He flipped on a flashlight, and when he did, the laughter died in midnote. Opening a cargo box bolted to the rear of the ATV, he fished out three powerful lanterns and a jacket that read “D.E.A.” in big letters across the back. “Here, you better put on this heirloom drug-bust jacket, Doc; you’re liable to catch pneumonia in here.” I waved it off, but he handed it to me anyhow. “I’d hate to be remembered as the sheriff who killed Dr. Brockton,” he said. As I put it on, I realized I was already shivering.
We trudged up the side of a sloping basin, ducked into a side tunnel, and soon emerged into another chamber. The rest of the cavern had been a dull grayishbrown, but these walls sparkled—practically blazed—with the fire of millions of crystals. Quartz, I guessed, though they seemed as brilliant as diamonds. A mammoth stalagmite, also sheathed in crystals, filled one side of the chamber. A narrow cleft separated the stalagmite from the wall. Kitchings nodded toward the crevice and played his light over the opening in a go-here sort of way. I edged my way in. It was a tight fit—I wondered how the sheriff had wrangled his beer belly through it—but then it opened up into a small, glittering grotto. Laid out on a rock shelf along one side was a body—the most remarkable human corpse I’d ever seen. I stared, and blinked, and stared again. The sheriff had been right. A day—or a month, or even a year—would have wrought little change in the striking corpse laid out on a rock shelf in that glittering grotto.
I had seen adipocere many times before. The term is Latin; it translates literally as “grave wax,” and that pretty much sums up what it is and where it’s found: a greasy, tallowlike material that forms when fatty flesh decomposes in a damp environment. Bodies buried in damp basements or crawl spaces under houses often have adipocere on them; so do floaters—bodies found in Tennessee’s abundant lakes and rivers—with most of the adipocere centered along the floater’s waterline. But the dozens of basement bodies and floaters I’d seen bore scant resemblance to the specimen laid out on the stone ledge before me. At first glance the corpse had appeared shrouded in adipocere, but as I studied it, I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t a surface coating, but something much rarer. The body’s soft tissues had been completely transformed into adipocere—
almost as if Madame Tussaud had placed a waxen mummy here as a private exhibit for me alone. The clothing had apparently crumbled away, its residue incorporated into a dark layer that began at the corpse’s neck and continued all the way down to the rotting leather at the soles of the feet. The Smithsonian possessed a similar corpse, that of Wilhelm von Ellenbogen, who had been dug up in the course of moving a cemetery more than a century ago. The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia—home to some of the most bizarre medical and forensic oddities on the planet—had his female counterpart, whom they nicknamed “the Soap Lady” because of adipocere’s chemical kinship to soap. But those were misshapen and repulsive compared to the eerily preserved corpse before me. It was not an image of repose, mind you—the eyes stared blindly and the mouth gaped in an eternal scream—and yet despite the grotesque expression, there was something oddly beautiful about it. I started forward, then caught myself and called out, “Have you all been in here?”
“Just far enough to see the body. Didn’t want to disturb the scene before you got a chance to look at it.”
“Good man. I wish more of your colleagues would be so careful.”
I took out the 35-millimeter camera I’d brought with me from Knoxville. Early in my career, one of the smartest cops I ever worked with gave me a piece of advice that sounded equally apt for crime scene photographers and ruthless bank robbers: “Shoot your way in and shoot your way out,” he said, and I’d been doing it ever since. Standing in the opening to the crystalline grotto, I started with wide shots from eye level, to establish the scene as a whole. Then I squatted down and shot across the floor of the cave at a low angle—another photography trick he’d taught me—to cast shadows that would throw footprints into sharper relief.
The flash was too quick and bright for me to see what it was getting, so I played the flashlight beam across the floor. The unevenness made it hard to tell for sure, but I thought I saw prints leading toward the body. I zoomed in on what seemed to be the best ones and fired off shots from several angles. Then I turned my attention and my lens toward the body.
I approached, slowly and circuitously, taking photographs every time I moved more than a few feet. I’d started with a fresh roll of 36 exposures—slides, as always, because a carousel tray was easy to carry into a classroom or a courtroom, and the film’s resolution was still far better than any digital image. You could project a good slide on a movie theater screen and it’d still look crisp; try that with a digital image and it would turn into some murky Impressionist rendering of a crime scene shrouded in fog. Besides, the one occasion when I’d tried using a digital camera, every picture I snapped erased the one before, so I left that crime scene with just one photo, a closeup of a stab wound. But I had read that the last Kodak carousel slide projector had rolled off the assembly line a year or so back, so I knew my nondigital days were numbered. “Progress, hell,” I muttered.