“Hey, he wasn’t old,” I squawked. “Sixty is the new fifty-nine.”
“He didn’t die in the heat of passion,” said Morgan. “Not unless the hygienist was under the desk while he was dictating records. The receptionist found him slumped over his desk, microphone in his hand.”
“But he wasn’t slumped over Garland Hamilton’s chart?”
Morgan shook his head again.
“And Hamilton’s dental records are nowhere to be found?”
“Nowhere.”
“Damn,” I said. “That’s going to make it hard to match these teeth. Can you check for other medical records? Any healed fractures we should be looking for? Any cranial X-rays that might show us some teeth?”
“I already left a message for Mrs. Vetter,” said Morgan, “asking for a list of his doctors. I’ll try her again later this afternoon. Sorry for the delay.”
I sighed. “Well, it’s not like we’re sitting here twiddling our thumbs. We’ll be at this for a while yet. As you can see, we’ve got about a thousand more pieces to glue back together.”
“Aha!” Miranda exclaimed. With a pair of tweezers, she reached down and plucked a small fragment of bone from the unmatched pieces. The piece was shaped like the continent of Australia, as were three or four hundred other pieces, as best I could tell. But she tucked it into an Australia-shaped gap in the forehead of the second skull, and it seemed to fit.
“Only nine hundred ninety-nine more pieces,” I said to Morgan. “Better get moving, Steve. Time’s a-wastin’.”
THE PHONE in the bone lab rang just after Morgan left. It was Darren Cash’s boss, District Attorney Robert Roper. “We’re holding a press conference this afternoon at four, but I wanted you to hear this from me first,” he said. “Stuart Latham just pled guilty to murder.”
“First degree?”
“No, second,” he said. “He wanted involuntary manslaughter, but we wouldn’t settle for that.”
“What’s his story? His new one, I mean.”
“He claims they were arguing about selling the farm. They’d both had a lot to drink, and things got out of hand. He hit her, and she fell backward and cracked her head on the kitchen floor. He thought she’d passed out—at least that’s what he claims—and he carried her to the bed. When he woke up the next morning, she was dead. He swears he never meant to kill her, but once he realized she was dead, he panicked.”
“Sure,” I said. “And two weeks ago, he swore he’d kissed her good-bye the morning he caught that plane to Vegas, too. If it was an accident, why’d he plead to second-degree murder, then?”
“Because we had him by the short hairs. It’s possible—barely possible—he’s telling the truth. But even if he didn’t mean to kill her, we could probably convince a jury he did. Besides, even with his new story, we had him nailed on evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, and desecration of a corpse. That last one alone could get him twenty years.”
He didn’t have to remind me of the penalty for mutilating a body—the state legislature had passed that law early in my career, after I’d detailed the way a killer had hacked his victim to pieces, then fed the remains to his Doberman.
“What made Latham start to crack,” Robert continued, “was when Darren told him how he did it—how he put the ice under the car and how many hours that gave him to get to Vegas. Darren showed him pictures of those two little burned circles you found in the grass near the barn.”
Actually, I’d found only one of the two, but I didn’t want to interrupt Roper to correct him.
“Then I took over,” the D.A. went on, “pointing out how those research experiments would be the nail in his coffin on the issue of premeditation.” Roper chuckled. “Hell, I’d no sooner said the words ‘death penalty’ than he started crying and begging to plead out.”
“So how long will Latham serve?”
“If the judge approves the deal, he’ll get a ten-year sentence. Could be out in five.”
“Five years—that’s not much for killing your wife and burning her body,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “But it’s a lot more than zero. And then there’s the fine.”
“What fine?”
“His twenty-five-million dollars that just went up in smoke.”
CHAPTER 29
I REACHED ART JUST AS HE WAS FINISHING LUNCH, judging by the smacking sounds on the other end of the line. “If you needed a body,” I said, “where would you get one?”
“Gee, let me think,” he answered. “Who do I know that has a body or two lying around?”
“Okay, smart aleck. If you needed a body and you couldn’t get it from the Body Farm, where would you get it?”
“Down in Georgia. They’re stacked up like cordwood down there.”
“Too late,” I said. “The GBI had those under lock and key by the time Garland Hamilton escaped.”
“In that case,” he mused, “maybe I’d try a funeral home. Buy a fresh body off an unscrupulous undertaker.”