Fatal Voyage tb-4

by Reichs, Kathy

  She cocked an eyebrow, then did her own ticking.

  “A body part that might or might not be related to an aviation disaster. An old man who might or might not be dead. A property that might or might not be implicated in either situation.”

  The hunch of an anthropologist who might or might not be the spawn of Satan. I didn't say it.

  “Let's at least go to his camp and look around,” I pushed.

  She thought a moment, then looked at her watch.

  “That I can do.”

  “Give me five minutes.” I gestured at Boyd.

  She nodded.

  “Come on, boy.”

  The head came up and the eyebrows puckered.

  A ping in my mind. The dead squirrel. My line of work makes me unusually sensitive to the smell of putrefaction, yet I hadn't detected a trace. Boyd went ballistic at ten yards.

  “Could the dog ride along?” I asked. “He's not cadaver-trained, but he's pretty good at sniffing out carrion.”

  “He sits in back.”

  I opened the door and whistled. Boyd bounded over and leaped in.

  Eleven days had passed since the Air TransSouth crash. All remains had been taken to the morgue, and the last of the wreckage was being hauled down the mountain. The recovery operation was winding down, and the change was evident.

  The county road was now open, though a sheriff 's deputy protected the entrance to the Forest Service road. The families and press were gone, and only a handful of vehicles occupied the overlook holding area.

  Crowe cut the engine where the road ended, about a half mile beyond the cutoff to the crash site. A large granite outcropping lay to the right. Clipping a radio to her belt, she crossed the gravel track and walked the uphill side, carefully studying the tree line.

  I leashed Boyd and followed, keeping him as close to me as I could. After a full five minutes the sheriff cut left and disappeared up the embankment into the trees. I gave Boyd his head, and was dragged along in her wake.

  The land climbed steeply, leveled off, then shot downward into a valley. As we moved farther and farther from the road, the trees closed around us, and everything started to look the same. But the landmarks given by the Wahnetah family made sense to the sheriff. She found the path they'd described, and from it a small dirt road. I couldn't tell if it was the same logging trail that passed by the wreckage field or another similar to it.

  It took Crowe forty minutes to locate Daniel's cabin, set among beech and pine at the edge of a small creek. I probably would have walked right past it.

  The camp looked as though it had been thrown up in an afternoon. The shack was wood, the floor dirt, the roof corrugated tin, extended in front to provide shelter for a makeshift bench beside the door. A wooden table and another bench sat to the left front of the shanty, a tree stump to the right. Out back I could see a pile of bottles, cans, tires, and other refuse.

  “How do you suppose the tires got here?” I asked.

  Crowe shrugged.

  Gingerly, I cracked the door and stuck my head inside. In the gloom I could make out a cot, an aluminum lawn chair, and a collapsible table holding a rusty camp stove and a collection of plastic dishes and cups. Fishing gear, a bucket, a shovel, and a lantern hung from nails. Kerosene cans lined the floor. That was it.

  “Would the old man leave his fishing gear if he planned to move on?”

  Another shrug.

  Lacking a real plan, Crowe and I decided to split up. She searched the creek bank while I walked the surrounding woods. My canine companion sniffed and peed contentedly.

  Returning to the shack, I secured Boyd to a table leg, swung the door wide, and propped it with a rock. Inside, the air smelled of mildew, kerosene, and muscatel. Millipedes skittered as I shifted objects, and at one point a daddy longlegs high-stepped up my arm. I found nothing to indicate where Daniel Wahnetah had gone or when he'd left. Or why.

  Crowe reappeared as I was poking through the refuse heap. After toeing over dozens of wine bottles, cracker tins, and Dinty Moore beef stew cans, I gave up and picked my way out to join her.

  Trees whispered in the wind. Leaves sailed across the ground in a colorful regatta, and a corner of the corrugated tin rose and fell with a scraping sound. Though the air felt dense and heavy, there was movement all around us.

