SATTERFIELD WAS DIRECTLY BENEATH the master bedroom, in what appeared to be a teenage boy’s room—piles of jeans and socks and T-shirts strewn everywhere; the bed unmade; posters of swimsuit models on the walls. He could hear the woman overhead, opening drawers and walking around her bedroom, as he poked idly through the boy’s belongings. He imagined her changing clothes: tugging off the sweatpants and the shirt, naked underneath; slipping on panties, cupping her breasts into a bra. Victoria’s Secret, or granny panties and a boob-sling? Probably somewhere in between, he guessed, based on her body—tight, but not flashy.
When he heard the sound of her footsteps leaving the bedroom, he headed upstairs, taking time for a quick look at the basement rec room and garage, so he’d have the entire layout in his head. Jogging up the stairs toward the kitchen, he called out, “Ma’am? Hello?”
“Yes?” She was at the sink, rinsing the bits of egg and toast into the garbage disposal. A tennis racket lay on the wooden table, and she was wearing a sweater and a short skirt and tennis shoes. Her legs looked freshly shaved, and the muscles in her calves and thighs looked chiseled—cut, he thought, pleased by the double entendre.
“I got lucky downstairs,” he said. “Loose connection in that bedroom jack. Shortin’ out somethin’ awful.”
She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “That’s it? We’re all set?” She lifted the receiver from the wall phone and held it to her ear, then frowned. “It’s still dead.”
“I just need to run out to your service box and reset the line. Wait sixty seconds and try it again. If it’s not working, holler at me. If it’s working—and it will be—I’m outta here.” He winked. “For now.”
CHAPTER 32
Brockton
THE DEEPER INTO THE woods we went, the more crime-scene tape I saw. The outer perimeter of the scene took the form of an irregular polygon, its perimeter composed of dozens of straight segments of crime-scene tape, stretched from tree to tree to tree, enclosing an area some fifty feet across by a hundred feet long.
Just inside the nearest segments stood a ladderlike structure—a hunter’s tree stand, I realized—its legs wrapped in spirals of tape, like yellow and black candy canes of crime. Leaning against the lower rungs of the stand was a hunting rifle with a powerful scope. A handful of evidence flags and evidence bags clustered around the base of the tree, but the real action—if the thicket of people was any indication—was at the far end of the scene.
Tyler and I skirted the perimeter, so we’d walk through as little of the enclosed area as possible. As we neared the far end, I saw two smaller ovals taped off within the overall scene—inner perimeters, which I guessed corresponded to the positions of the two victims.
A uniformed deputy whom I vaguely recalled from a prior case stood sentry at the outer edge of the scene. Jenkins, I nearly called him, but I had a flash of doubt, so I snuck a glance at his brass name bar. “Officer . . . Dinkins. Good to see you again. This is my graduate assistant, Tyler Wainwright.”
“Howdy, Doc. Good to see you. Nice to meet you, Tyler.” Dinkins recorded our names and arrival time on a log of people at the scene, then lifted the tape so we could enter without having to stoop much.
By the time I’d straightened, Kittredge was heading our way to lead us in.
The closer of the two inner scenes was twenty feet away, but even a distant glimpse of the body—a tall, barrel-chested corpse clad from head to foot in camouflage—convinced me that this was the male victim. As we got closer, I saw that he lay faceup on the ground, arms and legs sprawled outward, his body and even his face lightly dusted with red, gold, and brown leaves. His face was largely gone, and his abdomen had collapsed—a sure sign that he’d already passed through the “bloat” phase of decay, when bacteria and enzymes in the gut release gases that inflate the abdomen almost like a balloon, or like the belly of a woman who’s eight months pregnant. Once the bloating is over—once the digestive system has digested itself, after a fashion—the belly deflates and shrivels, as this man’s had. I couldn’t be sure, but my top-of-the-head guess, from the shrunken look of the abdomen, the bony fingers, and the extensive decay of the face, was that the man had been dead for at least a few days, maybe a week or more.