The Devil's Bones

by Jefferson Bass

  Even under the magnifying glass, it was difficult to find the gap where I’d seen the light shining through. Twice I had to twist the head of the lamp upside down, shining it up toward my face, in order to send light through the tiny opening again; the second time I did this, I took a pencil and drew faint arrows on both the inner and outer surfaces of the bone so I could find the spot again easily. Having marked the location, I held the bone beneath the magnifier once more and leaned in for a close look. From the outside, the fit looked fine: From one piece to the next, the edges of bone transitioned almost perfectly across the glue joint. But from the inside—a spot that would have lain just beneath the left eyebrow—something didn’t exactly match up.

  Rebuilding a shattered skull is a lot like rebuilding a Ming dynasty vase you’ve hurled into the fireplace in a fit of rage. The first few pieces fit together perfectly, zigs and zags and undulations mating exactly—partly because you’ve started with the biggest, easiest pieces, but also because it’s too soon for imperfection and distortion to rear their cumulative, misshapen heads. Gradually, though, minor imperfections start to compound, and the jig is up. Even if you tell yourself you can live with the cracks showing—they add a certain character and drama to the vase, after all, like tattoos and scars on skin—you know that the cemented shards will never again possess those elegant Ming lines. A missing crumb here or there distorts the fit by a thousandth of a degree; the china glue, though it be thin as water and only a few molecules thick, enlarges a reconstructed triangle just enough to keep it from nestling into its triangular niche. The edges and angles gradually cease to mate, forcing you into approximations and compromises—just as in the rest of life.

  The piece of frontal bone I held in my hand had been patched together from seven irregular fragments, none as large as the nail of my little finger; glued together, the seven pieces were about the size of the fat end of a Grade-A Large egg. The chunk of bone fit within the palm of my hand—with an inch of palm showing all around it. Even so, even as small as it was, the multitude of irregular seams and angles and edges had begun to rebel against being forced back together. As I zeroed in on the edges marked by my penciled arrow, I could see that the fracture lines on one edge didn’t correspond exactly to those of the adjoining edge. What’s more, now that I was examining the fit with a dubious eye, I gradually became aware of a slight difference in the hue of the char on the bone’s outer surface. The difference was slight—so slight it tended to vanish if I looked at it directly, the way a faint star vanishes if you look at it directly—but whenever I glanced at it slantwise, rather than dead on, there it was, an elusive and skittish truth, crouching in the forensic underbrush: Miranda had glued the wrong piece here. I batted the magnifying lamp away; it spun around in a half circle on the end of its spring-loaded arm, then stopped and swayed in place. “Damn,” I said angrily, then “damn” again, this time softly and sadly. The angry damn was for the wasted time and misdirected effort, butting our heads against the wrong wall, in our efforts to compare a faulty reconstruction with an X-ray. The sad damn was for Miranda, who would doubtless be devastated to learn of her mistake.

  I thought on that for a while. Did she actually need to learn of her mistake? Did she need to learn from her mistake? The teacher in me was inclined to think she did; otherwise she might make it again someday, in a case where there was no mentor looking over her shoulder to catch it and correct it. But another voice in me suggested that maybe I should cut her some slack, just this once—that I pushed too hard, expected too much, and held her to impossible standards; that the world wouldn’t end, and Miranda’s abilities wouldn’t self-destruct, if I didn’t point out this one small, understandable error. My inner teacher was winding up for a self-righteous retort—something to the effect that it would be condescending to protect Miranda from knowing she’d made a mistake—when my eye was caught by a glimmer in the tray of cranial fragments. The cascade of light from the magnifying lamp was now pooling in the tray of cranial fragments, and the lamp’s slight sway was causing a piece of bone to appear to move back and forth across the lens, growing and shrinking as it passed through the central field of view. It was almost as if the piece were breathing, expanding and contracting, coming to life. As I watched it, I realized that it looked familiar, in a backward sort of way, and then I realized why: Its jagged edge was the mirror image of one of the pieces in the reconstructed fragment. If I moistened the glue with just enough acetone—enough to detach Miranda’s mistake but not so much that all the pieces fell apart—I could substitute the piece that was dancing under the magnifying glass right now.

