I squatted close and opened my medical bag. With forceps, I collected maggots into a jar for the entomologist to examine later, and decided upon closer inspection that the victim was, in fact, a woman. She had been decapitated low on the cervical spine, arms and legs severed. Stumps were dry and dark with age, and I knew right away that there was a difference between this case and the others.
This woman had been dismembered by cutting straight through the strong bones of the humerus and femur, versus the joints. Getting out a scalpel, I could feel the men staring as I made a half-inch incision on the torso’s right side, and inserted a long chemical thermometer. I rested a second thermometer on top of my bag.
‘What are you doing?’ asked a man in a plaid shirt and baseball cap, who looked like he might get sick.
‘I need the body’s temperature to help determine time of death. A core liver temperature is the most accurate,’ I patiently explained. ‘And I also need to know the temperature out here.’
‘Hot, that’s what it is,’ said another man. ‘So, it’s a woman, I guess.’
‘It’s too soon to say,’ I replied. ‘Is this your packer?’
‘Yeah.’
He was young, with dark eyes and very white teeth, and tattoos on his fingers that I usually associated with people who have been in prison. A sweaty bandanna was tied around his head and knotted in back, and he could not look at the torso long without averting his gaze.
‘In the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he added, shaking his head with hostility.
‘What do you mean?’ Grigg had his eye on him.
‘Wasn’t from me. I know that,’ the driver said as if it were the most important point he would ever make in his life. ‘The Cat dug it up while it was spreading my load.’
‘Then we don’t know when it was dumped here?’ I scanned faces around me.
It was Pleasants who replied, ‘Twenty-three trucks unloaded in this spot since ten A.M., not counting this one.’ He looked at the packer.
‘Why ten A.M.?’ I asked, for it seemed like a rather arbitrary time to start counting trucks.
‘Because that’s when we put down the last cover of tire chips. So there’s no way it could have been dumped before then,’ Pleasants explained, staring at_ the body. ‘And in my opinion, it couldn’t have been out long, anyway. It doesn’t exactly look the way you’d expect if it’s been run over by a fifty-ton compactor with chopper wheels; trucks or even this loader.’
He stared off at other sites where compacted trash was being gouged off trucks as huge tractors crushed and spread. The driver of the packer was getting increasingly agitated and angry.
‘We got big machines all over the place up here,’ Pleasants added. ‘And they pretty much never stop.’
I looked at the packer, and the bright yellow loader with its empty cab. A tatter of black trash bag fluttered from the raised bucket.
‘Where’s the driver of the loader?’ I asked.
Pleasants hesitated before answering, ‘Well, I guess that would be me. We had somebody out sick. I was asked to work on the hill.’
Grigg moved closer to the loader, looking up at what was left of the trash bag as it moved in the hot, barren air.
‘Tell me what you saw,’ I said to Pleasants.
‘Not much. I was unloading him.’ He nodded at the driver. ‘And my bucket caught the garbage bag, the one you see there. It tore and the body fell out to where it is now.’ He paused, wiping his face on his sleeve and swatting at flies.
‘But you don’t know for sure where this came from,’ I tried again, while Grigg listened, even though he probably had already taken their statements.
‘I could’ve dug it up,’ Pleasants conceded. ‘I’m not saying it’s impossible. I just don’t think I did.’
‘That’s ’cause you don’t want to think it.’ The driver glared at him.
‘I know what I think.’ Pleasants didn’t flinch. ‘The bucket grabbed it off your packer when I was unloading it.’
‘Man, you don’t know it came from me,’ the driver snapped at him.