The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

Art shook his head. “We got the car back—he ditched it over in North Carolina—but we never got the guy.”

  “That took some nerve,” I said with a touch of admiration.

  Next came a lot whose fence was screened by blue tarps. I pointed. “What’s in that one?”

  “Cars seized from drug dealers, mostly,” he said.

  “Why the tarps?”

  “To keep people from gawking,” he said. “Your average drug dealer tends to drive a better class of car—we’ve got Acuras, Cadillacs, Mercedeses—and we had a problem with looky-loos hanging around window-shopping.”

  “Seems like the tarps would attract more people,” I said. “Make ’em wonder what’s in there that you don’t want anybody to see.”

  “There’s a troublemaker inside you just waiting to get out,” he said.

  Art pulled into the fourth lot, which was tucked at the farthest corner of the compound, back behind a security building outfitted with rooftop surveillance cameras at every corner. This lot contained hard-core specimens: cars flattened by high-speed rollovers or accordioned in head-on collisions. Many of them were missing doors and roofs, the metal chewed away by the Jaws of Life or slashed loose with a Sawzall. Several vehicles were covered with tarps—cars in which shootings had occurred, Art said. Off by itself, along the westernmost side of the fence, was the burned-out shell of a car. The windows were gone and the paint had blistered off, but I could tell by the lines that it had been a fairly new and expensive car just a couple of weeks before.

  A clean-cut young man in his early thirties was peering into the vehicle’s interior. When he heard the crunch of the tires on the gravel, he straightened and turned toward us. He was wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt with a yellow tie. The shirt stretched tight around his neck and shoulders, which looked like they’d been borrowed from an NFL linebacker. His crew cut and military posture suggested he’d been either a soldier or a cop before he became a D.A.’s investigator. As the three of us shook hands all around, I said, “I hear good things about you from your boss.”

  “You’ve been talking to my wife?”

  I laughed. “No, the district attorney.”

  “Oh, my day-job boss.” He grinned. “I’ve been lucky so far.”

  “Lucky my foot,” said Art. “Darren was the one who broke the Watkins case last year.”

  I hadn’t been involved in it, but I remembered reading about it and being shocked. “Watkins—that was the guy who took out the two-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the little girl, then drowned her in the backyard pool?”

  Cash nodded. “His granddaughter,” he said. “The policy had a two-year waiting period on the death benefit. The really sick thing about that case—”

  Art broke in. “You mean besides the fact that a man would drown his own granddaughter?”

  “Yeah,” said Cash, “even sicker than that. He took out the policy, put in the swimming pool, and then waited exactly twenty-five months. That little girl had a rattlesnake coiled around her feet for two years.”

  “That is sick,” I said. “How on earth could somebody do that to his own granddaughter—for any price, let alone a couple hundred thousand bucks?”

  “Some people are just plain evil,” Art said. “No other explanation for it, I don’t care what the forensic psychologists say.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you,” I said. “I’m not sure about God anymore, but I’m starting to believe in the devil. Not some red-suited guy with a pitchfork and horns, but regular-looking folks. A guy who drowns his granddaughter in the backyard. A woman who feeds her husband arsenic every night.”

  “A pedophile who trolls the Internet for gullible kids,” said Art.

  “A husband who kills his wife,” said Cash, “and lets her rot for days before burning her body.”

  I took that as the investigator’s hint that we should get down to business. I nodded toward the burned-out car, a short, sleek SUV. “This looks like it used to be a pretty nice car,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Lexus RX, 2006,” he said. “Probably around forty thousand new.”

  “That’s a lot,” I said. “Would have been cheaper to take her on a hike in the Smokies and push her off a bluff—say she tripped and fell.”

  “Bill loses more hiking buddies that way,” Art said. “Never, ever go to the mountains with him.”

  Cash laughed. “Thanks for the warning.” He nodded at the vehicle. “Book value on the vehicle’s more like twenty-five thousand now,” he said. “But the bank owns most of that. Deductible on the insurance policy’s five hundred. Five hundred is dirt cheap if it works to cover your tracks and give you an alibi.”

