I didn’t know what gribble worms were, but I knew what chewed-through dock pilings looked like. “Classic sign of meth mouth,” I said. “Long-term methamphetamine use. So the guy was an addict, and he was poor—maybe even homeless. Somebody wanted him dead, and maybe nobody else cared. Doesn’t necessarily make your job any easier.”
Evers shrugged. “Well, at least we know to poke around in the gutters, not the country clubs. Got anything else that might help us?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I went back out to the scene this morning and found this.” I handed him a small glass jar from the corner of my desk. The detective studied it, turning it this way and that. Finally he looked up, puzzled. “This? A dead leaf?”
Art reached over and plucked the jar from the detective’s hand. He held it up to the lamp so the light shone through, and he smiled.
• • •
The crime-scene tape still hung at the upper corner of the Body Farm, but even from a distance, I could see that by now—three days since the KPD forensic team had strung it around four tree trunks to form a perimeter around John Doe’s skeleton—the tape had gone slack, nearly touching the ground at the bottom of each sagging segment.
“Thanks for pitching in again,” I said to Miranda and Nick as we made our way up the hill.
“I live to serve,” said Miranda.
“Swell,” I told her. “You can carry my backpack.” She heaved a sigh, but reached for it nonetheless. I shook my head. “Nah, just kidding. Just testing. I’m fine.”
“Glad to help, Dr. B,” said Nick. “I know I haven’t exactly distinguished myself this year, but—”
“Doc?” A voice floated down from above. “Is that you?”
“Yeah. We’ll be right there, Art.”
“Art Bohanan?” said Miranda. “From KPD?”
“Yup. Also John Evers. The detective assigned to the case.”
“Hmm,” was her only reply.
I introduced the two police officers to the students, and I noticed Nick wincing as Evers tightened his viselike grip. Miranda wisely chose a wave as her greeting, and I decided to follow her example.
“You got something for us, Doc?” asked Evers.
“I do.” I set my pack on the ground and fished out a two-page printout. “Hot off the printer. The chemical analysis from Arpad Vass.” Arpad was a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a vast federal research and development complex twenty miles away. He was also one of my former Ph.D. students, and—more to the point—was now one of the world’s leading authorities, if not the leading authority, on the chemicals produced by human decomposition. Pointing to the dark, greasy stain on the ground—volatile fatty acids released by the breakdown of the body’s soft tissue—I told the students, “I took Arpad a sample of the soil from under the body yesterday. He ran it through his mass spectrometer last night.” I scanned the report. “Based on the ratio of decomp byproducts, Arpad says the time since death is eight to nine months.”
Evers did the computation. “So last August or September.”
I nodded. “Art, tell Detective Evers what it was like Sunday when we were picking our way up the hill to the condos.”
“Hard going,” said Art. “Deadfall, honeysuckle vines, briars all over the place. Couple times, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to make it through.”
“I’d be willing to bet,” I said, “that nothing bigger than a raccoon or a coyote has been through those woods in the past five years. For sure not in the past eight or nine months.”
“Which shows,” Evers said, “that somebody couldn’t have brought the body down from the condos last fall.”
“Not that recently,” I agreed. “Not without a clearer path. But what’s interesting is, somebody tried hard to make it look like the guy came down from the condos and came over the fence. That piece of fabric snagged in the barbed wire was a good touch—a fat, juicy red herring.”
“Wait, wait,” said Miranda. “So if the body didn’t come down from the condos…”
“It came up the same way we did. It came in through our front gate.”
I heard Miranda draw a quick breath through her mouth; I looked at her just in time to see her exhaling through flaring nostrils. I’d worked with her long enough to recognize that maneuver as a storm warning.
“But we already went through all that with Art,” she snapped. “The I.D. tags, the case numbers. I thought we all agreed that the guy couldn’t be one of our donated bodies.”
“We did,” I said.
“Still do,” said Art.
Miranda opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She and Nick exchanged uneasy glances. Finally, she turned to me again. “So now what? You asked us to help. What do you want us to do?”
