The Devil's Bones bf-3

by Jefferson Bass

  “I climbed on top of one of the shelves-that one right there,” she said, pointing to a rack halfway toward the back of the lab.

  “I figured that in the dark he might not find me up there. I could hear him going up and down the rows, stopping to listen for my breathing. Finally he walked toward the door, and I thought he was leaving. But then the lights came on.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “I knew he’d see me with the lights on, so I decided to try climbing out that little window up there.”

  “You’re brilliant,” I said. I’d completely forgotten about the windows. Set high into the side and back walls of the bone lab were a few small windows, each measuring about two feet high by three feet wide. They led not to the outside of the stadium but to its deepest labyrinthine recesses-the catacombs at the very base of the stands.

  “It’s true what they say about fear and adrenaline,” she said.

  “It took the strength of ten graduate assistants to slide that window open through forty years of gunk.” She flexed a muscle, and both the EMTs laughed. “Anyway, when I dropped down the other side my foot caught something, and I rolled my ankle pretty hard. I figured I was in real trouble at that point, but then I heard the sirens coming, and I heard him running out of the lab and up the stairwell. And here I am, and here are all of you. And jeepers, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did a little of both. “Thank God you’re okay,” I said. “Let’s get you to the ER and get that ankle X-rayed.”

  “Good grief, I don’t need an X-ray,” she scoffed. “You think I don’t know if my ankle is broken?”

  “She’s only measured a zillion ankles,” said the head EMT, earning a laugh from her.

  Miranda used her right foot to kick the sheet off her left leg. The EMTs already had the ankle immobilized in a strap-on boot; cold packs surrounded her foot and lower leg. “If you can just pull a string or two,” she said, “and get me in to see one of the football team’s physical therapists tomorrow, I’ll be fine in a couple of days.”

  “I think I can arrange that,” I said, and turned to the EMTs.

  “Can you let her go now, or do you have to take her to the hospital since you’re already here?”

  “I’d advise an X-ray,” said the lead EMT, “but no, we’re not going to force her to get treatment against her will, if she’s competent to refuse it.”

  “She’s one of the most competent people I know,” I said.

  He shrugged and went out to the ambulance, returning with a long form, in triplicate, requiring multiple signatures. She handed the forms back, and he glanced over them.

  “This 974 phone number here,” he said. “Is that…?”

  “That’s the number here in the lab,” she said. She hopped down from the gurney onto her good leg, then hobbled over to the desk and sat on the edge, tapping the phone with a finger.

  “You want to put your other number-home or cell number-here beside it? Just in case?”

  “Just in case what-my foot falls off when I get home?”

  He turned bright red, then mumbled, “I guess maybe this one’s enough.” He gave her a few unnecessary instructions on caring for a sprain, wished her a speedy recovery, and then retreated, trailing his gurney, his colleague, and his shredded dignity behind him.

  “‘Just in case’ he wanted to ask you out,” I said once he was gone. “You sure shut him down fast.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Kind of a shame-he was cute. But that was a test, and he flunked. If he doesn’t have the moxie to answer that in front of an audience, he doesn’t have enough moxie to deal with me.”

  “You could be right,” I said. “Hey, you ever tried speed dating?”

  She snorted. “Naw. Waste of time. I just fast-forward straight to speed rejection.”

  I laughed. “If you ever get tired of anthropology, I think you should write a relationship self-help book. Smart Women, Foolish Men or some such.”

  The campus police officers were standing around aimlessly, so I hoped maybe we could call it a night. “You guys gonna call a KPD forensic team to come get a swab of that?”

  “They’re already on the way,” he said. “Should be here in a couple of minutes.”

  “Do you need me to stay around and lock up once they’re done?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “We’ve got keys, so we can lock up. We can also call the physical plant people, get them to replace the glass in the morning.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said. “Can you ask them if they’ve got wire-reinforced security glass, or bulletproof glass, to make sure this kind of thing can’t happen again?”

  He nodded, and then I saw him looking at the bank of big windows across the front of the lab.

