THE CHATTANOOGA MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office occupied a small building on Amnicola Highway, several miles northeast of downtown. Unlike the Regional Forensic Center in Knoxville, which was part of UT Medical Center, Jess Carter’s facility was a freestanding structure, a nondescript, discreetly labeled rectangle of concrete block and glass that could have housed anything from a paint store to a software company. Its location always struck me as odd, too: its closest neighbor was the city’s police and fire department training facility, an adjacency that possessed a certain logic. Other nearby businesses seemed far more random, though, including a grain elevator, a chemical plant, a lumber company, television station, and trucking firm. On the other hand, I reflected as I turned into the small parking lot, death was no respecter of persons, nor of occupations; seen in that light, this blue-collar setting for the morgue made as much sense as any other.
In both square footage and staff, Jess’s facility was only half the size of Knoxville’s, but-also unlike the Knoxville center-it wasn’t handling cases from surrounding counties. The young murder victim dressed in drag whose body was found in the state forest in neighboring Marion County was an exception. Jess, and the Chattanooga police, had gotten involved because there was evidence to suggest that the victim had been abducted in Chattanooga.
Until a month ago, Jess’s staff of five had included a forensic anthropologist, Rick Fields, who was one of my former students. But Rick had just taken a similar position at the Regional Forensic Center in Memphis, which represented a big step up, in salary and in caseload: Memphis had about 150 murders a year, compared with Chattanooga’s 25 or 30. While Jess sought a replacement for Rick, I was filling in down here, just as she had been filling in as ME in Knoxville since Garland Hamilton’s suspension for incompetence.
I said hello to Amy, the receptionist separated from the lobby by a window of bulletproof glass. Amy pointed to my right, toward the end of the building that contained the autopsy suite, and buzzed me in through the metal door on that side of the lobby. Jess was just stitching up the abdominal cavity of an elderly white female. “Don’t tell me you’ve got another homicide,” I said.
Without looking up from her sutures, she answered, “No, just an unattended death. Colon cancer. She had just gone home from the hospital to die. The irony is, she was supposed to be in hospice care, but somehow the paperwork got lost, so they were scrambling around to get her signed up. If it had worked like it was supposed to-if there’d been a seamless handoff from the hospital to hospice-I wouldn’t have needed to spend two hours confirming what we already knew about her cause of death.”
Jess was wearing faded jeans-blue, not black-and a maroon scrub shirt. She looked more tired than I’d ever seen her look. Also less guarded and more human, somehow. It made me want to take care of her, ease the load she was carry ing. “No offense, but you look about halfway toward needing hospice care yourself,” I said.
“You silver-tongued flatterer, you,” she said, but the smart-ass words lacked her usual smart-ass crackle.
“Seriously,” I said, “you okay?”
“Tired. Really tired. In the past week I’ve done six autopsies here, four in Knoxville, and made a trip to Nashville. I’ve only had two days off, both of them Sundays, in the past month. I desperately need to hire a morgue technician, but our budget’s so tight the only thing keeping us out of the red is those two vacancies, the tech and the anthropologist.” I had never stopped to consider what a load Jess carried; her willingness to do double duty up in Knoxville was remarkably generous, and it was wearing her down fast.
She had her hair pulled back in a short ponytail, but a wisp had gotten loose and fallen across her face. She couldn’t reach up and brush it away because her gloves were a mess, so I did it for her. Then I laid my hand on her cheek. She leaned into it, and it felt good, so I put my other hand on her other cheek, cradling her face in my hands. She closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath, then puffed it out. As she did, she dropped her head deeper into my hands, her shoulders sagging with fatigue. Her gloved hands hung at her sides. I moved my hands from her face to her shoulders, then wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. She did not resist, and in a moment she laid her head on my chest. “I’m sorry you’re so tired, Jess,” I murmured. In response, she gave a small shiver, or maybe it was a sob. But then she stiffened and began to pull away. I held tight, and tried to soothe her. “Shhhh,” I said. “Just relax for a minute.”
For some reason I didn’t understand, it was the wrong thing to say. She began to struggle against me, and put her hands-messy gloves and all-on my chest and pushed me away. “Stop,” she said sharply. “Not here. I cannot be this way with you here.”
