The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  “Hello, Aunt Jean,” I said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m glad I found you.”

  A dozen photos, a quick conversation with Sean, and a three-hour drive later, I rolled into Knoxville, feeling exhausted but accomplished. I took a long, hot shower to wash away the smell of death and the aches of bending, then tumbled into bed and fell swiftly asleep. In my dreams I shared a cherry pie with a skeletal woman who flashed me a crooked smile. “Watch out for the pits,” she said, “they’ll break a tooth if you bite down on ’em. Did I ever tell you about the pie that broke my tooth?”

  “Tell me again,” I said to her. “Tell me the pie story.”

  When I woke up, daylight was streaming in the windows, and I called Burt DeVriess to tell him I’d found her.

  CHAPTER 20

  AFTER CALLING DEVRIESS, I HEADED TO CAMPUS. IT was early yet—not quite 7:30—and all the offices in the Anthropology Department were still dark and empty. Even the osteology lab, where Miranda often arrived by 7:00, remained locked. I was intrigued to find a vase of flowers—red roses—sitting in the stairwell just outside the lab’s door. A small card was nestled amid the flowers; the envelope was unsealed, so I slid out the card to see who was getting roses. I doubted that it was me, but then again, you never know.

  “For Miranda,” the neat block letters read, “my new favorite.” Below the inscription was a drawing of a heart pierced by an arrow. I felt a pang of jealousy the moment I read the words. But what disturbed me more was the blood dripping from the heart and pooling beneath it.

  An hour later, Miranda answered when I phoned the lab. She sounded jangled and edgy, and I wasn’t surprised. “I saw the flowers,” I said. “Who do you think sent them?”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “It creeps me out.”

  “Better to figure it out than not to know,” I said.

  “You’re probably right,” she said, “but I hate to get upset about it, because that gives whoever it is more power over me than I want.” I didn’t say anything, and after a moment, she went on.

  “I’m afraid it’s Stuart Latham,” she said. “He called yesterday, asking if I was involved with the investigation into Mary’s death.”

  This revelation stunned me. “My god,” I said, “what did you tell him?”

  “I told him I couldn’t discuss any forensic cases with him. But—true to form—he didn’t want to take no for an answer.” She laughed a brief, bitter laugh. “First he tried to charm me, and when that didn’t work, he played the grieving widower—the real victim in the case—and tried to guilt it out of me. Finally, when that didn’t work, he started getting mean.”

  “How so? Did he threaten you in any way?” I felt my pulse getting faster and my blood pressure rising.

  “No, nothing overt,” she said. “Just talking about how selfish and heartless I am.” She paused. “How I flirted with him and led him on back when I used to see them. How unhappy that made him realize he was in his marriage. How hard a time he’s had getting over the rejection.” She fell silent again, except for her breathing. From the sound of it, I wondered if she was crying. “The thing I’m ashamed of, Dr. B., is that I did flirt with him. I don’t know why. No, that’s not true; I do know. He was handsome, and he was a grown-up, and it was obvious that he was attracted to me. I think it was the seductiveness of being desired, you know?”

  I did know; what surprised me was that Miranda knew, and that she’d found it out from the likes of Stuart Latham.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “I never meant to cause trouble in their marriage, and I stopped flirting with him when I realized it was starting to.”

  “So how did the phone call end?”

  “Abruptly,” she said. “I told him never to call me again, and I hung up on him.”

  “You think he sent the flowers as an apology?”

  “Did you see the card?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Did that look like an apology?”

  “If it was an apology,” I said, “it was a kinda scary one.”

  “Kinda,” she said. “Like the pope is kinda Catholic.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I will be,” she said. “Soon as I get a chance to take a long, hot shower and wash the scum off.”

  “If he contacts you again, tell me,” I said. “We’ll call the campus police or KPD. The last thing he needs right now is to be any higher on the radar screen of the cops.”

  She thanked me and hung up. From what she’d said, it sounded plausible that Stuart Latham had sent the flowers, and the possibility was troubling. Two other possibilities—two other suspects, as I thought of them—had occurred to me, and both of those were troubling as well.

  One possibility was Edelberto Garcia, who I still feared might be interested in Miranda as more than a colleague or occasional babysitter. There was something about Garcia’s cool smoothness I didn’t fully trust, although I recognized that it might be jealousy rather than logic that lay behind my suspicions.

  The other possibility was Garland Hamilton, and the thought that Hamilton might have sent Miranda the flowers chilled me to the bone. A few months before, Hamilton had locked his sights on Jess, and now Jess was dead. When I considered this possibility, I couldn’t help praying that the flowers had come from Stuart Latham.

  By midmorning I was lost in the pages of the latest issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences—one of my colleagues was fine-tuning a way to estimate age by studying cranial sutures—when I gradually became aware of a soft, insistent tapping sound and then a familiar voice saying, “Doc, mind if I come in?” I roused myself back to the present.

