The Devil's Bones (Body Farm 3)

By the time I’d walked a mile along the river, it was too dark to see my feet, so when I got to the parking lot by the Indian mound, I followed the gravel up to Cherokee Boulevard. A cinder path ran down the center of the boulevard’s median; mileposts ticked off every quarter mile from the lower end of the street, down by the river, to the stoplight up at Kingston Pike. Just beyond the 1.5-mile mark, the median widened to accommodate a large fountain ringed by grass and a traffic circle. Normally the fountain shot a plume twenty feet into the air, but the drought and water rationing had dried it up, and tonight the fountain’s built-in lights illuminated stained concrete and empty air. Beyond the fountain the boulevard curved away from the river, winding over one low ridge and then up a second to the intersection with Kingston Pike. Old-fashioned streetlamps along the median lighted the cinder path, and I kept walking, past palatial houses whose pediments and even surrounding trees were lit like Hollywood sets.

When I reached Kingston Pike, I turned and retraced my steps, all the way back to the far end of the boulevard, 2.6 miles away. I repeated the circuit twice more-I covered fifteen miles without getting a step closer to peace. But although peace eluded me, fatigue did not. I staggered into my house at midnight, fell onto the bed, and drifted into a fitful sleep, haunted by dreams of Jess’s corpse and Garland Hamilton’s sneering face.

The phone woke me.

“Bill, it’s Jim O’Conner.”

I shook myself awake. “What’s up? Have you got him?” I glanced at the window and saw that it was still dark outside. The digital clock on the nightstand read 4:59. An uneasy feeling grabbed hold of my stomach. “Jim? Is everything okay?”

There was a pause, and the uneasy feeling turned into a knot. “I…I think so, but we’re not sure yet. All hell broke loose up here about an hour ago.”

“What? Tell me.”

“There was a big explosion and a fire. Cabin’s destroyed and the mountain’s on fire. I think Hamilton’s dead.”

“But you don’t know?”

“We can’t get in there to check for a body yet, but I don’t see how anybody could have survived. Couple of the SWAT guys got knocked flat, and they were fifty yards away.”

“Come on, Jim, what would cause a log cabin in the mountains to explode, just as an army of lawmen is about to arrest the guy inside? That can’t be a coincidence.”

“Hang on, hang on.” In the background I heard a crackling voice on a radio, and then I heard O’Conner saying, “You’re sure? Hundred-percent sure?” Then he was talking to me again, his voice racing. “Waylon says he just spotted a human skull. Burned, but definitely a skull, and definitely human.” My emotions felt like they were on some sort of theme-park thrill ride, tumbling headlong up and down and around, faster than I could give names or even meaning to.

After a while I noticed the voice in my ear. “Doc? Are you there?”

“Yeah,” I managed to say. “I’m here. Give me just a minute.” I focused on breathing-slow, deep, steady breathing. The ride slowed, and I felt my adrenaline subside. I also felt my conscious, curious mind start to assert itself. “We’ll need to make a positive identification to be sure it’s him,” I said. “You want me to come up with a team and do that?”

“Well…” O’Conner paused again, this time for longer than before. His voice sounded measured and careful now. “If you’re up to that and feel like you can step back from your personal involvement enough to focus clearly, sure, come on up. But if that’s asking too much, say so and I’ll request some assistance through the TBI or the FBI or the medical examiner’s office over in Memphis. There’s a forensic anthropologist over there that you trained, isn’t there?”

“There is, but I’ll be fine.” I thought of a fire scene I’d worked in West Tennessee a few years before. “Listen, Jim, if you’ve got firefighters there, ask ’em to take it easy with the hoses,” I said.

“Burned bones are very fragile, and the pressure from a fire hose can scatter them all over the place or smash them to bits. Wet ash tends to set up pretty hard, too-like concrete, once it dries. Do what you need to do to keep things safe, but the less water gets to those bones, the better.”

He excused himself, and I heard him relaying that message into a radio.

“Don’t worry about me, Jim. Once I’m there and looking at bones, it’ll be like any other case.”

He didn’t challenge me, but I could tell he wasn’t entirely convinced. Finally he said, “Okay, come on up. Just remember, there’s no shame in asking for help.”

“Okay, deal,” I said. “Listen, leave the bones right where they are. Don’t disturb the scene unless somebody’s safety is in jeopardy.”

“We won’t touch a thing,” O’Conner said. Then he gave me directions to Fish Creek and signed off. As soon as he did, I dialed Miranda’s pager and punched in my home number. It seemed like hours before my phone rang, although the digital clock on the nightstand claimed that only a minute had passed.

“Hey,” said Miranda sleepily, “you okay?” A lot of people seemed to be asking me that question lately.

“I’m okay. Garland Hamilton might be dead. They tracked him to a cabin in Cooke County, and just before they swooped in to arrest him, the cabin blew up and burned down. They say they’ve found an incinerated skull.”

“Holy hand grenade, Batman,” she said. “You think he knew the jig was up? Decided to go out in a blaze of glory?”

“I wish. But that doesn’t seem like his style. He was always so smug and superior, you know?”

She considered this. “That’s true,” she said. “Even when he was wrong, he was sure he was right. Hard to picture him making the ultimate admission of failure. But maybe it wasn’t suicide. Maybe it was an accident.”

“What kind of accident causes a huge explosion?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he was trying to rig some sort of booby trap, and it got away from him.”

“Possible, I guess. Let’s get up there and see what we see. Do you want me to pick you up at your house?”

“No, that’s okay-it’s out of your way. Just meet me on campus. I’ll park down by the bone lab and hope we get back before I get ticketed or towed.”

“Okay. Half an hour?”

“Half an hour.”

Thirty minutes later I turned down the narrow asphalt ramp that led to the base of the stadium. As I rounded one of the pillars holding up the south end-zone stands, I saw the brake lights of a VW Jetta wink out, the dome light switch on, and the door open. Miranda was already clad in a biohazard suit, and the glare of my headlights on the white Tyvek nearly blinded me. I cut the headlights, eased up beside the Jetta by the glow of my parking lights, and opened the passenger door.

“Anybody else going?”

“Nobody from the department.” Normally I took three graduate students into the field with me-one to recover bones, one to record everything we found, and one to shoot photographs-but I didn’t want a whole crew this time. “I’m a little nervous about this,” I said. “I didn’t want to take any of the other students.”