The Devil's Bones bf-3

by Jefferson Bass

  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.”

  “Oh, I see,” Miranda said. “Just take the expendable one. Nice.”

  “No,” I said, “the indispensable one. I’ve dragged Art out of a deep sleep, too. He’s not as swift on the osteology as a grad student, but he’s faster with a gun if need be.”

  “Isn’t that whole mountainside going to be crawling with cops?”

  “Probably. But I’ll feel better knowing one of them’s Art.”

  I threaded the truck back up to Stadium Drive, then along Neyland Drive toward downtown and KPD headquarters. The big downtown bridges loomed above us-the Henley Street Bridge with its graceful arches, then the sharp triangular trusses of the Gay Street Bridge. The night was warm and still, and the river was smooth except for gentle swirls and eddies created by currents unspooling over ledges and hollows and other secret shapes deep beneath the surface. The dark, flat water caught the harsh streetlights on the bridges
, melted and smeared it into pools and streaks of gold and orange, like fireworks in slow motion. I slowed to take it in, and Miranda said softly, “Mmm, it is beautiful, isn’t it? Strange that such beauty and such evil can exist side by side in this world, isn’t it?” I didn’t answer. But it didn’t matter, because she didn’t really expect me to.

  Passing under the Gay Street Bridge, we curved away from the river and away from the beauty, winding up a concrete gully of a ramp to Hill Avenue and KPD headquarters. The acre of asphalt out front did nothing to soften the glare of the sodium-vapor lights standing sentinel; if anything, the asphalt seemed tuned somehow to reflect and amplify the harshness of the orange lights. Art’s Crown Victoria was idling in the least bright corner of the lot, which is to say the only corner that didn’t make me long for my sunglasses. As he got out of the car, I saw that he was wearing a nine-millimeter pistol at his waist-and I suspected he had more firepower strapped to one ankle, or even to both.

  Art squeezed into the cab beside Miranda, and we sped east on I-40 toward Cooke County.

  O’Conner had told me to follow River Road for three miles after getting off I-40, then look to the right and follow the flames. He hadn’t been exaggerating; I could see the glow on the horizon even before we got off the interstate, the flames curling up the hillside and disappearing into roiling smoke, like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. I half expected to see demons and damned souls writhing amid the flames. The gravel road snaking upward into the fire zone was blocked by a Cooke County Sheriff’s vehicle, a black-and-white Jeep Cherokee that I remembered getting carsick in once, during a case a year or so before. The vehicle’s light bar was strobing, and the blue lights shot solid-looking beams into the pooling smoke.

  I cut my headlights, pulled to a stop alongside the SUV, and got out. As I approached, the driver’s window slid down. “Hello,” I said into the dark interior, “I’m Dr. Bill Brockton. Sheriff O’Conner asked me-”

  I was interrupted by what sounded like rolling thunder or the growl of a bear. “Hey there, Doc,” rumbled a deep voice from inside the vehicle. “Jim sent me down here to meet y’all.”

  “Waylon!” In spite of my anxiety, I felt myself smile.

  A massive, shaggy head loomed out of the window toward me, the coarse beard split by a crooked grin. “I heard a little something about what-all you been rasslin’ with, so I didn’t take it personal. ’Sides, we ain’t exactly been beatin’ a path to your doorstep neither. I reckon maybe we’ll forgive you.” He eyed my truck, then trained a blinding spotlight from the SUV through the passenger window. “Is that Art and Miss Miranda in there? Howdy!” he bellowed. “Good to see y’all!” Inside the truck, Art and Miranda shielded their eyes with one hand and waved the other in the general direction of Waylon and his searchlight.

  Waylon-I’d never heard a last name for him-was a mountain man in every sense of the term. A hulking, homespun fellow who had heedlessly put me in harm’s way and also selflessly saved my hide during a series of Cooke County adventures, Waylon had recently traded an outlaw’s life for a lawman’s uniform. “How you like being on this side of the law, Waylon?”

  He chuckled. “Hmm. Verdict on that ain’t in yet. Me and Jim’s had our work cut out for us, that’s for damn sure. Some of my own kinfolks ain’t on speakin’ terms with me no more. But mostly it feels like we’re doin’ some good. Clearing out some of the nastiest vermin, leastwise. I tell you, though, Doc, I sure do miss them cockfights since we shut down the pit.” He frowned about the loss of what had been Cooke County’s favorite spectator sport, but then the ragged smile returned, even broader, and I thought I saw a few flecks of chewing tobacco wedged between blue-lit teeth. “Hey, I delivered a baby last week, Doc, in the backseat of this-here Jeep. Lady called in a panic, said her husband weren’t home and the baby was a-comin’. Her and me was haulin’ ass for town with the siren on when she started hollerin’ that she couldn’t wait no more-she got to push right now. So I pulled off on the shoulder, and she popped a little baby boy right out in my hands. Named the little feller Waylon. That made me right proud.”

  “That makes me proud, too, Waylon. You keep up the good work. Say, you think maybe we can get up this road without melting the tires or blowing up the gas tank?”

