“Tell Ed I said help!”
I zoomed in a bit more, filling the viewfinder with The Face, then snapped another test picture. Taking care not to jostle the tripod, I removed the camera from the mount and huddled under my jacket to block out the daylight. The photo showed a lovely woman, but her face had gone slack, and the light and life had faded from her eyes. I used the cursor to enlarge the center of the image and saw that the camera had caught one blowfly in midair, just above her face; another was already emerging from the slightly opened mouth. Looking from the camera’s display to the body on the ground, I saw that those two flies had been joined already by dozens of others, swiftly drawn to the odor of death, even though I could detect no trace of it yet. Within minutes small smears of grainy white paste—clumps of blowfly eggs—would begin to fill her mouth and nose and eyes and ears, and by this time tomorrow her face would be covered with blowfly larvae, a writhing mass of newly hatched maggots. I fiddled with the camera’s digital menu, calling up the control screen for the built-in timer. Initially I’d planned to set it to take a photo every twelve hours, but as I glanced down at the swarming flies, I realized that twelve-hour intervals would miss many details of her decomposition. The funding people might not be interested in the subtle shifts of her decay, but I certainly was. What about a photo every half hour, or even every ten minutes? For that matter, why not just camp out here in person and watch it all in real time? Finally I compromised: one picture every fifty minutes, the length of a typical classroom lecture. I did the math: A picture every fifty minutes would yield thirty pictures a day. At the end of two months, I’d have eighteen hundred images. At thirty images a second—the speed of television images, I’d heard—eighteen hundred images would make a video sixty seconds long: exactly the running time of
“Maurie’s Minutes.”
Swapping out the camera’s small digital memory card for a larger one—a two-gigabyte chip, large enough to hold hundreds of images—I latched the camera back onto the tripod, and Miranda and I left the Body Farm, chaining the wooden gate shut and fastening the metal fence behind us. As I snapped the outer padlock shut on the Body Farm’s newest and most famous resident, I found myself thinking of the words she’d used at the end of every newscast for years. “Good night,” I murmured. “See you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 2
THE MAN’S FACE STARED BACK AT ME, HIS EXPRESSIONhovering somewhere in a zone bordered by detachment, curiosity, weariness, and disappointment. I wished I could discern more kindness and compassion in his eyes, because his eyes were my own: I was scrutinizing Bill Brockton’s face in my bathroom mirror, much as I’d scrutinized Maureen Gershwin’s features through a camera lens six hours before.
I glanced down to the counter, at the photo of Gershwin I’d taken at the Body Farm and printed before leaving campus for the day. Seeing it gave me a pang of guilt—partly because Miranda had seemed uncomfortable about the photo shoot and partly because, anthropologically speaking, Miranda had a lot of opinion on her side. People in a number of cultures—Native Americans and Chinese, for instance—traditionally believed that taking people’s pictures could steal their souls. By that reasoning, Maureen Gershwin’s soul had been stolen on a nightly basis for years, sucked into television cameras and dispersed like dust—puffs of electrons or photons or whatever television sets generated—throughout East Tennessee. Was I now stealing whatever scraps had remained? On the other hand, since Gershwin was already dead, might the camera somehow be restoring a bit of soul to an empty husk of a body?