Lives in Ruins (24 page)

Unfortunately, neither of our teams had pinpointed the pig's burial site. Nor had the other team. Moran and her assistants, Hatza and Eric Young, took us out behind one of the outbuildings at the field station and led us down a sandy trail through the woods. We hiked a mile or so to a spot closer to a busy paved road than the fire road. There, in a clearing near a big cistern, was an obviously disturbed piece of ground, roughly rectangular and sagging in the middle; at a certain point, a buried body begins to collapse and the stomach ruptures, leaving a telltale slump in the soil. Moran also pointed out straight edges where a shovel had sliced into the earth. “There are no straight lines in nature, people,” she told us. I maintain that our mistake was in overthinking our criminal's desire to conceal the body. He was no mastermind, just a panicked criminal; maybe it hadn't occurred to him that he could find better cover off the fire road than the highway. But what, I wonder, was buried in the sites we did find? We were there for only two days; we had no time to investigate the rest of the Pine Barrens, full as it might be of murder victims. The next day, we had to excavate the pig.

SOMEHOW I FOUND
myself alone in the woods the second morning. There was only one restroom in the field station, and I was last in line. By the time I emerged, everyone was gone, but I wasn't worried; though the site was a hike from here, it had been easy
enough to get to, and there was that big cistern nearby, an obvious marker. But the first trail I tried was a dead end and I had to double back. I tried another that felt all wrong. The sandy ground and piny woods looked the same no matter which way I turned, and the trails seemed to be multiplying. There are more than a million acres in the Pine Barrens; it covers a huge swatch of the map. Perhaps you remember the episode from
The Sopranos
where two mobsters, Paulie and Christopher, decide to dump the body of their Russian victim in the Pine Barrens. They drive to the vast, gnarly-wooded wilderness, pop the trunk, and fall into a horror story, Poe by way of Godot. The body is not dead; the mobsters are attacked with the grave-digging shovel and have their car stolen. Paulie loses a shoe. The men wander the woods in sharp coats and what's left of their shoes, shivering and bickering. I knew how they felt.

I found my way back to the field station, where two resident scientists finally steered me down the right path; deep in the woods, I ran into Moran herself, who had gone looking for her missing student. I'd needed three rescuers, a personal record.

Moran and I reached the pig burial site just after the others had marked off a generous area around the grave with yellow crime-scene tape. I pulled on my lightweight white Tyvek suit, with booties and a hood to keep me from contaminating evidence, then finished my outfit with two layers of latex gloves, and joined the crew. We looked like a platoon of astronauts, dispatched to a sandy semilunar landscape that was littered with little pine cones and dead leaves. First, we photographed and mapped the site. Then, inside the taped area, we lined up a couple feet apart and walked slowly, south to north, through the site, eight abreast, veering around trees, the cistern, and the grave. As we searched for shell casings or any other evidence, we used our pin flags to probe the leaves and soft ground, marking anything that looked like a human might have left it behind. Then we spread out and walked west to east across the site. Next we studied each of the flags and mapped
them. “Why is this one marked?” Moran asked. “There's your shell casing,” said the homicide cop, pointing out the shell camouflaged in the brown grass.

This excavation was a painstaking affair. We measured, photographed, and logged every step of it; checked the color of the soil against our soil charts; and ended up with a rectangular area four feet by eight, divided into quadrants, marked by nails at the corners; we tied string between the nails to mark the perimeter of the excavation. Eventually, as we took turns carefully troweling the surface to reverse the hasty burial, we started finding trotters and toes and lumps of fat covered with hair from the rotting pig; we also found water bottles and even a beer can and cigarette butts, all potentially powerful evidence. “Cigarette butts are great for DNA, and bad guys like to smoke,” Moran noted.

Lucky for us it was a chilly spring; we were sweating in the Tyvek suits, and I could just imagine what ninety degrees and swarms of insects could do to make this more difficult. We were already afflicted by buzzing gnats. As the hole deepened, reaching into the center of the grave to carefully extract the dirt required a stretch that made my ribs ache. “Try excavating over your head,” Moran said, laughing. “Try excavating on a steep slope!”

