The Devil's Bones

CHAPTER 9

THE PHONE RANG AND I GRABBED FOR IT, HOPING IT was Art-or a reporter, or anyone-calling to tell me Hamilton had been captured.

The caller was Robert Roper, the Knox County district attorney general, but he was calling to ask about Mary Latham. “You’re sure she was already dead when the car burned?” Robert was a longtime colleague and friend; I’d testified for him in a dozen or more murder trials over the past decade, and I respected his thoroughness and professionalism. I also appreciated the fact that Robert had recused his entire staff when the police initially charged me with Jess Carter’s murder.

“No way she could have been alive,” I said. “Not unless she was walking around like somebody out of Night of the Living Dead, with hunks of flesh falling off and flies and maggots swarming all over.”

“Thanks for sharing,” he said. “I was just about to eat lunch. Maybe I’ll catch up on my depositions instead.”

“If memory serves, you could stand to skip a lunch or two,” I parried. “Last time I saw you, you’d put on about twenty pounds.”

“You should write a book,” he said. “Dr. Brockton’s Gross-Out Weight-Loss Plan. It could be the next South Beach Diet. You might wind up on Oprah.”

“I’ll be sure to tell Oprah it was you who inspired me.”

“Great. Now back to Mary Latham. Can you tell if she decomposed in the car or someplace else?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Normally there’s a big, greasy stain where the decomposition occurred, but the car’s interior is probably too badly burned to tell. You might want the crime-scene guys to go back and check the house and the yard-anyplace she might have lain for a couple of days before her husband-or whoever-put her in the car.”

“How about the freezer in the basement?”

“Not likely, though it might’ve been a good idea-if he’d frozen her, she wouldn’t have decomposed.” I thought for a moment.

“Thing is, it would have been messy to get her into the car once she started to decompose. Parts fall off, stuff drips out. It’s not easy, and it’s sure not pleasant. Of course, if you’ve resorted to murdering your wife, pleasantness might not be high on your list of priorities at the moment. Still, my guess is she was already in the car. I’d be willing to bet he put her in the passenger seat right after he killed her, drove the car out to that field, and wiggled her over to the driver’s seat while she was still fresh. Although he’d be taking a chance on somebody finding her.”

“Not much of a chance,” said Robert. “That spot’s pretty isolated.”

“Are you sure it’s the husband?”

“Pretty damn sure,” he said. “During the three-day period before the car burned, nobody besides the husband seems to have seen her or talked to her.”

“Makes sense,” I said, “since she was dead.”

“There’s a big problem with the case against him, though,” Roper said.

“What’s that?”

“His alibi,” he said. “Stuart Latham was in Las Vegas when the car burned. The investigating officer got hold of him on his cell phone, and Latham called back from a landline in the Bellagio Hotel.”

“But was he already in Vegas when she was killed? If she’d been dead for days, why does it matter where he was when the car actually caught fire?”

“Because,” he said, “a good defense attorney will use that to plant doubt in the minds of the jurors. Make them think somebody else killed her.”

“Like who?” I said. “A burglar? Somebody after a stereo or a VCR? Why on earth would some stranger kill her, wait a couple of days, then drive her down to the south forty to burn the evidence? Doesn’t create much doubt in my mind.”

“You’re not a juror,” he said, “you’re a scientist.”

“And anyhow,” I persisted, “didn’t the husband tell the police she was alive and well when he got on the plane that morning? The decay and the bugs prove he’s lying through his teeth.”

“You know that, and I know that, but we have to convince twelve other people of that,” he said.

“Besides the burned bones, what else was found in the car?”

“Not much,” he said. “A few cigarette butts on the ground underneath the driver’s window, like maybe she sat there and smoked awhile before the grass caught fire. Husband says she liked to do that. Says he warned her a bunch of times about dropping cigarette butts in the grass. People driving on I-640 saw the smoke and called it in, probably within ten minutes of when it caught fire, according to the arson investigator.”

“Any sign of a timer?” I asked. “An ignition device, something he could have set to go off once he was out in Vegas?”

“Not that the evidence techs can find,” he said. “One of them’s just back from Iraq, and he doesn’t see any evidence of an IED.”

“What’s an IED?”

“Improvised explosive device. Iraqi insurgents use ’em as roadside bombs. They’re triggered by a cell phone, sometimes. Thing is, you gotta have some skill with electronics or some training as a terrorist to rig one of those, and Stuart Latham runs an Avis rental-car franchise.”

“Well, either he killed her or he didn’t,” I said in exasperation. “If he did, either he had an accomplice or he didn’t. And if he didn’t have an accomplice, there ought to be something, either in the car or out at the scene, indicating how he set off the fire from the Bellagio.”

“Are you willing to take a look? In the car and out at the property?”

“I’m not an evidence technician,” I reminded him.

