The skull was propped against the door frame and the edge of the seat. The seat’s upholstery was gone, its charred frame and springs smashed flat on the left side by the impact. Orbin’s eyes—what had once been the eyes—had been reduced to blackened cinders within their orbits, looking more like chunks of charcoal than windows to the soul. But then, from what little I had seen, Orbin’s soul had a lot of blackness to it.
Most of the skull’s soft tissue had burned away, yet the mandible remained precariously attached at the hinge of the jaw, giving the mouth a gaping, ghoulish, shrieking banshee look. It was slightly reminiscent of Leena’s, I realized—and then I realized that it was more than just slightly reminiscent. Like her, Orbin Kitchings had no lateral incisors in his upper jaw. And as I studied Orbin’s teeth, another image flashed suddenly into my mind: the photo of Tom Kitchings, squeezing through the narrow part of the cave, his clenched teeth bared in a grimace of effort. “I’ll be damned,” I breathed. The gene pool in Cooke County was a remarkably small and shallow body of protoplasm. Orbin had died strapped into his pilot’s harness. The harness’s nylon webbing had been consumed by the inferno, but Orbin, or what was left of him, remained at the helm of his ruined ship, looking like some pilot of the damned. Several of my students had researched the effects of fire on flesh and bone over the years, and I’d once watched one of them burn a human head in a barbecue grill. After only several minutes on a bed of hot coals, the skin across the forehead had split open and peeled backward. Judging by the gradations of calcination and color on Orbin’s skull—hues ranging from the ashy-white frontal bone to the caramel-brown occipital at the back of the skull—the deputy’s scalp had let go of his cranium only gradually, scalped in slow motion by some sadistic fire god. We might be able to remove most of his body from the wreckage in one piece. If so, that would make the excavation far quicker and simpler. I didn’t want to risk damaging the skull, though, so I reached into my tool case and removed a scalpel. Tilting the skull gently backward with one hand, I worked the blade back and forth with the other, severing the burned remnants of ligamentous tissue and spinal cord. As I lifted the skull, I backed out of the wreck and turned to show the skull to my teammates.
Art whistled when he saw the hole at the center of the forehead. It measured nearly an inch in diameter; the edges were jagged, and fracture lines radiated from it like crooked spokes in a mangled wheel. “That’s a big entry wound,” he said. “Bullet must’ve mushroomed some when it hit the windshield. Damn good shooting, too,” he added. “Or incredibly lucky. I bet Orbin was looking the shooter right in the eye when he pulled the trigger. Talk about staring death in the face.”
“If he’d been Keanu Reeves in The Matrix,” said Miranda, “he coulda dodged the bullet.”
“If he’d been Christopher Reeve in Superman, it woulda bounced right off,” I said.
“If he’d been Superman, he wouldn’t have been flying a helicopter,” Sarah pointed out.
“That’s right,” chimed in Art. “And he’d’ve used his telescopic vision to spot the guy. And his heat vision to burn him up.”
“Enough, already,” I said. “These complex forensic hypotheses are making my head spin.”
I handed off the skull to Miranda, then leaned back in to determine whether how much of the body remained intact. The arms and lower legs, not surprisingly, had burned off—thin, cylindrical, and surrounded by oxygen, they were always the first to go in a hot fire. Some of those bones lay on the warped metal of the pilot’s door; others were fused into a bizarre aggregate with the Plexiglas that had shattered, then melted, then cooled and hardened into a lumpy black mess. His ribs were almost completely exposed, except at the back, where they joined the vertebrae. There, the seat’s padding and leather had protected the flesh from the fire during its first several minutes, as it had beneath the buttocks and backs of the thighs. It would be an awkward, two-person job to wrestle his torso out through the windshield opening. “Miranda, y’all get a disaster bag open on the ground here,” I called out. “Art, are you gloved up?”
“Yeah,” he said, wiggling his fingers in a pair of purple gloves, “I’ve got the gloves on, but I couldn’t find my matching handbag anywhere. Whatcha need?”
“Come help me wrestle him out of here, would you?”
“Love to.”
As soon as Miranda and Sarah had unzipped the white bag and laid it open at my feet, I reached through the cockpit’s left side and slid my hands beneath the torso’s left hip and ribs. Art leaned in through the opening on the right, levering his hands behind the right shoulder and hip. “On three,” I said. “One, two, three!” As we grunted with the strain, the charred torso lifted free of the seat and door frame and lurched toward the windshield opening.
“Hang on a sec; I’ve got to shift my grip,” said Art, and with that, I found myself bearing the torso’s entire weight—admittedly, considerably reduced from what it once was, but still a hefty load for a middle-aged academic stooped at an awkward angle.