CHAPTER 35
“YOU PIECE OF HUMAN SHIT,” GROWLED A VOICE THAT resembled my own. “You twisted son of a bitch.”
Hamilton laughed. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t think my mother had much to do with this. I think most of the credit goes to you, Bill.”
“Bullshit,” I said without turning around. “You’re insane or you’re evil. Or both.”
“But why, Bill, and since when? I was a model of decency and stability until a year ago. Until you ruined me.”
Now I turned to face him—above me, silhouetted against the fading daylight—though I remained kneeling beside Miranda. “I pointed out a mistake you made in an autopsy, Garland. A mistake that would have cost an innocent man his life. It was a bad mistake, but it didn’t have to ruin you. You chose the path of ruin.”
“The path of ruin? The path of ruin?” He sneered it, coating the words with the slime of mockery. “Christ, it’s tough to pick just one thing,” he said, “but I think it’s the simplistic Brockton sanctimoniousness I’ll miss least of all.”
He bent down briefly, and when he straightened, he was holding a large container: a five-gallon gas can. He shook it, and light sparkled through a broken stream of liquid the color of tea. Then I felt the sting of the gasoline on my skin and in my nostrils.
“Fitting, don’t you think? Instead of me burned to death here, it’s going to be you and Little Miss Lovely.”
“No!” I jumped to my feet and lunged toward the corner of the basement. Leaping up as I ran, I planted a foot on the wall and transferred my forward momentum into vertical motion. I managed to grab both walls at the top and scrabbled at the concrete with my toes as I pulled with my arms.
Something swatted me down like a giant’s fist. I collapsed into the corner, bewildered at first. Then I felt a searing pain in my chest and realized I’d heard a loud pop. It gradually dawned on me that I’d been shot.
Bracing myself against the corner of the wall, I struggled back to my feet and staggered toward him, holding up both hands. “Don’t kill Miranda,” I begged. “She doesn’t deserve to die. She never did anything to you.”
“You still don’t get it,” he said. “I’m not killing her because she deserves it. I’m killing her to make you suffer. Just like I killed Jess to make you suffer.” He pointed at me and I saw a flash, and then my left leg collapsed. I tumbled to the floor beside Miranda, lying on my left side, my back to Hamilton. My field of vision began to shrink—as if I were peering through the wrong end of a telescope or a pair of binoculars—and I knew I was on the verge of losing consciousness. I felt more gasoline splashing me. Just let go, I thought. It won’t hurt as much that way. I focused on the blackness around the edges of my vision and I tried to embrace it, or let it embrace me, before the flames could.
But something wouldn’t let me let go, and through the pain and despair I realized that the something was Miranda. She was the only thing I could still see through the small tunnel of light, but she stayed there, stubborn as ever, refusing to fade to blackness. If I gave in now, I realized—if I took the easy, unconscious way out—I was giving up Miranda, too. I’d be giving her to Hamilton, who had already gotten Jess. I’ll be damned, I thought, if I let you take Miranda, too. Jess had been my lover, sweetly but briefly; Miranda had been my assistant, my colleague, and my protégée for years. Protégée, I thought: from the French word for “protect.”
Through the pain in my chest and my leg, I felt a surge of protectiveness and rage and hatred. It was small and tentative at first, but it caught and grew, like a fire whose heat draws in oxygen to feed its growth. For reasons I didn’t understand, I felt myself clutching at my chest, tugging at my shirt, fumbling with the flap of the pocket. Then I felt my fingers close tightly around something, and I realized what I held in my grip: Maybe it would be death, or maybe it would be deliverance, but it sure as hell would not be giving in. Miranda and I might be doomed—clearly we were—but I would not surrender her willingly.
I dragged my clenched fist across the concrete floor, then flung my arm into the air and opened my hand wide, as if waving good-bye to this world and all I’d held most dear within it. The fistful of kitchen matches I’d found in my pocket—the ones I stuffed there during the night’s storm—scratched and sparked, then burst into flame as I hurled them skyward. I looked up in time to see fire racing up the stream of gasoline that Garland Hamilton was pouring down on us. Hamilton recoiled reflexively from the fire, and when he did, the jerk of the five-gallon can drenched him in a shower of gasoline. Flames and smoke engulfed him instantly. He screamed and flailed atop the wall, a human ball of flame, and then I saw a tongue of fire licking toward me as well. I shielded my face with my arm and rolled atop Miranda to shield her. Casting a final glance up through the inferno, or through a dying dream of it, I thought I saw Garland Hamilton’s body take flight and arc through the darkening sky above me. It blazed like a human meteor, or some fire-demon released from hell. Then—only then—the constricting tunnel of vision and consciousness collapsed on me at last, and I sank into blackness and oblivion.
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 ba
ck 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 Tennessee 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
About the Author
JEFFERSON BASS is the writing team of Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility—the Body Farm—a quarter-century ago. He is the author or coauthor of more than two hundred scientific publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career at the Body Farm, Death’s Acre. Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as National Professor
of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His writings have been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, and Popular Science, and broadcasted on National Public Radio. The coauthor of Death’s Acre, he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
OTHER BOOKS BY JEFFERSON BASS
Fiction
Flesh and Bone
Carved in Bone
Nonfiction
Beyond the Body Farm
Death’s Acre
Credits
Jacket photographs: trees by Digital Vision Photography/Veer; fire by Tetra Images/Jupiterimages
Copyright
The Devil's Bones Page 26