  “Well, it didn’t quite do the job,” I said, “thanks to the bugs. Let’s see if there’s anything else to find.”

  Art and I had brought a few things in the back of my truck. We both unfolded white Tyvek jumpsuits and wriggled into them, looking like overgrown toddlers in baggy sleeper pajamas. I opened the tackle box that held an assortment of tools and took out two sharp-pointed trowels and two pairs of tweezers. I handed one of each to Art, then slid a wire screen out from beneath the tackle box. Each opening in the mesh was four millimeters square—about the size of the end of a set of wooden chopsticks from a Chinese take-out place.

  Cash showed me how the body had been found in the car. The woman’s legs had been down in the driver’s well, her left arm hanging down by her side. Her right arm stretched over near the passenger door. Her torso and head were flopped over to the right also.

  “As I understand it,” I said, “there were no traces of accelerant found in the interior. Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Cash said. “Arson dog didn’t smell anything, and I’m told that dog has a great nose.”

  “Sure is thoroughly burned for no accelerant,” I said, peering into the burned-out shell of the vehicle. The upholstery was completely gone. The seats had been reduced to charred, rusted springs and support rails. The underside of the roof was fully exposed, the same reddish gray as the vehicle’s exterior. The windshields and windows were gone. All that remained of the steering wheel was the steel skeleton, including the empty hub where the airbag had been before it fired.

  “Used to be cars had a lot of metal inside,” said Art. “Now everything’s plastic, and once the car catches fire, that plastic keeps feeding it. It’s like pornography.”

  I stared at him, baffled by the comparison. “Pornography? How so?”

  “Hot and nasty,” he said. “Temperatures in the passenger compartment can go over two thousand degrees. And all that burning plastic releases all kinds of toxic chemicals. Smoke inhalation can kill you long before the heat does.”

  I recalled the smoke roiling out of the cars we’d recently burned at the Ag farm—dense black billows seething out the windows and windshields once the glass gave way—and nodded. “Any way to tell where the fire started?”

  Cash shook his head. “Not for sure,” he said. “The ignition was on, though, so the engine was probably idling. We think either the catalytic converter or the muffler set the grass underneath on fire. Most of these luxury SUVs never get off the pavement, but out in that pasture it’d be easy for the exhaust system to set the grass on fire, especially as hot and dry as it’s been. Catalytic converter can get up to nearly a thousand degrees, if the car’s fairly new and the converter’s still working.”

  “I bet one of you guys knows the ignition temperature of grass,” I said.

  “Six hundred degrees,” they chorused.

  “So if that converter was in contact with the vegetation,” I said, “it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to start a grass fire.”

  “Right,” said Cash.

  “Which begs the question,” I said, “if the husband did it, how’d he get fifteen hundred miles away before it started burning?”

  None of us had an answer, so Art and I squatted down beside the vehicle—me beside the driver’s door, him beside the righ
t rear door—and began sifting through the debris in the floor pan. I didn’t find much: A layer of ash. A few bolts, screws, and coins. A couple of phalanges, the smallest bones of the fingers and toes. “Hey,” I razzed Art, “how come KPD missed these?”

  “Simple,” he said. “The car burned late afternoon, right after ‘Tiffany’ got out of school and got on the Web. I was too busy reading love notes from middle-aged perverts to go out to the Latham farm and look for bones. They had to send the B-team instead.”

  “We gotta get you off that pedophile assignment,” I said.

  “I’m training a replacement,” he said. “I hope to be back to healthier stuff—gunshots and stabbings and bludgeonings—within a month or so.”

  Art wasn’t finding much more in the back than I’d found in the front: springs, seat-belt buckles, and a few coins down where the rear bench seat once met the seat back—that place where every car accumulates loose change and candy wrappers and stray peanuts. I was about to suggest we call it a morning when I heard Art say, “Hmm. Hmm.” From one corner of the backseat, he plucked a tiny scrap of partially burned material. He held it up for Cash and me to inspect. It was charred on the edges, but enough remained for it to be recognizable as a shred of crumpled newspaper, not much bigger than a postage stamp. A few words were still legible: “foreign policy” and “Ira,” they read. I mentally supplied the missing q on the end of “Iraq.”

