The woman’s body jerked, her arms and legs flopping, as the shotgun blast slammed her head backward and the slug punched through the base of her skull, through the sofa, and into the earth below. Her limbs twitched in brief aftershocks, then grew still. Even through the protective earplugs, the roar of the gun was almost deafening, and it took a few moments before the dull rush in my ears subsided and was replaced by the normal background sounds of the Body Farm: the rotor blades of a Lifestar helicopter making its final approach along the Tennessee River to UT Medical Center; a police siren wailing out on Alcoa Highway, a half mile beyond the hospital; the chittering of an indignant squirrel overhead and the metallic thuds of a jackhammer chipping away at an unwanted piece of concrete somewhere across the river; the whir of the autofocus mechanism on the camera with which Miranda was photographing every aspect of the violent experiment and its effects.
“I’ve been in police work for a lot of years, and I never shot anybody before,” said Art. “Now I’ve shot three, in the space of twenty minutes. I sure hope this isn’t the start of a trend.” Art Bohanan—a longtime colleague and friend, and a senior criminalist with the Knoxville Police Department—stepped back from the blasted body and wiped the bloody barrel of the shotgun with a rag. The rag was already smeared with blood and tissue from the prior two shots, into the prior two bodies. His white Tyvek biohazard suit looked like something a slaughterhouse worker had worn for a double shift on the killing floor. Art surveyed the blood spatter on the suit. “And the sheriff’s office down in Georgia didn’t find a mess of bloody clothes in the husband’s laundry hamper? Wasn’t there a husband-shaped clean spot on the floor or the wall, where his body blocked the spatter?”
I shrugged. “The photos didn’t show much. He didn’t call it in until eight or ten hours after it happened. He had plenty of time to get rid of his clothes and do some cleaning. I don’t know about the spatter pattern; maybe he wiped some things down with bleach; hell, maybe he used a sheet or a shower curtain or something to contain the spatter. I figure we’ll never know, since the scene was worked so poorly and cleaned up right away. I’m just hoping we learn something useful by wrecking three perfectly good skeletons.”
Miranda and I had laid our three research subjects side by side on a trio of secondhand sofas, procured from Goodwill for twenty bucks apiece and positioned atop waferboard and pads of dirt I’d bulldozed into place with the Bobcat, our miniature bulldozer. The pad of dirt was a foot deep; I’d put big road signs—SCHOOL CROSSING, SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY, and DEER CROSSING, with the image of the deer already riddled with bullet holes—under the dirt as a secondary backstop. Judging by the test shot Art had fired through one end of a sofa, just before we placed the bodies, the dirt itself was thick enough to stop the slug and collect all the debris. But it couldn’t hurt—it could never hurt, I figured, although I’d forgotten this lesson in my life from time to time—to have contingencies and backups and backstops.
The first shot Art had fired, into the body of a small sixty-two-year-old white male, had been angled the way I’d expect in a shotgun suicide: the trigger down around waist level, the barrel pressed against the underside of the chin, rather than in the mouth. That shot, as I’d expected, had taken off the top of the cranium and some of the occipital, but had left the cervical spine unscathed. His second shot, into a medium-sized, twenty-eight-year-old black male, had been fired into the mouth, angled closer to straight on, though still slightly upward. That shot had blown off the back of the head and the base of the skull; the concussion had also fractured the first two vertebrae, but it had not destroyed them.
Art had fired the third shot into the mouth of the female cancer victim straight on, at a ninety-degree angle to the body. This shot, I saw with grim satisfaction, had obliterated the occipital and shattered the top of the spinal column, sending fragments of vertebrae splintering into the dirt. As I sifted the soil from beneath the mangled corpse, I found myself growing surprisingly nervous. What if I’d misinterpreted the bone trauma? What if I’d told Art the wrong trajectory? What if I’d ruined three perfectly good skeletal specimens for nothing?
Then, as I sifted the dirt from beneath the woman’s body, I saw bone fragments—familiar-looking fragments—shimmy into view as I shook the coarse wire screen. “Bingo,” said Miranda, zooming in with the lens as I paused to look closer. “There’s the dens epistrophei, and that looks like the back of the atlas. Good geometry, Dr. B.” Whir, click. Whir, click click click. “Good shooting, Art.”
“Not exactly sporting,” said Art ruefully, “but if it persuades GBI to open a case, maybe it’s done some good.”
Looking at the three ravaged bodies, I hoped he was right about that. I also hoped that the shattered skulls and spine might shed light on other, similar cases. I felt a debt, an obligation, to these three donors, and I realized I could repay the debt by sharing what I’d learned in forensic lectures and scientific articles. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said silently to each of the bodies. And again, aloud this time, to Art and Miranda: “Thank you.”