“Forgive my ignorance,” he said, “but do you have to get the family’s permission for that?”
I shook my head. “As a forensic case, it — she — is now in the medical examiner’s system. Processing the remains, getting them down to bone, is standard investigative protocol.”
He nodded. “What’d the M.E. find? Anything helpful?”
“I’m not sure how helpful this is,” I said, “but it’s interesting. She lost a lot of blood, but not enough to kill her. He thinks she died of a coronary.”
“A heart attack?” Kittredge looked puzzled.
“Yeah. The M.E. thinks she died of fright.”
He whistled softly. “That’s a first, for me. But I can believe it, considering what the guy was doing to her. Anything else?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I want to take a closer look at the right hand once it’s cleaned up. Something about that missing digit bugs me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. No pun intended.”
Kittredge nodded slowly. “I’d like you to take a look at what was in her mouth,” he said. “I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe you’ll have an idea.”
“I’ll try. Always happy to help, if I can.”
Kittredge leaned across the table and picked up a flat plastic sleeve, holding it up to display one side. Inside the sleeve was a sheet of what had been crisp white paper in a past life, but was now stained and smeared and wrinkled. In addition to what appeared to be random blotches, the sheet bore numerous fingerprints, these etched in bright purple, a hue somewhere between raspberry and grape jelly. I turned to Art. “You got prints off that wad of paper? Damn, you’re good.”
Art shrugged modestly. “Ninhydrin. Binds to the amino acids in proteins. Any time you handle something, you leave behind a few skin cells, and there’s protein in those cells. A quick spritz”—he nodded toward a spray bottle on the table—“and presto.”
“Presto indeed,” I said. “That’s a lot of prints.”
“At least three different sets,” he said. “Two men and one woman, looks like.”
“And good enough to run through AFIS?” I was proud that I knew the acronym for the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
“Good enough to give us a match already,” Kittredge interjected. “One of the men.”
“You’re kidding.”
The detective shook his head. “Nope. Dead serious.”
“Amazing.”
“What’s even more amazing,” said Kittredge, “is that the guy’s name is right here on the page.”
“His name?”
“Yep. Full name. Signature, too.”
“He wrote a note and actually signed it?”
“Not a note, exactly. Take a look, tell me what you think.” The detective handed me the plastic sleeve.
I flipped it over, and my heart nearly stopped.
Neatly typed on a sheet of UT letterhead, the name — and the scrawled but familiar signature beside it — read “William M. Brockton.”
I stared at the stained and rumpled piece of paper — the first page of a forensic report I’d written and submitted — its edges thick with purple fingerprints. My fingerprints. I looked from Kittredge’s face to Art Bohanan’s and back again. “How the hell,” I finally said, “did that end up in the mouth of a dead woman?”
Art said nothing; Kittredge said, “My question exactly, Doc. I was hoping you might be able to answer it for me.” Still reeling from shock, I nodded numbly, then drew a deep breath and took another, longer look.
I had recognized the format the moment I’d glimpsed the page. It was a forensic report, the kind I’d written and signed dozens of times, in dozens of cases. This particular report, I saw upon closer inspection, was addressed to a state trooper in Alaska — Corp. Byron Keller — and the subject line read “Re: Forensic case 90–02.”
I remembered the case well; in fact, I’d mentioned it to Tyler, though not by number, less than twenty-four hours before, as we’d driven back to the morgue with the two bodies from the woods. Keller’s case had begun when a pair of Alaska hunters had found a skeleton, half buried in a gravel bar at the shore of a river. Keller had initially thought the skeleton might be that of a hiker who’d gotten lost and starved to death, or perhaps been killed by a bear. But there’d been no reports of missing hikers in the area; in addition, there were no traces of backpacking equipment or apparel: no boots, and in fact, no clothing of any kind.
