“Just a matter of paying attention to little details, noticing when something’s not right,” I said.
As I said it, I started to notice that something was definitely wrong here. Miranda’s swift efforts had now exposed virtually the entire arm, and I’d worked my way down the neck to the clavicles and the top of the rib cage. The bones we’d exposed so far were burned to a uniformly grayish white color, which meant they were calcined: reduced to their bare, brittle mineral matrix. One good squeeze with my hands could probably crush the skull to pieces. Both the calcined bone and the melted wiring suggested that this fire had burned hotter than a cremation furnace. Hot enough to cause green bone to warp and splinter. But I didn’t see signs of warping and splintering.
“Damn,” I said, staring at a pelvis I’d just found. The pelvis was draped with the metal teeth of a steel zipper—and was neatly crosshatched with fractures. “This isn’t a burned body. This is a burned skeleton.” The search crew froze, and I felt everyone’s eyes riveted on me. “This was dry bone before the fire.”
I looked around at the search crew and the firefighters. Miranda and Art were nodding in understanding, but the rest looked confused. O’Conner voiced the question for everyone. “How is that possible?”
“It’s possible if Garland Hamilton put it here.”
I could see O’Conner struggling to process the information—struggling to accept its implications.
“Sheriff,” I said, “this isn’t Garland Hamilton.”
There was a long silence while that sank in. Then I heard a quick gasp. I looked around just in time to see Miranda lift a blackened object from the floor. “Well, if that’s not Hamilton,” she said, “maybe this is.”
In her outstretched hand, she cradled the shattered cranial vault of a second skull.
CHAPTER 27
IN THE LAST RAYS OF DAYLIGHT, WE STOOD IN A circle—Miranda, Art, Jim O’Conner, Waylon, and I—staring down at the two body bags spread on the ground beside my truck. On them, arranged in anatomical order, were the skeletons of two white males.
Something about the first skeleton—the one I was sure had been clean, dry bone even before the fire—seemed oddly familiar to me. I swept my eyes over it from head to foot, then back up again. And then my eyes returned to the chest—the right side of the rib cage. “Son of a bitch,” I said softly. “Miranda, take a good look at the right ribs.”
She looked, and her eyes widened. “Son of a bitch,” she echoed. “I never thought I’d see Billy Ray Ledbetter again.”
“Who is Billy Ray Ledbetter,” said the sheriff, “and what makes you think this is him?”
“Billy Ray was a guy whose autopsy Garland Hamilton screwed up,” I said. “He got stomped in a bar fight, then died a couple weeks later from internal bleeding—a punctured lung. His busted ribs were partially healed when he died.”
“And this one,” said Miranda, plucking the seventh rib from the arrangement, “was missing a sliver about an inch long, right about here.” With the tip of her trowel, she traced a long notch in the bone.
“How on earth,” persisted O’Conner, “did Billy Ray happen to end up here? Bar fights and burning basements—I’m thinking he had some bad karma.”
“All roads lead to Cooke County,” I said. “You remember when Leena’s skeleton was stolen?”
He nodded, looking hopelessly confused.
“A second skeleton was stolen at the same time—this one. Garland Hamilton stole them. He probably took Leena’s just to muddy the water; this was the one he was desperate to lay his hands on, because this was the case he’d botched so badly.”
The first skeleton we’d recovered, Ledbetter’s skeleton, intrigued me, but it was the second skeleton that mesmerized me. Unlike Ledbetter’s, these bones appeared to come from a man who was alive and well until the moment he wasn’t—the moment he was blasted and then burned beyond a crisp. Like the first skeleton, this one was calcined, so I doubted that any DNA remained in the bones. But the fractures had the splintered, spiraling appearance characteristic of green bone subjected to intense heat. Mingled with the bones of the feet and ankles were two dozen eyelets from a pair of boots, each eyelet stamped HERMAN SURVIVORS. Scattered amid the bones of the pelvis were the melted rivets and charred zipper of a pair of Levi’s, along with coins, keys, and the buckle and metal tip from a military-style belt of canvas webbing, now minus the canvas. “Here’s a historical footnote I bet y’all didn’t know,” I said, holding up the metal waistband button stamped with the jeans company’s name. “For the first sixty or eighty years, Levi’s had reinforcing rivets in the crotch, too. But sometime in the 1940s, the company’s president was sitting too close to a campfire and got burned by the crotch rivets.”