The Devil's Bones

no,” she said sharply, “I don’t mean it that way. The beer keg was always in the barn. There’d be bowls of apple slices to feed the horses.” Despite the darkness, I glimpsed a smile. “I still half-expect to smell hay and hear horses nickering whenever I smell beer.” The smile faded. “It was a lot of fun. Until it wasn’t.” She shook her head, as if shaking off a bug or a bad memory.

“When’s the last time you saw the Lathams?”

“Her, right after I switched to anthro; him, about a year later. I quit going to their parties, and he showed up at the bone lab one day. Said he wanted to make sure I knew I was always welcome at the farm. Anytime, he said.” She nodded toward the cars. “We all set here?”

“I think so,” I said. “Let me check with Art.” I looked around and finally spotted Art Bohanan’s dark form half hidden by the lone tree in the pasture. “Art!” I yelled. “Mind your manners-there’s a lady present.”

“Oh, sorry,” he called back, stepping away from the tree and tugging up his zipper. “I thought it was just you and Miranda.” He pointed at the tree. “I was just making sure this fine botanical specimen won’t catch fire.”

“Very eco-friendly of you, pig,” said Miranda.

“That’s ‘Officer Pig’ to you,” said Art pleasantly. Like me, he’d long since learned to enjoy Miranda’s sarcasm, since it was tempered by forensic smarts, a tireless work ethic, and a big heart. Besides, Art had an equally sizable streak of smart-ass himself. His East Tennessee roots had infused him with a down-home sense of fun. His three decades of crime-scene and crime-lab experience-he was the Knoxville Police Department’s senior criminalist-had added a dark, gallows topspin to the hillbilly humor. Working with Art practically guaranteed a Leno-like monologue of deadpan jokes about murders, suicides, and extreme fingerprinting techniques. (“Give me a hand, Bill,” he’d once said at a crime scene; he was asking me to amputate a murder victim’s right hand so he could rush it to the lab for fingerprinting.) To someone unaccustomed to daily doses of death and brutality, our humor might have sounded shocking, but Art-like Miranda, and like me-took his work seriously. It was only himself and his colleagues he took lightly. It made the bleakness bearable.

“Okay,” I said, “we’ve got both bodies in position, we’ve got an amputated leg in each backseat, we’ve poured two gallons of gasoline into both passenger compartments, we’ve hosed down the area till it’s the only patch of mud within a hundred miles, and we’ve got the water truck standing by with another five hundred gallons just in case. Anything I’ve forgotten?”

“You’ve forgotten to explain why it is we had to wait till my bedtime to get started,” said Art. “It’s not like the night’s all nice and cool for us. It’s still ninety, easy, and if that moon burns off some of this haze, it could get back up to ninety-five here pretty soon.”

“It’s not the heat,” I said to Miranda, “it’s the stupidity. You want to explain it to Sherlock here?”

“Sure, boss,” she said. “I live to serve.” She turned to Art.

“Our primary objective, of course, is to incinerate all the soft tissue, so we end up with nothing but burned bones-comparable to the ones in the case you’re working.”

“I understand that,” said Art, “and I do appreciate it. No, really. But don’t dem bones burn just as good in the daytime as they do in the dark? Or is there something you osteologist types know that we mere mortals are not privy to?”

“Many things, grasshopper,” said Miranda. “The bodies and bones burn just as well in the daytime, but they don’t photograph near as well, and we want to document the process in detail.” She pointed to the four tripods and digital video cameras we’d set up beside the vehicles. One camera was aimed through each vehicle’s windshield, another through each driver’s window. “If we did this during the day, the video would show nothing but smoke. Lit from the outside, by the sun, the smoke steals the show. Lit from within, by the flame, the tissue shows up clear as a bell while it burns away.”

“I knew that,” said Art.

“I know you knew,” said Miranda. “You were just checking to make sure I did. Right?”

