Next it was time to document the temperature and humidity of the air that enveloped the bodies-the same hot, sticky air that was making it so hard for me to breathe. The entomologist would eventually need this climatological data, so today and every day for a week the coroner or a deputy would have to return to this spot and document the temperature and humidity. The entomologist would then be able to look at the data and the maggots and work backward to figure out when the flies had first laid their eggs, when the maggots started feasting on the dead bodies-and when the bodies might have shown up in the field.
I went on to document the bodies' location, taking photos and making a quick sketch to remind me of their relationship to the surrounding scene. The sheriff's deputies were experts in this sort of procedure, so I left them to their more detailed sketches while I studied the two victims once more. Their postcranial area-everything from the neck on down-was still intact, which meant that any clues in these areas were the province of the forensic pathologist. Although there are some areas of overlap, pathologists usually deal with the soft tissues, while I deal with the hard ones-bones and teeth. If enough of the body is intact to permit a traditional autopsy, the pathologist conducts it, documenting the general appearance of the person and the internal organs, and collecting blood and tissue samples for analysis. If not enough soft tissue remains to yield any clues, then we rely on the bones, which I usually work on by myself. This division of labor-soft versus hard tissue-can be confusing to crime-show fans, since TV pathologists tend to appear as experts in all things; but in the forensic world, a person has usually either studied soft tissue and gotten an M.D. or has studied hard tissue and gotten an M.A. or a Ph.D. in anthropology. After all, no one can specialize in everything.
“Go ahead and bag them,” I told the coroner now, knowing that his men would take the bodies to the morgue. Tomorrow the forensic pathologist and I would do an autopsy together-him focusing on the soft tissue, me concentrating on the bone.
The coroner and his deputy wrapped each body in a clean white sheet and placed it in an individual body bag. Until we got a positive ID, the bags were labeled John and Jane Doe.
As the coroner was zipping up the first bag, I moved to the soil where the little boy's head had lain. Luckily, I'd brought a hand trowel, which I now dragged across the soil and matted grass. Piece by piece, a little treasure trove emerged: brownish-gray fragments from his shattered skull, tiny teeth that had separated from the rest of his head during decomp, and small black tufts of hair that had fallen away as his scalp sloughed off. Sealing my collection in a small plastic bag, I quickly labeled it “from head area of child victim” and tucked it inside the boy's body bag. As the guys carried the bag to the coroner's van, I made a similar collection in the spot where the woman had decomposed.
The police and sheriff's men had finished documenting the scene and were now fanning out across the surrounding field, searching for any remaining evidence. I'd finished my work though, so I stripped off my gloves, tore open a package of disinfecting towelettes to wipe my dripping face and hands, and plumped myself down on a clean patch of grass to drink a bottle of cold spring water.
“Well, I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances, but I'm sure glad you came down here.” Alan, the coroner, was sitting down beside me.
“Hey, a double homicide after three days on the job-I feel like I've just jumped into the deep end of the pool.”
Alan laughed quietly and handed me a clipboard full of forms.
“You know, Alan,” I said quickly, “this is my first case here in Kentucky. Think you could help me out with the paperwork?”
He grinned. “Don't worry, Doc, we got you covered.” He began to leaf through the pages with me. We continued to talk about the case until Alan asked finally, “So you and Dr. Hunsaker will do the autopsy tomorrow?”
I nodded. “Yes, he and I had better work on this one side by side-if that's okay with you.”
This was all old hat to Alan, but I was still getting used to the Kentucky procedure. Because Kentucky is such a large and rural state, every county has its own elected coroner, who serves as the primary death scene investigator after receiving special training in forensic death investigations. Elected coroners are not usually M.D.s, and even if they are, they don't do the autopsies. Instead, the coroner normally works the crime scene, sending any bodies that need autopsies to one of four regional state medical examiner's offices, where forensic pathologists who are M.D.s analyze the body further. The coroner has ultimate responsibility for his or her county, however, authorizing the pathologist to do the autopsy, receiving the final report and, ultimately, issuing the death certificate.
Sometimes the coroner also needs a bone specialist, in which case he or she calls me. I might come out to the crime scene, assist at the autopsy, or take the bones back to my lab in Frankfort. In this case, pathologist Dr. John Hunsaker would be analyzing the bodies' soft tissue while I tried to figure out what had happened to their skulls.
“Any thoughts so far?” Alan asked.
“Well, it's obvious their skulls were shattered,” I said slowly. “But right now I can't tell just how. And I strongly suspect they were dumped here, not killed here.” I was also fairly certain that the victims had died by blunt-force trauma-from being beaten, not shot or stabbed-but I wouldn't really know for sure until I'd had a chance to go back to my laboratory and rebuild the skulls. Since bones break in a fairly predictable manner, rebuilt skulls-or even skull fragments-can often help us figure out what caused the damage. At the very least, we might be able to rule out some potential weapons. Bullet wounds are pretty distinctive, but blunt-force trauma can also leave clues. The round end of a ball-peen hammer, for instance, often leaves a ball-shaped indentation, while a tire iron or the shaft of a golf club tends to leave a long narrow groove.
To get a true picture, though, you need to recover as many skull fragments as you can. Although in this case I'd found lots of loose skull pieces on the ground, I could see that several more fragments were still embedded in the congealed blood and decomposing brain tissue packed within the “brain case,” the cranium. John and I would have to work out a carefully choreographed sequence in tomorrow's autopsy to make sure that neither of us damaged the other's evidence.
For both of us, the maggots were going to be both help and hindrance: a help because they'd enable us to narrow down the postmortem interval, or “time since death”; a hindrance because as long as there were maggots in the body, they'd continue to devour its flesh even if the coroner put the bodies in the morgue cooler.
A maggot mass can take on an astonishing life of its own once it gets established in a carcass. Thousands of maggots can accumulate in a dead victim's chest cavity or pelvis, sort of like a chicken carcass packed tight with lots of creamy overcooked rice. Then the maggots pull together into a cohesive group that churns and boils continually when the air temperature gets too cold for them, as individual maggots try desperately to reach the core for warmth, pushing their hapless neighbors to the periphery-only to be themselves pushed out of the way by yet more desperate maggots. At night or in the morgue cooler, the collective maggot metabolism can be as much as 10 degrees higher than the rest of the body's temperature, so when the body emerges from the fridge, you're likely to see a cloud of steam rising slowly from your homicide victim's collapsed and half-devoured chest.