The words stung, or maybe it was the physical rejection that stung. Whichever the case, my face burned with disappointment and humiliation. “Dammit, Jess, then where? Not at my house-that wasn’t the place, either. Alan Gold’s? Those were somebody else’s hands on you there. Your house? You haven’t invited me there. Where does that leave? I’m confused and frustrated. I didn’t start this; you did. Unless I completely misread that dinner invitation you extended to yourself last week.”
Now it was her turn to flush. “Right now I’m working,” she said. “Would you do this in the middle of teaching a class?” She looked away and chewed on her lower lip. “No,” she said at last. “You didn’t misread. I’m confused, too. When I saw you last week, I thought you were finally over Kathleen’s death and ready for another relationship. What I failed to think about was whether or not I was ready.”
“Your divorce? How long has it been?”
“About six months. No; eight. But we’d been on the skids for a couple of years. Hell, I was on the verge of jumping ship myself. So how come it hurt so much when he beat me to the punch?” I saw tears welling up, something I’d never expected to see in the eyes of Jess Carter. I reached up to wipe them away, but she took a step back and held up a warning finger. Then she raised her arms, one after the other, and wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her scrubs. “I’m sorry, Bill,” she said. “This is harder than I thought, and I’m too tired and strung out to be smart about it.” She looked at the bloody smears her gloves had left on my chest. “I’m sorry about the shirt, too,” she said. “Go change into some scrubs, and while we’re looking at this forensic case, I’ll get Amy to run it through the wash.”
By the time I had changed, handed my wadded-up shirt to Amy, and returned to the autopsy room, Jess had rolled the cancer victim back to the cooler and rolled out the gurney on which our male murder victim lay. When the body came in eight days ago, she had taken X-rays and autopsied him; at this point, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see much that she hadn’t already spotted, but I was willing to give it a shot.
The crime scene photos hadn’t done justice to the violence inflicted on this battered body. The cranium-largely covered in the photos by the blond wig-had been hit with great force, more than once. Bone fragments had been driven deep into the brain; brain matter had oozed out like the insides of a smashed pumpkin. The zygomatic arches-the cheekbones-were both shattered; so were the nasal bone and the outside rim of the left eye orbit. From the X-rays Jess had clipped onto a light box on the wall, I could see that several ribs were broken, too.
I glanced from the body on the gurney to the cranial X-rays, then turned to Jess. “So was it the head trauma that killed him?”
“Superb deduction, Sherlock,” she said. “Massive brain trauma and acute subdural hematoma. I’m hoping you can give us an idea what the murder weapon was.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, “though with blunt-force trauma, it’s sometimes tough. The impression left by a baseball bat looks a lot like the impression left by a length of galvanized pipe. If we’re lucky, it might be something like a hammer, which leaves a nice round mark, or even an octagonal one, if the hammerhead is shaped that way-a wound with a distinctive signature. But from what I can see right now,” I said, bending down and peering at the face and cranium, “I don’t think we’re going to be that lucky.” It was a relief, after the awkwardness and tension of a few moments before, to burrow into the puzzle of a challenging case.
I did an overall visual exam first. The corpse’s most noticeable feature-aside from the battered skull with the top sliced off and the brain removed-was the differential decay: the stark contrast between the bare bones of the lower legs and the extensive soft tissue remaining on most of the body. The insects had managed to do a moderate amount of damage to the eyes, the nasal cavity, and the shoulders and base of the neck-an area that offered the only sizable horizontal surface on the upright body; otherwise, they’d been largely frustrated in their attempts to feast on the body that had been served up to them.
I rolled the body over. I saw numerous scratches on the back, and bits of pine bark embedded in the flesh, but those all looked like superficial abrasions, exactly what you’d expect to see on the back of a body lashed tightly to a tree.
“I don’t see anything, here or in the X-rays, that would suggest the manner of death involved anything other than the blunt-force trauma,” I said.
“Think you can tell what did it?”
