The Devil's Bones

they’ve made. Very popular with young people. Like MySpace.”

“Your space? You have a Web site that’s popular with kids?”

He laughed, then typed an address into his computer’s browser and called up a page filled with flashing ads and thumbnail pictures of faces and pets. “Not my space,” he said. “MySpace.com.”

After a few seconds, he clicked it back to the tango break dancing. “At first all the videos on YouTube were very clumsy and silly,” he said, “but a lot of them these days look like something straight out of Hollywood.” He studied my expression again. “But I think you didn’t stop to talk about cinema or the Internet.”

“No, I stopped for advice,” I said. “Do you have any tips on dealing with a Latino physician who seems to have a chip on his shoulder?”

“You mean Eddie Garcia?”

Eddie? I smiled. It was better than Ethelbert. Or Ethel. “How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess.” He smiled back. “What you need to remember is that he’s not just Hispanic, Dr. B., he’s Mexican, so you might need to cut him some slack.”

“What does that mean?” I asked. “If you weren’t Hispanic yourself, I’d think that was more than a little patronizing.”

“If I were a gringo, it would be patronizing. But I’m Latino, so it’s not.” Confusion was written all over my face, and he speed-read it and smiled. “All Latinos may be created equal,” he said,

“but we’re not all treated equally, even by one another. East Tennessee has Latinos from just about every country in Central and South America, and some of them look down on the Mexicans as harshly as any Tennessee redneck or Georgia cracker ever did.”

“How come?”

“Part of it’s just snobbery-there are so many Mexicans in the States that they’re not exotic, the way Venezuelans or Chileans are. It’s like a lawn or a garden-if one strange plant bursts into bloom, it’s a wildflower; if a bunch of them spring up, they’re considered weeds.”

“Not by the other plants,” I pointed out.

“True,” he conceded, “so the analogy’s not perfect. But you get the point?”

I nodded.

“Then there’s the pecking order of the workplace. Mexicans often take the shit jobs. They mow yards and lay brick and wash dishes and change linens-anything to get their foot in the door-while people like me get visas to study engineering or anthropology or medicine. So the white-collar Latinos look down on the blue-collar Latinos, and the Mexicans are mostly blue-collar.”

“But Garcia’s not,” I pointed out. “He’s a board-certified M.D., a forensic pathologist.”

“But that’s recent. He’s been Mexican all his life. And his parents were working class, so he knows what it’s like to be looked down on. He comes by that chip on his shoulder honestly.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of that,” I said. “So you know Garcia?”

“A little. Eddie’s okay. Yeah, he’s a little touchy. But cut him some slack, talk some shop, and things should be fine. He’s a forensic guy, you’re a forensic guy. Bond over the bones, Dr. B.”

“Jorge” I said over my shoulder, “you could have had a brilliant career in psychology. You’re pretty damn smart, for a Latino.”

He laughed. “Bastardo!” he called after me. I decided that was Spanish for “Amen, brother!”

GARCIA STOOD and nodded slightly when I entered his office at the Forensic Center, but he didn’t offer a hand, so I simply returned the nod. “Please, have a seat,” he said.

“It might be a little easier if we laid these bones out on a lab table,” I said.

“Very well,” he said again. Swell, I thought. Mr. Personality. I followed him down the hallway to the main lab and set my box on a countertop. The counter was covered with a large, absorbent blue pad, which helped cushion the fragile bones. I had brought three femora-femurs; thighbones-which I laid side by side. Garcia leaned down toward the closest, which was from the body that had been fully fleshed when it burned. The bone exhibited a range of colors, from ashy white at the distal end, near the knee, to a deep reddish brown at the proximal end, where it had joined the hip.

I chose my words carefully, as I didn’t want to appear to be lecturing him, even though I was. “We used two gallons of gasoline in each car, so it was a very hot fire,” I said. “It peaked at around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit-about eleven hundred Celsius. It burned away all the soft tissue, except for some on the central region of the torso.” I pointed to the femur from the fresh cadaver. “Down here at the distal end, the bone is obviously completely calcined, since the lower legs and knees get more oxygen and burn away before the thighs and torso do. Up here, where the thicker muscle tissue provided some protection for a while, the bone started to char, but it’s not calcined.”

He studied the bone closely.

“There’s still some organic material in there,” I went on. “You could probably get DNA-at least mitochondrial DNA, if not nuclear DNA-from a cross section of the bone up in this region.”

He nodded.

“What’s really interesting to me,” I went on, “is the fracture pattern here. It’s very irregular. Notice how the fractures seem to corkscrew around the bone in a sort of helical pattern. There’s also some fracturing between layers of the bone.”

“Yes, very interesting,” he said, sounding more animated. He reached up and swung a magnifying lamp into position, switching on the light that encircled the back side of the round lens. “It’s almost as if the bone is peeling apart. From the moisture inside turning to steam?”

“Probably,” I said. “Now compare that to the dry, defleshed bone. It’s completely calcined, not surprisingly, since there was no muscle to shield it. Notice how regular and rectangular the fracture pattern is, almost like crosshatching.”

He repositioned the magnifying glass over the uniformly burned femur.

“This reminds me of a big log,” I said, “that’s been burned very slowly in a bonfire.”

“Or a dead tree lying in the desert,” he said. “After years in the sun, they get that same burned look.”

“Here’s another one for you,” I said. “I was over in Memphis a few summers ago, when they had the worst drought in a century. The Mississippi River dropped fifteen or twenty feet. It exposed huge sandbars, a half mile wide and miles long. Walking on them was like walking along the beach at the ocean. And the river shrank from a mile wide to a narrow channel, a few hundred yards across-I could have skipped a rock to the other side.”

His mouth twitched, but I wasn’t sure if he was suppressing a smile or stifling a yawn. Either way, I was caught up in the memory.

“It was the most remarkable thing,” I said. “The sand was golden and clean-not what I’d expected, since the river is as murky as day-old coffee. Right beside the channel, the sand sloped down like this.” I angled my hand at forty-five degrees.

“If you took a running jump, you’d go flying over the edge, drop ten feet or so, then sink halfway to your knees near the bottom of the embankment.” I had leapt off that slope of sand a dozen times that day, and a hundred more since, in my memory. “There was a beautiful woman sunbathing, topless, in the middle of this vast expanse of sand,” I said. “But what really caught my eye were the tree trunks, four or five feet in diameter”-I made an arc with my arms, wide as I could stretch them-“down on a narrow shelf, right at the edge of the river channel. They had that same charred look, and it fascinated me, how being underwater for a hundred years made those trees look burned.”

He laughed, a soft, musical laugh from deep in his chest, and it was the first sound I’d heard him make that wasn’t tightly reined in. “Are you always doing research, even when a beautiful woman is stretched out on the sand?”

“Pretty much,” I said sheepishly. But I could see the absurdity of it, and I laughed along with him.

Garcia’s face got serious again, but his gaze and his voice stayed open. “Would you like to see this burn case?” he asked. “No, wait, that’s not exactly what I want to ask you. Would you please take a look at this burn case, Dr. Brockton? I would be very interested in your opinion.”

“Very well,” I said with a smile and a slight bow. “I would be honored, Dr. Garcia.”

He motioned me into the main autopsy suite, then disappeared into the morgue’s cooler and emerged a moment later wheeling a stainless-steel autopsy table. As he folded back the drape, I felt my adrenaline spiking,