“One of the laryngeal nerves — the recurrent vagus nerve, which controls the voice box — wraps around the aortic arch. A fast-growing aneurysm on the aorta can stretch that nerve, causing hoarseness. Maurie thought she’d just strained her voice last week during a charity telethon — that’s what she said on the air two nights ago, right before she died — when in fact her body was trying to warn her.”
Miranda shook her head. “Sad. Ironic. Here’s another irony for you: Her death made her a lot more famous than all those years of reporting the news. Somebody posted an Internet video of that clip from the newscast where she collapses in midsentence. They called it ‘Film at Eleven: Hot News Babe Dies on Camera.’ As of this morning, thirty million people had watched her die.”
“Thirteen million people have seen that footage?”
“Thirty million.”
The figure stunned me. “That’s probably twenty-nine and a half million more than ever watched her live.”
“Web fame’s an odd, viral thing.” She shrugged. “You remember Susan Boyle?”
I shook my head.
“Sure you do; you just don’t realize you do. That dumpy, middle-aged Brit who belted out a song on the limey version of American Idol?”
That did ring a bell, I realized.
“Her YouTube clip’s been watched fifty or sixty million times. She became this overnight megacelebrity. Of course, that was a year or so ago. She’s old news by now.” Miranda studied the newswoman’s face, reaching down to shoo away a cloud of blowflies. It was absurd, of course, since the whole point of putting Gershwin out here was to allow nature to have its way with her, but the fly shooing was a reflexive gesture of respect, so I kept my mouth shut. “What do you plan to do with all these pictures of The Face of Channel 10?”
“Couple things, probably,” I said. “I need to do a funding proposal for the dean’s office — apparently they’ve got some deep-pocket donor they think might be interested in adopting us — and I could see using a few of these photos to illustrate our decomposition research. I’ll probably also do a slide presentation at the national forensic-science conference next February. ‘Decomposition Day by Day’ or some such. Thirty slides, thirty days, talk for a minute about each slide.”
Miranda closed her eyes and let her head slump forward, then feigned a loud snore. “A slide presentation? That’s lame, totally twentieth century,” she said. “How about a podcast — a real-time video camera, streaming continuous images to the Web? That would actually fit the spirit of our gal’s life and work and last request.”
“Broadcast this on the Web?” I shook my head. “No way. I don’t have nearly enough fingers and toes to count the ways that could get us in hot water.”
“Well, at least make a movie instead of slides for your presentation,” she said.
“But this is a still camera,” I pointed out. “Besides, neither one of us has the time to hang around and film a documentary.”
“Neither one of us needs to,” she said. “You’re setting the timer to take a picture, what, every few minutes or every few hours?”
I nodded.
“So once she’s through skeletonizing, in a month or two, string all the pictures together into a video and it’ll fast-forward through the entire decomp sequence in a couple of minutes. That would be cool.”
“You think that would work for the funding proposal, too?”
She cringed. “Why would seeing this woman’s face decay inspire some rich alumnus to fork over big bucks for body bags and bone boxes and the like?”
“Actually, I’m hoping to raise money for your assistantship,” I said. Miranda’s head whipped around, and I wished I hadn’t said it, even though there was some truth to it. “Sorry. Bad joke. You’re covered.” She shot me a piercing look, hard enough to make me flinch. Miranda would make a terrific prosecutor or detective, I thought, if she ever got tired of forensic anthropology. “At least I think you’re covered.”
“You’re the chairman of the Anthropology Department,” she responded. “If anybody should know, it’s you.”
“I do know you’re not affected by the cuts I proposed,” I said. “But the dean has to approve the budget before it goes to the chancellor and the president. The football scholarships are safe and the coaching salaries are safe, but nothing else is guaranteed.” She didn’t say anything, but the worry in her eyes pained me. “By the way,” I added, “I’m giving a lecture at the Smithsonian on Saturday afternoon, and I’m having lunch with Ed Ulrich beforehand.” Ulrich had been one of my earliest and brightest Ph.D. students at UT; now he was head of the Smithsonian’s Division of Physical Anthropology. “I’m going to see if I can twist his arm for some research funding. Enough to support two graduate assistantships.”
“Tell Ed I said hi.” She was too young to have been a classmate of Ulrich’s, but she’d talked with him at conferences many times, and he’d made two or three trips to UT during the time she’d been my assistant. “Tell Ed I said help!”
I zoomed in a bit more, filling the viewfinder with The Face, then snapped another test picture. Taking care not to jostle the tripod, I removed the camera from the mount and huddled under my jacket to block out the daylight. The photo showed a lovely woman, but her face had gone slack, and the light and life had faded from her eyes. I used the cursor to enlarge the center of the image and saw that the camera had caught one blowfly in midair, just above her face; another was already emerging from the slightly opened mouth. Looking from the camera’s display to the body on the ground, I saw that those two flies had been joined already by dozens of others, swiftly drawn to the odor of death, even though I could detect no trace of it yet. Within minutes small smears of grainy white paste — clumps of blowfly eggs — would begin to fill her mouth and nose and eyes and ears, and by this time tomorrow her face would be covered with blowfly larvae, a writhing mass of newly hatched maggots.
I fiddled with the camera’s digital menu, calling up the control screen for the built-in timer. Initially I’d planned to set it to take a photo every twelve hours, but as I glanced down at the swarming flies, I realized that twelve-hour intervals would miss many details of her decomposition. The funding people might not be interested in the subtle shifts of her decay, but I certainly was. What about a photo every half hour, or even every ten minutes? For that matter, why not just camp out here in person and watch it all in real time? Finally I compromised: one picture every fifty minutes, the length of a typical classroom lecture. I did the math: A picture every fifty minutes would yield thirty pictures a day. At the end of two months, I’d have eighteen hundred images. At thirty images a second — the speed of television images, I’d heard — eighteen hundred images would make a video sixty seconds long: exactly the running time of “Maurie’s Minutes.”
Swapping out the camera’s small digital memory card for a larger one — a two-gigabyte chip, large enough to hold hundreds of images — I latched the camera back onto the tripod, and Miranda and I left the Body Farm, chaining the wooden gate shut and fastening the metal fence behind us. As I snapped the outer padlock shut on the Body Farm’s newest and most famous resident, I found myself thinking of the words she’d used at the end of every newscast for years. “Good night,” I murmured. “See you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 2
The man’s face stared back at me, his expression hovering somewhere in a zone bordered by detachment, curiosity, weariness, and disappointment. I wished I could discern more kindness and compassion in his eyes, because his eyes were my own: I was scrutinizing Bill Brockton’s face in my bathroom mirror, much as I’d scrutinized Maureen Gershwin’s features through a camera lens six hours before.