“She?” said Kittredge.
“The temp.” The detective still looked puzzled and dubious. “I had a temporary secretary for a month last spring,” I explained. “Trish, my regular secretary, was on medical leave. Ended up taking early retirement. But I had a temp for a few weeks, and while she was there, we did some office shuffling. The day the files got moved I was gone all day, giving a talk over at the TBI lab, near Nashville. The temp—Darla? Darlene? Charlene?—she boxed up all my case files and stacked them in the hall. I would never have let her put them there. Anyhow, the next day, she came to see me, all upset; said one of the boxes had gone missing, gotten lost somehow. I reamed her out, accused her of throwing ’em out by mistake, but she cried and cried, swore she’d packed and stacked everything really carefully. I didn’t believe her. Sent her back to Human Resources with a bad reference.”
“How many files did you lose?”
“Dozens,” I said. “All the forensic cases I’d worked since I came to UT. Not the photos, luckily—I keep those in a separate filing cabinet, in a different office—but all the written reports. Took all semester to rebuild those files—I had to call and get copies of those reports from everybody I’d done cases for.” I shook my head, remembering the tedious effort. “Oh, including Keller, the Alaska state trooper. I called to ask him for a copy. He’ll probably remember that, much as I bitched and moaned over the phone.”
Kittredge nodded. “Any guess who might’ve taken the files? And why?”
I remembered what Brubaker, the FBI profiler, had said two days before: “Somebody who thinks I ruined his life.”
CHAPTER 37
Tyler
TYLER LEANED BACK IN the rusting metal chair, his head pressing the chain-link fence, the mesh grating slightly as it bowed outward from the pressure. Overhead, low clouds scudded across a gray sky, and Tyler felt coldness seeping into his core—coldness that included, but was not limited to, the chill in the air.
There was a strange stillness and quietude in the cage; an absence so intense, it was almost a presence. Looking down at the increasingly skeletal corpse on the wire cot, he realized what it was: The maggots—most of them—were gone. A wide trail, brown and greasy, led from the concrete pad into the woods and across the ground before disappearing amid and beneath the fallen leaves. The Exodus, he thought in a flight of bizarre, blasphemous fancy. Some Moses maggot has led them to the Promised Land to pupate. “Follow me, and you shall be transformed. You shall be winged, like the angels, and take to the heavens . . .” Even more bizarre than his blasphemous fantasy was the bleak realization that he would miss the maggots.
Tyler turned to the back of his lab notebook—most of its pages now crammed with figures documenting time, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, maggot length, and the myriad of other minutiae he’d immersed himself in for weeks now—and began to write. He filled this page not with data, but with desolation.
October 27, 1992
Dear Roxanne,
A helicopter thuds overhead—LifeStar is airlifting someone to the emergency room at UT hospital—and the downdraft sends the tarp flapping off the roof of the enclosure, raining a shower of leaves down onto me and my constant, closest companion: not you, but Corpse 06-92.
I spend my days in a cage in the woods, watching the inexorable decay of a man who once lived and breathed and likely dreamed and loved. As I chart his decline, as I chart the rise of the insect multitudes into which he’s being transubstantiated, I wonder if I’m becoming that man—if I’m being transformed into something other than what I once was; something less than what I want to be; something corrupt and malodorous. “You; him,” the flies that swarm my face seem to say, “in the end, you both belong to us, and already there’s very little difference.”