DOWN IN GEORGIA I’D STUMBLED UPON A BUNCH OF bodies that should have been burned but weren’t. Here in Knoxville, I reflected, I was obsessed with a body that shouldn’t have been burned but was. I guess the universe is in balance, I thought. Except that Garland Hamilton’s still out there somewhere.
Darren Cash answered his cell phone on the third ring.
“I think I know how he did it,” I said.
“How who did what?”
I laughed. “Sorry. It’s Dr. Brockton from UT. I think I know how Stuart Latham set the car on fire while he was in Vegas.”
“Do tell,” said Cash.
“I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you,” I said. “I’d rather show you. Any chance you’ve got some free time late this afternoon or tomorrow?”
“Since you ask so nice,” he said, “and since you’re about to help me blast a killer’s alibi out of the water, I’ll make time. I’ve got some folks to interview this morning and after lunch, but I should be through by four o’clock or so.”
I checked my watch. It read 8:37.
“Can you meet me at the Anthropology Department around four-thirty? We’ll take a little field trip from there.”
“You’re being mighty cryptic,” he said, “but you’ve got me hooked.”
I told him how to find my office, and then I called Jason Story, one of my master’s-level graduate students. Jason sounded sleepy when he answered the phone, which wasn’t surprising considering he’d sent me an e-mail in the middle of the night describing the experiment he’d just finished.
“Sorry if I woke you up, Jason,” I said. “We need to do another run today.”
He yawned. “So soon? I’ve already done six in the past two days.”
“’Fraid so,” I said. “The stakes are higher on this one, though. This one’s the dog and pony show for the D.A.’s investigator.”
Suddenly he sounded much more alert. “Okay, no problem,” he said.
“Can you get it started by ten?”
“A.M. or P.M.?”
“A.M.”
“Wow,” he said. “That’s cutting it close. But okay, yeah. You might want to stay upwind of me, though-it’s been pretty hot out there, and I won’t have time to take a shower.”
“No matter how bad you smell, Jason? I’ve smelled worse things.”
“I guess so.” He laughed. “What time are you bringing the guy from the D.A.’s office out?”
“Around five, five-thirty. That should be about right, shouldn’t it?”
“Should be. Gotta go. See you then.”
Jason was getting ready to enter his second year in the graduate program. Like countless other high-school and college kids who’d gotten hooked on CSI, Jason aspired to be a forensic scientist. Unlike most, though, Jason had gone out and gotten real-world experience. He’d spent three years as a volunteer with a Knox County Rescue Squad. The rescue squad didn’t handle criminal cases, but Jason had worked enough death scenes-car crashes and drownings, even a plane crash-to get past the jitters, and as soon as he took osteology, I was sure he’d be a valuable addition to my Forensic Response Team. He was good with gadgetry, too-Jason felt as comfortable with a GPS or with a topographic map and a compass as I felt with a mandible or a femur. And if I ever needed to tie somebody up and be sure they couldn’t get loose, Jason would be the one whose knotcraft I would call on. He was steady and reliable, and, maybe more to the point, he was in the market for a thesis topic, so he’d jumped at the chance to help with some research.
At 4:20, Cash knocked on my door. “You’re early,” I said. “Good man.”
“I finished up a little sooner than I expected,” he said, “and I didn’t see much point in just killing time. If you’ve got things to do, though, tell me, and I’ll make some phone calls till you’re ready.”
‘No, this is fine,” I said. “Let’s go. Do you want to ride with me or follow me?”
“Let me follow you, so I can just head home when we’re done. You ready to tell me where we’re going?”
“One of the Ag farms,” I said. “By way of Burger King, if you don’t mind?”
“I never got lunch,” he said. “Burger King sounds great. At this point Purina Dog Chow would probably sound pretty good.”
“Let’s say Burger King.”
“WELC…BRRGRR…KI…” crackled the voice through the loudspeaker. I couldn’t even tell if the person was male or female. I hoped they’d be able to hear me better than I could hear them. “W…LIKE…TRY OUR zzttzztt COMBO…DAY?”
I didn’t know what I’d just been offered, but I did know that I didn’t want a combo. “I’d like a Whopper and a sweet tea, please,” I said. I spoke up, because the sound system didn’t seem to be working well.
“zzttzztt TEA?”
“Sweet tea,” I said loudly. “Do you have sweet tea?”
“zzttzztt TEA?”
“Sweet tea!” I shouted. “Sweet tea! If you don’t have sweet tea, regular tea’s okay!”
“zzttzztt TEA…ELSE?”
“That’s it!” I yelled. “Just the Whopper and the tea!”
