when it gets to the bluffs up top. Go on up-I’ll radio Jim you’re here.”
I thanked Waylon, got back into the truck, put it in gear, and began idling up the gravel. The road meandered through what looked, in the headlights, to be stands of tulip poplars and hemlocks; twice it forded a small stream, making me glad I was driving a truck instead of some low-slung sports car. Finally, after a mile that seemed like several, we emerged into a clearing. In the glare of headlights, work lights, and the red and blue strobes of a dozen fire trucks and police cars, the smoke that still hung in the air looked thick as water. The ruins of the cabin still smoldered, and as I got out of the truck, I felt a blast of heat radiating from the splintered and charred debris. A burned vehicle was parked in front of the burned structure, a thread of smoke still curling up from it to join the larger pall of smoke hanging over the whole area.
Jim O’Conner’s short, wiry frame emerged from a cluster of deputies and firefighters to greet us. He looked tired, worried, and chagrined. “What a mess,” he said, shaking my hand. “So much for my optimistic prediction about how easy it would be.”
“Any idea what set things off?”
O’Conner shook his head. “As best we can tell, the explosion came first, then the fire. The blast blew off part of the roof-you can see some pieces of burned trusses and joists over there,” he said, pointing to an area halfway between the cabin and some smoldering tree trunks. “But the fire started right away, and it built fast.” O’Conner checked his watch, then checked the sky.
“Should be sunup pretty soon now,” he said. “You want to go ahead and get started or wait for daylight?”
I looked up and thought I saw a hint of paleness. “Might as well wait,” I said. “It’s gonna be hard to see the bones in broad daylight, let alone in the dark. If Hamilton’s in there, he’s not gonna get any deader if we wait an hour.” I was recycling my jokes, I realized as I said it, but it was new to O’Conner, and the sheriff laughed-a touch ruefully, I thought, but at least he laughed.
The cabin was big, or had been, before its decimation-more like a log home than a weekend getaway. O’Conner said it had two stories aboveground, plus a basement dug into the ground. Now all that remained standing were the basement’s concrete-block walls and most of the stone chimney, whose massive fireplaces could probably have roasted a whole pig on each of the house’s three levels.
O’Conner pointed toward the basement fireplace with the beam of a four-cell flashlight. “Over there, about six feet straight out from the hearth, is where Waylon saw a skull.” I looked, and I saw broken pottery and what appeared to be a pair of charred tree branches, but the more I studied their odd symmetry, the more unlike branches they appeared-and the more like burned antlers from some hunting trophy that had hung over the mantel. Then-tucked down amid the antlers-I glimpsed a familiar rounded shape, with two dark ovals tunneling into it. A skull, unmistakably human. “Miranda?” She turned from her own survey of the floor and looked at me, as did Art. “Over there, under those antlers.” Her gaze tracked mine.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s not something you see every day. Like an interspecies hunting trophy.”
The blaze had completely consumed the staircases inside the house; to get to the basement floor, we’d need to clamber down a ladder. I asked for the ladder to be lowered into a corner near the fireplace, which was centered at one end of the building.
While waiting for full daylight, we unloaded the truck, suited up in disposable Tyvek coveralls, and staged our gear at the top of the ladder-trowels, rakes, shovels, wire screens, and paper evidence bags. Once we were ready and the light was bright, I nodded to O’Conner, and we began. One of the begrimed firemen descended first, then steadied the ladder for Miranda, Art, O’Conner, and me.
As soon as I got down, I noticed oddly bright bits of color amid the gray and black world of ashes and embers at my feet. Crouching, I sifted through the ash to extract one of the bits-a thin, ragged thread of metal, reddish orange in color, about six inches long. It had drooped up and down to follow the slight contours of the debris beneath it, but viewed from above, it ran in a straight line. Instinctively I looked up, though there was nothing to see now except the pale morning sky in place of the joists that had burned and the copper wiring that had melted and dripped.
“Any idea what the melting point of copper is?” O’Conner’s question echoed my own thoughts.
“I was just trying to remember,” I said. “Pretty hot. Somewhere around a thousand degrees, I think.”
