O’Conner laughed. “Waylon’s got a point there. Can you get DNA out of this?”
I shook my head dubiously. “Don’t know. We’ll try, of course, but the heat may have destroyed it. I’m hoping we can match the dental records.” I picked up the remnants of the mandible and studied them closely. The lower jaw had been shattered by the blast, and most of the teeth were missing. The upper jaw was in equally bad shape, not surprisingly, since the face—the cheekbones, the nasal bone, the fragile bones of the eye orbits—had been virtually obliterated by the explosion. All told, what was left of the upper and lower jaws contained just five teeth. But two of those five had fillings, so I was optimistic I had enough to compare with Hamilton’s dental records.
“Doc?” O’Conner looked thoughtful. “This might be a dumb question, but I’m gonna ask it anyhow.”
“No such thing as a dumb question, Jim. I tell my students that almost every class.”
“Okay. So let’s assume you’re right,” he said, “and Hamilton was using a skeleton as a stand-in for himself.”
I nodded.
“How come the bones were in the pugilistic posture? If there’s no muscle attached to the bone, there’s nothing to flex the arms and legs, is there?”
I pondered O’Conner’s question for a moment, and I realized I was puzzled. Not by the question itself, but by the realization that I had already asked and answered that same question in my own mind hours before, without even consciously noticing it. “God is in the details,” I said, more to myself than to O’Conner. “Or the devil. He’d have known to arrange it that way.”
“How can you be so sure?” O’Conner asked.
Miranda spoke up before I had the chance. “I know! I know!” she exclaimed, sounding more like a third grader than a Ph.D. student. “Because he and Dr. B. worked together on that burn case, the one where the guy was torched in his bed with his hands tied behind him.”
“That’s it,” I said. “I knew he’d know, but I didn’t remember how he’d know.”
Art raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, I give up,” he said. “You two are like twins, with some secret language all your own. I know I should’ve understood that, but I forgot to remember it.”
“No, I get it,” the sheriff said with a laugh. “If he’s smart enough to dress the bones in clothes and to stage that Coleman lantern and the gas can, he’s smart enough to make it look like the arms and legs are flexed.”
We spent the final half hour of daylight bagging up the bones and artifacts, long after the SWAT team and the firefighters departed. The bones had dried quickly in the heat of the day, once we’d fished them out of the soggy ashes, brushed them off, and laid them on the wire screens. The soggy ashes coating the basement floor were beginning to bake dry, too, forming a crust nearly as hard as concrete, so I was glad we’d gotten an early start, gotten the skeletal material out before everything set up around it. We gave the bones another gentle scrubbing with soft-bristled brushes, then carefully laid them in brown paper evidence bags. One set of bags contained the dry-bone skeleton I knew was a decoy. The other held the green-bone skeleton I fervently hoped was Garland Hamilton’s.
CHAPTER 28
MIRANDA AND I WERE DOWN IN THE BONE LAB—OUR home away from home—huddled over the jigsaw puzzle that had once been a human skull. The cranial vault had been crushed by falling boards as floor joists and rafters had burned through and collapsed into the basement. The two sets of remains didn’t appear to be commingled; luckily for us, the force of the blast had flung the bodies apart rather than together, and since we’d already identified the first skeleton as Billy Ray Ledbetter’s, we were free to concentrate on the second one. But reassembling the second skull was proving to be a herculean task.
We had poured a couple of inches of sand into the bottom of two cake pans. The sand was soft, so it cushioned the fragile skull fragments. It was easy to shape, too, into a depression that matched the curvature of a skull. As we found and fitted together additional cranial fragments, we’d trace a thin line of Duco cement on one edge, press the piece into place, and then nestle it into the sand and look for another match while the glue dried for a minute. It wasn’t as fancy as the high-tech wonder gadgets on television, but it worked. Still, reassembling the skulls out of a heap of tiny shards—none much bigger than my thumbnail—was tedious at best, and I knew there’d come a point at which we simply ground to a halt, unable to find any distinctive edges to match in the tiny bits of bone.
