Five or six minutes in, we reached a small clearing. At its center was a bearded giant in Australian bush gear standing over a dead gator. Together, we crossed to him.
The gator wasn’t huge, but it was big enough, maybe eight feet from snout to tail tip. Its mouth was half open. The reptile’s teeth grasped what appeared to be a portion of human pelvis encased in flesh that had rotted to the color and consistency of congealed oatmeal. The only indication the flesh had once been human was an obvious, if mottled and dented, belly button.
Yellen addressed the giant. “Howdy, Jordan.”
Jordan nodded. Looked each of us over. Then said, “Didn’t touch nothin’ once I brought her down and saw what she had.”
“You did right calling us.” Yellen didn’t move closer. “This lady’s a doctor specializes in bones.”
“Tempe Brennan.” I stepped forward and held out a hand.
Jordan wiped a giant paw on his khakis and thrust it toward me. “My name’s Dusty Jordan.” My hand disappeared in a leathery grip.
“What happened here?” I asked.
Jordan looked at me like I’d asked the meaning of “soup.” “I was huntin’ python. Saw this gal dragging somethin’ didn’t look right.”
“She’s quite dead?”
“She won’t hurt you,” he answered, obviously missing my Monty Python reference.
I squatted and leaned close to the gator. A full minute passed with only the buzz of flies and the whine of mosquitoes.
When Yellen could take it no longer, he burst out, “Is it the same vic?”
“The pelvic features I’m able to see are consistent with what I observed on the foot,” I said. But something else troubled me. “Would an alligator eat something that’s already dead?”
“Yep.” Jordan answered quickly, to Lundberg’s annoyance.
“It’s true.” Lundberg felt the need to assert scientific superiority. “And alligators will drag prey around for a long time, days even. To protect the food from other gators. And to help break it up.”
Yellen sighed. “Mother Mary in a handcart. We’re going to need CSI. Could be body parts all over this hammock.” He walked off to make the call.
I shifted to view the pelvis from another angle. “I’d field-estimate PMI at roughly nine days. That tracks with the remains recovered from the vulture.” Python. Whatever.
A snuffle from the gator made me spring back and land on my ass.
“You said it was dead.” More shrill than I’d intended.
Jordan gave me another look that said he questioned my basic intelligence. “I said she wouldn’t hurt you. Can’t kill a gator without the Hunting and Game folks classifying it as a nuisance. And this ole gal’s just out here working her turf.”
I scooted back slowly and carefully.
“Relax. She’s tranqed.” Jordan bounced a conspiratorial glance off Pierce. Women. “Dive right on in. She won’t wake for hours.”
“You’re telling me to reach into a live gator’s mouth?” I wasn’t believing this guy.
“Duh-uh.”
Lundberg addressed Jordan. “Anesthesia is an imprecise science. One must know weight to calculate proper dosage.”
Jordan regarded the biologist with an insolent stare. “If I say the dude’s out, she’s out.”
No one moved.
“Man.” Jordan dug into a ratty canvas pack and withdrew a Coke-can-size capsule. “Ketamine-midazolam. Eight thousand milligrams.”
Lundberg nodded slowly. “That should do it.”
“Should?” I looked from Jordan to Lundberg. “Should as in lost digits and phantom limbs?”
Wordlessly, Jordan pulled on heavy leather gloves, reached down, and pried open the gator’s mouth. The pelvis rose with the upper jaw. Unperturbed, Jordan stuck a finger between the tooth row and the human flesh, and shoved downward. The pelvis dropped to the ground with a soft thunk.
All eyes swung to me. The gator lay motionless, mouth held agape.
My gaze roved the pelvis. Like the foot, it was on the small end of the range for human adults. And I could see the disturbing feature more clearly now. The unsubtle gouging and splintering left by the action of a chain saw.
“Get me the scene bag,” I barked, emotions churning inside me.
Lundberg jumped to respond. I withdrew gloves and a body bag, pulled on the former, then unrolled and unzipped the latter. Ready, I edged closer to the gator.