When she was twenty years old, a recent graduate of Bryn Mawr in classical and Near East archaeology, Moran had been so determined to work as an archaeologist that she took a job on a field crew for a CRM firm. “It was tough, physical work, all day, every day,” she said. Safety was not a priority, so, not surprisingly, she suffered lead contamination working at a hazardous site. In the year 2000, she made $9.50 an hour, with no benefits. It was a punishing job, but it had one reward. When anyone asked her profession, she could say, with satisfaction,
professional archaeologist
.

“Here's a maggot,” Amanda called, and Moran offered her a vial and a label for the white, grublike creature. “I'm surprised we haven't found more of them,” Moran said. “Sometimes, you'll remove a layer
of dirt over the grave and there will be a whole bed of writhing maggots.” Maggots, the larval stage of various flies, are activated by heat. Moran described how systematic and careful attention to them could, like everything else in the realm of forensics, build a true picture and timeline of the scene and even help make a criminal case. Identifying which species of fly a maggot represented, for instance, can be correlated with air temperature and burial conditions and used to calculate how long a body has been dead. “It's one of the more accurate indicators of time of death,” Moran said. She was fascinated by all the ways nature recycled its dead and an eager scientist of decomposition. “I have forty-five rats buried in my backyard to study,” she said.

By mid-afternoon, we had excavated a foot deep into the grave and were stretched out on our stomachs to reach inside—five excavators radiating out from the hole, a star with white Tyvek points. I scraped and brushed in dirt from around the pig into the dustpan, then, still on my stomach, twisted back to dump it in a bucket, which others would screen. The smell from the emerging carcass rose like a powerful repulsing wave. I forced myself to breathe it in and tried to describe it, along with my fellow crime-scene analysts. Organic, foul as sewage or fetid water, but with a persistent, cloying density, it clung to my hair and clothes. When I got home later that night, my dog went crazy over the smell.

Moran's assistant Eric Young was about fifty, the oldest person at the gravesite besides me. Bald and mustached, he was a retired cop who had gone back to school to earn two degrees in archaeology. He stood over us, amused by our efforts to describe the stench. “You think
this
smells bad?” he asked, and began telling stories from his days as a detective. One involved the shotgun suicide of a man who never bathed. He told me he did forensic work “because somebody has to do it.” His passion, it turned out, was Mesoamerican archaeology, circa 3,000
B
.
C
.; he excavated, when he could, in Mexico and Guatemala. Next week he and
Moran would be in Austin, at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since Moran had earned a graduate degree in the U.K., she had been promoting British advances in the applied science of forensics (inspired, in part, she is convinced, by Sherlock Holmes—“He really anticipated a lot of forensics.”). She is an advocate for developing standard operating procedures for crime-scene analysis and for the past seven years, she has helped organize the SAA's annual panel on forensics. This year, she would be presenting a paper on her latest experiment, giving law enforcement and forensics professionals a chance to conduct a “full-scale post-blast investigation.” This had involved obtaining a bus, filling it with dead farm animals, and constructing an identity for each animal, complete with personal effects like cell phones and jewelry. The final step was to simulate a terrorist attack during the morning commute and blow up the bus.
^*
“The animals were dressed in clothing,” Young said appreciatively as Moran nodded. “Children's clothing!” The professionals participating in this exercise had to respond to the blast, secure the area, and process the site. They had to gather evidence, gleaning what information they could from the debris that could lead to the perpetrators. And they had to try to gather and properly identify each animal and its property—their duty to the survivors. Moran was proud of the results: every animal in the simulation (and fifty-eight of the sixty-one personal items she had planted) had been recovered and identified.

I looked at the huge, partially decayed pig, the stand-in for our waitress, and thought how much more difficult this would be with scraps of blue jeans or a T-shirt. And what if . . . ? Most of my fellow excavators here had already handled human remains, and reported
for work each day prepared to encounter more. I breathed deep, in a kind of salute to their fortitude.

