Corporal Keller had contacted me after reading a newspaper story about one of my early Kansas cases—the Sawzall dismemberment case, the one where I’d teamed up with an FBI profiler—and called to ask if I’d take a look at the bones from the gravel bar. Intrigued by the lack of clothing or other contextual clues—taphonomy, in technical terms—I’d agreed, and two days later, a FedEx courier had delivered the bones to Neyland Stadium. The bones, as my report to Keller had detailed, were those of a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old white female, approximately five feet five inches tall. Three amalgam fillings in her teeth indicated that she’d been born sometime after 1950, and that she’d received good dental care during her youth; two unfilled cavities in her third molars suggested that she’d stopped going to the dentist as an adult, probably because she lacked the money. “Based on prior, similar cases,” I’d written, “it is possible that the victim was a prostitute, one whose disappearance might never have been reported.”
The memorable feature of the case, and the reason I’d mentioned it to Tyler, was that the victim—eventually identified as a missing Anchorage prostitute—had been abducted and flown to the wilderness by a local man who was both a hunter and a bush pilot. “An X-ray of the remains reveals a smear of lead on vertebra T-7,” I wrote, “indicating that she had been shot.” After receiving the report, Corporal Keller had returned to the riverbank with a metal detector, and found a gray bullet nestled in the gray gravel. Had she been transported to the wilderness and released as prey? The suspect denied it, but on the basis of the remains I’d examined—plus three more shallow graves that had been marked by Xs on an aviation chart in the man’s airplane—he’d been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The details of the Alaska case had come back to me in a flash, the moment I’d seen Corporal Keller’s name on the report; indeed, it was almost as if the sun-bleached, river-rinsed bones of 90-02 were hovering in the air before me like a hologram. Then the hologram shimmered and shifted, the skull becoming a face, the empty eye orbits morphing into the piercing gaze of KPD Detective Kittredge. “So, Doc,” he prompted, “what can you tell me?”
“I can tell you I’m stunned,” I said. “As baffled as you. Maybe more.” He waited, his eyebrows raised to make sure I knew that he expected more. I racked my brain.
“The first time we talked,” Kittredge said slowly, “you described the crime scene at Cahaba Lane perfectly, before you’d ever been there. You had a picture of it in your hand before our photographer was even at the scene.”
“I got that photo in the mail,” I reminded him. “The killer sent it to me.”
“So you said. That night, you called 911 to say there were more bodies in the woods there.”
“It was a hunch,” I said, “not a confession.”
“Now, one of your reports—signed by you, handled by you—turns up in the mouth of one of the other bodies you said we’d find in the woods.”
“And I’m the one that found it in her mouth,” I pointed out. “Fished it out and handed it to Art. Remember? Why the hell would I hand over something that incriminating, if I were the one who’d put it there?”
He shrugged. “You own a hunting bow, Doc?”
“God no,” I said, relieved to be able to answer with a simple, unequivocal negative.
“So if we searched your house right now, we wouldn’t find one?”
“Are you kidding? I haven’t shot a bow and arrow since Cub Scouts. You’re welcome to come search the house. Let’s go, right now. Talk to my wife and son. They’d laugh if you asked them if I was a crack shot with a bow and arrow.” I held out my hands, palms up. “Do these look like fingertips that spend a lot of time on a bowstring? Feel them.” I stretched my hands toward Kittredge, and he probed my white-collar, desk-job fingers. “Hell, my wife has more calluses than I do,” I said.
Kittredge drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “So who would have had access to that report? That’s not a copy, that’s the original. You signed it, and you handled it. Who could’ve gotten hold of that? And why would he wad it up and stuff it in a woman’s mouth before using her for target practice?”
Glancing again at the report I held in my left hand, I shrugged, turning my right palm upward, empty-handed. “I sent the original to Keller at the Alaska State Police. I would’ve handled that one, because I signed it.” I glanced at the one in my hand. “But this isn’t the original,” I added. “It’s a copy.”
“How do you know it’s a copy?”
“Because my signature here is black. I sign the originals in blue.” I looked again at the smudges. “Art, you say there are three sets of prints on here—mine and two others?”
“At least three. Possibly more, but if I were a betting man, I’d say three.”
“And you’re sure one set is mine?”
“I’m sure one set matches what we’ve got on file as yours.”
“Then they’re my prints. If you say they’re mine, they’re mine. So this has to be a copy I handled.” I looked at the distribution list on the report. Often I sent copies of reports to several recipients—multiple investigators, the coroner or medical examiner, one or more prosecutors. This one had gone only to the state trooper. I felt another wave of surprise and confusion, bordering on panic. “This is my copy. Has to be. This came out of my own filing cabinet.” I stared at the page, as if the answers to my swirling questions might somehow materialize in the margins, superimposing themselves on the purple fingerprints—mine and the two mystery sets. Suddenly, it was almost as if an answer did materialize. “My God,” I breathed. “She was telling the truth.”
Kittredge and Art looked at me as if I’d gone over the edge, off the cliff of madness.