“That’s damned decent of Eddie,” I joked, “letting me have all the good ones.” All four agents smiled.
“The scary thing is,” Rocky said, “the Doc’s not being sarcastic. He actually means it.”
The truth was, Rocky was right. I actually did.
THE DEAD AGENT WAS MAURICE WATSON, ALIAS “Perry Hutchinson,” whom the DEA had planted as the manager of the airpark. Six months before, working through the drug smugglers’ distributors in Atlanta, Hutchinson had offered them a sweet deal: a house, a hangar, and a key to the gas pump in exchange for a small cut of the profits.
“They brought in the first load two weeks ago,” said Rocky. “It was small—just a test run. Smooth as silk. They were planning another run next week. A big load. We were all set to come down on them. But somebody got spooked—or got tipped off.” He shook his head grimly. “You ready to take a look?”
“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.”