A young man walking into the restaurant, a backpack slung over one shoulder, looked at me oddly and gave me a wide berth.
“YOU SAID A…zzttzztt AND…zzttzztt…TOTAL COMES…zzttzztt…WINDOW.”
Just as I was pulling away from the speaker, I noticed a display mounted underneath. It read WHOPPER, SWEET TEA, $3.87. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who’d had trouble with the audio system. Funny, I thought. Instead of fixing the microphone and the speaker, they’d installed a whole ’nother gadget. I fished my wallet out of my hip pocket and extracted a five-dollar bill as I eased around the building to the drive-up window.
I waited several minutes, but the window remained tightly closed. I gave a quick tap on the horn. Still no response. Behind me another horn blared, louder and longer than my polite little toot. I checked the mirror and saw two more vehicles idling behind Cash’s car. Now both of them blasted their horns at me. Frustrated, I decided to forego the Whopper, and gunned the gas. Suddenly an arm emerged from a window-a second drive-up window, which I hadn’t noticed-and waved frantically. I nearly clipped the hand with my outside mirror.
A pleasant young woman, probably a UT student, opened the window and smiled. “I was about to send out a search party for you,” she said brightly. “Your order comes to three eighty-seven.” I held out the five. She made change, then handed me a white paper bag and a heavy cup. “Enjoy your meal,” she said.
“THANK…zztt…MUH,” I said, delivering my best imitation of the faulty loudspeaker.
She looked startled, maybe even alarmed. The window snapped shut.
I’d meant to save the Whopper until Cash and I got to the Ag farm, but the smell of charbroiled beef came floating up out of the bag, almost like one of those beckoning fingers of aroma in an old cartoon. I held out as long as I could, which wasn’t long-just long enough to get from the Strip back to Neyland Drive. Steering with my left knee along Neyland’s slight curves, I fished out the burger and unfolded the wrapper to expose half the sandwich. My mouth was watering, despite what Jeff had told me about the carcinogenic chemistry of flame broiling-or maybe because of what Jeff had told me. Did knowing that the Whopper had a dark side beneath those grill marks make it more appealing? I’d never been particularly attracted by the idea of illicit sex, but I knew that some people were, and I wondered if this was anything like their experience. Maybe this, I thought, taking a greedy breath, is the sweet smell of forbidden fruit. Brockton, you are one reckless daredevil. The truck swerved as my knee slipped, and I made a quick grab for the wheel with my right hand. See? Once I was tracking straight again, I hoisted the burger with my left hand and bit down. “Mmm-mmm,” I moaned, as a symphonic chord of hot grease, smoky beef, mayonnaise, ketchup, pickle, onion, and carcinogens crescendoed in my mouth.
Chewing contentedly, I led Cash up the ramp onto James White Parkway, down the ramp to Riverside Drive, and then along Riverside to the Ag farm above the river confluence. As we passed the barn and the equipment shed, I noticed that the water truck’s windshield had been replaced but the deep dent in the hood remained. Then again, the fenders were rusting and the silver paint was peeling off the water tank, so I didn’t feel too bad. Besides, I’d done some serious groveling to the farm’s employees-and underscored the apology with a couple of cases of beer.
Cash and I bumped along a pair of ruts to an unburned part of the pasture and pulled to a stop beside Jason Story. Jason was reclining in a folding camp chair, the geometric, NASA-looking kind, with a footrest and drink holders and probably a mini-fridge and a television set tucked away somewhere. He was slouched, a floppy hat pulled low over his eyes, his chin practically on his chest, and when I saw him, I thought, Oh, Lord, he’s fallen asleep. But then I saw his right index finger twitch, and he raised a handheld electronic display from his lap to his face. His left hand came off the armrest and gripped the top of a large fire extinguisher standing in the grass beside him.
Jason barely glanced in our direction when we got out of our vehicles and slammed the doors. His attention alternated between the electronic display in his hand and the 2006 Lexus SUV that idled in the grass ten feet in front of him.
“Jason, this is Darren Cash,” I said, “an investigator with the Knox County D.A.’s Office. Darren, Jason Story.”
“Pleased to meet you, Jason,” said Cash.
“You, too,” Jason said, not making a move. “Sorry if I seem rude. I need to keep a pretty close eye on this thermocouple monitor.” I was just about to ask Jason what the readout was saying when a series of earsplitting beeps came from beneath the car.
Jason snatched at a lanyard hanging around his neck and grabbed a stopwatch, then punched a button. “Wow, that is right on time,” he said. He lurched out of the chair, hoisted the fire extinguisher, and discharged a cloud of vapor at the underside of the Lexus. Then he flung open the driver’s door, hopped in, and pulled the car forward about twenty feet.
