Miranda laughed. “Second-degree hot pants—I love it.” Waylon’s bushy eyebrows shot up at her comment, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut.
Several feet from the shattered second skull, we’d found the frames of a pair of eyeglasses. The frames were twisted and the lenses missing, but the glasses looked identical to the pair we’d found beside the first skull. They also looked identical to the pair I’d seen Garland Hamilton perch on his nose to inspect stab wounds and review autopsy notes. The moment I had realized that the first set of bones couldn’t possibly be Garland Hamilton’s, I’d felt my blood pressure skyrocket, but as the second skeleton and its accompanying artifacts had come to light, my pulse slowed and my blood pressure settled back to within shouting distance of normal.
We’d also found the twisted remnants of a Coleman gasoline lantern and a five-gallon gas can, which helped explain the intense heat of the fire. On the face of it, at least, the second set of remains appeared to be Hamilton’s. The positioning of the bones, and the trauma they had sustained, hinted at what might have happened in that fiery explosion. The skeleton was in a supine position—faceup—as if the body had fallen over backward. The bones of the face were essentially gone, as were both hands. A pair of thin wires ran beneath the other debris, stretching from the vicinity of the body to a lump of molten lead several feet away. These wires—their insulation burned away but the copper intact—had lain directly on the basement slab, where the temperature stayed slightly below the metal’s melting point.
“Here’s what I think happened,” I said to the group. “Garland Hamilton decides to fake his death, using this skeleton, but as a medical examiner he knows he’s got to cover his tracks pretty thoroughly. He decides to use dynamite to produce more trauma in the bones—probably to destroy the teeth, so we can’t compare them to his dental records. But somehow he screws up when he’s inserting the blasting caps, and that battery over there”—I gestured at the blob of lead—“sets off the caps while he’s holding the dynamite in his hands.”
“And kablooey?” said Art.
“Kablooey,” I said, smiling at the reference. Either nobody else realized Art was quoting Barney Fife or nobody else found Andy Griffith’s bumbling sidekick as amusing as Art and I did.
“Works for me,” said Miranda. “I can just picture Garland looking all clever and smug with a stick of dynamite in his hands, imagining how he’s going to outwit everyone. Just before shorting out the wires.”
“And kablooey,” Art deadpanned again.
“It’s just a theory at this point,” I said. “We’ve got to get a positive ID before we can be sure.”
“How you gonna do that?” Waylon asked. “Fucker’s all burnt up and blowed up.”
O’Conner laughed. “Waylon’s got a point there. Can you get DNA out of this?”
I shook my head dubiously. “Don’t know. We’ll try, of course, but the heat may have destroyed it. I’m hoping we can match the dental records.” I picked up the remnants of the mandible and studied them closely. The lower jaw had been shattered by the blast, and most of the teeth were missing. The upper jaw was in equally bad shape, not surprisingly, since the face—the cheekbones, the nasal bone, the fragile bones of the eye orbits—had been virtually obliterated by the explosion. All told, what was left of the upper and lower jaws contained just five teeth. But two of those five had fillings, so I was optimistic I had enough to compare with Hamilton’s dental records.
“Doc?” O’Conner looked thoughtful. “This might be a dumb question, but I’m gonna ask it anyhow.”
“No such thing as a dumb question, Jim. I tell my students that almost every class.”
“Okay. So let’s assume you’re right,” he said, “and Hamilton was using a skeleton as a stand-in for himself.”
I nodded.
“How come the bones were in the pugilistic posture? If there’s no muscle attached to the bone, there’s nothing to flex the arms and legs, is there?”
I pondered O’Conner’s question for a moment, and I realized I was puzzled. Not by the question itself, but by the realization that I had already asked and answered that same question in my own mind hours before, without even consciously noticing it. “God is in the details,” I said, more to myself than to O’Conner. “Or the devil. He’d have known to arrange it that way.”
“How can you be so sure?” O’Conner asked.
Miranda spoke up before I had the chance. “I know! I know!” she exclaimed, sounding more like a third grader than a Ph.D. student. “Because he and Dr. B. worked together on that burn case, the one where the guy was torched in his bed with his hands tied behind him.”
“That’s it,” I said. “I knew he’d know, but I didn’t remember how he’d know.”