CHAPTER 36
THE FACES WERE BLURRY, HALOED IN HAZE. I BLINKED and squinted. They remained hazy, but I recognized some familiar features. Jeff’s high, broad forehead. Art’s dwindling hairline and growing paunch. Jim O’Conner’s bantam-rooster stance and Waylon’s immense presence. Edelberto Garcia’s dark, quiet elegance.
“Are you the five people I meet in heaven?” The words came out in a dry croak, as if a raven had spoken them. Then I recognized a sixth person standing behind Art. “I guess not,” I rasped,
“since I see Grease there in the back.” The faces smiled fuzzily, and I heard a sound that reminded me of laughter.
Someone was missing-I closed my own eyes to think who it was, and when I managed to get them open again, everyone but Jeff was gone, and he was sleeping in a recliner beside the bed. Sleeping seemed like a good idea, so I closed my eyes again.
WHEN I AWOKE, daylight was streaming in through a set of miniblinds, and a nurse was jabbing rusty daggers into my hip, judging by the feel of things. “Ow!” I said. “If that’s not prohibited by the Geneva Convention, it ought to be.”
“You think it hurts now,” she said, “wait till the pain meds wear off.”
“This is the feel-good version?”
“’Fraid so. Hip replacement’s a bitch.”
“Somebody replaced my hip?”
“Seemed like the thing to do,” she said, “since somebody shot the old one to smithereens. You’re lucky they were able to save your leg.” She paused. “Actually, with that hole in your chest, you’re lucky they were able to save your life. A couple more minutes and you’d have bled out.” She lifted a clipboard from the foot of the bed and checked the chart. “You were five pints low when you got here,” she said.
“That’s pretty far down on the dipstick,” I said. “How’d I get here? And where is ‘here’ anyhow?”
She smiled. “UT Hospital, Dr. Brockton,” she said. “You could look out the window and see the Body Farm if you weren’t strapped to the bed.”
I glanced down. My arms were suspended by a complicated system of wires and pulleys, and instead of hands, I saw a pair of white paws floating several inches above the sheet. “What day is it? How long have I been here? What’s wrong with my hands?”
“Wednesday. You came in on LifeStar three days ago. You’ve got second-and third-degree burns on your hands and arms, but you’ll be fine. ‘The Forensic Phoenix,’ the News Sentinel’s calling you. Your lawyer friend just donated a million dollars to UT in your honor, and you not even dead. You’ve been quite the story.”
“You want to tell it?”
“You ready to hear it?”
“Depends,” I said. “Is it a happy ending or a sad ending?”
“For you, fairly happy, considering. But not for everybody. Hold on. I’m not the one should be telling you.”
She hung the clipboard back on the foot of the bed and whisked out the door. Jim O’Conner came in, looking like he hadn’t changed his uniform in a week.
“Morning, Doc,” he said. “Mighty good to see you. How you feeling?”
“Not bad, I guess, considering somebody chopped out my left hip and drilled a hole through my chest.”
“You should see the other guy,” he said.
The other guy. “Hamilton?” He nodded. “I think I did,” I said. “Or maybe I just dreamed I did. He was on fire, and he flew across the sky like a comet.” I laughed a little at the absurdity, and it hurt a lot, so I quit. “Some dream, huh?”
“Pretty close to right, actually. I got there just in time to see him catch fire.” O’Conner’s face was grim. “He went sailing over your head because I shot him. With a twelve-gauge. Pretty close range.” He looked away, then back at me. “He wouldn’t have survived those burns,” he said. “I didn’t really need to shoot him.”
“I think you did,” I said. “If you hadn’t, he might have fallen on Miranda and me. Hell, he might even have jumped on us, flames and all, to finish us off.”
He gave a slow nod, and something in his face eased. “You feel like telling me what happened before I got there?”
I told him the story as best I remembered it. I started with the moment in the bone lab when I matched the burned frontal sinus with Parnell’s X-ray-the moment I realized that Hamilton had murdered the homeless man to fake his own death while pretending to fake his own death with Billy Ray Ledbetter’s skeleton. I finished with the moment Hamilton was dousing us with gasoline, the moment I fished the matches from my pocket and struck them on the basement floor.
O’Conner shook his head. “Amazing,” he said. “A guy with kitchen matches outguns a guy with a.357.”
“I like to think of it as virtue triumphing over evil,” I said, and he smiled. “What brought you and your shotgun there in the nick of time?”
“Miranda,” he said. “She phoned from her car on the way there. Said something was happening up at the fire scene, she didn’t know what, but she was worried.”
Miranda. She hadn’t been in the room the first time I’d awakened, I realized, and her absence was ominous. I remembered how hard her head had struck the concrete and how faint her pulse had been, even before the world erupted in flame “Jim, tell me about Miranda,” I said. “I’m afraid to ask, but I need to know.”
