Authors: Jefferson Bass
W
e’d arranged for Kate Nicely’s body to be brought into the embalming room of Morningside Funeral home, figuring it would be equipped with an exhaust fan to remove odors and a floor drain to remove fluids. Thanks to Burton “Grease” DeVriess and his two degrees of separation from a Georgia judge, the coffin had been freshly exhumed, though I knew that
fresh
would not be a word likely to describe the corpse sealed inside.
When Angie and I arrived, we presented ourselves once again to the receptionist, Lily—whose name, I realized, was perfect for a woman who made her living from the dead. As before, Lily looked flustered by our arrival, or possibly by our mere existence; again, she fled swiftly into the inner sanctum of her boss’s office to announce us. Once more, the lugubrious Samuel Montgomery emerged, and I asked if everything was ready for us.
“We have a slight, ah, problem,” Montgomery breathed, causing me to have a powerful sense of déjà vu, a sensation that only intensified when Angie asked what
sort
of problem we had. “Well . . .” He hesitated. “I don’t know if you were aware of this, but we were not able to embalm the, ah, deceased.”
“My sister, you mean,” said Angie sharply. “You weren’t able to embalm my sister. Because her head was blown off?” Montgomery drew back. “Or because her husband hustled her into the ground so fast?”
“Both the, ah, nature of her injuries and the timing of the arrangements made embalming impossible,” he said. “As a result, we’re unable to bring the body inside. The, ah, odor is quite strong.” From the look of distress on his face, he might almost have been experiencing the odor at this very moment. He looked from Angie, whose face was a stony mask, to me. “Surely you can understand? When people come here to pay their last respects, they don’t want . . .” He trailed off.
Angie finished the sentence for him. “They don’t want it to smell like somebody’s
died
?”
Montgomery sighed. “Well, yes, if you insist. The entire
building
would smell.”
I could understand Angie’s edginess, but I could also appreciate his dilemma. “So what do you suggest?”
“We have a maintenance building for the cemetery,” he said. “A garage and shop area. It’s not fancy, but there’s electrical power. Fluorescent lights. Water. No air-conditioning,” he added apologetically, “but fans, which would help keep the air moving through.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “Angie?”
She started to say something, then bit it back and simply nodded.
T
he bad news was, Morningside’s maintenance shop was a corrugated metal building that soaked up the midday sun, creaking and popping as it expanded in the heat. The good news was, the ceiling was high, and the thick concrete slab under our feet still retained a trace of the spring’s coolness. The better news was, the building had a garage door in the front and another directly opposite it, in back, and the fans Montgomery had mentioned—a pair of industrial-sized blowers with blade assemblies that might have come off a small aircraft—transformed the funeral home’s shop into a cross between a landscaper’s shed and a NASA wind tunnel. Montgomery had placed the coffin on a wooden workbench, which was about waist-high. As he unscrewed the lid and tilted it off, I caught a strong whiff of decomposition, but the smell swirled away swiftly, sucked out of the building and mixing with the scent of the longleaf pines and honeysuckle vines and road-killed deer and armadillos of south Georgia and north Florida.
The coffin was a bottom-of-the-line model, made of cloth-covered particleboard. It had not been sealed in a watertight burial vault, so the fabric was caked with mud and the particleboard was already becoming waterlogged. My work had trained me not to sentimentalize death or the trappings of funerals, but I couldn’t help thinking how little this woman must have mattered to her husband, so swiftly and so cheaply had he put her in the ground.
We’d been joined by a Cheatham County deputy—a hangdog-looking fellow named Chumley—and a grizzled death investigator named Maddox from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A former police detective who’d retired after thirty years of interrogating homicide suspects, Maddox had recently embarked on a new career of observing victims’ autopsies. Assigned to the medical examiner at the GBI’s central-region lab in Dry Branch, Georgia—a small town just east of Macon—Maddox had driven south three hours to join us, and he wasn’t happy about it. “Hell,” he said, “this would’ve been only thirty minutes from the southwestern lab, in Moultrie.”
I asked the obvious question. “Then why didn’t Moultrie send somebody?”
“Nobody in Moultrie to send anymore,” he grumbled. “We closed that lab last spring. Budget cuts. The main lab and the other regional labs are swamped, and there’s a big backlog of evidence from local law enforcement agencies. Penny wise, pound foolish, if you ask me. But nobody did.” He smiled ruefully. “Including you. Sorry to spout off.”
“It’s okay,” I said, turning my attention to Kate’s body.
