by Liliana Hart
It sounded like Carl had handled things calmly and efficiently. I guess I’d expect that from a person who could rub themselves raw masturbating. Someone with that kind of dedication could get the job done.
“Stop thinking about it,” Jack said.
“I can’t,” I confessed. “It’s like staring at an ant pile after it’s been kicked. I’ll never be able to look at Carl the same.”
I’d had little dealings with scavengers and human remains, but it happened from time to time. A body left too long in the woods or in the water would always have some animal marks. And I’d once seen a body that had been eaten by rats in the morgue of Augusta General. They’d even eaten bone, and the identity of the victim had been almost impossible to determine by normal means.
I tried not to pay too close attention to the interior of the house as we made our way toward the bedroom. I’d learned humanizing the victim too much made it harder for me to do my job. It was already hard because I had such fond memories of Mrs. McGowen. But I couldn’t look away from the photographs that covered the walls. Pictures of two young people madly in love at different stages in their lives. There were no modern photographs. It’s like time had stopped for Mrs. McGowen when her husband had passed away.
As we entered the hallway, we faced an extra large mirror, and I could see my full reflection. The only part of me not covered was my eyes and the top of my head.
“The room on the left belongs to the cats,” Jack said. “Their litter boxes and food and water bowls are in there. There’s one of those play things they can climb on and a bunch of toys scattered about. Oddly enough, it’s the cleanest room in the house.
I followed Jack toward the room on the right. There was another door adjacent to the master bedroom, and I assumed it was the bathroom. Jack confirmed it.
“That’s the bathroom,” he said and then opened the door where Mrs. McGowen’s body lay.
My feet squelched into the carpet the moment I stepped into the room, and I was determined not to look down. It was better to focus on the body lying in front of us than anything else.
Death was never pretty. There were deaths that were peaceful and those that were violent in nature. But the beauty of life was always absent. Death had left Mrs. McGowen unrecognizable.
It made sense to assume at first glance that she’d taken a fall that had eventually ended her life. It happened all the time to the elderly, especially to those who lived alone. They’d fall or have a stroke or heart attack, and there’d be no one there to call for help. They’d sometimes lay for hours or days before finally succumbing to death. It was always sad to find those cases, and in my own mind, one of the most horrible ways to die. Broken, alone, and forgotten.
I’d also learned through the years to never jump to conclusions.
Jack and I had had established a rhythm since we’d been working together in an official capacity. I knew he’d already drawn his own conclusions, just as I knew he’d pick up on things that I wouldn’t and vice-versa. He let me enter the room and then got out of the way. This was my time now.
Mrs. McGowen, what was left of her, was crumpled on the floor like a ragdoll against the wall, only a few feet inside the door. A round Queen Anne table leaned haphazardly against a reading chair, and a white ceramic lamp lay broken on the floor next to her. The tattered remains of her dressing gown were soaked with blood—almost black in color.
“Why is her dress moving?” I asked. I already knew the answer, but I was hoping it was just a hallucination.
“Insect activity,” Jack said. “Apparently, Mrs. McGowen wasn’t running her AC yet. The last couple of days have been pretty warm.”
“There’s going to be no tissue samples left for me after the cats and maggots. I won’t be able to do anything other than take measurements and x-rays.”
I moved farther into the bedroom. It wasn’t an overly large room, but there was space for the queen size bed. It had a white ironwork headboard and footboard with ornate finials at each post. A wedding ring quilt in different shades of purple covered the bed, and there was a lamp on the nightstand to the left of the bed, along with a notebook, pen and a rotary phone. But the nightstand on the right was empty.
The nightstands each sat in front of a window with lace curtains that did nothing for privacy, but gave a beautiful view of the backyard garden. Purple lilac bushes surrounded the perimeter of the backyard, which was why I assumed she felt comfortable with lace curtains since the bushes were as dense and tall as any fence could be.
I took initial photographs, getting several of the positioning of the body, and then moved in closer. The carpet was saturated with blood, so I dug in my bag for the clear plastic tarp and laid it next to her so I could kneel down.
“The cats did a number on her,” I said. “If she does have any external wounds, they’ll be difficult to find unless damage was done to the bone.”
I took more pictures, starting at the head, and then let the camera drop against my chest. “The cats wouldn’t have let her body go cold before they started scavenging,” I said. “They’d start with soft tissues areas first. Eyes and lips and earlobes.”
I gently turned her head so Jack could see. All that was left of her face was the skeletal remains. Her silver hair lay on the floor like a small animal. “The maggots would have done the soft tissue work between the face and the skull, burrowing in and releasing the skin and hair follicles. That’s why her hair is on the floor. And seven cats would make short work of her.”
I moved down the torso with the camera, and then zoomed in where the stomach should have been. I’d never been squeamish about the human body. Death was a reality, and there were limitless ways for the body to die. I didn’t get the opportunity to see much of those variations working for King George County, but when I had been working hundred hour weeks as an ER doc at Augusta General, I’d seen all kinds of things. But I really hated maggots.
