Jefferson Bass - The Devil's Bones

“I was wondering what sort of access the blowflies might have had to the body.”

“All the car windows shattered in the fire. So the flies had plenty of access but not much time. When I arrived, the car was still too hot to touch. I don’t remember seeing any flies.”

“I don’t mean after the fire. I mean before.”

Garcia looked puzzled.

“Unless her brain was infested while she was still alive,” I said, extricating the tweezers from the eye orbit, “the bugs had been working on her for days before that car burned.” I held the tweezers over my left hand and deposited my prize in the palm. There on the drum-tight purple surface was an immature maggot, about the size and shape of a Rice Krispie. A Rice Krispie that had been thoroughly charred.

She hadn’t been burned alive; she’d been burned dead. Dead and already decomposing.

I STARED AT THE CONTENTS OF THE PACKAGE AGAIN,then stared at the note once more. “Dr. Brockton, please call me when you get this. Thanks. Burt.”

I dialed Burt DeVriess. I didn’t have to refer to the number embossed on the fancy letterhead; I remembered it from the brief, memorable, and ruinously expensive period when DeVriess-better known as “Grease” throughout Knoxville’s legal (and illegal) circles-had served as my criminal defense attorney. Grease had charged me an arm and a leg, but he had also saved my neck, so it was hard to begrudge him that fifty-thousand-dollar retainer. His secretary, Chloe, seemed to think that our association had saved some part of Grease as well, the part that passed for the attorney’s shriveled soul. Judging by the years he’d spent ruthlessly representing Knoxville’s seamiest criminals-his client list read like a who’s who of killers, drug peddlers, and pedophiles-salvation seemed too much to hope for. Still, the fact was, DeVriess had taken to turning down the notorious clientele that had made him rich and infamous. He’d not yet traded his Bentley for a Prius, as far as I knew, or started doing pro bono work for the homeless. But even if he hadn’t attained sainthood yet, he at least seemed to qualify for some sort of “Most Improved Karma” award.

Chloe answered on the second ring. “Mr. DeVriess’s office, may I help you?”

“Hi, Chloe, it’s Bill Brockton.”

“Hi there,” she chirped. “How are you?”

“Hanging in there, Chloe. And you?”

“Pretty good, but we do miss you. You need to get yourself arrested again, so we’ll see you more often.”

“I can’t afford it,” I said, laughing. “If I had to hire Burt again, I’d go bankrupt.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Then he could represent you in bankruptcy court.”

“For free, no doubt,” I said. “So speaking of the master of legal larceny, what’s the story on this package he sent me?”

“Oh, that, ” she said. “I think I’d better let him tell you about that. Hang on. And come see us?”

I smiled. Chloe had treated me exactly this way-as a friend-when I first walked in through her boss’s art deco doorway with a murder charge hanging over my head, so desperate that I’d stooped to hire the aggressive defense lawyer I despised above all others.

While I held the line for DeVriess, I took another look at the contents of the package he’d sent me. It was a small wooden box, almost a cube, about eight inches square. It was ornately carved, with an engraved brass latch and a hinged top. The box was beautiful, but what really caught my eye was the grainy, powdery mixture I saw when I opened the lid.

“Hello, Doc,” said a voice that managed to sound both butter smooth and granite hard at the same time. It sounded like money and power, and I knew that Knoxville’s winningest defense attorney had plenty of both. “How’s life down on the Farm these days?”

“People are dying to get in, Burt,” I joked. “How’s life down in the sewer?”

“Stagnating a little,” he said cheerily. “There’s a vicious rumor making the rounds that I’ve gone soft, maybe even developed a conscience. It’s killing my practice, but it’s great for my golf game.”

“There’s always a silver lining,” I said. “As they say, if you can’t have what you want, then want what you have. So this little present you sent me-is this what it looks like?” I stirred the upper layer of the mixture with the sharpened end of a pencil, and a tiny plume of dust rose from the box. Uppermost in the mixture was a layer of fine, grayish white powder; beneath that was a layer of grainy tan particles, along with what I quickly recognized as shards of incinerated bone. “I got excited when I opened the lid,” I joked. “Thought for a minute maybe these were your ashes.”

If he thought that was funny, he hid it well.

“So who is this, Burt?”

“That, Doc, is the sixty-four-million-dollar question,” he said. “Supposed to be my Aunt Jean. But my Uncle Edgar? He says not.”

“How come?”

“You looked at it yet?”

“Only a little.”

“Notice anything funny?”

I stirred around a bit more, creating another miniature dust storm. Down near the bottom of the box, I glimpsed what appeared to be small, rounded pebbles. “Well, there’s some rocks in here,” I said, “As least they sure look like rocks.”

“Damn right they look like rocks,” he said. “Doesn’t take a Ph.D. in anthropology to tell the difference between bone and pea gravel. Another thing? You wouldn’t have any way of knowing this, of course, but Aunt Jean’s knees aren’t in there.”

“Her knees? How do you know?”

“Because Aunt Jean’s knees were made of titanium. She had both of ’em replaced about five years ago.”

“Crematoriums don’t usually send things like that back to the family, Burt.”

“Uncle Edgar specifically asked for them.”

“Ah. Then that would seem to be a significant omission.”

“They couldn’t have melted and dripped down somewhere in the oven or something, could they?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Those orthopedic devices are made of pretty tough stuff. But let me do a little research on titanium and cremation and get back to you.”

“Could you do more than that, Doc?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something’s not right here, Doc,” he said. “What’d they do with her knees? What’s that gravel doing in there? And how come those chunks of bone are so big? I scattered my mother’s ashes up in the Smokies after she died, and there weren’t any pieces bigger than rock salt in Mom’s urn.”

“So you want me to do a forensic analysis on this set of cremains?”

“Cremains?” He snorted. “Who the hell came up with ‘cremains’?”

“Not me,” I said. “Some funeral director, probably. Easier to say than ‘cremated human remains,’ I reckon.”

“Cornier, too,” he said. “Listen, I’ll pay your hourly expert-witness rate, for however many hours you need to spend on this.” My rate was two hundred dollars an hour; that meant I’d need to poke around in the cremains for 250 hours to recoup the fifty thousand dollars I’d forked over to Grease a few months earlier. I didn’t want to spend 250 hours breathing the dust of Aunt Jean, but I was intrigued by the case-and impressed that the lawyer had zeroed in on the puzzling things in the mixture.

“I’ll find out everything I can,” I said.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I owe you.”

“Not yet,” I said, “but you will.”

He laughed. “I guess I’d better sell one of the Bentleys,” he said, but we both knew that my bill wouldn’t amount to a fraction of what I’d paid Burt to defend me. He gave me a few more details-his aunt’s date of death, the name of the funeral home and the crematorium, and the phone number of his Uncle Edgar, who lived in Polk County-then signed off, saying “’Preciate you, Doc.”