There was a kind of hypnotic rhythm to our painstaking work, my hands moving on autopilot as my brain wandered off on its own. Something wasn't quite right about this case, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Then, as I gave a particularly vigorous tug to unloose the victim's shoulder blade, I realized what had been bothering me: the consistency of the dirt.
Any kid who's ever buried a toy or some secret treasure in the backyard knows that such objects are fairly easy to unearth a week or two later. After several months, though, the object gets packed in tighter. Something that's been buried for a year or more takes a fair amount of work to dislodge. Rain loosens the earth, and then gravity causes the loose particles to resettle themselves more tightly against the buried object. The object and the earth begin to bond, and with each passing year it becomes more difficult to separate the two, until the object seems almost to form part of the matrix within which it lies. At that point, you're not lifting out a discrete object-you're teasing out a piece of the whole.
That was the kind of work I'd been doing to free these bones, which told me that they'd been here far longer than the year or two I'd originally thought. I was starting to wonder exactly how long this man had been dead when I caught sight of something else I didn't expect-a bright metal object, lying just where the man's back hip pocket would have been.
I finished recovering the bone I'd been working on and turned my attention to the metal. With the same care I'd used for the bones, I managed to free the object, slowly but surely. Then I knelt there for a moment, staring at it in amazement. It was a thick, gold-colored money clip.
The heavy clip was layered with grime, but something about its weight and heft told me it had once been expensive. “Look at this,” I said to Lambers, who shook his head.
“Not what you'd expect to find in some derelict's pocket, that's for sure.”
I nodded. The man's gold fillings and expensive dental care had spoken of prosperity, but plenty of people fall on hard times. How likely was it, though, that a destitute man had a clip like this in his possession?
“Well, maybe he was a thief and had stolen it. But then, why didn't whoever killed him steal it from him?”
Lambers bagged and labeled the money clip, and passed it to the cop who stood above us. I heard the murmurs of surprise, the new rounds of speculation, follow the item up the bank. A moment later, we found a big pair of eyeglasses, scratched and worn, but still intact. And then a metal pen and pencil, heavy and corroded, like the money clip, still attached to the fabric that had once been this man's breast pocket. I couldn't tell through the dirt and grime, but it seemed to me that they, too, were gold-colored and part of a matching set, hinting, as the money clip did, at wealth.
As we worked our way down to the other hip and rear pocket area, we found a rusty lump of metal that had once been keys. Years of corrosion had fused them all together, and I couldn't wait to get them back to the lab and see what secrets they might hold. Then there was an old coin that I thought looked like a nickel, though it was so worn and dirty I couldn't be sure. Maybe it had a date on it, or some other clue that might point us toward this man's identity. A few minutes later, we found a second money clip, smaller and less elaborate than the first but with the same heavy, solid feel.
Throughout our excavation, I had also been freeing pieces of cloth from the silty earth, teasing them away from the ground as gently as I could. How long had it taken, I wondered, for the cloth to disintegrate into pieces? I was starting to get the distinct impression that these bones had lain here longer than any of us had suspected.
“Do you think that's a sheet?” Lambers asked, pointing at one swatch of fabric. While much of the cloth was the odd blue-green that Mark had first called workman's blue, this new piece of material seemed to have once been white.
I pulled the last corner of the cloth free and looked at its sagging folds. “Maybe a shirt?” I suggested. With the fabric all in pieces, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to me that this man had been dressed in a shirt-a fairly nice one, too, by the look of it-and some kind of business suit. Again, not what you'd expect from some homeless guy in the woods. I was becoming ever more intrigued by the emerging portrait of this man, his bones partially swathed in rotting cloth, his remains surrounded by his final earthly possessions like some Egyptian king laid out for burial. As we freed him and the objects around him from the fine-grained sandy soil, I felt that I was watching a long-forgotten photograph slowly come into focus, a moment frozen in time that was gradually making itself visible to my eyes.
I fingered a scrap of the dark-blue cloth, which seemed to be a well-worn synthetic. “Lucky he wasn't an all-natural guy,” I murmured to Lambers. “Cotton or wool would be long gone by now.”
“But what about the money clips?” Lambers asked. “And all the other stuff? Why didn't the killer take it? And Doc, how old is it?”
I shook my head. “Tomorrow,” I said. I couldn't wait till we got this stuff back to the lab.
A few hours into the excavation, our safety-belt system was no longer working. As I continued to inch closer and closer to the crumbling edge of the riverbank, my legs were beginning to feel the strain of my constant balancing act, and I could only imagine how sore Al's arms were getting as he kept up his constant pull on my rope. The rest of our team was farther up the bank, but the photographer, videographer, and Lambers were right by my side as we migrated toward the dangerous drop-off.
The swollen Ohio had been rising steadily, its chilly waters now licking the edges of the bank about four feet below our ledge. With a certain amount of bravado, my three helpers had declined my offer of a safety rope. We had only one safety belt, and I was wearing it. My colleagues insisted that they were fine, but the safety officer called a halt. “Take a break, people!” he yelled down to us. “Help is on the way!”
I breathed a silent sigh of relief as I straightened my back and lay down my trowel. I could have used a break an hour ago, but surrounded by strong, fit cops, most of whom were decades younger than I was, I'd been reluctant to admit it. Sometimes I wonder just how long I can keep doing this type of strenuous fieldwork. I'm only in my mid-fifties, but I already use a walking stick, even while crossing level ground. One of the hazards of my profession is to make me all too uncomfortably conscious of how fragile my body is, holding me hostage to one torn ligament or pulled tendon, one bad twist of the knee or a sudden fall on the wrong part of my hip. Now I was extremely grateful for our half-hour enforced resting period before a local water rescue squad arrived at the scene: three men and a woman riding in a big flat-bottomed boat.
At first they simply stood by, ready to help if anyone should fall into the swift current, their boat bobbing in the choppy waters a few feet offshore. When they realized that the water was continuing to rise and the current was growing ever swifter, they jammed their bow right into the ledge, almost directly under my feet, their shoulders practically level with my hands. Suddenly, I had an idea.
“May I come on board?” I asked the rescue squad captain. He seemed a bit taken aback, but after a moment, he nodded yes. Still attached to my safety rope, I sat down in the dirt and slid down the exposed surface of the ledge until my feet were resting on the boat's bow. I carefully turned my head toward the ledge. Yes! I could excavate the rest of the site while standing in the boat. The site was just level with my chest, allowing me to hold my arms comfortably straight out in front of me.