The artificial knee, it turned out, was the highest point of the body, since both upper and lower leg bones angled downward from where we’d found it. Indeed, as Leach progressively laid bare the skeleton, we could all see that it rested upside down on the nape of its neck, its torso curved and twisted skyward and its heels tucked in so as not to stick out of the ground.
With that much clear, but with most of the body still encased in dirt, Leach summoned Tyler, Henry, Hillstrom, and me to his side.
“Okay, this is what we’ve got so far. You”-he pointed at Tyler-“take measurements and make a sketch while I point all this out. Henry, help him.”
Hillstrom had already begun taking photographs, so he left her alone and, standing before the half-visible skeleton as he might have before a blackboard, focused on me. “We’re looking at an adult, probably fully grown-whether male or female, I don’t know. It’s about six feet in length, which would statistically indicate a male, but that can be misleading-there are a lot of tall women around.
“He or she was dressed at the time of death in what looks to be a nylon shirt and a pair of blue jeans, but he wasn’t wearing any shoes. If he was wearing a sweater, all traces of it have long since vanished, but I’m pretty sure he was not wearing a coat of any kind. The only buttons here are consistent with the shirt alone.”
I bent forward and put my eyes a few inches away from where the skeleton was held by the dirt like a bug on flypaper. All I could see was skeleton. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
My body language gave me away. With a sigh of impatience, he began pointing out the telltale signs. “Blue jeans, see? The zipper and the copper stress-point tabs they use to secure the pocket corners have all left telltale green stains on the bone. The nylon shirt”-he pointed at a small shred of rotted material-”is the only material that might survive this long; cotton and wool vanish very quickly. And here, see the plastic buttons? Also, look at the feet: no lace grommets, no leather or rubber sole, no boot nails, no nothing. Therefore, no shoes.”
I was beginning to see what he saw. I pointed to a mass of tiny confetti-sized fragments that seemed to surround the entire outline of the body. “And that?”
“Plastic. He was wrapped in it-or she was; I’m just saying he for convenience. Don’t forget that.” He pulled a small trowel from his back pocket and scratched away at his exhibit. “Look, see those round plastic circles, like Life Savers? Those are the reinforced holes running along the top of a shower curtain. You’ll notice they’re all bunched together, as if they were gathered in a knot. And just below them, see that? Rope strands, indicating that the curtain had been tied off above the head, to make it a container for the body.”
He shifted to the feet. “Same thing here, see? No little circles, of course, since this is the bottom of the curtain, but you can see where there are more plastic fragments from where the curtain has been bunched together, and again, here are the rope strands.”
“So he was wrapped in the curtain, which was tied off at both ends with rope, and dragged to the hole.”
“From inside the house,” Leach finished.
“Because of the lack of shoes?”
“Possibly, although it was apparently warm weather-no jacket, remember-so he might have been running around barefoot. But the shower curtain also implies an interior death. If he died outside, why tear down the curtain from inside? Why not just dig the hole and dump him in? If he died inside, possibly pouring out a lot of blood, then you’d be more inclined to wrap him in something both handy and waterproof, like a shower curtain.”
A slow smile spread across my face, which he seemed to take as an affront, adding, “Of course, all that’s utterly meaningless with a body this old-just a little magic show to entertain the unwashed masses.”
He turned to Henry and Tyler. “You finished yet? I’d like to get this over with before next summer. Set up the rocker screens over there and filter the dirt I’ve already removed.”
The next stage of Leach’s “magic show” took on the more traditional appearance of a documentary on digging up dinosaurs. The backhoe was retired, the shovels stacked, and even the hand trowels put away. Now Hillstrom’s cranky little expert was down to dental tools and toothbrushes. The fact that he was toiling over an upside-down corpse with a metal knee instead of bits and pieces of a brontosaurus gradually lost its impact. As the hours went by, most of us lost sight of the overall horror of what had led us here. Like Leach, we became locked onto one minute patch of bone and dirt after another, cataloguing with him the retrieval of each button, belt buckle, scrap of cloth, and wristwatch that gradually was pried from the hard-packed damp earth.
Also, the skeleton itself lost its ghoulish powers as it was slowly dismantled and laid in an open body bag spread out on a stretcher, the soil supporting it having been removed and sifted through the fine-mesh rocker screens that Henry and J.P. steadily shook back and forth. James Dunn, despite his own peculiar enthusiasm, began looking distracted, glancing at his watch more and more frequently, no doubt ruing his decision not to have sent an assistant in his place.
The care and time finally paid off, however, when Leach quietly gestured to Hillstrom to take a photograph of the area just below the skeleton’s inverted rib cage. Looking over her shoulder as she focused for the shot, I saw the recognizable remains of a small-caliber bullet resting in the dirt, where presumably it had settled after the flesh holding it in place had rotted away.
That was all James Dunn needed. With a satisfied grunt, he rose from the rock he’d claimed as his chair for the past several hours and headed back to his office, the proud owner of another felony.
My own emotions were more complicated, since we were the ones who’d have to name the skeleton, as well as the person who’d placed him in his pit. Though not disproved by this latest discovery, any chances that Abraham Fuller had acquired his lethal wound through an accidental shooting had become microscopic.
Beverly Hillstrom stood beside me, watching as Leach carefully removed the rib cage and placed it on the stretcher, leaving only the skull in place. Her voice was very soft. “I feel like apologizing.”
“For what?”
“Ever since I called you about Mr. Fuller, your job seems to be getting increasingly difficult.”
I let out a little sigh. “Looks that way now. Maybe once you get this guy on your examining table in Burlington, things’ll improve.”
She shook her head. “I don’t see how. I might be able to trace the bullet’s trajectory, get a little more precise about his sex, age, and race, but there’s a limit, and that’s about it.”
“What about the knee?”
“Yes-I was thinking about that. A complete data search might yield something, especially if we can locate a serial number. If this fellow’s been in here too long, though, chances are the prosthesis originated in Europe, and that’ll open up a whole new set of problems… and expenses.”
I remained glum and silent.
“There is one thing, though…” she added tentatively, revealing that terrier-like inability to let go that I so valued in her.
“What?”
“I have a friend-a forensic anthropologist-who might be interested in taking a look. She’s very good, and bones are her specialty.”