Skeleton Dance

'I'll go see,” he said with a sigh. He had sighted it now, down by the riverbank under the willows, and it wasn't any bundle of clothes; the fourteen years he'd spent in homicide told him that much. And he was betting it wasn't a drunk or a sleeper either.

'Hey, buddy?” he called from fifteen feet away, although he would have been surprised to get an answer. “You okay? . . . hey, monsieur?'

He stood there for a moment longer, resisting the urge—an urge more deeply ingrained than he'd realized—to have a closer look, to take over, then turned on his heel, and walked back up to his silent, wide-eyed companions.

'Yvette, you better call the cops, the gendarmes. That guy's been dead a while.'

'Oh, for the love of Mike,” said Mrs. Winkelman to her neighbor. “Does this mean we don't get to have our tea?'

* * * *

The crime scene investigators grumbled at having to park the crime lab van alongside the highway and carry their equipment down to the riverbank (which meant they'd have to carry it back up afterward), but once there they got quickly and efficiently to work.

A twenty-by-twenty-meter area was cordoned off with tape and the nosy gaggle of American grannies and grandpas was helped on their way after a brief interrogation. A panning videotape of the over-all scene was made, and a diagrammatic sketch. The position of the body was measured and photographed. The cordoned-off area was then divided into five-by-five-meter sections and each of them meticulously searched by investigators working two at a time, one shuffling along with his eyes to the ground and the other taking notes. Two fairly distinct heel prints from a man's shoe—both probably from the same shoe—were photographed and cast in plaster of paris by the third member of the team. Various objects were diligently recorded, photographed, labeled, and bagged: several different kinds of cigarette stubs, including one with lipstick on it, a cigar wrapper, three ring-tabs from beer or soft-drink cans, burnt paper matches, a wadded-up facial tissue, two flattened cardboard drinking cups, odd bits of plastic and aluminum foil, a woman's imitation leather belt, worn-out and cheap, two rubber bands, a used adhesive strip decorated with Minnie Mouse pictures and with a little dried blood on it.

None of it was very promising; the typical detritus of a place that was an attractive spot for a riverbank picnic and also happened to lie within flinging distance of a highway. The one object of real interest—the investigators were practically slavering to get their hands on it—was a rifle, the wooden stock of which could be seen sticking out from under the right thigh of the corpse. But Joly and Roussillot were just getting started on the body, and until the two of them were through there was no hope of getting at it. And that wasn't going to be for a while; they were both sticklers for the rule book, as slow as boiled honey.

'Georges,” Joly called to the lead investigator, “you've finished with the victim? We can shift him now?'

'Absolutely, inspector, everything by the book.'

'We might as well turn him over then,” Roussillot said.

The body, fully clothed, lay on its front between them at the foot of a knee high rock. The face was turned to the left, the arms caught underneath the torso, one leg extended and the other bent-kneed and drawn up to the side. It was plain to both men that it had been there for some time. Maggots wriggled in the nostrils, the eyes, the mouth, the ears. What skin could be seen was a pasty, greasy, coppery color, mottled with greenish veins. The clothes, still moist from the passing showers, looked as if they'd been out in the rain more than once. Joly, smothering a grimace, instinctively held his breath and kneeled to take hold of the shoulders and Roussillot of the legs.

Between them they rolled the flaccid body carefully and deliberately onto its back. They had both rolled over enough cadavers not to be surprised at the strange, heavy inertia of the dead, the seeming chill that seeped through the clothing.

'Ah,” said Roussillot, “what do we have here?” He pointed with his chin at the black, ragged, hole, almost certainly a bullet hole, in the center of the man's chest, with a knot of maggots squirming about in it. The surrounding denim of his shirt was stained a rusty brown, with a few spatters and spots as far away as his sleeves. Not much blood, really, considering the size of the hole.

The rifle, which had been underneath him, had remained where it was, lying now a few inches away on the flattened, yellowing grass.

'Well, what do you think?” Joly asked, straightening up and brushing off the knees of his trousers, although he'd never quite let them come in contact with the earth.

'What do I think?” Roussillot paused to light a cigarette for Joly and one for himself and blew out a stream of smoke while he studied the corpse. “I think I see before me a reasonably well-nourished man in his forties, apparently a suicide, who's been dead anywhere from . . . let us say two days to a week. I think—'

Joly looked at him. “Two days, did you say? I should have said a week at a minimum.'

Roussillot smiled tolerantly—a good way to get under Joly's skin although it was no doubt meant kindly. “My dear Joly, these things are not as clear-cut as you people like to imagine. You could well be right; it might be a week. Or it might be only two days. That is precisely why I said—'

'But look at the maggots, at the skin; it's already begun to slip in places.'

'Yes, very true, but on the other hand, do you see any bloating of the abdomen, any copious discharge of fluids from the natural orifices? No; in fact there has been little if any distension of the gut. That, in my opinion, is far more significant, more reliable, and it sounds more like two days than seven, wouldn't you say? And surely you've noticed that the smell, while hardly agreeable, is by no means the overpowering odor one would expect from a corpse that's been lying out in the warm sun for a week.'

'No, now that you mention it,” Joly said thoughtfully, “it isn't.” He was obscurely annoyed with Roussillot for pointing out something that he himself should have noticed.

'You have to understand, Joly, the variables of post-mortem change—or taphonomic progression, as we refer to it in my profession—are highly inconstant and rarely in agreement. That is the reason we offer our findings in terms of ranges and not of fixed times. In this case it may be that the warmth of the last several days has accelerated some decompositional processes, but not others. On the other hand, the location of the body in this relatively cool spot by the river may have contributed—'