Tess Gerritsen - Last to Die

“Good old Bear,” she murmured, and opened her eyes to look at him. “What did you bring back for me?”

The dog had something in his mouth, something he did not seem willing to surrender. Only when she gave a tug on it did he finally let it drop. It was a leather glove, black. Where in these woods had Bear found a glove? It smelled bad, and it glistened with the dog’s saliva.

Grimacing, she picked it up and felt a heaviness to it. Peeking inside, she saw something white gleaming within. She turned the glove upside down, gave it a hard shake. What came tumbling out made her scream and scramble backward, away from the object that lay stinking on the boulder.

A hand.

“IT’S ALWAYS THE DOGS that find them,” said Dr. Emma Owen.

Maura and the Maine medical examiner stood in the dappled shade of the woods, insects buzzing around their faces, the air thick with the stench of cadaver. Maura thought of other bodies she’d examined over the years, also unearthed by dogs, whose noses are always on the alert for such ripe treasures. Although these remains were hundreds of yards up the slope, Bear had caught the scent and tracked it to this thicket, where dense underbrush partially concealed the body. The man, who appeared to be well muscled and fit, was dressed in camouflage cargo pants, a dark green windbreaker, a T-shirt, and hiking boots. A serrated knife was still strapped to his ankle, and a rifle with a telescopic sight was perched on a nearby boulder. He lay on his left side, exposing his right face and neck to the elements. Scavengers had been at work, greedily stripping away the scalp and face, gnawing at nasal cartilage, and digging into the right orbit, which now gaped empty, the socket scooped clean. Canids, thought Maura, noting the teeth marks on the remaining skin, the punctures in the thin orbital bone. Coyotes most likely. Or, in this remote area, perhaps wolves. Even in this tangle of vines, the cause of death was easy to spot: an aluminum arrow, its tip embedded deep in the left eye, its tail feathers dyed a deep green.

Under other circumstances, Maura might have assumed this was just an unlucky hunter, brought down in the woods by another hunter’s carelessness. But this man had been trespassing on Evensong property, and from the boulder where his rifle was positioned, he would have had a commanding view of the valley and the school below. He could have observed who arrived on the property, and who departed.

Inured as she was to foul smells, Maura had to turn away as the body was rolled onto a plastic sheet, stirring up a stench so foul that Maura gagged and lifted her arm over her nose. Dr. Owen’s staff was fully garbed and masked but Maura, standing here as a mere observer, had settled for gloves and shoe covers, the big-city ME trying to prove she was too seasoned to let a rotting corpse defeat her.

Dr. Owen crouched down over the body. “There’s barely persistent rigor mortis here,” she said, testing the limbs for range of motion.

“It was fifty-one degrees last night,” one of the state police detectives said. “Balmy.”

The medical examiner lifted the edge of the victim’s T-shirt to expose the abdomen. The changes from autolysis were obvious even from where Maura stood. Death sets off a cascade of changes in soft tissues as leaking enzymes digest proteins and disintegrate membranes. Blood cells break apart and leak through vessel walls, and in that soup of nutrients, bacteria feast, filling the abdomen with gases. Braving the stench, Maura crouched down beside Dr. Owen. She saw blue veins marbling the bloated belly and knew that if they rolled down the pants, they would find the scrotum swollen with those same gases.

“Forty-eight to seventy-two hours,” said Dr. Owen. “You agree?”

Maura nodded. “Based on the relatively minor amount of damage by scavengers, I’d favor the lower end of that postmortem interval. The attacks are confined to the head and neck and …” Maura paused, glancing at the bony stump poking from the jacket sleeve. “… the hand. The wrist must have been exposed. That’s how they got at it.” She wondered if Bear had sampled a taste before bringing his putrid prize to Claire. A friendly lick won’t be so welcome after this .

Dr. Owen patted the victim’s jacket and cargo pants. “There’s something here,” she said, and withdrew a thin billfold from the cargo pocket. “And we have ID. Virginia driver’s license. Russell Remsen, six foot one, a hundred ninety pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes, thirty-seven years old.” She eyed the cadaver. “Could be. Let’s hope he has dental X-rays on file.”

Maura stared at the victim’s face, half of it gnawed away, the other half swollen and streaked with purge fluid. A postmortem bulla had ballooned the intact eyelid into a bulging sac. On the right side, scavengers had stripped the neck of skin and muscle; the damage extended all the way down to the neckline of his clothing, where sharp teeth had already punctured and frayed the fabric, trying to tear into the thoracic outlet. Evisceration would have been next, heart and lungs, liver and spleen dragged out and feasted on. Limbs would be ripped from joints, portable prizes to be carried off to dens and pups. The forest would do its part as well, vines twisting around ribs, insects delving, devouring. In a year, she thought, Russell Remsen would be little more than bone fragments, scattered among the trees.

“This guy wasn’t carrying your usual hunting rifle,” the state police detective said, examining the weapon perched on the boulder. With gloved hands, he brought it over to show Dr. Owen, turning it to reveal the manufacturer’s stamp on the lower receiver.

“What kind of rifle is that?” asked Maura.

“An M one ten. Knight’s Armament, semiautomatic with a bipod.” He looked at her, clearly impressed. “This one’s got excellent optics, twenty-round box magazine. Fires a three oh eight or a seven six two, NATO. Effective range of eight hundred meters.”

“Holy cow,” said Dr. Owen. “You could shoot a deer in the next county.”

“Wasn’t designed for hunting deer. It’s military issue. A very nice and very expensive sniper rifle.”

Maura frowned at the dead man. At the camouflage pants. “What was he doing up here with a sniper rifle?”

“Well, a deer hunter might use one of these. It’s a pretty handy weapon if you want to drop a deer at long range. But it’s kind of like using a Rolls-Royce to make a run to the grocery store.” He shook his head. “I guess this is what you’d call irony. Here he was, equipped with top-of-the-line gear, and he’s taken down by something as primitive as an arrow.” He glanced at Dr. Owen. “I take it that’s going to be the cause of death?”

“I know cause of death seems obvious, Ken, but let’s wait until the autopsy.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

Dr. Owen turned to Maura. “You’re welcome to join me in the morgue tomorrow.”

Maura thought of slicing into that belly, ripe with decay and foul gases. “I think I’ll pass on this autopsy,” she said and stood up. “I’m supposed to be on a holiday from Death. But He keeps finding me.”

Dr. Owen rose to her feet as well, and her thoughtful gaze made Maura uncomfortable. “What’s going on here, Dr. Isles?”

“I wish I knew.”

“First a suicide. Now this. And I can’t even tell you what this is. Accident? Homicide?”

Maura focused on the arrow protruding from the dead man’s eye. “This would take an expert marksman.”

“Not really,” said the state detective. “The bull’s-eye on an archery target is smaller than an eye socket. A decent archer could hit that from a hundred, two hundred feet, especially with a crossbow.” He paused. “Assuming he meant to hit this target.”