“But you’re great with taphonomy,” Roper said. I was impressed the D.A. remembered the term. In archaeology, taphonomy referred to the process or circumstances of fossilization, but forensic anthropologists tended to use it more broadly, to describe the arrangement and relation of bodies, bones, and any other environmental or human-produced evidence that could shed light on a murder or its timing. Postmarked letters, a week-old newspaper open to the sports page, milk or meat tagged with a sell-by date, even a year-old sapling or a seasonal wasp nest within a rib cage or an eye socket-all these could be considered taphonomic evidence of when a murder occurred.

“I’ll be glad to take a look at the taphonomy,” I said. “Be good for me to get out of the office.”

“The car’s at the KPD impound lot,” he said. “When do you want to see it?”

“How about early in the morning,” I said, “while it’s a mere ninety degrees?”

“I’ll have my investigator, Darren Cash, meet you at the impound lot. Just so you know, we’re getting ready to ask a grand jury to indict Stuart Latham for first-degree murder, based on the insect evidence you found in the skull. First, though, we’ll get a search warrant to go back for another look at the property. If you find anything else in the car, that could help with the warrant.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, “but don’t hold your breath. What time should I meet Cash?”

“How does nine o’clock sound?”

“Sounds late and hot,” I said. “What about eight instead?”

“I’ll have Darren meet you at eight.”

“You mind if Art Bohanan comes along? He wasn’t available when the KPD forensics team went over the car.”

“I’m always glad to have Art take a look.”

AT 7:55 THE NEXT MORNING, Art and I turned onto the lane leading to the KPD impound lot. The lot was on a dead-end street in East Knoxville, directly across I-40 from the zoo. Something about the juxtaposition struck me as funny-hundreds of captive animals on the south side of the interstate, I realized, hundreds of captive vehicles on the north side. As we entered the dead end, I imagined a mass escape from the zoo: animals tunneling under the freeway, then speeding off in stolen cars and trucks-chimpanzees and gorillas driving the getaway vehicles, hippos and elephants hunkering in the back of the biggest trucks. I pointed out a car to Art, a red BMW convertible with the top down. “You think a giraffe could fit into the back of that Beemer?”

Art glanced at me, then at the car, then stared at me as if I were some sort of zoological specimen myself. He raised his eyebrows slowly, then shook his head, an expression of deep pity on his face. “We have got to get you some professional help,” he said.

“Come on,” I said, “it’s not that far-fetched. Primates have opposable thumbs-they could hot-wire the ignitions.”

“Professional help,” he said again. “A mind is a terrible thing to lose.”

The impound lot was a quarter mile long-four narrow lots, actually-sandwiched between the interstate on one side and a set of railroad tracks on the other. The first lot, an unfenced pad of gravel about fifty yards square, contained vehicles that would be auctioned off on September 1, a sign announced. These were unclaimed or forfeited cars and trucks, along with several horse trailers, which particularly intrigued me. Surely I could find a use for a cheap horse trailer at the Body Farm, I thought.

The second lot was a fenced expanse of asphalt measuring the same fifty yards deep-the depth being dictated by the train tracks bordering the back-but stretching a hundred yards long. This lot held vehicles that had been towed for a multitude of reasons: Fire hydrants had been blocked, parking meters had gone unfed for weeks on end, junkers had been abandoned alongside the interstate, unpaid traffic tickets had mounted to thousands of dollars. Many of the vehicles had open windows, and several, like the red BMW, were convertibles open to the elements. “Good thing for those convertibles we’re in the middle of a drought,” I said.

Art shrugged, unconcerned. “If the top’s down or the windows are open when we tow it, nothing we can do. We don’t have the keys.”

I noticed a video camera mounted on a pole at one corner of the lot. “Have you had break-ins, right here in the impound lot?”

“You wouldn’t believe what a problem it is,” he said. “We had one guy sneak in with wire cutters one night, cut a big hole in the fence, and drive away.”

“He hot-wired one of the cars?”

“He had the keys. It was his car.”

“He stole his own car from the police?” I couldn’t help laughing. “Did y’all catch him?”

Art shook his head. “We got the car back-he ditched it over in North Carolina-but we never got the guy.”

“That took some nerve,” I said with a touch of admiration.

Next came a lot whose fence was screened by blue tarps. I pointed. “What’s in that one?”

“Cars seized from drug dealers, mostly,” he said.

“Why the tarps?”

“To keep people from gawking,” he said. “Your average drug dealer tends to drive a better class of car-we’ve got Acuras, Cadillacs, Mercedeses-and we had a problem with looky-loos hanging around window-shopping.”

“Seems like the tarps would attract more people,” I said. “Make ’em wonder what’s in there that you don’t want anybody to see.”

“There’s a troublemaker inside you just waiting to get out,” he said.

