Combustible (A Boone Childress Novel) (12 page)

"
You boys mind pushing this over? It's a might heavy for an old man. Thanks." They shoved it to the side. It landed hard on the ashes and sent up a cloud of dust. "Don’t breathe that, Boone. It's toxic."

Boone
and the men quickly covered their noses with their shirts.

Abner
poked at the box springs under the mattress. "Hmm. Interesting.” He carefully pulled the twisted metal out of the soot. "There she is.”

The body was a lump of roasted tissue
. It reminded Boone of a marshmallow dropped into a charcoal fire. The skin was toasted brown in places and charred black in others. There were also maggots. Thousands of them. Coating the eye socket, the nasal cavity, and the mouth. Boone’s stomach turned a flip, and his instincts told him to turn away. But his intellectual curiosity won over his emotions, and he leaned down and lifted a maggot up with a fingernail.

“
Blowfly larvae,” he said, analyzing their yellowish color and pointed heads. “Takes less than a day for them to hatch.”

Like
a chorus line, the men turned away and began to vomit. They scrambled out of the wreckage and into the overgrown yard behind the house.

What
a bunch of wimps, Boone thought as he clicked one photo after another. He had grown up helping Abner catalog evidence and even helped boil bones so that he could testify to their age in court cases. It felt like he had been training for this moment for years.

From the moment that
Abner pulled the mangled box springs aside, Boone knew there was no going back. His first body. No, not a body, a dead person, a dead woman whose life had been ended by a fire. But who was she? And why had Eugene Loach lied about the house being empty? Boone had to know. He had to make it right.

Boone
bent over for a closer look. The top of the skull had exploded, and the hair had melted. "You said
she
. How do you know it's a she?"

Abner
pointed at the base of the skull. "Two reasons. First, see that area of exposed bone? The occipital protuberance is not pronounced."

How
could he see that so clearly? Boone knew, of course, that one of the several ways to determine the sex of skeletal remains was the occipital protuberance, a small notch of bone at the base of the skull. It was generally large in males. In females, it was almost absent. Any grad student could find it in a dry skull, which Boone had often done himself, but to spot that one characteristic out of a blackened mass was nothing short of amazing.

"Second reason?" Boone asked.

"She was wearing a synthetic house dress."

The
victim wore a housedress and one sock. Fire had burned off most of the floral patterned fabric, except for a patch on her trunk. Her unburned skin had a glossy look to it, like she had been lacquered down, and her face had crumpled up, the lips curling away from the teeth and the lids peeling away from the red sockets where the eyeballs had melted. Her arms were drawn up in what was termed the "pugilist position," the fingers formed into tight black balls.

T
his is what death looks like, Boone thought. This is what we’re left with when the very people who’ve sworn to protect us pretend that our cries can’t be heard.

He
felt the color drain from his face, the heat drain from his extremities. Though only seconds passed, he thought it had been forever when he finally blinked twice, handed the camera to Abner, and slowly walked away.

"We found a body,"
Boone said as soon as Cedar answered her cell.

"Come again?" she said. Her voice was almost drown
ed out by the noise of other students in the lab. "Wait, let me stick my head out in the hallway. Say that again."

Boo
ne found that his enthusiasm had ebbed. "Abner and I found a body at the Nagswood property. I was right. There was someone alive inside the house."

"That's awful! I mean, it's cool that you're right and everything, but that's awful! Someone's….somebody's…"

Dead.

"I know," he said. His voice dropped lower. "Look, I have to call 911 to alert the sheriff. I'll talk to you later. Okay?"

"Okay," she said. The sound of her voice echoed in the metal locker. "Text me. I'll be in class."

Boone ended the call. Cedar was right. It wasn't cool to find a dead person. It was awful.
It was even worse if the person is your best friend dying in the belly of an aircraft carrier, and you were on the fire crew that was able to save him.

He dialed 911 and waited for the operator to pick up
.

The cops came en masse to Nagswood. The routine fire that had been nothing more than the burning of the leftovers of a life suddenly became interesting to half the Bragg County Sheriff’s department. Boone heard the sirens minutes before he saw their roll lights. Out in the country, sound traveled fast and far.

The
first officer to arrive was Pete Mercer. He parked on the west side of the property, apart from the other cars. His front tires sank several inches into the soft soil. Luckily for him, Boone observed, the rear tires stayed on solid ground.

Abner
, Boone, and the others waited near the foundation. They had left the evidence, meaning the woman, where they had found it. Boone was leaning on the hooligan tool. Pickett and the others were smoking cigarettes and trying to get a signal on their phones. Clearly, they didn’t have service with the only carrier who covered that area of the county.

“Stand
where you are,” Deputy Mercer ordered them as he stepped out of his prowler. The Taser, Boone noted, was clipped to his gun belt. His radio was flipped over his left shoulder, dangling by its twisted cord.

Mercer
moved easily, Boone realized now that the truck wasn’t separating them. He was taller than Boone remembered, too, with cropped hair, a boxed chin, and shoulders that tapered to his waist. A swimmer’s build, Boone thought, as the deputy radioed his location in to dispatch.

“Which
one of you called 911?” Mercer asked.

“Does it matter?”
Pickett pointed at a long leaf pine across the property then introduced himself and his colleagues, explaining their purpose in being there, a purpose that clearly didn’t include Boone. “Dr. Zickafoose is the one who discovered the corpse.”

“I’d
rather use the term individual, if you don’t mind,” Abner said. “Abner Doubleday Zickafoose, Ph.D. My grandson, Daniel Boone Childress.”