“Hard to know till I get the soft tissue off,” I said. “Are you finished with him?” She nodded. “What I’d like to do, if you’re willing, is remove the head, take it back to Knoxville, and deflesh it so I can get a good look at the bone.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. She rolled over a tray of instruments. I chose a scalpel to begin cutting through the windpipe, esophagus, and muscles of the neck. When I had exposed the cervical vertebrae, I switched to an autopsy knife; scalpel blades were thin and relatively fragile, and all it took to break one was a little sideways pressure when the blade was wedged deep between two vertebrae.
As I began to cut between the second and third vertebrae, Jess moved to the corpse’s head and grasped it with both hands. She tilted it back, and also pulled slightly so that as the knife cut deeper, the gap between the bones widened. “Thanks,” I said. “That helps. Reduces the risk I’ll nick the bone, too.”
A few more strokes of the knife and the spine was severed. That left only the muscles and skin at the back of the neck, and those were easy to cut, especially as Jess continued to apply tension. When the head came completely free, she rotated it to study it, as if for the first time. As she gazed at it, I was reminded of a religious painting I’d seen once, of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist. But in the painting I’d seen, Salome looked exotic, youthful, and richly dressed; in the harsh fluorescent lights of the morgue, Jess-in her jeans and soiled scrub shirt-looked shabby, exhausted, and middle-aged. For the first time in the days since I’d found myself peering at the toes of her snakeskin boots, I began to despair of our chances at any sort of romance.
“I’ll bag this and put it in a cooler for you,” she said.
“Thanks. Do you still want me to go out to the death scene?”
“If you’re still willing,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “How far away is it?”
“Only about ten miles as the crow flies,” she said, “but probably twice that by road. And some of it’s gravel. So it’ll take forty-five minutes or an hour to get there.”
I checked my watch; it was already mid afternoon. “Guess I better make tracks, then.”
“Yeah. Why don’t you wash up and change-we’ve got some denim shirts with our logo on them; I’ll tell Amy to give you one-and I’ll pull together what you need to find your way out there.” She started toward the door, then stopped and turned back. “Bill? I’m sorry I’m a mess right now. Any false advertising was unintentional. Please don’t give up on me.” She took a step toward me, stood up on tiptoe, and kissed me quickly on the cheek. Before I could react, she was out the door of the autopsy room.
I looked down at the eyeless severed head on the gurney as if it had somehow witnessed the scene. “Well, unlike you,” I said, “I’m not quite dead yet.”
After I washed up and changed into the shirt Amy had given me, I found Jess in her office, at the other end of the building. She opened her desk drawer and fished out a set of keys and a handheld electronic gadget. She switched on the gizmo, and after a few seconds an image flashed onto an LCD screen the size of an index card. The image diagrammed a dozen points; lines from each of the twelve converged on a point at the screen’s center.
“Looks like a constellation,” I said, “except the dots aren’t connected in the shape of what’s supposed to look like an animal, but never does.”
“That’s us at the center,” she said. “We’re receiving GPS signals from twelve satellites. More satellites is good for the accuracy; you shouldn’t have any trouble pinpointing the spot.”
Her fingers flicked rapidly over the buttons, and the image changed to a small color topographical map, this one bearing two dots: one at the center, and one in the lower left corner. “That dot in the lower left? That’s a waypoint marking the death scene. The center one is us. That’s the thing I like best about GPS: it always acknowledges that I’m the center of the universe.” She laughed at herself. “God, how can I have such a gigantic ego and such stunted self-esteem at the same time?”
“Well, as Thoreau said, consistency is the mark of small minds,” I said.
“Actually, that was Emerson,” she said. “And he said ‘little minds,’ actually: ‘A foolish consistency is the hob goblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.’ If memory serves.”
“Very impressive,” I said. “How come I thought that came from Thoreau?”
“Same vein, sort of,” she said. “Thoreau’s trademark line is ‘different drummer,’ which is even more famous. ‘Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?’-almost nobody quotes that lead-in, which is a shame. ‘Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.’ Too bad he didn’t copyright that; with the royalties, he could’ve bought up Walden Pond and everything for miles around. Built himself a fancy mansion instead of that tatty shack he cobbled together out of scrap boards and recycled nails.”
Jess’s mixture of scholarly erudition and quirky irreverence always caught me by surprise, like topspin on a serve in tennis or Ping-Pong. But I liked it, the way I liked iced tea on a hot day. “They teach you all this in med school over at Vanderbilt?”