Her face was beginning to droop, but it was largely intact. Her front teeth were snapped, as I’d expected, from the abrupt kick of the shotgun barrel, but the skin of her face was unbroken. The undertaker who’d arranged the body in the casket—Montgomery himself, he confirmed when I asked—had propped the head in an approximation of a normal resting position. To do that, he’d used a small cylindrical pillow to fill the space formerly occupied by the base of the skull and the back of the neck. That pillow, like the bigger, rectangular one beneath it, was damp with blood and body fluids. I leaned down and turned the head gently to one side with my gloved hands. It flopped easily; the base of the skull and much of the cervical spine had been blasted away, and what remained of the head was attached to the body only by the soft tissue of the throat.
The only sounds were the groans of the building and the whoosh of the fans, but I was acutely conscious of Angie beside me, as motionless but as tense as a bear trap primed to snap with bone-crushing force. I stepped aside to give her a moment. I’d expected her to be overwhelmed with grief, but instead she seemed to draw strength from the sight of her sister’s body. It seemed as if she grew taller and stronger, somehow; her eyes glittered with anger, and her mouth twitched with what I’d have sworn was a grim smile. “I’d thought it’d be hard to see Kate’s body,” she said, “but this isn’t my sister anymore. This is just evidence now.”
After a moment she nodded, and then she, Montgomery, Maddox, and I lifted the body out of the casket—Chumley begged off helping, citing a bad back—and shifted it onto a metal gurney. Next I retrieved the soggy pillows and repositioned them beneath the head and neck.
Angie had brought a camera, and she began taking photos—wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, dozens of them—documenting the damage done by the blast. Carefully I tilted and rotated the head, then rolled the body onto its stomach so Angie could capture the wound from all angles. I’d found streaks of lead on a few of the bone fragments I’d recovered from the cleanup company’s biohazard boxes, but the exposed edges of the bones of the skull and neck—portions of the third cervical vertebra and the top of the fourth vertebra—showed no signs of lead. That didn’t surprise me; I knew from other gunshot deaths I’d worked that the shotgun slug itself would punch straight through, but the force of the air pressure and burning gases would create a wider cone of destruction. After Angie had thoroughly photographed the wound from every possible distance and direction, I placed the body faceup again, replicating how she’d lain on her sofa the night she died. Maddox kept quiet, but he watched closely; Chumley, meanwhile, had excused himself to “check in with the dispatcher”; evidently checking in was a detailed procedure, because the deputy never reappeared.
We had brought with us a wooden dowel, three feet long by an inch in diameter, as a stand-in for the shotgun. Angie had suggested bringing an actual gun, but I managed to dissuade her, on the grounds that it would be physically harder to handle than the dowel. I’d stopped short of adding “emotionally harder, too”; that, I felt sure, went without saying. I threaded the dowel through the jaws and out the back of the head, positioning the end—the “muzzle” of the dowel, so to speak—on the pillow directly at the center of the circle of missing flesh and shattered bone. Assuming the slug and explosive gases had emerged from the gun barrel in a symmetrical pattern, centering the end of the dowel would show us the angle of the gun when it was fired.
I checked and rechecked the position, and turned to Angie, who was taking more photos. “Does that look centered to you?” She lowered the camera, crouched to study the dowel’s position on the pillow, and adjusted the angle by a fraction of a degree. Then she frowned and put it back exactly where I’d had it.
During the past twenty years, I’d examined three shotgun suicides. In all three cases, the barrel had been angled upward, at roughly a forty-five-degree angle, with the butt of the stock down around waist level. But unless I’d badly misjudged the geometry, in this case the gun had intersected Kate’s body at a ninety-degree angle, and the shot had been fired from straight on: an unnatural and awkward angle.
Suddenly one of the death-scene photos—the ones taken by the sheriff’s deputy the day Kate had died—sprang unbidden to my mind. I turned to Angie. “You brought in the folder you’ve been keeping on your sister, didn’t you?”
She nodded at the end of the workbench. “Got it right here. Why?”
“Let’s take another look at the photos the deputy took.” She set down the camera, opened the file, and slowly flipped through the handful of pictures. I looked over her left shoulder; Maddox looked over her right. “That one,” I said, when she reached the next-to-last photo. It was a close-up of the business end of the shotgun. I laid the dowel on the gurney and peered at the picture, wishing I had a magnifying glass. “There,” I said, pointing a purple-gloved pinky at a small metal peg jutting up from the gun barrel. “What’s that?”
“That? That’s the gun sight.”
