The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  I thought for a moment. “Oh, I’d say at least several million.”

  “More like twenty-five,” he said, and I whistled. “Land in that area’s going for three hundred thousand an acre, and that’s a unique parcel. Of course, it’s worth twenty-five mil only if somebody’s willing to sell it.”

  “Mrs. Latham wasn’t willing to sell?”

  “Bingo,” he said.

  “Was Mr. Latham willing to sell?”

  “Mr. Latham was eager to sell,” he said. “I guess he’d gotten tired of renting cars. He approached a developer—same folks who built the big Turkey Creek development—about three months ago. Stuart was a man with a plan.”

  “But the farm wasn’t Stuart’s to sell—it was his wife’s family’s, right?”

  “Right.”

  I thought back to an earlier conversation. “You said Mrs. Latham didn’t have a life-insurance policy, but did she have a will?”

  “She had a will.”

  “Was he the heir?”

  “He was.”

  “Ah. Motive,” I said.

  “Motive,” he said. He waited half a beat, then added, “We’re going to the grand jury for the indictment tomorrow. Stay tuned.”

  CHAPTER 26

  I WAS PICKING AT A HEALTHY CHOICE ENTRÉE—A TRAY of bland lasagna I’d overcooked in the microwave—when the phone rang. I jumped, which was my standard response whenever a phone rang or a door slammed these days, then reached for the cordless on the kitchen table. “Garland Hamilton’s hiding out up here in Cooke County,” Jim O’Conner’s voice said, and instantly I was on full alert. “He rented a cabin up on Fish Creek. It’s on a private gravel road all by itself, way off the highway.”

  Part of me leapt to embrace the news. I desperately wanted Hamilton to be found, and Cooke County made sense: If I were a fugitive on the run, Cooke County—with its hills and hollows and frontier mentality—might well be my hideout of choice. Still, I was afraid to get my hopes up. “How do you know it’s him?”

  “Two days after Hamilton escaped, this guy called a realty company in Jonesport that rents out vacation cabins. Asked if they had something really private, way off the beaten track.”

  “Hell, Jim, if I were renting a cabin in the mountains, I’d ask for something like that, too.”

  “He paid cash for the first week.”

  “So?”

  “Two days ago he paid for another week. He used a credit card this time.” I felt the hairs on my neck and arms stand up. “It’s Hamilton. Or else a guy who fits his description and stole his credit card. The TBI got a call from the bank, and Steve Morgan looked into it. Morgan’s convinced it’s him.”

  “He had to know that the credit card was being watched,” I argued. “Why would he risk using it?”

  “I asked Morgan the same thing,” said O’Conner. “We went round and round about it, but Steve finally convinced me. First, Hamilton’s probably out of cash by now. Second, this cabin-rental outfit is way back in the Dark Ages, technologically speaking—they use those old-fashioned mechanical gizmos to take an imprint of the card. Send it to MasterCard by carrier pigeon. Besides, who else could it be? Who else is going to be using Hamilton’s card and wearing Hamilton’s face?”

  My hands were shaking. So were my knees.

  “Bill? You okay?”

  “Just a little jittery,” I said. “Now what?” I checked the wall clock; it read eight-fifteen, and the light outside was getting watery.

  “We’ve called in the heavy artillery. A SWAT team is moving into position after dark, and they’ll go in at sunup.”

  “What if he spots them and makes a break for it?”

  “The SWAT-team commander? He was in the Army Rangers with me. For practice he used to sneak up on the guys in the squad. You’d know he was coming after you, but you wouldn’t know when—not till you felt the flat of his knife at your throat. If his guys are half as good as he is, even the owls and the coyotes won’t see ’em coming.”

  “But you’ll wait till morning?”

  “Safer that way. Besides the SWAT team, we’ll have helicopters, K-9s, state troopers, TBI agents, and every Cooke County coon hunter I can deputize between now and then. We’ll come down on him like the wrath of God.”

  I felt my throat tightening, my heart pounding, and my breath coming in quick gulps. “You’re sure you’ll get him, Jim?”

  “I don’t see how anybody but the devil himself could wriggle out of this noose.”

  A shiver ran through me. “Damn, Jim, I wish you hadn’t said that.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get him.”

  “Be careful. Call me when you’ve got him.”

  It took everything I had not to jump into the truck and head for Cooke County as soon as I hung up, but I knew I’d only be in the way and might even jeopardize the operation. So I paced around the kitchen awhile, stirring a fork through the congealed lasagna every few laps of the table and the island. Then I went outside and paced Sequoyah Hills awhile, winding my way down the mazy streets toward the river. Darkness was falling now, but the park along the riverfront remained lively. A young couple, their eyes better adjusted to the twilight than mine, tossed a Frisbee back and forth. A pack of dogs—friendlier than the ones that had chased Art and me out of the Georgia woods—raced and roughhoused across the field, occasionally colliding in a five-dog pileup of tumbling fur. A runner jogged past, lifting a hand in silent greeting, like some athletic priest conferring a sweaty blessing on me. “Peace,” the gesture seemed to say, but peace was nowhere within reach for me.

  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.”