When he did, he exposed a still-smoking circle of burned grass about two feet in diameter, along with a partially melted smoke detector lying near one edge and a pair of wires stretching to the thermocouple monitor now lying beside the chair. Jason shut off the car and clambered out, then gave the grass another shot with the extinguisher. He consulted the stopwatch dangling from his neck again. “Seven hours, forty-three minutes,” he said proudly.
I turned to Cash. “Seven hours, forty-three minutes. You think that gives your guy enough time to get to Las Vegas?”
“He flew direct on Allegiant,” Cash said. “Flight’s four hours and a quarter,” he said. “Thirty-minute drive to the airport; check-in and boarding takes another thirty, if you shave it close. I’d say it would.” He studied the charred circle, studied the Lexus, and then studied Jason.
“Okay, I give,” he said. “How’d you do it?”
“Take a look in the grass,” I said.
He squatted down beside the blackened circle, then dropped to one knee and leaned forward, almost like a football player on the line of scrimmage. He plucked something from the ground and held it up between his left thumb and forefinger. It was a piece of heavy steel wire, cinched tight around a ruffle of ragged plastic.
I nodded at it. “Recognize that?”
He scrutinized it. “It’s like the thing you found in the burned grass at the Latham farm,” he said, “but this plastic stuff is different.”
“Exactly,” I said. “It’s not melted. That’s because we put the fire out before the car burned.”
“I hate to say it, but you’ve still got me,” he said. “What is it?”
“That,” I said, “is the end of an eight-pound bag of ice.”
“A bag of ice?”
“A bag of ice,” I said. “I realized what it was the other night when I picked up a bag on the way to my son’s house. It’s how Latham delayed the fire. He dumped a bag of ice on the grass, drove the car so the catalytic converter was right over the ice, then skedaddled for the airport.”
He looked dubious. “Come on, Doc. How’s he gonna control that? How’s he gonna know it’ll work at all, and how’s he gonna know how much time it buys him?”
“You remember that smaller burned oval in the grass at the Lathams’ farm, the one near the barn?”
He nodded. “Actually,” he said, “we found two more of those after you pointed out the first one.”
I could see the light beginning to dawn. I pointed at the scorched grass, frosted with powder from the fire extinguisher.
“We’re not the only ones who do experiments. Stuart Latham might’ve made a good scientist.” I turned to Jason. “You want to summarize the data for Mr. Cash, Jason?”
Jason cleared his throat nervously. “Well,” he said, “we’ve only got six data points-actually, seven now-so statistically the data set isn’t robust. In fact, if you remove the two outliers-”
“Jason,” I interrupted, “just cut to the chase. Tell the man what you found.”
“Okay, sorry,” he said. “On average, it takes the ice about ninety minutes to melt, plus or minus ten percent, depending on how consolidated the ice remains and how close to the catalytic converter it is. But then the grass is wet and the ground’s cold, so it takes about another six hours for everything to dry out, and another fifteen minutes or so for the grass to reach its flash point and catch fire.”
“In the seven runs you’ve done,” I asked, “how much variation did you see in the total elapsed time between parking the car and seeing the grass catch fire?”
“Less than thirty minutes,” he said. “It’s surprisingly consistent. Now, if the grass were shorter or taller or a different type or-”
“Thank you, Jason,” I interrupted again. I regarded Cash.
“Does this look pretty similar to the grass in the pasture at the Latham farm?”
“If I were a cow,” he said, “I’d think I was eating at the same restaurant.”
“And you’ve got pictures of the Latham’s pasture, taken the day the car burned?”
“Sure,” he said. “Dozens.”
“Any good close-ups of unburned grass?”
“Well, we weren’t actually focusing on the grass as a murder weapon,” he said. “We took close-ups of the burned cigarette butts under the driver’s window, but the grass in that area was burned, obviously.” He frowned, then he brightened. “We do have wide shots that show the whole circle of burned grass, including the unburned grass around the edges. Come to think of it,” he added, “one of them shows a uniformed officer standing in the field. The grass comes up about yea high on him.” He bent down and sliced a hand across his lower leg, midway between the knee and the foot. As he did, the tops of the Ag field’s grass grazed his fingers.
I grinned. “Jason, you took a bunch of pictures of the first couple experiments, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yessir, Dr. B.,” he said. “I’ve got probably three hundred. I filled up the memory card on my camera, and it holds a gigabyte.”
“A jury’ll like this,” I said.
“I sure like it,” said Cash.