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Miranda studied the bone as Sarah inked in the outline of the bone on the element inventory. “Well, one end is all black, and the other is gray,” said Miranda. “I assume that’s a clue?”
“Is that what you call differential burning?” asked Sarah, leaning in.
“Right — very good,” I said. Miranda raised her eyebrows, then smiled in grudging admiration. “See the humeral head,” I went on, “where the arm joins the shoulder? It’s completely calcined; that gray color means all the organic matter has been completely incinerated, leaving nothing behind but the minerals. Look at how fractured it is.” They both studied it intently. “Be careful with it — it’s very fragile, like bones that have been cremated. The distal end, at the elbow, is sort of caramel colored, which means it didn’t burn nearly as much. Because…?”
“Because there was still soft tissue shielding it for a while,” said Miranda quickly. She handed off the humerus to Sarah, who placed it in a brown paper evidence bag, which she labeled and numbered.
“Exactly.” I reached into the cockpit and pulled out a pair of bones, still attached to one another at the lower end. “Looks like the left tibia and fibula have that same pattern of differential burning, so the impact probably tore off his lower leg as well.” I handed out the leg bones for them to inventory, examine, and bag. “And the left femur has some midshaft calcining; that means the muscle probably split open from the force of the impact.” As I held out the femur, Art leaned in to take close-up photos of the burn pattern. The flash seared my eyes. “That’s okay, Art,” I said, “I didn’t really need those retinas to work here.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve heard you can ID bones with your eyes closed, so I figured you weren’t looking. This differential burning you’re talking about — is it forensically significant?”
“Not in this case — we already know how he was killed, because I saw it. So did two other people — three, actually, counting the shooter. But suppose we found these bones in a burned-out house. In that setting, the differential burning would be important — it would probably mean that the body was traumatized or dismembered before it was burned. Not exactly an accidental fire, then — more likely arson intended to conceal evidence of a murder.”
After the first few bones, and the first few minilectures, we got into a quiet, efficient rhythm. Without even looking or turning or speaking, I’d hand pieces out to Miranda, who would verbally ID them. As Sarah got busy inking the bones on the skeleton diagram, Art took over bagging and labeling. Soon the ground was covered with brown paper bags, like some gruesome, cannibalistic picnic lunch.
I had gradually worked my way down to the pedals near the pilot’s floor bubble, or what had once been the floor bubble. “Hey, Art,” I called as I began extricating a handful of calcined foot bones, “I know the pedals on an airplane work the rudder, but what do they do on a helicopter, which doesn’t have a rudder? They don’t control the throttle, do they?”
“Naw,” he said, reaching around me to point at a twisted metal tube mounted in the center of the cabin floor, “throttle’s built into the stick here, which is called the ‘collective’ in a chopper. The pedals control the tail rotor, which works like a rudder, in a frighteningly complex way. To yaw — pivot — to the left, the pilot mashes the left pedal, which actually causes the tail rotor to shove the tail boom to the right. I tried to fly one of these contraptions once.”
“And?”
“And like the Lyle Lovett song says, ‘Once is enough.’ Most complicated hand — eye, brain — machine coordination I ever tried to do. I’d get one thing almost right, and in the process, I’d get two or three other things wrong enough to turn us upside-down or sideways. Flight instructor actually kissed the ground when we got back down alive.”
Something caught Art’s eye, and he took another look into the cockpit, pointing at a rectangular object. “Bill, mind if I reach in and grab that box?” I shook my head and stepped aside. Art leaned into the cockpit and extracted a charred rectangle, not much bigger than a cigarette pack, and laid it on the ground beside him. Then he leaned back in, peered around, and emerged with a larger metal case as well. He took both objects to Sarah and gestured with the smaller one at an evidence bag. She held it open as he tucked them inside.
“How do you want me to label this?” she asked.
“Label it ‘RF unit’ and put a question mark after that,” he said.