  “I should probably give them a call, too,” I said. “Talk to them about some bars for those front windows.”

  “I’d say that’s a good idea,” he said.

  I looked at Miranda, realized what a close call she’d had.

  “Wish I’d thought of that sooner,” I said.

  “You can’t think of everything,” Miranda said. “If he hadn’t gotten in, he might have just been waiting for me outside. Point is, I’m fine.”

  “That’s part of the point,” I said. “Another important part is to keep you fine.”

  I offered Miranda my guest room for the night, partly because I was worried about her safety and partly because I feared she’d have trouble getting around with a badly sprained ankle.

  “Not a chance,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said. “I’ve got no designs on you.”

  “I know,” she said, “and I couldn’t take the disappointment.” Then she turned serious. “Actually, I figure you’re the next item on this guy’s to-do list. He was probably looking for you when he came down here in the first place. I was just the consolation prize.”

  A thought struck me suddenly. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I suspect you’re his new favorite.” When I quoted the line from the card on the flowers, the color drained from her face. Then she shook her head fiercely.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going to think that way. I don’t want to spend every moment looking over my shoulder, expecting some pervert or creep to be there.”

  “Then don’t,” I said. “But at least keep some pepper spray handy.”

  “I have some in the nightstand.”

  I drove Miranda home and helped her up the stairs and into her house. “I’ve never seen your house before,” I said. “It’s charming.”

  “You’ve never seen the inside,” she said pointedly. She saw the look of shame on my face, and she laid a hand on my arm. “It’s okay,” she said, and those two simple words of understanding and forgiveness were among the most profound and generous things anyone had ever said to me. I wrapped my arms around Miranda and gave her a bear hug, probably as tight as the one the UT police officer had given me outside the bone lab. After a moment she tapped me on the back, so I let go.

  “I might need to go to the ER now,” she said. “I think you just fractured half my ribs.”

  “God, you’re something,” I said. “What would I do without you?”

  “You’d find somebody else,” she said. “The world’s full of brave, brilliant women. Hell, graduate school’s full of brave, brilliant women.”

  “I don’t think there’s another one like you out there,” I said.

  “Good night, Miranda.”

  “Night, Dr. B.”

  She closed her door. I waited at the bottom of the steps until I heard the dead bolt snick shut, and then I went only as far as my truck. I reclined the seat a few inches, rolled down the windows so I could hear, and passed the night in an uneasy vigil outside her house.

  CHAPTER 22

  AIM FOR THE HEAD, I REMINDED MYSELF AS I LINED up the sights. The center of the head-the surest kill. The gun felt solid in my hand, more solid than I felt within myself. As I took aim at the s
hadowy figure, I hoped I could borrow a bit of steadiness from the heavy weapon in my right hand. Sweat trickled down my forehead, pooling in my eyes and clouding my view, and I squinted to squeeze it out. Focus. Center of the head. Don’t rush your shot. My finger tightened against the trigger. Could I really shoot Garland Hamilton? Don’t forget what he tried to do to you, I told myself, yet still I hesitated. Don’t forget what he did to Jess, and what he might have done to Miranda. It was Hamilton, I felt sure, who’d attacked Miranda-the police had interviewed both Latham and Garcia, and had found their arms uninjured-so that left Hamilton the likely source of the assault and of the flowers that had preceded it. That did it. I pictured Jess’s body tied obscenely to another corpse, and Miranda laid out on the gurney, and the gun jumped in my hand as I yanked the trigger. “Die, you son of a bitch,” I hissed, “die.” I fired again and again, until the gun had nothing left to fire. My arm dropped to my side. I was trembling, I realized, and tears were streaming down my face.

  “Press,” said a voice behind me. “Press. If you jerk the trigger, you jerk the gun. And if you jerk the gun, you miss the target. And if you miss the target, you end up getting shot.”

