The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  He laughed, then typed an address into his computer’s browser and called up a page filled with flashing ads and thumbnail pictures of faces and pets. “Not my space,” he said. “MySpace.com.”

  After a few seconds, he clicked it back to the tango break dancing. “At first all the videos on YouTube were very clumsy and silly,” he said, “but a lot of them these days look like something straight out of Hollywood.” He studied my expression again. “But I think you didn’t stop to talk about cinema or the Internet.”

  “No, I stopped for advice,” I said. “Do you have any tips on dealing with a Latino physician who seems to have a chip on his shoulder?”

  “You mean Eddie Garcia?”

  Eddie? I smiled. It was better than Ethelbert. Or Ethel. “How’d you know?”

  “Lucky guess.” He smiled back. “What you need to remember is that he’s not just Hispanic, Dr. B., he’s Mexican, so you might need to cut him some slack.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “If you weren’t Hispanic yourself, I’d think that was more than a little patronizing.”

  “If I were a gringo, it would be patronizing. But I’m Latino, so it’s not.” Confusion was written all over my face, and he speed-read it and smiled. “All Latinos may be created equal,” he said,

  “but we’re not all treated equally, even by one another. East Tennessee has Latinos from just about every country in Central and South America, and some of them look down on the Mexicans as harshly as any Tennessee redneck or Georgia cracker ever did.”

  “How come?”

  “Part of it’s just snobbery—there are so many Mexicans in the States that they’re not exotic, the way Venezuelans or Chileans are. It’s like a lawn or a garden—if one strange plant bursts into bloom, it’s a wildflower; if a bunch of them spring up, they’re considered weeds.”

  “Not by the other plants,” I pointed out.

  “True,” he conceded, “so the analogy’s not perfect. But you get the point?”

  I nodded.

  “Then there’s the pecking order of the workplace. Mexicans often take the shit jobs. They mow yards and lay brick and wash dishes and change linens—anything to get their foot in the door—while people like me get visas to study engineering or anthropology or medicine. So the white-collar Latinos look down on the blue-collar Latinos, and the Mexicans are mostly blue-collar.”

  “But Garcia’s not,” I pointed out. “He’s a board-certified M.D., a forensic pathologist.”

  “But that’s recent. He’s been Mexican all his life. And his parents were working class, so he knows what it’s like to be looked down on. He comes by that chip on his shoulder honestly.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought of that,” I said. “So you know Garcia?”

  “A little. Eddie’s okay. Yeah, he’s a little touchy. But cut him some slack, talk some shop, and things should be fine. He’s a forensic guy, you’re a forensic guy. Bond over the bones, Dr. B.”

  “Jorge” I said over my shoulder, “you could have had a brilliant career in psychology. You’re pretty damn smart, for a Latino.”

  He laughed. “Bastardo!” he called after me. I decided that was Spanish for “Amen, brother!”

  GARCIA STOOD and nodded slightly when I entered his office at the Forensic Center, but he didn’t offer a hand, so I simply returned the nod. “Please, have a seat,” he said.

  “It might be a little easier if we laid these bones out on a lab table,” I said.

  “Very well,” he said again. Swell, I thought. Mr. Personality. I followed him down the hallway to the main lab and set my box on a countertop. The counter was covered with a large, absorbent blue pad, which helped cushion the fragile bones. I had brought three femora—femurs; thighbones—which I laid side by side. Garcia leaned down toward the closest, which was from the body that had been fully fleshed when it burned. The bone exhibited a range of colors, from ashy white at the distal end, near the knee, to a deep reddish brown at the proximal end, where it had joined the hip.

  I chose my words carefully, as I didn’t want to appear to be lecturing him, even though I was. “We used two gallons of gasoline in each car, so it was a very hot fire,” I said. “It peaked at around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit—about eleven hundred Celsius. It burned away all the soft tissue, except for some on the central region of the torso.” I pointed to the femur from the fresh cadaver. “Down here at the distal end, the bone is obviously completely calcined, since the lower legs and knees get more oxygen and burn away before the thighs and torso do. Up here, where the thicker muscle tissue provided some protection for a while, the bone started to char, but it’s not calcined.”