  Ten minutes later the line of Duco cement was still damp where I’d plugged in the new piece of the puzzle. I left it drying on the light box—alongside the X-ray I’d just compared it to—and locked up the lab, springing into my truck. Threading out from beneath the stadium, I emerged into what I was surprised to find had become late-afternoon sunlight. I’d had my head buried in bone fragments for more than eight hours.

  Hurrying west along Neyland Drive, I veered onto the northbound ramp of Alcoa Highway, the quickest way to I-40 east. As I merged onto the interstate, I checked the sun’s height in the rearview mirror. I estimated I had three hours of daylight left, maybe just two in the mountains. The drive would take one of those hours. I hoped the other would be enough time to find whatever it was that lay waiting for me in Cooke County.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE TRUCK’S REAR TIRES ISSUED A SERIES OF STEADY screams as I careened around the curves of River Road. It was a good thing the day’s sun had already dried the pavement; otherwise I’d already be wrapped around one of the sycamores edging the riverbank.

  The yellow line in the pavement fishtailed back and forth beneath the truck as I took every curve down the center or the inside—“straightening the curves,” southerners called it, and when I realized I was doing it, I laughed. I’d made my first foray into Cooke County less than a year before, and on that trip, on this very stretch of road, I had been a white-knuckled, dizzy-headed, carsick passenger. Now I was driving every bit as recklessly as that deputy sheriff had driven. Things change, I thought.

  But not all things change, I realized. I felt a wave of nausea rising fast, and the beginnings of dizziness that warned me I was on the verge of triggering a bout of Ménière’s. Not now, I prayed, please not now. Sweat suddenly drenched my head, and my mouth flooded with saliva. I slowed the truck, turned the air-conditioning up to hurricane force, and started sucking in cold air for all I was worth.

  Back when I was a kid in grade school, my teachers and I had learned—learned the hard, messy, humiliating way—that when I started to sweat and salivate like this, I had about thirty seconds before my breakfast or lunch came churning up. I had always hated the sense of impending doom—the sweat and saliva never lied—but I did feel grudging appreciation for the early-warning system. Not everyone had it, I noticed, and those who didn’t sometimes suffered even more humiliation than I. There are few experiences more degrading for an eight-year-old than spending half a day at school in clothes that reek of vomit. Wetting or soiling your britches was about the only thing worse than throwing up on yourself. Any one of the three could haunt you for the rest of the school year—as if the faint aroma of your accident still clung to your hair and clothing, weeks or even months later.

  Careening along this snaking backcountry road, I wasn’t worried about shaming myself in front of a bunch of third-graders. But I had no desire to throw up in my truck. I scanned the road for a bit of shoulder, someplace to pull off safely, but the pavement was notched into a narrow ledge. Five feet to the right was solid mountainside; five feet to the left, rocky riverbank. I was caught, as the old saying goes, between a rock and a hard place.

  My thirty seconds were ticking down fast. Finally, in a right-hand curve, I let the truck drift all the way into the left lane, the outside of the curve, where I hoped it would be more visible. I hit the brakes, hung two wheels off the pav
ement as far as I dared, and turned on my emergency flashers. I flung open my door and leaned out just as the heaves began.

  I hadn’t eaten anything since a hurried bowl of cereal nine hours earlier, so there wasn’t much coming up—just a little gastric juice, sharp and acrid in my mouth and nostrils. But the force of the dry heaves squeezed tears from my eyes. When the convulsive heaves stopped, I took in a few deep breaths and then was hit by a second round. As I hung out the door of the truck, I heard brakes squeal behind me. I expected to feel a vehicle slam into mine, but the impact never came, and with another, different squealing of tires—sudden acceleration—the unseen vehicle sped on.

  Feeling wrung out but also relieved—it had always puzzled me, how much better I tended to feel after throwing up, especially when there was nothing in my stomach causing me distress—I sat up, drew in a few more breaths, and wiped my mouth with my handkerchief. I took mental inventory and was relieved to find that the sense of impending vertigo had largely faded. A bottle of water, half full, lay on the passenger seat beside me, and I took a small, grateful sip to rinse my mouth. Then I put the truck in gear, eased the left wheels back onto the pavement, and continued along River Road, this time at my typically prudent pace.

