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“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 granddaugh
ter,” 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.”
