“No.”
“This little scrap seems odd, the way it’s wedged way down in the corner of the backseat. You expect that with pennies and pens, but not so much with newspaper.” I knelt down beside the other corner of the backseat and sifted through the debris. The tip of my trowel teased out another bit, smaller and with no type, from a corner of the page. I recognized the distinctive saw-tooth fringe at the edge of the paper, where the roll of newsprint had been cut with a serrated edge. I craned my neck around to look at Darren. “Was the house searched?”
He nodded.
“I don’t suppose you remember whether there was a stack of newspapers?”
“You’re right,” he said, “I don’t remember. Why would newspapers be significant?”
“I’m just thinking out loud,” I said. “I remember a case in which a woman had stabbed her husband and decided to burn his body in the house. There were no traces of accelerant, but down behind some of the furniture the arson investigator found wads of newspaper, which she’d used as fuel. A couple more minutes and that paper would have gone up in flames. Luckily, the fire department got the fire out before it reached flashover, so some evidence remained.”
“So you’re thinking maybe Stuart Latham did the same thing?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “If there’s a stack of papers back at the house with a week’s worth missing, that might be a clue that he used newspaper to help goose the fire along.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “We can add that to the search warrant, along with what you and Dr. Garcia told us about the bones and the bugs.”
“Maggots never lie,” I said. “Unlike husbands.”
Art and I bagged the phalanges I’d found in the front floorboard, as well as the two bits of newspaper from the backseat. Art folded and taped the bags shut, then wrote the date and time, along with a brief description of the bones and shreds of paper. Then we pulled off the baggy jumpsuits, which by now were plastered to us with sweat, peeled the gloves off our dripping hands, and stuffed the disposable garb into a red biohazard bag, for burning in the morgue’s medical-waste incinerator. We gave Cash a sweaty good-bye handshake, then drove back out the way we’d come in—past the drug dealers’ cars, past the security building, past the main impound lot and the auction lot.
I pointed at the red convertible again. “That’s a pretty small backseat,” I said. “The giraffe would probably have to be a baby.”
“Not necessarily,” said Art. “Not if it was sitting sideways.”
CHAPTER 10
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, AS THE SUN STRUGGLED to burn through a layer of steamy haze, I threaded my way out of Sequoyah Hills and along Kingston Pike. Instead of taking the right onto Neyland and along the river to the stadium, I turned left onto Concord. I bumped across the railroad crossing, then took a right onto Sutherland Avenue, over another set of tracks and past the dusty silos of a pair of concrete plants, Sequatchie Concrete and Southern Precast, their gravel parking lots filled with powdered cement trucks, highway culverts, and staircases. Next, through the pillars of the Alcoa Highway viaduct, I glimpsed the white storage tanks of the Rohm and Haas plastics factory. One of the tanks carried a cartoonish painting of a bespectacled scientist in a white lab coat, captioned THAT’S GOOD CHEMISTRY. As I wrinkled my nose against the acrid fumes of superglue, or one of its chemical cousins, I thought, More like “THAT’S STINKY CHEMISTRY.” Then I laughed out loud at the irony of me, the founder of the Body Farm, complaining about any other establishment’s unpleasant smell.
I well knew superglue’s affinity for human fingers and fingerprints—I’d glued my fingers together on more than one occasion, and Art had actually patented a superglue-fuming device, “the Bohanan Apparatus,” used by crime labs nationwide to pick up latent prints on guns, knives, paper, even victims’ skin. As I sniffed my way past Rohm and Haas, I imagined every square inch of the factory and its workers to be covered with handprints—layer upon layer of loops and whorls, captured forever in superglue fumes and drifting concrete dust.