The Devil's Bones

wasn’t sure what it was when I found it. But it was something.

Cash came to the edge of the rectangle and squatted down, but he couldn’t see anything from there.

“I’ve got a big pair of tweezers in the tackle box in my truck,” I said. “You mind going and getting it?”

He didn’t answer; he just headed to the truck. He might not know a lot about vehicle exhaust systems, but he was easygoing and he didn’t seem overly impressed with his own importance. When he handed me the tweezers, I maneuvered the tips down through the burned stalks of grass, squeezed gently, and plucked out the small black shape that had caught my eye. It was hard, oval-more or less-and pinched in the center. Looking closely, I saw that the pinch in the center was caused by a bit of heavy wire, clamped tight.

I held it out for Cash’s inspection. “Any idea what that is?”

“None,” he said.

“You think it could be something off the underside of the car? A hose clamp or fuel-line fitting or some such?”

He shrugged once more. “You’re asking the guy who had no idea where the catalytic converter would be?”

“You’re right.” I laughed. “What was I thinking?”

“We could check with the mechanics at the Lexus dealership,” he said. “Maybe one of those guys would recognize it.”

“See, you come up with a good idea every now and then,” I said.

He grinned. “Even a blind squirrel finds some nuts.”

Something about the shape was familiar to me. Not the blackened blob but the heavy wire. I couldn’t place it, though, and when Cash held out an evidence bag, I deposited my find inside. Cash sealed and dated it, but then his pen hesitated.

“Problem?”

“We have to list everything we confiscate when we return the warrant to the judge,” he said. “I’ve got no idea what to call this.”

“Call it ‘blackened blob,’” I suggested helpfully.

He shot me an unamused look.

“Or ‘unidentified burned object recovered from beneath area of burned car.’”

“That sounds better,” he said. “I can see why they think highly of you at UT.”

Cash and I both went over the rest of the area beneath and surrounding the car, but neither of us found anything else, so he headed back to the house and I headed for UT. As I’d done on my way in, I drove slowly to savor the view. Just as I was nearing the barn, my peripheral vision snagged on something. I stopped the truck and backed up. About ten feet to the left of the dirt track was a small, neat oval, about one foot by two feet, sketched by scorched earth and burned grass. I got out and knelt, using the tip of a pen to sift through the charred stalks. I found nothing. All the same, I retrieved two evidence flags from the back of my truck. I stuck one right beside the circle and the other ten feet away, at the nearest edge of the dirt track.

As I turned from the driveway onto Middlebrook Pike toward downtown, I phoned Cash on his cell, describing what I’d seen and where to find the markers. “Maybe it’s nothing,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe not.”

“Maybe a blind squirrel just found a nut,” I said.

CHAPTER 11

I BOUNDED INTO THE BONE LAB JUST BEFORE LUNCH-TIME, eager to tell Miranda about my finds at the Latham farm. She wasn’t there.

Normally, unless she was out helping me recover a body or bones from a death scene or dashing to the Body Farm to deliver a corpse or retrieve a skeleton, Miranda practically lived in the osteology lab. I could count on walking in to find her bent over a lab table, measuring bones and keying the dimensions into the Forensic Data Bank. Every skeleton we got-and this year we’d get nearly 150, arriving at the Farm as fully fleshed cadavers and departing bare-boned-had to be measured, their dozens of dimensions added to the data bank. The work was tedious and time-consuming, and most of it was done by Miranda. Perhaps I should have been happy she was getting a brief break, but instead I felt slightly annoyed that she wasn’t here to listen.

I glanced at Miranda’s computer screen-the scene of so much Googling-and noticed a map filling the display. It was a street map of Knoxville’s North Hills neighborhood, which happened to be Miranda’s neighborhood. It struck me as odd that Miranda would need a map of her own neighborhood.

I picked up the phone on the desk and dialed Peggy, one floor up. “Have you seen Miranda this morning?”

“She left about fifteen minutes ago,” said Peggy. “Said she was going over to the morgue to use the dissecting microscope there.”

“The dissecting ’scope? What for?”

“I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell,” said Peggy. “Just like the military’s policy on gays.”

“Great,” I said, “because hasn’t that approach worked well.”

Peggy’s mention of the morgue made me want to tell Garcia about my visit to the Latham farm, too, so instead of dialing the morgue and asking for Miranda or him, I hopped into my truck and dashed across the river to the rear of the hospital. Parking in the no-parking zone by the morgue’s loading dock, I punched the code to open the door, crossed the garagelike intake area, and threaded my way down the hall to the microscopy lab. The anthropology department had one dissecting ’scope-a stereoscopic microscope, with a micrometer-adjustable stage-but there was sometimes heavy competition for it, so I could understand why Miranda might have come over to use one of the three here at the morgue. She wasn’t in the lab, although I did see her backpack, sitting on a table beside one of the ’scopes. A small, U-shaped bone rested on the stage-a hyoid bone, from a throat-and I guessed Miranda was inspecting it for fractures, possible evidence of strangulation. I flipped on the microscope’s lamp and took a quick look myself. The arc of bone was smooth and unbroken, except by the tiny numerals “49–06,” inked on the bone in Miranda’s neat hand, signifying that the hyoid was from the forty-ninth body back in 2006. Number 49–06 had clearly not been strangled, which was both unsurprising and also somewhat reassuring, since this particular man’s body had been donated, if memory served, by his widow.

Figuring maybe Miranda had gone to the restroom, I went down the hall to Edelberto Garcia’s office to tell him the latest from the Latham case. His door was half open, so I knocked and leaned my head in.

Garcia was standing behind his desk, Miranda leaning over from the other side. On the desk between them, in a circle of light cast by a lamp, was a piece of paper. Miranda’s index finger was tracing a zigzag on the page, which I recognized as a map-the same map I’d seen on her computer monitor. When I walked in, she straightened and removed her hand from the map. She looked embarrassed, and for some reason that made me feel embarrassed, too.

“Oh, excuse me,” I said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Hello, Bill,” said Garcia, making my name rhyme with “wheel.” “Come in. You’re not interrupting.”

But I was interrupting, I knew; I just couldn’t tell exactly what I was interrupting. “I was on my way to the research facility,” I said to him, “and I wanted to tell you a couple of new things about the Latham case.”

“Yes, please,” he said. “What is it?”

I told him about going out to the impound lot with Art and Darren Cash, and finding the bits of newspaper in the backseat. I also told him about my trip to the farm, and about finding the wire-cinched blob of material and the small oval of burned grass.

“That’s very interesting,” he said. But he didn’t seem as interested as I’d hoped he would. And I no longer felt as interested as I’d been when I bounded into the bone lab. I’d wanted to ask Miranda what she made of all of this, since she knew Stuart Latham, but this didn’t seem the right time or place. A silence hung in the air.

Finally Garcia said, “Was there anything else, Bill?”

“No,” I said, looking from his face to Miranda’s, then back again. “That was it. I’ll see you later.” I withdrew, then leaned partway back in. “Did you want this open or closed?” I heard something in my voice-an undertone of