there?”
“There is, but I’ll be fine.” I thought of a fire scene I’d worked in West Tennessee a few years before. “Listen, Jim, if you’ve got firefighters there, ask ’em to take it easy with the hoses,” I said.
“Burned bones are very fragile, and the pressure from a fire hose can scatter them all over the place or smash them to bits. Wet ash tends to set up pretty hard, too-like concrete, once it dries. Do what you need to do to keep things safe, but the less water gets to those bones, the better.”
He excused himself, and I heard him relaying that message into a radio.
“Don’t worry about me, Jim. Once I’m there and looking at bones, it’ll be like any other case.”
He didn’t challenge me, but I could tell he wasn’t entirely convinced. Finally he said, “Okay, come on up. Just remember, there’s no shame in asking for help.”
“Okay, deal,” I said. “Listen, leave the bones right where they are. Don’t disturb the scene unless somebody’s safety is in jeopardy.”
“We won’t touch a thing,” O’Conner said. Then he gave me directions to Fish Creek and signed off. As soon as he did, I dialed Miranda’s pager and punched in my home number. It seemed like hours before my phone rang, although the digital clock on the nightstand claimed that only a minute had passed.
“Hey,” said Miranda sleepily, “you okay?” A lot of people seemed to be asking me that question lately.
“I’m okay. Garland Hamilton might be dead. They tracked him to a cabin in Cooke County, and just before they swooped in to arrest him, the cabin blew up and burned down. They say they’ve found an incinerated skull.”
“Holy hand grenade, Batman,” she said. “You think he knew the jig was up? Decided to go out in a blaze of glory?”
“I wish. But that doesn’t seem like his style. He was always so smug and superior, you know?”
She considered this. “That’s true,” she said. “Even when he was wrong, he was sure he was right. Hard to picture him making the ultimate admission of failure. But maybe it wasn’t suicide. Maybe it was an accident.”
“What kind of accident causes a huge explosion?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he was trying to rig some sort of booby trap, and it got away from him.”
“Possible, I guess. Let’s get up there and see what we see. Do you want me to pick you up at your house?”
“No, that’s okay-it’s out of your way. Just meet me on campus. I’ll park down by the bone lab and hope we get back before I get ticketed or towed.”
“Okay. Half an hour?”
“Half an hour.”
Thirty minutes later I turned down the narrow asphalt ramp that led to the base of the stadium. As I rounded one of the pillars holding up the south end-zone stands, I saw the brake lights of a VW Jetta wink out, the dome light switch on, and the door open. Miranda was already clad in a biohazard suit, and the glare of my headlights on the white Tyvek nearly blinded me. I cut the headlights, eased up beside the Jetta by the glow of my parking lights, and opened the passenger door.
“Anybody else going?”
“Nobody from the department.” Normally I took three graduate students into the field with me-one to recover bones, one to record everything we found, and one to shoot photographs-but I didn’t want a whole crew this time. “I’m a little nervous about this,” I said. “I didn’t want to take any of the other students.”
“Oh, I see,” Miranda said. “Just take the expendable one. Nice.”
“No,” I said, “the indispensable one. I’ve dragged Art out of a deep sleep, too. He’s not as swift on the osteology as a grad student, but he’s faster with a gun if need be.”
“Isn’t that whole mountainside going to be crawling with cops?”
“Probably. But I’ll feel better knowing one of them’s Art.”
I threaded the truck back up to Stadium Drive, then along Neyland Drive toward downtown and KPD headquarters. The big downtown bridges loomed above us-the Henley Street Bridge with its graceful arches, then the sharp triangular trusses of the Gay Street Bridge. The night was warm and still, and the river was smooth except for gentle swirls and eddies created by currents unspooling over ledges and hollows and other secret shapes deep beneath the surface. The dark, flat water caught the harsh streetlights on the bridges, melted and smeared it into pools and streaks of gold and orange, like fireworks in slow motion. I slowed to take it in, and Miranda said softly, “Mmm, it is beautiful, isn’t it? Strange that such beauty and such evil can exist side by side in this world, isn’t it?” I didn’t answer. But it didn’t matter, because she didn’t really expect me to.
Passing under the Gay Street Bridge, we curved away from the river and away from the beauty, winding up a concrete gully of a ramp to Hill Avenue and KPD headquarters. The acre of asphalt out front did nothing to soften the glare of the sodium-vapor lights standing sentinel; if anything, the asphalt seemed tuned somehow to reflect and amplify the harshness of the orange lights. Art’s Crown Victoria was idling in the least bright corner of the lot, which is to say the only corner that didn’t make me long for my sunglasses. As he got out of the car, I saw that he was wearing a nine-millimeter pistol at his waist-and I suspected he had more firepower strapped to one ankle, or even to both.
Art squeezed into the cab beside Miranda, and we sped east on I-40 toward Cooke County.
O’Conner had told me to follow River Road for three miles after getting off I-40, then look to the right and follow the flames. He hadn’t been exaggerating; I could see the glow on the horizon even before we got off the interstate, the flames curling up the hillside and disappearing into roiling smoke, like a scene out of Dante’s
I cut my headlights, pulled to a stop alongside the SUV, and got out. As I approached, the driver’s window slid down. “Hello,” I said into the dark interior, “I’m Dr. Bill Brockton. Sheriff O’Conner asked me-”
I was interrupted by what sounded like rolling thunder or the growl of a bear. “Hey there, Doc,” rumbled a deep voice from inside the vehicle. “Jim sent me down here to meet y’all.”
“Waylon!” In spite of my anxiety, I felt myself smile.
A massive, shaggy head loomed out of the window toward me, the coarse beard split by a crooked grin. “I heard a little something about what-all you been rasslin’ with, so I didn’t take it personal. ’Sides, we ain’t exactly been beatin’ a path to your doorstep neither. I reckon maybe we’ll forgive you.” He eyed my truck, then trained a blinding spotlight from the SUV through the passenger window. “Is that Art and Miss Miranda in there? Howdy!” he bellowed. “Good to see y’all!” Inside the truck, Art and Miranda shielded their eyes with one hand and waved the other in the general direction of Waylon and his searchlight.
Waylon-I’d never heard a last name for him-was a mountain man in every sense of the term. A hulking, homespun fellow who had heedlessly put me in harm’s way and also selflessly saved my hide during a series of Cooke County adventures, Waylon had recently traded an outlaw’s life for a lawman’s uniform. “How you like being on this side of the law, Waylon?”
He chuckled. “Hmm. Verdict on that ain’t in yet. Me and Jim’s had our work cut out for us, that’s for damn sure. Some of my own kinfolks ain’t on speakin’ terms with me no more. But mostly it feels like we’re doin’ some good. Clearing out some of the nastiest vermin, leastwise. I tell you, though, Doc, I sure do miss them cockfights since we shut down the pit.” He frowned about the loss of what had been Cooke County’s favorite spectator sport, but then the ragged smile returned, even broader, and I thought I saw a few flecks of chewing tobacco wedged between blue-lit teeth. “Hey, I delivered a baby last week, Doc, in the backseat of this-here Jeep. Lady called in a panic, said her husband weren’t home and the baby was a-comin’. Her and me was haulin’ ass for town with the siren on when she started hollerin’ that she couldn’t wait no more-she got to push
“That makes me proud, too, Waylon. You keep up the good work. Say, you think maybe we can get up this road without melting the tires or blowing up the gas tank?”
“Oh, sure, Doc-didn’t mean to keep you here jawin’. You’ll be all right up there. Ever’thin’s kindly burned itself out right around the cabin. What used to be the cabin anyways. Fire’s still climbin’ the ridge behind it, but it’ll stop