“Help us find the de-gloved skin,” I said. “Since the guy died only nine months ago, I’m betting we can find the skin that sloughed off his hands a few days after he died.” As I spoke, I slowly peeled off one of my purple nitrile gloves by way of demonstrating. “If we can find the de-gloved skin, I’m guessing Art here can get fingerprints and I.D. our John Doe.”
Nick looked startled. “Really? Wow,” he said. “Awesome. So how you want to do the search?”
“How about you and Miranda search on the downhill side—you on the right, Miranda on the left, starting at the fence. Art, you and Detective Evers can search the uphill quadrants. Work from the outside in and converge on the stained area, where the body decomposed.”
Evers raised a finger. “Excuse me, Doc?”
“Yes, Detective?”
“How will we know it if we see it?”
“It’ll look a lot like a dried, curled-up leaf,” I explained, “but not so brittle…more like parchment, or paper-thin leather.” He nodded. “If in doubt, give a shout. Ready?”
Heads nodded, and one by one they dropped to all fours.
Art and Evers worked slowly, picking up numerous leaves, pinching a tip of each, then frowning and discarding it when it crumbled between their fingers. Miranda moved fast, ignoring most of the leaves, picking up and swiftly rejecting a few. Nick’s pace was somewhere between Miranda’s and Art’s. He picked up more leaves than Miranda, but he didn’t pick up the one thing he should have: the shriveled husk of skin from the dead man’s right hand, which had been two feet in front of the spot where I’d told him to start. I’d found the skin the day before, when I’d come out alone to the scene and carefully gone over the ground myself. I’d marked its location with a pair of sticks, angled in the shape of an arrow, to make sure I could spot it easily again. After Nick was a foot beyond my makeshift pointer, I knelt beside him. “What about this, Nick?” I asked, plucking the skin from the ground.
He glanced at it, shook his head. “Looks like an elm leaf to me.”
“Looks like de-gloved skin to me,” I replied. “Art, what do you think?” I stretched my arm across the stained patch and tipped the curl into his upturned palm.
“Bingo,” Art said.
“Think you’ll be able to get prints from that?”
“No guarantees,” he replied, “but I’d say the odds are good. I’ll take it back to the lab and soak it in water and fabric softener for a while, then uncurl it and slip my own fingers inside these, so I can print them. My guess is, this guy’s got a police record. That means his prints are in the system already, and we’ll get a match just like that.” He snapped his fingers—the sudden sound seemed loud as a gunshot—and Miranda flinched, then flushed. “Once we know who the victim is, Evers here’ll be on the killer like a duck on a June bug.”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “Wow. That’s amazing.”
“It is amazing,” I agreed. The digits of Nick’s hands were twitching, almost as if he were playing piano. “Art’s amazing. This guy can get prints out of thin air.” I glanced at Evers, who gave me a slight nod. Reaching into my pack, I carefully removed our John Doe’s skull. I held the skull so that the empty eye orbits were facing Nick, then I rotated it slightly, reveali
ng the fracture.
Nick’s eyes widened.
“Just to show you how good he is? Art put this skull in his superglue gizmo and fumed it for latent prints,” I said. “What’d you find, Art?”
“I found prints all over it,” said Art, standing up and taking a step toward Nick. He took hold of Nick’s wrist and turned the young man’s palm up, then brought the fingers to his face for a close look. “I found these prints—Nick’s prints—all over it.”
“No!” exclaimed Nick, snatching away his hand. “That’s not possible! I never touched him after—” He snapped his mouth shut and turned crimson.
Evers pounced. “Never touched who, Nick? After what? After they found the body? After you put the body here? How’d you know whose skull this was, Nick? Doc didn’t say whose it was.”
“Come on, I’m not an idiot,” Nick said, blushing. “Who else would you be talking about here?” His eyes hardened. “I never touched that skull,” he said defiantly. “First time I ever saw that guy was Saturday, when we were out here doing spring cleaning and the undergraduates found him.”
