Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone (11 page)

“Murder with a view,” I said. “You think that was intentional?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Otherwise, I can’t quite figure why this particular spot. Be a pain in the ass to get a body out here.”

“Sure would,” I said.

“Also,” he added, “it’s not much of a hiding place. Not nearly as isolated as some areas over in the western side of the forest. Hell, over toward Long Point and Inman Point, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another vehicle or a person. If I wanted to dump a body, I’d take it over thataways.”

“So maybe the killer wanted the body to be found,” I said. “Just not right away.”

“I think you’re right,” he said.

I studied the mountain across the river. The top looked unnaturally flat, with a stone or concrete dike-looking wall along the edge. I pointed to it. “What’s that?”

“That’s Raccoon Mountain,” he said. “TVA has a big pumped-storage reservoir up there, a lake nearly a mile wide. They pump water from the river up there at night, or whenever there’s not much demand for power. Then, whenever the demand for power ramps way up—hot summer afternoons, cold winter mornings—they draw it down, letting the water spin generating turbines down there by the river.” He pointed down into the gorge, to the shore directly opposite us; several buildings and a parking lot had been set at the base of the steep mountainside, and I saw water churning out a spillway and into the river channel.

“You’re a good tour guide,” I said.

“Not many people have this kind of view from their workplace,” he said. “I eat lunch out here probably once a week if the weather’s decent.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t find the body, then,” I said. Looking to my right, I eyed the crime scene tape staked out around the big pine.

“I was out here on a Monday about three weeks ago,” he said. “Then I was off for a week—not that week, but the next one. Hiker found him on a Sunday, day before I got back. So it could’ve happened anytime during those thirteen days. Pretty big window of time.”

I did the arithmetic; at the outside, the murder had occurred twenty days ago; at the inside, a mere eight—but that seemed too recent, given the decomposition of the lower legs. “Well, if we’re lucky, we can narrow it down a little more than that,” I said. I walked slowly toward the tree, bent over to study the ground closely. After stepping over the tape, I knelt and continued the last six or eight feet on all fours.

Jess had shown me the report from the evidence techs who’d worked the crime scene. They’d done a reasonably good job, it sounded like, including collecting some key insect evidence. Since the creation of the Body Farm—and partly because of research conducted there—forensic entomology had advanced remarkably. In our first pioneering study of insect activity in human corpses, one of my graduate students had spent months studying the sequence of bugs that came to feed on bodies, making detailed notes about what bugs appeared, and precisely when. While observing and collecting bugs, he also fended off food-crazed blowflies, the first and most numerous visitors, as they landed on his face and tried to crawl into his own nostrils and ears and mouth. Within seconds after a body bag was unzipped, he had documented, the blowflies began homing in on the fresh scent of death; within minutes, some of the females would begin seeking out the body’s moist orifices or bloody wounds as ideal spots to lay masses of eggs, which looked rather like dabs of grainy white toothpaste. And sometimes within only a few hours after a fly laid her eggs—especially in warm weather—they would hatch into hundreds of tiny maggots, the larval form of the blowfly.

Now, years later, most crime scene techs knew to collect the largest maggots they could find on a body, as those would probably have hatched from the earliest flies to find the body. By collecting and preserving those maggots and sending them to a forensic entomologist, the crime scene techs could get a pretty good idea how long ago the murder had occurred. The best-trained techs would also keep a few of the largest maggots alive, and make careful note of when they encased themselves in a pupa case, or puparium—the inelegant maggot’s version of a caterpillar’s cocoon—and record when the metamorphosis into the adult insect occurred. The only difference was that instead of a beautiful butterfly emerging from its cocoon, what would emerge from the puparium would be a young blowfly, which would promptly home in on the body, too, if the body were still there. So far, Jess said, none of the live maggots collected from the body had pupated yet. That meant, if the collected specimens did indeed represent the earliest fly hatch, the murder had occurred less than fourteen days ago.

