Walking single file through a steady cold drizzle, we all headed for the site, which was about twenty feet down the side of the embankment away from the road. A bright-orange surveyor's plastic flag marked the spot, and I was surprised that I couldn't see the skull-until Gus Skinner, the Forest Service law enforcement investigator, got down on his knees and folded back some droopy clumps of grass to reveal something resembling a groundhog's burrow. There, about two feet below the surface, I could see the back of a human skull, resting face down in a pool of crystal-clear water.
To reach into the hole-the origin of a little artesian spring-I'd have to lie down flat on my belly and stick one arm and shoulder into the burrow, with my cheek rubbing into the very soil where the victim's body had probably decomposed. Maybe I was getting used to human decay-but I wasn't yet ready to do that.
As soon as he saw the problem, Milford voluntarily removed his ample raincoat and laid it on the ground with a flourish that would have made Sir Walter Raleigh proud. I lay down on it, took a few pictures, and finally reached down to grab the skull. I sat up as quickly as I could, turning the skull over in my hands to do a brief analysis in the flashing light of the detectives' cameras.
First off, I could tell this skull had belonged to an adult White male-the same biological profile as the putative victim. I could see the empty tooth sockets with their sharply defined edges-clear signs that the man's teeth had fallen out after he died. I suspected that the teeth were still down there in the hole. I could also see one tooth socket that was already filling in with bone as the edges began to smooth over. That tooth had been lost well before death, so long ago, in fact, that it had begun to heal. The dental information would come in handy when we had to make our ID.
I didn't see any fresh fractures in the skull that would have indicated any sort of head injuries. That, too, was useful, because it told us that we wouldn't have to look for a bullet or a baseball bat.
I put the skull into my evidence bag for future reference and turned my attention to the teeth and some small neck bones I could now see at the bottom of the spring. Even when I lay on Milford 's raincoat, they remained just out of my reach. The guys dug out a little around the hole's edge, which seemed like a good idea until I actually put my head, shoulders, and both arms into the enlarged hole. Then, thanks to Milford 's plastic coat, I started to slide in, headfirst. Chivalry is not dead in Kentucky, though, and at least three pairs of hands instantly grabbed hold of my belt, ankles, and parts in between, saving me from a chilly, stinky shampoo.
With that we decided to quit for the night and start fresh the next morning. Milford made arrangements for all of us to stay at a little local motel and, after we checked in, we all slipped over to the café next door. By “all,” I include the confessed murderer. In fact, sitting across from him, munching on my hamburger and talking about the weather, I lost sight of the fact that I was in the middle of a homicide investigation until he stood up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom. Three men with guns and badges were on their feet before he ever cleared his chair. He wasn't fazed by this, but I certainly was. When they finally escorted him to the men's room, the rest of us laughed quietly to break the tension. Then Deputy David Morrow leaned across the table and asked me if I wanted to hear the story he'd started to tell me out there in the woods. Of course, I said yes.
“I'm not sure you noticed, but halfway down that mountain road there was a divot in the limestone cliff, and a piece of pipe was sticking out,” he began.
“Yeah, I saw that. It looked like some sort of well, or maybe a spring.”
“That's exactly what it is, Doc, the outlet of a spring where most of the locals get their drinking water.” In the next seat, Skinner, the weather-worn U.S. Forest Service investigator, nodded as he, too, listened intently.
“That spring is a dandy, too,” chimed in Milford 's son Ethelbert. “In fact, I stopped on my way down and filled me up a couple of jugs.”
The deputy and Skinner exchanged glances. David set down his cup of coffee and closed his eyes. Skinner took over.
“Son, do you remember last spring when I placed a Forest Service warning sign on that spring?”
“Sure do. And do you know, the whole county was laughing at you for doing it? We've been getting our water from that spring ever since Daddy's daddy can remember. Everybody knows that it tastes funny every once in a while when the weather changes, but no harm has ever come of it. No gov'ment sign can keep the folks from this county from doin' what they've always done. And that's why that sign saying the water ain't fit to drink came down almost as soon as it went up.”
“Well, Ethelbert, they shouldn't have done that,” Skinner said patiently. “And you might want to go empty your jugs. Tonight the doc there almost fell into the source of that spring. And the guy she was trying to lift out of the water had a full-blown case of AIDS when the killer dumped his body there.”
Everybody at the table froze, and we “outsiders” turned to look at the Creekmores sitting at one end of the long table. As one, they pushed back their chairs and left the café. It's hard to say what happened that night, but rumor has it that the phone lines in McCreary County were jammed for hours.
The next morning, though, they were all back at the site, ready to go to work. Nobody mentioned the fouled drinking water again, but when Milford, Jr., one of the hardest workers in the bunch, was helping me scour the sand and gravel from the little stream, a frown was fixed across his face and he never uttered a word.
We searched for bones until the middle of the afternoon and we were able to find about half of what Conley had started with. The forest carnivores-coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and opossums-had done their best to scatter individual bones as they dragged them away from the rotting carcass to feast on the flesh and gnaw for the marrow. Then Mother Nature camouflaged what was left. Leaf-fall had blanketed the forest floor, and the bones had bleached and discolored until they matched the deep gray-brown of the twigs and leaves that covered them.
Those bones' size and shape make some of them difficult to locate, and even when they are located, it's important not to pick them up right away. Earlier, I had handed out handfuls of brightly colored surveyor's flags to all of my helpers, instructing them to leave each bone where they found it. “Just stick a flag in the ground and call me,” I'd urged. Sometimes, if you stand back and see the location of several bones at once, you can establish a pattern to the scatter. In many cases, heavy rains rushing down a slope or an animal following some instinctive route will scatter the bones in a specific direction that might lead you to a cache of smaller, lighter bones, the ones that are usually hardest to find.
That's exactly what had happened here, and after about fifteen flags dotted the forest floor, I could see that they formed a kind of pie-slice shape, with the apex right near the spot where we'd found the skull. From there, the flags sort of fanned out, with one edge of the triangle along the creek and the other at the base of the hill. We'd found one rib bone about sixty feet from the spring outlet, which we used to mark the third side of the triangle. For now, this triangle was the outer limit of our search as we walked shoulder to shoulder in one long line, back and forth across this wedge of land, stirring the leaves with our feet and sticking marker flags into the ground every time we found a bone.