The Skeleton's Knee by Archer Mayor Page A

for a moment. I’d been brought up with a wood stove heating the home; in fact, once I was old enough, it had been my job to light it every morning before the rest of the family got up. Assembling the wood in the firebox, the kindling at the bottom, piled around a heart of tightly crumpled newspaper, had become a habit so inbred I got so I could do it while still half asleep. It had become totally automatic, including throwing the spent match onto the burgeoning flame. Never had I opened a stove in the morning to find a half-burned match waiting for me. It would have been as incongruous as a rose blooming in February.
    I hit the intercom button on my phone and dialed Tyler’s extension. “Do you remember looking into Fuller’s wood stove?”
    “Sure.”
    “All you saw was cold wood ash and the match; no burned paper or anything else unusual?”
    J.P. paused at the other end, never one to dismiss such a question without thought. “There was nothing obvious, Joe, but that’s not to say something couldn’t have been burned and then destroyed to blend into the regular ash.”
    “Okay. Thanks.”
    I pawed over the assorted papers on my desk and finally came up with the report from the medical examiner’s office. I flipped it open and went over the section detailing the body’s appearance. There was nothing unusual concerning Fuller’s hands or fingernails, except a small cut on his forefinger—probably the result of a blood draw at the hospital—and a note that they had obviously been exposed to a lifetime of manual labor and exposure to the soil. There was a footnote that the hospital had cleaned up the patient prior to his death.
    I called Rescue, Inc. and asked to talk to John Breen, the paramedic who had initially treated Abraham Fuller. “This is Joe Gunther, from the PD. Do you remember anything unusual about Fuller’s hands when you picked him up?”
    “His hands?” There was a pause. “What do you mean ‘unusual’?”
    I didn’t want to plant any ideas in his head. “You tell me.”
    Again he hesitated. “Well, they were workingman’s hands. Let’s see… Yeah, there was one thing. His right hand was sooty—the palm had ash stains all over it. And his fingertip was cut—pricked, actually. It wasn’t bleeding much, though. It stopped before I could do anything about it.”
    So much for blood draws, not that any alternatives leapt to mind. “Did you notice the soot before or after he sent you guys outside for that five minutes?”
    “After. He wouldn’t let us near him before then.”
    I was a little disappointed at that. “How about an odor after you went back in?”
    Breen chuckled. “There was an odor all right. He was lying in the middle of it.”
    “No—I mean something else, something new.”
    “No, sorry. It smelled pretty raw in there. If there’d been another odor, I doubt we would have smelled it, anyhow.”
    “Okay. Thanks a lot.”
    I tried to picture what must have happened: Fuller, after deciding to go on the ambulance, sends the crew outside, drags himself to where he’s hidden the money, pulls out his emergencies-only red bag, along with some sort of document. He then drags himself back to the stove, near where he was lying to begin with, and burns the document with a match he tosses into the stove. Finally, after the document has been destroyed, he crumples the ashes up in his right hand so they’ll mingle with the wood ashes in the stove, and then he crawls back to the rug near the bookcase.
    I considered that Coyner, or whoever had stolen the chart, might also have burned something in the stove, maybe even the chart itself, minus the frame and glass. But the first scenario made more sense, especially with Fuller’s stained right hand.
    It meant that Fuller had taken the precaution of burning the paper, either because he didn’t want someone to find it while he was recuperating in the hospital or because he suspected he wasn’t going to survive. Initially, after