The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  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.”

  “So what’s the typical temperature when a wooden building burns down?”

  “Eight hundred, maybe a thousand Fahrenheit,” he said.

  “More if they’s plenty of fuel and a good oxygen supply. You get a stack effect going—say, one of them old three-or four-story Victorians—you can get up to fifteen hunnerd or two thousand. Log house like this, though, would normally burn slower than a stick-built house—just like logs in a campfire burn slower than twigs. But this thing burned like it was made outta cardboard. Had to’ve been a shitload of accelerant in here.”

  I laughed. “‘Shitload’—is that a technical, arson-investigation term?”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Yessir.”

  A pair of deputies leaned over the edge of the basement and relayed our tools down to us. The concrete floor slab was coated in a layer of wet ash, but the stone hearth, which stood about eighteen inches above the floor, was barely damp. Sliding my feet along the floor so as not to risk stepping on any bones, I turned the hearth into a makeshift lab table, laying out the equipment. The wire screens, of the same sort used by archaeologists, were framed of one-by-four-inch lumber, with the screen nailed to the bottom of the frame. When we were sifting dirt at a dig, the wooden frame helped keep the dirt from sliding off the sides. Here, since the bones were likely to be damp, I laid the screens upside down on the hearth, so the wire mesh would be elevated by several inches, allowing the skeletal material to dry.

  “Okay,” I said, “since we’ve got a skull just a few feet away, let’s start searching here from the hearth forward. Hands and knees, about two feet apart.” I gave everybody a trowel and an artist’s paintbrush, and gave a quick demonstration in how to use them to tease out and clean small bones. “Art, you and Jim start at the corners of the hearth; Miranda and I will take the centerline. We’ll work from this end to the middle of the house, then work back along the edges. That way we’re starting where we know there’s at least some material. Take your time; look at everything or feel everything, all the way down to the concrete. Get back in touch with your inner toddler, the one who loved to dig in the mud. If you’re not sure what something is, ask Miranda or me.”

  I dropped to my hands and knees, and the rest of them followed suit. The concrete slab had been transformed, quite literally, into an immense ashtray, containing seven layers of burned debris: the basement’s contents, the main floor’s joists and flooring, the main floor’s furnishings, the second floor’s joists and flooring, that floor’s furnishings, the second floor’s ceiling joists, and remnants from the roof trusses and roof. The explosion had blown much of the roof skyward, and the blaze had carried some of the interior aloft as a plume of burning embers. That made the debris layer thinner than it might have been. Still, the going was slow, and I suspected we’d be lucky to finish the search by sundown.

  I had a head start, literally, with the skull, but Mira
nda, two feet to my right, started finding material within minutes. “Finger bones,” she said, flicking the tip of her trowel lightly into the damp ash. “Left hand. Wrist. Metal wristwatch.” She sounded clinical and detached, but I knew her well enough to hear the excitement underneath.

  “Here’s a radius and ulna,” she said a moment later.

  “Slow down,” I teased her. “You’re making the rest of us look like slackers.” At this point we weren’t trying to recover and bag anything; we’d start by brushing off the top layers of debris and simply exposing the bones where they lay. “Eyeglasses,” I said. They looked familiar—they looked like the wire-rimmed reading glasses I’d seen on Garland Hamilton—but I reminded myself that wire-rimmed reading glasses were common.

  Miranda’s paintbrush flicked rapidly. “A humerus. The arm is flexed in the pugilistic posture.”

  O’Conner, working his way along the wall on Miranda’s other side, looked puzzled at that. “Pugilistic? Isn’t that an oldfangled word for boxing? The gentlemanly art of fisticuffs?”

  “Bingo,” I said.

  He looked even more puzzled.

  “When a body’s exposed to a fire,” I explained, “the muscles shrink as they start to dry out.”

  “You mean as they cook?”

