The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

“Exactly. The first call came at three fifty-three P.M.—while he was playing the slots in the Bellagio.”

  Cash led me into the burned circle, pointing out four evidence flags, which indicated where the corners of the vehicle had been. A fifth flag marked the spot where five cigarette butts—almost but not quite consumed by the blaze—had been found below the driver’s door. I knelt and inspected that area, seeing nothing but the charred stubble of grass and the thin wire of the evidence flag jammed into the ground.

  I pointed back toward where the rear of the vehicle would have been. “Do you remember which side the exhaust pipe was on?”

  “The right,” he said.

  Staying well clear of the imaginary vehicle’s boundaries, I walked back to what would have been the vehicle’s right rear corner and knelt again. The grass there looked exactly like the grass everywhere else within the circle of burned vegetation. “Any idea where the catalytic converter on a Lexus RX is?”

  He shrugged. “Um…somewhere between the engine and the end of the tailpipe?”

  “No wonder your boss thinks so highly of you,” I said. “Every answer at your fingertips. Just like on CSI.” I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled forward, toward what would have been the center of the vehicle, scanning from side to side as I crept. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, and I wasn’t sure what it was when I found it. But it was something.

  Cash came to the edge of the rectangle and squatted down, but he couldn’t see anything from there.

  “I’ve got a big pair of tweezers in the tackle box in my truck,” I said. “You mind going and getting it?”

  He didn’t answer; he just headed to the truck. He might not know a lot about vehicle exhaust systems, but he was easygoing and he didn’t seem overly impressed with his own importance. When he handed me the tweezers, I maneuvered the tips down through the burned stalks of grass, squeezed gently, and plucked out the small black shape that had caught my eye. It was hard, oval—more or less—and pinched in the center. Looking closely, I saw that the pinch in the center was caused by a bit of heavy wire, clamped tight.

  I held it out for Cash’s inspection. “Any idea what that is?”

  “None,” he said.

  “You think it could be something off the underside of the car? A hose clamp or fuel-line fitting or some such?”

  He shrugged once more. “You’re asking the guy who had no idea where the catalytic converter would be?”

  “You’re right.” I laughed. “What was I thinking?”

  “We could check with the mechanics at the Lexus dealership,” he said. “Maybe one of those guys would recognize it.”

  “See, you come up with a good idea every now and then,” I said.

  He grinned. “Even a blind squirrel finds some nuts.”

  Something about the shape was familiar to me. Not the blackened blob but the heavy wire. I couldn’t place it, though, and when Cash held out an evidence bag, I deposited my find inside. Cash sealed and dated it, but then his pen hesitated.

  “Problem?”

  “We have to list everything we confiscate when we return the warrant to the judge,” he said. “I’ve got no idea what to call this.”

  “Call it ‘blackened blob,’” I suggested helpfully.

  He shot me an unamused look.

  “Or ‘unidentified burned object recovered from beneath area of burned car.’”

  “That sounds better,” he said. “I can see why they think highly of you at UT.”

  Cash and I both went over the rest of the area beneath and surrounding the car, but neither of us found anything else, so he headed back to the house and I headed for UT. As I’d done on my way in, I drove slowly to savor the view. Just as I was nearing the barn, my peripheral vision snagged on something. I stopped the truck and backed up. About ten feet to the left of the dirt track was a small, neat oval, about one foot by two feet, sketched by scorched earth and burned grass. I got out and knelt, using the tip of a pen to sift through the charred stalks. I found nothing. All the same, I retrieved two evidence flags from the back of my truck. I stuck one right beside the circle and the other ten feet away, at the nearest edge of the dirt track.

  As I turned from the driveway onto Middlebrook Pike toward downtown, I phoned Cash on his cell, describing what I’d seen and where to find the markers. “Maybe it’s nothing,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But maybe not.”

  “Maybe a blind squirrel just found a nut,” I said.

  CHAPTER 11

  I BOUNDED INTO THE BONE LAB JUST BEFORE LUNCH-TIME, eager to tell Miranda about my finds at the Latham farm. She wasn’t there.