  A few sedate miles farther, I came to the gravel drive marked ALMOST HEAVEN and took a right. Crime-scene tape was still tied to a tree on one side of the driveway, but rather than stretching across the entrance, the tape lay wadded at the base of the tree, splattered with mud from last night’s downpour.

  As I splashed up the gravel through a succession of puddles, I noticed that someone else had done the same. Jim O’Conner, I guessed, or maybe an insurance adjuster handling the damage claim for the cabin-rental company. When I reached the clearing, I saw a pickup parked near the crater that had once been the cabin. I called out—“Hello? Hello?”—but got no answer. The clearing was still ringed with blackened tree trunks and vegetation, but already the ravaged look of the place was beginning to soften, thanks to a carpet of new vegetation. Cleared ground with a view of the sky was a rarity in the mountains, and these optimistic, opportunistic botanical pioneers had wasted no time laying claim to this choice patch of sunlit real estate, a sudden and unexpected windfall.

  I walked slowly to the edge of the crater and peered down. By now half the basement was in shadow, and I knew I didn’t have much time—thirty minutes or so—before it would get too dark to work. I wasn’t sure what I was seeking here, but I knew there must be something: something small and subtle that we’d overlooked as we focused on the excitement of plucking not one but two incinerated skeletons from the debris.

  The day of the search and recovery, we’d had more than a dozen law-enforcement officers and firefighters on hand to assist. We’d also had a ladder planted firmly on the basement’s concrete slab. If I’d planned ahead, I’d have brought a stepladder from home, but I hadn’t planned ahead; I’d leapt up impulsively from the table in the bone lab the moment I solved the puzzle of the frontal sinus. Equipment needs had been the furthest thing from my mind.

  The basement slab lay about ten feet below the top of the cinder-block wall on which I stood. It wouldn’t be hard to hang from the wall and drop down into the basement. It was getting back out again that I was concerned about. A drop of several feet was easy; an upward leap of several feet was a whole ’nother matter. I could have done it back in my teens, when I was playing high-school basketball, but my knees and thighs and calves were no longer what they’d been thirty-five years before. I’d need to find or engineer a more reliable way out.

  I scanned the floor for any tall objects I might stand on—an empty oil drum would do very nicely, I thought, or even a metal folding chair. Unfortunately, whoever had originally furnished the house seemed to have thought that a wooden cabin deserved wooden furnishings, for there was very little in the basement’s debris field that wasn’t some variation on the theme of charred cellulose. If I piled enough debris in a corner, I could probably jump up and grab the top of the wall, but I wasn’t entirely sure I had the upper-body strength it would take to hoist myself up. As I frowned at one of the corners, my gaze strayed to the massive stone fireplace and chimney, built into the one end wall that was not entirely below grade. Was the stonework rough enough to allow me to climb the rocks? And if so, was my balance good enough to allow me to walk the top of the cinder blocks to the nearest corner, where I could step safely back onto solid ground? As I studied the chimney and the wall, I realized there was an easier way out. On either side of the massive fireplace—set into the four-foot-wide section of cinder blocks flanking the stonework—was a small window opening. The lower sills were about chest-high, and the openings in the block measured a couple of feet square. The windows themselves had been blown out by the explosion, and the wooden frames had burned as flames roared out the openings. I’d get a pretty good coating of soot if I wriggled out through one of them, but soot was a lot less objectionable than substances I encountered on a daily basis in my line of work.

  I sat down atop the wall, my feet dangling down into the basement. Twisting my body toward the corner, I leaned across and put my right hand on the end wall, keeping my left hand on the long side wall where I sat. I twisted my hips next, swinging my right leg toward the inner face of the end wall, lifting my butt off the blocks so I could turn and lower my body down into the corner. My toes scrabbled on the blocks, and I felt myself begin to fall, but then my right foot caught the windowsill and I regained my balance. Shifting both hands now to the wall above the window opening, I centered my feet on the sill, then reached down with one hand and gripped the top of the opening. Letting go of the top of the wall, I made a graceless transition from standing in the opening to squatting in the opening, then jumping down onto the concrete floor. If Olympic judges had been scoring my dismount on a scale of 1 to 10, my scores would probably have ranged from 0.1 (from the hostile French judge) to 2.1 (from the friendly U.S. judge). Still, I was down in one piece, and I was confident I could get up and out the window opening.

