“You might wait and see if anything similar occurs,” he said. “If it’s a case of personal revenge, you’re probably not looking for a serial killer. But if another case like it shows up, this could be the start of something bad.”
“We do have a lot of trees here in Tennessee,” I said. “And a lot of bears. Anything similar happens, we’ll holler for help. But what you’ve just told me is really useful. Now I’ve got an angle or two we can work, and I didn’t have to jump through any bureaucratic hoops to get ’em. One advantage of getting old is that you know a lot of people you can call up and ask for favors.”
He laughed. “Well, ask anytime. Which reminds me. You said you had two favors to ask. What’s the second?”
I told him, and he didn’t hesitate. “I might be able to help you out,” he said. “No promises, but I’ll do what I can.”
I thanked him and hung up, then hurried to my truck. Trash detail beckoned; the crime-scene sewer awaited. And suddenly I couldn’t wait to dive in.
THE BLACK GARBAGE BAG GLISTENED DULLY ON THE lab’s stone counter, lumpy and ominous, stuffed with the detritus of human cruelty and depravity. I approached it warily, donning nitrile gloves and a paper surgical mask to protect myself, not just from bacteria or stinking scraps, but from subtler, more sinister contaminations—spiritual toxins and contagions, if such things existed—waiting to escape the bag we’d brought with us from the death scene.
The bag rustled, its contents shifting and clinking and rattling, when I lifted it and carried it across the room, placing it on a stainless steel counter beneath the largest of the lab’s exhaust hoods. I touched the switch and the fan whirred and whooshed, smooth and powerful. The hairs on my arm moved and tickled in the rush of air, and the ruff of loose black plastic above the bag’s twist tie twitched, as if something in the bag were alive and trying to get out. The hairs on my neck suddenly prickled, too—stirred not by the fan’s updraft, I suspected, but by some psychic currents of superstition or premonition. Get a grip, Brockton, I ordered myself.
And so I did. Gripping the bag’s tightly cinched neck, I untwisted the plastic-coated twist tie and laid it aside, then slowly lifted the bottom of the bag. Clattering and clanking, the contents tumbled out: Tin cans. Plastic bottles and jugs. Bags and wrappers and pouches of paper, foil, cellophane.
Where to begin? Did it even matter, my arbitrary starting point, since I’d be sifting and sorting and scrutinizing the whole mess? “Eeny . . . meeny . . . miny . . . moe,” I said, my gloved index finger tapping a flattened milk jug at “moe.” Starting with the milk jugs made good sense, I realized. For one thing, they were the largest items, so examining them first would shrink the trash heap the fastest, creating at least the illusion of rapid progress, as well as freeing up counter space for sorting the smaller items. Best of all, though, the pull dates on the cartons might tell me when the young man’s captivity had begun . . . and when his feeding, and his life, had ceased.
“Okay, Moe, tell me your story,” I commanded the first crumpled plastic milk jug. I picked it up by the edges, rather than the handle, on the off chance that the TBI crime lab, to which I would relay everything, might be able to coax a DNA sample or a latent print from the surface. The latter seemed doubtful; the container’s textured plastic was the sort of print-defying surface I’d heard forensic technicians curse countless times. Still, it never hurt to try. “You have to try,” I reminded myself, quoting from a Lyle Lovett song. “What would you be if you didn’t even try?”