“Like what? What could have made that mark?”
“I really don’t know. We’ll know a lot more in a few minutes. But the discoloration that caused the strange mark on the little girl’s buttock is from something oxidizing as she lay on top of it. That’s what I think.”
“I hope the press isn’t here,” said Katz.
“I have a real hard time with that. Especially this time of year.”
“Because of Halloween,” I said.
“You can imagine. I’ve had them hung up in the razor wire before and end up in the hospital. Last time it was law school students.” We pulled into a parking lot that in warm months could be quite unpleasant for hospital employees assigned there. A tall unpainted wooden fence topped with coiled razor wire began where pavement ended, and beyond was The Farm.
A trace of a foul odor seemed to darken the sun as we got out, and no matter how often I had smelled that smell, I never really got used to it. I had learned to block it without ignoring it, and I never diminished it with cigars, perfume, or Vicks. Odors were as much a part of the language of the dead as scars and tattoos were.
“How many residents today?” I asked as Dr. Shade dialed the combination of a large padlock securing the gate.
“Forty-four,” he said.
“They’ve all been here for a while, except for yours,” Katz added.
“We’ve had the two of them exactly six days.”
I followed the men inside their bizarre but necessary kingdom. The smell was not too bad because the air was refrigerator cold and most of the clients had been here long enough to have gone through their worst stages. Even so, the sights were abnormal enough that they always gave me pause. I saw a parked body sled, a gurney, and piles of red clay, and there were plastic-lined pits where bodies tethered to cinder blocks were submerged in water. Old rusting cars held foul surprises in their trunks or behind the wheel. A white Cadillac, for example, was being driven by a man’s bare bones.
Of course, there were plenty of people on the ground, and they blended so well with their surroundings that I might have missed some of them were it not for a gold tooth glinting or mandibles gaping. Bones looked like sticks and stones, and words would never hurt anyone here again except for amputated limbs, whose donors, I hoped, were still among the living.
A skull grinned at me from beneath a mulberry tree, and the bullet hole between its orbits looked like a third eye. I saw a perfect case of pink teeth (probably caused by hemolysis, and still argued about at almost every forensic meeting). Walnuts were all around, but I would not have eaten one of them because death saturated the soil and body fluids streaked the hills. Death was in the water and the wind, and rose to the clouds. It rained death on the Farm, and the insects and animals were fed up with it. They did not always finish what they started, because the supply was too vast.
What Katz and Dr. Shade had done for me was to create two scenes. One was to simulate a body in a basement by monitoring the postmortem changes that take place in dark, refrigerated conditions. The other was to place a body outside in similar conditions for the same length of time.
The basement scene had been staged in the only building on the Farm, which was nothing more than a cinder-block shed. Our helper, the husband with cancer, had been placed on a cement slab inside, and a plyboard box had been built around him to protect him from predators and changes in the weather. Photographs had been taken daily, and Dr. Shade was showing them to me now. The first few days revealed virtually no change to the body. Then I began to note that the eyes and fingers were drying.
“Are you ready to do this?” Dr. Shade asked.
I returned the photographs to their envelope. “Let’s take a look.”
They lifted off the crate, and I squatted near the body to study it carefully. The husband was a small, thin man who had died with white stubble on his chin and a perfect Popeye tattoo of an anchor on an arm. After six days in his plyboard crypt, his eyes were sunken, his skin doughy, and there was discoloration of his left lower quadrant.