“No harm done,” I said, rising from my crouch. “Y’all sure know how to keep a fellow on his toes. Tyler, you okay?”
“Hoo-eee,” Tyler said, rising and dusting himself off. “Love the adrenaline rush. Hate wettin’ my pants.”
The sheriff turned and yelled toward the far end of the bridge. “Hey. Aikins! Next time you tell us before you do that.”
“Sorry, Sheriff,” came a voice from the shadows across the ravine.
“He’s a good boy,” the sheriff muttered, “but not a whole lot upstairs. Come on out on the bridge, and I’ll show you where she is. You can figure out the best way to get her out.”
He turned and walked toward the bridge, then onto the span. Twenty feet across, just short of the midpoint where Meffert stood, a loop of crime-scene tape hung from the concrete rail. I followed the sheriff, my heart still thudding and my skin prickling from the shotgun blast. Below, I heard the churning of the creek as I walked along the right-hand side of the bridge, peering over the waist-high rail. The creek was fifteen or twenty feet below, a narrow torrent of tumbling water, edged and obstructed by ledges and boulders, by hemlocks and rhododendron. When I reached the yellow tape, I saw why it was there: A wide smear of dark brown covered the top of the rail, and several drips ran partway down the side. In the creek bed below, a few feet downstream from the bridge, lay the body of a woman — or, rather, what had once been a woman. She lay just above the waterline, on the right-hand bank. She was lying, undressed and in several pieces, near a jumble of blood-soaked fabric that was wedged between rocks at the water’s edge.
Tyler joined me at the rail; Meffert stood slightly behind us, not speaking, allowing us to take in the scene on our own. “Tell me what you see, Tyler,” I said. It was my favorite teaching technique — like taking medical students on hospital rounds, but instead of sick patients and puzzling diseases, my rounds revolved around stinking bodies or bare bones.
“What I see is a lot of work getting her up out of there,” he began. I waited, knowing that after mouthing off — partly to stall for time, but also to take the edge off the grim work that lay ahead — Tyler would begin to wheel and spiral in, a forensic version of the buzzard spiral that the deputy’s shotgun blast had interrupted. “Looks like she was dismembered,” he said slowly. “Her limbs appear severed, not gnawed off.” I’d already come to the same conclusion. I also felt sure she’d been dismembered before she was dumped into the creek bed, not after. Tyler glanced down at the rail. “There was lots of blood,” he said, “but there’s not as much on the rail as it looks like.”
“Explain,” I encouraged.
“It didn’t pool up here at all.” I nodded, impressed by how much detail he was noting and interpreting intelligently. Tyler had worked a dozen death scenes with me by now, and he seemed to soak up knowledge the way gauze soaks up blood. He pointed, tracing the margins of the big bloodstain without quite touching it. “And see how the edges are feathered, rather than sharply defined? So it’s mostly just a smear, but a smear from a big, wide area.” He squatted down, studying the few drips there were, and then dropped to all fours, his face just inches from the pavement. I smiled, having a pretty good idea what he’d spotted. “There’s a little spatter down here,” he said, “the drops diverging from the rail. Means she landed on the rail pretty hard. I’d say she fell a ways — maybe a couple feet — before she hit the rail and then tumbled on over the side.”
Meffert stepped closer, unable to hold back any longer, and squatted down for a look. “Huh,” he said. “I missed those spatters. You got better eyes than I do, young man.” He straightened up with a lurch and a grunt. “Better knees, too.”
Tyler squinted down at the remains in the streambed. “Female torso, probably adult, but the soft tissue’s too far gone to tell,” he said. “We can narrow down the age once we get a good look at the bones.” He paused and considered before adding, “That’s about all I’ve got so far.”
“That’s about all there is to get from here,” I said. “Sheriff, you weren’t exaggerating — it’s a mess, all right.”
“Wish the mess had been a couple miles farther north,” the sheriff replied.
“Why?”
Meffert answered my question. “That’d make it Kentucky’s mess, not Tennessee’s.”
I was turning away from the railing when something tugged at the sleeve of my awareness — something I hadn’t even realized I’d seen. I turned back, scanning the concrete.
“What is it?” asked Tyler.
“Not sure,” I said. “Something caught my eye. I thought so, anyhow. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was… ” Just then I saw it, on the inside of the concrete rail, an arm’s length beyond the end of the blood smear. The tiniest flash of light, like a droplet of dew glinting. It was a small fleck of paint — red paint — glinting in the afternoon sun. “I might be wrong,” I said, “but I’m guessing there’s a truck out there somewhere that’s got a little ding in the edge of one door.” I guesstimated the height of the railing. “About thirty-two inches off the ground. Too high for a car door, I’d say.”
“I’ve got a tape measure in the car,” said Meffert. “I can measure it. And I’ll scrape that paint off and get it to the TBI lab. See if they can find a match.”
“Well, shit,” said the sheriff. “If it’s a trucker, could be from anywhere in the country. We get thousands of ’em passing through here on I-75 ever’ damn day.”
I nodded sympathetically. “Hard to know even where to start looking.” I turned to Tyler. “We’d better get on down there. We’ve got an hour of daylight, at best.”
“We can get you some work lights if we need to,” Sheriff Grainger said. “The highway department garage ain’t far away.”
I shook my head. “Even with good lights, it’s just not the same,” I said. “You always miss something. If we can’t finish up by dark, I’d rather come back in the morning.”
Sheriff Grainger shrugged. “Whatever you want, Doc.” He pointed at the trees lining the nearer side of the gorge. “We went ahead and rigged you a rope down through that notch in the bluff. You said y’all have a litter in your truck?”
“We do.” I studied the bluff. Even the notch — a narrow gap in the rock face, threaded by a thin yellow strand — was almost vertical. “Probably best to lower the litter from here on the bridge. Bag the remains and whatever else we find, lash everything to the litter, and hoist it back up.”
“That’s how I figured it, too,” he said. “We’ve got more rope. We’ll rig you two hauling lines and lower the litter, while y’all start on down.”
“How about you tie our gear on the litter and lower it down? Lot easier to shinny down that rope if we don’t have our hands full.”
The sheriff saluted and called the deputy over. Tyler was already halfway back to the truck. I caught up with him as he was laying the litter crosswise on the tailgate. He looked up. “What all you want to take, Dr. B?”
“Both cameras. Body bag, ID tags, a few biohazard bags, box of rubber gloves,” I said. I tucked a pair of leather work gloves into a pocket of my jeans and stuffed a pair into one of Tyler’s pockets, too. “To prevent rope burn,” I said, then, “hmm. Two flashlights and two headlamps, just in case the time gets away from us. Oh, and the hoe.”
“The hoe?” Tyler looked puzzled. “Nothing but rocks and water down there. What for?”
“You never know,” I said. “I was a Boy Scout. Our motto—”
“I know, I know,” he interrupted wearily, probably because he’d heard me say it a thousand times. “Be Prepared.”
We met the sheriff and Meffert at the end of the bridge and handed them the litter and tools — everything except the hoe, which I wanted to carry with me. Tyler shook his head, as if I were crazy; when the two officers looked quizzically at me, I simply smiled. Deputy Aikins pointed. “See that big ol’ hemlock right yonder?” I looked, then nodded. “Rope’s tied to that. Just foller it down. Bring you right to th
at ledge where she’s at.”
“Either one of you touch anything down there?”
“Nossir, not me,” said Aikins. “Ain’t been down there.”
“None of us have,” said Meffert. “We figured we’d leave the dirty work for y’all.”
The deputy chortled. “Got that right,” he said.