  Crowe knew what I was thinking. Without a word she pulled a small spiral-bound atlas from her jacket and flipped through the pages.

  “Show me,” she said, handing me the book.

  The map she'd chosen was a close-up of the piece of Swain County in which we stood. Using elevation lines, the county road, and the logging trails, I located the crash site. Then I estimated the position of the courtyard house and pointed to it.

  “Here.”

  Crowe studied the topography around my finger.

  “You're sure there's a structure back in there?” I heard doubt in her voice.

  “Yes.”

  “It's less than a mile.”

  “By foot?”

  She nodded, a slower motion than usual.

  “There's no road I know of, so we might as well go overland.”

  “Can you find it?”

  “I can find it.”

  We spent an hour threading our way through trees and brush, up one ridge and down another, following a track that was clear to Crowe but invisible to me. Then, at an ancient pine, its trunk knotted and worn, we emerged onto a path that even I could recognize.

  We came to a high wall, vaguely familiar from my previous visit. Every sense sharpened as we moved along the mossy stone. A jay cawed, shrill and strident, and my skin seemed to tighten on my body. There was something here. I knew it.

  Boyd continued to amble and snuffle, oblivious to my tension. I wrapped the leash around my palm, tightened my grasp.

  Within yards, the wall made a ninety-degree turn. Crowe rounded the corner and I followed, my grip so tight I felt my nails dig into my palm.

  The trees ended three quarters of the distance up the wall. Crowe stopped at the verge of the woods and Boyd and I caught up.

  Ahead and to the left I spotted another walled enclosure, the rock face rising in the distance beyond. I had my bearings. We'd approached from the rear of the property; the house lay ahead of us, its back to the escarpment. The wall we'd been skirting surrounded a larger area I hadn't noted on my first visit. The courtyard was within the larger enclosure.

  “I'll be damned.” Crowe reached down and released the safety on her gun.

  She called out as I had done. Called again.

  Eyes and ears alert, we proceeded to the house and climbed the steps. The shutters were still closed, the windows still draped. I was gripped by the same sense of foreboding as on my first visit.

  Crowe stepped to the side of the door and gestured with an arm. When Boyd and I had moved behind her, she knocked. Still no answer.

  She knocked again, identified herself. Silence.

  Crowe raised her eyes and looked around.

  “No phone lines. No power lines.”

  “Cell phone and generator.”

  “Could be. Or the place could be deserted.”

  “Do you want to see the courtyard?”

  “Not without a warrant I don't.”

  “But, Sheriff—”

  “No warrant, no entry.” She looked at me, her eyes unblinking. “Let's go. I'll buy you a Dr Pepper.”

  At that moment, a light rain began to fall. I listened to drops tick softly on the porch roof, frustration seething in me. She was right. It was nothing but a hunch. But every cell in my being was telling me that something important lay close at hand. Something evil.

  “Could I run Boyd around the property, see if he has any thoughts?”

  “Keep him outside the walls, I've got no objection. I'll check for vehicular access. If folks are coming here, they must be driving.”

  For fifteen minutes Boyd and I crisscrossed the brush to the west of the house, much as I had on my first trip. T
he dog showed no reaction. Though I was beginning to suspect the squirrel hit had been a fluke, I decided to make one last sweep, skirting the edge of the forest up to its terminus at the second enclosure. This would be virgin territory.

  We were twenty feet from the wall when Boyd's head snapped up. His body tensed, and the hair prickled along his back. He rotated his snout, testing the air, then growled in a way I'd heard only once, deep and feral and vicious. Then he lunged, choking and barking as though possessed.

  I staggered, barely able to hold him.

  “Boyd! Stop!”

  Spreading my feet, I grabbed the leash with both hands. The dog continued to pull, muscles straining, forefeet scrabbling inches above the ground.

  “What is it, boy?”

  We both knew.

  I hesitated, heart pounding. Then I unwrapped the leash and let it fall.

