“Before you cut into the clothing, did you notice anything that made you think the body or the grave had been disturbed?”
I shook my head.
“And the clothing was undamaged?”
“Well, the fabric was beginning to rot in places, but otherwise yes, it was intact.”
“That means whoever took his arms and legs did it before he was buried,” he mused. “Not exactly a case of grave robbing. Mutilating a corpse, I guess, unless the limbs were amputated while he was still alive.”
I shook my head again. “There’s no sign of bleeding or healing to the tissue at the shoulders and hips,” I explained. “That means he was already dead when he was cut.”
“Hmm…theft of property? I don’t know — who owns the bodies in a cemetery?”
I shrugged.
“Fraud or breach of contract, maybe,” he mused, “if the funeral home didn’t provide the services it got paid for.” He massaged the back and sides of his neck, just below the base of his skull, even as his jaw muscles continued to knot rhythmically. “We need to get the evidence techs out here to go over the coffin and the body, see if they find anything that sheds light on this. After that I guess we need to send the body to the forensic center for a more detailed examination.”
DeVriess took a step toward the coffin. “Detective,” he oozed in his smooth, courtroom voice, the one that sounded like old money, cigars, and fine whiskey, “surely I don’t need to remind you that I have a court order authorizing the exhumation of this body and the collection of DNA samples.”
“Of course,” replied Culpepper, and DeVriess smiled warmly. The smile froze, though, when Culpepper added, “You surely don’t need to remind me. But this is now a crime scene, and the samples for your civil suit will have to wait until we’ve finished our search for evidence in the criminal case.”
I could see DeVriess drawing himself up to bluster, so I reached out and touched his shoulder briefly. There was nothing to be gained — and certainly no fun to be had — in a graveside pissing match over a dismembered corpse. “Burt, your client’s gotten by without this paternity test for a lot of years already. You reckon maybe he could get by without it for maybe one or two more days?”
DeVriess stared at me. I’d seen that stare a few times before, in court, just before Grease ripped into me on the witness stand. He looked from me to Miranda, as if to say, Did you see what he just did? Miranda simply shrugged and smiled, as if to say, He’s crazy, but he’s harmless.
She held his gaze, and as swiftly as he’d puffed up, DeVriess suddenly deflated, and then he laughed. “Damned if I’m not going soft in my old age.”
Culpepper was as startled by Burt’s acquiescence as Burt himself was. “Well, then. Great. I’ll call out the evidence techs. Dr. Brockton, I suspect we’d like you or the medical examiner to examine the body, so I’d like to arrange to have it transported to the forensic center once we clear the scene here.”
I nodded. “Dr. Garcia’s still on medical leave, but he’s getting better. I imagine he’d be interested in taking a look at a case this unusual.” I pulled out my pocket calendar. “I’m flying to Washington tomorrow to give a talk at the Smithsonian. Could we stick this guy in the cooler until first thing Monday morning?”
Remarkably, Culpepper and DeVriess both agreed that Monday morning was soon enough. I still had some work to do on the next day’s talk in Washington, so after packing the slightly soiled scissors and the unused Stryker saw and pliers in the back of my truck, Miranda and I departed for campus. DeVriess followed us down the driveway, leaving the body of Trey Willoughby — what was left of it — in the keeping of detective Culpepper and the forensic technicians who would comb the coffin for clues to the postmortem butchery.
CHAPTER 5
The dot of the laser pointer danced across the rib that was projected, ten times larger than life, on a screen deep beneath the Mall in Washington, D.C. I was lecturing, as part of a series called Smithsonian Saturdays, to three hundred people who’d given up a weekend afternoon — and given up fifty bucks apiece — to sit in a windowless underground auditorium and view slides of decaying corpses, bullet-riddled skulls, and incinerated skeletons.
I’d had a disappointing lunch meeting with Ed Ulrich, my former student. Actually, the lunch was great — we sampled a tasty variety of Native American dishes at the Museum of the American Indian — but the meeting was discouraging. Ed had sympathized with my funding plight, but his own program at the Smithsonian was confronting painful budget cuts, too, so he had no research money to funnel to his alma mater.
Deflated by the bad news, I’d gotten off to a slow start in my talk, but by the time I reached the slide of the rib, my energy was as focused as the laser pointer. “That little notch in the rib is a cut mark made by a knife,” I told the audience. Clicking the projector’s remote, I advanced to the next slide, a close-up of the notch. At this magnification the rib looked the size of a tree trunk, and the cut might have been inflicted by a dull chain saw. “See how the outer layer of bone, the cortical bone, looks torn? You can tell by the way the fibers angle that the knife thrust was going from front to back.” I tapped my chest, just below my right collarbone. “This is the first right rib, by the way, so as the knife penetrated beyond the rib, it punctured the upper lobe of the lung.”
“Excuse me?” A woman’s voice floated up to me from the darkness at the rear of the auditorium.
“Did you have a question?”
“Yes. You said a medical examiner did an autopsy on this girl’s body?”
“Yes. The state medical examiner in Kentucky. The body of the girl — Leatha Rutherford was her name — was found hidden in a trash pile outside Lexington.”
“Why didn’t the medical examiner see the stab wound?”
“Good question. By the time she was found, she’d been dead nearly six months, so there just wasn’t enough soft tissue left to show the traces of a stab wound. The M.E. also took X-rays, but because the first rib runs underneath the clavicle”—I tapped my chest again—“the knife mark was masked on the X-rays.”
“And how did you happen to find it?”
“Dumb luck,” I said, earning a few laughs. “Actually, I have to give maternal doggedness the credit for this. Leatha was eighteen when she disappeared. The M.E. ruled her death a homicide, but he listed the actual cause of death as ‘unknown.’ She was buried, and the case more or less came to a dead end, but her mother wouldn’t give up. She kept nagging the detectives, and then she contacted me. She’d seen me on a television show—60 Minutes? no, wait, it was 48 Hours, I think — and she sent me a letter. ‘If anyone can figure out how Leatha died, it’s you,’ she wrote. ‘Please help me.’ How do you say no to something like that? So I took a graduate student up to Kentucky, and we exhumed the bones. We brought them back to the morgue in Lexington, cleaned off the remaining tissue, and we got lucky. If dogs had gotten to the bones or if the knife had passed cleanly between the ribs instead of nicking this one, we would never have known what killed her.”
The red laser dot twitched and skittered along the cut mark again. No wonder cats love these things, I thought. “That nick in the bone is about half an inch long, an eighth inch wide, and a quarter inch deep,” I said, “but here’s how it looks up really, really close.” I flicked to the next slide. “We wondered if we could learn anything more about the murder by examining the cut mark more closely, so we took the rib back to UT and looked at it under a scanning electron microscope.” At this scale, magnified hundreds of times, the edges of the rib could not be seen; instead an area measuring less than one inch square filled the Smithsonian’s twenty-foot screen. The surface of the outer, cortical bone — ivory smooth to the naked eye and to probing fingertips — appeared ragged and spongy, like bread dough allowed to rise for too long. The small notch was now an immense fissure, wider than the span of my arms. I outlined it with the pointer. “Look carefully at the cut mark,” I said. “What do you see?”