by Kathy Reichs
“No.”
Slidell jabbed a finger. “The kid in Matamoros.”
I nodded. “Mark Kilroy.”
Rinaldi underlined something in his notebook. Underlined it again.
Slidell opened his mouth to speak. His phone rang. Clamping his jaw, he clicked on.
“Talk.”
Slidell was moving through the door when Larabee appeared in it, face so tense it looked molded to the bone.
“What’s happened?” I asked Larabee.
“When?” Slidell’s voice floated in from the hall.
“Just got a call about a body at Lake Wylie,” Larabee said to me. “I may need your help.”
“Sonovabitch.” Slidell sounded agitated.
“Why?” I asked.
“We’re on it.” Slidell’s phone snapped shut.
“Vic’s missing his head,” Larabee said.
10
LARABEE RODE IN THE VAN WITH HAWKINS. THOUGH SLIDELL offered a lift, I was familiar with his auto hygiene. Less tolerant than Rinaldi, I took my own car.
Twenty minutes after departing the MCME, I was exiting I-485 onto Steele Creek Road. Following Hawkins’s directions, I forked southwest onto Shopton Road, crossed Amohr Creek, then made a series of turns through a pocket of forest that had temporarily escaped the developer’s ax. Though vague on my exact position, I had a sense the McDowell Nature Preserve lay roughly to the south, the Gaston County line somewhere to the west.
One more left and I spotted a CMPD patrol unit backlit by an expanse of choppy blue water. A uniformed cop was half sitting, half leaning against a rear quarter panel. Pulling to the shoulder, I got out and walked toward him.
Stretching from Mountain Island Dam in the north to Wylie Dam in the south, Wylie is one of eleven lakes in Duke Power’s Catawba River chain. On maps, the thing resembles a furry vein snaking from the Tar Heel into the Palmetto State.
Despite the nuclear power plant humming on its southwestern shore, Lake Wylie is ringed by a number of upmarket developments—River Hills, the Palisades, the Sanctuary.
Palisaded against whom? I often wondered. Sanctuary from what? Day-Glo bass and eight-legged toads?
Whatever the threat, there were no fortified mansions on this piece of the lakeshore. The few homes I’d passed were strictly vinyl siding, aluminum awnings, and rusting carports. Some were little more than shacks, remnants of a time when Charlotteans went to “the river” to escape the press of urban living. Little did they know.
On spotting me, the cop pushed upright and assumed a wary stance. His face and body were lean, his shades straight out of The Matrix. At five yards out I could read the name Radke on a small brass plaque on his right breast.
I flicked a wave. It was not returned.
Behind Radke, a plastic-tangled lump lay on the shore.
I gave my name and explained who I was. Relaxing a hair, Radke chin-cocked the lump.
“Body’s over there. This cove’s a magnet for crap.”
My face must have registered something. Surprise? Reproach?
Reddening, Radke chest-folded his arms. “I’m not referencing the vic. I mean, it appears a lot of stuff washes up here. It’s a crazy strong wake zone.”
My eyes drifted past Radke. On sunny weekends, Wylie is a gnat swarm of boats. Today a half dozen putted and skimmed nearby.
“You search the area?”
“I walked the shore maybe twenty yards in either direction. Poked around in the trees. Nothing systematic.”
I was forming a follow-up question, when I heard an engine, then the sound of crunching gravel. Turning, I saw a Ford Taurus nose up to the bumper of my Mazda.
Two doors opened. Rinaldi unfolded from one and stick-walked toward us. Slidell heaved from the other and lumbered after, Ray-Bans flashing as his head swiveled left then right.
“Officer.” Slidell nodded in Radke’s direction.
Radke returned the nod.
Nods. Rinaldi-Brennan. Brennan-Rinaldi.
“Whadda we got?” Slidell was surveying the lake, the shoreline, the woods, assessing.
“Headless body.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Guy found it while walking his dog.”
“Must live under a lucky star.”
“My money’s on the pooch.”
“You put that in your report, Radke?”
“Dog didn’t seem too concerned about credit.”
