Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 (33 page)

“I ain’t leavin’,” said Williams. “This is a Cooke County crime scene, I was the first officer on the scene, and that makes me the incident commander here.”

The TBI agents glanced at each other, then Rankin beckoned to Williams.

“Leon—
buddy
—how’s about you come chew the fat with your ol’ pal Rooster fer a minute?” He pointed toward Leon’s Jeep, and they got inside. This time the voices—the deputy’s, at least—got pretty loud. Then, to my surprise, the Cherokee’s engine fired up and the vehicle fishtailed angrily across the field, taking the deputy and the undercover agent out of the valley. Morgan flashed me a sunny smile. “Interagency cooperation,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing.” I waited, hoping he might enlighten me about the leverage Rankin seemed to have with Williams, but he didn’t. “Don’t let me keep y’all from your work,” he said, looking toward the helicopter.

We started by mapping the crash site. I asked Sarah to sketch the main features of the scene as Art and Miranda plotted the coordinates of key landmarks. The advent of handheld GPS receivers had greatly simplified the job of scene mapping—with the push of a button, it was now possible to pinpoint the latitude and longitude of a body and even superimpose it on an onscreen map—but I wasn’t quite ready to dispense with old-fashioned maps and measurements quite yet. Batteries run down, displays burn out, circuit boards fail, even satellites go on the fritz. Besides, most GPS units have a one-to three-meter margin of error, meaning—in the worst-case scenario—that I could go back to a death scene six months later, stand or dig exactly where the gizmo indicated the body had lain, and be off by up to ten feet any direction. If you’re troweling for a missing hyoid bone, a twenty-foot circle—three hundred square feet—is an enormous area.

One obvious and unambiguous landmark for our coordinates was the house—

specifically, the southwest corner of the front porch, the closest point to the wreckage. Art shot a compass reading to the center of the cockpit, calling out

“255 degrees.” Sarah drew an arrow and noted the bearing on her map, then, when Art unspooled a long tape measure between the corner and the chopper, she added “87.5 feet” beneath the compass reading. For the second landmark, they chose a large hemlock tree, standing alone beside the small stream that ran the length of the valley floor before plunging into the kudzu tunnel. The chopper lay 74 feet, on a heading of 128 degrees, from the base of the hemlock. So unless the house were destroyed and the tree cut down, we’d be able to pinpoint the crash site with precision and certainty for years to come, GPS or no. One advantage of the crash, if such a word could be used, was that most of the remains were contained within the shell of the cockpit. I had worked several crashes in the Great Smoky Mountains during my years in Knoxville. Those aircraft—a couple of propeller planes and a military air-refueling tanker jet—

were traveling horizontally at high speeds when they hit; as a result, wreckage and body parts were scattered over hundreds of yards of hillside. Orbin’s helicopter, though, had dropped nearly straight down, so while there was considerable trauma to his body—first from the force of the crash, then from the fire—at least there was no scatter.

The helicopter had hit sideways, which also made the excavation easier. If it had impacted right-side-up, the engine and rotor would have crushed the cockpit, forcing us to cut or pry our way in. As it was, I could lean into the cockpit, which remained largely intact, through the windshield opening. As I stepped up to the JetRanger’s vacant windshield opening, I was choked by the smell of burned flesh. I knew that by the time I finished, my clothes and even my hair and skin would reek of the unforgettable smell: seared and foul but with a disturbing and sickening undertone of sweetness, too. Best just to get on with it, then. I leaned in and found myself face to face with the gaping skull of Orbin Kitchings.

The skull was propped against the door frame and the edge of the seat. The seat’s upholstery was gone, its charred frame and springs smashed flat on the left side by the impact. Orbin’s eyes—what had once been the eyes—had been reduced to blackened cinders within their orbits, looking more like chunks of charcoal than windows to the soul. But then, from what little I had seen, Orbin’s soul had a lot of blackness to it.