“Right.” Despite the slight grumbling about the late start, I knew that Art was glad to be out here, rather than bent over a computer screen swapping chat messages with pedophiles. Six months earlier he’d been given the unenviable assignment of creating the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, dedicated to ferreting out sexual predators who trolled the Web for young victims. Since then he’d spent countless hours posing as “Tiffany,” a fourteen-year-old girl who loved to chat online. Although Art took pride in catching and arresting the sort of men who preyed on the Tiffanys of this world, he found the work sad, stressful, and dispiriting. So getting permission to work even one old-fashioned murder case-something he found wholesome by comparison to pedophilia-was a welcome break for him.

“Okay, you two,” I said, “a little less conversation, a little more incineration.”

Miranda fished around in a pocket of her jumpsuit. “Rock and roll,” she said. She flicked a disposable lighter, and a jet of flame appeared at the tip. She swayed like a drunk or a stoner, waving the lighter, and sang, “SMOKE on the WA-ter, a FIE-uhr IN the sky-y.”

I laughed. “Aren’t you a little young to know that song, missy? That’s from back in my heyday.”

“My grandpa used to play it on the Victrola,” she said, “whenever he grilled up a woolly mammoth he’d clubbed.” She grinned, and her teeth shone golden in the glow of the flame.

“Very funny,” I said. “Remind me to laugh on the way back to the old folks’ home.”

“Ouch,” she said, but she wasn’t smarting from my snappy retort. She took her thumb off the trigger, and the flame died.

“Serves you right,” I said. “Okay, let’s get some data.” I walked toward one of the cars, and Miranda headed to the other. Fishing a book of paper matches from one pocket, I lit one-it took three tries to get enough friction from the tiny strip at the base of the book-then used that match to set off the rest. The matchbook erupted in a fusillade of flame, flaring bigger than I’d expected, and I reflexively flung it through the open window of the car. The gas-soaked upholstery ignited with a flash and a whoosh, and I wondered if I’d been too liberal with the accelerant. I also wondered, as I felt the heat searing my face, if I had any eyebrows left.

Through the rush and crackle of the growing fire, I caught the drone of an airplane overhead. A small plane, just off the runway from the nearby airport, banked in our direction. As it circled, the flash of its wingtip strobes illuminated the smoke from the burning cars in bursts, like flash grenades, minus the boom. I tried to wave them off, but if they could even see me, they ignored my frantic gestures.

Backing away from my vehicle, I glanced over at the other car, also engulfed in flames. Despite the intensity of the inferno, Miranda stood barely ten feet from the car, one arm shielding her face, a look of utter fascination in her eyes. I forced my way through the blast of heat and took her by the arm. “You’re too close,” I shouted over the hiss and roar of the fire.

“But look!” she shouted back, never moving her eyes, pointing into the vehicle at the figure slumped in the driver’s seat. I looked just in time to see the skin of the forehead peel slowly backward, almost like an old-fashioned bathing cap. As it continued to peel backward, I realized that what I was seeing was a scalping. A scalping done by fire, not by knife.

“Very interesting!” I yelled. “But you’re still too close. That’s what we’ve got the video cameras for. This is dangerous.”

As if to underscore my point, a thunderous boom shook the air. Miranda yelped, and I instinctively wrapped both arms around her and tucked my head. I saw a puff of smoke from one of the tires-the heat had increased the pressure and weakened the rubber to the bursting point. Miranda and I scurried to join Art in the shelter of the water truck. “I hope you took off the gas tanks,” Art shouted, “or filled them up with water!”

“Why?”

“In case there’s any gas left. You don’t want any vapors,” he said.

“Since they came from the junkyard-” I began, but I didn’t get to finish the sentence. Just then the gas tank of the car Miranda had been standing beside exploded, and pellets of hot glass rained down on us like some infernal version of hailstones. The car’s spare tire-launched from the trunk by the blast-arced toward the water truck, slammed into the hood, and smashed through the windshield. It’s going to be a long, hot summer, Bill Brockton, I said to myself, and you’ve got some serious ’splainin’ to do.

The circling airplane beat a hasty retreat into the safety of darkness, and a moment later I heard sirens.