I was right. The body part was a segment of lower torso, including a partial pelvis and portions of soft tissue from the waist and upper groin region. Dotted lines of puncture wounding crisscrossed the decomposing flesh. Bite marks left by reptilian teeth.
Moving cautiously, I slid my hands under the torso and transferred the whole to the body bag. When finished, I checked the gator’s mouth and dentition. A glance up to make sure Jordan had a firm grip on the jaws, then I carefully collected stray tissue and bone fragments that had detached from the main hunk. Extracting evidence from between razor-sharp teeth was like the extreme sports version of the game Operation.
I was about to call it quits when a glint caught my eye, there, then gone.
“Can you spread the jaws wider?” I couldn’t believe what I was asking. What I was about to do.
Jordan widened his stance, flexed the gator’s neck backward, and did as I’d requested. Remarkably, the beast offered no resistance.
Sunlight flashed again.
Inhaling deeply, I took a small surgical forceps from the bag, reached my arm in, elbow deep, and peered at the back of the dental arcade.
The thing was silver and wedged between two maxillaries. As I wiggled it free, the gator whipped her tail left, then right. I froze, but Jordan held the animal’s head immobile with a hammerlock.
Yanking my arm free, I scrambled backward and, in a childish display of victory, held my prize aloft. Then I lowered and studied the object in my forceps.
It was a silver dolphin charm affixed to a loop via a short filigree chain. A chunk of decaying flesh clung to the dolphin’s upraised tail.
Belly ring. A distinctive one.
My moment of triumph faded when I glanced up.
My four companions were staring at me with matching expressions of horror.
Chapter Four
Kiley James was a short, athletic python wrangler. Former marathoner. Liked by all. At least, all but one.
It wasn’t a formal ID, but my companions had no doubt that I’d recovered her belly ring. The gloom was palpable.
Solemnly, we reboarded the airboat and headed east. This was no case for the natural resources center. Yellen had gotten permission to collect and transport the torso, and me, and we were going straight to the Miami–Dade County morgue.
The boat pulled to shore somewhere along Highway 997. We sat on a weathered dock and waited for the medical examiner van, which was en route.
“She was one of the best.” For a change, Lundberg sounded subdued.
“You can’t be certain of identity from a piece of jewelry.” I wasn’t trying to raise hopes. Just being precise.
“The kid liked belly shirts.” Yellen was terse.
I swatted a mosquito. Not to think ill of the dead, but the idea of exposing unnecessary skin in this habitat seemed lunacy. Then I berated myself. Facts before conclusions. Stop assuming the victim is James.
Our group had diminished, Yellen having directed his deputy to Jordan’s airboat to ensure its owner found his way to the Hammocks district station. Jordan had protested vehemently, to no avail. Yellen didn’t say it, but the man was now a suspect. Turned out Jordan knew James. And he’d “found” her body way out in the middle of nowhere. Yellen would be negligent not to bring him in.
And I’d be negligent to rely on personal effects to establish a positive ID. Many others probably owned the same belly ring. Or the ring could be unconnected to the body. Or James might have lost hers, sold it, or given it away.
And the thing just happened to end up in a
gator’s mouth with a mangled hunk of torso?
Small. Active. Woman. My own words whispered across my brain. Kiley James fit the profile in every respect.
“Has anyone talked to James recently?” I asked.
Lundberg shook his head no. “Kiley would camp in the glades for the duration of the contest. She was just like the pythons she hunted—you only saw her if she wanted to be seen.”
“She’d be required to deliver her bounty, wouldn’t she?” I persisted.
When the biologist nodded, mid-afternoon sun flashed off his lenses. “Any capture must be dropped off within twenty-four hours at one of several stations, along with a completed data sheet and GPS coordinates for the harvesting location.”
“Maybe her GPS notes will help pinpoint her last field location.”
Yellen shot me a scathing look. “This ain’t my first rodeo, doc lady.”