Slidell ignored the attempt at levity. “What’s his story?”
“Just taking a dump.”
The Ray-Bans crawled to The Matrix.
“That was funny, Radke. That line about the dog. What I got a problem with is your timing. You gotta practice that. Plan your jokes so’s they don’t take up no part of my day.”
Shrugging, Radke pulled out a notepad.
“Guy’s name is Funderburke. Lives up the road, walks the dog at seven, at midday, and again around six. Says the body showed up sometime between their morning and noon outings on Tuesday.”
“He check it out?”
“Not until today. Says he figured it was trash. And the dog wanted his nap.” Pause. “Name’s Digger.”
“I’ll make a note.”
“With two g’s.” Deadpan.
I liked Radke.
“He open the package?”
Radke shook his head. “Saw one foot. Called nine-one-one.”
Leaving the men, I moved off toward the body, mind logging impressions.
Ground hard-packed. Pines and hardwoods thick to within five feet of the shore. Embankment muddy, sloping, and strewn with debris.
I made a mental inventory. Beer and soda cans, food wrappers, plastic six-pack loops, a waterlogged sneaker, a chunk of Styrofoam, a tangle of fishing line.
The body lay on, not under, the trash, looking pitifully small against the backdrop of lake and horizon. Flies danced the blue plastic in a continuous action-reaction ballet.
Snapping on gloves, I moved close and dropped to a squat. The humming swelled to a frenzied buzzing as flies darted, bodies iridescent green in the sunlight.
Most people are disgusted by flies. And rightly so. Like those bouncing off my face and hair, many species breed and feed on decaying organic matter. And they’re not picky about the menu. Feces or Whoppers, it’s all just chow. So is flesh, human or otherwise.
Though repulsive, necrophagous insects are useful citizens. With their single-minded focus on eating and reproducing, they speed decomp along its inevitable path. Key players in nature’s recycling plan, they work hard at returning the dead to the earth. From a forensic perspective, bugs kick ass.
But, for now, I ignored them.
I also ignored the object of their interest, save to note that it was loosely wrapped in blue plastic sheeting. I couldn’t tell if the wrapping had been intentionally placed, or if the body had become entangled accidentally while free-floating in the lake.
But I did note the absence of smell. Odd, given recent warm temperatures. If the body had been here since Tuesday morning, things should have been cooking inside that plastic.
Rising, I checked the immediate surroundings. No boot prints. No tire treads. No drag marks.
No cast-off shoes or articles of clothing. No recently overturned rocks.
No head.
In less than a minute, motor and tire sounds overrode the drone of the Caliphoridae.
I glanced toward the road.
Larabee was striding in my direction, camera in one hand, field kit in the other. Hawkins was opening the rear doors of the van. Both wore Tyvek coveralls.
The flies went bananas when Larabee joined me.
“Blowflies. I hate blowflies.”
“Why blowflies?”
“The noise. Buzzing creeps me out.”
I told Larabee what Radke had said.
The ME looked at his watch. “If Funderburke’s right, we’ve got a time frame of roughly forty-eight hours.”
“Forty-eight hours here,” I s
aid, pointing at the ground.
People have a habit of moving corpses. So does water. PMI could have been forty-eight hours or forty-eight days.
Either way, there should have been odor.
“Good point.” Larabee batted a fly from his forehead.
While Hawkins shot video and stills, Larabee and I walked the shoreline. Beside us, waves lapped the mud, indifferent.
When we’d finished, we executed a grid in the woods, moving side by side, searching with our eyes and our feet. We spotted nothing suspicious. No head.
When we returned to the body, Hawkins was still shooting. Slidell and Rinaldi were with him. Pointlessly, each detective held a handkerchief to his nose. One was monogrammed, made of linen. The other was red polyester. Funny the things you notice.
“That should do her.” Hawkins let the camera drop to his chest. “Pop the cork?”
“Mark the plastic where you make your cuts.” Larabee’s voice sounded flat. I suspected he was feeling as unenthused as I.
When Hawkins stepped to the body, flies rose in a crazed nimbus of protest.