Even from several feet away, I could see the dark stain at the base of the tree, marking where volatile fatty acids had leached from the body as it began to decay. Drawing closer, I thought I saw the first piece of additional evidence I was hoping to see: a faint line of stain leading from the base of the tree into the edge of the woods. The crime scene report had given me reason to hope I would see this.

“Sharp eye, wrong interpretation,” I muttered.

“How’s that?” I had forgotten the forester was with me.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, “I was talking to myself. You see this faint trail of dark fluids?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A drag mark. One of the crime scene guys pointed it out to me. Said it showed the killing occurred over there at the edge of the woods—said that was the primary death scene, and the tree here was really the secondary death scene.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “You see how the stain is darkest here at the tree, then fades as it leads over there?”

He studied the faint trail. “Maybe, now that you mention it. So what?”

“What I think we’re looking at here is a maggot trail.”

“A maggot trail?”

“Sometimes, when the maggots get ready to cocoon and turn into flies, they crawl away from the body to find a more protected place. Probably so they won’t get gobbled up by birds. And for reasons we don’t understand, when they do that, they all tend to head in the same damn direction, like a herd of sheep or cows, or a bunch of lemmings.”

“Huh,” was all he said.

“The reason the trail gets fainter as it leads away from the body is that they’re coated with goo from the body at first.”

“Goo?”

“Goo. That’s a technical term we Ph.D.’s like to throw around to impress folks,” I said. “More or less interchangeable with ‘gack.’ Also with ‘volatile fatty acids.’ Anyhow, they’re all greasy with goo when they first crawl off to cocoon, but as they wiggle along the ground, the goo gets wiped off, leaving that trail we see. But by the time they get where they’re going, sometimes they’re scrubbed off enough that they’ve stopped leaving a trail. I bet if we head in that direction, though, we can find where they ended up.”

The trail of dark stain led to the west, in a remarkably straight line about a foot wide, so I followed it into the edge of the woods. Within a few feet it began to fade dramatically, so I dropped to all fours again and crawled along through the brush. Cliff followed me upright. Just when I reached a thicket of mountain laurel that seemed impenetrable, I began to see them, mostly tucked under a protective layer of last fall’s leaves. I beckoned Cliff closer and pointed. “You see those little torpedo-shaped things, about a quarter inch long?”

He frowned, squatted down, and then said, “Oh yeah, dark brown? With little rings around ’em? What are they?”

I picked up one with my right thumb and forefinger, taking care not to crush it, and cradled it in the palm of my left hand. One end had a small round opening, revealing the cylinder’s hollow interior. “It’s a puparium—a pupa case. This one’s empty, which means the fly has already chewed his way out. So that means the body was out here at least two weeks ago.”

“So you’re saying these things tell you that the murder occurred maybe just a few days after I was out here?”

“Looks that way to me,” I said. Taking a small vial from my shirt pocket, I flipped off the cap with my thumb and tipped in the puparium from my cupped palm. Then I plucked several more from the ground, snapped the lid closed, and buttoned the vial into my shirt. “We’ve re-created the death scene at my research facility up at UT-Knoxville, using a donated cadaver. It’s been tied to a tree for nearly a week now, and it’s starting to reach the same stage of decay as the body here was in when it was found. So that argues for the same timetable.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a tiny movement among the leaves. I looked down in time to see a tiny fly, newly hatched, crawl onto a reddish brown leaf from a chestnut oak. It joined several others already on the leaf ’s broad surface, which was catching the afternoon sun. I pointed to them, and Cliff leaned down for a look. I waved a finger above them; they scuttled to and fro, trying to get away, but remained on the leaf rather than flying away. “When they first hatch,” I explained, “their wings are still damp and soft. They have to dry awhile before they’re stiff enough for flight. If you look around on some of the tree trunks here, you might see a bunch more. Once I worked a death scene where the south-facing wall of a building was covered with thousands of little flies, all drying their wings.”

He scouted around, then called my attention to a couple of tree trunks. “Not thousands, but probably hundreds on these two trees.” I nodded. He looked thoughtful. “So next time I bring my lunch out here,” he said, “these guys are gonna be all over me, huh?”