  But now that I was here, what was I looking for? I still didn’t know. I scanned the debris, halfway hoping to spot a bright red evidence flag, maybe one labeled LOOK HERE FOR IMPORTANT CLUE, but nothing so helpful met my inquiring gaze. In the absence of a miracle, I’d need to resort to old-fashioned work—a swift but systematic search. I decided to start by reexamining the area where we’d found the skeletons, then spiral outward toward the basement walls.

  The search didn’t take long. Tucked into the angle at the base of the long wall, I found a second pair of thin, unmelted copper wires leading from the melted car battery—the battery that had set off the dynamite jammed between Freddie Parnell’s teeth. This pair of wires had been concealed by a line of bricks strung along the wall. I gave the wires a tug, and they slid out from beneath the bricks. As I continued to tug, the wires led me toward the corner of the basement; by the time I got there, I’d already figured out where they went next: out the small window. Hamilton had staged the Ledbetter skeleton, the homeless man’s body, the dynamite, and the accelerant, then crawled out the window and triggered the destruction from outside. It would have been easy, I guessed, to slip away in the pandemonium created by the blast and the blaze.

  I was startled by the toot of a car’s horn, then the slam of a door and the cadence of footsteps.

  “Let me guess,” I heard Miranda’s voice saying above me. “It’s not him. The second skeleton’s not Hamilton, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “But why do you need to guess? You saw it for yourself, didn’t you? I left the sinus right there by the light box.”

  Now it was Miranda who sounded puzzled. “By what light box? In the osteo lab? I haven’t been on campus at all today.”

  “Then how’d you know it’s not Hamilton? I thought about calling you once I found the missing piece of frontal sinus, but I just jumped in the truck and headed out here instead.”

  Suddenly I felt a wave of dizziness, like th
e Ménière’s was about to kick in again.

  “What are you doing here, then? How’d you know I was here?” I demanded.

  “I got your message.”

  “What message?”

  “The text message on my pager. ‘M—Meet me at Cooke County fire scene ASAP. Urgent. BB.’”

  “That message came from my cell phone?”

  “Yes. Wait. I don’t know. It said ‘private number.’ I figured you’d just changed your settings.”

  “I’ve never sent a text message in my life,” I said. “I don’t even know how.” Alarms were shrieking in my head, and either Miranda saw the fear in my eyes or she’d figured something out on her own. “I think we should get out of here.”

  Miranda held up a hand, then froze, and then spun to face something behind her. I heard the beginnings of a gasp, and then the gasp turned into a grunt, and suddenly Miranda was falling, tumbling backward into empty space, her arms and legs windmilling as she fell. If this had been a scene in a movie, that’s when everything would have happened in slow motion; I’d have lunged and somehow managed to catch her, or at least managed to break her fall. But this was not a movie, and I stood rooted to the spot, not even comprehending the fact of her fall until the moment she thudded to the floor on her back and her head snapped down onto the concrete with a sickening crack. Her body convulsed once, then lay still. I felt horror rising in my throat, and suddenly I was retching again, retching and crawling through the wreckage of the basement to where she lay.

  I felt for a pulse in her wrist. When I couldn’t find it, a blind panic began racing through my veins and nerves—a primitive, wild-animal sort of panic, the kind that short-circuits all semblance of thought, all powers of language. I forced myself to slow the rapid, racking breaths that were pouring oxygen and adrenaline onto the blaze of my fear. I laid a hand on Miranda’s neck, guiding my fingertips to the left side of her throat, to the hollow between her windpipe and the muscles at the side of the neck—the valley where her carotid artery lay. I stilled the pounding of my own heart enough to feel the faint flutter beneath my praying fingertips. She was alive. I felt a shudder of relief run through my frame, heard a gasp or sob of some sort coming from my chest, and then shuddered again as the words floated down from above. “I hope the fall didn’t kill her,” said a familiar voice mildly. “I have a much better death in mind.” I looked up to see Garland Hamilton standing at the top of the wall, sneering down at Miranda and me.