Cut to the Bone (Body Farm 8)

I nodded, already moving on, focusing on the legs and feet. I’d leave the examination of the mutilated genitals to Garland and his autopsy. I noticed that each thigh was pierced completely and pegged to the tree by a single arrow. An additional arrow jutted from the back of the right thigh, the base of the arrowhead barely visible through the entry wound. That meant, I assumed, that the point was lodged deep in the bone. It reminded me of an Arikara Indian skeleton I’d excavated years before: a robust male who had lived — and limped — for years with a Sioux arrowhead embedded in his femur, the bone healing and remodeling, doggedly but imperfectly, around the flint point. The position of the arrowheads could not have been more similar; the circumstances of the wounds could not have been more different: one received during a battle between warriors, the other as a defenseless woman fled from a sadistic psychopath.

The woman’s feet intrigued me. Actually, what intrigued me was the contrast between her feet and the rest of her body. The decomposition in the feet was consistent with what I’d seen in the face and hands of the dead hunter; consistent with what I’d observed in numerous corpses a week after death. The decay in the rest of her body, on the other hand, was more consistent with what I’d seen in corpses that had been dead only two or three days. It was as if one corpse’s feet had been grafted onto a fresher corpse’s legs. “Tyler, did you notice the differential decay?”

“Sure did,” he said. “Interesting.”

“Be sure you get plenty of pictures.”

“I’m on it,” he said. The click of the shutter, nearly as regular and frequent as the ticking of my mantelpiece clock, confirmed that he was.

“Got a theory?” As I posed the question, I was wondering if I had a theory.

“Gimme a minute to think on it,” he said.

In my mind’s eye, I scanned back through various cases — various corpses — characterized by differential decay, or a dramatic difference in the degree of decomposition exhibited by certain regions of the body. In every case I could think of, the differential decay could be explained by trauma. In one case — a Cocke County man who’d been stabbed to death a week before we found him — the soft tissues of the left hand remained largely intact; the right hand, by contrast, was down to bare bone. When I cleaned and examined the bones of the right hand, I found cut marks in the metacarpal bones and phalanges. In attempting to ward off the attack, the victim had sustained defense wounds in the right hand. Those bloody wounds had drawn droves of blowflies, which had laid countless eggs in the wounds, and the larvae — maggots — that hatched from those eggs had swiftly consumed the soft tissue of the right hand. A similar explanation, I expected, would account for the differential decay I’d seen the day before, in the first of the Cahaba Lane bodies, the one with no feet: Virtually all the soft tissue was gone from the woman’s neck — probably because she’d been strangled, causing bruises and bloody scrapes that attracted blowflies, the way Sung T’zu’s thirteenth-century sickle had; the way my bloody chain saw had.

But the pattern here was different. The feet — which weren’t pierced by arrows, and presumably weren’t bleeding profusely — were far more decayed than regions that had been pierced, that had bled: regions that should, therefore, have been swarming with hungry maggots.

“By the way, Tyler, you did take samples of the maggots from the woman yesterday, didn’t you?”

“Sure,” he said. “The ten biggest ones, just like you said.”

“Good. Be sure you do the same today — from both bodies. If we compare the sizes, we should be able to tell which murder happened first. Let’s compare ’em to the ones out at the research cage, too — might help us pin down the time since death a little closer.”

Kittredge interrupted. “So you use the bugs to tell time? Like a stopwatch?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Cool.”

Tyler resumed our conversation. “Okay, I have a theory on the differential decay.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Is it possible,” he said, “that she’s in a cooler microclimate over here than the dude over there? Cool breezes eddying up this little draw?”

I turned and stared at him. “A microclimate?” He shrugged sheepishly. “Tyler, that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

He flushed; at least the color was returning to his cheeks. “It was a reach, I grant you. You got a better theory, Herr Professor?”

“Well…,” I said slowly, stalling for time, searching my memory banks. I recalled the case of a man who’d hanged himself in the woods, and whose body was in remarkably good condition a month after death. Just then my peripheral vision flickered. Something very small and very close had fallen downward through my field of vision from somewhere above. I checked the area around my feet without spotting anything unusual, then I heard myself say, “Hmm. Hmm.” Centered on the glossy black toe of my left boot I saw a single grain of rice. Only it wasn’t a grain of rice; it was a baby maggot — the small, freshly hatched stage called the “first instar.” As I looked at it, pondering its unexpected appearance on the toe of my boot, my eye caught another downward flicker of motion — rather like a shooting star plunging to earth. But it wasn’t a star; it was another first-instar maggot, whose trajectory brought it squarely onto my boot, cheek by jowl with the first one. My eyes instinctively swept upward. If it was raining maggots, there must be a cloud up there somewhere.

It didn’t take long to locate it. My left toe was positioned directly beneath the arrow wound in the right thigh. Peering closely at the wound, I saw a handful of maggots clinging to the bloody tissue there. Even as I watched, another of the maggots lost its grip — its toehold or mouthhold or whatever hold it had — and fell. This one landed slightly to one side, squarely on the exposed bones of the victim’s right foot. “Yes, as a matter of fact,” I said to Tyler, as insight dawned, accompanied by a slow smile spreading across my face. “I do indeed have a better theory. And once you’ve finished your master’s thesis, you can start your dissertation project and prove I’m right. Maggots — like Isaac Newton’s apple — must obey the law of gravity.”

* * *

Our job at the scene was complicated by the need to free the woman’s corpse, which was pinned to the tree by deeply embedded arrows. I tried wiggling the arrows while tugging, but to no avail. “Art,” I called, “are you hoping to get prints off these? What I mean is, do we need to handle them gently?”

“I’m always hoping to get prints,” he said. “Expecting, no; hoping, sure.”

“In that case,” I suggested, “we might want to think about cutting the arrows right behind the head. Then the shafts would slide right out of her.” I saw heads n

odding in agreement. “One of y’all got bolt cutters in your cruiser?”

The youngest and slimmest of the deputies turned and began jogging down through the woods toward the vehicles. While we waited for him to return, we bagged the man’s body.

Unlike the woman, the man had bled out from a single wound. His camo shirt was soaked, and blood had poured off his chest and pooled on the ground beneath him. “Those arrows mean business,” I remarked.

“I’d rather get gun shot than arrow shot,” said Dr. Hamilton. “You ever taken a close look at a hunting arrow?”

“Depends,” I said. “Do eighteenth-century Arikara Indian arrows count?”

“No comparison,” he said. “We’re not talking a chip of flint tied to a stick. These things are killing machines — engineered to inflict massive, lethal damage on big, big animals. They can shatter bone, rip muscle, shred arteries. Most of ’em have four blades angling back from the point — razor-sharp blades, flaring to an inch or more wide.” He looked around at his audience, seemed satisfied with our attentiveness. “The entry wound from one of these arrows is twice the size of a .45-caliber bullet. Granted, a .45 slug traveling eight hundred feet a second packs more wallop than an arrow at three hundred feet a second. Still, think about the damage done by something that can bore a one-inch hole through a caribou.” He nodded at the corpse. “This guy’s heart virtually exploded. His brain might’ve had time to realize how thoroughly he was screwed. But the screwing itself?” He snapped his fingers. “A nanosecond.”

“So quick bright things come to confusion,” said Kittredge.

“Huh?” I said.

“A line from Shakespeare,” he explained. “It’s just a fancy way of saying you can be screwed in a heartbeat.”

* * *