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I named another former student, now teaching in Tampa, at the University of South Florida. “Did you try her? I think she consults on forensic cases.”
“She’s in Africa all month,” said Angie. “Teaching Nigerian medical students about skeletal trauma.”
“Nigeria? Well, good for her. Sounds like I need to keep better tabs on our graduates, though. Maybe I should put tracking collars on them.”
“Ha,” said Vickery. “While you’re at it, could you put shock collars on a few of my colleagues?”
I laughed, and Angie laughed, too, which did my heart good. “So,” she said, “any chance we could beg, borrow, or steal an hour or so more of your expertise before I put you on your flight back to Knoxville?”
I pulled out my pocket calendar and took a look. I’d blocked out the next two weeks to write a journal article — an account of an experiment in which we’d tested the ability of side-scan sonar to image a body we’d submerged in the Tennessee River — but my heart wasn’t in the project.
/> “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll make you a better offer. If you can sign this skull over to me for a few days, I’ll take it back to Tennessee, finish cleaning it, and write a forensic report on it. Then I’ll see if I can get you a facial reconstruction. There’s a forensic artist who works in the bone lab, and she does great work. If Joanna can put a face on this skull for us, somebody might recognize it.” I paused. “And if you can find me a cheaper place to stay, I’ll come back for a week and help you look into your sister’s death.”
* * *
Angie, not Stu, nearly caused me to miss my flight back to Knoxville. The reason was not that she was bad with a watch; the reason was that she took us on a three-hour detour to Associated Services.
Associated Services — was there ever a vaguer name? — cleaned up messes. If your house got flooded by a broken pipe or a monsoon — as hundreds of homes did in 2008, when Tropical Storm Fay dumped twenty inches of water on Tallahassee — Associated Services would pump out the water, remove the sodden carpet, replace the soggy, moldy drywall. If you bought a run-down house that was jammed with junk and filth, they’d shovel it out and scrub and disinfect it for you. And if your sister’s brains got spattered all over her living-room sofa and carpet and subflooring, the strong-stomached employees of Associated Services would don their biohazard suits and their respirators, clean up the bloody mess, and dispose of it safely.
Joe Walsh, whose father had started Associated Services thirty-five years before, met Angie and me at the company’s warehouselike facility near the campus of Florida State University. The building — brick and corrugated metal — had offices in the front half, a warehouse in the back. At one end of the building was a large gravel parking lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. Five company vans were parked in the lot, as was a pair of black enclosed trailers emblazoned with two-foot-high biohazard warning emblems.
Walsh emerged from the front door and led us into a simply furnished office, motioning us onto a sofa. “I’d offer you coffee, but it’s from this morning, so I wouldn’t be doing you a favor by letting you drink it.”
He’d sounded hesitant, even suspicious, when Angie had called him — she’d phoned as she was driving me back to the Duval to check out — but as she’d talked about her sister’s death, and about why she and I hoped to sift through the shattered, spattered debris the company had removed from Kate’s living room, he’d lowered his guard, at least enough to agree to meet with us.
“I Googled you after I got off the phone,” he said to me. “I’d heard of the Body Farm, but I didn’t really know much about it. That’s interesting work you do there.” I thanked him; then there was a brief, awkward pause before he went on. “I’m sorry if I seemed rude on the phone,” he said. “You get all sorts of calls in a business like this, you know? I had a guy call me once, asking questions about what we’d do to clean up a scene where somebody’d died this way or that way, and it sounded like he was planning ahead, you know? Trying to make some choices on the front end. I told him the first thing we’d do is make sure law enforcement had investigated thoroughly and released the scene. He hung up pretty quick then. So next thing I did, I called the sheriff’s office and gave them his number off my caller ID and suggested they check him out.”
“It wasn’t by any chance a Georgia number,” asked Angie, “sometime in the past couple weeks?”
“No, ma’am,” he said sympathetically. “That call came from Sopchoppy, and it was two, three years ago.”
“Too bad,” she said. “Be great if your caller ID could point an incriminating finger at my scumbag brother-in-law.”
He shrugged apologetically. “Wish I could help you there, but I can’t.”
“But you can help us by letting us look through the debris you took out of my sister’s house.”
He winced and sighed. “Here’s the thing, Ms. St. Claire. I’m more than happy to cooperate with law enforcement. If FDLE wants to examine this material, all you need to do is bring me a court order, and I’ll be glad for you to take it over to the crime lab and go through it with a fine-tooth comb. But I can’t let you go through it here. It’s a biohazard, and I can’t take a chance on the liability.”
“Angie and I work with biohazardous materials all the time,” I pointed out.
“But not on my property, you don’t,” he said. “If you got sick and sued, it could ruin me. My family, too.”
“No offense,” I said, “but it seems to me that even the dumbest lawyer in Tallahassee could create reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind about the source of any nasty bugs Angie and I might happen to come down with.”