“Wouldn’t mean diddly. The kid covered a lot of ground.”
I jumped when Pierce spoke because he did it so rarely. I’d forgotten he was slumped against a piling behind me.
“Most snakes are brought in alive, but Kiley didn’t mess around.” Lundberg sounded totally miserable. “She’d euthanize in the field then move on. I’ve never seen anyone else deliver three kills in twenty-four hours.”
“Mating season.” Pierce crossed his outstretched legs, dropped his chin onto his chest, and, I assumed, lowered his lids. Couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark Maui Jims.
“When did she last check in?” I persisted. The investigation was not my turf. But I’m impatient by nature and the wait was making me churlish.
“You’d have to check with FWC, the state fish and wildlife commission,” Lundberg offered. “The contest is their show. But it couldn’t have been that long ago. She’d have had bounty to register. She was leading the pack. By a good margin.”
My guess was nine days.
“Who’d want to kill her?” I switched tack.
Yellen gave a humorless snort. “Only about fifteen hundred people.”
“Tell me about her.”
Yellen turned his aviator shades full on me. I held his stare. On the road above us, a pickup rattled by, belching black exhaust.
Finally, the lawman sighed. “For a little lady, James packed quite a punch. She was determined to win the whole damn shooting match.”
“How much cash is involved?”
“With private sponsors sweetening this year’s pot, the prize tops out at thirty thousand dollars.”
“That’s a lot of money.” And a lot of motive.
“You bet your sweet ass it is.” Yellen’s thoughts were obviously traveling the same path as mine.
“With that many hunters out in the swamp, wouldn’t people be falling all over each other? Someone must have seen her.”
“Well, hell. Wish I’da thought of that.” Yellen’s sarcasm did nothing to calm my nerves. “You sayin’ I should have my boys canvas the entire gun-and-machete redneck family reunion?”
Lundberg interpreted. “As an FWC python permit holder, Kiley could harvest snakes in several state-managed areas. Her FWC permits were as broad as one can possibly obtain. She was also on the Nature Conservancy’s Python Patrol, and was one of the volunteer agents participating in the Everglades National Park’s python program. The latter permit holders are authorized to use our roads and trails to look for snakes.”
“So she could hunt anywhere.”
“No. Harvesting for the FWC challenge isn’t allowed in the national park.” Apparently Pierce had been awake and taking in every word. “She could only collect in the park for us.”
“And we don’t call it ‘hunting’ in the park.” Lundberg hooked air quotes. “Funding restrictions disallow use of the term.”
Before I could respond, an ME van, a cruiser, and a Miami-Dade crime scene truck pulled to the shoulder above us. After a short briefing, the two CSS techs boarded the airboat for the trip to the hammock. Pierce and Lundberg joined those going to the Hammocks district station in the cruiser. Yellen and I secured the torso in the back of the van in a small plastic tub and climbed in.
The ride passed in silence. Despite our grim mission, I was looking forward to a visit to Miami’s famed ME facility. I’d been there on previous occasions and knew it to be the Taj Mahal of morgues—23,000 square feet of shiny and modern, including a grand total of fifteen autopsy stations. When we arrived, I was the first out of the van.
A lab-coated death investigator named Elvis helped us log the remains in to the computer, then led us to a separate “decomp” building behind the main morgue. We were assigned one of the two autopsy rooms, down the hall from a cooler large enough to accommodate seventy-five bodies.
I knew the fridge storage size because Elvis was a frustrated tour guide at heart. By the time we’d gathered around the autopsy table, I also knew that, along with the four main coolers, the facility could store as many as 555 bodies. Why 555? Exactly the capacity of a 747 jumbo jet.
You’ve got to love Florida’s sense of mortality. And the state’s willingness to pony up funding for a state-of-the-art death investigation system.
Elvis even found a lab coat in my size.
I’d barely slipped it on when a staff pathologist stepped into the room. Jane Barconi. We’d met, but I’d never worked with her.