  “Oh, sure, Doc-didn’t mean to keep you here jawin’. You’ll be all right up there. Ever’thin’s kindly burned itself out right around the cabin. What used to be the cabin anyways. Fire’s still climbin’ the ridge behind it, but it’ll stop when it gets to the bluffs up top. Go on up-I’ll radio Jim you’re here.”

  I thanked Waylon, got back into the truck, put it in gear, and began idling up the gravel. The road meandered through what looked, in the headlights, to be stands of tulip poplars and hemlocks; twice it forded a small stream, making me glad I was driving a truck instead of some low-slung sports car. Finally, after a mile that seemed like several, we emerged into a clearing. In the glare of headlights, work lights, and the red and blue strobes of a dozen fire trucks and police cars, the smoke that still hung in the air looked thick as water. The ruins of the cabin still smoldered, and as I got out of the truck, I felt a blast of heat radiating from the splintered and charred debris. A burned vehicle was parked in front of the burned structure, a thread of smoke still curling up from it to join the larger pall of smoke hanging over the whole area.

  Jim O’Conner’s short, wiry frame emerged from a cluster of deputies and firefighters to greet us. He looked tired, worried, and chagrined. “What a mess,” he said, shaking my hand. “So much for my optimistic prediction about how easy it would be.”

  “Any idea what set things off?”

  O’Conner shook his head. “As best we can tell, the explosion came first, then the fire. The blast blew off part of the roof-you can see some pieces of burned trusses and joists over there,” he said, pointing to an area halfway between the cabin and some smoldering tree trunks. “But the fire started right away, and it built fast.” O’Conner checked his watch, then checked the sky.

  “Should be sunup pretty soon now,” he said. “You want to go ahead and get started or wait for daylight?”

  I looked up and thought I saw a hint of paleness. “Might as well wait,” I said. “It’s gonna be hard to see the bones in broad daylight, let alone in the dark. If Hamilton’s in there, he’s not gonna get any deader if we wait an hour.” I was recycling my jokes, I realized as I said it, but it was new to O’Conner, and the sheriff laughed-a touch ruefully, I thought, but at least he laughed.

  The cabin was big, or had been, before its decimation-more like a log home than a weekend getaway. O’Conner said it had two stories aboveground, plus a basement dug into the ground. Now all that remained standing were the basement’s concrete-block walls and most of the stone chimney, whose massive fireplaces could probably have roasted a whole pig on each of the house’s three levels.

  O’Conner pointed toward the basement fireplace with the beam of a four-cell flashlight. “Over there, about six feet straight out from the hearth, is where Waylon saw a skull.” I looked, and I saw broken pottery and what appeared to be a pair of charred tree branches, but the more I studied their odd symmetry, the more unlike branches they appeared-and the more like burned antlers from some hunting trophy that had hung over the mantel. Then-tucked down amid the antlers-I glimpsed a familiar rounded shape, with two dark ovals tunneling into it. A skull, unmistakably human. “Miranda?” She turned from her own survey of the floor and looked at me, as did Art. “Over there, under those antlers.” Her gaze tracked mine.

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s not something you see every day. Like an interspecies hunting trophy.”

  The blaze had completely consumed the staircases inside the house; to get to the basement floor, we’d need to clamber down a ladder. I asked for the ladder to be lowered into a corner near the fireplace, which was centered at one end of the building.

  While waiting for full daylight, we unloaded the truck, suited up in disposable Tyvek
coveralls, and staged our gear at the top of the ladder-trowels, rakes, shovels, wire screens, and paper evidence bags. Once we were ready and the light was bright, I nodded to O’Conner, and we began. One of the begrimed firemen descended first, then steadied the ladder for Miranda, Art, O’Conner, and me.

  As soon as I got down, I noticed oddly bright bits of color amid the gray and black world of ashes and embers at my feet. Crouching, I sifted through the ash to extract one of the bits-a thin, ragged thread of metal, reddish orange in color, about six inches long. It had drooped up and down to follow the slight contours of the debris beneath it, but viewed from above, it ran in a straight line. Instinctively I looked up, though there was nothing to see now except the pale morning sky in place of the joists that had burned and the copper wiring that had melted and dripped.

  “Any idea what the melting point of copper is?” O’Conner’s question echoed my own thoughts.

  “I was just trying to remember,” I said. “Pretty hot. Somewhere around a thousand degrees, I think.”

  The firefighter who had come down to hold the ladder for us spoke up. “I think it’s a lot more than that. Hell, lead melts at something like six hunnerd, and copper’s a lot tougher than lead.”

  “Oh, sorry, I was talking Celsius,” I said. “A thousand Celsius would be, let’s see, close to two thousand Fahrenheit.”

  The firefighter nodded. “Sounds more like it. Only other time I seen melted wiring was in a paint-store fire. Way all them solvents went up-lacquer thinner, turpentine, acetone, oil-base paints, what have you-you’d’ve thought it was the world’s biggest case of arson. Weren’t, though. Just a accident.”