The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  She carried the bucket to a workbench along one wall of the building and tipped out the contents onto a workbench there. Next she grasped a U-shaped handle, which was attached to a block of metal a few inches square. With it she began crushing the bones, almost as if she were making mashed potatoes. After reducing the bones to pieces no more than an inch or two at the biggest, she dragged the block back and forth through the bone fragments. Soon its sides and bottom bristled with industrial-strength metal staples, and I realized it was a magnet.

  “Where’d all those staples come from?”

  “The bottom of the shipping container,” she said. “The sides and top are cardboard, but the bottom is plywood, stapled to the cardboard.”

  “Makes sense to use plywood,” I said. “You don’t want the bottom getting soggy and letting the body fall out.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t think about that, but you understand because you’ve seen what happens when bodies start to decompose.”

  “Doesn’t take more than a day or two for fluids to start leaching out,” I agreed. “You fish out the staples so they don’t go back to the family?”

  “That,” she said, “and so they don’t dull the blades of the processor. I’ll show you that in a minute.” She stirred around a bit more, snagging a zipper and a few buttons. “Here you go, a Cracker Jack prize,” she said. She fished out a short metal bracket drilled with four holes, a scorched screw threaded through each hole. “She must have had a plate in her arm or leg,” she said.

  “Do you get a lot of orthopedic hardware?”

  “More and more, seems like.”

  “As the Baby Boomers start to die off,” I said, “I bet you’ll see even more. All those joggers and tennis players and downhill skiers going in for new parts. What do you do with stuff like that?”

  “We bury it,” she said, “unless the family asks for it.”

  “So if somebody had a pair of artificial knees and the family wanted them, you’d send ’em back?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. She took a hand broom and swept the crushed bones into a small mound, then unhooked a large metal dustpan from a peg above the workbench. Bracing the bone fragments with the broom, she slid the dustpan underneath, scooping nearly everything into it with one quick, efficient push. Then she slid it backward about a foot and carefully swept the remaining dust into it.

  At the left-hand end of the workbench was a large metal pot, the size and shape of a restaurant kitchen’s stockpot. “This is the processor,” she said. “You see the blades there in the bottom?” I looked into the vessel and saw a thin, flat bar attached to a bolt at the center. The pot was roughly fifteen inches in diameter; the bar reached about halfway to the sides of the pot. Both ends of the bar had shorter bars attached to what appeared to be bearings or pivots. “If you flip that switch, you’ll see how it works.” She nodded toward a toggle on the wall just above the container. I flipped it up, and the blades jolted into motion. I caught a brief glimpse of the shorter bars flipping outward toward the rim, and then the whole whirling assembly disappeared, the way an airplane propeller disappears at full throttle. I flipped the switch off, and the blades spun down, the centrifugal force keeping the shorter bars extended until the assembly coasted to a stop.

  “That blade assembly looks like what I feel when I jam my hand down into my garbage disposal to untangle the dishrag,” I said, giving an involuntary shudder. “You could sure lose a hand in there fast.” She nodded again, then tipped the dustpan into the pot. She started an exhaust fan above the processor, then switched on the blades. A plume of dust eddied upward as the blades chewed through the chunks of bone, sending a swirl of powder and small bits of bone up the sides of the vessel. After a half minute or so, she switched off the motor, and the pulverized material settled, the blades sending smaller and smaller waves spinning through the powder as they slowed. She grasped the two handles of the pot, gave a twist to release it from the central shaft that came up from the motor underneath, and hoisted the pot up to the workbench. Then she tipped it into another hopper, this one emptying into a bag of clear, heavy plastic that was cinched to its spout. She tapped the side of the hopper to coax the last bit of powder to fall, then unhooked the bag, dropped in a small metal identification tag, and sealed the bag with a twist tie.

  “Where does the tag come from?”

  “I make those here,” she said. “Each body gets an ID number, which goes in the file and on this tag.”

  “Just like at the Body Farm,” I said. “You’ve got a good system here.”

  “Well, I’ve had twenty years to work out the kinks,” she replied, laughing.

  The bag was already inside a black plastic container, measuring about six inches by eight inches wide and eight or ten inches tall. She folded down the box’s plastic lid and snapped it shut.

  “Could I ask one more favor?”

  “Sure,” she said. “What?”

  “Would you mind if I took the bag out and weighed it?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  Before leaving the Anthropology Department, I’d borrowed the postage scale from Peggy’s supply closet. I was curious to see how the cremains I’d received from Burt DeVriess compared in weight to those from the crematorium. Burt’s Aunt Jean had weighed barely three pounds. These cremains tipped the scales at nearly twice that. I commented on the difference to Helen. “Well, this gal was pretty good-sized,” she said. “Big-boned, as large people like to say.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “The heavier you get, the stronger your bones have to be just to carry your body weight. Bones are like muscles—the more you challenge ’em, the stronger they grow.”

  She smiled. “I like that analogy. Like muscles.”

  “A little bit longer-lasting, though,” I said. “Especially when there’s fire involved.”