  Normally, unless she was out helping me recover a body or bones from a death scene or dashing to the Body Farm to deliver a corpse or retrieve a skeleton, Miranda practically lived in the osteology lab. I could count on walking in to find her bent over a lab table, measuring bones and keying the dimensions into the Forensic Data Bank. Every skeleton we got—and this year we’d get nearly 150, arriving at the Farm as fully fleshed cadavers and departing bare-boned—had to be measured, their dozens of dimensions added to the data bank. The work was tedious and time-consuming, and most of it was done by Miranda. Perhaps I should have been happy she was getting a brief break, but instead I felt slightly annoyed that she wasn’t here to listen.

  I glanced at Miranda’s computer screen—the scene of so much Googling—and noticed a map filling the display. It was a street map of Knoxville’s North Hills neighborhood, which happened to be Miranda’s neighborhood. It struck me as odd that Miranda would need a map of her own neighborhood.

  I picked up the phone on the desk and dialed Peggy, one floor up. “Have you seen Miranda this morning?”

  “She left about fifteen minutes ago,” said Peggy. “Said she was going over to the morgue to use the dissecting microscope there.”

  “The dissecting ’scope? What for?”

  “I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell,” said Peggy. “Just like the military’s policy on gays.”

  “Great,” I said, “because hasn’t that approach worked well.”

  Peggy’s mention of the morgue made me want to tell Garcia about my visit to the Latham farm, too, so instead of dialing the morgue and asking for Miranda or him, I hopped into my truck and dashed across the river to the rear of the hospital. Parking in the no-parking zone by the morgue’s loading dock, I punched the code to open the door, crossed the garagelike intake area, and threaded my way down the hall to the microscopy lab. The anthropology department had one dissecting ’scope—a stereoscopic microscope, with a micrometer-adjustable stage—but there was sometimes heavy competition for it, so I could understand why Miranda might have come over to use one of the three here at the morgue. She wasn’t in the lab, although I did see her backpack, sitting on a table beside one of the ’scopes. A small, U-shaped bone rested on the stage—a hyoid bone, from a throat—and I guessed Miranda was inspecting it for fractures, possible evidence of strangulation. I flipped on the microscope’s lamp and took a quick look myself. The arc of bone was smooth and unbroken, except by the tiny numerals “49-06,” inked on the bone in Miranda’s neat hand, signifying that the hyoid was from the forty-ninth body back in 2006. Number 49-06 had clearly not been strangled, which was both unsurprising and also somewhat reassuring, since this particular man’s body had been donated, if memory served, by his widow.

  Figuring maybe Miranda had gone to the restroom, I went down the hall to Edelberto Garcia’s office to tell him the latest from the Latham case. His door was half open, so I knocked and leaned my head in.

  Garcia was standing behind his desk, Miranda leaning over from the other side. On the desk between them, in a circle of light cast by a lamp, was a piece of paper. Miranda’s index finger was tracing a zigzag on the page, which I recognized as a map—the same map I’d seen on her computer monitor. When I walked in, she straightened and removed her hand from the map. She looked embarrassed, and for some reason that made
me feel embarrassed, too.

  “Oh, excuse me,” I said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Hello, Bill,” said Garcia, making my name rhyme with “wheel.” “Come in. You’re not interrupting.”

  But I was interrupting, I knew; I just couldn’t tell exactly what I was interrupting. “I was on my way to the research facility,” I said to him, “and I wanted to tell you a couple of new things about the Latham case.”

  “Yes, please,” he said. “What is it?”

  I told him about going out to the impound lot with Art and Darren Cash, and finding the bits of newspaper in the backseat. I also told him about my trip to the farm, and about finding the wire-cinched blob of material and the small oval of burned grass.

  “That’s very interesting,” he said. But he didn’t seem as interested as I’d hoped he would. And I no longer felt as interested as I’d been when I bounded into the bone lab. I’d wanted to ask Miranda what she made of all of this, since she knew Stuart Latham, but this didn’t seem the right time or place. A silence hung in the air.

