who took out the two-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the little girl, then drowned her in the backyard pool?”
Cash nodded. “His granddaughter,” he said. “The policy had a two-year waiting period on the death benefit. The really sick thing about that case-”
Art broke in. “You mean besides the fact that a man would drown his own granddaughter?”
“Yeah,” said Cash, “even sicker than that. He took out the policy, put in the swimming pool, and then waited exactly twenty-five months. That little girl had a rattlesnake coiled around her feet for two years.”
“That is sick,” I said. “How on earth could somebody do that to his own granddaughter-for any price, let alone a couple hundred thousand bucks?”
“Some people are just plain evil,” Art said. “No other explanation for it, I don’t care what the forensic psychologists say.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” I said. “I’m not sure about God anymore, but I’m starting to believe in the devil. Not some red-suited guy with a pitchfork and horns, but regular-looking folks. A guy who drowns his granddaughter in the backyard. A woman who feeds her husband arsenic every night.”
“A pedophile who trolls the Internet for gullible kids,” said Art.
“A husband who kills his wife,” said Cash, “and lets her rot for days before burning her body.”
I took that as the investigator’s hint that we should get down to business. I nodded toward the burned-out car, a short, sleek SUV. “This looks like it used to be a pretty nice car,” I said. “What is it?”
“Lexus RX, 2006,” he said. “Probably around forty thousand new.”
“That’s a lot,” I said. “Would have been cheaper to take her on a hike in the Smokies and push her off a bluff-say she tripped and fell.”
“Bill loses more hiking buddies that way,” Art said. “Never, ever go to the mountains with him.”
Cash laughed. “Thanks for the warning.” He nodded at the vehicle. “Book value on the vehicle’s more like twenty-five thousand now,” he said. “But the bank owns most of that. Deductible on the insurance policy’s five hundred. Five hundred is dirt cheap if it works to cover your tracks and give you an alibi.”
“Well, it didn’t quite do the job,” I said, “thanks to the bugs. Let’s see if there’s anything else to find.”
Art and I had brought a few things in the back of my truck. We both unfolded white Tyvek jumpsuits and wriggled into them, looking like overgrown toddlers in baggy sleeper pajamas. I opened the tackle box that held an assortment of tools and took out two sharp-pointed trowels and two pairs of tweezers. I handed one of each to Art, then slid a wire screen out from beneath the tackle box. Each opening in the mesh was four millimeters square- about the size of the end of a set of wooden chopsticks from a Chinese take-out place.
Cash showed me how the body had been found in the car. The woman’s legs had been down in the driver’s well, her left arm hanging down by her side. Her right arm stretched over near the passenger door. Her torso and head were flopped over to the right also.
“As I understand it,” I said, “there were no traces of accelerant found in the interior. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” Cash said. “Arson dog didn’t smell anything, and I’m told that dog has a great nose.”
“Sure is thoroughly burned for no accelerant,” I said, peering into the burned-out shell of the vehicle. The upholstery was completely gone. The seats had been reduced to charred, rusted springs and support rails. The underside of the roof was fully exposed, the same reddish gray as the vehicle’s exterior. The windshields and windows were gone. All that remained of the steering wheel was the steel skeleton, including the empty hub where the airbag had been before it fired.
“Used to be cars had a lot of metal inside,” said Art. “Now everything’s plastic, and once the car catches fire, that plastic keeps feeding it. It’s like pornography.”
I stared at him, baffled by the comparison. “Pornography? How so?”
“Hot and nasty,” he said. “Temperatures in the passenger compartment can go over two thousand degrees. And all that burning plastic releases all kinds of toxic chemicals. Smoke inhalation can kill you long before the heat does.”
I recalled the smoke roiling out of the cars we’d recently burned at the Ag farm-dense black billows seething out the windows and windshields once the glass gave way-and nodded. “Any way to tell where the fire started?”
Cash shook his head. “Not for sure,” he said. “The ignition was on, though, so the engine was probably idling. We think either the catalytic converter or the muffler set the grass underneath on fire. Most of these luxury SUVs never get off the pavement, but out in that pasture it’d be easy for the exhaust system to set the grass on fire, especially as hot and dry as it’s been. Catalytic converter can get up to nearly a thousand degrees, if the car’s fairly new and the converter’s still working.”
“I bet one of you guys knows the ignition temperature of grass,” I said.
“Six hundred degrees,” they chorused.
“So if that converter was in contact with the vegetation,” I said, “it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to start a grass fire.”
“Right,” said Cash.
“Which begs the question,” I said, “if the husband did it, how’d he get fifteen hundred miles away before it started burning?”
None of us had an answer, so Art and I squatted down beside the vehicle-me beside the driver’s door, him beside the right rear door-and began sifting through the debris in the floor pan. I didn’t find much: A layer of ash. A few bolts, screws, and coins. A couple of phalanges, the smallest bones of the fingers and toes. “Hey,” I razzed Art, “how come KPD missed these?”
“Simple,” he said. “The car burned late afternoon, right after ‘Tiffany’ got out of school and got on the Web. I was too busy reading love notes from middle-aged perverts to go out to the Latham farm and look for bones. They had to send the B-team instead.”
“We gotta get you off that pedophile assignment,” I said.
“I’m training a replacement,” he said. “I hope to be back to healthier stuff-gunshots and stabbings and bludgeonings-within a month or so.”
Art wasn’t finding much more in the back than I’d found in the front: springs, seat-belt buckles, and a few coins down where the rear bench seat once met the seat back-that place where every car accumulates loose change and candy wrappers and stray peanuts. I was about to suggest we call it a morning when I heard Art say, “Hmm.
“Darren,” I asked, “any other newspaper found in the vehicle?”
“No.”
“This little scrap seems odd, the way it’s wedged way down in the corner of the backseat. You expect that with pennies and pens, but not so much with newspaper.” I knelt down beside the other corner of the backseat and sifted through the debris. The tip of my trowel teased out another bit, smaller and with no type, from a corner of the page. I recognized the distinctive saw-tooth fringe at the edge of the paper, where the roll of newsprint had been cut with a serrated edge. I craned my neck around to look at Darren. “Was the house searched?”
He nodded.
“I don’t suppose you remember whether there was a stack of newspapers?”
“You’re right,” he said, “I don’t remember. Why would newspapers be significant?”
“I’m just thinking out loud,” I said. “I remember a case in which a woman had stabbed her husband and decided to burn his body in the house. There were no traces of accelerant, but down behind some of the furniture the arson investigator found wads of newspaper, which she’d used as fuel. A couple more minutes and that paper would have gone up in flames. Luckily, the fire department got the fire out before it reached flashover, so some evidence remained.”
“So you’re thinking maybe Stuart Latham did the same thing?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “If there’s a stack of papers back at the house with a week’s worth missing, that might be a clue that he used newspaper to help goose the fire along.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “We can add that to the search warrant, along with what you and Dr. Garcia told us