  I thanked Helen for the help and headed back to UT. When I got back to the office, I looked again at the cremains Burt DeVriess had sent me. With the comparison fresh in my mind, I was struck more than ever by how wrong they looked. The bone fragments were too big and splintered. The granular part was too grainy. The powder was too fine. And those pebbles—they were just plain wrong. I’d known it from the moment I saw them; now, somehow, I took them as a personal affront. With the tip of a pencil, I stirred the mixture, frowning, thinking about various tests I could use to determine what precisely was in this urn besides, or instead of, Burt’s Aunt Jean.

  The phone rang. “Dr. B.?”

  “Yes, Peggy?”

  “You haven’t seen my postage scale, have you?”

  Damn—it was on the corner of my desk, where I’d set it and promptly forgotten it upon walking into my office.

  “I need to mail Kate Spradley’s bound copy of her dissertation to her down in Pensacola, and I can’t find the scale to weigh it.”

  “I’ll look around and see if I spy it anywhere,” I said.

  “Would you like me to pick up one for you next time I’m at Office Depot, Dr. B.?”

  “Whatever would I need with a postage scale, Peggy?”

  “Heaven only knows,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.”

  When I hung up, I made a mental note to stop by the men’s room on my way to her office. If I was lucky, the electric hand dryer would have enough oomph to blow away the coating of human dust from the crematorium.

  I wished it could also dispell the layers of dread and fear that had settled over my heart since Garland Hamilton’s escape.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE PHONE RANG AND I GRABBED FOR IT, HOPING IT was Art—or a reporter, or anyone–calling to tell me Hamilton had been captured.

  The caller was Robert Roper, the Knox County district attorney general, but he was calling to ask about Mary Latham. “You’re sure she was already dead when the car burned?” Robert was a longtime colleague and friend; I’d testified for him in a dozen or more murder trials over the past decade, and I respected his tho
roughness and professionalism. I also appreciated the fact that Robert had recused his entire staff when the police initially charged me with Jess Carter’s murder.

  “No way she could have been alive,” I said. “Not unless she was walking around like somebody out of Night of the Living Dead, with hunks of flesh falling off and flies and maggots swarming all over.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” he said. “I was just about to eat lunch. Maybe I’ll catch up on my depositions instead.”

  “If memory serves, you could stand to skip a lunch or two,” I parried. “Last time I saw you, you’d put on about twenty pounds.”

  “You should write a book,” he said. “Dr. Brockton’s Gross-Out Weight-Loss Plan. It could be the next South Beach Diet. You might wind up on Oprah.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell Oprah it was you who inspired me.”

  “Great. Now back to Mary Latham. Can you tell if she decomposed in the car or someplace else?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Normally there’s a big, greasy stain where the decomposition occurred, but the car’s interior is probably too badly burned to tell. You might want the crime-scene guys to go back and check the house and the yard—anyplace she might have lain for a couple of days before her husband—or whoever—put her in the car.”

  “How about the freezer in the basement?”

  “Not likely, though it might’ve been a good idea—if he’d frozen her, she wouldn’t have decomposed.” I thought for a moment.

  “Thing is, it would have been messy to get her into the car once she started to decompose. Parts fall off, stuff drips out. It’s not easy, and it’s sure not pleasant. Of course, if you’ve resorted to murdering your wife, pleasantness might not be high on your list of priorities at the moment. Still, my guess is she was already in the car. I’d be willing to bet he put her in the passenger seat right after he killed her, drove the car out to that field, and wiggled her over to the driver’s seat while she was still fresh. Although he’d be taking a chance on somebody finding her.”

  “Not much of a chance,” said Robert. “That spot’s pretty isolated.”

  “Are you sure it’s the husband?”

  “Pretty damn sure,” he said. “During the three-day period before the car burned, nobody besides the husband seems to have seen her or talked to her.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, “since she was dead.”

  “There’s a big problem with the case against him, though,” Roper said.

  “What’s that?”

  “His alibi,” he said. “Stuart Latham was in Las Vegas when the car burned. The investigating officer got hold of him on his cell phone, and Latham called back from a landline in the Bellagio Hotel.”

  “But was he already in Vegas when she was killed? If she’d been dead for days, why does it matter where he was when the car actually caught fire?”

  “Because,” he said, “a good defense attorney will use that to plant doubt in the minds of the jurors. Make them think somebody else killed her.”

  “Like who?” I said. “A burglar? Somebody after a stereo or a VCR? Why on earth would some stranger kill her, wait a couple of days, then drive her down to the south forty to burn the evidence? Doesn’t create much doubt in my mind.”

  “You’re not a juror,” he said, “you’re a scientist.”

  “And anyhow,” I persisted, “didn’t the husband tell the police she was alive and well when he got on the plane that morning? The decay and the bugs prove he’s lying through his teeth.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but we have to convince twelve other people of that,” he said.

  “Besides the burned bones, what else was found in the car?”

  “Not much,” he said. “A few cigarette butts on the ground underneath the driver’s window, like maybe she sat there and smoked awhile before the grass caught fire. Husband says she liked to do that. Says he warned her a bunch of times about dropping cigarette butts in the grass. People driving on I-640 saw the smoke and called it in, probably within ten minutes of when it caught fire, according to the arson investigator.”

