On our way over, Angie and I had made a quick stop at Home Depot to procure the makings of a bare-bones crime-scene kit, since she wasn’t allowed to use FDLE resources for an outside case. We’d bought Tyvek painter’s coveralls; rubber gloves; dust masks; curved needle-nose pliers; wooden dowel rods; tape measures and yardsticks; quarter-inch wire screening; a staple gun; and a large plastic tarp. After suiting up, Angie and I spread the tarp on the concrete floor of the warehouse, then began opening boxes and reassembling the scene, like some bloody, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. We started with the four pieces of waferboard that had been cut and pried from the floor joists. Pieced back together, the chunks of subflooring formed a roughly thirty-inch square, with a bloody six-inch hole at its center, and with assorted drips and runs at irregular intervals around it. Next we unpacked the padding and carpet and put those in position; they, too, had been cut, rather than folded, to fit into the boxes. Then we set the sofa frame in place, using a wooden dowel to center the holes one atop the other. Next, unfolding the bed’s metal frame, we pieced the cut mattress back together and refolded it, and finally wedged the sections of cushions into position. Once everything was in place and we’d rechecked and adjusted the alignment of the holes, Angie took dozens of photos with her camera—wide, medium, and tight shots—from every conceivable angle, with and without the scale provided by the yardsticks and tape measures. Finally satisfied that she’d documented the assemblage thoroughly, she allowed me to begin searching it—which meant disassembling the scene we’d just spent an hour painstakingly reassembling.
The couch was a sobering testament to the destructive force of a twelve-gauge at close range. The shot had blown a ragged hole through the seat cushion, up near one arm of the sofa. The hole was about three inches in diameter at the top of the cushion, where Kate’s head had lain; it was twice that diameter at the bottom of the cushion, as the force of the blast—not just from the slug itself, but also from the column of air forced out of the barrel ahead of the accelerating slug, as well as the hot gases from the exploding gunpowder behind the slug, pushing it—had widened in the shape of a cone. By the time it tore through the mattress and out the underside of the sofa, the shock wave had grown to a foot in diameter, though much of its force was then dispersed and absorbed by the carpet and padding.
While Angie took more photographs, I used a flashlight and the forcepslike pliers—whose long, slender jaws I covered with the fingers from a rubber glove, to avoid damaging bone fragments or lead—to pick through the ragged walls of the blasted tunnel. The cushion and mattress were covered with a reddish-brown spray of blood, mixed with bits of tissue and short strands of hair; embedded here and there within the walls of the tunnel were shards of bone—plenty of them, but none large enough to be readily identifiable. “Not much to go on here,” I remarked, “except for the angle of the shot itself.” Angie lowered the camera and looked with her eyes rather than the lens. “If it were me,” I went on, thinking out loud, “I’d’ve sat on the sofa and leaned over, bracing the butt of the gun on the floor. That would’ve put spatter all over the walls and the ceiling.”
“I know,” she agreed grimly. “Everywhere.”
“But if,” I went on, “for some reason I decided to lie down instead, I think I’d probably prop my head up on the arm of the sofa. But see how vertical the hole is?” She nodded. “That means her head was lying flat on the sofa, and the gun was straight up and down. That’s a lot of weight to hold at an odd angle. Seems strange. Wrong.”
She nodded grimly. “Everything about it seems strange and wrong.”
But apart from the nagging sense that the angle of the shot was unusual, what did we have, really? Nothing, I was forced to admit as we reboxed the sofa cushions and sections of mattress, refolded the bed frame, and set the sofa aside so we could pack the ravaged layers of flooring once again. With the sofa removed, the circle of blue tarp showed through the hole in the carpet and pad and waferboard. The plastic was bright and clean, cheerful and mocking. I stared at it in frustration, and then with curiosity and the glimmer of an idea. “So your sister’s house,” I said, looking at the splintered edges of the subflooring, “it must not have been on a concrete slab.”
“No. Crawl space.”
I turned to Joe. “Did y’all by any chance do any cleaning under the house?”
“Sure,” he said. “If you leave contaminated dirt in the crawl space, it smells like somebody died under there. Makes the whole house stink, and that just traumatizes the family all over again.” Suddenly he smacked himself in the forehead. “Duh, I’m sorry—I got so interested in watching you work, I forgot to bring you the dirt. There’s two boxes of it in the other trailer; I’ll bring ’em right over.”
I asked him to bring me a clean, empty box, too, and I stretched the wire screen across the top of this one, then folded the edges of the screen over the edges of the box and stapled them to hold the screen taut. As Angie slowly dumped dirt onto it, I jiggled the box and brushed the dirt across and through the mesh, sifting the soil, prospecting for nuggets of bone. There was nothing in the first box except screws, nails, bottle caps, and old fragments of broken bottles. I was nearly through screening the second box of dirt when two small objects danced into view on the shimmying mesh. The first, about an inch long and half an inch in diameter, was the lead slug from a shotgun shell. I was glad we’d found it, because if we hadn’t, I’d worry that we’d failed to search thoroughly, but I wasn’t sure the slug would shed all that much light on things: there was no question that Kate had been shot, nor any question about what gun had fired the shot; the only question was who had pulled the trigger, and I knew the slug couldn’t answer that for us.
The second object was a piece of bone about the size and shape of a pencil eraser. “Now, that’s interesting,” I said to Angie.
“What is it?”
I plucked it from the dirt with my gloved fingers. “It’s the dens epistrophei.”