I didn’t need to deflesh the entire skeleton, just the thoracic region which Jess had cut free for me. Curling my fingers under the rib cage, I lifted the ripe section of torso and lugged it to a nearby counter, where a mammoth steam-jacketed steel kettle stood waiting. Resting my burden on the rim, I shifted my grip and lowered it in, then filled it to within a few inches of the rim, using a short hose hanging on the wall behind it. I added a splash of bleach from a Clorox bottle — I liked the fresher, green-labeled variety — and what I guessed to be a tablespoon from a jar of Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer. The Adolph’s would cut the time and the bleach would cut the odor, as well as lightening the bones’ caramel color to the shade of aging ivory that lawyers and jurors seemed to prefer. I twisted the thermostat at the base of the kettle to 180 degrees. Below that, the tissue would take too long to soften; any higher, and I’d be risking a nasty boil-over.
As I left Billy Ray Ledbetter to simmer, I realized I’d been doing a lot of stewing myself. I’d kept a tight lid on my emotions ever since Kathleen died — outwardly, at least — hoping that by doing so, I could keep my life from getting messy. Jess’s advice, and my own behavior lately, had shown me that I, too, had come close to boiling over. Maybe she was right. Maybe I needed to loosen up. Maybe I did need to get laid.
CHAPTER 17
I leaned out the truck and down toward the drive-through window. “Here you go,” said Dolores, handing me the bright yellow plastic box.
“Did I get anything besides the lens cap?”
“Some great shots of your left index finger,” she laughed. “Your buddy Art could run those through his fingerprint database for sure.” Seeing the alarm on my face, she laughed again. “Gotcha. Not bad, mostly — less gross than usual, which I personally appreciate. Some of ’em, though, looks like you accidentally hit the shutter button before you were ready.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Nothing but mud.”
I smiled. “Any footprints in that mud?”
“Well, now that you mention it, seems like maybe there were. Is that what you were after?” I nodded.
Dolores had been developing my slides for years now; during that time, she’d seen photos from crime scenes that had made hardened cops lose their lunch. She always seemed interested, but her questions invariably stopped short of nosiness. I didn’t mind sharing a few details, because I knew she’d keep anything she saw or heard to herself. In her mind’s eye, she seemed to click back through the strip of film. “Nothing but mud in some, but others, you’ll probably find something interesting. You must’ve been shooting at night.”
“In a cave, actually.”
“I wondered where you’d found all that mud, dry as it’s been this month. Always something new with you, Doc.”
“Keeps life interesting, Dolores. Keeps old age at bay.” I paid, took my receipt, and waved as the drive-through window slid shut and Dolores disappeared into the depths of FotoFast.
Back at the office, I inserted the slides, upside-down, into a carousel tray and snapped the tray onto the Kodak projector. I switched on the projector’s lamp and turned out the overhead fluorescent. As the autofocus lens ratcheted in and out, seeking clarity, green and yellow blurs gradually resolved into the ATVs we’d wrangled up the mountainside and into the cave. Sheriff Kitchings’s belly flashed up, filling half the screen, as he wriggled through the narrow squeeze. His face was contorted and his teeth were clenched with the strain. I studied him, this man who had asked for my help and then hidden the truth from me. Something about the photo disturbed me. The image — the way he was hoisting his belly — was grotesque, but that wasn’t what nagged at me. I stared at his face awhile longer, still unable to put my finger on anything specific, then moved on. The soles of three different boots — the sheriff’s, the deputy’s, and mine — flashed past. Only then, because I had purposely loaded the three-boot reference photos out of sequence, did my shots of the cave’s muddy floor begin.
The first few images showed some hint of foot traffic, but the angle — high, shooting nearly straight down — made everything appear flat and featureless. As the camera angle got progressively lower, shadows appeared and grew, as if the sun were setting in the cave, throwing the contours of the mud into sharp relief, revealing a world of texture. A world of footprints.
The prints reminded me of craters on the moon, seen through a telescope: at full moon, viewed straight-on, the rocky surface appears deceptively smooth. But at other stages, especially when viewed at the terminus — the border between light and dark — the craters and canyons show themselves to be rugged, razor-edged, and forbidding. The cave’s craters were made by human feet, not by massive meteorites, but the surface looked almost as pocked and layered as the ancient face of the moon.
Kitchings had told me that he and Williams ventured into the grotto just far enough to determine that a body lay there. Sure enough, two sets of tracks — a lugged-sole pattern that matched the sheriff’s boots and a rippled design that matched Williams’s — led toward the rock shelf where the body lay. The tracks stopped, and some random, layered trampling suggested shifting stances by both men. Then the tracks reversed direction, leading back toward the camera and in the direction of the grotto’s entrance. I nodded to myself; it was what I’d expected to see, based on what they’d told me.
What I hadn’t expected to see came in the next slide, which I’d taken by leaning far to the left, beyond the corpse’s head, still shooting low. The image that flashed onto the screen made me gasp. A veritable stampede of footprints approached the body from the opposite direction — a shadowy nook in the grotto, as I recalled, which I had taken to be a dead-end crevice. The tracks — lots of them, a dozen or more — departed the same way they’d come. I was dumbfounded. “Jesus,” I said out loud, “how many people were in on this damn thing?” Then another thought struck me: could they be morbid sightseers, who had somehow gotten wind of the grisly spectacle in the grotto? But it took only a few seconds to decide that what appeared to be many people’s footprints were actually many prints from a single person: layer upon layer of tracks from what appeared to be the same pair of boots. Judging by the soles, the boots were old and worn — work boots, maybe, rather than hiking or combat boots. But here and there along the edge, some of the earlier tracks — ones that were only partially obliterated by later imprints — looked sharper, as if the boots were newer. I felt my mind ratcheting back and forth, like the projector’s lens, struggling to focus. Finally I got it: someone had visited the grotto repeatedly, over a long period of time. I’d ask Art to take a look and give me his read on it, but that seemed the only explanation that made sense. The only other possibility was that a crowd of people had trooped in, wearing identically made but differently aged boots. Either scenario was disturbing.
But not as disturbing as what I saw next. It was the final image of the cave’s floor, similar to the previous one, but following the tracks even farther toward what was clearly the room’s other entrance. At the edge of the mass of identical tracks was one additional set of prints — uppermost, and therefore most recent. Unlike the layers of increasingly worn work boot tracks, these prints showed crisp, practically new soles. Lugged soles. They looked a lot like the soles on the feet of Sheriff Tom Kitchings.