The jug’s paper label had peeled off—it was probably curled or wadded up elsewhere in this portable trash midden—but I didn’t need a label to identify the brand. A glance at the yellow polyethylene and the circular medallions embossed on the jug’s sides told me that the milk had been bottled by Mayfield, an East Tennessee dairy that was headquartered just fifty miles south of Knoxville, in Athens. Mayfield operated a large distribution center in West Knoxville, beside Interstate 40. For decades, the industrial-looking building was elevated from eyesore to quirky landmark by the larger-than-life figure of Maggie, an immense fiberglass Jersey cow. Twelve feet high by twenty feet long, endowed with forty-gallon udders, Maggie stood serenely on a large flatbed trailer alongside I-40. Her location and her wheels made it easy for Mayfield to herd Maggie to county fairs and cornbread festivals . . . and also made it relatively simple for pranksters to borrow Maggie from time to time, during fraternity initiations or other alcohol-fueled rites of passage. Maggie had, alas, been put out to pasture in recent years, retired to Mayfield’s original dairy farm, which was now open to tourists and school groups. I missed her, and I suspected the UT fraternities did, too.
The jug’s pull date, printed by a dot-matrix printer around the neck, read “Sell by 10/03/16.” I blinked, stunned—He couldn’t have been alive two weeks ago, I thought—but then I looked again and saw that I had misread the year: the fading ink read 2013, not 2016. That, too, was puzzling, though, given that it seemed clear—from the lack of leaf litter atop the bones—that the death had occurred only a few months before, perhaps during summer. Removing the jug from beneath the hood, I raised it toward my face, sniffing as I did, ready to thrust it back into the exhaust the moment I caught the stench of sour milk. But I never did, even when the open spout was practically touching my nose. Water, I realized: The jug had been rinsed out and used to store water. I set it on a table behind me and reached for another jug.
This one—translucent and colorless, not Mayfield yellow—didn’t require the sniff test, as it had flecks of clotted milk clearly visible within the hollow handle. It also had a far more recent pull date: May 29, just five months before. The remaining half-dozen jugs followed the same pattern as the first two: three of them were clean, odorless jugs, stamped with pull dates ranging from six months to three years earlier; the other three stank of sour milk, and bore dates ranging from May 17, the earliest, to June 24, the latest. Chained in the woods for six weeks, I calculated. God in heaven.
Next I tackled the cans—a few beer cans, but mostly an assortment of pull-top tins of processed meats, including, I grimaced to see, cheap dog food. The cans, whose contents were supposedly tasty for years, were less informative than the milk jugs, so I gave each one only a quick look before setting it aside. Next came a series of crumpled wrappers and bags: Slim Jim meat sticks. Lay’s Potato Chips. Armour Star Bacon. McDonald’s Egg McMuffin—a delicacy consumed by the killer, I suspected, who didn’t seem the sort to waste a warm, tasty breakfast sandwich on a victim he sometimes fed dog food. Three Red Man Tobacco foil pouches, whose contents likewise had probably gone into the killer’s cheek: chewing tobacco was a luxury item, an indulgence, which almost surely would not have been offered to the captive victim, except, perhaps, in the form of a stream of brown spittle, delivered to the face and followed with an insult.
I set the beer cans, the Egg McMuffin wrapper, and the Red Man pouches to one side. I would package those separately for the TBI lab, in hopes that the killer’s mouth had contacted their surfaces and left behind a trace of telltale DNA. A cigarette butt might have done the job also, but apparently our perpetrator preferred saliva to smoke as his nicotine delivery system.
After I’d removed the jugs, the cans, the wrappers, and the bags, very little was left. A foil chewing-gum wrapper. A whiskey bottle. An empty Altoids tin. And, oddly, two sticks of deodorant—or, rather, two empty deodorant dispensers, their labels peeling and tightly curled. Why on earth . . . , I wondered. It seemed inconceivable that the victim had been provided with toiletries to keep him smelling fresh during his ordeal in the woods. But it also made no sense that our tobacco-chewing perpetrator would be attending to his own personal hygiene at the scene of the crime, either. If he had been, why stop with deodorant? Where were the empty toothpaste tubes, the nail clippers, the dental floss?
On a whim—curious about what brand of deodorant might appeal to the sort of person who would chain a young man in the woods for weeks—I gave the deodorant a tentative sniff. It didn’t smell like my own “sport” fragrance, nor like baby powder, nor lavender, nor any other deodorant I’d ever smelled. It smelled pungent, like rancid meat. Involuntarily I made a face, then gave the curled label a tug to remove it from the dispenser. As I held the paper in my upturned palm and smoothed it flat, it gave a sudden flutter, then—caught by the exhaust hood’s rising column of air—it fluttered upward and plastered against the mesh screen guarding the fan. “Crap,” I muttered, switching off the fan. As the spinning blades slowed, the label detached from the screen and drifted down, landing faceup on the soiled steel counter.
I read the label—once, twice, three times—and then heard myself whispering, “Son of a bitch. You sick, sick sonofabitch.”