“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 right 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 carto
onish 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.
“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.
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