“Okay, I give up,” I said. “How many?”
“I don’t even know yet,” she said. “For one, you didn’t have a burn permit—hell, Bill, there’s been a moratorium on open burning for the past month because everything’s dry as tinder. For another, you destroyed state property.”
“What state property—the circle of grass we burned?”
“The Ag farm’s water truck.”
Ooh. I had hoped she didn’t know about the truck. “Come on, Amanda,” I said. “I’ve seen university presidents throw out thousands of dollars’ worth of perfectly good carpeting just because the office hadn’t been redecorated lately. You’re busting my chops about breaking the windshield and denting the hood of a twenty-year-old farm truck?”
She glared. “And the Federal Aviation Administration says you’re a menace to air traffic.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. “That’s like saying the candle is a menace to the moth,” I said. “That plane went out of its way to come down and circle those burning cars. If anybody’s a menace, it’s that idiot of a pilot. Miranda and I could have been killed. Hacked to bits by the propeller. Aren’t pilots supposed to keep at least five feet away from innocent bystanders and enormous fires?”
“You think this is all a joke,” she said, “but it’s not. What if the truck had caught fire? What if the house on the adjoining property had burned down? What if the plane had crashed or your graduate student had been hit by that wheel? Any of those things could have happened if something had gone just a little more wrong. And then the university would be held accountable. And I’d be the one who had to clean up behind you.”
“But none of them did happen, Amanda,” I said gently, trying to soothe her now.
“But they could have.”
I was tempted to reply, But they didn’t, only I didn’t see much to be gained by it. Amanda and I could contradict each other all day long, like two bickering dogs, but we wouldn’t have anything to show for it except sore throats and ragged nerves. “Can I show you something, Amanda?” She eyed me suspiciously, as if I were about to unfasten my pants and flash her, then acquiesced with a shrug. Twisting around to the table behind my desk, I picked up a left femur—a thighbone, burned to a grayish white—and held it under the lamp on my desk. “This is from one of the bodies we burned last night,” I said. “You see these fractures? This rectangular, rectilinear pattern?” I pointed with the tip of a pencil, and she leaned in, curiosity gradually outweighing her indignation. “This body was partially skeletonized when we put it in the car, and the bone was already drying. Now look at this one.” I took another femur from a second tray of bones and held it alongside the first. “This was green bone,” I said, “from a fresh body. Lots of moisture still in the bones—just like green wood with lots of sap in it. See the difference in the fractures?” She gave it a perfunctory glance, but then her gaze sharpened and took hold of something, and her eyes darted from one bone to the other.
“The fractures in the green bone aren’t as regular,” she said.
“They’re more random.” She peered closer. “They kind of spiral or corkscrew around the shaft, don’t they? Almost like the bone is splintering apart instead of just cracking.”
“Very good,” I said. I debated whether to play her the video clip showing the scalp peeling off the skull but decided that might be too graphic. “You’d have made a good forensic anthropologist.”
Her guard went back up—she guessed I was herding her somewhere that she didn’t want to go. “So why are you showing me this? What’s your point?”
“This difference in the fracture pattern of dry bone and green bone could be important in a murder case,” I said. “Actually, not ‘could be’—is important in a murder case. That’s why I needed to do the experiment. The difference tells us whether the victim was burned alive or whether she’d been dead awhile.” She frowned. “The police and the district attorney are trying to decide, right now, whether to charge someone with murder in this case.” I was pushing my luck, but I decided to press a point. “Tell me the truth, Amanda,” I said. “If I’d come to you and described this experiment—setting fire to two cars at night, with bodies and amputated limbs in them—how long would it have taken to get the approvals you’d need? Weeks? Months? Forever?”
She shrugged and held out her hands, palms up, unable or unwilling to guess.
“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “You’ve been here, what, five or six years now?”
“Seven,” she said.