I parked beside the entrance and unlocked the padlocks on the chain-link fence and the inner wooden gate. We didn’t have any redbuds or dogwoods inside the Body Farm, but we did have dandelions galore in the clearing, bright splashes of yellow amid the new grass and old bones.
As Miranda and I trudged up the path toward the upper end of the facility, I noticed a new body bag a few feet off the trail, with one hand and one foot exposed. “Is that the highway fatality?”
“Yes,” she said. “We brought him out from the morgue yesterday morning.”
I knelt down beside the body and folded the bag back. As I did, a small squadron of blowflies swarmed up from around and beneath the black plastic. “And he was walking on I-40?”
“Yeah, wandering along that elevated stretch downtown where there’s no shoulder. Stumbled into the traffic lane, and some high school student smacked right into him. I feel sorry for the kid-apparently he’s pretty torn up about it.”
“Be hard not to be,” I said. “I ran over a dog once, and it made me throw up. I can’t imagine accidentally killing a person.”
“He’s lucky he was driving a big SUV. Otherwise, he might’ve been killed, too. The front end was pretty smashed up. Smaller car, this guy might’ve come right over the hood and blown through the windshield at sixty or seventy miles an hour.”
I studied the dead man, who looked to have lived four or five tough de cades before dying in the fast lane. One side of the face and head had been crushed; shards of glass and paint were tangled in the hair, and a number of teeth had snapped off at the gum line. The left arm, shoulder, and ribs appeared shattered as well. I noticed clumps of white fly eggs, which looked like grainy paste or Cream of Wheat, scattered across his many wounds. Twenty-four hours from now, his entire body would be swarming with newly hatched maggots.
“Looks like a coin toss whether he died of brain damage or internal injuries,” I said. “I guess Jess could pin it down, if it mattered.”
“The family said they didn’t want an autopsy, and they didn’t want the body, either,” Miranda said. “He’d been living on the street for a while; problems with drinking and probably mental illness. Apparently no love lost between him and his relatives. The death certificate simply lists ‘multiple injuries from automobile impact’ as the cause of death.”
“Well, it’s too bad,” I said, “but he’ll be an interesting addition to the skeletal collection. Good example of massive blunt-force trauma, and how you can tell the direction of impact from the way the bones are fractured.”
“Also a good example of why it’s not a good idea to drink and walk.”
“That too,” I said.
I folded the body bag back over the man, nudged his hand and foot beneath its shade. The shade would keep the skin from turning leathery-tough, as it would in the sunshine; it would also keep the maggots-which shun daylight, and the predatory birds that accompany it-munching busily around the clock. With that, we turned and headed up the path again toward our Chattanooga victim’s stand-in.
As we got close, I saw why Miranda had been eager to bring me out for a look. The body still hung from the tree, its head sagging forward nearly to its chest. Despite the facial injuries I had replicated-bloody injuries that would normally prompt a feeding frenzy by teeming maggots-most of the soft tissue remained. Even the exaggerated eye makeup remained intact. But the body’s feet, ankles, and lower legs had been reduced almost to bare bone.
“Wow,” I said, “he’s looking a lot like the murder victim, except that his abdomen is still bloated. Another couple days, maybe, and I’d say he’ll correspond almost exactly.” I knelt down and checked the feet and legs for signs of carnivore chewing, but I didn’t see any-again, just like the Chattanooga victim. All I saw were maggots, fighting over what little tissue remained on the lower extremities.
We had set an infrared camera on a tripod, aimed at the body; it was rigged to a motion sensor so if a nocturnal animal managed to breach the fence and chew on the body, we’d capture a photo of it. “Have you checked the camera?” Miranda nodded. “Has anything triggered it?”
“Nope. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
I stood up to study the face more closely. I had to crouch slightly, and look up from below the dangling head, to get a good view. As I did, I felt a tiny maggot drop onto my cheek. And then another. And another. I jumped back, shaking my head like a wet dog, then brushing my cheeks for good measure. “Woof,” I said. “I think I understand now why there’s such differential decay between the upper body and the feet.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Once the blowfly eggs hatch, the maggots fall off. There’s no good horizontal surface, the way there is when a body’s lying on the ground.” I pointed down at the feet. “They fall down there, and the feet are easy for them to reach. Some of them manage to crawl up the ankles, and a few even make it partway up the lower leg. But the higher you look, the fewer you see.”
Miranda leaned in, but not so far as to place herself beneath the rain of maggots drizzling down from the head. “You’re right,” she said. “You could graph the distribution as an asymptotic curve. As X-the distance above the ground-increases, Y-the number of maggots-drops from near infinity to near zero.”
I stared at her. “Asymptotic curve? What language are you speaking?” She stared back, puzzled at my puzzlement, then we burst into simultaneous laughter.
“Okay, I admit it: I’ve become the world’s biggest, weirdest nerd,” she said. “But it is a nice curve, and a classic asymptote.” She raised one index finger high overhead, traced a near-vertical line downward, then gradually, gracefully swooped it toward horizontal.
“Very nice indeed,” I agreed. “Actually, you probably could get a paper about this published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Especially if you include a video of yourself tracing the asymptotic curve in the air like that.”
She made a face at me. “Eat maggots and die,” she said.
I didn’t die, but I did suddenly feel my scalp itching in half a dozen places.
CHAPTER 11
THERE WAS A LIGHT tap on my doorframe, and a millisecond later-even before I had time to look up-a female voice said, “Knock knock.”
“Come in,” I said, not yet looking up. I was writing a note on a student’s test paper, and I wanted to finish the sentence before I forgot the second half of it. As I tapped the period into place, I realized that the voice was familiar, but that it was also not one I was accustomed to hearing in the dingy quarters of Stadium Hall.
My first glance explained the disconnect. The voice belonged to Amanda Whiting, and I had never heard it except in the walnut-paneled confines of the President’s Dining Room and the similarly veneered interior of the UT president’s home.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “I must be in some mighty deep trouble if you’ve come all the way down here looking for me.” Amanda was a UT vice president; she was also the university’s chief counsel, its highest-flying legal eagle. “What did I do this time? I’ve tried to cut back on the dirty jokes in class. Really, I have.”
“I wish it were as simple as a coed offended by your Neanderthal sense of humor,” she said. “This is about Jason Lane.”
“Jason Lane? He’s one of my students; I do recognize the name. But beyond that, I’m drawing a blank.”
She heaved a sigh. “Jason Lane is a devout young man. A devoutly fundamentalist Christian young man.” I suddenly saw where this was heading, and I didn’t like what I saw. “He believes the Bible to be the literal, unerring word of God. He believes the Book of Genesis to be the definitive account of the creation of the earth and of all the life-forms therein.”