Using a Scripto, the death investigator drew a line on the plastic then slashed along its length. Should matching this segment of plastic to a source roll become necessary, tool mark analysts could easily separate Hawkins’s blade mark from those made by the perpetrator when cutting the sheet.
The corpse lay with rump up, legs tucked, chest and face to the ground. Had there been a face. The torso ended at a midshoulder stump that was dotted with fly eggs. The anus also showed moderate insect activity.
“Naked as a jaybird.” Spoken through red polyester.
Hawkins resumed shooting. Larabee and I masked and stepped in.
“Looks young,” Rinaldi said.
I agreed. The limbs were slender, body hair was scarce, and the feet were free of bunions, calluses, thickened nails, or other indicators of advanced age.
Slidell bent sideways and squinted under the upraised buttocks. “Got a full load.”
Though inelegantly stated, Slidell’s observation was correct. The genitalia were male and fully adult.
“No doubt he’s a white boy,” Rinaldi said. The skin was ghostly, the fine covering of hair a light, golden blond.
I dropped to my knees. The flies went mad. Waving them aside, Larabee joined me.
Up close I could see pale yellow bone glistening in the flesh of the truncated neck. The bright pink flesh. Something odd there.
“Wound looks red as a porterhouse.” Larabee spoke my thought.
“Yes,” I agreed. “The head hasn’t fallen off, it was severed. Given a PMI of two days, the whole body’s surprisingly well-preserved.”
Larabee palpated a defect at the level of the tenth rib, in the right muscle mass paralleling the spinal column.
“Any guess on that?”
The indentation looked like a series of six short parallel lines, with a seventh crossing at a ninety-degree angle.
“Contact with some sort of debris?” I didn’t really think so.
“Maybe.” Larabee examined one upturned palm then the other. “No defense wounds. Looks like we may get usable prints.” To Hawkins. “Make sure to bag the hands.”
“This guy come out of the water?” Slidell asked.
“Doesn’t look like most floaters I’ve seen,” I said.
“No signs of aquatic scavenging,” Larabee said.
“Immersion time could have been brief.”
Larabee shrugged agreement. “In any case, there’s no need to check for water in the lungs. If he did wash out of the lake, he definitely wasn’t breathing when he went in.”
“So, how much time we looking at?” Slidell asked.
“The body’s been here long enough for blowflies to arrive and oviposit, and for a few eggs to hatch.” I’d noticed that the few larvae present were young, and that there were no pupae or empty casings.
“You gonna translate that for us average mopes?”
“Flies would have found the body in minutes, especially with such a massive open wound. Eggs would have been laid in a matter of hours. Hatching would have occurred anywhere from twelve to forty-eight hours later, depending on temperatures.”
“It’s been warm,” Rinaldi said.
“That would speed things up.”
“So whaddya think?” Slidell repeated his question, this time with a note of annoyance.
Given Funderburke’s story, I thought something was off. I kept it to myself.
“I’m not an entomologist,” I said. “I’ll collect samples for analysis.”
In addition to the lack of smell and paucity of insect activity, another thing bothered me. If the body had been dumped where it lay, or if its time in the lake had been brief, that might explain the absence of aquatic scavenging. But Funderburke’s story placed it on the shore last Tuesday morning. The local wildlife should have opened a soup kitchen. Why no signs of animal damage?
Slidell was about to comment when two CSS techs emerged from the trees. The woman was tall, with puffy cheeks and braids pinned to her head. The man was sunburned and wore Maui Jims.
Larabee filled them in. Neither seemed interested in lengthy explanations. Fair enough. They were facing a long afternoon of documenting and collecting evidence and remains.
We waited while markers were placed, photos were taken, and measurements were made. Prelims finished, both techs looked to the ME.
Turning to me, Larabee arm-gestured an invitation.
We stepped to the corpse, me at the hips, Larabee at the shoulders.
Behind us a boat whined approach, then retreat. A series of waves slapped the shore.
“Ready?” Above his mask, the ME’s brows were grimly knitted. The moment of truth. The turning of the body.