The truth was, very little of my work dealt with homicides, but that’s what excited the press, so when I did have one I always got news coverage. Most of the bodies that came across my table were regular people who lived everyday lives and then died a normal death. Sometimes, there was no explainable reason for a healthy thirty-year old man to die. And sometimes there wasn’t much left to work with at all, just like with Mrs. McGowen. But those were the cases that interested me most.
I tried to ignore the constant moving beneath the remains of Mrs. McGowen’s housecoat, but I couldn’t avoid it forever, so I carefully cut open her clothes, the fabric hard with dried blood.
“There are two stages of insect activity,” I told Jack. “The eggs would’ve been laid and hatched within the first twenty-four hours of her death. But it could’ve been sooner with the heat, accelerating the process. A few of these maggots are mature adults, but most have just been hatched, which means she’s been dead long enough for a second generation. In normal temperatures, you’re looking at six to ten days. But with the heat, maybe three to five.”
And it was hot in the house. The AC wasn’t on, the windows were shut tight, and though I’d seen ceiling fans in a couple of the rooms and there was a box fan in the corner. They weren’t on and there wasn’t even a hint of a breeze.
“We still have to canvas the neighborhood and see if anyone saw her after her banana bread delivery, but that timeline works if she died sometime late Sunday or early Monday morning,” Jack said. “The bed is made and she’s in her night clothes, so she either hadn’t gone to bed yet, or she was already up for the day.”
“It’s easy enough to lose balance and take a header at her age. I’ll check her for broken bones once I get back to the lab and can do x-rays. If she broke a hip or a leg, she wouldn’t have been able to get back up. The pain could’ve sent her into cardiac arrest, though her heart is missing so it’s just conjecture.”
“Let’s say you’re right and she tripped and fell. We have to assume she was incapacitated to the point that she couldn’t even make an at
tempt to reach the phone. Look at the way her body fell. The way she’s facing, as if she were entering the room. If she’d tripped, she would have fallen forward, right? Maybe breaking her fall with her hands. But she fell backward and to the side, away from us.”
“So maybe a stroke or heart attack,” I said, seeing it clearly. “She just dropped where she was. Her left side would be pretty banged up from hitting the table, and she’d probably have hit her head against the wall or floor.”
“I want you to look for things that might not result in a death from natural causes.”
I raised my brows. “You think she could’ve been murdered?”
That had not been what I was expecting. But Jack was a hell of a cop, and if he was asking, it was because he had a reason. Sometimes the reason was only his gut, but it was enough for me.
Chapter Three
“I can’t do anything else here,” I said. “I should have an answer for you in a couple of hours though. I’m going to bring in the team and get her out of here.”
I got to my feet and stretched out my back, feeling a couple of vertebrae crack. “Just out of curiosity, why am I looking for a COD other than natural causes?”
“Did you notice the windows?” Jack asked.
I waited for my brain to shift gears and think about the investigation outside the body, but I was coming up at a loss with the windows. They looked like regular windows to me. “What about them?” I asked.
“This one here and one in the living room.” He moved to the window to the right of the bed. “The curtains got shut in the window when it was closed. If you look past the damage done by the cats, I think you’ll find that Mrs. McGowen was very neat and tidy.” He opened the closet door and inside were perfectly folded sweaters on a shelf, clothes hung by color, and shoes in labeled shoe boxes. “Everything has a place. I’ve never seen closets as organized as these before.”
“So someone else wasn’t quite as careful,” I said.
“The kitchen is the same,” he said. “It’s the only room in the house she’s modernized. It’s state of the art. Pans, dishes, cookbooks. Everything is in meticulous order. Except there’s dishes in the sink and an empty pan on the floor.”
“From the banana bread for the neighbors?”
“Hard to tell. Common sense tells me there’d be a lot more dishes or…something. This seems more simple. Two mixing bowls in the sink and an empty pan.”
“You’d have a much better guess in that area that I would,” I said.
“Very true. Suzy Homemaker you will never be.”
I could see the grin in his eyes, though his mouth was covered by the mask.
“My talents lie in other areas.”
“So I’ve discovered. Have I told you I’m grateful?” he asked.
“Not since eleven-fifty-three last night when you slapped me on the butt and told me good game.”
“I was showing good sportsmanship. How come I didn’t get a slap on the butt?”
“Because I was comatose and facedown in the mattress. You know it was a good game when that happens. And stop fishing for compliments. We were talking about my talents.”
The front door opened and the sound of muted voices could be heard as my assistant and one of the interns made their way with the gurney to the bedroom.
Sheldon Durkus needed a job so he could work his way through mortuary school, and I’d needed an assistant. It had seemed like the stars had aligned when he’d answered my ad for employment. In the month since I’d hired him, he’d caught on quickly as long as what he was working on was in the lab. It was alive people he wasn’t so great with. I’d questioned more than once whether being a mortician was in his future, as it was necessary to be sympathetic to the living while taking care of their loved ones. The sympathy gene seemed to have passed right through Sheldon.
