“I hope you’re here to tell me y’all have caught Garland Hamilton,” I said.
He winced and shook his head. “I wish I were, but I’m not,” he said. “I think you’ll find this interesting, though. We’ve been watching his bank accounts and looking at his credit cards.”
“And?”
“We found a storage unit he rented about six months ago, and inside was something that belongs to you.” He stepped back into the hallway, then reappeared, cradling a cardboard box in his arms. The box was 36 inches long, 12 inches high, and 12 inches deep. I knew the exact dimensions because I had spent years putting skeletons into boxes just like this one. I had a pretty good idea whose skeleton was in this particular box, too: I’d have bet a year’s salary that the box contained the postcranial skeleton—the bones from the neck down—of Leena Bonds, a young woman killed in Cooke County thirty years earlier. I had recovered the woman’s body from deep in a cave in the mountains, where the combination of cool air and abundant moisture had transformed her soft tissue into adipocere, a soaplike substance that preserved her features remarkably well over the decades. Midway through the investigation into Leena’s murder, someone had broken into my office and stolen the box. That someone had been Garland Hamilton.
I motioned toward my desktop, and Morgan set the box down. I raised the lid, which was hinged along one of the three-foot sides. Inside, I saw the bones of a young white female, each bone bearing the case number in my writing. Two parts of the skeleton were missing, as I knew they would be: the skull and the hyoid, both of which I had taken to show my anthropology class the day the box was stolen. The woman’s skull—Leena’s skull—and the fractured hyoid bone from her throat had been buried eight months ago up in Cooke County by Jim O’Conner. O’Conner was now the county’s sheriff, but thirty years earlier he’d been simply a young man who loved Leena, when she was still an innocent girl. Before her uncle had molested her and her aunt had strangled her.
The bones took me back in time, the way the smell of baking bread or fresh-mown grass can take you back to your childhood. For me, seeing a skeleton was like reading a diary—a diary recording injuries, illnesses, handedness, and a host of other parts of life that remained written in the bones long after death. In the room that adjoined my office, I had a library full of such diaries—diaries of life and death. Every one was uniquely fascinating, and I always remembered its details. Every one was uniquely sad, too—Leena’s doubly so. I shook myself free of the memory and looked up at Morgan.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just taking a quick trip down a dark stretch of memory lane.”
He nodded. “I understand,” he said. “Take your time.”
“I’m done,” I said. “You mentioned you were looking at Garland Hamilton’s credit-card receipts. Anything that points to where he is now?”
“No,” he said. “The storage-unit rental was about six months ago, and he paid for a whole year up front. Latest activity”—he hesitated—“was a couple hours after he escaped. A security camera at a SunTrust ATM on Hill Avenue shows him using the cash machine. He got a four-hundred-dollar cash advance and four hundred dollars out of checking. The most the machine would let him get.”
“Where’d he get the cards?”
“I don’t know,” said Morgan. “He didn’t have them in jail, so he must have had them stashed someplace safe and easy to get to. Maybe the storage unit.”
“Weren’t his accounts frozen?”
Morgan shook his head. “If he were bankrolling international terrorism or embezzling millions, the feds would freeze his accounts. Otherwise there’s no legal basis for it. He won’t get real far on eight hundred bucks, but it lets him drop off the radar at least for a while.”
“Any idea where he might be? You think he’s staying put, or do you think he’s on the run?”
Morgan frowned. “Hard to tell. Typically, escaped murderers run, but he’s not typical. He’s smarter than most, and he knows how cops think.”
“So he might run after all,” I said. “Figuring that you guys would expect him not to.”
“Hell, you can chase your tail in circles second-and third-guessing that way. Doesn’t get you anything except dizzy, though. His picture’s all over the media, and we’ve sent an APB to every law-enforcement agency in the country. We’ll get him.”
“I hope sooner rather than later,” I said.
“It’ll be sooner,” he said. “Meantime, though, I was wondering—have you thought about carrying a gun?”
“Me? A gun? When I’m out in the field, I’m generally on all fours, with my butt sticking up in the air.” The description got a laugh from Morgan. “What good would a gun do me?”