Walsh smiled, but he shook his head. “Maybe so, but I don’t have enough time or money to take that chance.”
“How about this,” I suggested. “How about if Angie and I sign liability releases, in blood, promising not to hold you or your company liable for anything that might happen?”
“It’s not just that,” he said. “If we go opening up biohazard bags, our neighbors — businesses and residents right around here — are going to smell it and get upset. I can’t afford to risk the ill will.”
“I understand your concern,” I said. “The Body Farm is only a few hundred yards downhill from a condominium development in Knoxville — fancy condos up on a bluff over the river — and on hot summer days when the air is just sitting still, our neighbors sometimes aren’t too happy.” I gestured out the window behind me. “But look out there. You really think anybody’s going to catch a whiff of anything right now?”
He looked; a storm was blowing up, and across Madison Street trees were swaying in the wind — a wind that would have whisked away the odor from a hundred corpses, let alone from some bloody cushions and carpeting.
Ten minutes later, he swiveled in his chair and took two hastily drafted liability releases from a computer printer on a table behind him. Angie and I glanced at what we were promising not to hold the company liable for: illness or injury, emotional trauma, even old age and eventual death, or so it seemed. We scrawled our signatures, and Walsh unlocked the chain-link gate so we could pull into the back lot alongside the biohazard storage trailers.
I’d somehow imagined that the cleanup crew had hauled away the sofa and flooring materials intact, more or less, except for the damage from the gun blast. When I saw what we’d be sifting through — how thoroughly everything had been disassembled — my heart sank. The frame of the sleeper sofa had been stripped down to the bare metal of the folding mechanism, and all the porous materials — the heavy batting of the cushions and the mattress, the blood-soaked carpeting, the rubber carpet pad, and the waferboard subflooring — had been cut apart and sealed into plastic biohazard bags inside cardboard boxes measuring two feet square. Before we could search the scene, we’d have to reconstruct it.
On our way over, Angie and I had made a quick stop at Home Depot to procure the makings of a bare-bones crime-scene kit, since she wasn’t allowed to use FDLE resources for an outside case. We’d bought Tyvek painter’s coveralls; rubber gloves; dust masks; curved needle-nose pliers; wooden dowel rods; tape measures and yardsticks; quarter-inch wire screening; a staple gun; and a large plastic tarp. After suiting up, Angie and I spread the tarp on the concrete floor of the warehouse, then began opening boxes and reassembling the scene, like some bloody, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. We started with the four pieces of waferboard that had been cut and pried from the floor joists. Pieced back together, the chunks of subflooring formed a roughly thirty-inch square, with a bloody six-inch hole at its center, and with assorted drips and runs at irregular intervals around it. Next we unpacked the padding and carpet and put those in position; they, too, had been cut, rather than folded, to fit into the boxes. Then we set the sofa frame in place, using a wooden dowel to center the holes one atop the other. Next, unfolding the bed’s metal frame, we pieced the cut mattress back together and refolded it, and finally wedged the sections of cushions into position. Once ever
ything was in place and we’d rechecked and adjusted the alignment of the holes, Angie took dozens of photos with her camera — wide, medium, and tight shots — from every conceivable angle, with and without the scale provided by the yardsticks and tape measures. Finally satisfied that she’d documented the assemblage thoroughly, she allowed me to begin searching it — which meant disassembling the scene we’d just spent an hour painstakingly reassembling.
The couch was a sobering testament to the destructive force of a twelve-gauge at close range. The shot had blown a ragged hole through the seat cushion, up near one arm of the sofa. The hole was about three inches in diameter at the top of the cushion, where Kate’s head had lain; it was twice that diameter at the bottom of the cushion, as the force of the blast — not just from the slug itself, but also from the column of air forced out of the barrel ahead of the accelerating slug, as well as the hot gases from the exploding gunpowder behind the slug, pushing it — had widened in the shape of a cone. By the time it tore through the mattress and out the underside of the sofa, the shock wave had grown to a foot in diameter, though much of its force was then dispersed and absorbed by the carpet and padding.
While Angie took more photographs, I used a flashlight and the forcepslike pliers — whose long, slender jaws I covered with the fingers from a rubber glove, to avoid damaging bone fragments or lead — to pick through the ragged walls of the blasted tunnel. The cushion and mattress were covered with a reddish-brown spray of blood, mixed with bits of tissue and short strands of hair; embedded here and there within the walls of the tunnel were shards of bone — plenty of them, but none large enough to be readily identifiable. “Not much to go on here,” I remarked, “except for the angle of the shot itself.” Angie lowered the camera and looked with her eyes rather than the lens. “If it were me,” I went on, thinking out loud, “I’d’ve sat on the sofa and leaned over, bracing the butt of the gun on the floor. That would’ve put spatter all over the walls and the ceiling.”
