“Works for me,” said Miranda. “I can just picture Garland looking all clever and smug with a stick of dynamite in his hands, imagining how he’s going to outwit everyone. Just before shorting out the wires.”
“And kablooey,” Art deadpanned again.
“It’s just a theory at this point,” I said. “We’ve got to get a positive ID before we can be sure.”
“How you gonna do that?” Waylon asked. “Fucker’s all burnt up and blowed up.”
O’Conner laughed. “Waylon’s got a point there. Can you get DNA out of this?”
I shook my head dubiously. “Don’t know. We’ll try, of course, but the heat may have destroyed it. I’m hoping we can match the dental records.” I picked up the remnants of the mandible and studied them closely. The lower jaw had been shattered by the blast, and most of the teeth were missing. The upper jaw was in equally bad shape, not surprisingly, since the face-the cheekbones, the nasal bone, the fragile bones of the eye orbits-had been virtually obliterated by the explosion. All told, what was left of the upper and lower jaws contained just five teeth. But two of those five had fillings, so I was optimistic I had enough to compare with Hamilton’s dental records.
“Doc?” O’Conner looked thoughtful. “This might be a dumb question, but I’m gonna ask it anyhow.”
“No such thing as a dumb question, Jim. I tell my students that almost every class.”
“Okay. So let’s assume you’re right,” he said, “and Hamilton was using a skeleton as a stand-in for himself.”
I nodded.
“How come the bones were in the pugilistic posture? If there’s no muscle attached to the bone, there’s nothing to flex the arms and legs, is there?”
I pondered O’Conner’s question for a moment, and I realized I was puzzled. Not by the question itself, but by the realization that I had already asked and answered that same question in my own mind hours before, without even consciously noticing it. “God is in the details,” I said, more to myself than to O’Conner. “Or the devil. He’d have known to arrange it that way.”
“How can you be so sure?” O’Conner asked.
Miranda spoke up before I had the chance. “I know! I know!” she exclaimed, sounding more like a third grader than a Ph.D. student. “Because he and Dr. B. worked together on that burn case, the one where the guy was torched in his bed with his hands tied behind him.”
“That’s it,” I said. “I knew he’d know, but I didn’t remember
Art raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, I give up,” he said. “You two are like twins, with some secret language all your own. I know I should’ve understood that, but I forgot to remember it.”
“No, I get it,” the sheriff said with a laugh. “If he’s smart enough to dress the bones in clothes and to stage that Coleman lantern and the gas can, he’s smart enough to make it look like the arms and legs are flexed.”
We spent the final half hour of daylight bagging up the bones and artifacts, long after the SWAT team and the firefighters departed. The bones had dried quickly in the heat of the day, once we’d fished them out of the soggy ashes, brushed them off, and laid them on the wire screens. The soggy ashes coating the basement floor were beginning to bake dry, too, forming a crust nearly as hard as concrete, so I was glad we’d gotten an early start, gotten the skeletal material out before everything set up around it. We gave the bones another gentle scrubbing with soft-bristled brushes, then carefully laid them in brown paper evidence bags. One set of bags contained the dry-bone skeleton I knew was a decoy. The other held the green-bone skeleton I fervently hoped was Garland Hamilton’s.
CHAPTER 28
MIRANDA AND I WERE DOWN IN THE BONE LAB-OUR home away from home-huddled over the jigsaw puzzle that had once been a human skull. The cranial vault had been crushed by falling boards as floor joists and rafters had burned through and collapsed into the basement. The two sets of remains didn’t appear to be commingled; luckily for us, the force of the blast had flung the bodies apart rather than together, and since we’d already identified the first skeleton as Billy Ray Ledbetter’s, we were free to concentrate on the second one. But reassembling the second skull was proving to be a herculean task.
We had poured a couple of inches of sand into the bottom of two cake pans. The sand was soft, so it cushioned the fragile skull fragments. It was easy to shape, too, into a depression that matched the curvature of a skull. As we found and fitted together additional cranial fragments, we’d trace a thin line of Duco cement on one edge, press the piece into place, and then nestle it into the sand and look for another match while the glue dried for a minute. It wasn’t as fancy as the high-tech wonder gadgets on television, but it worked. Still, reassembling the skulls out of a heap of tiny shards-none much bigger than my thumbnail-was tedious at best, and I knew there’d come a point at which we simply ground to a halt, unable to find any distinctive edges to match in the tiny bits of bone.
I heard a rap on the steel door. It swung outward, and Steve Morgan walked in. Morgan and I had spoken earlier in the day, as he was headed over to see Garland Hamilton’s dentist and get me Hamilton’s dental records. I was surprised to notice that he was empty-handed.
“Problem with the dentist?” I asked.
“You might say that,” he said. “He died last week. Heart attack.”
I remembered reading a short item in the newspaper, but I hadn’t paid it much attention at the time. “That was Hamilton’s dentist? Dr. Vetter, or some such?”
Morgan nodded glumly.
“How old was the guy?”
“Sixty.”
“Any history of heart disease?”
“You’d have made a good physician,” Morgan said. “Or a good police interrogator. Vetter had a pacemaker put in a couple of years ago.”
“I thought the whole idea of the pacemaker was to prevent a heart attack.”
“Me, too,” he said, “so I called and asked Dr. Garcia that same question. Garcia told me that if your heart stops, the pacemaker will jump-start it. But if your coronary arteries clog up, a pacemaker won’t save you. It’s like getting a new battery for your car-if the fuel line clogs, the battery’s no help.”
“Did Dr. Vetter have partners?”
Morgan shook his head. “Solo practice,” he said. “A hygienist and a receptionist, that was it.”
“Couldn’t one of those get the records for you?”
“Not there to get,” he said. “They couldn’t find the file.”
“Hel-
I didn’t like the sound of that much myself. “Did Garcia do an autopsy?”
“No,” said Morgan. “The widow objected. She said he wouldn’t eat right and he wouldn’t exercise. She tried telling him he was headed for a heart attack, but he wouldn’t listen. Sounds like she thinks he got what he had coming to him.”
“Sounds like maybe she’s at the ‘anger’ stage of the grieving process,” I said.
“Sounds like maybe he died in the arms of a girlfriend,” said Miranda. “Isn’t that what tends to send you old codgers over the edge, myocardially speaking? That would explain the heart attack and the widow’s anger.”
“Hey, he wasn’t old,” I squawked. “Sixty is the new fifty-nine.”
“He didn’t die in the heat of passion,” said Morgan. “Not unless the hygienist was under the desk while he was dictating records. The receptionist found him slumped over his desk, microphone in his hand.”
“But he wasn’t slumped over Garland Hamilton’s chart?”
Morgan shook his head again.
“And Hamilton’s dental records are nowhere to be found?”
“Nowhere.”
“Damn,” I said. “That’s going to make it hard to match these teeth. Can you check for other medical records? Any healed fractures we should be looking for? Any cranial X-rays that might show us some teeth?”