Art pulled into the fourth lot, which was tucked at the farthest corner of the compound, back behind a security building outfitted with rooftop surveillance cameras at every corner. This lot contained hard-core specimens: cars flattened by high-speed rollovers or accordioned in head-on collisions. Many of them were missing doors and roofs, the metal chewed away by the Jaws of Life or slashed loose with a Sawzall. Several vehicles were covered with tarps-cars in which shootings had occurred, Art said. Off by itself, along the westernmost side of the fence, was the burned-out shell of a car. The windows were gone and the paint had blistered off, but I could tell by the lines that it had been a fairly new and expensive car just a couple of weeks before.

A clean-cut young man in his early thirties was peering into the vehicle’s interior. When he heard the crunch of the tires on the gravel, he straightened and turned toward us. He was wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt with a yellow tie. The shirt stretched tight around his neck and shoulders, which looked like they’d been borrowed from an NFL linebacker. His crew cut and military posture suggested he’d been either a soldier or a cop before he became a D.A.’s investigator. As the three of us shook hands all around, I said, “I hear good things about you from your boss.”

“You’ve been talking to my wife?”

I laughed. “No, the district attorney.”

“Oh, my day-job boss.” He grinned. “I’ve been lucky so far.”

“Lucky my foot,” said Art. “Darren was the one who broke the Watkins case last year.”

I hadn’t been involved in it, but I remembered reading about it and being shocked. “Watkins-that was the guy who took out the two-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the little girl, then drowned her in the backyard pool?”

Cash nodded. “His granddaughter,” he said. “The policy had a two-year waiting period on the death benefit. The really sick thing about that case-”

Art broke in. “You mean besides the fact that a man would drown his own granddaughter?”

“Yeah,” said Cash, “even sicker than that. He took out the policy, put in the swimming pool, and then waited exactly twenty-five months. That little girl had a rattlesnake coiled around her feet for two years.”

“That is sick,” I said. “How on earth could somebody do that to his own granddaughter-for any price, let alone a couple hundred thousand bucks?”

“Some people are just plain evil,” Art said. “No other explanation for it, I don’t care what the forensic psychologists say.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” I said. “I’m not sure about God anymore, but I’m starting to believe in the devil. Not some red-suited guy with a pitchfork and horns, but regular-looking folks. A guy who drowns his granddaughter in the backyard. A woman who feeds her husband arsenic every night.”

“A pedophile who trolls the Internet for gullible kids,” said Art.

“A husband who kills his wife,” said Cash, “and lets her rot for days before burning her body.”

I took that as the investigator’s hint that we should get down to business. I nodded toward the burned-out car, a short, sleek SUV. “This looks like it used to be a pretty nice car,” I said. “What is it?”

“Lexus RX, 2006,” he said. “Probably around forty thousand new.”

“That’s a lot,” I said. “Would have been cheaper to take her on a hike in the Smokies and push her off a bluff-say she tripped and fell.”

“Bill loses more hiking buddies that way,” Art said. “Never, ever go to the mountains with him.”

Cash laughed. “Thanks for the warning.” He nodded at the vehicle. “Book value on the vehicle’s more like twenty-five thousand now,” he said. “But the bank owns most of that. Deductible on the insurance policy’s five hundred. Five hundred is dirt cheap if it works to cover your tracks and give you an alibi.”

“Well, it didn’t quite do the job,” I said, “thanks to the bugs. Let’s see if there’s anything else to find.”

Art and I had brought a few things in the back of my truck. We both unfolded white Tyvek jumpsuits and wriggled into them, looking like overgrown toddlers in baggy sleeper pajamas. I opened the tackle box that held an assortment of tools and took out two sharp-pointed trowels and two pairs of tweezers. I handed one of each to Art, then slid a wire screen out from beneath the tackle box. Each opening in the mesh was four millimeters square-about the size of the end of a set of wooden chopsticks from a Chinese take-out place.

Cash showed me how the body had been found in the car. The woman’s legs had been down in the driver’s well, her left arm hanging down by her side. Her right arm stretched over near the passenger door. Her torso and head were flopped over to the right also.

“As I understand it,” I said, “there were no traces of accelerant found in the interior. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Cash said. “Arson dog didn’t smell anything, and I’m told that dog has a great nose.”

“Sure is thoroughly burned for no accelerant,” I said, peering into the burned-out shell of the vehicle. The upholstery was completely gone. The seats had been reduced to charred, rusted springs and support rails. The underside of the roof was fully exposed, the same reddish gray as the vehicle’s exterior. The windshields and windows were gone. All that remained of the steering wheel was the steel skeleton, including the empty hub where the airbag had been before it fired.

“Used to be cars had a lot of metal inside,” said Art. “Now everything’s plastic, and once the car catches fire, that plastic keeps feeding it. It’s like pornography.”