Boone
nodded. The deputy glared. He remembered their meeting from the other day. Boone wasn’t surprised. He looked like a guy who held grudges.

“Where’s
the corpse?” Mercer said. He pulled a pair of wraparounds out of a pocket and put them on. The effect, Boone had to admit, made him look a lot more intimidating. Too bad he needed sunglasses to scare people.

“This
way.” Pickett led him to the edge of the foundation closest to the spot. He hung there, obviously unwilling to jump back into the debris.

“Don’t you need a warrant to do a search?”
Boone said.

Mercer
ignored Boone’s question. He jumped onto a rafter, then crossed over the ruins of the woman’s bedroom. He had excellent balance and hopped nimbly from one spot to the next until he stood atop the mound of plaster.

“We came in through the front, initially,” Pickett said.

Mercer wrinkled his nose. “And destroyed valuable evidence in the process, too.”

“Which
is what he’s doing,” Boone said out of the side of his mouth to his grandfather. “The more they investigate, the less evidence there will be.”

Abner
patted the breast pocket of his angler’s vest. It was where he stored his digital camera. “Pictures in, pictures out. My mantra.”

Boone
nodded. Abner’s habit of taking photographs of every step of an investigation allowed him to revisit a crime scene as many times as he wanted, no matter how many feet had stomped the evidence into oblivion.

Mercer
peered down from the plaster mound. He squatted for a better look, leaning over the woman’s malformed body. “This is it? I can’t see a body here, just a—Whoa! Whoa!”

The
deputy’s weight cracked the plaster. The mound crumbled, dumping him onto the bedsprings. Mercer landed hard. His feet scrambled for purchase in the rubble, coating his gray uniform in soot.

“Can
I get a hand?” he said to Pickett, who stood on the lip of the foundation. Neither he nor the other men stirred.

Abner
dropped his head in disgust. He took the hooligan from Boone and offered the hook end to Mercer. “Take hold of this, deputy. Watch out for the tip, it’ll cut you.”

With
a quick yank, Mercer was on the grass and on his feet. He was smacking the dust from his uniform when three more prowlers pulled in, parking behind Abner’s Rover.

Sheriff
Hoyt was among them.

“He
didn’t even say thanks,” Boone said as Abner returned the hooligan.

“They
never do,” Abner said. “Take that poker back to my truck. This joint’s about to start hopping, and we don’t want anybody getting hurt on the business end. And cover it in plastic so the blade doesn’t cut my seats.”

Boone
went the long way around the house on purpose. He needed a few minutes to get his thoughts together before the questioning started, and he was feeling a mix of emotions that he needed to sort out in his mind before they came out in his words. When they found the remains, he felt an instant rush of satisfaction—he had redeemed himself. He expected to feel many other things, like satisfaction and justification. An overwhelming sadness was not one of them.

H
e opened the back of the Rover and slid the bare end of hooligan between the rear seats. He covered the head the way Abner had asked, which seemed like overkill. The tool had never cut anything in his truck. But Abner was meticulous, and Boone had learned a long time ago to follow his rules. If he had listened to Abner about his research project, for example, he wouldn’t have had to start data collection over three separate times.

By
the time Boone rejoined Abner, two deputies were carrying a body bag to the site. Another pair was stringing yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter, and Deputy Mercer stood next to the sheriff, still half-covered in dust, taking notes as Hoyt questioned Abner. They moved on to Pickett's men next. Boone watched them intently for a few minutes as they gave nervous answers, with Pickett gesturing toward the house and then pointing at Abner.

“They
want to make sure the cops knew I was the one that disturbed the crime scene,” Abner said.

Boone
snorted. “If not for you, this wouldn’t be a crime scene.”

“You’re
the one who heard the woman. It would’ve been real easy to convince yourself that all you heard was wood whistling or air popping, especially when your own folks seem more interested in proving you wrong.”

“
Well,” Boone said because there wasn’t much else he could say. “Thanks.”

“I
call ‘em like I see ‘em. I don’t especially like what I’m seeing here, though. Does the sheriff look like a man investigating a potential murder case to you?”

“Murder?”
Boone said, his voice dropping. “Is that what you think?”

“I
think lots of things. It’s called an open mind.”

Boone
tugged on an ear. “I’ll be glad to help in any way I can. If you need me, you know, to help investigate.”

“
Didn’t you just get out of the hospital?”

“
I’m tough, and I have meds.”

“
There’s one problem you haven’t thought of,” Abner said. “Your mama. She thinks you’re at home instead of picking through a burned out house. This is a small town, word travels fast.”

“I’ll
tell her…” Boone said, formulating a likely scenario.

“The
truth. It’s not always the easiest thing to admit, but it’s the easiest to remember.”

Across
the lawn, Pickett and his colleagues hook Hoyt’s hand goodbye. They walked quickly past Boone without a word of acknowledgement. They were in their cars and gone before Hoyt returned to ask Abner if he had overlooked any details.

“That’s
about all there is to it,” Abner said patiently, as if he were explaining the mechanics of osteoarthritic lipping to a college student. “I used the floor plan and my experience with this type of house to locate the two bedrooms. The individual wasn’t at the first location, so I traced fly movement to the second. And there she was.”

“She?”
the sheriff said.

Abner
explained how he had identified the sex. “I’ll be glad to do a more through examination for you when the coroner is through with her. I could assist, if you like. Is Leroy Sweeney still your man? We've worked a couple cases together.”