Most of the skull’s soft tissue had burned away, yet the mandible remained precariously attached at the hinge of the jaw, giving the mouth a gaping, ghoulish, shrieking banshee look. It was slightly reminiscent of Leena’s, I realized—and then I realized that it was more than just slightly reminiscent. Like her, Orbin Kitchings had no lateral incisors in his upper jaw. And as I studied Orbin’s teeth, another image flashed suddenly into my mind: the photo of Tom Kitchings, squeezing through the narrow part of the cave, his clenched teeth bared in a grimace of effort. “I’ll be damned,” I breathed. The gene pool in Cooke County was a remarkably small and shallow body of protoplasm. Orbin had died strapped into his pilot’s harness. The harness’s nylon webbing had been consumed by the inferno, but Orbin, or what was left of him, remained at the helm of his ruined ship, looking like some pilot of the damned. Several of my students had researched the effects of fire on flesh and bone over the years, and I’d once watched one of them burn a human head in a barbecue grill. After only several minutes on a bed of hot coals, the skin across the forehead had split open and peeled backward. Judging by the gradations of calcination and color on Orbin’s skull—hues ranging from the ashy-white frontal bone to the caramel-brown occipital at the back of the skull—the deputy’s scalp had let go of his cranium only gradually, scalped in slow motion by some sadistic fire god. We might be able to remove most of his body from the wreckage in one piece. If so, that would make the excavation far quicker and simpler. I didn’t want to risk damaging the skull, though, so I reached into my tool case and removed a scalpel. Tilting the skull gently backward with one hand, I worked the blade back and forth with the other, severing the burned remnants of ligamentous tissue and spinal cord. As I lifted the skull, I backed out of the wreck and turned to show the skull to my teammates.

Art whistled when he saw the hole at the center of the forehead. It measured nearly an inch in diameter; the edges were jagged, and fracture lines radiated from it like crooked spokes in a mangled wheel. “That’s a big entry wound,” he said. “Bullet must’ve mushroomed some when it hit the windshield. Damn good shooting, too,” he added. “Or incredibly lucky. I bet Orbin was looking the shooter right in the eye when he pulled the trigger. Talk about staring death in the face.”

“If he’d been Keanu Reeves in
The Matrix
,” said Miranda, “he coulda dodged the bullet.”

“If he’d been Christopher Reeve in
Superman
, it woulda bounced right off,” I said.

“If he’d been Superman, he wouldn’t have been flying a helicopter,” Sarah pointed out.

“That’s right,” chimed in Art. “And he’d’ve used his telescopic vision to spot the guy. And his heat vision to burn him up.”

“Enough, already,” I said. “These complex forensic hypotheses are making my head spin.”

I handed off the skull to Miranda, then leaned back in to determine whether how much of the body remained intact. The arms and lower legs, not surprisingly, had burned off—thin, cylindrical, and surrounded by oxygen, they were always the first to go in a hot fire. Some of those bones lay on the warped metal of the pilot’s door; others were fused into a bizarre aggregate with the Plexiglas that had shattered, then melted, then cooled and hardened into a lumpy black mess. His ribs were almost completely exposed, except at the back, where they joined the vertebrae. There, the seat’s padding and leather had protected the flesh from the fire during its first several minutes, as it had beneath the buttocks and backs of the thighs. It would be an awkward, two-person job to wrestle his torso out through the windshield opening. “Miranda, y’all get a disaster bag open on the ground here,” I called out. “Art, are you gloved up?”

“Yeah,” he said, wiggling his fingers in a pair of purple gloves, “I’ve got the gloves on, but I couldn’t find my matching handbag anywhere. Whatcha need?”

“Come help me wrestle him out of here, would you?”

“Love to.”

As soon as Miranda and Sarah had unzipped the white bag and laid it open at my feet, I reached through the cockpit’s left side and slid my hands beneath the torso’s left hip and ribs. Art leaned in through the opening on the right, levering his hands behind the right shoulder and hip. “On three,” I said. “One, two,
three
!” As we grunted with the strain, the charred torso lifted free of the seat and door frame and lurched toward the windshield opening.

“Hang on a sec; I’ve got to shift my grip,” said Art, and with that, I found myself bearing the torso’s entire weight—admittedly, considerably reduced from what it once was, but still a hefty load for a middle-aged academic stooped at an awkward angle.

“Hurry, I can’t hold him long,” I gasped.

“Okay, got him; let’s go,” Art said, and I felt my burden ease. As we maneuvered the torso out the opening, a femur snagged on the windshield’s center post, throwing me off balance. I stumbled backward, into Miranda’s arms. The body cartwheeled downward, thudding onto my feet.

“Damn,” I said.

“Good thing we aren’t EMTs,” said Art. “If he weren’t dead already, he would be now. Either that or speed-dialing his lawyer.”

