Kittredge interrupted. “So you use the bugs to tell time? Like a stopwatch?”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Cool.”
Tyler resumed our conversation. “Okay, I have a theory on the differential decay.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Is it possible,” he said, “that she’s in a cooler microclimate over here than the dude over there? Cool breezes eddying up this little draw?”
I turned and stared at him. “A microclimate?” He shrugged sheepishly. “Tyler, that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
He flushed; at least the color was returning to his cheeks. “It was a reach, I grant you. You got a better theory, Herr Professor?”
“Well . . . ,” I said slowly, stalling for time, searching my memory banks. I recalled the case of a man who’d hanged himself in the woods, and whose body was in remarkably good condition a month after death. Just then my peripheral vision flickered. Something very small and very close had fallen downward through my field of vision from somewhere above. I checked the area around my feet without spotting anything unusual, then I heard myself say, “Hmm. Hmm.” Centered on the glossy black toe of my left boot I saw a single grain of rice. Only it wasn’t a grain of rice; it was a baby maggot—the small, freshly hatched stage called the “first instar.” As I looked at it, pondering its unexpected appearance on the toe of my boot, my eye caught another downward flicker of motion—rather like a shooting star plunging to earth. But it wasn’t a star; it was another first-instar maggot, whose trajectory brought it squarely onto my boot, cheek by jowl with the first one. My eyes instinctively swept upward. If it was raining maggots, there must be a cloud up there somewhere.
It didn’t take long to locate it. My left toe was positioned directly beneath the arrow wound in the right thigh. Peering closely at the wound, I saw a handful of maggots clinging to the bloody tissue there. Even as I watched, another of the maggots lost its grip—its toehold or mouthhold or whatever hold it had—and fell. This one landed slightly to one side, squarely on the exposed bones of the victim’s right foot. “Yes, as a matter of fact,” I said to Tyler, as insight dawned, accompanied by a slow smile spreading across my face. “I do indeed have a better theory. And once you’ve finished your master’s thesis, you can start your dissertation project and prove I’m right. Maggots—like Isaac Newton’s apple—must obey the law of gravity.”
OUR JOB AT THE scene was complicated by the need to free the woman’s corpse, which was pinned to the tree by deeply embedded arrows. I tried wiggling the arrows while tugging, but to no avail. “Art,” I called, “are you hoping to get prints off these? What I mean is, do we need to handle them gently?”
“I’m always hoping to get prints,” he said. “Expecting, no; hoping, sure.”
“In that case,” I suggested, “we might want to think about cutting the arrows right behind the head. Then the shafts would slide right out of her.” I saw heads nodding in agreement. “One of y’all got bolt cutters in your cruiser?”
The youngest and slimmest of the deputies turned and began jogging down through the woods toward the vehicles. While we waited for him to return, we bagged the man’s body.
Unlike the woman, the man had bled out from a single wound. His camo shirt was soaked, and blood had poured off his chest and pooled on the ground beneath him. “Those arrows mean business,” I remarked.
“I’d rather get gun shot than arrow shot,” said Dr. Hamilton. “You ever taken a close look at a hunting arrow?”
“Depends,” I said. “Do eighteenth-century Arikara Indian arrows count?”
“No comparison,” he said. “We’re not talking a chip of flint tied to a stick. These things are killing machines—engineered to inflict massive, lethal damage on big, big animals. They can shatter bone, rip muscle, shred arteries. Most of ’em have four blades angling back from the point—razor-sharp blades, flaring to an inch or more wide.” He looked around at his audience, seemed satisfied with our attentiveness. “The entry wound from one of these arrows is twice the size of a .45-caliber bullet. Granted, a .45 slug traveling eight hundred feet a second packs more wallop than an arrow at three hundred feet a second. Still, think about the damage done by something that can bore a one-inch hole through a caribou.” He nodded at the corpse. “This guy’s heart virtually exploded. His brain might’ve had time to realize how thoroughly he was screwed. But the screwing itself?” He snapped his fingers. “A nanosecond.”
“So quick bright things come to confusion,” said Kittredge.
“Huh?” I said.
“A line from Shakespeare,” he explained. “It’s just a fancy way of saying you can be screwed in a heartbeat.”