He looked thoughtful for a moment, then walked to the back of my truck and ran his hands along the underside of the rear bumper. “Eureka,” he said, and yanked something loose. It, too, was a small metal case, with a wire dangling from one end.
I stared at it. I didn’t recognize it, and I’d looked under my bumper many times, retrieving the spare key I kept there in a magnetic case. “What’s that?”
“A beacon.”
“What kind of beacon?”
“An RF beacon. Somebody put a radio frequency transmitter on your truck.” I was still playing catch-up. “Like those radio collars biologists put on the wolves in Yellowstone.” Art pointed to the helicopter wreckage. “See those metal prongs sticking up from the roof of the cockpit? That’s a directional antenna array, which picks up the signal from this transmitter here. The boxes I found in the cockpit are the receiver and control unit. They pick up the signal from the beacon and compute your direction and distance. Orbin was tracking you, Bill.”
“Why would Orbin want to track me?”
“Well, maybe the sheriff and his boys figured you might lead ’em to O’Conner. Or maybe this was Orbin flying solo, so to speak, and he wanted to settle up with you for that day we got the drop on him and his brother. From what you told me about his visit to Cousin Vern’s pot patch, he wasn’t the type to forgive and forget.”
“The thought of Orbin tracking me like an animal gives me the shivers,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too,” he said. “But I’d say you got the better end of the deal. And now we know why Orbin showed up here right after you did.”
Steve Morgan didn’t say a word. But the TBI agent didn’t miss a syllable of the exchange between Art and me.
CHAPTER 37
I parked in my usual spot under the streetlight behind the Regional Forensic Center and let myself in the back door with the keypad combination lock. It was nearly midnight now, and my back and neck ached from leaning into the helicopter’s cockpit for three hours straight. The morgue looked deserted, though in fact it was never unattended. If I’d rung the loading bay doorbell, a video camera would have swiveled in my direction after a few moments, and a groggy morgue assistant would have buzzed me in. But since the assistant was probably a pathology intern — and therefore desperately short on sleep — I’d let myself in, and I moved through the hallways as quietly as possible, lest I disturb a much-needed nap.
Once in the basement of the hospital itself, I caught an elevator up to the seventh floor, which housed the cardiac care unit. The night duty nurse at the station smiled broadly when she saw me. “Hi, Dr. Brockton; good to see you,” she beamed. “What brings you up here at almost midnight? You must be scouting for likely donors.” We shared a laugh at the joke, which I heard some version of almost any time I crossed from the catacombs of the dead to the wards of the ailing.
“Not tonight,” I said, “but if you get any hot prospects for me, give me a call. Actually, I wanted to check on one of your new patients, Sheriff Tom Kitchings, who came in on LifeStar a few hours ago.”
“He’s a popular guy,” she said.
“Oh?”
“A gentleman was here earlier, right before I came on shift, and one of his deputies just left. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into him in the elevator.”
Williams? It had to be Williams, since Orbin was over in the osteology lab with Miranda, getting simmered and scrubbed clean. My mind was racing with scenarios. Had the deputy come out of concern for his boss? Had he heard that we’d found the tracking beacon on my truck — and had he known
it was there? Had he reclaimed the cartridge cases from the shooting, and if so, why?
“If he’d bumped into me, he’d have been lost,” I said. “I came up from the morgue on the service elevator. I’m surprised he was here, though. This is right on my way home, but it’s a long trip for somebody from Cooke County.”
“A wasted trip, too,” she said. “The sheriff’s asleep — I gave him a good dose of Ativan when I changed his drip at eleven. The deputy said he just wanted to get an update on his condition, so I went over the chart with him. He asked if he could look in on the sheriff and just sit with him a few minutes. I said he could, long as he didn’t wake him up.”
I was bone-tired and raw-nerved, so maybe I was just feeling paranoid, but something about that scared me. “Have you been back in the sheriff’s room since the deputy left?”
“No, that was only five minutes ago. Why?”
“I don’t know; I’m just jumpy. Mind if we go check on him?”