  He studied the bone closely.

  “There’s still some organic material in there,” I went on. “You could probably get DNA—at least mitochondrial DNA, if not nuclear DNA—from a cross section of the bone up in this region.”

  He nodded.

  “What’s really interesting to me,” I went on, “is the fracture pattern here. It’s very irregular. Notice how the fractures seem to corkscrew around the bone in a sort of helical pattern. There’s also some fracturing between layers of the bone.”

  “Yes, very interesting,” he said, sounding more animated. He reached up and swung a magnifying lamp into position, switching on the light that encircled the back side of the round lens. “It’s almost as if the bone is peeling apart. From the moisture inside turning to steam?”

  “Probably,” I said. “Now compare that to the dry, defleshed bone. It’s completely calcined, not surprisingly, since there was no muscle to shield it. Notice how regular and rectangular the fracture pattern is, almost like cross-hatching.”

  He repositioned the magnifying glass over the uniformly burned femur.

  “This reminds me of a big log,” I said, “that’s been burned very slowly in a bonfire.”

  “Or a dead tree lying in the desert,” he said. “After years in the sun, they get that same burned look.”

  “Here’s another one for you,” I said. “I was over in Memphis a few summers ago, when they had the worst drought in a century. The Mississippi River dropped fifteen or twenty feet. It exposed huge sandbars, a half mile wide and miles long. Walking on them was like walking along the beach at the ocean. And the river shrank from a mile wide to a narrow channel, a few hundred yards across—I could have skipped a rock to the other side.”

  His mouth twitched, but I wasn’t sure if he was suppressing a smile or stifling a yawn. Either way, I was caught up in the memory.

  “It was the most remarkable thing,” I said. “The sand was golden and clean—not what I’d expected, since the river is as murky as day-old coffee. Right beside the channel, the sand sloped down like this.” I angled my hand at forty-five degrees.

  “If you took a running jump, you’d go flying over the edge, drop ten feet or so, then sink halfway to your knees near the bottom of the embankment.” I had leapt off that slope of sand a dozen times that day, and a hundred more since, in my memory. “There was a beautiful woman sunbathing, topless, in the middle of this vast expanse of sand,” I said. “But what really caught my eye were the tree trunks, four or five feet in diameter”—I made an arc with my arms, wide as I could stretch them—“down on a narrow shelf, right at the edge of the river channel. They had that same charred look, and it fascinated me, how being underwater for a hundred years made those trees look burned.”

  He laughed, a soft, musical laugh from deep in his chest, and it was the first sound I’d heard him make that wasn’t tightly reined in. “Are you always doing research, even when a beautiful woman is stretched out on the sand?”

  “Pretty much,” I said sheepishly. But I could see the absurdity of it, and I laughed along with him.

  Garcia’s face got serious again, but his gaze and his voice stayed open. “Would you like to see this burn case?” he asked. “No, wait, that’s not exactly what I want to ask you. Would you please take a look at this burn case, Dr. Brockton? I woul
d be very interested in your opinion.”

  “Very well,” I said with a smile and a slight bow. “I would be honored, Dr. Garcia.”

  He motioned me into the main autopsy suite, then disappeared into the morgue’s cooler and emerged a moment later wheeling a stainless-steel autopsy table. As he folded back the drape, I felt my adrenaline spiking, the way it always did when I confronted a forensic puzzle. Garcia began talking, almost as if he were dictating notes. “The subject is a deceased white female, positively identified from dental records as Mary Louise Latham, age forty-seven.” According to what I’d learned from Art and Miranda and the newspaper stories, Latham had lived in Knoxville all her life. She and her husband, Stuart, lived on a farm along Middlebrook Pike, in northwest Knoxville. I was fairly sure I knew the property. Middlebrook Pike had been transformed in recent decades into a corridor of warehouses, petroleum tanks, and trucking depots; there was only one farm, as far as I knew, along Middlebrook, and the prettiness of it was underscored by its uniqueness. The land was a mix of rolling pastures and wooded ridges, with a graceful old farmhouse and a well-kept white barn. It wasn’t really a working farm these days, more like a hobby farm, with a couple of milk cows, a handful of chickens, and a half-acre vegetable garden. The Lathams had no children, but Mrs. Latham often invited elementary-school groups to visit and learn about farming.

