Abner looked at the sun. “Any of you gentlemen ever cleaned up a site after an old house burned?”

They all shook their heads.

“Plaster acts different from gypsum board in a fire. The lathing behind it burns, and sheets of the stuff collapse. Super heated plaster behaves almost like modeling clay, forming around whatever it hits. Like a box springs, for instance.”

Abner shoved the hooligan under the mound and used an unburned rafter as a fulcrum. The mound lifted up, revealing a twin bed box springs.

“You boys mind pushing this over? It’s a might heavy for an old man.”

Early and Stuart shoved it to the side. It landed on the ashes and sent up a cloud of dust.

“Don’t breathe that,” Abner said. “It’s toxic.”

We quickly covered our noses with our shirts.

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

The body was a lump of roasted tissue. It reminded me 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.

I picked a maggot up with a fingernail. “Blowfly larvae. Note the yellowish color and pointed heads. Takes them less than a day to hatch.”

The men turned away and promptly lost their lunches.

What a bunch of wimps.

With Abner’s camera, I clicked one photo after another. I’d grown up helping him catalog evidence and even helped boil bones. It felt like I had been training for this moment for years. From the moment that Abner pulled the mangled box springs aside, I knew there was no going back.

My first body.

No, not a body, a person, a dead woman whose life had been ended by a fire.

I bent over for a closer look. As Abner predicted, the top of the skull had exploded, and the hair had melted.

“You said she, Doc. 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.”

I 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 I had often done myself, but to spot that one characteristic out of a blackened mass was nothing short of amazing.

“Second reason?” I 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.

“You’re right.”

“Not bad for a senile old cuss, huh?”

This is what death looks like, I thought. I felt the color drain from my face. I handed the camera to Abner and slowly walked away.

“You all right, Boone?”

“Just need some air.” But what I really needed was to tell somebody.

“We found a body,” I said as soon as Cedar answered her cell.

“Come again?” Her voice was drowned out by other students in the lab. “Wait, let me stick my head out in the hallway. Say that again.”

 “Abner and I found a body at the Nagswood property. I was right. There was someone 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.” My voice dropped lower. “Look, I have to call 911 to alert the sheriff. I’ll talk to you later. Okay?”

“Okay.” Her voice echoed in the metal locker. “Text me. I’ll be in class.”

I 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 dying in the belly of an aircraft carrier, and you were on the fire crew that wasn't able to save him.

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

3

There’s something about the finding a human body that draws law enforcement like rubberneckers to a highway wreck. Fifteen minutes after I called it in, 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 fascinating to ninety percent of the Allegheny County Sheriff’s department.

The first officer to arrive was Deputy Mercer. He parked on the west side of the property, apart from the other cars. His front tires sank several inches into the clay soil. Mercer was taller than I remembered, with cropped hair, a boxed chin, and shoulders that tapered to his waist. A swimmer’s build.

Abner and I waited near the foundation. We had left the evidence where we had found it. I was leaning on the hooligan tool. Pickett and the others were smoking cigarettes and trying to get a signal on their old flip phones.

“Stand where you are.” Mercer swung himself out of the prowler. The Taser was clipped to his gun belt. His radio was flipped over his left shoulder, dangling by its twisted cord. “Which one of y’all called 911?”

“Does it matter?” Pickett said. “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.”

The deputy glared at me. I wasn’t surprised. Mercer looked like a guy who held grudges.

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

“This way.” Pickett led him to the body. “Don’t you need a warrant to do a search, Deputy?”

Mercer ignored him. 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.”

“Which is what he’s doing,” I whispered to my grandfather. “The more they investigate, the less evidence there will be.”

Abner patted the breast pocket that stored his camera. “Pictures in, pictures out.”

His 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 cops had stomped the evidence into oblivion.

Mercer squatted on the plaster mound. “This is it? I can’t see a body here, just a bunch of maggots—Whoa! Whoa!”

His weight cracked the plaster. The mound crumbled. His feet scrambled for purchase in the rubble, coating his gray uniform in soot and dumping him onto the bedsprings.

Mercer landed hard.

“Can I get a hand?” he asked Pickett.

Pickett, Early, and Stuart shook their heads.

Abner took my hooligan and offered it to Mercer. “Take hold of this, deputy. Watch out for the tip, it’ll poke a hole clean through you.”

With a quick yank, Mercer was on his feet. “Thanks for nothing, Pickett. “

He was smacking the dust from his uniform when three more prowlers pulled in. They parked behind Abner’s Rover.

“Pete!” Sheriff Hoyt yelled. “What’re you doing wallowing in a crime scene?”