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.