“Pliers is for sissies, guy like him’d say,” Waylon scoffed. “What’s them awards for folks that do stupid stuff that kills ’em?”
“The Darwin Awards?” I asked, and he nodded. “Survival of the fittest,” I agreed. “Or at least of the nonidiotic.”
O’Conner, Steve Morgan of the FBI, and Decker’s colleague Ron were off to one side conferring, and I saw the sheriff make a phone call. When he finished, the three of them joined Waylon and me beside the body. “This guy is determined to make our job harder, even after he’s dead,” O’Conner said to me.
“What do you mean?”
“Explosives are involved. That means we’ve got to call in the ATF.”
“Makes sense,” I said. I had worked several cases with the ATF—officially renamed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but still informally called the ATF—and I respected their expertise. “Given that the gate was booby-trapped, and the guy has explosives, probably a good idea to let them check the place out, get rid of anything dangerous.” I nodded at the body. “Can somebody give me and my friend a ride back to Knoxville? Not that there seems much doubt about cause of death, but the sooner we get him to the medical examiner, the less smelly he’ll be.”
O’Conner frowned. “Like I said, this guy’s making it hard for us. All of us. Including you, Doc.” I must have looked confused, because he added, “The ATF doesn’t want us to disturb anything—not even the body—until they’ve made sure everything’s safe.”
I was about to protest—inspecting the body for explosives at this point seemed like installing a barn-door surveillance camera after the horse had been stolen—but I saw Ron and Morgan both nod, and I decided there was no point arguing about a delay designed to keep me from getting blown up. Be a shame to win a Darwin Award of my own, I realized. “Any idea when they’ll release the body?”
“I asked the same thing. He said probably within a day.”
“That’s reasonable, I guess,” I conceded. “The good news is, it’s not hot. Tonight’s low is supposed to be near forty.”
“In Knoxville?” asked Waylon, and I nodded. “So it’ll get down to about freezing up here,” he said. “Be just like keepin’ him in the meat locker. He’ll stay fresh as a daisy.”
“Sure,” I said, eyeing the growing number of buzzards wheeling overhead. With each spiral they edged closer, and by the time O’Conner assigned Waylon to drive me back to Knoxville, I felt as if I’d just escaped from a bad scene in the Hitchcock film The Birds.
CHAPTER 26
“SHALL WE BEGIN?”
Eddie Garcia’s three simple words, spoken with quiet formality and a slight Spanish accent, made me smile. It had been a while since I had stood elbow to elbow with Eddie during an autopsy, and I realized I had missed the corpse-side camaraderie. In some ways Eddie—Dr. Edelberto Garcia, M.D., Knox County’s medical examiner—was my polar opposite: slight and dapper, well groomed and well dressed, from an aristocratic family in Mexico City. But bring us together over a body, and those superficial differences dropped away, and we were simply colleagues and kindred spirits, equally eager to commune with the dead and hear their stories. To be sure, my anthropologist ears were attuned to older stories, while Eddie’s pathologist ears tended to listen for fresher tales of tragedy. A body like Shiflett’s—several days past its peak of freshness—was nearing the outer limits of Eddie’s expertise and verging into my own, but the corpse’s condition gave us enough overlapping interest to provide an excuse to hang out together in the autopsy suite.
Eddie folded back the sheet, exposing Shiflett’s mangled face and bloating body. “I’m sorry Miranda could not join us,” he said. “Her insights are always worthwhile, and sometimes quite unexpected.”
“She sends regrets,” I said. “Painful regrets. Her dissertation defense is next week, and she’s frantically preparing.”
He nodded. “I have read this dissertation. Twice, in fact. A remarkable piece of work, I think. Do you agree?”