my left hand. One end had a small round opening, revealing the cylinder’s hollow interior. “It’s a puparium-a pupa case. This one’s empty, which means the fly has already chewed his way out. So that means the body was out here at least two weeks ago.”
“So you’re saying these things tell you that the murder occurred maybe just a few days after I was out here?”
“Looks that way to me,” I said. Taking a small vial from my shirt pocket, I flipped off the cap with my thumb and tipped in the puparium from my cupped palm. Then I plucked several more from the ground, snapped the lid closed, and buttoned the vial into my shirt. “We’ve re-created the death scene at my research facility up at UT- Knoxville, using a donated cadaver. It’s been tied to a tree for nearly a week now, and it’s starting to reach the same stage of decay as the body here was in when it was found. So that argues for the same timetable.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a tiny movement among the leaves. I looked down in time to see a tiny fly, newly hatched, crawl onto a reddish brown leaf from a chestnut oak. It joined several others already on the leaf ’s broad surface, which was catching the afternoon sun. I pointed to them, and Cliff leaned down for a look. I waved a finger above them; they scuttled to and fro, trying to get away, but remained on the leaf rather than flying away. “When they first hatch,” I explained, “their wings are still damp and soft. They have to dry awhile before they’re stiff enough for flight. If you look around on some of the tree trunks here, you might see a bunch more. Once I worked a death scene where the south-facing wall of a building was covered with thousands of little flies, all drying their wings.”
He scouted around, then called my attention to a couple of tree trunks. “Not thousands, but probably hundreds on these two trees.” I nodded. He looked thoughtful. “So next time I bring my lunch out here,” he said, “these guys are gonna be all over me, huh?”
“Some of them,” I said. “Unless they’ve caught wind of something, or somebody, that smells more interesting someplace else.”
“And these came from the maggots that were feeding on the body, right?”
“I think so,” I answered. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s time to find myself another lunch spot.”
I retraced my steps to the tree where the body had been lashed. Stooping down, hands on knees, I scanned the ground. I didn’t see what I was seeking, so again I dropped to my hands and knees and began crawling outward from the base of the tree in a series of ever-widening arcs.
“What are you looking for now?”
Just as I was about to say it wasn’t there, I spotted what appeared to be a shriveled, curled leaf sitting by itself atop the carpet of moss and pine needles. “This, I think,” I answered. I picked it up and rolled it between two fingers, gently but with enough pressure to crumble a dead leaf. It did not crumble. I uncurled it ever so slightly and held it up to the light. The sun shone through it, giving it an amber glow, and in that glow I could discern a pattern of creases and swirls I would recognize anywhere.
I walked over to Cliff, bearing it like some holy relic. In a way, it was: the identity, potentially, of the young man who had been beaten to death here in this spot. I held it up to the light so he could look through it. He studied it, frowning, and then a look of understanding and wonder dawned on his face. “Looks like fingerprints,” he said. I nodded. The frown returned. “But how…?”
“About a week after death, the outer layer of skin-the epidermis-sloughs off of the hands,” I explained. “It comes loose from the underlying layer, the dermis, and peels off almost like a surgical glove. I can take this back to the lab, soak it in water and fabric softener overnight, and tomorrow morning somebody in the crime lab can put his fingers inside these fingers-put this glove on
He whistled. “I don’t think the deputies from Marion County know that trick.”
“Well, it’s not something you run across very often,” I said. “And this guy might not have prints on file anyway. But if he does, we should be able to ID him.” I took another, larger vial from my hip pocket, slid the husk of skin inside, and sealed the lid.