“Some of them,” I said. “Unless they’ve caught wind of something, or somebody, that smells more interesting someplace else.”

“And these came from the maggots that were feeding on the body, right?”

“I think so,” I answered. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s time to find myself another lunch spot.”

I retraced my steps to the tree where the body had been lashed. Stooping down, hands on knees, I scanned the ground. I didn’t see what I was seeking, so again I dropped to my hands and knees and began crawling outward from the base of the tree in a series of ever-widening arcs.

“What are you looking for now?”

Just as I was about to say it wasn’t there, I spotted what appeared to be a shriveled, curled leaf sitting by itself atop the carpet of moss and pine needles. “This, I think,” I answered. I picked it up and rolled it between two fingers, gently but with enough pressure to crumble a dead leaf. It did not crumble. I uncurled it ever so slightly and held it up to the light. The sun shone through it, giving it an amber glow, and in that glow I could discern a pattern of creases and swirls I would recognize anywhere.

I walked over to Cliff, bearing it like some holy relic. In a way, it was: the identity, potentially, of the young man who had been beaten to death here in this spot. I held it up to the light so he could look through it. He studied it, frowning, and then a look of understanding and wonder dawned on his face. “Looks like fingerprints,” he said. I nodded. The frown returned. “But how…?”

“About a week after death, the outer layer of skin—the epidermis—sloughs off of the hands,” I explained. “It comes loose from the underlying layer, the dermis, and peels off almost like a surgical glove. I can take this back to the lab, soak it in water and fabric softener overnight, and tomorrow morning somebody in the crime lab can put his fingers inside these fingers—put this glove on his hands—and get a set of prints.”

He whistled. “I don’t think the deputies from Marion County know that trick.”

“Well, it’s not something you run across very often,” I said. “And this guy might not have prints on file anyway. But if he does, we should be able to ID him.” I took another, larger vial from my hip pocket, slid the husk of skin inside, and sealed the lid.

I took one last look around. I noticed blood and bone shards and bits of brain matter lodged in the bark of the pine tree. Did that add anything to what I already knew? Maybe not, but it confirmed something: the trauma, or at least the cranial trauma, had occurred out here, not someplace else. It occurred to me that the rural deputies might not have thought to collect samples for evidentiary purposes, and that a slick defense attorney—someone, say, like my sometime nemesis Burt DeVriess—might use that omission to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of jurors. Taking out my pocketknife and one of the several ziplock plastic bags I’d brought, I unfolded the larger of the two blades and pried loose a few scales of the flaky pine bark, catching them in the bag as they fell. The bark was dark brown, almost black on top; underneath, it was the rich, rusty red of cinnamon. I made sure to get enough so that Jess could preserve some unaltered and send some off for DNA analysis, to confirm that this material came from the same shattered skull sitting in a cooler in my truck, a few hundred yards away.

As I sealed the bag and zipped it into the side pocket of my cargo pants, I noticed the sun was dropping down toward the S-curve in the river. I checked my watch and calculated that I had been out here for well over an hour; closer to two. “I thought you wanted to head for the barn before this,” I said to Cliff.

“I wasn’t sure you’d find your way back out,” he said. “Didn’t want to get called out at midnight to find you.” He saw the look of chagrin on my face and added, “Besides, this is interesting stuff. I learned a lot more from you than I did from the deputies who worked it last week.” He seemed to mean it, so I thanked him and decided to quit worrying that I had imposed on him.

By the time I coasted and corkscrewed back down Suck Creek Mountain to Chattanooga, Jess was already gone for the day, so I left her a note saying I was taking the skin of the hand back to Knoxville. It was extremely delicate, and I didn’t trust anyone but Art Bohanan to handle it. I got Amy to buzz me into the autopsy suite, where I filled the plastic evidence jar with warm water and added a few drops of Downy. Finally, before hitting the road, I signed over the bone shards to Amy, who gave me a receipt for them and locked them in the evidence room. Then I bid her good-bye, asked her to relay my regards to her boss, and—cooler and head in hand—headed for my truck, and the drive back to Knoxville.

