The caller was Robert Roper, the Knox County district attorney general, but he was calling to ask about Mary Latham. “You’re sure she was already dead when the car burned?” Robert was a longtime colleague and friend; I’d testified for him in a dozen or more murder trials over the past decade, and I respected his thoroughness and professionalism. I also appreciated the fact that Robert had recused his entire staff when the police initially charged me with Jess Carter’s murder.
“No way she could have been alive,” I said. “Not unless she was walking around like somebody out of Night of the Living Dead, with hunks of flesh falling off and flies and maggots swarming all over.”
“Thanks for sharing,” he said. “I was just about to eat lunch. Maybe I’ll catch up on my depositions instead.”
“If memory serves, you could stand to skip a lunch or two,” I parried. “Last time I saw you, you’d put on about twenty pounds.”
“You should write a book,” he said. “Dr. Brockton’s Gross-Out Weight-Loss Plan. It could be the next South Beach Diet. You might wind up on Oprah.”
“I’ll be sure to tell Oprah it was you who inspired me.”
“Great. Now back to Mary Latham. Can you tell if she decomposed in the car or someplace else?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Normally there’s a big, greasy stain where the decomposition occurred, but the car’s interior is probably too badly burned to tell. You might want the crime-scene guys to go back and check the house and the yard—anyplace she might have lain for a couple of days before her husband—or whoever—put her in the car.”
“How about the freezer in the basement?”
“Not likely, though it might’ve been a good idea—if he’d frozen her, she wouldn’t have decomposed.” I thought for a moment.
“Thing is, it would have been messy to get her into the car once she started to decompose. Parts fall off, stuff drips out. It’s not easy, and it’s sure not pleasant. Of course, if you’ve resorted to murdering your wife, pleasantness might not be high on your list of priorities at the moment. Still, my guess is she was already in the car. I’d be willing to bet he put her in the passenger seat right after he killed her, drove the car out to that field, and wiggled her over to the driver’s seat while she was still fresh. Although he’d be taking a chance on somebody finding her.”
“Not much of a chance,” said Robert. “That spot’s pretty isolated.”
“Are you sure it’s the husband?”
“Pretty damn sure,” he said. “During the three-day period before the car burned, nobody besides the husband seems to have seen her or talked to her.”
“Makes sense,” I said, “since she was dead.”
“There’s a big problem with the case against him, though,” Roper said.
“What’s that?”
“His alibi,” he said. “Stuart Latham was in Las Vegas when the car burned. The investigating officer got hold of him on his cell phone, and Latham called back from a landline in the Bellagio Hotel.”
“But was he already in Vegas when she was killed? If she’d been dead for days, why does it matter where he was when the car actually caught fire?”
“Because,” he said, “a good defense attorney will use that to plant doubt in the minds of the jurors. Make them think somebody else killed her.”
“Like who?” I said. “A burglar? Somebody after a stereo or a VCR? Why on earth would some stranger kill her, wait a couple of days, then drive her down to the south forty to burn the evidence? Doesn’t create much doubt in my mind.”
“You’re not a juror,” he said, “you’re a scientist.”
“And anyhow,” I persisted, “didn’t the husband tell the police she was alive and well when he got on the plane that morning? The decay and the bugs prove he’s lying through his teeth.”
“You know that, and I know that, but we have to convince twelve other people of that,” he said.
“Besides the burned bones, what else was found in the car?”
“Not much,” he said. “A few cigarette butts on the ground underneath the driver’s window, like maybe she sat there and smoked awhile before the grass caught fire. Husband says she liked to do that. Says he warned her a bunch of times about dropping cigarette butts in the grass. People driving on I-640 saw the smoke and called it in, probably within ten minutes of when it caught fire, according to the arson investigator.”
“Any sign of a timer?” I asked. “An ignition device, something he could have set to go off once he was out in Vegas?”
“Not that the evidence techs can find,” he said. “One of them’s just back from Iraq, and he doesn’t see any evidence of an IED.”
“What’s an IED?”
“Improvised explosive device. Iraqi insurgents use ’em as roadside bombs. They’re triggered by a cell phone, sometimes. Thing is, you gotta have some skill with electronics or some training as a terrorist to rig one of those, and Stuart Latham runs an Avis rental-car franchise.”
“Well, either he killed her or he didn’t,” I said in exasperation. “If he did, either he had an accomplice or he didn’t. And if he didn’t have an accomplice, there ought to be something, either in the car or out at the scene, indicating how he set off the fire from the Bellagio.”
“Are you willing to take a look? In the car and out at the property?”