  Finally Garcia said, “Was there anything else, Bill?”

  “No,” I said, looking from his face to Miranda’s, then back again. “That was it. I’ll see you later.” I withdrew, then leaned partway back in. “Did you want this open or closed?” I heard something in my voice—an undertone of suspicion or hurt feelings—that I didn’t much like. I hoped neither of them heard it.

  “Oh, open of course,” said Garcia smoothly.

  I turned and retraced my steps down the hall, past the microscope lab, where Miranda’s open backpack still sat. It hadn’t moved, but it had changed—the map she was sharing with him had been printed in the bone lab, I felt sure, and brought to Garcia in the backpack. I drove back to the stadium feeling suddenly guilty and afraid. Afraid of what? I couldn’t have said, but a series of faces flashed in my mind’s eye: Miranda’s. Jess’s. Garland Hamilton’s. Stuart Latham’s. Edelberto Garcia’s. The faces of women I cared for—and men who threatened them, in reality or in my overactive imagination.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE STREET SIGN WAS HALF HIDDEN BY AN OVERHANGING tree branch, which doubtless added greatly to the neighborhood’s charm in the daylight but subtracted substantially from the ease of navigation at night. I flipped the headlights to high beam, but all that did was intensify the shadow on the sign.

  I had located North Hills Boulevard without any trouble. A large subdivision sign, thoughtfully placed down at headlight level, marked the neighborhood’s entrance off Washington Pike. North Hills was one of three Knoxville “Hills” neighborhoods dating back to the 1920s. Sequoyah Hills, where I had managed to find an affordable ranch house amid million-dollar mansions, sprawled along one bank of the Tennessee River, a few miles west of downtown and UT. Holston Hills, on the city’s east side, flanked the Holston River, just upstream from the field where Miranda and I had burned the cars.

  North Hills lacked the river frontage and the country clubs sported by Sequoyah and Holston, but it did not lack for charm. A broad median divided the boulevard winding into the neighborhood, giving the area the feeling of a park. In springtime the emerald grass of the median and the yards that lined it blazed with dogwoods and redbuds and azaleas. But this year’s blossoms had shriveled three months earlier, and the summer’s heat—and the ban on lawn watering that the drought had made necessary for the past two weeks—had scorched the grass to a pale, crumbling tan. The trees still clung to life and greenness, but it was a dry and desperate shade of green.

  The houses were smaller here, tending more toward cottages than mansions, so the neighborhood had remained relatively affordable—the biggest house in North Hills would probably sell for half what a similar place in Sequoyah would fetch. Even so, it would have been a huge stretch for Miranda to afford a house in North Hills. I doubted that her assistantship would cover the monthly mortgage, let alone a down payment. But then again, I realized, her family might have helped her buy a house. Or she might be renting. Or she might have roommates. Or a partner. There was a lot about Miranda’s personal life I didn’t know—almost everything about it, in fact. Was that because I respected her privacy, or was it because I was uncaring and selfish, interested only in the forty or fifty or even sixty hours of work she did for me every week? But if I didn’t care, what was I doing here at nine o’clock at night, trying to find her house in the maze of darkened streets?

  I was snooping, that’s what I was doing, and the realization shamed me, making me feel like a stalker or a thief.

  As I strained to make out the name on the street sign, a car rounded the curve in the boulevard and stopped behind me. Cursing mildly, I rolled forward a few feet and cut the wheel to the right, pulling far enough out of the lane for the car to squeeze past me, and stuck my arm out the window to wave it past. Once the taillights disappeared around the curve, I opened the glove box, took out a flashlight, and aimed it at the green sign. “Kenilworth” was the word I was looking for, but according to the white letters on the sign to my left, Maxwell Street was the name of the cross street, and if I continued straight ahead, I would henceforth be on Fountain Park Boulevard. So what had become of North Hills Boulevard, which had begun with such elegance and promise? Ah, finally, I saw that North Hills took a turn to the right, stealing the thunder of poor little Maxwell Street. I appeared to be at the intersection of North Hills Boulevard and North Hills Boulevard, but how could that be? Confused, I shone the light on the map I’d printed before leaving campus for the day—the very map I’d seen on Miranda’s computer and Garcia’s desk.

