I HAD PAUSED IN MY PHOTOGRAPHY TO ABSORB THE horror of the gruesome death sentence imposed on the person chained to the tree, but after a moment, I got back to work. I was still standing beside the tulip poplar, some thirty feet from the bones, but I wasn’t yet ready to approach them. There were more things to photograph where I stood.
I had noticed an assortment of litter strewn across the ground, though initially I hadn’t focused on it. Litter is common in rural counties, where household trash isn’t always collected by garbage trucks, but litter is generally confined to roadside ditches and gullies, not strewn in remote forests. I now took a closer look. Here, the litter was largely confined to the sixty-foot circle worn in the ground, and for an absurd instant, I wondered why a murderer—for unless this death was the world’s strangest suicide, it was surely a murder—would choose a dump as the scene of the crime. Then the grim truth hit me, again with terrible force: The trash had accumulated after the victim was chained to the tree, not before; the trash—empty cans, plastic wrappers, milk jugs, shards of chicken bones—had arrived over the course of days or even weeks, during which the chained, circling victim had been fed. Had been kept terribly, terrifyingly alive. No, Waylon, I silently answered him, I can’t imagine dying thataway.
I took a series of photos of the trash, once more starting with wide-angle shots, then zooming in on representative samples. Bumblebee Tuna. Underwood Deviled Ham. Hormel Bacon. Armour Vienna Sausage. Van Camp’s Beanee Weenees. The combination—a profusion of high-fat, chemical-laden processed meats, plus the terrible purpose to which they had been put—turned my stomach, and several times I had to look away and breathe deeply to keep nausea at bay. It was ironic; comical, even: In decades of forensic work, dealing with decomposing and even dismembered bodies, at every stage of decay, I had thrown up only once, on my very first case, when an exhumed coffin was opened to reveal a rotting, dripping corpse. Yet here I was, brought to the brink of vomiting by a scattering of empty cans and wrappers.
“Let’s be sure to bring up a couple of rakes and trash bags,” I said over my shoulder to Miranda. “I want to bag this stuff and take it back with us.”
“What do you think it’ll tell you?” asked the sheriff.
“Maybe nothing, maybe a lot,” I said. “If we hit the jackpot, we might get fingerprints or DNA—from the victim or the suspect. Maybe from both. But even if we don’t, we could still learn some things about when this happened, and how long it went on. We might not get much insight from the Vienna sausage cans—processed meat has a shelf life that’s measured in years. But—”
Miranda snorted. “Decades, more like it. Maybe centuries. Mmmm,” she said sarcastically. “Vienna sausage—every bit as tasty and nutritious in a thousand years as the day it went into the can!”
“Hey, now,” Waylon protested. “Don’t be talkin’ bad ’bout Vienna sausage. I had me some for lunch, and like as not I’ll have me some more for dinner.”
“Lucky you,” she said.
I ignored their culinary bickering. “The milk jugs might tell us something,” I went on. “The pull dates—‘sell by’—might help us pin down the time since death. Maybe even on how long he was out here.” A chilling thought hit me. “Or she.”
“OKAY, MIRANDA, YOU KNOW THE DRILL. TELL ME what you see.”
It was one of my favorite teaching techniques: putting my students on the spot and testing their knowledge, in the same way chief residents quiz medical students during hospital rounds. Miranda, of course, hardly counted as a student by now; she was more like a junior colleague, but this was a ritual we’d performed for years, and I suspected she had come to share my fondness for it.
After I had “shot my way in” to close-ups of the bones, we had switched gears, returning to the truck to fetch rakes, trash bags, trowels, gloves, and evidence bags. We hadn’t bothered with a body bag; there was no body—just a skeleton, and only a partial one, at that. No point wasting an eighty-dollar vinyl bag when a few fifty-cent paper bags would do the job just fine.
Miranda bent down, then dropped to one knee and studied the bones for a long moment. Drawing a deep breath, she began. “The remains are fully skeletonized, indicating a considerable time since death—perhaps several months, though almost certainly less than a year; in fact, probably less than six months.”
“Explain,” I said, trying not to show that I was pleased that she had reached the same conclusion I had.
“Given the elevation here in the mountains, and the declining average temperatures in September and October, there would almost certainly be soft tissue on the bones if the death had occurred in the fall, when the weather cools off and decay slows down. But if the death occurred no later than, say, mid-August—we’ll need to check the temperature records, of course—the corpse could have skeletonized fast, in just two or three weeks.”