“I’d like to, yes. I want to get a facial reconstruction done. Put the likeness out there, see if anybody recognizes it. But I can scrape off some of the blood, so you can take that to the lab, too.”
He nodded, and I rummaged around in my desk drawer for a scalpel. I cleaned the blade with an antibacterial wet wipe—another staple the Anthropology Department purchased in bulk and consumed at a rapid rate—and began scraping flakes of dried blood from the forehead onto a clean sheet of paper. After I’d scraped off a tiny heap of flakes—if the material were salt, I’d call the quantity a pinch—Steve said, “That’s probably good.” He folded the paper, marked it as evidence, and sealed it in the envelope I offered him.
“What else did y’all find?” I asked. “Hard evidence tying Shiflett to the kid chained to the tree?”
“Looks like it, though we need the computer forensics people’s help.”
“With what?”
“His computer’s hard drive was erased.”
“Crap,” I said. “Although frankly, I’m kinda surprised this guy had a computer.”
“Why, Doc? He did communications work in the military. And you know from the snuff film that he was savvy with video editing and social media.”
“Good point,” I conceded. “But what can the computer forensics people find, if the hard drive’s been wiped clean?”
“Erased,” he said, “but probably not wiped. Most people think that deleting files is enough to cover their tracks, but it’s actually not.”
“How’s that?”
He shrugged, as if to say that he didn’t fully understand it himself. “The way it was explained to me, deleting a file doesn’t actually delete the file. It makes that file’s space on the drive available, but the data doesn’t really get removed. It just gets overwritten, a little at a time, as new data gets added. So a lot of the old data is still there, especially if there hasn’t been a lot of new data. Sort of like deciding to paint your house a new color, but only painting for a few minutes every couple days. Gonna take a long time before that old paint’s out of sight.”
“Steve, you missed your calling,” I said. “You should’ve been a computer scientist. Who dabbles in home improvements.”
He laughed. “Point is, our computer nerds can probably recover a lot of the data.”
“Well, I hope you’re right.”
He grinned and held up an index finger. “But wait, there’s more. Much more. We found six video surveillance cameras, powered by a twelve-volt car battery. A video hard drive. DVDs with raw footage of the victim chained to the tree.”
I felt my excitement rising. “That’s great!” I winced at the way I’d said it, and he gave a shrug: absolution. He understood.
“Also a big assortment of hate literature. White supremacy publications. Neo-Nazi stuff. A bunch of antigovernment stuff, including The Turner Diaries, Tim McVeigh’s inspiration for Oklahoma City. Militia handbooks. DIY manuals on bomb making and sabotage.”
I was afraid to ask my next question, but I was even more afraid not to ask it. “Steve, did you find anything that ties Jimmy Ray Shiflett to Nick Satterfield?”
His brow furrowed. “Satterfield? The escaped killer?” I nodded. “No, nothing. Whatever makes you ask that?”
“Forget it,” I said. “Just jumpy, I guess. Hearing things go bump in the night.”
MOST TABLES IN THE BONE LAB WERE LITTERED WITH bare bones. Joanna Hughes’s table was occupied by human heads—some male, some female; some Anglo, some Latino; some smiling, some sad.
Despite the diversity, all the heads were the uniform gray of potter’s clay. Joanna was a facial reconstruction artist—the first and, as far as I knew, the only student at UT to major in forensic art. She had devised the major herself, combining classes in sculpture, drawing, anatomy, and osteology: a combination that gave her detailed knowledge of how bones, muscles, and tendons meshed to create the complex structures of the human face. Reconstructing a face wasn’t simply a matter of slathering clay onto a skull and mashing it around to create lips and noses and cheeks. No, reconstructing a face was a remarkably intricate process, requiring every muscle of the face to be created and applied, layered and interwoven, just as they had been in life, before the final covering of clay “skin,” whose thickness had to match precise scientific measurements of tissue depth at numerous landmarks on the face and head.