  In less than an hour, a burning car had reduced her to charred remnants. Some of the small bones of the hands and feet were missing—probably fragmented and embedded in a layer of ash and debris in the car’s floor pan. The blackened bones of the arms and the lower legs were devoid of soft tissue, even burned soft tissue; they were calcined at their distal ends but not at the proximal ends, where they’d joined the torso and had gotten less oxygen. The pelvis and torso still had tissue on them—if you could call the scorched, crusty material clinging to the bones “tissue.” What had once been the cranial vault had been reduced to shards of bone, resembling small, burned bits of shell, none of them more than a couple inches across.

  Garcia switched on the surgical light above the autopsy station and trained it on the bones. Then he offered me a pair of purple nitrile gloves, which I tugged on, as he did likewise with another pair. He touched a purple finger to the right leg, just below the knee. “This is interesting,” he said. “Up here near the proximal end of the tibia, the fractures look like the ones you just showed me in green bone.” Leaning in, I saw the spiraling, splintered pattern left behind after flesh has burned away, and I nodded in agreement. “But down here at the distal end”—he pointed—“the fractures are more regular.” Sure enough, just above the ankle, the bone was neatly crosshatched with cracks.

  “Huh,” I said. “Looks almost like two different cases—one involving green bone, the other involving defleshed bone—rolled into one tibia.” Studying the rest of the body, I noticed a similar trend in the other limbs.

  “What do you make of that?”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t ignoring him; I was just distracted. Something lodged in the skull—deep within a shattered eye orbit—had caught my attention. Reaching to the counter along the wall, I selected a pair of long tweezers and eased their tips down into the recess, trying to tease out the tiny object. “Do you know,” I asked, “whether the car’s windows were up or down?”

  “Three of them were up, but the driver’s window was down a few inches,” he said. “There were several cigarette butts on the ground underneath it. Why do you ask?”

  “I was wondering what sort of access the blowflies might have had to the body.”

  “All the car windows shattered in the fire. So the flies had plenty of access but not much time. When I arrived, the car was still too hot to touch. I don’t remember seeing any flies.”

  “I don’t mean after the fire. I mean before.”

  Garcia looked puzzled.

  “Unless her brain was infested while she was still alive,” I said, extricating the tweezers from the eye orbit, “the bugs had been working on her for days before that car burned.” I held the tweezers over my left hand and deposited my prize in the palm. There on the drum-tight purple surface was an immature maggot, about the size and shape of a Rice Krispie. A Rice Krispie that had been thoroughly charred.

  She hadn’t been burned alive; she’d been burned dead. Dead and already decomposing.

  CHAPTER 6

  I STARED AT THE CONTENTS OF THE PACKAGE AGAIN, then stared at the note once more. “Dr. Brockton, please call me when you get this. Thanks. Burt.”

  I dialed Burt DeVriess. I didn’t have to refer to the number embossed on the fancy letterhead; I remembered it from the brief, memorable, and ruinously expensive period when DeVriess—better known as “Grease” throughout Knoxville’s legal (and illegal) circles—had served as my criminal defense attorney. Grease had charged me an arm and a leg, but he had also saved my neck, so it was hard to begrudge him that fifty-thousand-dollar retainer. His secretary, Chloe, seemed to think that our association had saved some part of Grease as well, the part that passed for the attorney’s shriveled soul. Judging by the years he’d spent ruthlessly representing Knoxville’s seamiest criminals—his client list read like a who’s who of killers, drug peddlers, and pedophiles—salvation seemed too much to hope for. Still, the fact was, DeVriess had taken to turning down the notorious clientele that had made him rich and infamous. He’d not yet traded his Bentley for a Prius, as far as I knew, or started doing pro bono work for the homeless. But even if he hadn’t attained sainthood yet, he at least seemed to qualify for some sort of “Most Improved Karma” award.

