“Plenty of room. For a mountain goat.”
The door of the nearer cruiser opened and a uniformed officer got out. “He’s here,” I heard him saying into the mic of his two-way radio, the coils of the cord stretched to their limit. “Just pulled up.” He released the mic, which the cord yanked from his hand, and closed the door. “Dr. Brockton?”
“That’s me.” I extended my hand, walking toward him.
“Sheriff Grainger.” He took a few steps toward me, and we shook hands midway between the two vehicles—a tiny patch of neutral ground. I’d never had any territorial squabbles with law-enforcement officers—any “whose-jurisdiction-is-bigger contests,” as Tyler called such things—but it never hurt to observe a few unwritten rules of courtesy and common sense. Meet in the middle, as equals; don’t kowtow to the cops, but don’t rub their noses in your Ph.D., either.
I introduced Tyler, and then Sheriff Grainger led us toward the bridge. A steady breeze was funneling up the narrow valley of Stinking Creek, spooling across the roadway and humming up the ridge. The temperature was dropping along with the sinking sun, and I was grateful for the sweatshirt I’d added beneath the windbreaker. I sniffed the air and caught the nutty smells of autumn leaves, fall acorns, and a faint, acrid scent that might have been sulfur from the creek. I didn’t pick up any trace of decomp in the air, but unless the two dozen buzzards overhead were badly mistaken, it was there; definitely there. Some of the birds wheeled above the ravine; others hovered, surfing the wind that rippled up the ridge.
Just as we reached the bridge, a shotgun boomed, loud and near. I dropped to a crouch beside the Crown Vic, and Tyler scuttled into the gap behind it. The sheriff laughed. “Sorry, Doc,” he said. “That’s just Aikins, shooing off the buzzards.” He pointed skyward, and I looked up just in time to see the last of the birds hightailing it over the ridgeline. “I should’ve warned you about that. My bad.”
“No harm done,” I said, rising from my crouch. “Y’all sure know how to keep a fellow on his toes. Tyler, you okay?”
“Hoo-eee,” Tyler said, rising and dusting himself off. “Love the adrenaline rush. Hate wettin’ my pants.”
The sheriff turned and yelled toward the far end of the bridge. “Hey. Aikins! Next time you tell us before you do that.”
“Sorry, Sheriff,” came a voice from the shadows across the ravine.
“He’s a good boy,” the sheriff muttered, “but not a whole lot upstairs. Come on out on the bridge, and I’ll show you where she is. You can figure out the best way to get her out.”
He turned and walked toward the bridge, then onto the span. Twenty feet across, just short of the midpoint where Meffert stood, a loop of crime-scene tape hung from the concrete rail. I followed the sheriff, my heart still thudding and my skin prickling from the shotgun blast. Below, I heard the churning of the creek as I walked along the right-hand side of the bridge, peering over the waist-high rail. The creek was fifteen or twenty feet below, a narrow torrent of tumbling water, edged and obstructed by ledges and boulders, by hemlocks and rhododendron. When I reached the yellow tape, I saw why it was there: A wide smear of dark brown covered the top of the rail, and several drips ran partway down the side. In the creek bed below, a few feet downstream from the bridge, lay the body of a woman—or, rather, what had once been a woman. She lay just above the waterline, on the right-hand bank. She was lying, undressed and in several pieces, near a jumble of blood-soaked fabric that was wedged between rocks at the water’s edge.
Tyler joined me at the rail; Meffert stood slightly behind us, not speaking, allowing us to take in the scene on our own. “Tell me what you see, Tyler,” I said. It was my favorite teaching technique—like taking medical students on hospital rounds, but instead of sick patients and puzzling diseases, my rounds revolved around stinking bodies or bare bones.
“What I see is a lot of work getting her up out of there,” he began. I waited, knowing that after mouthing off—partly to stall for time, but also to take the edge off the grim work that lay ahead—Tyler would begin to wheel and spiral in, a forensic version of the buzzard spiral that the deputy’s shotgun blast had interrupted. “Looks like she was dismembered,” he said slowly. “Her limbs appear severed, not gnawed off.” I’d already come to the same conclusion. I also felt sure she’d been dismembered before she was dumped into the creek bed, not after. Tyler glanced down at the rail. “There was lots of blood,” he said, “but there’s not as much on the rail as it looks like.”