THE WOMAN—DEFINITELY A woman—lay facedown, the skull misshapen, probably fractured by the fall. The arms and legs had tumbled free of the body and lay at odd, unnatural angles, the knees and elbows bent. The soft tissue of the extremities was largely gone, as were some of the finger and toe bones. Gnaw marks on the remaining bones of the hands and feet, as well as on the distal ends of the long bones, suggested that canine scavengers—coyotes, probably—had been sharing the remains with the buzzards.
We took a series of photos—both of us shooting, in the interest of speed. “Okay, good enough,” I said. “Let’s get her tagged and bagged.” Normally we’d have spent more time observing and interpreting the scene, but time was a luxury we didn’t have in the fading light of the mountain ravine. Tyler unfolded and unzipped the heavy, rubberized fabric of the body bag, and together we worked the big C-shaped opening underneath the torso. As we did, maggots—some of them as small as rice grains, some a half-inch long—wriggled from the corpse and dropped into the crevices between rocks. A thought struck me. “Before you put her in to simmer,” I said, “find the five biggest maggots and put ’em in alcohol.”
“Uh, okay. How come?”
“The biggest ones must’ve been the first to hatch,” I told him. “Next donated body we get, we document how long it takes the maggots to reach this size. Presto—we know how long this woman’s been dead.”
“So, when you say, ‘we document’ . . .”
“I mean you document,” I clarified. “But we both learn something. We start learning to read the bugs like a time-since-death stopwatch. Timing is everything.” He nodded thoughtfully.
Once the torso was inside, we tucked in the limbs as well, then slid the bag onto the litter. Tyler began zipping it shut, sliding the zipper across the bottom, up one side, and across the top.
“Don’t close it all the way just yet,” I said. “We might find a few bones from the hands and feet in the crevices.”
“You want to reach your hand down into snake-land, you go right ahead,” said Tyler. “I’ll start in on this pile of clothes and stuff.” He unfolded a biohazard bag, then began tugging the tangle of fabric from the crevices in the rock. “Looks like some bloody sheets,” he narrated, as I peered down into nooks and crannies beneath the spots where the hands and feet had lain. “Tennis shoes. Bra. Panties. T-shirt. Blue jeans.” He had just finished extricating the blue jeans from the tangle when he gave a low whistle. “Holy shit,” he said, holding up the jeans, “look at this, Dr. B.” I was puzzled at first—the jeans had wider legs than any pants I’d ever seen. Had the woman been morbidly obese? Then I realized what I was seeing: a single layer of fabric, as if one of the seams in each leg had been left unsewn. But that wasn’t the explanation. The explanation was, the legs of the pants had been sliced open, from top to bottom, up the front of each leg. The pants had been removed by cutting them off.
I took a closer look, and suddenly my blood ran cold. The cut edges of the jeans were stained, for their entire length, with blood. Whoever had cut the jeans off hadn’t done it the way I’d have expected—hadn’t put the blade inside the legs of the pants and then sliced up and out, away from the skin. The jeans had been cut from the outside, by bearing down on the blade and slicing inward. The killer had used the victim herself as a cutting board.
WE LOADED THE LITTER by the last of the daylight, pausing to put on the headlamps we would need for the climb out of the gorge. We had laid the body bag on first, then the biohazard bag containing the shoes and blood-soaked clothing, all of it cut. Last came another biohazard bag, this one containing a blood-soaked sheet and mattress pad. I lashed the bags tightly in place, so that nothing would spill if the litter tipped or even flipped as the officers hoisted it. When I was sure everything was secure, I slid the handle of the hoe beneath the lashings.
Tyler turned to look at me, his headlamp bright enough to be blinding even in the twilight. I held up a hand to shield my eyes, and he angled the headlamp down to lessen the glare. “You’re sending the hoe up? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Look who’s become a believer in the value of the hoe,” I said.
“Hey, if you’d told me why you wanted it in the first place, I’d have believed you,” he said.
“If I’d told you why I wanted it in the first place, there wouldn’t have been a second place—you’d have stayed up on the bridge,” I countered. “Or locked yourself in the truck.”
“Could be. But now that I’ve seen the light, I think we should hang on to the hoe till we’re out of the woods. Figuratively and literally.”
“Can’t. We need both hands free to climb. Besides, the snakes are probably holed up for the night by now.” I didn’t actually know if that was true, but I wanted to reassure Tyler. And myself.