I stared at him, baffled by the comparison. “Pornography? How so?”

“Hot and nasty,” he said. “Temperatures in the passenger compartment can go over two thousand degrees. And all that burning plastic releases all kinds of toxic chemicals. Smoke inhalation can kill you long before the heat does.”

I recalled the smoke roiling out of the cars we’d recently burned at the Ag farm-dense black billows seething out the windows and windshields once the glass gave way-and nodded. “Any way to tell where the fire started?”

Cash shook his head. “Not for sure,” he said. “The ignition was on, though, so the engine was probably idling. We think either the catalytic converter or the muffler set the grass underneath on fire. Most of these luxury SUVs never get off the pavement, but out in that pasture it’d be easy for the exhaust system to set the grass on fire, especially as hot and dry as it’s been. Catalytic converter can get up to nearly a thousand degrees, if the car’s fairly new and the converter’s still working.”

“I bet one of you guys knows the ignition temperature of grass,” I said.

“Six hundred degrees,” they chorused.

“So if that converter was in contact with the vegetation,” I said, “it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to start a grass fire.”

“Right,” said Cash.

“Which begs the question,” I said, “if the husband did it, how’d he get fifteen hundred miles away before it started burning?”

None of us had an answer, so Art and I squatted down beside the vehicle-me beside the driver’s door, him beside the right rear door-and began sifting through the debris in the floor pan. I didn’t find much: A layer of ash. A few bolts, screws, and coins. A couple of phalanges, the smallest bones of the fingers and toes. “Hey,” I razzed Art, “how come KPD missed these?”

“Simple,” he said. “The car burned late afternoon, right after ‘Tiffany’ got out of school and got on the Web. I was too busy reading love notes from middle-aged perverts to go out to the Latham farm and look for bones. They had to send the B-team instead.”

“We gotta get you off that pedophile assignment,” I said.

“I’m training a replacement,” he said. “I hope to be back to healthier stuff-gunshots and stabbings and bludgeonings-within a month or so.”

Art wasn’t finding much more in the back than I’d found in the front: springs, seat-belt buckles, and a few coins down where the rear bench seat once met the seat back-that place where every car accumulates loose change and candy wrappers and stray peanuts. I was about to suggest we call it a morning when I heard Art say, “Hmm. Hmm.” From one corner of the backseat, he plucked a tiny scrap of partially burned material. He held it up for Cash and me to inspect. It was charred on the edges, but enough remained for it to be recognizable as a shred of crumpled newspaper, not much bigger than a postage stamp. A few words were still legible: “foreign policy” and “Ira,” they read. I mentally supplied the missing q on the end of “Iraq.”

“Darren,” I asked, “any other newspaper found in the vehicle?”

“No.”

“This little scrap seems odd, the way it’s wedged way down in the corner of the backseat. You expect that with pennies and pens, but not so much with newspaper.” I knelt down beside the other corner of the backseat and sifted through the debris. The tip of my trowel teased out another bit, smaller and with no type, from a corner of the page. I recognized the distinctive saw-tooth fringe at the edge of the paper, where the roll of newsprint had been cut with a serrated edge. I craned my neck around to look at Darren. “Was the house searched?”

He nodded.

“I don’t suppose you remember whether there was a stack of newspapers?”

“You’re right,” he said, “I don’t remember. Why would newspapers be significant?”

“I’m just thinking out loud,” I said. “I remember a case in which a woman had stabbed her husband and decided to burn his body in the house. There were no traces of accelerant, but down behind some of the furniture the arson investigator found wads of newspaper, which she’d used as fuel. A couple more minutes and that paper would have gone up in flames. Luckily, the fire department got the fire out before it reached flashover, so some evidence remained.”

“So you’re thinking maybe Stuart Latham did the same thing?”

“It’s possible,” I said. “If there’s a stack of papers back at the house with a week’s worth missing, that might be a clue that he used newspaper to help goose the fire along.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “We can add that to the search warrant, along with what you and Dr. Garcia told us about the bones and the bugs.”

“Maggots never lie,” I said. “Unlike husbands.”

Art and I bagged the phalanges I’d found in the front floorboard, as well as the two bits of newspaper from the backseat. Art folded and taped the bags shut, then wrote the date and time, along with a brief description of the bones and shreds of paper. Then we pulled off the baggy jumpsuits, which by now were plastered to us with sweat, peeled the gloves off our dripping hands, and stuffed the disposable garb into a red biohazard bag, for burning in the morgue’s medical-waste incinerator. We gave Cash a sweaty good-bye handshake, then drove back out the way we’d come in-past the drug dealers’ cars, past the security building, past the main impound lot and the auction lot.

I pointed at the red convertible again. “That’s a pretty small backseat,” I said. “The giraffe would probably have to be a baby.”

“Not necessarily,” said Art. “Not if it was sitting sideways.”