or wrote for big-city newspapers along the Atlantic seaboard. Regional perspectives aside, the reality was that Mr. Jackson was a would-be civil rights organizer who lacked the physical presence or visceral charisma of a Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King, and even by the most generous historical reckonings, was decidedly second shelf. Which is precisely why he ended up in the floodplain of eastern Arkansas in 1965 rather than Mississippi or Alabama or Georgia or one of the m