I heard a rap on the steel door. It swung outward, and Steve Morgan walked in. Morgan and I had spoken earlier in the day, as he was headed over to see Garland Hamilton’s dentist and get me Hamilton’s dental records. I was surprised to notice that he was empty-handed.
“Problem with the dentist?” I asked.
“You might say that,” he said. “He died last week. Heart attack.”
I remembered reading a short item in the newspaper, but I hadn’t paid it much attention at the time. “That was Hamilton’s dentist? Dr. Vetter, or some such?”
Morgan nodded glumly.
“How old was the guy?”
“Sixty.”
“Any history of heart disease?”
“You’d have made a good physician,” Morgan said. “Or a good police interrogator. Vetter had a pacemaker put in a couple of years ago.”
“I thought the whole idea of the pacemaker was to prevent a heart attack.”
“Me, too,” he said, “so I called and asked Dr. Garcia that same question. Garcia told me that if your heart stops, the pacemaker will jump-start it. But if your coronary arteries clog up, a pacemaker won’t save you. It’s like getting a new battery for your car—if the fuel line clogs, the battery’s no help.”
“Did Dr. Vetter have partners?”
Morgan shook his head. “Solo practice,” he said. “A hygienist and a receptionist, that was it.”
“Couldn’t one of those get the records for you?”
“Not there to get,” he said. “They couldn’t find the file.”
“Hel-lo,” said Miranda, looking up from her sandbox, “how convenient is that? The dentist codes just before you come calling, and the crucial records vanish into the ether?”
I didn’t like the sound of that much myself. “Did Garcia do an autopsy?”
“No,” said Morgan. “The widow objected. She said he wouldn’t eat right and he wouldn’t exercise. She tried telling him he was headed for a heart attack, but he wouldn’t listen. Sounds like she thinks he got what he had coming to him.”
“Sounds like maybe she’s at the ‘anger’ stage of the grieving process,” I said.
“Sounds like maybe he died in the arms of a girlfriend,” said Miranda. “Isn’t that what tends to send you old codgers over the edge, myocardially speaking? That would explain the heart attack and the widow’s anger.”
“Hey, he wasn’t old,” I squawked. “Sixty is the new fifty-nine.”
“He didn’t die in the heat of passion,” said Morgan. “Not unless the hygienist was under the desk while he was dictating records. The receptionist found him slumped over his desk, microphone in his hand.”
“But he wasn’t slumped over Garland Hamilton’s chart?”
Morgan shook his head again.
“And Hamilton’s dental records are nowhere to be found?”
“Nowhere.”
“Damn,” I said. “That’s going to make it hard to match these teeth. Can you check for other medical records? Any healed fractures we should be looking for? Any cranial X-rays that might show us some teeth?”
“I already left a message for Mrs. Vetter,” said Morgan, “asking for a list of his doctors. I’ll try her again later this afternoon. Sorry for the delay.”
I sighed. “Well, it’s not like we’re sitting here twiddling our thumbs. We’ll be at this for a while yet. As you can see, we’ve got about a thousand more pieces to glue back together.”
“Aha!” Miranda exclaimed. With a pa
ir of tweezers, she reached down and plucked a small fragment of bone from the unmatched pieces. The piece was shaped like the continent of Australia, as were three or four hundred other pieces, as best I could tell. But she tucked it into an Australia-shaped gap in the forehead of the second skull, and it seemed to fit.
“Only nine hundred ninety-nine more pieces,” I said to Morgan. “Better get moving, Steve. Time’s a-wastin’.”
THE PHONE in the bone lab rang just after Morgan left. It was Darren Cash’s boss, District Attorney Robert Roper. “We’re holding a press conference this afternoon at four, but I wanted you to hear this from me first,” he said. “Stuart Latham just pled guilty to murder.”
“First degree?”
“No, second,” he said. “He wanted involuntary manslaughter, but we wouldn’t settle for that.”