Corporal Keller had contacted me after reading a newspaper story about one of my early Kansas cases — the Sawzall dismemberment case, the one where I’d teamed up with an FBI profiler — and called to ask if I’d take a look at the bones from the gravel bar. Intrigued by the lack of clothing or other contextual clues—taphonomy, in technical terms — I’d agreed, and two days later, a FedEx courier had delivered the bones to Neyland Stadium. The bones, as my report to Keller had detailed, were those of a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old white female, approximately five feet five inches tall. Three amalgam fillings in her teeth indicated that she’d been born sometime after 1950, and that she’d received good dental care during her youth; two unfilled cavities in her third molars suggested that she’d stopped going to the dentist as an adult, probably because she lacked the money. “Based on prior, similar cases,” I’d written, “it is possible that the victim was a prostitute, one whose disappearance might never have been reported.”
The memorable feature of the case, and the reason I’d mentioned it to Tyler, was that the victim — eventually identified as a missing Anchorage prostitute — had been abducted and flown to the wilderness by a local man who was both a hunter and a bush pilot. “An X-ray of the remains reveals a smear of lead on vertebra T-7,” I wrote, “indicating that she had been shot.” After receiving the report, Corporal Keller had returned to the riverbank with a metal detector, and found a gray bullet nestled in the gray gravel. Had she been transported to the wilderness and released as prey? The suspect denied it, but on the basis of the remains I’d examined — plus three more shallow graves that had been marked by Xs on an aviation chart in the man’s airplane — he’d been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The details of the Alaska case had come back to me in a flash, the moment I’d seen Corporal Keller’s name on the report; indeed, it was almost as if the sun-bleached, river-rinsed bones of 90–02 were hovering in the air before me like a hologram. Then the hologram shimmered and shifted, the skull becoming a face, the empty eye orbits morphing into the piercing gaze of KPD Detective Kittredge. “So, Doc,” he prompted, “what can you tell me?”
“I can tell you I’m stunned,” I said. “As baffled as you. Maybe more.” He waited, his eyebrows raised to make sure I knew that he expected more. I racked my brain.
“The first time we talked,” Kittredge said slowly, “you described the crime scene at Cahaba Lane perfectly, before you’d ever been there. You had a picture of it in your hand before our photographer was even at the scene.”
“I got that photo in the mail,” I reminded him. “The killer sent it to me.”
“So you said. That night, you called 911 to say there were more bodies in the woods there.”
“It was a hunch,” I said, “not a confession.”
“Now, one of your reports — signed by you, handled by you — turns up in the mouth of one of the other bodies you said we’d find in the woods.”
“And I’m the one that found it in her mouth,” I pointed out. “Fished it out and handed it to Art. Remember? Why the hell would I hand over something that incriminating, if I were the one who’d put it there?”
He shrugged. “You own a hunting bow, Doc?”
“God no,” I said, relieved to be able to answer with a simple, unequivocal negative.
“So if we searched your house right now, we wouldn’t find one?”
“Are you kidding? I haven’t shot a bow and arrow since Cub Scouts. You’re welcome to come search the house. Let’s go, right now. Talk to my wife and son. They�
��d laugh if you asked them if I was a crack shot with a bow and arrow.” I held out my hands, palms up. “Do these look like fingertips that spend a lot of time on a bowstring? Feel them.” I stretched my hands toward Kittredge, and he probed my white-collar, desk-job fingers. “Hell, my wife has more calluses than I do,” I said.
Kittredge drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “So who would have had access to that report? That’s not a copy, that’s the original. You signed it, and you handled it. Who could’ve gotten hold of that? And why would he wad it up and stuff it in a woman’s mouth before using her for target practice?”
Glancing again at the report I held in my left hand, I shrugged, turning my right palm upward, empty-handed. “I sent the original to Keller at the Alaska State Police. I would’ve handled that one, because I signed it.” I glanced at the one in my hand. “But this isn’t the original,” I added. “It’s a copy.”
“How do you know it’s a copy?”
“Because my signature here is black. I sign the originals in blue.” I looked again at the smudges. “Art, you say there are three sets of prints on here — mine and two others?”
“At least three. Possibly more, but if I were a betting man, I’d say three.”
“And you’re sure one set is mine?”