I tugged the bag’s sides up around the torso, then zipped it closed. “Let’s each grab a corner,” I said, “and go ahead and get this into the truck.” Distributed among the four of us, the weight was surprisingly light—no more than twenty pounds apiece.

Miranda and Sarah reached the back of the truck with their end of the bag first.

“Let’s set it down here on the tailgate, then climb inside and slide him in,” said Miranda. They scampered up and inside the low cap over the bed a lot more gracefully than I could have. “Oh, to be young and nimble again,” I said, lifting and sliding my corner toward them.

“Oh, to be tenured and tended by assistants,” shot back Miranda. In the dark interior of the cap, Sarah coughed back a laugh.

“It’ll never happen,” I said, “if you piss off the department head and he flunks you.”

“He wouldn’t dare. I’ve been propping him up for the last two years. He’d be lost without me.”

“True,” I said, “but I’m grooming your replacement right now.”

“I don’t think so,” said Sarah. “The pay’s lousy and the hours stink. So do the patients.” They emerged and hopped down from the truck.

“Ooh, that’s a new one,” I said. “Let me just retreat to my work while I compose a witty retort.” I went back to the cockpit to begin extricating bones that had separated from the corpse. The first one I pulled out was a humerus.

“Looks like the impact tore his left arm off,” I said to Miranda. “Do you know how I can tell?”

Miranda studied the bone as Sarah inked in the outline of the bone on the element inventory. “Well, one end is all black, and the other is gray,” said Miranda. “I assume that’s a clue?”

“Is that what you call differential burning?” asked Sarah, leaning in.

“Right—very good,” I said. Miranda raised her eyebrows, then smiled in grudging admiration. “See the humeral head,” I went on, “where the arm joins the shoulder? It’s completely calcined; that gray color means all the organic matter has been completely incinerated, leaving nothing behind but the minerals. Look at how fractured it is.” They both studied it intently. “Be careful with it—it’s very fragile, like bones that have been cremated. The distal end, at the elbow, is sort of caramel colored, which means it didn’t burn nearly as much. Because…?”

“Because there was still soft tissue shielding it for a while,” said Miranda quickly. She handed off the humerus to Sarah, who placed it in a brown paper evidence bag, which she labeled and numbered.

“Exactly.” I reached into the cockpit and pulled out a pair of bones, still attached to one another at the lower end. “Looks like the left tibia and fibula have that same pattern of differential burning, so the impact probably tore off his lower leg as well.” I handed out the leg bones for them to inventory, examine, and bag. “And the left femur has some midshaft calcining; that means the muscle probably split open from the force of the impact.” As I held out the femur, Art leaned in to take close-up photos of the burn pattern. The flash seared my eyes. “That’s okay, Art,” I said, “I didn’t really need those retinas to work here.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve heard you can ID bones with your eyes closed, so I figured you weren’t looking. This differential burning you’re talking about—is it forensically significant?”

“Not in this case—we already know how he was killed, because I saw it. So did two other people—three, actually, counting the shooter. But suppose we found these bones in a burned-out house. In that setting, the differential burning would be important—it would probably mean that the body was traumatized or dismembered before it was burned. Not exactly an accidental fire, then—more likely arson intended to conceal evidence of a murder.”

After the first few bones, and the first few minilectures, we got into a quiet, efficient rhythm. Without even looking or turning or speaking, I’d hand pieces out to Miranda, who would verbally ID them. As Sarah got busy inking the bones on the skeleton diagram, Art took over bagging and labeling. Soon the ground was covered with brown paper bags, like some gruesome, cannibalistic picnic lunch.

I had gradually worked my way down to the pedals near the pilot’s floor bubble, or what had once been the floor bubble. “Hey, Art,” I called as I began extricating a handful of calcined foot bones, “I know the pedals on an airplane work the rudder, but what do they do on a helicopter, which doesn’t have a rudder? They don’t control the throttle, do they?”

“Naw,” he said, reaching around me to point at a twisted metal tube mounted in the center of the cabin floor, “throttle’s built into the stick here, which is called the ‘collective’ in a chopper. The pedals control the tail rotor, which works like a rudder, in a frighteningly complex way. To yaw—pivot—to the left, the pilot mashes the left pedal, which actually causes the tail rotor to shove the tail boom to the right. I tried to fly one of these contraptions once.”