THE SUN WAS GONE and the evening star—Venus—was hanging like a pearl in an indigo sky as I clicked the keyless remote to unlock my truck. The drive to Knoxville would take two hours, and even though it was all interstate, I wasn’t looking forward to doing it in the dark. Although I still had a bit of an adrenaline buzz from finding the empty puparia and the degloved skin, that buzz was fading fast, and underneath it, I was deeply tired.

As I cupped my fingers under the handle of the driver’s door, they encountered a soft but unexpected obstacle. A piece of paper had been folded up and tucked into the hollow beneath the door handle. I unfolded it and saw that it was a page off MapQuest.com, an Internet site that offered maps and driving directions to anyplace in the nation. The word START was superimposed on what I recognized as the location of the ME’s office, where I was now parked. The word END occupied a street address in a neighborhood a few miles away, which the map labeled as Highland Park. A wide, purple-shaded line—the computer’s version of a highlighter mark—led from one to the other. I puzzled over the map’s meaning, but then my eye caught sight of two lines of text in a small box just above the map. “B—I hope it’s not too late to invite you over for dinner. J.”

As the meaning between the lines of the brief message sank in—or at least, the meaning I hoped lay between the lines—my fatigue dropped away. My breath quickened as I climbed into the truck, and I noticed as I fiddled with the key that my hand was shaking slightly. “Easy, fella,” I said to myself. “Drive safely so you’ll get there in one piece, and don’t expect too much once you’re there.”

Highland Park proved to be a charming neighborhood, one that I guessed dated back to the late 1800s. The houses ranged from gingerbread-clad Victorians to simple shotgun cottages. Jess’s house was a simple but elegant old two-story, a design I seemed to remember being called a foursquare—four rooms up, four down, with a chimney flanking each side and a deep porch stretching the width of the front. The exterior of the ground floor was clad in lapped wooden siding, painted the green of baby leaves; the second floor was sheathed in cedar shakes, barn red. A second-floor balcony nestled beneath the roof, tucked into an alcove between the two front bedrooms. I could picture Jess sipping her morning coffee there, reading the newspaper before heading into the morgue. The image of her engaged in such an act of cozy domesticity surprised and pleased me.

A stone staircase led up to the front porch. The porch was surrounded by a waist-high balustrade whose wide rail was completely covered with ferns and spider plants and red geraniums. The simple lines of the house contrasted with the elaborate front door, which featured leaded glass in the door itself, in a pair of sidelights that flanked it, and in a wide transom above. The dozens of panes, beveled at the edges, diffracted the golden light from inside the house, giving each partial image a rainbow-like aura.

I rang the bell, and in a moment glimpsed a fragmented, beveled figure approaching. The door swung wide and there was Jess, unfragmented now, smiling at me. She was wearing a navy Harvard sweatshirt, three sizes too big, whose sleeves were streaked and spattered with putty-colored paint that matched the living room walls. Underneath the shirt she wore gray sweatpants, nearly as baggy as the shirt; their fleece had an odd, nubby nap, like a much-loved teddy bear, or a bowl of oatmeal that had been drying on the kitchen counter for a few hours. Instead of the sharp-toed footwear I was accustomed to seeing on her feet, she wore soft clogs of wool or felt. Her hair was pinned up and damp, as if she’d just gotten out of the shower, and her face had been scrubbed free of makeup. She looked utterly beautiful.

I touched one of the smears of paint on her sleeve. “I like the way you’ve accessorized,” I said. “Picks up the color in your walls.”

She plucked at the sleeve and smiled. “Thanks for noticing. I pulled out all the stops for you. How’d things go at the crime scene—any luck?”

With a flourish, I produced both containers from my pockets. “Eureka,” I said. “Empty puparia, which argue for an earlier death than the maggots you’re incubating at the office. And the grand prize, the skin from one of the hands.”

She clapped. “You are amazing,” she said. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

“You mind if I take this skin back to Knoxville and let Art print it? The lab folks here might do fine with it, but Art’s probably got more experience printing degloved hands than all the criminalists in Chattanooga put together.”