I nodded.
Together, we rolled the corpse onto its back.
Everyone there was a veteran, used to murder, mutilation, and all the horror one human can inflict on another. I doubt anyone present had seen this before.
Rinaldi spoke for us all.
“Holy hell.”
11
THOUGH CONTACT WITH THE GROUND HAD DISCOURAGED MOST flies, a few hardy ladies had managed to maneuver beneath the body. A white circle seethed in the pale, hairless chest. A smaller oval churned on the belly.
“What the hell?” Muffled through red polyester.
Leaning close, I could see that the egg masses weren’t evenly distributed, but appeared to cluster into patterns. With one gloved finger, I nudged outlier eggs back toward thicker bands that seemed to rim and crisscross the circle.
And felt coldness congeal in my chest.
The eggs formed an inverted five-point star.
“It’s a pentagram,” I said.
The others remained silent.
Using the same finger, I proceeded to “clean up” the oval until that pattern was clear: 666.
“That don’t say Old Time Gospel Hour to me.” Slidell’s voice was thick with revulsion.
“How…?” Rinaldi’s question trailed off.
“Flies are like the rest of us,” I said. “Given a choice, they take the easy route. Orifices. Open wounds.”
Slidell knew what I was saying. “The kid was carved up.”
“Yes.”
“Before or after his head was whacked off?” Angry.
“I don’t know.”
“So Lingo’s right.”
“We shouldn’t jump to—”
“You got another theory?”
I didn’t.
“Let’s go.” Stone-jawed, Slidell strode off.
“He means no disrespect.” Rinaldi’s tone was apologetic. “His niece had some problems in high school.” He stopped, considered whether to elaborate. Decided against it. “Anyway, he’s anxious to wrap up the Greenleaf business. We’ve got a line on Kenneth Roseboro, the kid that inherited the house.”
“Wanda Horne’s nephew,” I said.
“Yes.” Again, Rinaldi offered nothing
further. “You want a cadaver dog to come sweep the area, maybe try to sniff out the head?”
I nodded.
“I’ll call in a request.”
When I returned from the car with my field kit, Hawkins was shooting video and the CSS team was walking the area. Already the shoreline was dotted with orange markers indicating the presence of potential trace evidence. Cigarette butts. Candy wrappers. Tissues. Most of it would turn out to be useless, but at this stage no one knew what was relevant and what was present due to accidental association.
Opening my kit, I spread out supplies. Beside me, the ME unsheathed a thermometer for insertion into the anus. Or the egg mass. I couldn’t be sure. For two hours we gathered and labeled evidence, Larabee on the corpse, Brennan on the bugs.
First I took close-ups, in case something matured into something else in transit to the entomologist. I’d made that mistake once.
Using a dampened child’s paintbrush, I then scraped up eggs. Half I preserved in diluted alcohol. RIP. The rest I wanted alive for the entomologist to raise to maturity for species identification. That lucky half I placed in vials with beef liver and damp tissue.
Then, I went for maggots. Since the few larvae present appeared to be of the same species and newly hatched, I didn’t worry about separation according to size, merely area of collection: neck, anus, surrounding soil. As with the eggs, one half went into vials with air, food, and perching material. The other half went into hot water, then an alcohol solution.
After netting and packaging adult flies, I gathered representatives of every species present within a yard of the body. My inventory included two black beetles, a long brown crawly thing, and a handful of ants. The yellow jacket got a pass.
Bugs sealed and labeled, I collected soil samples, then made notes about the habitat: freshwater lake, hardwoods and pines, semiacid soil, elevation five hundred to six hundred feet, temperature ranging from midsixties to mideighties Fahrenheit, low humidity, full sunlight.
Finally, I jotted comments concerning the body. Naked. Prone, buttocks raised, arms straight at the sides. Decapitation, no blood or bodily fluids at the scene. Head missing. Incised wounds on chest and belly. Minimal decomp. No aquatic or animal scavenging. Egg masses at neck and anus with internal temperatures of 97 and 98 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. Unknown cause of death.