“I’m sure one set matches what we’ve got on file as yours.”
“Then they’re my prints. If you say they’re mine, they’re mine. So this has to be a copy I handled.” I looked at the distribution list on the report. Often I sent copies of reports to several recipients — multiple investigators, the coroner or medical examiner, one or more prosecutors. This one had gone only to the state trooper. I felt another wave of surprise and confusion, bordering on panic. “This is my copy. Has to be. This came out of my own filing cabinet.” I stared at the page, as if the answers to my swirling questions might somehow materialize in the margins, superimposing themselves on the purple fingerprints — mine and the two mystery sets. Suddenly, it was almost as if an answer did materialize. “My God,” I breathed. “She was telling the truth.”
Kittredge and Art looked at me as if I’d gone over the edge, off the cliff of madness.
“She?” said Kittredge.
“The temp.” The detective still looked puzzled and dubious. “I had a temporary secretary for a month last spring,” I explained. “Trish, my regular secretary, was on medical leave. Ended up taking early retirement. But I had a temp for a few weeks, and while she was there, we did some office shuffling. The day the files got moved I was gone all day, giving a talk over at the TBI lab, near Nashville. The temp — Darla? Darlene? Charlene? — she boxed up all my case files and stacked them in the hall. I would never have let her put them there. Anyhow, the next day, she came to see me, all upset; said one of the boxes had gone missing, gotten lost somehow. I reamed her out, accused her of throwing ’em out by mistake, but she cried and cried, swore she’d packed and stacked everything really carefully. I didn’t believe her. Sent her back to Human Resources with a bad reference.”
“How many files did you lose?”
“Dozens,” I said. “All the forensic cases I’d worked since I came to UT. Not the photos, luckily — I keep those in a separate filing cabinet, in a different office — but all the written reports. Took all semester to rebuild those files — I had to call and get copies of those reports from everybody I’d done cases for.” I shook my head, remembering the tedious effort. “Oh, including Keller, the Alaska state trooper. I called to ask him for a copy. He’ll probably remember that, much as I bitched and moaned over the phone.”
Kittredge nodded. “Any guess who might’ve taken the files? And why?”
I remembered what Brubaker, the FBI profiler, had said two days before: “Somebody who thinks I ruined his life.”
CHAPTER 37
Tyler
Tyler leaned back in the rusting metal chair, his head pressing the chain-link fence, the mesh grating slightly as it bowed outward from the pressure. Overhead, low clouds scudded across a gray sky, and Tyler felt coldness seeping into his core — coldness that included, but was not limited to, the chill in the air.
There was a strange stillness and quietude in the cage; an absence so intense, it was almost a presence. Looking down at the increasingly skeletal corpse on the wire cot, he realized what it was: The maggots — most of them — were gone. A wide trail, brown and greasy, led from the concrete pad into the woods and across the ground before disappearing amid and beneath the fallen leaves. The Exodus, he thought in a flight of bizarre, blasphemous fancy. Some Moses maggot has led them to the Promised Land to pupate. “Follow me, and you shall be transformed. You shall be winged, like the angels, and take to the heavens…” Even more bizarre than his blasphemous fantasy was the bleak realization that he would miss the maggots.
Tyler turned to the back of his lab notebook — most of its pages now crammed with figures documenting time, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, maggot length, and the myriad of other minutiae he’d immersed himself in for weeks now — and began to write. He filled this page not with data, but with desolation.
October 27, 1992
Dear Roxanne,
A helicopter thuds overhead — LifeStar is airlifting someone to the emergency room at UT hospital — and the downdraft sends the tarp flapping off the roof of the enclosure, raining a shower of leaves down onto me and my constant, closest companion: not you, but Corpse 06–92.
I spend my days in a cage in the woods, watching the inexorable decay of a man who once lived and breathed and likely dreamed and loved. As I chart his decline, as I chart the rise of the insect multitudes into which he’s being transubstantiated, I wonder if I’m becoming that man — if I’m being transformed into something other than what I once was; something less than what I want to be; something corrupt and malodorous. “You; him,” the flies that swarm my face seem to say, “in the end, you both belong to us, and already there’s very little difference.”
