“Jesus.” She turned back to the skull, shaking her head. “Sounds like she had a really awful life.”
“I’d say she had a bad death, too, however she died.” I glanced at the pastel drawing beside the skull. In the foreground, healthy, happy people smiled at one another. “Truth is, Jenny, I don’t think anybody ever gave a damn about this girl.”
She looked up from the skull, looked me in the eye with a directness and frankness I found startling in a teenager. “You do,” she said. “And now I do. It’s not much, but maybe it’s a start.”
CHAPTER 16
Tyler
TYLER SLID THE BODY bag halfway out of the truck, then paused. “Ready, Dr. B?”
Dr. B leaned over the tailgate and grasped the corners at the bag’s other end. “Ready.”
“Okay, on three. One, two, three.” As Tyler walked backward, the bag slid; just before it dropped off the edge of the tailgate, Dr. B hoisted the end, and together they trudged to the chain-link cube in the woods.
The cube—a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot cage, with a concrete floor and a chain-link roof—wouldn’t win any architectural prizes, that was for sure. But they’d designed and built it themselves, for a few hundred bucks, and it would do the job it was designed to do: keep out raccoons and coyotes and buzzards, but let in blowflies and other bugs . . . and let in Tyler, to observe and document the insects’ arrival, activity, and departure in the days and weeks to come.
The corpse—the unclaimed body of a seventy-year-old white male who’d committed suicide—had come from the medical examiner in Nashville. Most male suicides used firearms—“Men love guns, even when they hate themselves,” Dr. B had said to Tyler once. Men preferred guns and nooses to kill themselves; women went for poison. This man, though, had cut his own throat, an act that spoke to Tyler of fierce determination and deep despair. Slashed wrists were often survivable, especially if the cuts were shallow and crosswise, rather than lengthwise and deep enough to shred arteries. But taking a straight razor to the neck, like this guy had done? No turning back, long as you nicked the jugular vein or the carotid artery.
They squeezed through the narrow gate, Tyler first, moving backward. “Walk softly,” Dr. B reminded him. “The concrete’s only been curing for forty-eight hours.” Dr. B had wanted to wait a week before putting any load on the concrete, but as Tyler had pointed out—repeatedly—fall was coming, and if he didn’t start the project before the weather turned cold, the only insect activity he’d be able to record for quite a while could be summed up in one word: hibernation.
By the time they laid the body bag on the wire-mesh rack Tyler had built—a cot, basically, made of two-by-fours and quarter-inch wire mesh—the bag was swarming with flies, and as he tugged the long, C-shaped zipper open, the eager insects began squirming through the gap to get at the body.
The blowflies’ eagerness was no surprise to Tyler, nor were their numbers; he’d seen them plenty of times before, at death scenes and at the pig barn. What was new to him was that this time—with this corpse—the flies were not simply a nuisance to be endured, a buggy cross to be borne. This time, the flies were the stars of the show, the subjects of scientific scrutiny, their comings and goings and ages and stages to be attentively observed and meticulously chronicled.
Dr. B watched, and then posed, as Tyler took photos: the first photos of the first research study at the world’s first laboratory focused on human decomposition. Then, satisfied or bored, he departed, leaving Tyler alone in the cage with the corpse. “I’ll give you two some time to get acquainted,” he’d joked as he headed toward the parking lot. “Keep in touch. And take plenty of pictures.”