  Boyd flew to the wall and exploded in a frenzy of barking, approximately six feet south of the back corner. I could see that the mortar was crumbling at that point, and that a dozen stones had tumbled free, leaving a gap between the ground and the wall's foundation.

  I ran to the dog, crouched at his shoulder, and inspected the gap. The soil was moist and discolored. Overturning a fallen stone, I saw a dozen tiny brown objects.

  Instantly, I knew what Boyd had found.

  I DID NOT GO TO THE SWAIN COUNTY COURTHOUSE ON MONDAY.Instead, I recrossed the mountains west to Tennessee, and by midmorning was approximately thirty miles northwest of Knoxville, approaching the entrance to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The day was wet and gloomy, and my wipers slapped a steady cadence back and forth, clearing two fans on the misty windshield.

  Through the side window I could see an old woman and toddler feeding swans on the bank of a small lagoon. At the age of ten I'd had a run-in with an ugly duckling that could have taken out a commando force. I questioned the wisdom of their outing.

  After showing ID at a guardhouse, I drove across a vast parking area to the reception center. My host was waiting, signed me in, and we returned to the car. Another hundred yards, and my new ORNL badge and license plates were verified at a third checkpoint before I was allowed to pass through a chain-link fence surrounding the compound.

  “Pretty tight security. I thought this was Department of Energy.”

  “It is. Most of the work involves energy conservation, computers and robotics, biomedical and environmental conservation, medical radioisotope development, that sort of thing. We maintain security to protect DOE intellectual property and physical equipment. There's also a high-flux isotope reactor on-site.”

  Laslo Sparkes was in his thirties but already nurturing a stout paunch. He had short, slightly bowed limbs and a round face, pockmarked on the cheeks.

  Oak Ridge began as a World War II wonder baby, constructed in just three short months in 1943. Thousands were dying in Europe and Asia, and Enrico Fermi and his colleagues had just achieved nuclear fission in a squash court under the stands of the football stadium at the University of Chicago. Oak Ridge's mission had been simple: build the atomic bomb.

  Laslo directed me through a labyrinth of narrow streets. Turn right here. Left. Left. Right. Except for its vast size, the complex looked like an apartment project in the Bronx.

  Laslo indicated a dark brick building identical to a score of other dark brick buildings.

  “Park here,” he said.

  I pulled over and cut the engine.

  “I really appreciate your doing this on such short notice.”

  “You were there when I asked for help.”

  Years earlier, Laslo had needed bone for his master's research in anthropology, and I'd provided samples. We'd kept in touch throughout his doctoral work and during the decade he'd been a research scientist at Oak Ridge.

  Laslo waited while I retrieved a small cooler from the trunk, then led me into the building and up the stairs to his lab. The room was small and windowless, every millimeter crammed with battered steel desks, computers, printers, refrigerators, and a million machines that glowed and hummed. Glass vials, water containers, stainless-steel instruments, and boxes of latex gloves lined the countertops, and cardboard cartons and plastic buckets were stacked below.

  Laslo led me to a work space in back and reached for the cooler. When I handed it to him, he removed a plastic bag, peeled off the tape, and peeked inside.

  “Give this to me again,” he said, sniffing the bag's contents.

  As I explained my trek with Lucy Crowe, Laslo poured dirt from the bag into a glass container. Then he began entering information onto a blank form.

  “Where did you sample?”

  “I collected where the dog indicated, under the wall and under the stones that had fallen out. I figured that soil would be most protected.”

  “Good thinking. Normally the corpse acts as a shield for the soil, but stones would have had the same effect.”

  “Does rain create problems?”

  “In a protected environment the heavy, mucoidlike secretions produced from anaerobic fermentation bind the soil together, making dilutional factors from rainfall insignificant.”

  He sounded like he was reading from one of his articles in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

  “Keep it simple, please. This is way off my field.”

  “You spotted the decomp stain.”

