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“So what’s the typical temperature when a wooden building burns down?”
“Eight hundred, maybe a thousand Fahrenheit,” he said.
“More if they’s plenty of fuel and a good oxygen supply. You get a stack effect going-say, one of them old three-or four-story Victorians-you can get up to fifteen hunnerd or two thousand. Log house like this, though, would normally burn slower than a stick-built house-just like logs in a campfire burn slower than twigs. But this thing burned like it was made outta cardboard. Had to’ve been a shitload of accelerant in here.”
I laughed. “‘Shitload’-is that a technical, arson-investigation term?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Yessir.”
A pair of deputies leaned over the edge of the basement and relayed our tools down to us. The concrete floor slab was coated in a layer of wet ash, but the stone hearth, which stood about eighteen inches above the floor, was barely damp. Sliding my feet along the floor so as not to risk stepping on any bones, I turned the hearth into a makeshift lab table, laying out the equipment. The wire screens, of the same sort used by archaeologists, were framed of one-by-four-inch lumber, with the screen nailed to the bottom of the frame. When we were sifting dirt at a dig, the wooden frame helped keep the dirt from sliding off the sides. Here, since the bones were likely to be damp, I laid the screens upside down on the hearth, so the wire mesh would be elevated by several inches, allowing the skeletal material to dry.
“Okay,” I said, “since we’ve got a skull just a few feet away, let’s start searching here from the hearth forward. Hands and knees, about two feet apart.” I gave everybody a trowel and an artist’s paintbrush, and gave a quick demonstration in how to use them to tease out and clean small bones. “Art, you and Jim start at the corners of the hearth; Miranda and I will take the centerline. We’ll work from this end to the middle of the house, then work back along the edges. That way we’re starting where we know there’s at least some material. Take your time; look at everything or feel everything, all the way down to the concrete. Get back in touch with your inner toddler, the one who loved to dig in the mud. If you’re not sure what something is, ask Miranda or me.”
I dropped to my hands and knees, and the rest of them followed suit. The concrete slab had been transformed, quite literally, into an immense ashtray, containing seven layers of burned debris: the basement’s contents, the main floor’s joists and flooring, the main floor’s furnishings, the second floor’s joists and flooring, that floor’s furnishings, the second floor’s ceiling joists, and remnants from the roof trusses and roof. The explosion had blown much of the roof skyward, and the blaze had carried some of the interior aloft as a plume of burning embers. That made the debris layer thinner than it might have been. Still, the going was slow, and I suspected we’d be lucky to finish the search by sundown.
I had a head start, literally, with the skull, but Miranda, two feet to my right, started finding material within minutes. “Finger bones,” she said, flicking the tip of her trowel lightly into the damp ash. “Left hand. Wrist. Metal wristwatch.” She sounded clinical and detached, but I knew her well enough to hear the excitement underneath.
“Here’s a radius and ulna,” she said a moment later.
“Slow down,” I teased her. “You’re making the rest of us look like slackers.” At this point we weren’t trying to recover and bag anything; we’d start by brushing off the top layers of debris and simply exposing the bones where they lay. “Eyeglasses,” I said. They looked familiar-they looked like the wire-rimmed reading glasses I’d seen on Garland Hamilton-but I reminded myself that wire-rimmed reading glasses were common.
Miranda’s paintbrush flicked rapidly. “A humerus. The arm is flexed in the pugilistic posture.”
O’Conner, working his way along the wall on Miranda’s other side, looked puzzled at that. “Pugilistic? Isn’t that an oldfangled word for boxing? The gentlemanly art of fisticuffs?”
“Bingo,” I said.
He looked even more puzzled.
“When a body’s exposed to a fire,” I explained, “the muscles shrink as they start to dry out.”
“You mean as they cook?”
“You could put it that way. And the flexors-in your arm, the muscles you use to clench your fist and curl it toward you-are stronger than the extensors. So the flexors overpower the extensors, and the fingers and arms curl up. The legs flex slightly, too.”
“So a body burned in a fire assumes a boxer’s stance?” O’Conner clenched his fists and held them up near his shoulders, posing his body as he posed the question.
“Exactly. Unless there’s some reason it can’t.”
“Such as?”
“If the arms and legs are tied, for instance. I worked a case once where a burned body was found in a bedroom. The guy was a heavy smoker, and they figured he fell asleep smoking in bed. But the arms were extended, and they were behind the back. I knew that wasn’t right, so I used a magnifying glass and a two-millimeter screen to comb through the ashes of the mattress. Found a few burned fibers the TBI identified as rope. Turns out he was murdered by his business partner, who had a million-dollar insurance policy on him.”
“Amazing,” said O’Conner, “that you were able to figure it out from the position of the arms.”
“Just a matter of paying attention to little details, noticing when something’s not right,” I said.
As I said it, I started to notice that something was definitely wrong here. Miranda’s swift efforts had now exposed virtually the entire arm, and I’d worked my way down the neck to the clavicles and the top of the rib cage. The bones we’d exposed so far were burned to a uniformly grayish white color, which meant they were calcined: reduced to their bare, brittle mineral matrix. One good squeeze with my hands could probably crush the skull to pieces. Both the calcined bone and the melted wiring suggested that this fire had burned hotter than a cremation furnace. Hot enough to cause green bone to warp and splinter. But I didn’t see signs of warping and splintering.
“Damn,” I said, staring at a pelvis I’d just found. The pelvis was draped with the metal teeth of a steel zipper-and was neatly crosshatched with fractures. “This isn’t a burned body. This is a burned skeleton.” The search crew froze, and I felt everyone’s eyes riveted on me. “This was dry bone before the fire.”
I looked around at the search crew and the firefighters. Miranda and Art were nodding in understanding, but the rest looked confused. O’Conner voiced the question for everyone. “How is that possible?”
“It’s possible if Garland Hamilton put it here.”
I could see O’Conner struggling to process the information-struggling to accept its implications.
“Sheriff,” I said, “this isn’t Garland Hamilton.”
There was a long silence while that sank in. Then I heard a quick gasp. I looked around just in time to see Miranda lift a blackened object from the floor. “Well, if that’s not Hamilton,” she said, “maybe this is.”
In her outstretched hand, she cradled the shattered cranial vault of a second skull.
CHAPTER 27
IN THE LAST RAYS OF DAYLIGHT, WE STOOD IN A circle-Miranda, Art, Jim O’Conner, Waylon, and I-staring down at the two body bags spread on the ground beside my truck. On them, arranged in anatomical order, were the skeletons of two white males.
Something about the first skeleton-the one I was sure had been clean, dry bone even before the fire-seemed oddly familiar to me. I swept my eyes over it from head to foot, then back up again. And then my eyes returned to the chest-the right side of the rib cage. “Son of a bitch,” I said softly. “Miranda, take a good look at the right ribs.”
She looked, and her eyes widened. “Son of a bitch,” she echoed. “I never thought I’d see Billy Ray Ledbetter again.”
“Who is Billy Ray Ledbetter,” said the sheriff, “and what makes you think this is him?”
“Billy Ray was a guy whose autopsy Garland Hamilton screwed up,” I said. “He got
stomped in a bar fight, then died a couple weeks later from internal bleeding-a punctured lung. His busted ribs were partially healed when he died.”