It was late in the afternoon. Moran regretted that we didn't have time to remove the carcass from the grave. Sometimes what was underneath a body was telling: a weapon, or footprints. “Or even dead leaves,” she said. “If the killer dug the hole in advance and left it open, this could be a sign of premeditation.” But the partially excavated pig would be reburied and left for another class to find. Young, Moran, and one of the students puffed on a few of Young's cigarettes, then threw the butts into the grave, along with some soda cans and water bottles—criminal evidence for future forensic students to puzzle over. We filled in the pit with screened dirt, tamped it down, and hiked back through the pines with our shovels and crime-scene tape and evidence bags.

Amateurs

SINCE WORKING FOR
the medical examiner of New York City, going through the debris from the neighborhood of the Twin Towers, Erin Coward had decided to make forensic anthropology her specialty. While she applied for programs, she was staying with her mother near Washington, D.C. We arranged to meet one afternoon near the Capitol. Coward and her mother, Lane, picked me up at my hotel to whisk me off to check out an archaeological museum Erin had found online. “We never heard of this place,” her mother said, “but Erin called and made arrangements for a private showing.” How great is this? I thought happily, as her mother chauffeured us around the circles and loops of suburban D.C. and chatted knowledgeably about her daughter's archaeological career. “Did she tell you about finding a seashell in the middle of the desert?”

It was an adventure with lively and well-read companions. The bedtime story that Erin had wanted to hear each night in childhood had been
Beowulf
; now she consumed biography, travel essays, British
novels, Stephen Jay Gould, Bill Bryson. Of Bryson's
A Short History of Nearly Everything
, Erin said: “I was prepared to be a skeptic—‘I will take you down!'—but he was amazing on evolution.”

The car climbed the hills above D.C. to the Palisades, a residential neighborhood of lovely homes on an old river terrace above the Potomac. We would never have found the Palisades Museum of Prehistory without GPS. We were running a little late, and Erin nervously chewed a nail while her mother drove up and down a road of pretty houses, all of us squinting at street numbers. There were no signs, no indication that anything commercial was happening here—and, as it turned out, nothing commercial was. The address was for the corner house on the big lot, with a grape arbor and an outbuilding and children's toys littering the patio. Our host, Doug Dupin, was a relaxed young dad, a skateboarder, who led us out back. We walked across the lawn to the outbuilding, an elaborate clubhouse with just enough room inside for four. “I've been working for a few years on this thing, and every once in a while people come through,” Doug Dupin said. He had been digging the foundation for a wine cellar when he began to uncover layers of history: old medicine bottles, Civil War bullets, shards of pottery, and Native American points. While Lane Coward and I admired the decor, burlap walls with bark accents, and the posters he made and sold (Smoking Pipes of the American Indian, Stone Points of the Potomac Palisades), Erin gravitated toward the display cases of mounted Indian points. She and Dupin began speaking the language of stone tools.

Dupin's personal collection, and his determination to salvage what he could of the archaeology of the area, had deepened when a soccer field was dug in his neighborhood. He watched bulldozers churn up the earth, exposing all sorts of artifacts. He alerted the archaeologist who worked for the District of Columbia, but could not get him to halt the construction or gather the artifacts, so he and a couple neighbors began surface-collecting points and pottery
in the evenings. He posted his finds on an archaeology listserv, only to earn a scolding from the local historic preservation office. “Look,” he told us, “I'm happy to let the professionals take over, but if they aren't going to do their jobs, I will step in.” Dupin began noticing how little actually got surveyed and mitigated in the Palisades before developers broke ground. So he decided to intervene on his own, collecting and cataloging artifacts for public display. He bought some display cases, fixed up his clubhouse as a museum, put together a website, and stepped into the cavernous gap left by the local professionals. He also started to document local violations of historic preservation laws, to create a record of the local history that had been found—as well as the history that had been erased.