By the time the sound of Dr. B’s truck had faded away, dabs of white, grainy paste were already appearing on the corpse. The dabs, whose appearance and timing Tyler duly recorded on film and in his field notes, were deposits of blowfly eggs, and by mid-afternoon the eggs had already begun to hatch, releasing thousands of tiny, wiggling, ravenous little maggots, whose miniature feeding frenzies Tyler watched through a magnifying glass and photographed with a close-up lens. The hatching eggs were clustered at the edges of the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth, the ears, and also—especially—along the bloody slash across the neck.
After shooting an entire roll to document the corpse’s initial state, Tyler dug a collapsible tripod out of his backpack and positioned it beside the corpse, screwing a second camera on top—a camera with a built-in timer, set to take one photo every hour, day and night. Then, and only then, did he take time to unfold the metal chair he’d brought over from the stadium. Reaching into his backpack once more, he took out the Chinese forensic handbook Dr. B had given him, The Washing Away of Wrongs, and settled into the chair. He opened the book to a dog-eared page and read—aloud, as if the corpse could hear the story, and would appreciate its relevance—about a crime that a clever investigator had solved some seven and a half centuries before:
There was an inquest on the body of a man killed by the roadside. It was first suspected that he had been killed by robbers. At the time when the body was checked, all clothing and personal effects were there. On the whole body there were ten old wounds inflicted by a sickle. The inquest official said, “Robbers merely want men to die so that they can take their valuables. Now, the personal effects are there, while the body bears many wounds. If this is not a case of being killed by a hateful enemy, then what is it?” He then ordered those around him to withdraw, summoned the man’s wife and said, “In the past what man was your husband’s worst enemy?” She replied, “Hitherto my husband had no enemies. But only recently there was a certain X who came to borrow money. He did not get it. They had already fixed on a definite date and they discussed that. But there were no bitter enemies.” The inquest official secretly familiarized himself with the victim’s neighborhood. He thereupon sent a number of men separately to go and make proclamations. The nearest neighbors were to bring all their sickles, handing them in for examination. If anyone concealed a sickle, they would be considered the murderer and would be thoroughly investigated. In a short time, seventy or eighty sickles were brought in. The inquest official had them laid on the ground. At the time the weather was hot. The flies flew about and gathered on one sickle. The inquest official pointed to this sickle and said, “Whose is this?” One man abruptly acknowledged it. He was the same man who had set the debt time limit. Then he was interrogated, but still would not confess. The inquest official indicated the sickle and had the man look at it himself. “The sickles of the others in the crowd had no flies. Now, you have killed a man. There are traces of blood on the sickle, so the flies gather. How can this be concealed?” The bystanders were speechless, sighing with admiration. The murderer knocked his head on the ground and confessed.
BY SUNDOWN THE FLIES had dissipated: gone to ground, or to the trees, or to wherever they took their night’s rest. But within the cage, upon the corpse on the wire-mesh cot, the maggots remained, restless and ravenous, their labors unceasing; their appetites insatiable.
THE DRONE OF THE flies—so constant over the past two days that it had become white noise, soporific in its regularity and monotony—suddenly grew louder and more singular, as an intense tickle in his left nostril caused Tyler to leap from the folding chair and paw at his nose. “You little bastard,” he said to the retreating blowfly, which narrowly avoided being crushed by the pinch Tyler gave his itching nose. He pointed down at the corpse, which rested on the cot of wire mesh, already beginning to drip with greasy effluvia. “Him, dumbass, not me.”
Tyler had been observing blowflies for two days now—observing, photographing, and occasionally swatting, despite Dr. B’s admonition to the contrary. Penned in the new research enclosure with the first corpse in his entomology study, he was beginning to feel like a prisoner, though his sentence was a self-imposed one: bug bites and a chain-link cage, for the sake of science.