  “Actually, my dog did.” I indicated a plastic vial. “The pupae are what tipped me.”

  Laslo withdrew the jar, twisted off the lid, and shook a number of casings into the palm of his hand. Each looked like a miniature football.

  “So maggot migration had taken place.”

  “If the stain is from a decomp espisode.” I'd had all night to worry over Boyd's discovery. Though I was sure his nose and my instincts were correct, I wanted proof.

  “Maggot pupae definitely suggest the presence of a corpse.” He replaced the casings. “I think your dog was right on.”

  “Can you determine if it was an animal?”

  “The amount of volatile fatty acids will tell us if the body was over one hundred pounds. Very few mammals get that big.”

  “What about hunting? A deer or bear could get that big.”

  “Did you find any hairs?”

  I shook my head.

  “Decaying animals leave behind tons of hair. And bones, of course.”

  When an organism dies, scavengers, insects, and microbes take an immediate interest, some munching from the outside, others from within, until the body is reduced to bone. This is known as decomposition.

  Ruby would talk in terms of dust to dust, but the process is much more complicated than that.

  Muscle, comprising 40 to 50 percent of the weight of a human body, is composed of protein, which is composed of amino acids. At death, the fermentation of fat and protein yields volatile fatty acids, or VFAs, through bacterial action. Inside the gut, other microbes do their part. As putrefaction advances, liquids ooze from the body, carrying with them the VFAs. Death investigators call the mixture soup.

  Laslo's research focused at the microbial level, analyzing organic components contained in the dirt under and around a body. Years of work had demonstrated a correlation between the decay process and VFA production.

  I watched him filter soil through a stainless-steel sieve.

  “Exactly what do you look for in the dirt?”

  “I don't use soil, I use soil solution.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “The liquid component between soil particles. But first I have to clean it.”

  He weighed the sample.

  “As body fluids flow through, the organic matter becomes bound to the soil. I can't use chemical extractants for separation, because that would partially dissolve the volatile fatty acids from the decomposing body.”

  “And alter their measurements.”

  “Exactly.”

  He placed the soil in a centrifuge tube and added water.

  “I use deionized water in a ratio
of two to one.”

  The tube went onto a vortex for one minute to mix the solution. Then he transferred it to a centrifuge and closed the lid.

  “The temperature inside is held at five degrees. I'll centrifuge for forty minutes, then filter the sample to remove any remaining microorganisms. After that it's simple. I'll check the pH, acidify with a formic acid solution, and pop the thing into the gas chromatograph.”

  “How about a crash course.”

  Laslo finished adjusting settings, then gestured to a desk and we both sat.

  “O.K. As you know, I'm looking at the products of muscle and fat breakdown called volatile fatty acids. Are you familiar with the four stages of decomposition?”

  Anthropologists and death investigators think of corpses as being in one of four broad stages: fresh, bloated, decayed, or skeletal.

  I nodded.

  “There's little change in VFAs in a fresh corpse. In the second stage, a body bloats due to anaerobic fermentation, primarily in the gut. This causes skin breakage and the leakage of fermentation byproducts rich in butyric acids.”

  “Butyric acids?”

  “Volatile fatty acids include forty-one different organic compounds, of which butyric acid is one. Butyric, formic, acetic, propionic, valeric, caproic, and heptanoic are detectable in soil solution because they're soluble in water. Two of them, formic and acetic, are too abundant in nature to be of much use.”

  “Formic is the one that causes pain from ant bites, right?”

  “That's the one. Caproic and heptanoic are only found in significant amounts during the colder months. Propionic, butyric, and valeric are my boys. They're released from a decomposing corpse and deposited in soil solutions in specific ratios.”

  I felt like I was back in Biochem 101.

  “Since butyric and propionic acids are formed by anaerobic bacteria in the gut, the levels are high during the bloat stage.”

  I nodded.

  “Later, during decay, aerobic bacteria join the act.”

  “So at stage three there's a surge in all VFA formation.”