“What’s his story? His new one, I mean.”
“He claims they were arguing about selling the farm. They’d both had a lot to drink, and things got out of hand. He hit her, and she fell backward and cracked her head on the kitchen floor. He thought she’d passed out—at least that’s what he claims—and he carried her to the bed. When he woke up the next morning, she was dead. He swears he never meant to kill her, but once he realized she was dead, he panicked.”
“Sure,” I said. “And two weeks ago, he swore he’d kissed her good-bye the morning he caught that plane to Vegas, too. If it was an accident, why’d he plead to second-degree murder, then?”
“Because we had him by the short hairs. It’s possible—barely possible—he’s telling the truth. But even if he didn’t mean to kill her, we could probably convince a jury he did. Besides, even with his new story, we had him nailed on evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, and desecration of a corpse. That last one alone could get him twenty years.”
He didn’t have to remind me of the penalty for mutilating a body—the state legislature had passed that law early in my career, after I’d detailed the way a killer had hacked his victim to pieces, then fed the remains to his Doberman.
“What made Latham start to crack,” Robert continued, “was when Darren told him how he did it—how he put the ice under the car and how many hours that gave him to get to Vegas. Darren showed him pictures of those two little burned circles you found in the grass near the barn.”
Actually, I’d found only one of the two, but I didn’t want to interrupt Roper to correct him.
“Then I took over,” the D.A. went on, “pointing out how those research experiments would be the nail in his coffin on the issue of premeditation.” Roper chuckled. “Hell, I’d no sooner said the words ‘death penalty’ than he started crying and begging to plead out.”
“So how long will Latham serve?”
“If the judge approves the deal, he’ll get a ten-year sentence. Could be out in five.”
“Five years—that’s not much for killing your wife and burning her body,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “But it’s a lot more than zero. And then there’s the fine.”
“What fine?”
“His twenty-five-million dollars that just went up in smoke.”
CHAPTER 29
I REACHED ART JUST AS HE WAS FINISHING LUNCH, judging by the smacking sounds on the other end of the line. “If you needed a body,” I said, “where would you get one?”
“Gee, let me think,” he answered. “Who do I know that has a body or two lying around?”
“Okay, smart aleck. If you needed a body and you couldn’t get it from the Body Farm, where would you get it?”
“Down in Georgia. They’re stacked up like cordwood down there.”
“Too late,” I said. “The GBI had those under lock and key by the time Garland Hamilton escaped.”
“In that case,” he mused, “maybe I’d try a funeral home. Buy a fresh body off an unscrupulous undertaker.”
“How would he explain the empty coffin to the grieving family at the viewing or the service?”
He thought for a moment. “Maybe he wouldn’t have to. Wait till after the viewing, then swap the body for two or three concrete blocks, so the pallbearers don’t get suspicious.”
“Why wouldn’t this undertaker report you to the cops?”
“Because he’s unscrupulous?”
“So unscrupulous he’s going to help a notorious killer who’s just escaped? That seems mighty risky,” I said.
“Okay, I give up,” he said. “You’re fishing for an answer that I’m not coming up with. What is it you’re after?”
I told him the idea that had occurred to me, the way I might try to procure a stand-in if I were trying to fake my death.
“That could work,” he said finally.
“Could you check missing-persons reports, see if there’s anything on file?”
“Sure,” he said. “Oh, and Bill?”
“Yeah?”
“Remind me never to turn my back on you in a dark alley.”
I laughed as he hung up.
A half hour later, he called me back. “Only one new report in the past two weeks,” he said. “Teenage girl—a runaway. You sure those burned bits of skull are male?”
“The pelvic bones are in pretty good shape,” I said, “so it’s definitely male. And we’ve got two fully erupted third molars in what’s left of the mandible and maxilla, so he was at least eighteen. Harder to estimate the age because of the condition of the bones, but I’m thinking I see some signs of osteoarthritis on the vertebrae, which suggests he was middle-aged.”