  “Darren,” I asked, “any other newspaper found in the vehicle?”

  “No.”

  “This little scrap seems odd, the way it’s wedged way down in the corner of the backseat. You expect that with pennies and pens, but not so much with newspaper.” I knelt down beside the other corner of the backseat and sifted through the debris. The tip of my trowel teased out another bit, smaller and with no type, from a corner of the page. I recognized the distinctive saw-tooth fringe at the edge of the paper, where the roll of newsprint had been cut with a serrated edge. I craned my neck around to look at Darren. “Was the house searched?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t suppose you remember whether there was a stack of newspapers?”

  “You’re right,” he said, “I don’t remember. Why would newspapers be significant?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” I said. “I remember a case in which a woman had stabbed her husband and decided to burn his body in the house. There were no traces of accelerant, but down behind some of the furniture the arson investigator found wads of newspaper, which she’d used as fuel. A couple more minutes and that paper would have gone up in flames. Luckily, the fire department got the fire out before it reached flashover, so some evidence remained.”

  “So you’re thinking maybe Stuart Latham did the same thing?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “If there’s a stack of papers back at the house with a week’s worth missing, that might be a clue that he used newspaper to help goose the fire along.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “We can add that to the search warrant, along with what you and Dr. Garcia told us about the bones and the bugs.”

  “Maggots never lie,” I said. “Unlike husbands.”

  Art and I bagged the phalanges I’d found in the front floorboard, as well as the two bits of newspaper from the backseat. Art folded and taped the bags shut, then wrote the date and time, along with a brief description of the bones and shreds of paper. Then we pulled off the baggy jumpsuits, which by now were plastered to us with sweat, peeled the gloves off our dripping hands, and stuffed the disposable garb into a red biohazard bag, for burning in the morgue’s medical-waste incinerator. We gave Cash a sweaty good-bye handshake, then drove back out the way we’d come in—past the drug dealers’ cars, past the security building, past the main impound lot and the auction lot.

  I pointed at the red convertible again. “That’s a pretty small backseat,” I said. “The giraffe would probably have to be a baby.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Art. “Not if it was sitting sideways.”

  CHAPTER 10

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, AS THE SUN STRUGGLED to burn through a layer of steamy haze, I threaded my way out of Sequoyah Hills and along Kingston Pike. Instead of taking the right onto Neyland and along the river to the stadium, I turned left onto Concord. I bumped across the railroad crossing, then took a right onto Sutherland Avenue, over another set of tracks and past the dusty silos of a pair of concrete plants, Sequatchie Concrete and Southern Precast, their gravel parking lots filled with powdered cement trucks, highway culverts, and staircases. Next, through the pillars of the Alcoa Highway viaduct, I glimpsed the white storage tanks of the Rohm and Haas plastics factory. One of the tanks carried a cartoonish painting of a bespectacled scientist in a white lab coat, captioned THAT’S GOOD CHEMISTRY. As I wrinkled my nose against the acrid fumes of superglue, or one of its chemical cousins, I thought, More like “THAT’S STINKY CHEMISTRY.” Then I laughed out loud at the irony of me, the founder of the Body Farm, complaining about any other establishment’s unpleasant smell.

  I well knew superglue’s affinity for human fingers and fingerprints—I’d glued my fingers together on more than one occasion, and Art had actually patented a superglue-fuming device, “the Bohanan Apparatus,” used by crime labs nationwide to pick up latent prints on guns, knives, paper, even victims’ skin. As I sniffed my way past Rohm and Haas, I imagined every square inch of the factory and its workers to be covered with handprints—layer upon layer of loops and whorls, captured forever in superglue fumes and drifting concrete dust.

