well-defined leg and arm muscles and not an ounce of flab. Despite her present condition, I recognized her face from Army posters. She was quite attractive in a clean-cut way, and wore her blond hair in a simple shoulder-length style, perhaps a few inches beyond regulations, which was the least of her problems at the moment.
Around her neck was a long length of the same nylon cord that bound her wrists and ankles, and beneath this cord were her panties, which had been pulled over her head, one leg of the panties around her neck, so that the cord did not bite directly into her neck, but was cushioned by the panties. I knew what this meant, but I don’t think anyone else did.
Cynthia came up beside me, but said nothing.
I knelt beside the body and noted that the skin appeared waxy and translucent, causing the powder blush on her cheeks to stand out sharply. Her fingernails and toenails, which had only a clear lacquer on them, had lost their pinkish color. Her face was unbruised, unscratched, and without lacerations or bite marks, and so were the parts of her body that I could see. Aside from the obscene position of her body, there were no outward signs of rape, no semen around the genitals, thighs, or in the pubic hair, no signs of struggle in the surrounding area, no grass or soil marks on her skin, no blood, dirt, or skin under her nails, and her hair was mostly in place.
I leaned over and touched her face and neck, where rigor mortis usually sets in first. There was no rigor, and I felt her underarms, which were still warm. There was some livor mortis, or lividity, that had settled into her thighs and buttocks, and the lividity was a deep purple color, which would be consistent with asphyxia, which in turn was consistent with the rope around her neck. I pressed my finger against the purplish skin above where her buttocks met the ground, and the depressed spot blanched. When I took my finger away, the livid color returned, and I was reasonably certain that death had occurred within the last four hours.
One thing I learned a long time ago was that you never take a witness’s statement as gospel truth. But so far, Sergeant St. John’s chronology seemed to hold up.
I bent over further and looked into Ann Campbell’s large blue eyes, which stared unblinking into the sun. The corneas were not yet cloudy, reinforcing my estimate of a recent death. I pulled at one of her eyelids and saw in the linings around the eye, small spotty hemorrhages, which is presumptive evidence of death by asphyxia. So far, what Kent had told me, and the scene that presented itself, seemed to comport with what I was discovering.
I loosened the rope around Ann Campbell’s neck and examined the panties beneath the rope. The panties were not torn and were not soiled by the body or by any foreign substance. There were no dog tags under the panties, so these, too, were missing. Where the ligature, the rope, had circled the neck there was only a faint line of bruising, barely discernible if you weren’t looking for it. Yet, death had come by strangulation, and the panties lessened the damage the rope would normally have done to the throat and neck.
I stood and walked around the body, noting that the soles of her feet were stained with grass and soil, meaning she had walked barefoot for at least a few steps. I leaned down and examined the bottom of her feet, discovering on her right foot a small tar or blacktop stain on the soft fleshy spot below her big toe. It would appear that she had actually been barefoot back on the road, which might mean she had taken off her clothes, or at least her boots and socks, near the humvee and was made to walk here, fifty meters away, barefoot or perhaps naked, though her bra and panties were near the body. I examined her bra and saw that the front clasp was intact, not bent or broken, and there were no signs of dirt or stress on the fabric.
All this time no one said a word, and you could hear the morning birds in the trees, and the sun had risen above the line of white pines beyond the berm, and long morning shadows spread across the firing ranges.
I addressed Colonel Kent. “Who was the first MP on the scene?”
Kent called over the female MP nearby, a young PFC, and said to her, “Give your report to this man.”
The MP, whose name tag said Casey, looked at me and reported, “I received a radio call at 0452 hours advising me that a female body had been found at rifle range six, approximately fifty meters west of a humvee parked on the road. I was in the vicinity and I proceeded to this location and reached the scene at 0501 hours and saw the humvee. I parked and secured my vehicle, took my M-16, and proceeded onto the rifle range, where I located the body. I felt for a pulse, listened for a heartbeat, tried to detect breathing, and shined my flashlight into the victim’s eyes, but they did not respond to the light. I determined that the victim was dead.”
I asked her, “Then what did you do?”
“I returned to my vehicle and called for assistance.”
“You followed the same path to and from the body?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you touch anything except the body? The ropes, the tent pegs, the undergarments?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you touch the victim’s vehicle?”
“No, sir. I did not touch the evidence beyond determining that the victim was dead.”
“Anything else you want to mention?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you.”
PFC Casey saluted, turned, and resumed her position.
Kent, Cynthia, and I glanced at one another, as if trying to see what the others were thinking, or feeling. Truly, moments like this try the soul and become indelibly burned into the mind. I have never forgotten a death scene, and never want to.
I looked down at Ann Campbell’s face for a full minute, knowing I would not see it again. This is important, I think, because it establishes a communion between the living and the dead, between the investigator and the victim. Somehow it helps—not her, but me.
We went back to the road and walked around the humvee that Ann Campbell had driven, then looked inside the driver’s side window, which was open. Many military vehicles have no ignition keys, only a starter button switch, and the switch on the humvee was in the off position. On the front passenger seat was a black leather nonmilitary- issue handbag. Cynthia said to me, “I would have gone through the bag, but I didn’t want to do that without your permission.”
“We’re off to a good start. Retrieve the handbag.”
She went around to the passenger side, and, using a handkerchief, opened the door, took out the bag with the handkerchief, then sat on the lower bench of the bleachers and began laying out the contents.
I got down on the road and slid under the humvee, but there was nothing unusual on the blacktop. I touched the exhaust system at various points and found it slightly warm in spots.
I stood, and Colonel Kent said to me, “Any ideas?”
“Well, a few possible scenarios come to mind. But I have to wait until forensic gets finished. I assume you called them.”
“Of course. They’re on their way from Gillem.”
“Good.” Fort Gillem is outside Atlanta, about two hundred miles north of Hadley, and the CID lab there is a state-of-the-art operation that handles all of North America. The people who work there are good, and like me they go where they’re needed. Major crimes are still relatively rare in the Army, so the lab can usually muster the resources it needs when a big one comes down. In this case, they’d probably show up with a caravan. I said to Colonel Kent, “When they get here, tell them to be very curious about a black smudge on the sole of her right foot. I want to know what it is.”
Kent nodded, probably thinking to himself,
“Also, I want you to do a grid search. Let’s say two hundred meters in each direction from the body, excluding an area fifty meters immediately around the body.” This would mess up any footprints, but there were hundreds of bootprints in the area of the rifle range anyway, and the only ones I was interested in were those within fifty meters of the body. I said to Kent, “I want your people to gather up anything that isn’t natural flora— cigarette butts, buttons, paper, bottles, and all that, and record the grid where they found it. All right?”
“No problem. But I think this guy got in and got out clean. Probably by vehicle, just like the victim.”
“I think you’re right, but we’re creating files.”
“We’re covering our asses.”
“Right. We go by the book.” Which was safe and sometimes even effective. Bottom line on this one, though, I was going to have to get real creative, and I was going to piss off a lot of important people. That’s the fun part.