  “You could put it that way. And the flexors—in your arm, the muscles you use to clench your fist and curl it toward you—are stronger than the extensors. So the flexors overpower the extensors, and the fingers and arms curl up. The legs flex slightly, too.”

  “So a body burned in a fire assumes a boxer’s stance?” O’Conner clenched his fists and held them up near his shoulders, posing his body as he posed the question.

  “Exactly. Unless there’s some reason it can’t.”

  “Such as?”

  “If the arms and legs are tied, for instance. I worked a case once where a burned body was found in a bedroom. The guy was a heavy smoker, and they figured he fell asleep smoking in bed. But the arms were extended, and they were behind the back. I knew that wasn’t right, so I used a magnifying glass and a two-millimeter screen to comb through the ashes of the mattress. Found a few burned fibers the TBI identified as rope. Turns out he was murdered by his business partner, who had a million-dollar insurance policy on him.”

  “Amazing,” said O’Conner, “that you were able to figure it out from the position of the arms.”

  “Just a matter of paying attention to little details, noticing when something’s not right,” I said.

  As I said it, I started to notice that something was definitely wrong here. Miranda’s swift efforts had now exposed virtually the entire arm, and I’d worked my way down the neck to the clavicles and the top of the rib cage. The bones we’d exposed so far were burned to a uniformly grayish white color, which meant they were calcined: reduced to their bare, brittle mineral matrix. One good squeeze with my hands could probably crush the skull to pieces. Both the calcined bone and the melted wiring suggested that this fire had burned hotter than a cremation furnace. Hot enough to cause green bone to warp and splinter. But I didn’t see signs of warping and splintering.

  “Damn,” I said, staring at a pelvis I’d just found. The pelvis was draped with the metal teeth of a steel zipper—and was neatly crosshatched with fractures. “This isn’t a burned body. This is a burned skeleton.” The search crew froze, and I felt everyone’s eyes riveted on me. “This was dry bone before the fire.”

  I looked around at the search crew and the firefighters. Miranda and Art were nodding in understanding, but the rest looked confused. O’Conner voiced the question for everyone. “How is that possible?”

  “It’s possible if Garland Hamilton put it here.”

  I could see O’Conner struggling to process the information—struggling to accept its implications.

  “Sheriff,” I said, “this isn’t Garland Hamilton.”

  There was a long silence while that sank in. Then I heard a quick gasp. I looked around just in time to see Miranda lift a blackened object from the floor. “Well, if that’s not Hamilton,” she said, “maybe this is.”

  In her outstretched hand, she cradled the shattered cranial vault of a second skull.

  CHAPTER 27

  IN THE LAST RAYS OF DAYLIGHT, WE STOOD IN A circle—Miranda, Art, Jim O’Conner, Waylon, and I—staring down at the two body bags spread on the ground beside my truck. On them, arranged in anatomical order, were the skeletons of two white males.

  Something about the first skeleton—the one I was sure had been clean, dry bone even before the fire—seemed oddly familiar to me. I swept my eyes over it from head to foot, then back up again. And then my eyes returned to the chest—the right side of the rib cage. “Son of a bitch,” I said softly. “Miranda, take a good look at the right ribs.”

  She looked, and her eyes widened. “Son of a bitch,” she echoed. “I never thought I’d see Billy Ray Ledbetter again.”

  “Who is Billy Ray Ledbetter,” said the sheriff, “and what makes you think this is him?”

  “Billy Ray was a guy whose autopsy Garland Hamilton screwed up,” I said. “He got stomped in a bar fight, then died a couple weeks later from internal bleeding—a punctured lung. His busted ribs were partially healed when he died.”

  “And this one,” said Miranda, plucking the seventh rib from the arrangement, “was missing a sliver about an inch long, right about here.” With the tip of her trowel, she traced a long notch in the bone.

  “How on earth,” persisted O’Conner, “did Billy Ray happen to end up here? Bar fights and burning basements—I’m thinking he had some bad karma.”