  “Sorry. Sure, come on in.” I looked up at the same moment I placed the voice. Steve Morgan walked in, and the sight brought a smile to my face, despite the stress of the past two days. Steve was a TBI agent who’d been a student of mine years before; more recently he’d been part of a joint TBI-FBI investigation into official corruption in the Cooke County Sheriff’s Office.

  “I hope you’re here to tell me y’all have caught Garland Hamilton,” I said.

  He winced and shook his head. “I wish I were, but I’m not,” he said. “I think you’ll find this interesting, though. We’ve been watching his bank accounts and looking at his credit cards.”

  “And?”

  “We found a storage unit he rented about six months ago, and inside was something that belongs to you.” He stepped back into the hallway, then reappeared, cradling a cardboard box in his arms. The box was 36 inches long, 12 inches high, and 12 inches deep. I knew the exact dimensions because I had spent years putting skeletons into boxes just like this one. I had a pretty good idea whose skeleton was in this particular box, too: I’d have bet a year’s salary that the box contained the postcranial skeleton—the bones from the neck down—of Leena Bonds, a young woman killed in Cooke County thirty years earlier. I had recovered the woman’s body from deep in a cave in the mountains, where the combination of cool air and abundant moisture had transformed her soft tissue into adipocere, a soaplike substance that preserved her features remarkably well over the decades. Midway through the investigation into Leena’s murder, someone had broken into my office and stolen the box. That someone had been Garland Hamilton.

  I motioned toward my desktop, and Morgan set the box down. I raised the lid, which was hinged along one of the three-foot sides. Inside, I saw the bones of a young white female, each bone bearing the case number in my writing. Two parts of the skeleton were missing, as I knew they would be: the skull and the hyoid, both of which I had taken to show my anthropology class the day the box was stolen. The woman’s skull—Leena’s skull—and the fractured hyoid bone from her throat had been buried eight months ago up in Cooke County by Jim O’Conner. O’Conner was now the county’s sheriff, but thirty years earlier he’d been simply a young man who loved Leena, when she was still an innocent girl. Before her uncle had molested her and her aunt had strangled her.

  The bones t
ook me back in time, the way the smell of baking bread or fresh-mown grass can take you back to your childhood. For me, seeing a skeleton was like reading a diary—a diary recording injuries, illnesses, handedness, and a host of other parts of life that remained written in the bones long after death. In the room that adjoined my office, I had a library full of such diaries—diaries of life and death. Every one was uniquely fascinating, and I always remembered its details. Every one was uniquely sad, too—Leena’s doubly so. I shook myself free of the memory and looked up at Morgan.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was just taking a quick trip down a dark stretch of memory lane.”

  He nodded. “I understand,” he said. “Take your time.”

  “I’m done,” I said. “You mentioned you were looking at Garland Hamilton’s credit-card receipts. Anything that points to where he is now?”

  “No,” he said. “The storage-unit rental was about six months ago, and he paid for a whole year up front. Latest activity”—he hesitated—“was a couple hours after he escaped. A security camera at a SunTrust ATM on Hill Avenue shows him using the cash machine. He got a four-hundred-dollar cash advance and four hundred dollars out of checking. The most the machine would let him get.”

  “Where’d he get the cards?”

  “I don’t know,” said Morgan. “He didn’t have them in jail, so he must have had them stashed someplace safe and easy to get to. Maybe the storage unit.”

  “Weren’t his accounts frozen?”

  Morgan shook his head. “If he were bankrolling international terrorism or embezzling millions, the feds would freeze his accounts. Otherwise there’s no legal basis for it. He won’t get real far on eight hundred bucks, but it lets him drop off the radar at least for a while.”

  “Any idea where he might be? You think he’s staying put, or do you think he’s on the run?”

  Morgan frowned. “Hard to tell. Typically, escaped murderers run, but he’s not typical. He’s smarter than most, and he knows how cops think.”

  “So he might run after all,” I said. “Figuring that you guys would expect him not to.”

  “Hell, you can chase your tail in circles second-and third-guessing that way. Doesn’t get you anything except dizzy, though. His picture’s all over the media, and we’ve sent an APB to every law-enforcement agency in the country. We’ll get him.”

  “I hope sooner rather than later,” I said.

  “It’ll be sooner,” he said. “Meantime, though, I was wondering—have you thought about carrying a gun?”

  “Me? A gun? When I’m out in the field, I’m generally on all fours, with my butt sticking up in the air.” The description got a laugh from Morgan. “What good would a gun do me?”

  “I meant for when you’re not in the field,” he said. “When you’re in the office, or at home. I know you’re not a gun-totin’ kind of guy. But maybe for now, till we catch him.”

  In fact, I had already considered it. “You think I’m in danger?” I asked.

  He considered that. “Depends on which matters more to Hamilton,” he said, “getting away or getting even. He already tried to kill you once. He might consider that unfinished business—a score he’s got another chance to settle, now that he’s on the loose.”

