“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.