Dead Guilty

muttering to each other. They looked in her direction and nodded as she came into the clearing— obviously glad to see her arrive.

At the familiar yellow-and-black tape she stopped to take in details of the scene. Like a grotesque image from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, three bodies hung by their necks from ropes in the copse of trees.

The sheriff approached her, shaking his head, wip ing his face with a blue bandana and fanning himself with his wide-brimmed hat. He was a tall, thin man with a round face and thick, wavy dark hair that was just beginning to gray at the sides.

‘‘I don’t know what they could have done to these people to make them like that,’’ he said, motioning in the direction of the three hanging bodies. ‘‘When word of this gets out...’’

Diane said nothing. She walked with the sheriff carefully around the perimeter of the yellow-taped crime scene. What had upset the sheriff and his depu ties was not simply the triple death, but the horrid look of it. Bodies hanging still, as though frozen— their necks stretched from one to three feet in length.

The bodies looked very much alike, the way dead do. The kinship of the dead—skin black with decay, vacant eye sockets, exposed bones, mouths open and askew. They were each dressed in similar if not identi cal coveralls —navy blue, maybe dark gray, it was hard to tell, they were so stained with dried body fluids. One had long blond hair half plastered to its skull, with strands blowing gently in the breeze. The other two had shorter dark hair— brown maybe, or black. All had their hands tied behind their backs.

Without warning, the farthest body fell as the neck skin ripped apart. The head bounced on the ground and rolled a dozen feet from the torso, trailing a long piece of neck with it.

‘‘Oh, Jesus,’’ said one of the deputies, jumping back reflexively.

Diane watched the fall with interest. To her it was a process, and knowing the processes that work on bodies after death is to understand pieces to a puzzle of great consequence that she had to solve. The direc tion and distance a head rolls when it pops out of the noose is useful information for finding a missing skull. Knowing how long it takes for the head to separate from the torso in a decomposing hanging victim under specific conditions is valuable information for those interested in taphonomy.

She could see from the faces of the people here watching that this information was not of interest to them. She glanced at her watch.

The sheriff turned his gaze from the scene and mopped his brow again. ‘‘What do you make of this, Dr. Fallon?’’

‘‘We’ve been having a long dry spell,’’ Diane said. He gave her a sideways glance. She crumpled leaves from a nearby bush in her hand and nodded toward the vic tims. ‘‘The dry air aids in this rather peculiar effect.’’

‘‘You saying this is natural?’’ He said, ‘‘I’ve seen a few hanging victims, and I know the body stretches, but jeez... I’ve never seen anything like this.’’

‘‘You just haven’t seen them at the right time, or under the right conditions. The pull of gravity makes the bodies stretch, making them taller than they were in life. Sometimes you get this effect.’’ Diane gestured toward the long neck of the victim closest to them.

‘‘Well, I’ll have to say that’s a relief. We couldn’t figure out how the killer could have done this—or why. Thought it must be some kind of perverted maniac—you know, as opposed to our normal maniacs we have running around.’’

Diane laughed with him, glad for any comic relief, no matter how mild.

She turned her attention back to the scene. Not many maggots on the corpses. But she didn’t expect there would be. She turned her attention to the drip zone—an area underneath the bodies where liquified decay and bits of flesh dropped to the ground. Hun dreds of maggots and their beetle predators made the surface of the ground move with a writhing motion. Soon they would find the fallen corpse, and if left alone they and other late arrivals would strip it bare.

‘‘This is just disgusting,’’ said one of the deputies.

Diane didn’t recognize him. She didn’t know all the deputies in this county to the north of Rosewood. He must be new. If he stayed with this job, he’d see things far more disgusting.

Hang ’em high. The words flitted through Diane’s brain as she looked at the two bodies suspended from the leafy canopy. Even stretched long as they were, their shoes were still three feet from the ground. How had they been hung so high?

The killer—or killers—had to scout out a place with enough strong limbs for three hangings. Even in heav ily wooded areas, hanging trees weren’t that easy to come by. She glanced at the deputies milling around.

‘‘Ask everyone to move back,’’ she said to the sher iff. ‘‘There have to be vehicle tracks here somewhere.’’ But looking at the underbrush and ground cover, she didn’t see where a vehicle could have passed.

‘‘You’d think so,’’ said the sheriff, looking at the ground as though the tracks might be under his feet. ‘‘The perp had to use a winch or something.’’ He mo tioned to the deputies. ‘‘All right, everybody. Let’s move back, and watch where you step. We don’t need to be trampling the crime scene.’’

‘‘Those guys with the surveying equipment . . . did they find the bodies?’’ asked Diane.

The sheriff nodded. ‘‘They were doing a timber cruise for the paper company. This land belongs to Georgia Paper.’’

‘‘Then the two men are familiar with the lay of the land around here.’’

‘‘I’m sure.’’ He turned to speak to a young deputy when he saw him spit out a chew of tobacco. ‘‘Dam mit, Ricky, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Pick that up.’’

‘‘What?’’ The deputy looked around at the others, who shook their heads and tried not to laugh.

‘‘That wad of tobacco you just spit out. Pick it up. This is a crime scene, not a sidewalk.’’

‘‘Pick it up and do what with it?’’

‘‘Put it back in your mouth—I don’t care, just don’t throw it away here.’’