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“Sure. Let’s go.”
The intense heat of the fire had reduced the hangar to scorched brick walls and sagging steel roof trusses silhouetted against blue sky and gray smoke. Entering through a side door, I found myself sloshing through an inch of muck — a slimy mixture of water, ash, soot, and petrochemicals — and I was grateful that I’d put on my waterproof boots before delivering corpse 49–12 to the Body Farm.
Occupying one side of the hangar was a blackened Ford pickup; on the other side was a scorched plane, a V-tailed Beechcraft Bonanza; and tucked between them was a riding lawn mower, its gas cap removed. Lying on the floor next to the mower, faceup in the muck, was the corpse, its facial features all but obliterated, its left hand still clutching a five-gallon gasoline can. The heat of the fire had shrunk the flexor muscles of the arm, locking the man’s fingers around the handle in what was, quite literally, a death grip. “So, looks like an accident,” Stone said. “Might even have been an accident.”
“Mighty convenient accident,” I said, “the way the fire just happened to break out so close to so much gasoline.”
“Damned convenient,” Rocky agreed.
I knelt beside the body. “I assume he’s not carrying his DEA badge,” I said, “but have you checked him for other identification? What was his undercover name? Hutchinson?”
Rocky nodded. “He’s got the Hutchinson driver’s license. Can you get a DNA sample so we can be sure? Or did the heat…? Is the DNA…?”
I finished the question for him. “Is the DNA cooked? Probably not. The femur is pretty well insulated by the muscles of the thigh, and most of that tissue’s still there, so we can probably get a good DNA sample. But the dental records might be quicker and easier. Can you get me those?” Tugging on a pair of gloves and kneeling beside the corpse, I opened the mouth. “Agent Stone? Unless your man had just come from a barroom brawl, he wasn’t refueling his lawn mower when he died.” Leaning back so Rocky could get a better view, I showed him the teeth. All eight incisors had been snapped off at the roots.
“Shit,” Rocky muttered. “That doesn’t look like something the fire did.”
“No way,” I told him. “See how the teeth are folded backward into the mouth? That’s called a ‘hinge fracture,’ and it means somebody swung something at him — a baseball bat or a steel pipe or the butt of a rifle — and caught him square on the mouth.” I studied the face with my eyes, and then with my fingertips, pressing and squeezing in order to feel the bones through the burned flesh. From there I worked my way down the entire body. When I finally got down to the feet, I looked up at Rocky. “I’ll X-ray the body when I get it back to the Regional Forensic Center,” I said, “but I can tell you already he’s got multiple fractures. Half a dozen, at least. I hate to say it, Rocky, but somebody broke your man, bone by bone, before they killed him.”
Stone’s eyes had gone narrow and cold, and his jaw muscles pulsed rhythmically, forming knots the size of walnuts. “Damn those bastards to hell,” he said. “How long will it take you to do the exam?”
“The exam itself, half a day,” I said. “But I’ve got to get the tissue off the bones to do it right. And that’ll take a couple weeks — we’ll put him out at the Body Farm and let Mother Nature clean him off.”
He grimaced. “Isn’t there any other way? Something more respectful? More dignified?”
I shook my head. “I could dismember him, put him in kettles, and cook him down. That’d be a little faster. But it seems less respectful, to my way of thinking. And an aggressive defense attorney would claim that I damaged the bones in taking him apart.”
He sighed. “All right, do it the way you think is best. Just find everything—everything—so we can nail these scum-sucking bastards.” He looked at the vehicles. “Thank God we got the fire out so fast. If the gas tanks had gone up, I doubt there’d’ve been any of him left for you to look at.”
“Wait. Wait.” I looked up, my gaze swiveling from his face to the blackened vehicles. “You’re saying there’s still unburned gas in here?” He nodded. “In the truck and in the airplane?”
“Yup. The truck holds twenty-six gallons; the plane holds ninety.”
“There’s almost a hundred gallons of high-octane aviation fuel sitting right over our heads? We shouldn’t even be in here, should we?”
Stone shrugged. “Fire’s out.”
“There might be an ember somewhere in that plane. One of the tanks might fail. The roof could collapse. A spark from—”
I was interrupted by a metallic clatter — the clatter of metal punching through metal — and a neat round hole suddenly appeared in the side of the airplane.
“Shots! Shots! Take cover!” yelled one of the agents. Another bullet slammed into the plane, this time into the wing, and a thin stream of pale blue liquid began dribbling from the wing and pooling atop the muck.