  Middlebrook Pike was the next intersection after I passed Rohm and Haas. I turned left on Middlebrook, heading west, away from downtown. The road burrowed beneath I-40 and then, an industrialized mile later, crossed over the I-640 bypass. Just beyond 640 the cityscape gave way to farmland, and I knew I’d reached the Latham property. The entire Middlebrook frontage, perhaps half a mile, was lined with white board fence. Huge oaks and tulip poplars dotted rolling meadows, and a small stream—Third Creek, if I remembered Knoxville’s prosaic creek-naming scheme correctly—meandered out of the property beside an entry road.

  The driveway led to a two-story white clapboard farmhouse, easily a century old, shaded by more of the towering oaks. The house was simple but graceful, with a wide, airy porch and generous windows of wavy antique glass. A handful of law-enforcement vehicles, including a crime-lab van, lined a semicircular drive that approached the front porch. Off to the side of the house was a yellow Nissan Pathfinder, which I guessed to be Stuart Latham’s.

  Beyond the house, after the asphalt drive gave way to gravel, stood a large whitewashed barn, complete with weather vane and lightning rods atop the metal roof. I’d passed this property many times, but I’d never realized how big it was, or how beautiful. Beyond the barn a dirt track led farther out, winding into the pasture, where a pond glistened in a low hollow. The dirt track looped down past the pond, then angled up a hillside beyond. The only jarring notes in the whole pastoral, picturesque scene, a mere two miles from the heart of downtown Knoxville, were the black circle of grass and the blue strobes of the unmarked car belonging to Darren Cash, who’d told me where to meet him.

  Cranking down my window—the morning was already hot but not yet unbearable—I caught the sweet, dusty fragrance of hay, a welcome change from the chemical fumes that had forced their way into my truck only a few minutes before. I idled past the barn, around the pond, and up the rise toward Cash, taking my time so I could enjoy the view. Cash was half sitting, half leaning on the trunk of his car, his arms folded, his biceps stretching the limits of a navy polo shirt. As I pulled alongside and parked, just outside the scorched circle, Cash used one foot to shove off from the rear wheel, then extended his hand through my open window for me to shake. Now that my engine was off, I could hear the steady whoosh of traffic somewhere through the woods to the north—not loud but surprising, considering I could see no signs of the bypass from here.

  “Morning, Doc,” Cash said. “Nice
place, huh?”

  “Very nice,” I agreed, clambering out. “I wouldn’t mind having a place like this myself.”

  “Well, it could be coming on the market soon,” he said. “If we’re smart or lucky.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “About an hour. We were waiting for Latham at the gate down at the bottom of the driveway when he headed for work. He wasn’t too happy to see our little caravan.”

  “Did he go on to work?”

  “No way,” said Cash. “He’s in the house, acting all indignant, watching the evidence techs like a hawk. Trying to figure out what they’re looking for.”

  I studied the burned circle, which measured maybe twenty yards across, then turned and looked back toward the house, which was barely visible. “For a place that’s as close to downtown as my house, this is mighty isolated,” I said. “I can see why nobody would have just happened by and seen a body in the car.”

  He nodded. “Latham says she liked to park up here when she wanted to think. Sit and smoke and look at the view.”

  I gazed out over the farmland. From the rise where we stood, the pasture had lovely views to both the east and the west. “Actually, I’ll buy that part of the story,” I said. “I’d probably do the same if I owned this chunk of land. Except for the smoking.”

  “Which Latham mentioned three times in his statement. He actually said, ‘It was probably a cigarette butt that caught the grass on fire.’ When I read his statement the other day, I could almost feel his elbow nudging me in the ribs every time he mentioned the smoking.”

  “That’s because he thinks cops are dumb,” I said. “Wanted to make sure they got it.”

  “Another interesting thing about this location,” said Cash.

  “Once the car was burning, hundreds of people would have seen the smoke from 640—it’s only a quarter mile through those trees. Half a dozen people called 911 to report a fire—which I’m sure he wanted.”

  “To establish the time of the fire,” I said.