The Devil's Bones

Funny how a dead woman’s pie story could bring something to the surface through years of cynicism and bare- knuckles courtroom battles.

“Okay, Number Ninety-nine,” I said to the rotted corpse on the shelf, “let’s have a look at your upper left lateral incisor.” I leaned down-the body was on the second shelf up from the floor, at waist level-to study the teeth. The head was in shadow, partly from the shelf above and partly from me, making it difficult to see the tooth’s contours, so I reached in and ran the tip of my left index finger over the biting surfaces of the upper teeth. Where the edge of the incisor should have been, I felt a quarter-inch notch instead. I retrieved my key chain again and shone the tiny LED light on the teeth. Years of wear had softened the edges, but half the tooth had broken away. This had to be Aunt Jean, but I needed to make absolutely sure. Unzipping the body bag completely, I folded back the entire C-shaped flap that constituted the bag’s upper surface. I gave the key-chain light another squeeze and swept the faint beam down from the face, down across the shipwreck of the rib cage, across the collapsed abdomen and jutting hipbones, and along the legs. When I got to the knees, I stopped. The light bounced back at me with a dull silvery sheen. Number 99 had two metallic knees-knees made of titanium-662, I felt certain.

“Hello, Aunt Jean,” I said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m glad I found you.”

A dozen photos, a quick conversation with Sean, and a three-hour drive later, I rolled into Knoxville, feeling exhausted but accomplished. I took a long, hot shower to wash away the smell of death and the aches of bending, then tumbled into bed and fell swiftly asleep. In my dreams I shared a cherry pie with a skeletal woman who flashed me a crooked smile. “Watch out for the pits,” she said, “they’ll break a tooth if you bite down on ’em. Did I ever tell you about the pie that broke my tooth?”

“Tell me again,” I said to her. “Tell me the pie story.”

When I woke up, daylight was streaming in the windows, and I called Burt DeVriess to tell him I’d found her.

CHAPTER 20

AFTER CALLING DEVRIESS, I HEADED TO CAMPUS. IT was early yet-not quite 7:30-and all the offices in the Anthropology Department were still dark and empty. Even the osteology lab, where Miranda often arrived by 7:00, remained locked. I was intrigued to find a vase of flowers-red roses-sitting in the stairwell just outside the lab’s door. A small card was nestled amid the flowers; the envelope was unsealed, so I slid out the card to see who was getting roses. I doubted that it was me, but then again, you never know.

“For Miranda,” the neat block letters read, “my new favorite.” Below the inscription was a drawing of a heart pierced by an arrow. I felt a pang of jealousy the moment I read the words. But what disturbed me more was the blood dripping from the heart and pooling beneath it.

An hour later, Miranda answered when I phoned the lab. She sounded jangled and edgy, and I wasn’t surprised. “I saw the flowers,” I said. “Who do you think sent them?”

“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “It creeps me out.”

“Better to figure it out than not to know,” I said.

“You’re probably right,” she said, “but I hate to get upset about it, because that gives whoever it is more power over me than I want.” I didn’t say anything, and after a moment, she went on.

“I’m afraid it’s Stuart Latham,” she said. “He called yesterday, asking if I was involved with the investigation into Mary’s death.”

This revelation stunned me. “My god,” I said, “what did you tell him?”

“I told him I couldn’t discuss any forensic cases with him. But-true to form-he didn’t want to take no for an answer.” She laughed a brief, bitter laugh. “First he tried to charm me, and when that didn’t work, he played the grieving widower-the real victim in the case-and tried to guilt it out of me. Finally, when that didn’t work, he started getting mean.”

“How so? Did he threaten you in any way?” I felt my pulse getting faster and my blood pressure rising.

“No, nothing overt,” she said. “Just talking about how selfish and heartless I am.” She paused. “How I flirted with him and led him on back when I used to see them. How unhappy that made him realize he was in his marriage. How hard a time he’s had getting over the rejection.” She fell silent again, except for her breathing. From the sound of it, I wondered if she was crying. “The thing I’m ashamed of, Dr. B., is that I did flirt with him. I don’t know why. No, that’s not true; I do know. He was handsome, and he was a grown-up, and it was obvious that he was attracted to me. I think it was the seductiveness of being desired, you know?”

I did know; what surprised me was that Miranda knew, and that she’d found it out from the likes of Stuart Latham.

“Anyhow,” she said, “I never meant to cause trouble in their marriage, and I stopped flirting with him when I realized it was starting to.”

“So how did the phone call end?”

“Abruptly,” she said. “I told him never to call me again, and I hung up on him.”

“You think he sent the flowers as an apology?”

“Did you see the card?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Did that look like an apology?”

“If it was an apology,” I said, “it was a kinda scary one.”

“Kinda,” she said. “Like the pope is kinda Catholic.”

“Are you okay?”

“I will be,” she said. “Soon as I get a chance to take a long, hot shower and wash the scum off.”

“If he contacts you again, tell me,” I said. “We’ll call the campus police or KPD. The last thing he needs right now is to be any higher on the radar screen of the cops.”

She thanked me and hung up. From what she’d said, it sounded plausible that Stuart Latham had sent the flowers, and the possibility was troubling. Two other possibilities-two other suspects, as I thought of them-had occurred to me, and both of those were troubling as well.

One possibility was Edelberto Garcia, who I still feared might be interested in Miranda as more than a colleague or occasional babysitter. There was something about Garcia’s cool smoothness I didn’t fully trust, although I recognized that it might be jealousy rather than logic that lay behind my suspicions.

The other possibility was Garland Hamilton, and the thought that Hamilton might have sent Miranda the flowers chilled me to the bone. A few months before, Hamilton had locked his sights on Jess, and now Jess was dead. When I considered this possibility, I couldn’t help praying that the flowers had come from Stuart Latham.

By midmorning I was lost in the pages of the latest issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences-one of my colleagues was fine-tuning a way to estimate age by studying cranial sutures- when I gradually became aware of a soft, insistent tapping sound and then a familiar voice saying, “Doc, mind if I come in?” I roused myself back to the present.

“Sorry. Sure, come on in.” I looked up at the same moment I placed the voice. Steve Morgan walked in, and the sight brought a smile to my face, despite the stress of the past two days. Steve was a TBI agent who’d been a student of mine years before; more recently he’d been part of a joint TBI-FBI investigation into official corruption in the Cooke County Sheriff’s Office.

“I hope you’re here to tell me y’all have caught Garland Hamilton,” I said.

He winced and shook his head. “I wish I were, but I’m not,” he said. “I think you’ll find this interesting, though. We’ve been watching his bank accounts and looking at his credit cards.”

“And?”

“We found a storage unit he rented about six months ago, and inside was something that belongs to you.” He stepped back into the hallway, then reappeared, cradling a cardboard box in his arms. The box was 36 inches long, 12 inches high, and 12 inches deep. I knew the exact dimensions because I had spent years putting skeletons into boxes just like this one. I had a pretty good idea whose skeleton was in this particular box, too: I’d have bet a year’s salary that the box contained the postcranial skeleton-the bones from the neck down-of Leena Bonds, a young woman killed in Cooke County thirty years earlier. I had recovered the woman’s body from deep in a cave in the mountains, where the combination of cool air and abundant moisture had transformed her soft tissue into