“You’re lying to us, Nick,” said Evers. Nick shook his head vehemently. “Know how we know? We found your prints in this guy’s trailer.”
“No! I’ve never been…What guy? You don’t even know who he is.”
“Actually, we do, Nick,” Evers said. “His name’s Troy Akins. A drug addict and a drug dealer.”
“But…” Nick stared at Evers, then at Art, then at the curl of skin in Art’s hand. “But…”
“That’s what sloughed off the right hand, Nick,” I said. “But Art’s already printed the skin from the left hand. I gave it to him yesterday. He got a match just like that.” This time, I was the finger-snapper, and this time Nick was the one who flinched.
“We searched Akins’ trailer last night,” Evers said. “We found four human skulls inside.”
“Four of the six skulls that were stolen last year,” I added.
Nick’s gaze bored into me, then into Evers. Finally, he turned his palms up as if to say, See? “Well then, there you go,” he said. “This guy—Akins?—he stole those six skulls. That’s great! I mean, it’s great that you found them. Found out about him. So he must have been coming back for more…”
Evers held up a hand to silence him. “Tell him, Art.”
“I fumed all four of those skulls last night,” Art said. “I found two sets of prints on every one of them. His. And yours.” Art’s earlier claim—that Nick’s prints were on the drug dealer’s own skull—had been a deception, a stratagem Evers had concocted to throw Nick off balance. Unfortunately, this claim was the truth.
Nick looked startled, then swiftly grew indignant. “So what?” he sputtered. “You’d find my prints on lots of skulls out here. I work here, remember? I handle these bones all the damn time.”
He looked to me for confirmation. “Thing is, son,” I said, “those four skulls had been cleaned. Processed by a pro. By somebody I’d trained.” Nick was sweating now. “And your prints were all over them. Which means you handled those skulls after they were cleaned.” I shook my head sadly. “After you stole them and scrubbed them up for Akins.”
“That’s not all we found, Nick,” said Evers. “Akins kept a ledger. Names, dates, amounts. Your name started showing up about a year-and-a-half ago. Not real often. Not at first. Not till last summer.” Evers took a step forward. “How about showing us your teeth, Nick.”
“My teeth?”
“Your teeth.”
“What…what for?”
“Just do it, son,” said Evers.
Nick stared at me, then looked in turn at Miranda, Art, and Evers. “This is stupid,” he said. “This is total bullshit.”
“Let’s see your teeth, Nick,” I said. We waited, all eyes on him. Finally, he gave a sigh that was also a groan—the sound, I thought, of a life breaking. Then his eyes closed, and with remarkable slowness and surprising dignity, he opened his lips to expose his teeth. The damage was minimal so far, but sure enough, right along the gum line, were the early signs of decay. The first gribble-worm nibblings of meth mouth.
Nick shook his head and wiped away tears. “Troy said he had something really great for me to try. Ten times better than cocaine. ‘Best shit in the world,’ he said. ‘Free sample.’ I was stoned at the time, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ And he was right—it was amazing. A once-in-a-lifetime rush. Never to be repeated, no matter how many times I tried.” He looked at me sorrowfully, shamefully. “He made me steal those six skulls last spring, Dr. B. I owed him money. A lot of money. I thought that would be the end of it, but he said he needed more. Last fall.” Nick hung his head.
I glanced at Miranda. She was standing still as a statue, but tears rolled down her face.
“Troy made me bring him out here Labor Day weekend, when nobody else was around. He walked all around, looking for the best skulls. Then he stopped and pulled out his pipe. He took a hit, gave me a hit. Then he started talking about how he owned me, how he could ruin me anytime he wanted. How he already had ruined me. Then he laughed, and I realized he was right. So I…I told him the best skull of all was up at the top of the hill.” He fell silent, looking down at the ground.
“And once he was up there,” I said, reaching into my backpack for the third time, “you hit him with this.”
When he saw the hammer in my hand, Nick looked as if he’d seen a ghost. “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes. How did you know?”
