“What’s that, Doc?”
“Sorry, just talking to myself in here. Y’all come on back.”
They squeezed through the crevice into the grotto. Williams, who was skinny as a stray dog, slipped through easily. Kitchings required considerable time and effort. He turned sideways, his arms raised, for the first part. Then, when he reached the narrowest part of the passage—“Fat Man’s Squeeze,” the gap would be called if this were a commercial cave tour—he reached down, cupped his hands under his belly, and squished it upward like some gargantuan breast in a cyclopean Miracle Bra. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist: I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.
He yelped when the flash seared his eyes. “God damn! What the hell?”
I grinned. “Just making sure I document everything at the scene.”
“Document my ass. Looka here, Doc, forensic legend or not, you show that picture to a soul, and I figure any jury in Cooke County would call your death justifiable homicide.”
Williams piped up, “Could be, Tom, but to beat the rap, you’d have to show the picture to all twelve of ’em.” He chuckled at the notion.
“Well, shit. That complicates my damn plan, don’t it? I reckon maybe I better just confiscate the doc’s film.”
“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, Sheriff,” I said. “I think I had the lens cap on anyhow.”
When they were both standing beside me, I asked, “Mind if I take a picture of your feet?”
They looked puzzled for a moment, then the light dawned. Kitchings held Williams’s shoulder to steady himself, then raised one boot sole toward me for a photo, followed by the other. Next, Williams braced on Kitchings and I photographed his feet, too. Finally, I handed the camera to Kitchings and had him snap mine. It was unlikely to come up in court, but I didn’t want some defense lawyer claiming that what the prosecution presented as a ruthless killer’s footprints were actually an inept anthropologist’s. The only things I’d brought from Knoxville besides my camera were a pair of latex gloves, a small tape measure, and a pocketknife. I opened the pocketknife and set it on the rock shelf, then donned the gloves and picked it back up. Using the tip of the blade, I gently picked at the adipocere in the region of the cheek. As I suspected, underneath was nothing but bone. “Can’t tell the race from the skin,” I said, “because there’s no skin left.”
Williams spoke up. “Got to be white. We don’t have black folks up here. Not after sundown, anyhow.” He snickered. “Not if a black man values his life.”
I leveled a look at the deputy. “Then again, if a black man was to have car trouble or get lost up here when the sun went down, this might be just the sort of spot he’d wind up in, mightn’t it?”
“Leon, you dumbass hillbilly redneck,” Kitchings spat.
Williams blinked and looked away, his jaw muscles twitching hard.
“You’re probably right, I’m pretty sure it’s a Caucasian,” I went on. “The hair looks straight and blond, and the mouth structure is textbook Caucasoid—see how vertical the teeth are?” I touched the tip of the knife blade to what was once the upper lip, just below where the nose had collapsed, then swung the flat side of the blade down across the lips, resting it on the greasy chin. “If this individual were Negroid, the teeth and jawbones would angle forward, and this straight edge wouldn’t touch the chin.”
I pulled out the tape. With Williams holding one end gingerly, I measured the corpse. “About five feet eight,” I read. “Allowing for postmortem shrinkage of the cartilage, could’ve been another two or three inches taller than that in life. Just from the stature, I’d have guessed male, but from the facial features, the small skull, and the wide pelvis, I’m thinking female. Any guesses? Any women—tall women—missing in Cooke County?”
They thought awhile before Kitchings broke the silence. “Not that I know of. How long you reckon she’s been here, Doc?”
“Between the cave and the adipocere, it’s hard to say. Caves are cool, and it doesn’t look like the flies and maggots ever got to her. So it could have been a long time—I’d say years rather than months, maybe even be a whole lot of years.”
“Well, that’s gonna mean going back through the files quite a ways, then,”
Kitchings said. “Might take awhile. Some of the files aren’t too good, either. The ones since I took office are okay, but the older ones are a mess.”
“Well, see what you can find,” I said. “There might be some folks who’d remember right off. Didn’t I see some old-timers whittling on a bench outside the courthouse? You’d be amazed what guys like that can tell you.”