  “Any sign of a timer?” I asked. “An ignition device, something he could have set to go off once he was out in Vegas?”

  “Not that the evidence techs can find,” he said. “One of them’s just back from Iraq, and he doesn’t see any evidence of an IED.”

  “What’s an IED?”

  “Improvised explosive device. Iraqi insurgents use ’em as roadside bombs. They’re triggered by a cell phone, sometimes. Thing is, you gotta have some skill with electronics or some training as a terrorist to rig one of those, and Stuart Latham runs an Avis rental-car franchise.”

  “Well, either he killed her or he didn’t,” I said in exasperation. “If he did, either he had an accomplice or he didn’t. And if he didn’t have an accomplice, there ought to be something, either in the car or out at the scene, indicating how he set off the fire from the Bellagio.”

  “Are you willing to take a look? In the car and out at the property?”

  “I’m not an evidence technician,” I reminded him.

  “But you’re great with taphonomy,” Roper said. I was impressed the D.A. remembered the term. In archaeology, taphonomy referred to the process or circumstances of fossilization, but forensic anthropologists tended to use it more broadly, to describe the arrangement and relation of bodies, bones, and any other environmental or human-produced evidence that could shed light on a murder or its timing. Postmarked letters, a week-old newspaper open to the sports page, milk or meat tagged with a sell-by date, even a year-old sapling or a seasonal wasp nest within a rib cage or an eye socket—all these could be considered taphonomic evidence of when a murder occurred.

  “I’ll be glad to take a look at the taphonomy,” I said. “Be good for me to get out of the office.”

  “The car’s at the KPD impound lot,” he said. “When do you want to see it?”

  “How about early in the morning,” I said, “while it’s a mere ninety degrees?”

  “I’ll have my investigator, Darren Cash, meet you at the impound lot. Just so you know, we’re getting ready to ask a grand jury to indict Stuart Latham for first-degree murder, based on the insect evidence you found in the skull. First, though, we’ll get a search warrant to go back for another look at the property. If you find anything else in the car, that could help with the warrant.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, “but don’t hold your breath. What time should I meet Cash?”

  “How does nine o’clock sound?”

  “Sounds late and hot,” I said. “What about eight instead?”

  “I’ll have Darren meet you at eight.”

  “You mind if Art Bohanan comes along? He wasn’t available when the KPD forensics team went over the car.”

  “I’m always glad to have Art take a look.”

  AT 7:55 THE NEXT MORNING, Art and I turned onto the lane leading to the KPD impound lot. The lot was on a dead-end street in East Knoxville, directly across I-40 from the zoo. Something about the juxtaposition struck me as funny—hundreds of captive animals on the south side of the interstate, I realized, hundreds of captive vehicles on the north side. As we entered the dead end, I imagined a mass escape from the zoo: animals tunneling under the freeway, then speeding off in stolen cars and trucks—chimpanzees and gorillas driving the getaway vehicles, hippos and elephants hunkering in the back of the biggest trucks. I pointed out a car to Art, a red BMW convertible with the top down. “You think a giraffe could fit into the back of that Beemer?”

  Art glanced at me, then at the car, then stared at me as if I were some sort of zoological specimen myself. He raised his eyebrows slowly, then shook his head, an expression of deep pity on his face. “We have got to get you some professional help,” he said.

  “Come on,” I said, “it’s not that far-fetched. Primates have opposable thumbs—they could hot-wire the ignitions.”

  “Professional help,” he said again. “A mind i
s a terrible thing to lose.”

  The impound lot was a quarter mile long—four narrow lots, actually—sandwiched between the interstate on one side and a set of railroad tracks on the other. The first lot, an unfenced pad of gravel about fifty yards square, contained vehicles that would be auctioned off on September 1, a sign announced. These were unclaimed or forfeited cars and trucks, along with several horse trailers, which particularly intrigued me. Surely I could find a use for a cheap horse trailer at the Body Farm, I thought.

  The second lot was a fenced expanse of asphalt measuring the same fifty yards deep—the depth being dictated by the train tracks bordering the back—but stretching a hundred yards long. This lot held vehicles that had been towed for a multitude of reasons: Fire hydrants had been blocked, parking meters had gone unfed for weeks on end, junkers had been abandoned alongside the interstate, unpaid traffic tickets had mounted to thousands of dollars. Many of the vehicles had open windows, and several, like the red BMW, were convertibles open to the elements. “Good thing for those convertibles we’re in the middle of a drought,” I said.

  Art shrugged, unconcerned. “If the top’s down or the windows are open when we tow it, nothing we can do. We don’t have the keys.”

  I noticed a video camera mounted on a pole at one corner of the lot. “Have you had break-ins, right here in the impound lot?”

  “You wouldn’t believe what a problem it is,” he said. “We had one guy sneak in with wire cutters one night, cut a big hole in the fence, and drive away.”

  “He hot-wired one of the cars?”

  “He had the keys. It was his car.”

  “He stole his own car from the police?” I couldn’t help laughing. “Did y’all catch him?”