“Naw,” she said, “this is what I have to show for my four years at Smith. Scraps of poetry and philosophy. Oh, and that one unfulfilling foray into dating within my own gender.”
“Ah. I had almost managed to forget,” I said, feeling awkward and sounding prudish.
“Come on, Bill, that’s an experiment I did once, twenty years ago. Don’t turn it into something that defines me. Hell, I tried all sorts of things when I was young, didn’t you?” She was glaring at me now; I had pressed one of her hot buttons without intending to. “I mean, isn’t that part of how we grow and learn who we are, by trying things on and seeing what fits? I tried on another girl, and she didn’t fit. Big deal. I got drunk a few times in college, too, but that doesn’t make me an alcoholic. I cheated on a biology test in high school, but that doesn’t make me a cheat. I stole a candy bar when I was six, but I’m not a thief.”
I felt ashamed of my small-mindedness. “I’m sorry, Jess. I don’t judge you for it. Or maybe I do, but I don’t like the part of me that does. I came along, what, ten years ahead of you? I grew up in a small town, where even straight sex was practically immoral. I went to a conservative college, and I settled into a traditional life-marriage and family-right after graduating. My horizons got drawn a little nearer, a little narrower, than yours. Doesn’t mean I want my mind or my heart to be narrow.” She still looked mad. “Please,” I said, “this is important to me. You are important to me. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but I’d like the chance to figure it out. I think maybe you would, too. At least, I hope you still do.”
Her eyes bored into mine, fiercely still. And then, almost imperceptibly, something softened, yielded just a fraction. I smiled. She smiled. I laughed. So did she. “God,” she said, “you make me so mad sometimes. But you also make me feel so human.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” she said, but her eyes were smiling as she said it. “Do we never really grow up? Sometimes I feel as clueless and confused inside as I did when I was fourteen, and first started feeling these inexplicable, thrilling, terrifying stirrings.”
“Oh my,” I said. “It thrills and terrifies me just to imagine you at fourteen.” I leaned toward her, angling for a kiss. She placed a hand on my chest and held me off. “Not here. Not now,” she said. “But soon, I hope. You need to get going if you want to have any daylight when you get out to Prentice Cooper.” She ended the conversation by reaching down and hefting something from beneath her desk. It was a small cooler, and as she handed it to me, I felt something round and heavy shift inside. It was the dead cross-dresser’s head.
I set the cooler down on the desk long enough to stuff the keys and GPS receiver in the roomy pockets of my cargo pants. Then I hefted the cooler in hand, found the four-wheel drive Bronco Jess had offered me for the trip, and set out for Prentice Cooper State Forest, hoping I wouldn’t have a cooler-smashing accident or get pulled over by a curious cop.
Prentice Cooper lay barely ten miles west of Chattanooga, but it was a world away, both topographically and culturally. Most of its 26,000 acres lined the slopes and rim of the Tennessee River Gorge, a thousand-foot-deep gash the river had carved through the southern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. In addition to the GPS, which would guide me to the exact spot where the body was found, I had a printed topo map of the area, too. To reach the forest, I would head west for about five miles on state highway 27, which was nestled between the base of Signal Mountain and the river’s north shore. Then the highway would veer north, up a smaller side gorge carved by Suck Creek, which-according to the topo map-would split into North Suck Creek and South Suck Creek. The highway angled and corkscrewed up the side of South Suck Creek, finally topping out-for two or three miles-near Suck Creek School. If I missed the turnoff to the state forest, I would quickly find myself descending the west flank of the mountain through Ketner Gap, which looked every bit as steep as Suck Creek, and appeared to offer few opportunities for a U-turn.
I needn’t have worried. The left turn to Prentice Cooper was well marked, as was another left through a meandering collection of small rural houses. Civilization dropped away fast, though, as soon as I crossed the boundary into the forest. Asphalt gave way to gravel; yards gave way to woods.
I rolled down the windows on the Bronco. The weather was sunny but cool, and the air up here was as crisp and sweet as a good apple.
Suddenly I heard a gunshot. Then another, and another. I hit the brakes, and the Bronco rasped to a stop, enveloping me in a cloud of my own dust. The dust kept me from seeing my assailant coming, but it also hid me from sight, and from aim, so I figured I was no worse off than I’d been.
