With my left hand, I pulled the mandible gently to open the mouth wider; with my right, I reached deep inside. Clamping my fingers together to compress the material, I wiggled and tugged gently to remove the improvised gag. “Hmm,” I grunted, surprised at what I’d fished out. “It’s not a rag after all. It’s a big wad of paper.”
“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Art. “Maybe it’s a signed confession, with the perp’s name and address on it.”
“You want me to unwad it?”
“Better if I do it back at the lab. Probably help if I moisten it a little more.”
Nodding, I turned and held it toward him, then dropped it into the paper evidence bag he opened beneath my hand.
I turned my attention back to the corpse. Up close, focused now on the details, I was able to stop thinking of her as a tortured and violated woman and to begin scrutinizing her as a corpse, a case, and a challenge. Moving downward from the face, I was struck by a number of small, circular marks on her breasts. “Garland, are these what I think they are?”
“They are if you think they’re cigarette burns,” he said.
“I hate it when I’m right that way,” I said. “I’m guessing they’re antemortem, not postmortem?”
“Probably,” he said. “Point of burning somebody with a cigarette is to hurt and humiliate ’em. Doesn’t work as well if they’re dead.”
I nodded, already moving on, focusing on the legs and feet. I’d leave the examination of the mutilated genitals to Garland and his autopsy. I noticed that each thigh was pierced completely and pegged to the tree by a single arrow. An additional arrow jutted from the back of the right thigh, the base of the arrowhead barely visible through the entry wound. That meant, I assumed, that the point was lodged deep in the bone. It reminded me of an Arikara Indian skeleton I’d excavated years before: a robust male who had lived—and limped—for years with a Sioux arrowhead embedded in his femur, the bone healing and remodeling, doggedly but imperfectly, around the flint point. The position of the arrowheads could not have been more similar; the circumstances of the wounds could not have been more different: one received during a battle between warriors, the other as a defenseless woman fled from a sadistic psychopath.
The woman’s feet intrigued me. Actually, what intrigued me was the contrast between her feet and the rest of her body. The decomposition in the feet was consistent with what I’d seen in the face and hands of the dead hunter; consistent with what I’d observed in numerous corpses a week after death. The decay in the rest of her body, on the other hand, was more consistent with what I’d seen in corpses that had been dead only two or three days. It was as if one corpse’s feet had been grafted onto a fresher corpse’s legs. “Tyler, did you notice the differential decay?”
“Sure did,” he said. “Interesting.”
“Be sure you get plenty of pictures.”
“I’m on it,” he said. The click of the shutter, nearly as regular and frequent as the ticking of my mantelpiece clock, confirmed that he was.
“Got a theory?” As I posed the question, I was wondering if I had a theory.
“Gimme a minute to think on it,” he said.
In my mind’s eye, I scanned back through various cases—various corpses—characterized by differential decay, or a dramatic difference in the degree of decomposition exhibited by certain regions of the body. In every case I could think of, the differential decay could be explained by trauma. In one case—a Cocke County man who’d been stabbed to death a week before we found him—the soft tissues of the left hand remained largely intact; the right hand, by contrast, was down to bare bone. When I cleaned and examined the bones of the right hand, I found cut marks in the metacarpal bones and phalanges. In attempting to ward off the attack, the victim had sustained defense wounds in the right hand. Those bloody wounds had drawn droves of blowflies, which had laid countless eggs in the wounds, and the larvae—maggots—that hatched from those eggs had swiftly consumed the soft tissue of the right hand. A similar explanation, I expected, would account for the differential decay I’d seen the day before, in the first of the Cahaba Lane bodies, the one with no feet: Virtually all the soft tissue was gone from the woman’s neck—probably because she’d been strangled, causing bruises and bloody scrapes that attracted blowflies, the way Sung T’zu’s thirteenth-century sickle had; the way my bloody chain saw had.
But the pattern here was different. The feet—which weren’t pierced by arrows, and presumably weren’t bleeding profusely—were far more decayed than regions that had been pierced, that had bled: regions that should, therefore, have been swarming with hungry maggots.
“By the way, Tyler, you did take samples of the maggots from the woman yesterday, didn’t you?”
“Sure,” he said. “The ten biggest ones, just like you said.”
“Good. Be sure you do the same today—from both bodies. If we compare the sizes, we should be able to tell which murder happened first. Let’s compare ’em to the ones out at the research cage, too—might help us pin down the time since death a little closer.”