“No, I mean what’s that
on
the gun sight?” Snagged on the peg was what appeared to be a shred of pink lint. But it wasn’t lint; it was human tissue. That in itself wasn’t surprising, since the blast had spattered a lot of blood and tissue. Still, something about the way it hung from the sight nagged at me; it appeared not so much spattered as torn. I took a final squint at the photo, then turned and inspected Kate’s mouth. On the inner surface of the left cheek I found it: a horizontal laceration about half an inch long, extending to the corner of the mouth. It was exactly the sort of laceration the sight might make as the gun barrel kicked. I showed the laceration to Angie, then gave Maddox a chance to look. “Anything about this strike you as odd?”
Angie bit her lip to concentrate, and her eyes darted back and forth from the photo to the corpse as she tried to work it out. I’m sure she would have, given another minute, but I couldn’t wait. “You’d think the gun sight might gouge the roof of her mouth, or knock an extra chip from one of her top teeth, or maybe gash her upper lip, right?” She nodded, frowning. “But the
corner
of her mouth?” I picked up the dowel and reinserted it. “That means the gun was twisted in her mouth, like so.” I rotated the dowel a quarter turn counterclockwise. “Which would have made it even harder to hold at that angle. You see what that means? It means that the gun wasn’t fired by the person lying
on
the sofa.”
“It means,” she said as Maddox reached for his phone, “that the gun was fired by a person standing
beside
the sofa.”
An hour later, Kate Nicely was sealed once more in her cheap coffin. Maddox had arranged for her to be taken, in the back of a Morningside hearse, to Dry Branch, Georgia.
Me, I would be headed for Washington, D.C., early the next morning. While Kate was headed for the GBI lab, I was bound for the Smithsonian Institution, and I was taking with me the second skull, that of the African-American boy whose left mastoid process had been shattered.
T
he computer mouse scrolled down a list of files, and a click later, the screen filled with the life-sized likeness of a skull: the likeness of the second skull Winston Pettis’s dog had dragged home from the Florida woods. Joseph Mullins, a forensic-imaging specialist, wiggled his mouse, and the skull’s intricate image rotated on the screen as if spinning in space. I’d seen many CT scans of skulls in the past few years, but I never ceased to marvel at their detail.
I had hoped to coax another swift facial reconstruction out of Joanna Hughes before she started her maternity leave, but Joanna’s baby had other ideas: the day after she finished the androgynous face I’d taken back to Tallahassee, she’d gone into labor, and had given birth to a beautiful daughter. So instead of sending the second skull to Knoxville, I’d brought it instead to Alexandria, Virginia, home of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. My presence here at Mullins’s elbow wasn’t necessary; in fact, it was probably a time-wasting distraction for him. For me, though, it was a fascinating and eye-opening experience. I’d spent fifty thousand frequent-flier miles for my plane ticket from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C.—a foolish waste of miles, by any rational measure. But by my reckoning, time was short, the miles had been gathering dust anyhow, and the chance to watch Mullins work was well worth the hasty trip.
I’d started the morning, bright and early, by renewing my acquaintance with the TSA screeners at the Tallahassee airport. I knew to ask for the supervisor by name as soon as I approached the checkpoint, and, perhaps not surprisingly, he remembered me from my prior trip. I’d tried to get a laugh from him by asking, “Do you want to search my carrion bag?”—I all but dug my elbow into his ribs as I said “carrion”—but he obviously didn’t catch the pun.
From Tallahassee I’d flown—through Atlanta, of course—to D.C.’s National Airport. I’d spent a pleasant, productive lunchtime with Ed Ulrich, a former student of mine, who was now a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution. Borrowing from the Smithsonian’s vast collection of skulls, Ed had found a mandible that articulated nicely with the cranial vault of the black Florida teenager. Once we’d cobbled the pieces together, one of the Smithsonian’s radiology technicians had run the skull through the museum’s CT scanner. After that, Ed had steered me here, to the high-tech office of Joe Mullins.
Mullins, like Joanna Hughes, was skilled at re-creating human faces on bare skulls, guided by the architecture of the bone itself and by my insights about the boy’s age, race, and sex. Over the years, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children—whose initials, NCMEC, were pronounced “NICK-meck”—had gained renown for its “age progressions” of missing children’s photos. Starting with the last or best photos of a missing child, NCMEC’s age-progression artists created images showing how that child might look two years later, and four years later, and so on, up to early adulthood. Their results spoke for themselves: their age-progression photos had made it possible for people to recognize and identify hundreds of missing children, sometimes many years after they’d disappeared.
