“Leon— buddy—how’s about you come chew the fat with your ol’ pal Rooster fer a minute?” He pointed toward Leon’s Jeep, and they got inside. This time the voices—the deputy’s, at least—got pretty loud. Then, to my surprise, the Cherokee’s engine fired up and the vehicle fishtailed angrily across the field, taking the deputy and the undercover agent out of the valley. Morgan flashed me a sunny smile. “Interagency cooperation,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing.” I waited, hoping he might enlighten me about the leverage Rankin seemed to have with Williams, but he didn’t. “Don’t let me keep y’all from your work,” he said, looking toward the helicopter.
We started by mapping the crash site. I asked Sarah to sketch the main features of the scene as Art and Miranda plotted the coordinates of key landmarks. The advent of handheld GPS receivers had greatly simplified the job of scene mapping—with the push of a button, it was now possible to pinpoint the latitude and longitude of a body and even superimpose it on an onscreen map—but I wasn’t quite ready to dispense with old-fashioned maps and measurements quite yet. Batteries run down, displays burn out, circuit boards fail, even satellites go on the fritz. Besides, most GPS units have a one-to three-meter margin of error, meaning—in the worst-case scenario—that I could go back to a death scene six months later, stand or dig exactly where the gizmo indicated the body had lain, and be off by up to ten feet any direction. If you’re troweling for a missing hyoid bone, a twenty-foot circle—three hundred square feet—is an enormous area.
One obvious and unambiguous landmark for our coordinates was the house—
specifically, the southwest corner of the front porch, the closest point to the wreckage. Art shot a compass reading to the center of the cockpit, calling out
“255 degrees.” Sarah drew an arrow and noted the bearing on her map, then, when Art unspooled a long tape measure between the corner and the chopper, she added “87.5 feet” beneath the compass reading. For the second landmark, they chose a large hemlock tree, standing alone beside the small stream that ran the length of the valley floor before plunging into the kudzu tunnel. The chopper lay 74 feet, on a heading of 128 degrees, from the base of the hemlock. So unless the house were destroyed and the tree cut down, we’d be able to pinpoint the crash site with precision and certainty for years to come, GPS or no. One advantage of the crash, if such a word could be used, was that most of the remains were contained within the shell of the cockpit. I had worked several crashes in the Great Smoky Mountains during my years in Knoxville. Those aircraft—a couple of propeller planes and a military air-refueling tanker jet—
were traveling horizontally at high speeds when they hit; as a result, wreckage and body parts were scattered over hundreds of yards of hillside. Orbin’s helicopter, though, had dropped nearly straight down, so while there was considerable trauma to his body—first from the force of the crash, then from the fire—at least there was no scatter.
The helicopter had hit sideways, which also made the excavation easier. If it had impacted right-side-up, the engine and rotor would have crushed the cockpit, forcing us to cut or pry our way in. As it was, I could lean into the cockpit, which remained largely intact, through the windshield opening. As I stepped up to the JetRanger’s vacant windshield opening, I was choked by the smell of burned flesh. I knew that by the time I finished, my clothes and even my hair and skin would reek of the unforgettable smell: seared and foul but with a disturbing and sickening undertone of sweetness, too. Best just to get on with it, then. I leaned in and found myself face to face with the gaping skull of Orbin Kitchings.