Emily Craig - Teasing Secrets from the Dead - My Investigations at America

“Do you think that's a sheet?” Lambers asked, pointing at one swatch of fabric. While much of the cloth was the odd blue-green that Mark had first called workman's blue, this new piece of material seemed to have once been white.

I pulled the last corner of the cloth free and looked at its sagging folds. “Maybe a shirt?” I suggested. With the fabric all in pieces, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to me that this man had been dressed in a shirt-a fairly nice one, too, by the look of it-and some kind of business suit. Again, not what you'd expect from some homeless guy in the woods. I was becoming ever more intrigued by the emerging portrait of this man, his bones partially swathed in rotting cloth, his remains surrounded by his final earthly possessions like some Egyptian king laid out for burial. As we freed him and the objects around him from the fine-grained sandy soil, I felt that I was watching a long-forgotten photograph slowly come into focus, a moment frozen in time that was gradually making itself visible to my eyes.

I fingered a scrap of the dark-blue cloth, which seemed to be a well-worn synthetic. “Lucky he wasn't an all-natural guy,” I murmured to Lambers. “Cotton or wool would be long gone by now.”

“But what about the money clips?” Lambers asked. “And all the other stuff? Why didn't the killer take it? And Doc, how old is it?”

I shook my head. “Tomorrow,” I said. I couldn't wait till we got this stuff back to the lab.

A few hours into the excavation, our safety-belt system was no longer working. As I continued to inch closer and closer to the crumbling edge of the riverbank, my legs were beginning to feel the strain of my constant balancing act, and I could only imagine how sore Al's arms were getting as he kept up his constant pull on my rope. The rest of our team was farther up the bank, but the photographer, videographer, and Lambers were right by my side as we migrated toward the dangerous drop-off.

The swollen Ohio had been rising steadily, its chilly waters now licking the edges of the bank about four feet below our ledge. With a certain amount of bravado, my three helpers had declined my offer of a safety rope. We had only one safety belt, and I was wearing it. My colleagues insisted that they were fine, but the safety officer called a halt. “Take a break, people!” he yelled down to us. “Help is on the way!”

I breathed a silent sigh of relief as I straightened my back and lay down my trowel. I could have used a break an hour ago, but surrounded by strong, fit cops, most of whom were decades younger than I was, I'd been reluctant to admit it. Sometimes I wonder just how long I can keep doing this type of strenuous fieldwork. I'm only in my mid-fifties, but I already use a walking stick, even while crossing level ground. One of the hazards of my profession is to make me all too uncomfortably conscious of how fragile my body is, holding me hostage to one torn ligament or pulled tendon, one bad twist of the knee or a sudden fall on the wrong part of my hip. Now I was extremely grateful for our half-hour enforced resting period before a local water rescue squad arrived at the scene: three men and a woman riding in a big flat-bottomed boat.

At first they simply stood by, ready to help if anyone should fall into the swift current, their boat bobbing in the choppy waters a few feet offshore. When they realized that the water was continuing to rise and the current was growing ever swifter, they jammed their bow right into the ledge, almost directly under my feet, their shoulders practically level with my hands. Suddenly, I had an idea.

“May I come on board?” I asked the rescue squad captain. He seemed a bit taken aback, but after a moment, he nodded yes. Still attached to my safety rope, I sat down in the dirt and slid down the exposed surface of the ledge until my feet were resting on the boat's bow. I carefully turned my head toward the ledge. Yes! I could excavate the rest of the site while standing in the boat. The site was just level with my chest, allowing me to hold my arms comfortably straight out in front of me.

With the help of one of the rescue squad, I unhooked my safety belt. “Heads up!” I called to the men on the shore, and tossed the belt up to Lambers, who put it on gratefully. We passed the next few hours in relative comfort, he wearing the belt, I standing in the boat.

Of course, there was one small problem: motion sickness. I probably could have handled the gentle rocking of the boat, but all day long huge barges kept making their majestic way up and down the Ohio, creating enormous wakes that rippled their way toward shore. Each time we collided with a wake, our boat would lurch, and I had to stop my work, standing stock-still, eyes squeezed shut, until the nausea passed. I must admit, it's the first time I ever got seasick while digging for a body.

Mark still hadn't gotten back from his office, and I was starting to get worried about losing the bullet, especially now that bits of soil had started to crumble away from the bank, so my gallant rescue crew improvised a solution. Two men held a wooden backboard up against the bank, allowing me to examine the loose fragments of earth before they fell into the river and were gone forever. I didn't mind the dirt, but I was taking no chances on losing our bullet.

My patience was starting to wear thin, though. “Where is Dr. Schweitzer?” I asked at about two in the afternoon, and as if on cue Mark came running over the hill waving a large brown envelope.

“I've got the x-rays!” he called down to us. “I can see the bullet in his skull!” This was certainly a welcome bit of news, though I had to laugh at how my earlier envy had melted into relief. It was good to know that when push came to shove, I really was more interested in getting the results than in taking the credit.

When Mark made his careful way down to the ledge, I pointed to the large tree root I had just unearthed. “Look, Mark. This actually grew right into his pants. It got inside his pants leg through a small hole near the hip, then grew parallel to his thigh bone for years.”

Mark looked more closely at the root, which was several inches in diameter. “How long do you think he's been there?” he asked in an awed whisper.

I shook my head. The bones felt old to me, and the associated evidence-the cloth and objects unearthed along with the bones-had clearly been in the ground for quite a while. In my own mind, I was saying, Ten years? Twenty? But until I could get everything to the lab, I was taking no chances on committing to the wrong answer, even to myself. This case had already thrown us more than its share of curveballs, and I wanted to keep an open mind.

Lambers and I had agreed that he'd maintain the evidence overnight, bringing it to my lab first thing the next morning. Like a nervous hostess, I scurried around the lab, hurrying to clear away the skeletal remains and paperwork from the case I'd been working on the week before. I'd just doused the counters with disinfectant and loaded my favorite Patsy Cline CD into the stereo when Lambers arrived, looking very much like an overburdened shopper as he clutched several big brown bags tightly to his chest, the inventory list tucked under his chin.

“Come on, Doc,” he said without moving his jaw, as I rushed to take his burdens from him. “Where should we get started?”

I smiled at his enthusiasm and couldn't help thinking that he, at least, seemed no worse for wear after yesterday's efforts. I wasn't about to tell him that I was stiff and sore.