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.
CHAPTER 15
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 c
ollege—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.
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