could turn and lower my body down into the corner. My toes scrabbled on the blocks, and I felt myself begin to fall, but then my right foot caught the windowsill and I regained my balance. Shifting both hands now to the wall above the window opening, I centered my feet on the sill, then reached down with one hand and gripped the top of the opening. Letting go of the top of the wall, I made a graceless transition from standing in the opening to squatting in the opening, then jumping down onto the concrete floor. If Olympic judges had been scoring my dismount on a scale of 1 to 10, my scores would probably have ranged from 0.1 (from the hostile French judge) to 2.1 (from the friendly U.S. judge). Still, I was down in one piece, and I was confident I could get up and out the window opening.
But now that I was here, what was I looking for? I still didn’t know. I scanned the debris, halfway hoping to spot a bright red evidence flag, maybe one labeled LOOK HERE FOR IMPORTANT CLUE, but nothing so helpful met my inquiring gaze. In the absence of a miracle, I’d need to resort to old-fashioned work-a swift but systematic search. I decided to start by reexamining the area where we’d found the skeletons, then spiral outward toward the basement walls.
The search didn’t take long. Tucked into the angle at the base of the long wall, I found a second pair of thin, unmelted copper wires leading from the melted car battery-the battery that had set off the dynamite jammed between Freddie Parnell’s teeth. This pair of wires had been concealed by a line of bricks strung along the wall. I gave the wires a tug, and they slid out from beneath the bricks. As I continued to tug, the wires led me toward the corner of the basement; by the time I got there, I’d already figured out where they went next: out the small window. Hamilton had staged the Ledbetter skeleton, the homeless man’s body, the dynamite, and the accelerant, then crawled out the window and triggered the destruction from outside. It would have been easy, I guessed, to slip away in the pandemonium created by the blast and the blaze.
I was startled by the toot of a car’s horn, then the slam of a door and the cadence of footsteps.
“Let me guess,” I heard Miranda’s voice saying above me. “It’s not him. The second skeleton’s not Hamilton, is it?”
“No,” I said. “But why do you need to guess? You saw it for yourself, didn’t you? I left the sinus right there by the light box.”
Now it was Miranda who sounded puzzled. “By what light box? In the osteo lab? I haven’t been on campus at all today.”
“Then how’d you know it’s not Hamilton? I thought about calling you once I found the missing piece of frontal sinus, but I just jumped in the truck and headed out here instead.”
Suddenly I felt a wave of dizziness, like the Meniere’s was about to kick in again.
“What are you doing here, then? How’d you know I was here?” I demanded.
“I got your message.”
“What message?”
“The text message on my pager. ‘M-Meet me at Cooke County fire scene ASAP. Urgent. BB.’”
“That message came from my cell phone?”
“Yes. Wait. I don’t know. It said ‘private number.’ I figured you’d just changed your settings.”
“I’ve never sent a text message in my life,” I said. “I don’t even know how.” Alarms were shrieking in my head, and either Miranda saw the fear in my eyes or she’d figured something out on her own. “I think we should get out of here.”
Miranda held up a hand, then froze, and then spun to face something behind her. I heard the beginnings of a gasp, and then the gasp turned into a grunt, and suddenly Miranda was falling, tumbling backward into empty space, her arms and legs windmilling as she fell. If this had been a scene in a movie, that’s when everything would have happened in slow motion; I’d have lunged and somehow managed to catch her, or at least managed to break her fall. But this was not a movie, and I stood rooted to the spot, not even comprehending the fact of her fall until the moment she thudded to the floor on her back and her head snapped down onto the concrete with a sickening crack. Her body convulsed once, then lay still. I felt horror rising in my throat, and suddenly I was retching again, retching and crawling through the wreckage of the basement to where she lay.
I felt for a pulse in her wrist. When I couldn’t find it, a blind panic began racing through my veins and nerves-a primitive, wild-animal sort of panic, the kind that short-circuits all semblance of thought, all powers of language. I forced myself to slow the rapid, racking breaths that were pouring oxygen and adrenaline onto the blaze of my fear. I laid a hand on Miranda’s neck, guiding my fingertips to the left side of her throat, to the hollow between her windpipe and the muscles at the side of the neck-the valley where her carotid artery lay. I stilled the pounding of my own heart enough to feel the faint flutter beneath my praying fingertips. She was alive. I felt a shudder of relief run through my frame, heard a gasp or sob of some sort coming from my chest, and then shuddered again as the words floated down from above. “I hope the fall didn’t kill her,” said a familiar voice mildly. “I have a much better death in mind.” I looked up to see Garland Hamilton standing at the top of the wall, sneering down at Miranda and me.
CHAPTER 35
“YOU PIECE OF HUMAN SHIT,” GROWLED A VOICE THAT resembled my own. “You twisted son of a bitch.”
Hamilton laughed. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t think my mother had much to do with this. I think most of the credit goes to you, Bill.”
“Bullshit,” I said without turning around. “You’re insane or you’re evil. Or both.”
“But why, Bill, and since when? I was a model of decency and stability until a year ago. Until you ruined me.”
Now I turned to face him-above me, silhouetted against the fading daylight-though I remained kneeling beside Miranda. “I pointed out a mistake you made in an autopsy, Garland. A mistake that would have cost an innocent man his life. It was a bad mistake, but it didn’t have to ruin you. You chose the path of ruin.”
“The path of ruin? The
He bent down briefly, and when he straightened, he was holding a large container: a five-gallon gas can. He shook it, and light sparkled through a broken stream of liquid the color of tea. Then I felt the sting of the gasoline on my skin and in my nostrils.
“Fitting, don’t you think? Instead of me burned to death here, it’s going to be you and Little Miss Lovely.”
“No!” I jumped to my feet and lunged toward the corner of the basement. Leaping up as I ran, I planted a foot on the wall and transferred my forward momentum into vertical motion. I managed to grab both walls at the top and scrabbled at the concrete with my toes as I pulled with my arms.
Something swatted me down like a giant’s fist. I collapsed into the corner, bewildered at first. Then I felt a searing pain in my chest and realized I’d heard a loud pop. It gradually dawned on me that I’d been shot.
Bracing myself against the corner of the wall, I struggled back to my feet and staggered toward him, holding up both hands. “Don’t kill Miranda,” I begged. “She doesn’t deserve to die. She never did anything to you.”
“You still don’t get it,” he said. “I’m not killing her because she deserves it. I’m killing her to make you suffer. Just like I killed Jess to make you suffer.” He pointed at me and I saw a flash, and then my left leg collapsed. I tumbled to the floor beside Miranda, lying on my left side, my back to Hamilton. My field of vision began to shrink-as if I were peering through the wrong end of a telescope or a pair of binoculars-and I knew I was on the verge of losing consciousness. I felt more gasoline splashing me.
But something wouldn’t let me let go, and through the pain and despair I realized that the something was Miranda. She was the only thing I could still see through the small tunnel of light, but she stayed there, stubborn as ever, refusing to fade to blackness. If I gave in now, I realized-if I took the easy, unconscious way out-I was giving up Miranda, too. I’d be giving her to Hamilton, who had already gotten Jess.
