Or in this case, it meant documenting the evidence of what coyotes and crows and perhaps rats could do when presented with a nice fresh body. Only this one wasn’t so fresh anymore. The smell of death coated the inside of Leif ’s nose and filled the back of his throat. It was sweet and rotten, acidic, like nothing else. No wonder the dog had found her so quickly.
Using a Canon SLR, Leif took establishing photographs of the body, then midrange photos, close-ups, and finally close-ups with a paper ruler laid down for scale. It was easier when he was focusing through the camera. It put some distance between him and what he was seeing, as if it were already two-dimensional. He took dozens of pictures, looking for abrasions, bruising, bite marks or impression evidence, bloodstain patterns, defensive wounds—and finding precious little.
Still, Leif had been taught to photograph everything. Evidence disappeared. Processing went awry. A photograph might offer the only clues they would ever have. How much evidence had already disappeared or degraded, washed away by the rain or dried up by the faint sun that had shown intermittently since Katie’s disappearance?
As the shutter opened and closed, Leif asked himself the four questions he did at every crime scene: What was the cause of death? Could the victim have caused her own death? Were there any signs of a struggle? And what object had caused the injuries?
So was this murder—or suicide? Leif wondered as he bent over the body and snapped another photo. Someone had fashioned a simple noose by threading the end of the leash through the hand loop, forming a second loop that was now buried in the swollen purpled flesh of the girl’s neck. The rest of the leash trailed on the ground next to her. Right now it looked like suicide, but looks could be deceiving. He remembered another case, a man’s body found in a crashed car. It had seemed open and shut: a single-car accident. Then the autopsy had turned up five stab wounds to the chest.
Besides, if it was suicide, why wasn’t she still hanging? He looked up but didn’t see any broken branches.
Leif held his breath as he bent closer to the girl. Only she wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a husk, a shell, a life-sized rag doll. It was easier to think of her that way. Not as a girl who might have been wondering what she might get for Christmas.
Normally he paid particular attention to the victim’s eyes, hands, and feet and the soles of their shoes, but for the first two he had to be content with photographing where each had been.
Seasoned veteran of the ERT, Rod Emerick, kept the photo log. As Leif worked, Rod carefully noted the pertinent facts of each photograph: its number, a description of the object or scene, its location, and the time and date. Every evidence tech had heard the cautionary story of what had happened when the FBI took photos of JFK but neglected to note whether the photos were of entrance or exit wounds. The pictures had wound up being useless.
Leif took another photograph, this one of the head. Hanks of dark blonde hair clung wetly to the skull, but most of the face had been eaten away. What was left of her visible skin looked brown and stiff. She had been out here long enough that she had begun to mummify.
He straightened up and stretched, pressing his fists into the middle of his back. It gave him a chance to check in on his team without being obvious. Even the seasoned agents looked upset. A young kid like this, chewed up by animals—it was a hard scene for anyone. Leif decided to organize a trauma debrief in the next week, get a chaplain to come in. It was a good way to check in with everyone while underlining that the ERT was a team in every sense of the word, a team that looked after each other.
He leaned over again and snapped photos of the red leash. Some of Katie’s hair was caught underneath.
Leif imagined how it had gone down. She could have looped the leash around her own neck, tied the other end around a branch, let her weight sag forward. It was a lot easier than most people thought to hang yourself. Your feet didn’t even need to leave the ground. Over the past few years he had been called to scenes where people had died with a noose around their neck leaning, kneeling, sitting, or even lying down. The noose didn’t even need to be tight to be effective. The heart and the lungs failed, although the brain probably eked out a horrible minute or two.
Alternatively, someone could have looped the leash around Katie’s neck and strangled her.