“Jesus, that’s avgas,” said Stone. “We gotta get outta here.” He hoisted me to my feet and began pulling me toward the door. All around us, agents and deputies were scrambling, staring and pointing in various directions, drawing weapons. Another bullet chipped a cinder block and ricocheted off in a shower of sparks. A flame bloomed at the base of the far wall. From there it followed a finger of gas, a finger beckoning it toward the center of the hangar, toward the leaking airplane.
I tore free of Stone’s grasp and ran back toward the plane. Behind me, I heard him shouting, “Doc, come back! Get out!”
A wall of flame had engulfed the far wing of the plane by the time I reached the dead agent. Grabbing his feet — the closest things to me — I tucked them under my arms and dragged him behind me like a sleigh, slipping and staggering as I hauled him through the muck. I’d almost made it to the door when the plane exploded, and a fist of fire slammed into my back and knocked me flat.
* * *
Rocky Stone helped me carry the body of his dead agent to the most secluded corner of the Body Farm and lay him at the foot of a big oak. Unzipping the body bag, I tugged it free, fastened ID tags on the left arm and left ankle, and then draped the bag over the corpse.
“You broke half a dozen procedures and every rule of common sense, going back for him like that,” Stone said. “And I am incredibly grateful. If you hadn’t gotten him out, we wouldn’t have a prayer of making a murder case.”
“I wish the shooter hadn’t gotten away.”
“You and me both, Doc. He was only a couple hundred yards away — up on that low ridge — but by the time any of our guys got there, he was gone.” Stone knelt and laid a DEA medallion on top of the bag. Closing his eyes, he said a few silent words, then stood. “So, you say it’ll take about two weeks to get us a report?”
“More or less. More if it turns cool, less if it gets really hot. Once the bugs and I have cleaned him off, I’ll take photos of all the fractures.” I had already documented them, or at least most of them, with X-rays, which I took with a portable machine at the loading dock of the Forensic Center. But if the case came to trial, the prosecutors would need crisp photos to corroborate the fuzzy X-ray images.
Normally I’d have delegated the cleanup to my graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, who ran the bone lab and did much of the legwork at the Body Farm. Miranda had left for France only three days before, but already I was feeling her absence. I missed her help, and I missed her camaraderie. At the moment, though, I was relieved she hadn’t been with me in Sevierville. I’d narrowly escaped being incinerated; in fact, the hair on the back of my head was singed, and if I’d been wearing my usual outfit — jeans and a cotton shirt — instead of the Nomex jumpsuit, my clothes would surely have caught fire. Thank God Miranda wasn’t there, I thought.
> She’d left on short notice, under circumstances that remained slightly mysterious to me. A week earlier, she’d received an urgent e-mail and then a phone call from a French archaeologist, Stefan Beauvoir, asking her to come help with a hastily arranged excavation. The site was a medieval palace dating from the thirteen hundreds — practically prehistoric by American standards, but nearly modern for Europe.
I’d hesitated before saying I could spare her; after all, during half a decade as my graduate assistant, she’d made herself indispensable. I valued and respected Miranda’s intelligence and forensic expertise. But it went deeper than that, I had to admit: She was as important to me personally as she was professionally. In some ways, I felt closer to Miranda than to anyone else on earth, even my own son. If you took DNA out of the equation, Miranda was my next of kin. I felt certain that the bone lab and the Body Farm could limp along without Miranda for six weeks, but I wasn’t sure I could manage that long.
“Excuse me, Doc?” Rocky’s voice seemed to come from far away, not so much interrupting my thoughts as awakening me from some dream. “So if we’re done here, I guess I’ll be taking off. The TBI’s gonna think we’ve hijacked their chopper.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to check out on you there. Hang on — I’ll walk you out and lock up.”
I bent to straighten one corner of the body bag, and as I did, my cell phone began bleating. Fishing the phone from the pocket of the jumpsuit, I glanced at the display. I didn’t recognize the number; it started with 330, an area code I didn’t know, and it looked longer than a phone number should be. I stared dumbly for a moment before I realized why. It was a foreign call, and 33 was the country code — the code, I suddenly remembered, for France. Miranda! I flipped open the phone, but in my excitement, I fumbled it, and it fell onto my foot and skittered beneath the body bag. Flinging aside the bag, I rooted for the phone, which had lodged — ironically and absurdly — beside the dead man’s left ear. I had just laid hold of it when it fell silent. “Damn it,” I muttered. I punched the “send” button, only to be told by a robotic voice that my call “cannot be completed as dialed,” doubtless because it was an overseas number. “Damn damn damn,” I muttered, but just as I finished the third damn, the phone rang again, displaying the same number.
