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.