Art raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, I give up,” he said. “You two are like twins, with some secret language all your own. I know I should’ve understood that, but I forgot to remember it.”
“No, I get it,” the sheriff said with a laugh. “If he’s smart enough to dress the bones in clothes and to stage that Coleman lantern and the gas can, he’s smart enough to make it look like the arms and legs are flexed.”
We spent the final half hour of daylight bagging up the bones and artifacts, long after the SWAT team and the firefighters departed. The bones had dried quickly in the heat of the day, once we’d fished them out of the soggy ashes, brushed them off, and laid them on the wire screens. The soggy ashes coating the basement floor were beginning to bake dry, too, forming a crust nearly as hard as concrete, so I was glad we’d gotten an early start, gotten the skeletal material out before everything set up around it. We gave the bones another gentle scrubbing with soft-bristled brushes, then carefully laid them in brown paper evidence bags. One set of bags contained the dry-bone skeleton I knew was a decoy. The other held the green-bone skeleton I fervently hoped was Garland Hamilton’s.
CHAPTER 28
MIRANDA AND I WERE DOWN IN THE BONE LAB—OUR home away from home—huddled over the jigsaw puzzle that had once been a human skull. The cranial vault had been crushed by falling boards as floor joists and rafters had burned through and collapsed into the basement. The two sets of remains didn’t appear to be commingled; luckily for us, the force of the blast had flung the bodies apart rather than together, and since we’d already identified the first skeleton as Billy Ray Ledbetter’s, we were free to concentrate on the second one. But reassembling the second skull was proving to be a herculean task.
We had poured a couple of inches of sand into the bottom of two cake pans. The sand was soft, so it cushioned the fragile skull fragments. It was easy to shape, too, into a depression that matched the curvature of a skull. As we found and fitted together additional cranial fragments, we’d trace a thin line of Duco cement on one edge, press the piece into place, and then nestle it into the sand and look for another match while the glue dried for a minute. It wasn’t as fancy as the high-tech wonder gadgets on television, but it worked. Still, reassembling the skulls out of a heap of tiny shards—none much bigger than my thumbnail—was tedious at best, and I knew there’d come a point at which we simply ground to a halt, unable to find any distinctive edges to match in the tiny bits of bone.
I heard a rap on the steel door. It swung outward, and Steve Morgan walked in. Morgan and I had spoken earlier in the day, as he was headed over to see Garland Hamilton’s dentist and get me Hamilton’s dental records. I was surprised to notice that he was empty-handed.
“Problem with the dentist?” I asked.
“You might say that,” he said. “He died last week. Heart attack.”
I remembered reading a short item in the newspaper, but I hadn’t paid it much attention at the time. “That was Hamilton’s dentist? Dr. Vetter, or some such?”
Morgan nodded glumly.
“How old was the guy?”
“Sixty.”
“Any history of heart disease?”
“You’d have made a good physician,” Morgan said. “Or a good police interrogator. Vetter had a pacemaker put in a couple of years ago.”
“I thought the whole idea of the pacemaker was to prevent a heart attack.”
“Me, too,” he said, “so I called and asked Dr. Garcia that same question. Garcia told me that if your heart stops, the pacemaker will jump-start it. But if your coronary arteries clog up, a pacemaker won’t save you. It’s like getting a new battery for your car—if the fuel line clogs, the battery’s no help.”
“Did Dr. Vetter have partners?”
Morgan shook his head. “Solo practice,” he said. “A hygienist and a receptionist, that was it.”
“Couldn’t one of those get the records for you?”
“Not there to get,” he said. “They couldn’t find the file.”
“Hel-lo,” said Miranda, looking up from her sandbox, “how convenient is that? The dentist codes just before you come calling, and the crucial records vanish into the ether?”
I didn’t like the sound of that much myself. “Did Garcia do an autopsy?”
“No,” said Morgan. “The widow objected. She said he wouldn’t eat right and he wouldn’t exercise. She tried telling him he was headed for a heart attack, but he wouldn’t listen. Sounds like she thinks he got what he had coming to him.”
“Sounds like maybe she’s at the ‘anger’ stage of the grieving process,” I said.
“Sounds like maybe he died in the arms of a girlfriend,” said Miranda. “Isn’t that what tends to send you old codgers over the edge, myocardially speaking? That would explain the heart attack and the widow’s anger.”