  I turned. Steve Morgan and a TBI firearms instructor-John Wilson-stood together just behind my lane of the KPD firing range. True to his word, Morgan had gotten a permit for me to carry a weapon, and he’d even loaned me one of his own spares, a nine-millimeter Smith amp; Wesson. The permit apparently hadn’t been too difficult to arrange, since I already carried a TBI badge as the bureau’s forensic-anthropology consultant. The bigger hurdle, it appeared, would be qualifying with the gun. To qualify, I’d have to shoot with an accuracy of 70 percent-that is, 70 percent of my shots had to strike the kill zone, the smaller shaded areas within the upper chest and head of the target, a thuglike male outline whose right hand pointed a pistol directly at me.

  Morgan, Wilson, and I walked the thirty feet to the target to see what damage I’d done. It wasn’t much. I’d yanked off eight shots. The paper had just three holes in it, and two of those lay outside the lines of the body: Only one of my eight shots would actually have hit Garland Hamilton if this had really been him. That one shot, though, pierced the shaded area of the head, just left of the target’s midline, in what would have been the region of the right nostril.

  Morgan pointed to it. “Doc,” he said encouragingly, “if that was your first shot, he’d be a dead man.”

  “Actually, that was his first shot,” said Wilson. “His barrel crept up a little higher after every shot, which is why these two other hits are above the head. Those last five shots probably landed somewhere up in Kentucky.”

  “Well, here’s hoping Garland Hamilton was walking around in southern Kentucky just now,” I said.

  “If you can just remember to press the trigger instead of yanking it and remember to keep the sights lined up, you’ll nail this by the end of the day.”

  I had my doubts, but Wilson was right. After unloading that first, emotional magazine, I managed to separate myself from the issues of life and death and vengeance and instead to immerse myself in the physics of shooting a gun and acquiring a feel-a muscle memory, Wilson called it-for the precise amount of force needed to trip the trigger, and the slight lowering of the barrel required to realign the sights after each jump of the barrel. Over the course of three sweat-soaked hours, I fired nearly three hundred rounds. My forearm and shoulder ached from holding the two-pound weapon aloft at arm’s length, but I qualified.

  If I were taking aim at Garland Hamilton, would I be able to hang on to my newly acquired muscle memory-remain calm and focused as I pressed precisely and grouped my shots into his head? I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know whether to hope I’d get the chance to find out-or to pray I didn’t.

  CHAPTER 23

  BURT DEVRIESS HAD BEEN RIGHT. HIS PHONE HAD started ringing the day the crematorium scandal first aired on CNN, and it had scarcely stopped. Some of the calls came from people who wondered what was really in that fancy urn or that plain box they’d gotten back from the crematorium. Others came from reporters who sought (and got) punchy quotes-some of them from Nephew Burt, grieving over the indignity done to Aunt Jean, some from Counselor DeVriess, crusading for justice, or at least for millions in restitution.

  It didn’t seem to matter-to Burt, to prospective clients, or to legions of reporters-that he’d never before practiced anything but criminal defense. Nor did it actually matter to the Tennessee Bar Association. “Tennessee does not certify attorneys in specific areas of the law,” read the disclaimers on countless television commercials and phone-book ads. “The law is the law,” Burt had thundered when one reporter asked about the sudden, sharp switchback in his career path. Somehow that slick bit of fancy footwork got transformed into the story’s headline and then into the slogan of Burt’s campaign to bring the funeral industry to its knees. The truth was, if Burt had chosen to hang out his shingle in a small town somewhere in the hills-Jonesport, for instance-he’d have been forced to piece together a living out of whatever cases walked through his door, be they criminal defense, civil suits, wills and estates, prenups, or divorces. It was only because he’d been so spectacularly successful that Grease had gotten pigeonholed as a defense attorney. Burt was wearing, I supposed, a version of golden handcuffs. No reason he shouldn’t trade them for a platinum pair, if he wanted to; Burt’s greatest talent, in fact, was generating large amounts of news coverage and revenue. A big class-action contingency suit, particularly one as juicy as this, would generate copious quantities of coverage. And the revenue stream might well rival the Tennessee River at flood stage-and keep flowing strong for years to come.