Just as I was about to back around and hightail it back to civilization, the dust settled and I saw it: RIFLE RANGE, said a brown and white sign pointing down a side road to the right. The direction of the gunshots. Amused and appalled by my paranoia, I wiped a fresh layer of dusty sweat-or was it sweaty dust? — from my forehead and headed south again. Suck Creek Mountain was more plateau than peak, so the road ran surprisingly straight over gently rolling terrain. Two or three miles in, I bisected a cluster of forest ser vice structures, including a fire lookout tower on a rise to the right. “Well, I might be paranoid,” I said out loud, “but at least I’m still on Tower Road.” Then I said, “I might be turning into a guy who talks to himself, though.” After a pause, I added, “Yep. I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that.”
Jess had told me that the body was found just off a Jeep trail near Pot Point. The name had concerned me-in the course of my last case involving a body in a mountainous rural area, I’d learned firsthand that where there were pot patches, there were often booby traps, too, ranging from shotguns with trip wires to poisonous snakes staked out with fishhooks through their tails-so I had asked Jess if “Pot Point” referred to illegal agriculture. “No, I’m pretty sure the name is some historical reference,” she had answered, “but I don’t know the particulars.”
On the little GPS screen, it hadn’t looked far from the forest entrance to Pot Point, but on the ground, it seemed to be taking forever. The road was good, but it was gravel, so my speed rarely topped twenty miles an hour. I perked up when I passed Sheep Rock Road, as that meant I was more than halfway there.
Two miles later, I reached a fork in the road. Tower Road, the main artery through the forest, bore right; Davis Pond Road-my turn-angled left. The terrain became hillier, which meant I was nearing the edge of the plateau. The road began to pitch and curve, and the woods closed in. After an undulating mile, I passed a small pond on the left, and the gravel road suddenly became a dirt road. Then it forked into two smaller dirt roads and I stopped, unsure which way to go. The GPS display showed only one road here, bearing east near the rim of the gorge; my printed topo map showed two roads, roughly parallel, which I assumed were branching from the spot where I’d just stopped: Upper Pot Point Road and Lower Pot Point Road. Unfortunately, the waypoint marking the crime scene was on the GPS, so I couldn’t tell which of the two roads to take.
I pulled out my cellphone to call Jess for clarification, but I wasn’t getting any signal bars. Civilization, or at least cellphone ser vice, had dropped away as I had threaded my way up Suck Creek, and my journey into the forest hadn’t done much to restore either one. I got out of the Bronco and flattened the USGS map across the hood, hoping a side-by-side comparison of the two maps might help. And indeed it did, though not quite as I’d expected. A white Ford 4 × 4 pickup came slewing off of Upper Pot Point Road; when the driver saw me, he stopped alongside me and rolled down his window. There was a Tennessee Department of Forestry logo on the door of the truck-the tree in the center tipped me off-and the shoulder of the man’s tan shirt bore a patch with the same logo. I caught a brief snatch of country music-“I know you’re married, but I love you still,” wailed a woman-before he switched off the radio and leaned out the window. He was tall and lanky, with curly red hair going to gray, and a short beard that had already gone to white. His face was weathered and ruddy except in the deep crinkles that years of smiling or squinting had etched in it. He glanced at the official logo on the side of the ME’s vehicle, then at me and my map. “You returning to the scene of the crime?” he asked.
“Not returning. Headed there for my first look,” I said. “But I can’t tell from the map whether I want Upper Pot Point Road or Lower.”
“Well, you want Lower Pot Point, but you don’t want it much. Gets kinda rough in spots, but you should be all right in that Bronco. Take your right-hand fork here for about a mile; there’s a turnout just past a little water crossing. Then you got to bushwhack about a hundred yards to the rim trail…” He trailed off, studying me and my navigational aids doubtfully. “Tell you what,” he said, “let me show you the way. If you haven’t been there before, I’m not sure you’ll find it on your own.”
I thanked him, and started folding up the big topo map. “Oh, one other question, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“Fire away.”
“Why is it called Pot Point? Does the name refer to marijuana, or Native American artifacts?”