  Even though I’d worked closely with Miranda for four years now—and even though I’d sometimes wondered whether there might be more between us than academic collegiality—I’d never been to her house. I knew where she lived, since her address was on file in the department and her assistantship checks were mailed to her house. But anytime we went out on a case together—even once when a body was found less than a mile from her neighborhood—she arranged to meet me at UT. Was there something about me that worried her, that made her guard her boundaries against me? Or was she just one of those people who like to keep work and home completely separate from one another? Probably not the sort of thing I could ask her about, at least not without trespassing in the very manner she was trying to discourage.

  I wasn’t sure what it was that had bothered me when I’d walked into Garcia’s office earlier: the mere fact that she’d handed him the map or the fact that when I walked in, Garcia had folded the map and changed the subject. I’d tried to forget about it, but it nagged at me, like a shred of steak snagged between two teeth. Was it possible that Miranda was getting romantically involved with Garcia? He was handsome, I had to admit, and he seemed smooth and quietly confident. But he had been here for only a matter of weeks. And I was virtually certain I had seen a wedding ring on his left hand.

  It’s not your business! I shouted at myself. You’re right, it’s not, I answered…and then I bent over the map for a closer look. Kenilworth was two blocks beyond this odd corner, where the asphalt straight ahead changed names to Fountain Park; staying on North Hills Boulevard required taking a right. Jess was killed by a medical examiner, I added in my own defense to myself. I know, I know, it was a different medical examiner—a crazy medical examiner. But still, I think I’m entitled to a little paranoia. So could you please cut me some slack here?

  Rightly or wrongly, I cut myself some slack, turned onto North Hills, Part B, and then onto Kenilworth, Miranda’s street. Now I was looking for house numbers, and reading house numbers in the dark made reading the street signs seem like a walk in the park. How in the world did police and firefighters find the correct house during an emergency at night? A mental cartoon flashed into my head—a sort of Far Side image of firefighters shining a flashlight beam on the numbers on a dark doorpost while flames roar out of the house next door—and I laughed in spite of the complicated and guilty feelings swirling around my
clandestine visit to Miranda’s neighborhood.

  Midway down the block, I glimpsed her white VW Jetta parked in the driveway of a gray bungalow. A yellow vehicle was parked behind the Jetta, and I was startled when I realized it was another Nissan Pathfinder—or the same one I’d seen parked beside the Lathams’ farmhouse. I felt a pang of fear, or jealousy, or dread, or shame, or some mixture of them all. I cut the headlights, coasted to the curb just beyond the house, and sat there for a moment. Then I got out, eased the door shut, and walked back toward the driveway. Golden light was spilling from every window on the front and side of the house; the place looked warm and inviting, and a chorus of crickets and katydids sang the praises of cozy domesticity.

  I heard the low murmur of voices, then a peal of laughter—Miranda’s laugh, floating above the song of the bugs—and then a lower, deeper laugh. The laughter seemed to be coming from the side of the house, and I edged down the driveway, alongside the Pathfinder, toward the lighted windows. As I got closer, I found myself looking into the kitchen. Miranda sat at the table, chatting between bites of food. Eddie Garcia sat catty-corner from her, on her right, smiling and nodding. Then Garcia turned his head away from Miranda and spoke. I heard another voice—another female voice—and a dark-haired woman appeared behind him, holding a dark-haired baby on her hip. Garcia beamed and reached up, taking the baby from her. He nuzzled its cheek, then nibbled at its ear, and I heard the pure melody of baby laughter. Miranda spoke softly, and Garcia handed the baby to her. She sat the child on the edge of the kitchen table, her hands encircling its chest and tucked beneath its arms, and leaned her face close. I caught snatches of her voice, the gentle singsong of baby talk. Miranda looked radiant, and the baby grinned, and Garcia and his wife beamed proudly, and I felt a wave of sadness and loneliness and shame crash over me.

  CHAPTER 13