Sheldon was what I liked to call pocket-sized. He was a few inches shorter than I was, and though he wasn’t overweight, he was doughy. He had a full head of black curly hair and a pencil-thin mustache that was so fine it looked like dirt smudges. He was a cross between Rob Schneider and a Cabbage Patch Kid. He was dressed in an army green coverall that he’d been given at mortuary school, and he wore a supply pack on his back— like a Ghostbuster.
“Doctor Graves,” he said as he entered the room, pulling the gurney behind him. And then he stopped as he caught sight of the victim.
“Why are her clothes moving?” he asked.
“Maggots.”
I won’t lie. I found a little satisfaction in the fact that he turned an unusual shade of green, and I was glad I was wearing the surgical mask so my smile didn’t show. I snuck a look at Jack and could see the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes.
“Ohmigod,” another voice said from the doorway.
Lily Bennet was my new intern. She had the face of a supermodel, the body of a Kardashian, and the brain of a scholar. She was close to six feet tall and her mink colored hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and waved halfway down her back. Every police officer in the county had tried making a move on her. No one had succeeded.
Statistically, it was ridiculous that she had just about everything possible going for her. Plus, she was just sarcastic enough that it was hard to hate her. I actually really liked her. She was still inexperienced, but she’d eventually make a hell of a dead doctor. Why she’d chosen to go the forensic pathologist route instead of being a surgeon where she could make the big bucks was beyond me, but she seemed determined, and I was getting someone with an exceptional skill set and brain for free.
“Well,” she said. “That’s unexpected.”
“A group of cats is called a clowder,” Sheldon said. “So technically, the victim was eaten by a clowder of cats. In case it needs to go in the report.”
There was an awkward pause while we all stared at Sheldon, and he wiped at the sweat on his upper lip.
“Right,” I said, thinking it probably would have to go in the report. “We’re going to have to be careful in transport. The meat between the remaining skin and bone is gone, so it’ll shift if we’re not careful. Bring everything with her in the bag.”
“How do we move her without dislodging the skin?” Lily asked.
The skin had dried out without the moisture of blood beneath it and looked somewhat mummified.
“The best way I’ve found is with straps or towels,” I said. “Our hands can do a lot of damage to sensitive tissues. Put a towel beneath each limb and use it to lift her into the bag. Let’s get her wrapped up. I’ve reached my tolerance level for smells for the day.”
I supervised to make sure they got the body into the bag okay, and then left them to finish up with the gurney. I followed Jack back out to the front porch. The air, warm as it was, was refreshing and I took off my mask, sucking in a deep breath. Jack did the same.
“I need to get a clear picture of her day to day routine,” he said. “I’m going to have the boys catalog this like a crime scene. I’d rather be safe than sorry. Who knows, maybe my gut is still on vacation.”
We’d only been back from our honeymoon for a couple of weeks, and things had been very slow leading into summer. It made it nice because we’d fallen into a routine of sorts, each getting home from work at reasonable hours and usually having time to eat lunch together during the day.
“Something just feels off here,” he said. “The people on this street know everything about each other, what they’re doing and when they’re doing it. She’s been dead for three days. Someone had to have seen something.”
“That might be the point,” I said. “If no one saw anything in a neighborhood like this, maybe she did slip and fall.”
“That would certainly be the preferable explanation. I just want to make sure. I’ve already called in for a search warrant. It’s easy enough to justify for a search of what could’ve contributed to her death, especially since the cats destroyed the body.”
Jack checked his watch as Sheldon and Lily rolled the gur
ney out the front door, and we all lifted it down the stairs. It had never happened to me, but I’d witnessed an EMT lose his grip on a gurney before and drop a victim. It wasn’t pretty. And it was never good in front of an audience.
“Let’s meet back here when you’re finished and we’ll do some door to doors. I’m anxious to talk to the neighbors.”
I was too, but I wasn’t sure if it was because I was nosy or because Jack had stirred something in me that was making me look at the scene from a different angle. The best thing I could do was get back to the lab and get started.
Graves Funeral Home was on the corner of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. As far as locations went, it was a good one. It was close enough to the cemetery that it was convenient for the families of the deceased, and close enough to the Town Square that my signage was a good advertisement to passersby.
There was a strip mall across the street that held a myriad of revolving businesses, but over the past month or so, the owners had given it a facelift and repaved the parking lot. The laundromat was still there, but a delicatessen had just opened in the corner unit, and a Crate and Go had opened in one of the middle units. There was a sign advertising that a Crossfit gym was coming soon, and I wondered if the convenience of it would give me the incentive to work out. I figured the answer to that was no unless they were giving away free hot fudge sundaes after every workout session.
I’d hitched a ride in the Suburban to come back to the funeral home, and we turned onto Catherine of Aragon. The Suburban was black and had large magnetic stickers on each side, advertising the funeral home, so it wasn’t like we were covert. Much of the traffic had pulled to the side with curious drivers watching us pass by. By this time of the morning, word around town would have spread about Mrs. McGowen’s death, and most everyone would know we were transporting her body.