Forgive me for dragging you into the sickening scene I witnessed. It haunted me — haunts me still — but I should have been more considerate; should not have spread that contagion to you. I’ve reimagined that scene every day since I saw it; it grieves me to think that perhaps you have, too. Was I naïve to hope that I could walk through the valleys and alleys of the shadow of death — even wrapped in the armor of truth and justice — and then simply walk blithely out again, scot-free, without something nasty sticking to the sole of my shoe; sticking to the shoe of my soul?
Now that the tarp is off the top of the cube, I can look up, through the chain-link, and see the sky for the first time in days. The airspace above the cage is crisscrossed with birds, stirred up by the passing helicopter, I suppose, and something about their flight strikes me for the first time. Birds on the wing rise and fall, rise and fall, a hundred times or more a minute. Not the loafing coasters, of course — not the lazy buzzards gliding overhead, sizing me up with appraising eyes — but the ordinary, diligent little fliers. In our mind’s eye, smoothing algorithms are overlaid, flattening the birds’ trajectories, minimizing their myriad midair miracles. We see their flights as perfect forward motion, but nothing could be further from the truth. In truth, every flap is followed by a tuck and a sweep, hasty and high stakes; hot on the heels of every flickering gain in altitude comes a small, heart-thudding drop.
So go their brave and lovely lives aloft: They — like us — rise and fall and rise again. Continually risking. Continually failing. Continually triumphing.
Or so I still hope, here within my cage.
I miss you, sweet Roxie, and I miss the man — I miss the “me”—I get to be when I’m with you.
Please let me see you at Thanksgiving. Please give me a reason to give thanks.
Please.
Please.
Please.
Tyler
* * *
That evening, after scrubbing bones from the steam kettle, then scrubbing his skin until it wa
s raw, Tyler put on exercise clothes and slipped into the back row of a yoga class — a room filled with bodies more limber than his, minds less troubled than his. During Tree Pose, he looked at the woman directly ahead of him and shuddered: For a moment, as she clasped one foot and folded her leg, Tyler thought her leg had been severed at the knee; thought the droplets falling from the knee were blood, not sweat.
At the end of the class, he lay on his back — Corpse Pose — and felt droplets falling from his face: not sweat, but tears. Then pressure on his fingers — the woman beside him had reached out, taken his hand, offered a comforting squeeze. He could not return the squeeze. Corpses cannot return kindness.
At the end of class, he rolled onto his side: Rebirth Pose. By the time he opened his eyes, the room was empty and he was alone.
CHAPTER 38
Kathleen
She gave the office door an exploratory nudge, then — when it moved — she hipped it open with a practiced bump. She was mildly annoyed that the latch still hadn’t been fixed, but at the same time, she was grateful that she didn’t need to set down her briefcase or coffee to open it.
Kathleen wanted to believe that Bill was being coy at breakfast: that he hadn’t mentioned their anniversary because he was planning to surprise her with a romantic dinner at Regas or, better yet, the Orangery — closer to home and much more elegant, though twice as expensive. Despite her hopes, though, she suspected that he’d simply forgotten the date. It wasn’t that Bill was a thoughtless husband — not compared with most of her colleagues’ husbands, at any rate, not if their reports were accurate. But lately he’d been busy, preoccupied, and tense.
She felt a commingled rush of surprise, delight, and guilt, therefore, when she saw the vase of roses and the gift-wrapped box on her desk. Sweet man — he hadn’t forgotten. She plunked down her briefcase and picked up the phone to call him. While she waited for Bill’s secretary to transfer the call — the girl was new, and not terribly efficient yet — Kathleen shouldered the phone to her ear and plucked the box from the desktop. It was small — the size of a pack of cigarettes — and she gave it a shake, listening for the telltale rattle of earrings or a necklace. She untied the gold foil ribbon, then used a fingernail to slit the tape on one of the end-flaps of blue wrapping paper.
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