“Hey, I’m not complaining,” I assured him. “I’ll do just about anything for a helicopter ride.”
The subdivision wasn’t just an aviation nut’s dream; it was also, the DEA agent explained, a drug runner’s dream. “For the past year,” Rocky said, “we’ve been investigating a smuggling ring based in Colombia. They’ve been flying cocaine into small airports all over the Southeast, changing the drop point every time. But this place is perfect as a more permanent base — a clandestine hub, I guess you could call it. No control tower, very little traffic, virtually no risk of detection. You land whenever you’ve got a shipment, taxi the plane into your own private hangar, lock the door, and unload in complete privacy. This operation could have run without a hitch for years.”
“So what happened?” I asked, nodding at the smoking ruins. “Turf war? A raid that got too hot to handle?”
“I wish,” Rocky said. “One of our undercover agents had infiltrated the operation. What’s left of him is there, in what’s left of the hangar. We’ve got an arson investigator coming, but we’d like you to examine the body. See if he died during the fire or died before the fire. We need to know if it was an accident or a homicide.”
“Dr. Garcia’s the medical examiner,” I pointed out. “He’s got primary jurisdiction here.” Dr. Edelberto Garcia — Eddie — served as ME for Knoxville, Knox County, and several surrounding counties.
“Actually, we called Dr. Garcia just before we called you. He says if the body’s rotten or burned, you’re the guy to look at it.”
“That’s damned decent of Eddie,” I joked, “letting me have all the good ones.” All four agents smiled.
“The scary thing is,” Rocky said, “the Doc’s not being sarcastic. He actually means it.”
The truth was, Rocky was right. I actually did.
The dead agent was maurice watson, alias “Perry Hutchinson,” whom the DEA had planted as the manager of the airpark. Six months before, working through the drug smugglers’ distributors in Atlanta, Hutchinson had offered them a sweet deaclass="underline" a house, a hangar, and a key to the gas pump in exchange for a small cut of the profits.
“They brought in the first load two weeks ago,” said Rocky. “It was small — just a test run. Smooth as silk. They were planning another run next week. A big load. We were all set to come down on them. But somebody got spooked — or got tipped off.” He shook his head grimly. “You ready to take a look?”
“Sure. Let’s go.”
The intense heat of the fire had reduced the hangar to scorched brick walls and sagging steel roof trusses silhouetted against blue sky and gray smoke. Entering through a side door, I found myself sloshing through an inch of muck — a slimy mixture of water, ash, soot, and petrochemicals — and I was grateful that I’d put on my waterproof boots before delivering corpse 49–12 to the Body Farm.
Occupying one side of the hangar was a blackened Ford pickup; on the other side was a scorched plane, a V-tailed Beechcraft Bonanza; and tucked between them was a riding lawn mower, its gas cap removed. Lying on the floor next to the mower, faceup in the muck, was the corpse, its facial features all but obliterated, its left hand still clutching a five-gallon gasoline can. The heat of the fire had shrunk the flexor muscles of the arm, locking the man’s fingers around the handle in what was, quite literally, a death grip. “So, looks like an accident,” Stone said. “Might even have been an accident.”
“Mighty convenient accident,” I said, “the way the fire just happened to break out so close to so much gasoline.”
“Damned convenient,” Rocky agreed.
I knelt beside the body. “I assume he’s not carrying his DEA badge,” I said, “but have you checked him for other identification? What was his undercover name? Hutchinson?”
Rocky nodded. “He’s got the Hutchinson driver’s license. Can you get a DNA sample so we can be sure? Or did the heat…? Is the DNA…?”
I finished the question for him. “Is the DNA cooked? Probably not. The femur is pretty well insulated by the muscles of the thigh, and most of that tissue’s still there, so we can probably get a good DNA sample. But the dental records might be quicker and easier. Can you get me those?” Tugging on a pair of gloves and kneeling beside the corpse, I opened the mouth. “Agent Stone? Unless your man had just come from a barroom brawl, he wasn’t refueling his lawn mower when he died.” Leaning back so Rocky could get a better view, I showed him the teeth. All eight incisors had been snapped off at the roots.
“Shit,” Rocky muttered. “That doesn’t look like something the fire did.”
“No way,” I told him. “See how the teeth are folded backward into the mouth? That’s called a ‘hinge fracture,’ and it means somebody swung something at him — a baseball bat or a steel pipe or the butt of a rifle — and caught him square on the mouth.” I studied the face with my eyes, and then with my fingertips, pressing and squeezing in order to feel the bones through the burned flesh. From there I worked my way down the entire body. When I finally got down to the feet, I looked up at Rocky. “I’ll X-ray the body when I get it back to the Regional Forensic Center,” I said, “but I can tell you already he’s got multiple fractures. Half a dozen, at least. I hate to say it, Rocky, but somebody broke your man, bone by bone, before they killed him.”
Stone’s eyes had gone narrow and cold, and his jaw muscles pulsed rhythmically, forming knots the size of walnuts. “Damn those bastards to hell,” he said. “How long will it take you to do the exam?”
“The exam itself, half a day,” I said. “But I’ve got to get the tissue off the bones to do it right. And that’ll take a couple weeks — we’ll put him out at the Body Farm and let Mother Nature clean him off.”
He grimaced. “Isn’t there any other way? Something more respectful? More dignified?”
I shook my head. “I could dismember him, put him in kettles, and cook him down. That’d be a little faster. But it seems less respectful, to my way of thinking. And an aggressive defense attorney would claim that I damaged the bones in taking him apart.”
He sighed. “All right, do it the way you think is best. Just find everything—everything—so we can nail these scum-sucking bastards.” He looked at the vehicles. “Thank God we got the fire out so fast. If the gas tanks had gone up, I doubt there’d’ve been any of him left for you to look at.”
“Wait. Wait.” I looked up, my gaze swiveling from his face to the blackened vehicles. “You’re saying there’s still unburned gas in here?” He nodded. “In the truck and in the airplane?”
“Yup. The truck holds twenty-six gallons; the plane holds ninety.”
“There’s almost a hundred gallons of high-octane aviation fuel sitting right over our heads? We shouldn’t even be in here, should we?”
Stone shrugged. “Fire’s out.”
“There might be an ember somewhere in that plane. One of the tanks might fail. The roof could collapse. A spark from—”
I was interrupted by a metallic clatter — the clatter of metal punching through metal — and a neat round hole suddenly appeared in the side of the airplane.
“Shots! Shots! Take cover!” yelled one of the agents. Another bullet slammed into the plane, this time into the wing, and a thin stream of pale blue liquid began dribbling from the wing and pooling atop the muck.
“Jesus, that’s avgas,” said Stone. “We gotta get outta here.” He hoisted me to my feet and began pulling me toward the door. All around us, agents and deputies were scrambling, staring and pointing in various directions, drawing weapons. Another bullet chipped a cinder block and ricocheted off in a shower of sparks. A flame bloomed at the base of the far wall. From there it followed a finger of gas, a finger beckoning it toward the center of the hangar, toward the leaking airplane.