With the help of one of the rescue squad, I unhooked my safety belt. “Heads up!” I called to the men on the shore, and tossed the belt up to Lambers, who put it on gratefully. We passed the next few hours in relative comfort, he wearing the belt, I standing in the boat.
Of course, there was one small problem: motion sickness. I probably could have handled the gentle rocking of the boat, but all day long huge barges kept making their majestic way up and down the Ohio, creating enormous wakes that rippled their way toward shore. Each time we collided with a wake, our boat would lurch, and I had to stop my work, standing stock-still, eyes squeezed shut, until the nausea passed. I must admit, it's the first time I ever got seasick while digging for a body.
Mark still hadn't gotten back from his office, and I was starting to get worried about losing the bullet, especially now that bits of soil had started to crumble away from the bank, so my gallant rescue crew improvised a solution. Two men held a wooden backboard up against the bank, allowing me to examine the loose fragments of earth before they fell into the river and were gone forever. I didn't mind the dirt, but I was taking no chances on losing our bullet.
My patience was starting to wear thin, though. “Where is Dr. Schweitzer?” I asked at about two in the afternoon, and as if on cue Mark came running over the hill waving a large brown envelope.
“I've got the x-rays!” he called down to us. “I can see the bullet in his skull!” This was certainly a welcome bit of news, though I had to laugh at how my earlier envy had melted into relief. It was good to know that when push came to shove, I really was more interested in getting the results than in taking the credit.
When Mark made his careful way down to the ledge, I pointed to the large tree root I had just unearthed. “Look, Mark. This actually grew right into his pants. It got inside his pants leg through a small hole near the hip, then grew parallel to his thigh bone for years.”
Mark looked more closely at the root, which was several inches in diameter. “How long do you think he's been there?” he asked in an awed whisper.
I shook my head. The bones felt old to me, and the associated evidence-the cloth and objects unearthed along with the bones-had clearly been in the ground for quite a while. In my own mind, I was saying, Ten years? Twenty? But until I could get everything to the lab, I was taking no chances on committing to the wrong answer, even to myself. This case had already thrown us more than its share of curveballs, and I wanted to keep an open mind.
Lambers and I had agreed that he'd maintain the evidence overnight, bringing it to my lab first thing the next morning. Like a nervous hostess, I scurried around the lab, hurrying to clear away the skeletal remains and paperwork from the case I'd been working on the week before. I'd just doused the counters with disinfectant and loaded my favorite Patsy Cline CD into the stereo when Lambers arrived, looking very much like an overburdened shopper as he clutched several big brown bags tightly to his chest, the inventory list tucked under his chin.
“Come on, Doc,” he said without moving his jaw, as I rushed to take his burdens from him. “Where should we get started?”
I smiled at his enthusiasm and couldn't help thinking that he, at least, seemed no worse for wear after yesterday's efforts. I wasn't about to tell him that I was stiff and sore.
“Let's start with the skull,” I suggested. “I can't wait to get my hands on that bullet.” Lambers watched in fascination as I soaked the skull in a basin of water, rinsing all the dirt away. Then I set up a fine wire-mesh screen, poured the dirty water through it, and breathed a sigh of triumph. There lay the bullet, intact upon the screen.
I took a picture of the bullet and packed it carefully into a small envelope labeled with the case number, the date, and my initials. Later I'd take it downstairs to the ballistic experts in the state police lab.
Lambers and I looked at the rest of the evidence bags, feeling like two kids on Christmas morning. So much intriguing evidence-where would we begin?
“There's no real way to decide,” I said finally. “Let's just pick what interests us most and start there.”
Lambers nodded and said exactly what I was thinking: “The money clip.”
As I went through the shopping bags, Lambers prepared to resume his job from the day before, taking notes on everything I said and did. With mounting excitement, I pulled out the two plastic evidence bags that held the money clips. Even through the sand and ground-in dirt, I could see that the larger one was engraved with an intricate cross-hatch pattern and the initials HS-or was it SH? Frustratingly, both ways looked correct. The other one was engraved also, but with simple straight lines. Both bore marks indicating they were made of 14-karat gold.
Lambers was quick to conclude that this probably wasn't a robbery. “These were in his pockets, Doc. It's hard to believe that someone would take a wad of bills out of solid-gold money clips and then put the clips back into the guy's pocket.”
I had to agree. “And you can't quite see some derelict just picking them up while scrounging around, can you? You'd need a wad of bills to buy each one.”
I took the clips over to my sink and gently rinsed them in clear, warm water, removing the last traces of sand with a soft toothbrush. After I laid them on a clean blue towel to dry, Lambers and I each took several photographs with both conventional and digital cameras. In this case, Lambers and I would rely on conventional photographs as evidence, but I e-mailed the electronic pictures to Detective Daly in Fort Thomas, where they appeared on the evening news that very night.
Next, I looked at the eyeglasses, their cloudy lenses surrounded with thick black plastic frames. “Not too stylish, are they?” I asked Lambers, who was busy noting the time I had opened the bag.
“No, but they sure are big.” Indeed they were: From side to side, the earpieces measured almost eight inches.
“Well, his bones are big,” I answered. “And with these glasses, it looks like a lot of flesh must have covered his bones, but we'll know more once we get to his clothes. That's going to be a monumental task, so let's say we do a few more easy ones first.” Lambers nodded as he handed me the bag labeled SOCKS.
The socks were made of a thin synthetic fiber and were almost twenty inches long, another indication that our victim had been large. At the top of each cuff, I found a clump of rusty metal imbedded in the fabric. When I scraped off the corrosion with a small knife, I saw that these were garter snaps. This man had been wearing knee socks, held up by garters-an unusual style, to say the least.
Lambers handed me the bag labeled GLOVES. They were big, too, but I could see that they'd been hand-stitched from smooth leather. The same was true of his belt.
Now I couldn't wait to get a good look at his clothes. Although Mark had originally described the cloth as workman's blue, it was actually closer to a dark blue-green. As I carefully pulled the fragile fabric from the evidence bag, I brushed off the loose dirt, flattened the fabric with my hands, and laid it out on the gurney. Soon I could see that each piece was an individual panel of the same garment. The threads that once held these garments together had disintegrated, perhaps because, until the last few decades, most thread was made of cotton, a natural fiber that decomposes rapidly. The cloth itself was in remarkably good shape. It looked and felt like polyester, a petroleum-based product that theoretically can last forever.