  “All roads lead to Cooke County,” I said. “You remember when Leena’s skeleton was stolen?”

  He nodded, looking hopelessly confused.

  “A second skeleton was stolen at the same time—this one. Garland Hamilton stole them. He probably took Leena’s just to muddy the water; this was the one he was desperate to lay his hands on, because this was the case he’d botched so badly.”

  The first skeleton we’d recovered, Ledbetter’s skeleton, intrigued me, but it was the second skeleton that mesmerized me. Unlike Ledbetter’s, these bones appeared to come from a man who was alive and well until the moment he wasn’t—the moment he was blasted and then burned beyond a crisp. Like the first skeleton, this one was calcined, so I doubted that any DNA remained in the bones. But the fractures had the splintered, spiraling appearance characteristic of green bone subjected to intense heat. Mingled with the bones of the feet and ankles were two dozen eyelets from a pair of boots, each eyelet stamped HERMAN SURVIVORS. Scattered amid the bones of the pelvis were the melted rivets and charred zipper of a pair of Levi’s, along with coins, keys, and the buckle and metal tip from a military-style belt of canvas webbing, now minus the canvas. “Here’s a historical footnote I bet y’all didn’t know,” I said, holding up the metal waistband button stamped with the jeans company’s name. “For the first sixty or eighty years, Levi’s had reinforcing rivets in the crotch, too. But sometime in the 1940s, the company’s president was sitting too close to a campfire and got burned by the crotch rivets.”

  Miranda laughed. “Second-degree hot pants—I love it.” Waylon’s bushy eyebrows shot up at her comment, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

  Several feet from the shattered second skull, we’d found the frames of a pair of eyeglasses. The frames were twisted and the lenses missing, but the glasses looked identical to the pair we’d found beside the first skull. They also looked identical to the pair I’d seen Garland Hamilton perch on his nose to inspect stab wounds and review autopsy notes. The moment I had realized that the first set of bones couldn’t possibly be Garland Hamilton’s, I’d felt my blood pressure skyrocket, but as the second skeleton and its accompanying artifacts had come to light, my pulse slowed and my blood pressure settled back to within shouting distance of normal.

  We’d also found the twisted remnants of a Coleman gasoline lantern and a five-gallon gas can
, which helped explain the intense heat of the fire. On the face of it, at least, the second set of remains appeared to be Hamilton’s. The positioning of the bones, and the trauma they had sustained, hinted at what might have happened in that fiery explosion. The skeleton was in a supine position—faceup—as if the body had fallen over backward. The bones of the face were essentially gone, as were both hands. A pair of thin wires ran beneath the other debris, stretching from the vicinity of the body to a lump of molten lead several feet away. These wires—their insulation burned away but the copper intact—had lain directly on the basement slab, where the temperature stayed slightly below the metal’s melting point.

  “Here’s what I think happened,” I said to the group. “Garland Hamilton decides to fake his death, using this skeleton, but as a medical examiner he knows he’s got to cover his tracks pretty thoroughly. He decides to use dynamite to produce more trauma in the bones—probably to destroy the teeth, so we can’t compare them to his dental records. But somehow he screws up when he’s inserting the blasting caps, and that battery over there”—I gestured at the blob of lead—“sets off the caps while he’s holding the dynamite in his hands.”

  “And kablooey?” said Art.

  “Kablooey,” I said, smiling at the reference. Either nobody else realized Art was quoting Barney Fife or nobody else found Andy Griffith’s bumbling sidekick as amusing as Art and I did.

  “Works for me,” said Miranda. “I can just picture Garland looking all clever and smug with a stick of dynamite in his hands, imagining how he’s going to outwit everyone. Just before shorting out the wires.”

  “And kablooey,” Art deadpanned again.

  “It’s just a theory at this point,” I said. “We’ve got to get a positive ID before we can be sure.”

  “How you gonna do that?” Waylon asked. “Fucker’s all burnt up and blowed up.”