The firefighter who had come down to hold the ladder for us spoke up. “I think it’s a lot more than that. Hell, lead melts at something like six hunnerd, and copper’s a lot tougher than lead.”
“Oh, sorry, I was talking Celsius,” I said. “A thousand Celsius would be, let’s see, close to two thousand Fahrenheit.”
The firefighter nodded. “Sounds more like it. Only other time I seen melted wiring was in a paint-store fire. Way all them solvents went up-lacquer thinner, turpentine, acetone, oil-base paints, what have you-you’d’ve thought it was the world’s biggest case of arson. Weren’t, though. Just a accident.”
“So what’s the typical temperature when a wooden building burns down?”
“Eight hundred, maybe a thousand Fahrenheit,” he said.
“More if they’s plenty of fuel and a good oxygen supply. You get a stack effect going-say, one of them old three-or four-story Victorians-you can get up to fifteen hunnerd or two thousand. Log house like this, though, would normally burn slower than a stick-built house-just like logs in a campfire burn slower than twigs. But this thing burned like it was made outta cardboard. Had to’ve been a shitload of accelerant in here.”
I laughed. “‘Shitload’-is that a technical, arson-investigation term?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Yessir.”
A pair of deputies leaned over the edge of the basement and relayed our tools down to us. The concrete floor slab was coated in a layer of wet ash, but the stone hearth, which stood about eighteen inches above the floor, was barely damp. Sliding my feet along the floor so as not to risk stepping on any bones, I turned the hearth into a makeshift lab table, laying out the equipment. The wire screens, of the same sort used by archaeologists, were framed of one-by-four-inch lumber, with the screen nailed to the bottom of the frame. When we were sifting dirt at a dig, the wooden frame helped keep the dirt from sliding off the sides. Here, since the bones were likely to be damp, I laid the screens upside down on the hearth, so the wire mesh would be elevated by several inches, allowing the skeletal material to dry.
“Okay,” I said, “since we’ve got a skull just a few feet away, let’s start searching here from the hearth forward. Hands and knees, about two feet apart.” I gave everybody a trowel and an artist’s paintbrush, and gave a quick demonstration in how to use them to tease out and clean small bones. “Art, you and Jim start at the corners of the hearth; Miranda and I will take the centerline. We’ll work from this end to the middle of the house, then work back along the edges. That way we’re starting where we know there’s at least some material. Take your time; look at everything or feel everything, all the way down to the concrete. Get back in touch with your inner toddler, the one who loved to dig in the mud. If you’re not sure what something is, ask Miranda or me.”
I dropped to my hands and knees, and the rest of them followed suit. The concrete slab had been transformed, quite literally, into an immense ashtray, containing seven layers of burned debris: the basement’s contents, the main floor’s joists and flooring, the main floor’s furnishings, the second floor’s joists and flooring, that floor’s furnishings, the second floor’s ceiling joists, and remnants from the roof trusses and roof. The explosion had blown much of the roof skyward, and the blaze had carried some of the interior aloft as a plume of burning embers. That made the debris layer thinner than it might have been. Still, the going was slow, and I suspected we’d be lucky to finish the search by sundown.
I had a head start, literally, with the skull, but Miranda, two feet to my right, started finding material within minutes. “Finger bones,” she said, flicking the tip of her trowel lightly into the damp ash. “Left hand. Wrist. Metal wristwatch.” She sounded clinical and detached, but I knew her well enough to hear the excitement underneath.
“Here’s a radius and ulna,” she said a moment later.
“Slow down,” I teased her. “You’re making the rest of us look like slackers.” At this point we weren’t trying to recover and bag anything; we’d start by brushing off the top layers of debris and simply exposing the bones where they lay. “Eyeglasses,” I said. They looked familiar-they looked like the wire-rimmed reading glasses I’d seen on Garland Hamilton-but I reminded myself that wire-rimmed reading glasses were common.
Miranda’s paintbrush flicked rapidly. “A humerus. The arm is flexed in the pugilistic posture.”
O’Conner, working his way along the wall on Miranda’s other side, looked puzzled at that. “Pugilistic? Isn’t that an oldfangled word for boxing? The gentlemanly art of fisticuffs?”