“Anything that might help us ID the guy,” she said. “Oh, have you eaten?”

“No. Have you?”

“I picked up pad thai on the way home. I already scarfed some down, but there’s leftovers. You want?”

“Sure, thanks.” Normally I wasn’t an adventurous eater, but I knew pad thai was pretty safe—an Asian version of spaghetti—and I had worked up an appetite traipsing around the woods at the death scene. I followed Jess through an arched doorway and into the kitchen, which was a composition in blond wood, black granite, and stainless steel, lit by small lights with cobalt blue shades. “Jeez, I feel like I’ve just stepped into the pages of Architectural Digest,” I said. “I didn’t realize you had such an eye for style. Guess I should’ve figured, though, from the car and the shoes and all.”

She gestured at her sweatpants and clogs. “Fashionista, that’s me, all right.” She popped a covered bowl into the microwave and hit the one-minute button. “Actually, I wanted to be an architect, but I couldn’t draw worth a damn. I used to dream these great buildings when I was in college—spaces Frank Lloyd Wright would have given his left nut to’ve designed—but when I’d wake up and try to sketch them, they’d look like some kindergartner’s drawing. If I’d had some way to hook a VCR to my brain while I was dreaming, I’d be rich and famous today.”

“Judging by this, I’d say you work pretty well in three dimensions. It’s elegant, but not at all frilly. It suits you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I never have been much for frills. You know one of my favorite things about this house?” I shook my head. “Guess who created it?”

“Let’s see,” I said. “Surely I can dredge up the name from my encyclopedic knowledge of Chattanooga architects of the early 1900s…”

“Wasn’t a Chattanooga architect,” she grinned. “Sears.”

“Sears? Who Sears? From where—New York?”

“Not ‘Who Sears’; ‘Sears Who.’ Sears Roebuck, the department store,” she said, pointing to a wall. There, she’d hung a framed page from a century-old Sears catalog, showing an ad for the house I was standing in. It bore the catchy name “Modern Home No. 158,” and a price tag of $1,548. “Houses by mail order,” said Jess. “This house came into town on a freight car, in pieces. Probably ran four grand, all told, for the kit plus the caboodle.”

“I’m guessing it’s appreciated some since then.”

“Well, I appreciate it some,” she said.

The microwave beeped, and she pulled out the bowl and handed it to me, then reached into a drawer and fished out a pair of chopsticks. I made a face; I had never mastered the art of using them. “What, you got no forks?” She shook her head and handed me the chopsticks. The noodles, a reddish brown, smelled of garlic and peanuts and scallions and shrimp and hot oil, all swirled together so richly and tantalizingly I’d have eaten with my bare hands if I had to. Clutching the chopsticks awkwardly, I hoisted a wad of pad thai toward my mouth. Halfway there, the sticks went askew and the tangle of noodles plopped back into the bowl.

“Here,” she laughed, “let me show you a better way to hold those.” She took my hand in one of hers, and with the other, she pried the chopsticks from my fist. “Very simple,” she said. “One of them is fixed, the other moves. Sort of like a fencepost and a gate. The fixed one nestles down in the V between your thumb and forefinger, like so, and between the tips of your pinkie and your ring finger.” She demonstrated. “Hold the other one almost like you would a pencil, but not quite so near the point.” She gripped the second chopstick with the tips of her thumb and first two fingers, then made a great show of waving it to and fro, then clicking the tips together like a lobster claw. “Okay, try it.” She laid my hand, palm up, in her own palm, then arranged the two chopsticks for me. I studied them awhile. She looked at me, puzzled. “Still confused?”

“No,” I said. “I think I’ve got the concept. I just don’t want to move my hand right now.”

She laughed, then looked shy, but she stretched up and gave me a quick, warm kiss on the mouth. “Eat,” she said. “You might need your strength.” I looked up at her, hoping she meant what I thought she meant. In response to my quizzical look, she hoisted a suggestive eyebrow at me. Newly inspired, I snagged an enormous clump of noodles with the chopsticks and managed to get most of them into my mouth, with only a few stragglers draping my chin. “Easy, Popeye,” she said. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere. Be bad for an ME’s career if you choked to death in her kitchen.”