  “Gee, this is making me feel better,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” he said. “I’m just being realistic. Get a weapon. Hell, you’re a TBI consultant; I’m sure we can get you a permit. We’d just need to take you out to the firing range and get you qualified.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I hate this. But if you can make it happen, I’ll do it.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll see what hoops we need to jump through. And I’ll let you know as soon as we find anything on Hamilton.” He shook my hand and turned to go. “Be careful,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  After Morgan left, I picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Cooke County Sheriff,” said a brisk voice in an East Tennessee twang. “Kin I hep you’uns?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m wondering if the sheriff’s in.”

  “Kin I tell him who’s calling?”

  “It’s Dr. Bill Brockton from UT.”

  “I’ll tell him, hon,” she said. I felt like I was in a truck-stop café rather than on the phone with a law-enforcement agency.

  “Hang on, if you don’t care to.” The expression—which actually meant “if you don’t mind”—made me smile.

  Ten seconds later, I heard Jim O’Conner’s voice. “Doc, you all right? I hear things have gotten exciting down there.”

  “I’ve had better times, but I’m okay,” I said.

  “I’m sorry he’s loose.”

  “Not half as sorry as I am,” I said. “Listen, you gonna be around late this afternoon?”

  “Should be,” he said. “Unless somebody does some spectacular lawbreaking up here in Cooke County. Which,” he added, “is always a distinct possibility.”

  “Mind if I come see you?”

  “Come on up. Any particular occasion?”

  “Got something to show you,” I said.

  “I’ll be here. You remember how to find us?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Drive east till civilization ends, then follow the sound of the gunfire.”

  He laughed. “Yup, you remember. If something comes up and I can’t be here, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Same here,” I said. “It’ll be good to see you, Jim.”

  “Be good to see you, too, Doc.”

  TWO HOURS later and fifty miles to the east, I took the I-40 exit for River Road, the winding, two-lane blacktop that snaked along a tumbling mountain river and into Jonesport, the county seat of Cooke County.

  The sheriff’s office was tucked into a granite courthouse that looked more like a small fortress than a seat of county government. As I parked, I noticed a couple of stoop-shouldered whittlers occupying a bench on the courthouse lawn. Shavings were heaped almost knee-high between the feet of each man. I had seen these same whittlers on that same bench in the exact same postures some nine months earlier when I’d been up in Cooke County. I wondered if they had even left their post, or were they permanent fixtures, like the Civil War cannon and the statue of Obadiah Jones, the town’s founder and namesake? I tucked the box of Leena’s bones under one arm. As I passed the bench, I lifted my other hand in greeting. Neither man spoke or waved, but there was a flicker of eye contact and the barest hint of a nod from each aged head, and both pairs of eyes swiveled to the box under my arm.

  “That’s a mighty good pile of shavings you-all got there,” I said. “Just be careful you don’t drop a lit match. I’d hate to have to come identify your burned bones.”

  “Is them bones you got in that box?” one of the men asked.

  “From that Kitchings girl?” asked the other.

  “She weren’t a Kitchings,” corrected the first one. “She were a Bonds.”

  “Bonds. I knowed that,” said his friend. “I just disremembered.”

  “Are them bones? That Bonds girl’s bones?” persisted the first one.

  “You’d need to ask the sheriff about that,” I said.

  “Sheriff’s inside,” said Whittler Number Two.

  “Is he doing a pretty good job cleaning up the county?” I asked.

  “View from here is pretty much the same all the time,” said the first whittler. “Don’t too many folks commit their crimes right here in front of the courthouse.”

  The second one laughed, exposing toothless gums. “They was a lot of crime going on inside the courthouse,” he said.

  The first one wheezed out a chuckle at that.

  “Course we didn’t know about some of it at the time. New sheriff might be doing stuff we don’t know about neither.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Jim O’Conner isn’t that kind of guy. Anyway, I’d best get in. Y’all don’t cut yourselves.” They nodded, bent low over their whittling again.

  Jim O’Conner�
��s head was barely visible behind the immense pile of papers, files, and folders on his desk. I knocked on the door. He raised up, peering over the stack.

  “Thank goodness,” he said. “This paperwork’s driving me nuts, and I was desperate for a break. Come on in.”

  “Not quite how I imagined I’d find you,” I said. “Figured you’d be out chasing thieves and bootleggers and poachers and such things.”

  “Well, the job is mostly administrative,” he said. “Got training logs to fill out, grant requests to write, grant reports to write, court cases to get ready for, hiring requisitions.”

  “You’re hiring? Business booming?”

  “Well,” he said, “we didn’t have many people to start with. I had to let some of them go, ’cause they were sort of in Orbin Kitchings’s vein,” he said. “Law enforcement for personal profit.”

  I grimaced at the mention of the name. Orbin Kitchings had been the county’s chief deputy, and he’d used his badge and his authority to commit crimes with impunity. I’d never forget the interaction I witnessed between Orbin and a small-time marijuana farmer—the deputy had extorted money from the man and had cruelly shot the poor fellow’s dog.

  “I’m not surprised you’re having trouble with that,” I said.

  “It’s a small county, with a frontier mentality. The line between the good guys and the bad guys gets kind of fuzzy sometimes, especially when money’s involved.”