“Neither,” he said. “Back before TVA built Nickajack Dam, there were three big rapids in the river just below that overlook. The one farthest downstream was called the Frying Pan, the middle one was called the Skillet, and the uppermost was called the Boiling Pot. Pretty ferocious, supposedly-there’s a house on the shore there that was built partly from the wreckage of old riverboats. I guess the Boiling Pot must’ve been the biggest, since the overlook is called Pot Point. Me, if I’d been naming the rapids, I’d have called the middle rapid the Frying Pan and the next one downstream the Fire. Get it? Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire?”
“Oh, I got it,” I said. “Yep, that’s a good one, all right.”
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Fire away,” I said.
“The body’s been gone for a week. What are you hoping to find?”
“Couple things,” I said. “Be better to show you than try to explain. You want to hang around and see?”
He checked his watch-it was close to three o’clock, and I could practically see him calculating how long before his workday ended, and subtracting the half hour it would take to drive back to the highway. “It won’t take more than an hour, will it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “And if it does, you can leave me on my own. I was expecting to be out there by myself anyway.”
He put his truck in reverse, cut his wheels sharply, and eased back until his rear bumper nudged a sapling at the edge of the woods. Then he spun the steering wheel to the left and edged forward, narrowly clearing the Bronco’s fender as he turned. Motioning for me to follow him, he idled down the narrowing dirt track.
The road was a fresh reddish brown cut through the woods, a wound whose edges had not yet healed; its newness explained why it hadn’t shown on the GPS map. Rutted clay alternated with stretches of tan sand and exposed sandstone. After several minutes, we bumped across a rocky little stream, then the pickup nosed into a cut in the treeline where the bulldozer that carved the road had shoved a pile of dirt and roots twenty feet into the woods. The F-150 pulled far enough forward to allow me room behind him, and we got out.
A crisscrossing of knobby tire tracks testified to a spate of recent traffic here, but otherwise, there was no hint that a crime scene lay nearby. “I’m mighty glad I ran into you,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d have found this on my own. Probably not.”
“Glad to do it,” he said. “Gives me an excuse to get out of the truck and walk in the woods on a nice day. Name’s Gassoway, by the by. Clifton. Call me Cliff.”
“Cliff, I’m Bill Brockton. I’m a forensic anthropologist from UT-Knoxville.” We shook hands.
“Are you the one with all the bodies?”
“That’s me,” I said. “Some folks collect antiques; I collect corpses.” I glanced back at the Bronco, considering whether to show him the contents of the cooler in the rear floorboard, but decided that might be too much, too soon. “Lead on.”
We followed the small stream for a short distance; there was no clearly defined path, but the leaves and underbrush looked recently trampled. After a hundred yards or so, we intersected a well-worn trail marked by blazes of white paint on tree trunks every so often. He turned right, and I followed. “Looks like we’re not as far off the beaten path as I’d thought,” I said.
“We’re near the southern end of the Cumberland Trail,” he said. “It’s still a work in progress, but eventually it’ll stretch three hundred miles along the Cumberland Plateau, clear up to Kentucky. We don’t get as many hikers as sections a little farther north-Fiery Gizzard and Devil’s Staircase and the Big South Fork have some spectacular scenery-but I like seeing the river gorge here.”
As he said it, I began noticing gaps in the vegetation to our left, gaps that soon widened to reveal a spectacular view. A mile to the south, a steep mountainside rose in a dark, concave curve; at its base, the Tennessee River made a wide U-turn, flowing south from Chattanooga, deflected back to the north by this immovable geologic object, then finding passage to the west in an S-curve two miles long.
The overlook where we stood consisted of a half dozen sandstone ledges carpeted with moss and straw from a grove of widely spaced pines. Some of the trees looked healthy; others had fallen victim to pine beetles and violent winds, which had snapped their trunks ten feet above the ground.
The ledges adjoined one another, each one slightly higher or lower than its neighbors. The geometry reminded me of Falling-water, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house whose many balconies jutted daringly above a rocky stream and waterfall in Pennsylvania. Near the edge of the westernmost terrace, only a few feet from the bluff, stood a large pine swathed in yellow and black crime scene tape. I looked from the tree to the river gorge.
“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.