Colonel Shy wasn’t the only case where I’d been derailed by difficulty in determining time since death. Another murder case—a case I’d consulted on shortly before my move to Knoxville—still haunted me. A suspect in the case had been seen with the victim two weeks before the body had been found—the last known sighting of the victim—and the investigator and prosecutor pressed me hard: Could I testify, with certainty, that the murder had occurred then? “No,” I’d been forced to admit, “not with any scientific confidence.” As a result, the suspect had gone free.
Hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge—determined to avoid such frustrations and humiliations in the future—I had combed through stacks of scientific journals, seeking data on decomposition. But apart from a few musty articles about insect carcasses—dead bugs found in bodies exhumed from old cemeteries—I’d found virtually nothing. Nothing recent, at any rate, though I had come across a fascinating handbook written by a death investigator in China centuries before, in 1247 A.D.—a research gap of more than seven centuries. The good news was, I wasn’t the only forensic anthropologist who was flying by the seat of his pants when estimating time since death. The bad news was, every forensic anthropologist was flying by the seat of his pants.
The interesting news, I realized now, as Tyler and I reached the base of the mountain, and the road’s hairpin curves gave way to a long, flat straightaway, was that the field was wide open. Time since death—understanding the processes and the timing of postmortem decomposition—was fertile ground for research.
The sun was low in the sky, a quarter moon high overhead, when Tyler and I passed through Wartburg’s town square on our way back to Knoxville. As I glanced up at the courthouse belfry, still pondering ways to unlock the secrets of time since death, I found myself surrounded by markers and measures of time: A frozen clock. A fossilized town. An ancient fern. The bones of a girl who would never reach adulthood.
A girl for whom time had stopped, sometime after wildcat miners had ravaged a mountainside; sometime before a papery seed had wafted from a tree, and a wasp queen had begun building her papery palace in the dark.
CHAPTER 2
Satterfield
SATTERFIELD OPENED THE DOOR and reached into the wire-mesh hutch. Grasping the soft, loose skin just behind the ears, he raised the animal slightly, then cupped a hand beneath the chest and lifted it out of the hutch. The rabbit was young and small—scarcely larger than the palm of Satterfield’s hand—and its large, luminous eyes dominated its face, in the way of all baby mammals. The eyes flitted back and forth, and the animal trembled.
Satterfield crossed the room to a second enclosure, also made of wire mesh. This one was sturdier and larger—as big as a baby’s playpen, though only half as high—and its floor was covered with sandy earth, flat rocks, and good-sized pieces of driftwood. The enclosure was split down the middle by a removable panel of wire mesh, inserted through a narrow slit in the top. Cupping the rabbit to his chest, Satterfield stooped to unlatch the door in the top, then set the animal inside. It sat, motionless except for the tremor. On the other side of the divider, the other side of the cage, Satterfield glimpsed a trace of movement, slow at first, then more rapid: a slender, bifurcated black ribbon of tongue sliding in and out of a mouth, flicking as it sampled the new scent in the air.
The snake—a fer-de-lance that Satterfield had paid a thousand dollars to have imported from Costa Rica—measured four feet long and three inches thick; its broad back was saddled, from neck to tail, by bold, black-and-tan diamonds. The head—a flat-topped triangle with thin black stripes running from the eyes to the back of the jaws—was nearly as broad as Satterfield’s hand.
Satterfield had kept snakes for most of his life, but the fer-de-lance was different from others he’d had. It was fearless, irritable, and aggressive, and that was on its mellow days. Most snakes in the present situation would’ve sat tight, studying the rabbit for a while, maybe even waiting for it to lower its guard, perhaps even wander foolishly toward the jaws of death. The fer-de-lance, though, after a few more confirmatory flicks of the tongue, slid slowly but confidently toward the rabbit. The rabbit emitted a squeal and then leaped away, huddling in the corner of the cage. The snake slithered along the divider, its head reared, its tongue flicking through open squares in the wire mesh one by one as it drew closer.