He pointed again, adding, “We’re assuming the body there on the left is Cheney.”
Yellow crime scene tape glistened wetly against the dark bark of trees. Twigs snapped beneath the feet of men moving about, their voices blending into an indistinguishable babble beneath the relentless, dreary rain. Opening my medical bag, I got out a pair of surgical gloves and my camera.
For a while I did not move as I surveyed the shrunken, almost fleshless bodies before me. Determining the sex and race of skeletal remains cannot always be done at a glance. I would not swear to anything until I could look at the pelvis, which were obscured by what appeared to be dark blue or black denim jeans. But based on the characteristics of the body to my right – small bones, small skull with small mastoids, non-prominent brow ridge, and strands of long blondish hair dinging to rotted fabric – 1 had no reason to think anything other than white female. The size of her companion, the robustness of the bones, prominent brow ridge, large skull, and flat face were good for white male.
As for what might have happened to the couple, 1 could not tell. There were no ligatures indicating strangulation. I saw no obvious fractures or holes that might have meant blows or bullets. Male and female were quietly together in death, the bones of her left arm slipped under his right as if she had been holding on to him in the end, empty eye sockets gaping as rain rolled over their skulls.
It wasn’t until I moved in close and got down on my knees that I noticed a margin of dark soil, so narrow it was barely perceptible, on either side of the bodies. If they had died Labor Day weekend, autumn leaves would not have fallen yet. The ground beneath them would be relatively bare. I did not like what was going through my mind. It was bad enough that the police had been tramping around out here for hours. Dammit. To move or disturb a body in any way before the medical examiner arrives is a cardinal sin, and every officer out here knew that.
“Dr. Scarpetta?”
Morrell was towering over me, his breath smoking. “Was just talking to Phillips over there.”
He glanced in the direction of several officers searching thick underbrush about twenty feet east of us. “He found a watch and an earring, some change, all right about here where the bodies are. The interesting thing is, the metal detector kept going off. He had it right over the bodies and it was beeping. Could be from a zipper or something. Maybe a metal snap or button on their jeans. Thought you should know.”
I looked up into his thin, serious face. He was shivering beneath his parka.
“Tell me what you did with the bodies in addition to running the metal detector over them, Morrell. I can see they’ve been moved. I need to know if this is the exact position they were in when they were discovered this morning.”
“I don’t know about when the hunters found them, though they claim they didn’t get very close,” he said, eyes probing the woods. “But yes, ma’am, this is the way they looked when we got here. All we did was check for personal effects, went into their pockets and her purse.”
“I assume you took photographs before you moved anything,” I said evenly.
“We started taking pictures as soon as we arrived.”
Getting out a small flashlight, I began the hopeless task of looking for trace evidence. After bodies have been exposed to the elements for so many months, the chance of finding significant hairs, fibers, or other debris was slim to none. Morrell watched in silence, uneasily shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“Have you found out anything else from your investigation that might be of assistance, assuming this is Deborah Harvey and Fred Cheney?”
I asked, for I had not seen Morrell or talked to him since the day Deborah’s Jeep had been found.
“Nothing but a possible drug connection,” he said. “We’ve been told Cheney’s roommate at Carolina was into cocaine. Maybe Cheney fooled around with cocaine too. That’s one of the things we’re considering, if maybe he and the Harvey girl met up with someone who was selling drugs and came out here.”