  Chloe answered on the second ring. “Mr. DeVriess’s office, may I help you?”

  “Hi, Chloe, it’s Bill Brockton.”

  “Hi there,” she chirped. “How are you?”

  “Hanging in there, Chloe. And you?”

  “Pretty good, but we do miss you. You need to get yourself arrested again, so we’ll see you more often.”

  “I can’t afford it,” I said, laughing. “If I had to hire Burt again, I’d go bankrupt.”

  “Perfect,” she said. “Then he could represent you in bankruptcy court.”

  “For free, no doubt,” I said. “So speaking of the master of legal larceny, what’s the story on this package he sent me?”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “I think I’d better let him tell you about that. Hang on. And come see us?”

  I smiled. Chloe had treated me exactly this way—as a friend—when I first walked in through her boss’s art deco doorway with a murder charge hanging over my head, so desperate that I’d stooped to hire the aggressive defense lawyer I despised above all others.

  While I held the line for DeVriess, I took another look at the contents of the package he’d sent me. It was a small wooden box, almost a cube, about eight inches square. It was ornately carved, with an engraved brass latch and a hinged top. The box was beautiful, but what really caught my eye was the grainy, powdery mixture I saw when I opened the lid.

  “Hello, Doc,” said a voice that managed to sound both butter smooth and granite hard at the same time. It sounded like money and power, and I knew that Knoxville’s winningest defense attorney had plenty of both. “How’s life down on the Farm these days?”

  “People are dying to get in, Burt,” I joked. “How’s life down in the sewer?”

  “Stagnating a little,” he said cheerily. “There’s a vicious rumor making the rounds that I’ve gone soft, maybe even developed a conscience. It’s killing my practice, but it’s great for my golf game.”

  “There’s always a silver lining,” I said. “As they say, if you can’t have what you want, then want what you have. So this little present you sent me—is this what it looks like?” I stirred the upper layer of the mixture with the sharpened end of a pencil, and a tiny plume of dust rose from the box. Uppermost in the mixture was a layer of fine, grayish white powder; beneath that was a layer of grainy tan particles, along with what I quickly recognized as shards of in
cinerated bone. “I got excited when I opened the lid,” I joked. “Thought for a minute maybe these were your ashes.”

  If he thought that was funny, he hid it well.

  “So who is this, Burt?”

  “That, Doc, is the sixty-four-million-dollar question,” he said. “Supposed to be my Aunt Jean. But my Uncle Edgar? He says not.”

  “How come?”

  “You looked at it yet?”

  “Only a little.”

  “Notice anything funny?”

  I stirred around a bit more, creating another miniature dust storm. Down near the bottom of the box, I glimpsed what appeared to be small, rounded pebbles. “Well, there’s some rocks in here,” I said, “As least they sure look like rocks.”

  “Damn right they look like rocks,” he said. “Doesn’t take a Ph.D. in anthropology to tell the difference between bone and pea gravel. Another thing? You wouldn’t have any way of knowing this, of course, but Aunt Jean’s knees aren’t in there.”

  “Her knees? How do you know?”

  “Because Aunt Jean’s knees were made of titanium. She had both of ’em replaced about five years ago.”

  “Crematoriums don’t usually send things like that back to the family, Burt.”

  “Uncle Edgar specifically asked for them.”

  “Ah. Then that would seem to be a significant omission.”

  “They couldn’t have melted and dripped down somewhere in the oven or something, could they?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Those orthopedic devices are made of pretty tough stuff. But let me do a little research on titanium and cremation and get back to you.”

  “Could you do more than that, Doc?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something’s not right here, Doc,” he said. “What’d they do with her knees? What’s that gravel doing in there? And how come those chunks of bone are so big? I scattered my mother’s ashes up in the Smokies after she died, and there weren’t any pieces bigger than rock salt in Mom’s urn.”