I took one last look around. I noticed blood and bone shards and bits of brain matter lodged in the bark of the pine tree. Did that add anything to what I already knew? Maybe not, but it confirmed something: the trauma, or at least the cranial trauma, had occurred out here, not someplace else. It occurred to me that the rural deputies might not have thought to collect samples for evidentiary purposes, and that a slick defense attorney-someone, say, like my sometime nemesis Burt DeVriess-might use that omission to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of jurors. Taking out my pocketknife and one of the several ziplock plastic bags I’d brought, I unfolded the larger of the two blades and pried loose a few scales of the flaky pine bark, catching them in the bag as they fell. The bark was dark brown, almost black on top; underneath, it was the rich, rusty red of cinnamon. I made sure to get enough so that Jess could preserve some unaltered and send some off for DNA analysis, to confirm that this material came from the same shattered skull sitting in a cooler in my truck, a few hundred yards away.
As I sealed the bag and zipped it into the side pocket of my cargo pants, I noticed the sun was dropping down toward the S-curve in the river. I checked my watch and calculated that I had been out here for well over an hour; closer to two. “I thought you wanted to head for the barn before this,” I said to Cliff.
“I wasn’t sure you’d find your way back out,” he said. “Didn’t want to get called out at midnight to find you.” He saw the look of chagrin on my face and added, “Besides, this is interesting stuff. I learned a lot more from you than I did from the deputies who worked it last week.” He seemed to mean it, so I thanked him and decided to quit worrying that I had imposed on him.
By the time I coasted and corkscrewed back down Suck Creek Mountain to Chattanooga, Jess was already gone for the day, so I left her a note saying I was taking the skin of the hand back to Knoxville. It was extremely delicate, and I didn’t trust anyone but Art Bohanan to handle it. I got Amy to buzz me into the autopsy suite, where I filled the plastic evidence jar with warm water and added a few drops of Downy. Finally, before hitting the road, I signed over the bone shards to Amy, who gave me a receipt for them and locked them in the evidence room. Then I bid her good-bye, asked her to relay my regards to her boss, and-cooler and head in hand-headed for my truck, and the drive back to Knoxville.
CHAPTER 15
THE SUN WAS GONE and the evening star-Venus-was hanging like a pearl in an indigo sky as I clicked the keyless remote to unlock my truck. The drive to Knoxville would take two hours, and even though it was all interstate, I wasn’t looking forward to doing it in the dark. Although I still had a bit of an adrenaline buzz from finding the empty puparia and the degloved skin, that buzz was fading fast, and underneath it, I was deeply tired.
As I cupped my fingers under the handle of the driver’s door, they encountered a soft but unexpected obstacle. A piece of paper had been folded up and tucked into the hollow beneath the door handle. I unfolded it and saw that it was a page off MapQuest.com, an Internet site that offered maps and driving directions to anyplace in the nation. The word START was superimposed on what I recognized as the location of the ME’s office, where I was now parked. The word END occupied a street address in a neighborhood a few miles away, which the map labeled as Highland Park. A wide, purple-shaded line-the computer’s version of a highlighter mark-led from one to the other. I puzzled over the map’s meaning, but then my eye caught sight of two lines of text in a small box just above the map. “B-I hope it’s not too late to invite you over for dinner. J.”
As the meaning between the lines of the brief message sank in-or at least, the meaning I hoped lay between the lines-my fatigue dropped away. My breath quickened as I climbed into the truck, and I noticed as I fiddled with the key that my hand was shaking slightly. “Easy, fella,” I said to myself. “Drive safely so you’ll get there in one piece, and don’t expect too much once you’re there.”
Highland Park proved to be a charming neighborhood, one that I guessed dated back to the late 1800s. The houses ranged from gingerbread-clad Victorians to simple shotgun cottages. Jess’s house was a simple but elegant old two-story, a design I seemed to remember being called a foursquare-four rooms up, four down, with a chimney flanking each side and a deep porch stretching the width of the front. The exterior of the ground floor was clad in lapped wooden siding, painted the green of baby leaves; the second floor was sheathed in cedar shakes, barn red. A second-floor balcony nestled beneath the roof, tucked into an alcove between the two front bedrooms. I could
