“Skid marks, broken glass.” Either of these might have indicated that a second vehicle had been involved in the accident; O’Neil was asking the right questions.
“I didn’t see none, sir.”
“Anyone witness the accident?”
“Not to my knowledge, sir. This area’s pretty dead at night.”
“Were mere any vehicles on the street?”
“No, sir, not a single car. There’s no parking allowed on the approach road, you know.”
“I meant was there any moving traffic?”
“No, sir, the street was deserted.”
“Okay, thanks,” O’Neil said. He knew he wasn’t going to get any valuable answers to the How or the Why suggested in the manual, and he didn’t want to waste further time. Instead, he walked to where the car had gone off the road and through the barricade. Skid marks are usually visible to the naked eye, even on a surface that isn’t wet or dusty, but there were no marks leading to the spot where the barricade had been breached. Nor were there any glass fragments on the road or on the muddy embankment beyond. Two of the sawhorses had been broken, apparently by the weight of the bus as it rolled over them; tire tracks in the mud showed the direction the bus had taken in its downward plunge. We were studying these tracks when we heard the ambulance approaching. The sound of the siren apparently reminded O’Neil that he’d need a medical examiner at the scene. He walked over to the patrol car and asked the driver to radio a request for one. He still didn’t know who the victim of die accident was, but he knew he had a dead man on his hands. I didn’t tell him that I already knew who was in that smoldering bus.
The interne and the ambulance attendants were annoyed at having to wait around till the M.E. arrived. O’Neil sent one of the patrolmen out for coffee, in an attempt to mollify them. It took forty minutes for the assistant M.E. to arrive. The fire engines were gone by then. He half slid, half ran down the muddy embankment to where the bus lay on its side. The front end had hit a huge boulder, and part of the roof and one door had been demolished in the resultant explosion. The subsequent fire had undoubtedly been intense; even the paint on the outside of the bus had been partially scorched away. The rear end of the bus was a total wreck, the metal torn open and twisted into sharp black tendrils of steel.
A man sat behind the steering wheel. The assistant M.E. turned away at the stench of burned flesh and hair. He tied a handkerchief around his face, covering his nose. A police photographer was busy taking pictures. His flash bulbs kept popping into the night, lending a curiously celebratory air to the macabre scene. When all the photos had been taken, the M.E. asked if it was all right to move the body out of the bus. O’Neil said it would be all right, and then asked the ambulance attendants and the interne to move it. They did so without comment, but it was plain to see they wished they were elsewhere. The M.E. put down his black satchel and got to work. O’Neil strolled over to me. We had been on the scene for an hour and a half already, but nobody yet knew who’d been incinerated inside that bus. Except me.
“What do you think?” O’Neil asked. His question surprised me. I hadn’t expected him to ask me for an opinion.
“What do you think?” I said. I had been told by two cops I respected that O’Neil was a good cop. So far, he had done nothing to disabuse their opinions.
“It bothers me that there’s no skid marks,” he said. “There should be skid marks, don’t you think? If the guy went off the road, there should be marks.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Also, did you notice those tracks in the mud? The car was pointed straight downhill. That’s unusual, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I mean, if the guy lost control and went off the road, it’s unlikely he Would’ve gone through the barricade at that angle.”
Coop walked over. “Danny,” he said, “the MJE.’s got some stuff you’ll want to tag,”
“Thanks, Captain,” O’Neil said, and walked back to the bus. Coop and I followed him.
The M.E. had found a scorched wallet in the dead man’s pants pocket. The clothing covering his upper torso had been completely burned away, but tatters of fabric still clung to his legs. The M.E. handed the wallet to O’Neil, who immediately tagged it for identification and then went through it. The only things he found were twenty dollars in fives and singles and a browned but still partially legible driver’s license. O’Neil read it, and then said, “Arthur J. Wylie.”
“Let me see that,” Coop said.
We looked at it together. The driver’s license had been issued a year ago August, and would not expire for two years yet. The address on the license was 574 Waverly Street. The M.E. was removing a signet ring from the dead man’s right hand. He told O’Neil which finger on which hand the ring had been taken from, and then handed it to him. The initials on the ring were AJW. O’Neil slipped it into an evidence envelope. From the dead man’s left hand, the M.E. removed a wedding band. Again he identified the finger and the hand, and then passed the ring on to O’Neil. On the inside of the band the names Arthur and Helene were engraved, and immediately following them, the date 8/8/54.
I looked down at the body. The face, the hands, and the front of the trunk had suffered the worst of the fire. Almost all of the head hair had been burned away, but several blond patches had escaped the inferno. The face was unrecognizable, a charred and shapeless mass of cooked meat. The burned and blackened fingers were hooked like claws. The stench was intolerable. A Police Department truck was inching its way down the embankment. The body was brightly illuminated for just a moment until the headlights turned away. Coop turned away, too.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Fourth-degree burns,” the M.E. said. “You can put that down as your cause of death.”
The driver of the truck cut the engine. He came out of the cab and walked over to where they were standing. “Who’s in charge?” he asked tonelessly.
“I am,” O’Neil said.
“You want the bus lifted, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, we’ll get the winch on it,” he said.
“I’m finished here,” the M.E. said. “Let’s tell the ambulance crew.”
As we climbed the embankment, I fell in beside the medical examiner. He was a portly little man, and he was puffing hard against the grade.
“How are the teeth?” I said.
“The teeth?”
“The corpse’s teeth. Did the fire damage them?”
“They’re charred,” he said, “but they’re still in his head.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Below us, the men from the truck were shouting to each other as they attached their cable to the bus. When we got back to the road again, O’Neil was waiting for the M.E.
“What do you figure happened, Doc?” he asked.
The M.E. wasn’t paid to make guesses, but he made one now. “Tank probably exploded on impact,” he said. “The burns are typical. With explosions of this sort, the parts nearest to the blast are the ones that get most severely burned. In addition, he’d probably been cooking inside the bus for some time before the fire was extinguished. The dermis is contracted and brittle—did you notice those wide elliptic cracks? And the hair’s all but gone, of course, cornea of the eyes opaque.” The M.E. shrugged. “That’s about it,” he said.
O’Neil went over to tell the ambulance crew they could take the body. Some ten feet away, the police photographer was snapping pictures of the smashed sawhorses and the tire tracks in the mud. A reporter from the city’s morning tabloid was on the scene. He asked Coop what had happened.
“No comment,” Coop said.
“Hey, come on, Captain,” the reporter complained.