  It wasn’t long, I noticed, before the rising tide started lifting my own academic boat. I had gotten involved with the crematorium mess when Burt had sent me the urn that should have contained Aunt Jean’s knees but didn’t. We now knew there were hundreds more Aunt Jeans and Uncle Bobs and Mamas and Daddies out there-hundreds more bogus sets of cremains sitting on mantels, and possibly thousands of additional, legitimate urns that people suddenly suspected, and would continue to suspect, until someone proved the contents to be authentic.

  That someone, at least for Burt’s new clients, turned out to be me. Chloe began sending me packages almost daily; one day, in fact, I got three packages. The outer containers ranged from plain cardboard boxes to intricately carved wooden or brass chests, but the contents seldom varied, at least when the cremains hailed from Georgia. The twist-tied plastic bags from Trinity Crematorium nearly always contained the same mix of powder, sand, and pebbles I had found in Aunt Jean’s supposed cremains-a mixture, it turned out, remarkably similar in composition to Quikrete concrete mix. The day I got the three packages, I called Burt’s office to tease Chloe.

  “Too bad I can’t keep this material,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about pouring a patio in the backyard, and you’ve sent me enough Quikrete this week to pave half an acre.”

  Mine was not the only professional boat bobbing on the tide; my colleagues in Chemistry and Geology and even Forestry were helping analyze the mixtures from Georgia. Burt’s class-action suit was headed for trial, and he’d named a long list of defendants. First on the list, of course, came the crematorium and its owners. But I’d seen where the Littlejohns lived, and they didn’t look rich. The real prize, the mother lode Burt planned to mine for millions, was the list of funeral homes that had done business with Trinity. The funeral homes carried liability insurance, and the coverage typically ran to a million dollars or more per case. On paper, at least, that added up to a jackpot of more than $300 million. If Burt’s class-action suit could land the entire sum, his 30-percent contingency would be worth $90 million. The insurance companies were starting to sweat, and they’d already sent a few settlement feelers in Burt’s direction. Their initial offers were low, and Burt had rejected them swiftly, indignantly, and quotably-at a press conference that made page one of every newspaper in the Southeast, as well a
s several national network newscasts. “We seek the full measure of justice for these families who have suffered so much,” said Burt, in a voice that would have done a Baptist preacher proud. “We will not rest until their pain has been heard, their wounds have been healed, and their wrongs have been set right.” He’d paused to let the words sink in, and the television camera zoomed in for a close-up. When it did, I’d have sworn I saw a solitary tear trickle down his cheek, right on cue. God, the man was amazing.

  On the heels of that press conference, the consortium of insurance companies added another zero to the string of digits they were offering Burt to settle. He rejected that offer as well and readied for trial. He planned to call me to testify that the cremains I’d examined were not purely human bone, and I was ably qualified to do that. What I was not qualified to do, under the constraints of what was known in legal circles as the “Daubert rule,” was to testify about the actual composition of the bogus cremains. I could testify that the mixture appeared to contain sand, cement powder, and pebbles, but it would take Daubert-qualified experts-Ph.D.-packing geologists and chemists-to verify that the sand was indeed sand, the cement was bona fide cement, and the pebbles really were pebbles. Funding this small army of experts would whittle down Burt’s big bonanza, but not by much. In the first ten days after Burt started reeling in clients, I examined twenty-three sets of cremains. Of the twenty-three, the ten oldest cases were legitimate-for a while, up until a year or two earlier, the crematorium seemed to have done a decent job-but thirteen were problematic, containing the same odd mixture of human bone, animal bone, and Quikrete. Most of them weighed about half what they should have, judging by my regular trips out to East Tennessee Cremation, where Helen Taylor had graciously allowed me to come weigh cremains on a regular basis-using the new postal scale that had mysteriously appeared on my desk one day after my third unauthorized use of Peggy’s scale.

  I invoiced Burt $6,900 for the twenty-three examinations. Burt notified the insurance companies he’d added another $13 million in liability claims for the thirteen bogus cremains, plus half a million apiece for the ten legitimate cremains-compensation for the pain and suffering incurred by families whose faith had been shattered by the revelations about the crematorium’s shocking practices.