But facial reconstruction was a newer and smaller niche at NCMEC, and Mullins was the only artist on staff who filled it. His method was a fascinating combination of old-school artistry and gee-whiz technology. He had a degree in fine art, but his workstation was straight out of
Star Trek
. To the right of his monitor stood a gizmo that looked like a small robotic arm—an arm with two elbows instead of just one, and a penlike stylus on the end where a hand ought to go. My assistant, Miranda, frequently used a similar-looking device, a 3-D digitizing probe, in the UT bone lab. Miranda used it to take measurements of skulls: all she had to do was touch the tip of the probe to prominent points, or landmarks, on the skull—the bridge of the nose, the tip of the chin, the cheekbones, the brow ridge, the crown of the head, and so on—and the digitizing probe would capture the spatial coordinates. Once she’d touched all the landmarks, the skull’s key dimensions would be recorded in our forensic data bank, which contained measurements from thousands of other skeletons. If the skull was an unknown—a John or Jane Doe, rather than a Body Farm donor whose identity was already known to us—our ForDisc software could then tell us the likely race and the sex of the unknown skull by comparing it to measurements from known skulls. ForDisc gave us a computerized way of doing, in a matter of minutes, what it had taken me decades to learn to do. I still made my own judgments, and I tended to make them faster than Miranda could digitize the measurements and run the software. ForDisc was a useful backup, though . . . and once, when the software and I had disagreed about the race of an unknown skull (I’d said “white” and ForDisc had said “black”), I’d been wrong and ForDisc had been right.
But NCMEC’s digital arm had a very different use than ours did. As I watched, Mullins gripped the stylus and used it to move the computer’s cursor—a tiny icon shaped like the stylus—to a drop-down menu on one side of the screen. There, he latched onto a small cylindrical shape representing a tissue-depth marker and dragged it over to the CT image of the skull, then stuck it onto the bridge of the nose. He swiftly repeated the process with more markers, which he attached to other landmarks along the midline of the skull: the top of the head, the center of the forehead, the brow ridge, the end of the nasal bone, the tip of the chin, and the indentation between the base of the nose and the top teeth. He moved the stylus swiftly and fluidly, with no wasted movements, but I found myself wondering how he knew exactly when to click the button that seemed to transfer the markers from the stylus to the skull. “Do you just hover over the right spot? How do you let go of the marker and get it to stick to the skull?”
“I’m just pressing it on,” he said. “I feel it when I bump up against the bone.” He saw me puzzling to take this in. “Here, try it.” He rolled his chair to the side and allowed me to take his place at the computer and grip the stylus. I moved it tentatively back and forth, up and down, in and out, and then in a series of spirals. It moved freely, almost weightlessly, in all directions, with virtually no friction, as the tiny icon flitted and spiraled across the computer screen, floating around and above the image of the skull.
“That’s cool,” I said, “but I still don’t quite get how you transfer the depth markers onto the skull.”
“Move it in closer, all the way onto the skull.”
“But how will I know when I’m there?”
He smiled. “You’ll know.” I centered the stylus over the forehead and eased it forward, as the icon on the screen mimicked the movement. “Just shove it,” he urged. “Don’t worry; you can’t hurt it.” I pushed the stylus forward; the arm swung freely . . . and then stopped as abruptly and firmly as if it had hit a wall. I pulled it back toward me, then moved it forward again. Again it jolted to a stop when the small icon bumped the forehead. Intrigued, I slid it downward, feeling both friction and undulations as it moved over the contours of the forehead and the brow ridge. Suddenly, as I dragged the stylus across the lower edge of the brow ridge, the arm slid forward and the stylus icon plunged into the right eye orbit. As I watched, astonished, it careened through the opening at the back of the orbit—the opening through which the optic nerve had once connected with the brain—and disappeared from view. I tried pulling it back out, but it resisted my efforts.
“Help,” I squawked. “What have I done?”
Mullins laughed. “You’re trapped inside the cranial vault now. You can come out where you went in, or out the nasal opening, or even out the foramen magnum at the base of the skull, where the spinal cord comes out. I’m guessing you know all the emergency exits from a skull.”
I moved the invisible stylus in various directions, but didn’t manage to free it from the cavity where I’d trapped it. As I struggled to free it, I found myself growing nervous, verging on panic. What if I’d broken the system, trapped the stylus in some permanent, irretrievable way? Finally it occurred to me to close my eyes and move the stylus by feel, exploring the inner contours of the cranial vault. In my mind’s eye, I replaced the stylus with a tiny version of myself—a miniature spelunker within the cavern of a cranium—sliding my hands around the rough-surfaced perimeter, reaching overhead to feel the top of the vault, bending down to probe the gaping pit of the foramen magnum that opened at my tiny feet. My brief panic gave way to delight. The contours fascinated me; as I retraced the right side of the cranial vault, I felt the zigzag seam of the cranial suture where the frontal bone joined the parietal, then, just behind that, the grooves where the middle meningeal artery had once run, bringing blood to the brain. If this had been the first skull Pettis’s dog had found, I might have been able to feel the subtle fracture line that intersected the groove. But this was the second, more damaged skull, so I felt my way to the left side of the parietal bone, where the mastoid process had been broken off by a powerful blow. Sure enough, the stylus snagged on the ragged edges of the break, and I winced as I imagined a slow-motion version of the bone’s shattering.