Something about the fracture in the skull had looked oddly familiar to me the instant I’d first seen it, but I couldn’t place it—not at first, and not later, when Art made his joke about hammers and nails. Then—finally—the prior afternoon, as I was leaving the Body Farm, my eye was drawn to the claw hammer that always hung from a pair of nails just inside the gate. Thirty years before, while using the hammer as a crowbar, I’d broken one of the claws. It had snapped off at an angle, creating a sharp, triangular stub on one side. Now, as Nick and Miranda and Art and Evers watched, I took the skull in my left hand and the hammer in my right and brought them slowly together, sliding the undamaged claw into the rectangular slot in the skull’s temporal bone. When the intact claw was an inch deep, the broken claw—its sharp, angled tip—drew close, then tucked neatly into the small triangular puncture. The fit was perfect; it was one of the best examples I’d ever seen of a signature fracture together with the weapon that had produced it.
Evers stepped behind Nick, cuffing his wrists with a motion that appeared almost gentle, and began the familiar, terrible litany: “You have the right to remain silent…”
Throughout the recitation of his rights, Nick stood stock-still, his head bowed, tears streaming down his face and falling to the forest floor. When Evers finished, Nick raised his head and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Dr. B,” he said, so softly I could scarcely hear him.
“Me, too, Nick,” I answered truthfully. “Really, really sorry.”
As the detective led Nick down through the woods—toward the gate and toward his fate—I called after him. “Write your thesis, Nick. Get clean, serve your sentence, and write your thesis.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw his backbone straighten and his bowed head lift a bit higher, at least for a moment, before he and Evers were lost from view in the shadows of the Body Farm.
KISSIN’ DON’T KILL
by Catriona McPherson
He was deader than a dead duck up a dead end with a dead weight tied to his cold dead ankles. But his widow, sitting at his bedside, chafing his hand and talking softly to him, every so often bending over to kiss him, still didn’t seem quite ready to let him go.
The doc caught the eye of the driver, hovering in the doorway with the body bag as his partner rolled the gurney along the hall.
So this, the doc thought, was what a happy marriage looked like at the end. The table was still set for the anniversary dinner they had shared just before the old boy collapsed. Crisp white tablec
loth, polished silver, crystal glasses, even a menu card with its shaky, old-lady script. He had glanced at it on his way through.
Bean sprout salad
Tempura mushrooms
Slow-braised meat medley and steamed greens
Seasonal red berry compote and whipped cream
“Ma’am?” he said gently. “I can prescribe you something to help you sleep tonight.”
She shook her head and gave him a vague smile.
“We met when I was eighteen, and I’m seventy-nine now,” she said. “This will be the first time in sixty years I’ve spent apart from him.”
“That’s why I thought maybe…”
“I should have recorded his snore,” she said. “That would be a boon now. It’s going to be very quiet without him.”
The doc smiled. “Is there someone you can call to come and be with you?”
That seemed to rouse her a bit. “No, no, I’m fine. But there’s a lot of people I need to tell.” Finally, she let go of the hand and pattered through to the living room, touched the phone. “He was a friend to all the world. There must be 500 names in his address book.”
“Well, that’s something to be thankful for,” the doc said. “You’ll have people around you.” He cleared his throat to cover the sound of the body-bag zipper.
“Oh, they’re not my friends,” she told him. “I’m more of a homebody, always was. I like to keep a nice house.” She pulled down the cuff of her sweater and polished the phone.
He nodded. When he came out to a death, he didn’t often catch people on their best day, and he had seen some sights that threatened to stay with him. Indoor cats with one dead owner, the downside of hoarding, the downside of lots of things really. Every so often there was a pleasant change, but he had never, in all his years, seen a cleaner home than this one. Everything gleaming and smelling of pine in the living room and dining room. Everything sparkling and smelling of lemon soap in the bathroom and kitchen. Even in their bedroom the carpet looked as if it had only just been shampooed.
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