“What do you need to know?”
The voice came from the doorway, and I thought my heart would burst at the sound of it. Miranda! Her head was clouded in bandages, but her eyes shone clear as the morning.
“Miranda,” I breathed. “Jesus, I thought you were dead. The way your head hit that slab…”
“I’m pretty hardheaded,” she said. “You know that.”
Jim O’Conner reached out, gave my knee a squeeze, and left the room.
I studied Miranda’s head, turbaned in gauze. She lifted a hand and touched the gauze gently, posing like a model in an old-fashioned hair-spray ad. “Like it?” I wiggled a thumb horizontally, halfway between thumbs-up and thumbs-down. “I have a brand-new cranial suture under here,” she said, “so they’ve duct-taped me back together for now. But once the bone knits and the hair grows, I’m good as new.”
“That’s pretty damn good,” I said. The white gauze glowed in the early light, and she could almost have passed for a medieval saint, the ones with the dinner plates painted behind their heads.
“I thought I’d lost you, Miranda,” I said. “I was so afraid I’d lost you.”
“But you didn’t lose me,” she said, “you saved me. Against all odds, you saved me.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s always a pleasure to thank people who have been kind enough to help us. It’s a long list, and even at that, we’ve probably left some folks out. If you’re one of those, we do apologize!
We’re grateful to several other forensic anthropologists-all products of the UT Anthropology Department’s graduate program-whose research we’ve drawn on in this book: Joanne Devlin, Steve Symes, and Elaine Pope have done fascinating experiments to explore how cars burn and how fire affects flesh and bone. Angi Christensen-now serving as the FBI’s staff forensic anthropologist-has extensively studied the use of frontal sinuses in human identification (for her Ph.D. dissertation) and notso-spontaneous human combustion (for her M.S. thesis). Rick Snow, the staff forensic anthropologist for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, knows firsthand-thanks to the Noble, Georgia, crematorium scandal-what it takes to identify hundreds of uncremated bodies.
Dave Icove, a superb arson investigator and whip-smart engineer, increased our understanding of fires, and of people who set them. Roger Nooe, a retired UT professor of social work (who now works for the Knox County public defender’s office), provided a remarkable look at the world of the homeless in Knoxville, as did Maxine Raines of Lost Sheep Ministry and Lisa Wells and Donna Rosa of Volunteer Rescue Ministry. Roger, Lisa, and Maxine also bravely allowed us to use their real names in the book.
Helen Taylor-the real-life Helen-welcomed us into East T
ennessee Cremation Services, showing us what an impeccably run crematorium is like.
Art Bohanan continues to allow us to fictionalize him, and continues to be a close friend, as well as a remarkable source of information about fingerprints, other trace evidence, police work, and life in general.
Karen Kluge-the hostess with the mostest-provided a quiet and elegant writing refuge, without which this book could not have been completed on time (or almost on time, anyway).
Heather McPeters, a fast and brilliant reader, praised the good parts of the first draft and helped make the not-as-good parts better. So did our copy editor, Maureen Sugden, who went above and beyond the call of duty.
We are deeply thankful for the faith and encouragement of our editor, Sarah Durand, and our publisher, Lisa Gallagher, who have made us feel so welcome at William Morrow. Sarah’s able assistant, Emily Krump, keeps the wheels turning smoothly a surprising amount of the time, and always leaps in to help when we need something unexpectedly and quickly. We’re also thankful for the fine work of the Morrow art and production staff-especially our production editor, Andrea Molitor-for turning our bare-bones typescript into beautiful books, sometimes on very tight schedules!
The work doesn’t end when a book is published. At Morrow, no one knows that better than our publicist, the tireless Buzzy Porter. Buzzy and Ben Bruton have performed Herculean labors to publicize our books, and we’ll be very grateful-just as soon as we recover from the book tour! The sales and marketing staff at Morrow have also done a wonderful job building demand for our books. So have freelance videomeister Buck Kahler and Web designer Jack Hardcastle, the creative minds behind Jefferson Bass.com.
Susan and Jim Seals and Mary Jo Tarvin have volunteered many hours of their time to help make our book signings run like clockwork. Their graciousness, thoughtfulness, and generosity are remarkable. Similarly, Donna Griffin-the Anthropology Department’s secretary-is helpful in more ways, on more occasions, than we can even begin to keep track of.
Our agent, Giles Anderson, never ceases to amaze us; we appreciate the fine job he’s done of keeping us off the streets and gainfully employed these past several years.
Last, but far from least, we’re especially grateful to the many booksellers and readers who have embraced us, our books, and our characters so warmly. Many thanks, y’all.
— Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass: Jefferson Bass
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