“This skull was brought home by a dog,” I told Mullins. “We’re still looking for the rest of the bones.”
He nodded. “One of the first reconstructions I did was a case like that,” he said. “A dog in Vermont found a skull somewhere in the woods. The sheriff’s office looked and looked, but they couldn’t find anything else. Finally they put a tracking collar on the dog, hoping he’d go back for more.”
“And did he?”
“Nope. They never found anything more than the skull. But we got an identification from the reconstruction. Turns out it was a severely retarded boy who’d been killed by his dad. People thought the boy had been put in an institution somewhere, but he’d been murdered and dumped in the woods instead.”
“It’s possible that this boy, our boy here, was institutionalized and then murdered,” I said. “A reform school. A mighty grim one, by all accounts.” I continued feeling my way around the interior of the cranial vault. “This is amazing.” I’d spent thirty years examining skulls—usually their exteriors, though sometimes their interiors as well—but never before had I explored one in this way, as if I were a spelunker in a cave. The experience was mesmerizing and moving: an intensely intimate encounter with the skull of this unknown young man. Finally, after what must have been several minutes, I realized I was holding up progress on the reconstruction. I imagined the location of the foramen magnum and then imagined myself as a cliff diver, diving down into a small pool of deep water, swimming downward and out to the side. I opened my eyes just as the stylus reappeared on the left side of the skull, hovering roughly where the ear had once been.
“Amazing,” I said again. “I could spend hours doing that.”
“It’s addictive,” he agreed. “Like a video game, only real.”
“Ever see that sci-fi movie
Fantastic Voyage
?”
“Sure, I have it on DVD.” He grinned. “A submarine full of scientists gets shrunk down to the size of a molecule and injected into a guy’s bloodstream.”
“Right. What is it they need to do? Blast a brain tumor with a laser beam?”
“Close; a blood clot,” he corrected, “in the brain of a Russian defector. Cool movie. The wonders and perils of the human body. Wouldn’t that be cool, if we could actually take that trip?” I liked this kid.
Reluctantly I scooted my chair aside and turned the computer back over to him. “Okay, it’s all yours. How long will it take you to do the reconstruction?”
“Depends. A week, best case. Two weeks, if you hang around and help.” He laughed.
“Never fear,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to Tallahassee. But if you can pretend I’m not here right now, I’d love to look over your shoulder for a few minutes while you work on this.”
“Be my guest. I’ll get the rest of these depth markers on pretty quickly, then start sculpting the muscles of the face.”
In a matter of minutes—or so it seemed, though maybe it was longer and I just lost track of time—the skull bristled with rodlike depth markers projecting from its landmarks. Thin-skinned areas, such as the forehead, nasal bridge, and chin, sported nubby little markers, less than an eighth of an inch thick; in the fleshier regions of the cheeks and lower jaw, the markers jutted out nearly an inch. Ten markers were positioned along the skull’s midline, and another eleven were arrayed on each side. Mullins rotated the skull to make sure he’d not omitted any, slowly at first, then faster, like a gruesome version of a spinning top.
After a few moments the skull slowed and stopped, facing forward. Then, using the stylus in click-and-drag mode again, Mullins began grabbing strands of virtual clay from the left side of the screen and pressing them onto the skull’s right cheek. As more and more strands angled downward from the cheekbone toward the corners of the mouth, I realized that they represented bundles of muscle fibers. “So you sculpt every muscle, one by one? You can’t just put on a layer of clay and contour it to the thickness of the depth markers?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Well, you can—I’ve tried that, and yeah, it’s a lot faster—but it doesn’t look right. You just can’t fake the contours of the face. You’ve got to lay the foundation of muscles underneath the skin. No easy shortcuts.”
Fiber by fiber, as I stood and watched, Mullins continued sculpting in virtual clay. Finally I eased away silently so as not to distract him again. The muscle he was creating as I left was the zygomaticus: the muscle that had once tugged this murdered black boy’s mouth into a smile.
It had been a long, long time since he’d used that muscle.