I slowed down slightly but still managed to empty the bowl in about two minutes flat. She rinsed it, put it in the dishwasher, and came back to stand in front of me, close enough that I could feel the breath from her upturned face. I put a hand to her cheek, because she seemed to like that when I did it earlier, at the morgue. She seemed to like it again, so I put my other hand on her other cheek. She didn’t seem to mind that, either—she turned her face slightly and kissed my palm—so then I pulled her face to mine and kissed her. She kissed back, and she kissed me like she meant something by it.

After a long spell of meaningful kissing, I slid my hands down her neck, over her shoulders, and down her sides to the bottom of the sweatshirt. Then I burrowed them under the loose-fitting hem and began easing them back up: up the nubby sweatpants, over the top of her hips, till I felt the bare skin of her waist. It seemed magical, miraculous somehow, that within this huge, shapeless tent of a sweatshirt could be something so slender, so smooth—so female—as the sculpted curves and hollows of this waist. I touched the tips of my thumbs together, and my fingers stretched halfway around her back. I grazed my thumbs around the rim of her navel, imagining its vertical cleft; I pressed the taut flatness of her belly, slid the waistband of the pants down to grip the solid flare of her hip bones. It had been more than two years since my hands had held a woman’s hips like this, but I remembered what female hips felt like, and I could tell these were splendid hips, to match the splendid belly. It augured well for what the rest of her would be like, too. Just to be sure, I slipped my hands higher, and I knew I’d guessed right. Her breath caught as I began to trace the curves of her breasts, which were bare beneath the baggy shirt. It seemed almost as if I were living two lives at the moment: one life, my visible life, was a baggy, frumpy sweatshirt sort of life; the other, lived by my mouth and hands, was an exotic, dizzying swirl of tongues and fingertips, rounded breasts and hardening nipples. I pulled away from the kiss so I could see Jess’s face, and I was glad I did, because it radiated a combination of tenderness and desire and wonder I had never glimpsed before.

“That is the single most gorgeous thing I have ever seen on this earth,” I whispered, and she buried her face in my neck and began to kiss softly. “You know what?” I murmured eventually.

“No, what?”

“You did such a good job showing me how to work those chop-sticks, I’m thinking maybe you could teach me a few other skills.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“What’s the best way to take off a pair of sweatpants—standing up, or lying down?”

“Come upstairs and I’ll show you,” she said.

And so I did, and she did, and we did. And we liked what we did so much that we did it again. Finally, happily tired from all we’d done, we laced our arms and legs together and lay still. Within minutes Jess was asleep, a sweet, childlike snore accompanying the rhythmic rise of her chest.

I watched her sleep, savoring the peaceful expression on a face that was often as focused and intense as a laser. Eventually I must have dozed off, because I noticed a murky awareness of awakening. The clock read 4:47. Unknotting myself from her embrace, I recovered my far-flung clothes and got dressed, leaving off my shoes so I wouldn’t make noise. I found some paper and a pen, and wrote a note. “Dear Jess—Sorry to go. I have an early meeting, and I couldn’t bear to wake you. Call me when you wake, if you want.” I thought a moment, then added, “You took my breath away, and then you gave it back again.” I didn’t figure I needed to sign it.

I folded her sweats and laid them on the foot of the bed, setting the note on top. Then I bent and kissed her cheek. She made a soft sound, somewhere between a coo and a laugh, and I hoped maybe she was dreaming of the love we had made.

I tiptoed out of her bedroom, down the stairs, and out the front door. Sitting on the top step of Modern Home No. 158, I put on my shoes and walked to my truck. I had parked on the street, and the truck was headed down a gentle incline, so I coasted a ways before cranking the engine. I pulled onto I-75 North toward Knoxville just as the sky’s velvety darkness began to yield to a voluptuous red in the east.