“That could fit with your theory,” he said, “though it sure doesn’t prove it. I called Evers and ran it past him. The good news, sort of, is that he said it’s possible.”
“The bad news?”
“He said it sounds like the ultimate wild-goose chase. Even if somebody saw something, they’re not likely to tell the cops.”
“Well, damn.” I was saying that a lot lately, I noticed. I thanked Art and hung up. But I wasn’t ready to let go of the idea. I dug out the phone book and looked for a number.
“Public Defender’s Office,” said the woman who answered the phone.
“Is Roger Nooe in?” His name, despite the double o, rhymed with “Chloe,” not “kablooey,” I realized while I was on hold. The thought of Chloe and her speed dating made me smile, and I wondered if she’d met any good prospects.
Roger had taught for years in the UT College of Social Work; he’d retired several years before, but when he did, he took a job in social services at the Public Defender’s Office. The PD’s clients were the polar opposite of the well-heeled criminals represented by Burt DeVriess: Roger’s work put him in daily touch with people who were poor, unemployed, and often impaired by alcohol, drugs, or mental disorders—the kind of people who were falling through the widening gaps in America’s safety net by the millions in recent years. The challenges facing Roger and his colleagues seemed grim and insurmountable to me, but grimness is in the eye of the beholder; over the years—always to my surprise—I’d spoken with many people who regarded my own work as grim, too. I’d seen Roger a few times since he’d joined the PD’s office, and he’d seemed energized by the chance to develop programs and services to keep low-income defendants—and their families—from spiraling downward through poverty, crime, and imprisonment.
We played catch-up for a few minutes, as longtime colleagues and friends do when it’s been a year or so between conversations. We traded progress reports on our grown children and speculated about UT’s prospects in the upcoming football season—iffy, we agreed, given how many of the team’s key players had graduated the prior spring. Roger didn’t mention Jess’s murder or Garland Hamilton’s escape, and I appreciated that, even though I was about to bring up the subject myself. By letting me steer the conversation, he allowed me to frame things forensically rather than personally, and that made it easier for me. “Roger, you know more about street people and homelessness in Knoxville than anybody else in town,” I began.
&n
bsp; “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “but I can probably bore you with statistics for a few hours.” Roger was being characteristically modest, I knew—at the request of the city mayor and the county mayor, he’d led a ten-year study of homelessness, and his group had gone on to develop an ambitious plan to tackle the roots of the problem.
“If I needed a body,” I said, “would it be fairly easy to kill a homeless person and get away with it?”
He didn’t say anything at first; when he did speak, he sounded taken aback—shocked, even—by the callousness of the idea or the bluntness of the question. “Let me think about that for a minute,” he finally said.
“Here’s why I’m asking,” I said. “I’ve got two burned skeletons down in the osteology lab under the stadium. We know who Skeleton Number One was—a guy named Billy Ray Ledbetter. Skeleton Number Two might be Garland Hamilton’s.” If Roger was puzzled by what I was saying, he didn’t let on, so I assumed he’d been reading the newspapers. I described what we’d found in the basement of the cabin in Cooke County—one skeleton that appeared to have been defleshed before the fire and a second set of bones, clearly from a fresh body. “We’re thinking—and I’m very much hoping,” I admitted—“that Hamilton died while trying to fake his death with Billy Ray’s skeleton. But we’re having trouble making a positive identification. But maybe Skeleton Number Two isn’t Hamilton either—maybe it’s a double fake. You follow?”
“Just barely,” he said. “We social-work types aren’t as devious as you forensic types. We tend to worry about how to save people, not kill ’em.”
“This isn’t actually how I normally think either,” I said. “I’m just trying to think like Hamilton, which isn’t easy, since he’s either psychotic or pure evil. But I’m hoping you can tell me whether a homeless person might be a fairly easy target, if Hamilton were looking for someone to abduct and kill as a stand-in.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “If you’ve got an hour or two, we could do some field research. I’ll drive you around a little, you can take a look through the eyes of a potential killer, and then decide for yourself.”
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