Splatter on Barconi’s lab coat and apron suggested she’d been interrupted while cutting and slicing and weighing. The look on her face said she was not happy about it.
While Elvis took the torso off for X-ray, I told Barconi the little I knew. The hammock. The gator. The belly ring. The possible ID. The directive from her boss, the chief medical examiner, that the remains come to the epicenter of the morgue bureau.
Barconi listened without comment, then, when Elvis returned, she peered at the contents of the tub. Her tight expression tightened even further. Relaxed slightly when I assured her I could work unassisted.
After gloving and masking, I transferred the remains to the autopsy table.
Yellen stood in a corner, expression impassive, thumbs hooked in his pockets. Impressive. Many cops can’t stomach the autopsy room. Especially if the vic is a decomp.
So I began.
Using a scalpel, I gently teased tissue from the exposed innominate, one of three bones that compose the pelvic girdle, and the only one present. It was soon evident that the iliac crest, a crescent-shaped sliver of bone topping the hip blade portion, was not fully fused. I made a note and moved on.
As I worked, I’d periodically glance at Yellen. He didn’t pester me with questions. Just observed, silent but attentive. I was actually starting to like the guy.
At some point Elvis returned again. I heard the sound of X-rays popping onto wall-mounted illuminators but didn’t stop to look.
Thirty minutes of careful cutting and tugging revealed the pubic symphysis, the point at which the right half of the pelvis joins with left front and center in the lower abdomen. I found a magnifying lens and leaned close.
The small oval face had deep furrows running horizontally across its surface. This, along with the condition of the oval’s border, confirmed the age estimate I’d jotted down based on the iliac crest.
The shape of the oval, along with that of the pubic element and the portion of sciatic notch that remained intact, confirmed my preliminary statement with regard to gender.
I sat back and lowered my mask. Rolled my shoulders to loosen tight muscles. Then turned to Yellen.
“The victim is female, aged eighteen to twenty-four. Small stature. Probably in good health at the time of her death.” Before being dismembered and scavenged by a gator.
“Nothin’ that says it couldn’t be James.”
“Agreed. But nothing that says conclusively it is.”
“So what are you saying?”
“The remains are consistent with the biological profile of Kiley James.”
“And the foot?”
“Features I observed on the
torso are consistent with those I observed on the foot. For a positive ID, both sets of remains should be submitted for DNA sequencing.”
While Yellen scribbled in a small notebook, I walked to the light boxes and worked my way down the X-rays Elvis had taken. Saw the partial pelvis glowing white inside the gray mass of tissue. Some lumbar vertebrae. The bottommost ribs.
At the last in the series, I stopped in my tracks. Using a finger, I counted, not touching the film.
“Hmm.”
Yellen’s head snapped up. “What?”
“Most people have twenty-four ribs. The first seven pairs are called true ribs because they attach to the sternum via cartilage. The next three are known as false ribs because they share a common cartilaginous connection to the sternum. The eleventh and twelfth pairs are called floating ribs because they don’t attach to anything in front.”
I glanced at Yellen to see if he was following. He was.
“Some individuals lack a pair of floating ribs, others have a couple extra. It’s an uncommon anomaly, but not rare.”
“Does missing a set cause problems?”
“No. Twenty-two ribs are sufficient to protect the organs. The condition is a harmless variation. Nothing you’d notice in a person walking around.”
He waited.
“This victim is lacking a pair of floating ribs,” I said. “If Kiley James has antemortem X-rays on file somewhere, they could help to confirm identity.”
“I’m gettin’ medical records. Anything else?”
I snapped off my gloves. “Unfortunately I can’t give you cause or manner of death based on what was recovered. But I can state with certainty that this victim was dismembered with a chain saw.”
A beat passed. I remembered Yellen had known this woman, and liked her.
“Ante or post?” was his reply.
“Post.” Small comfort.
“Around here, chain saw doesn’t narrow the suspect pool much.”
“If you can locate the saw, I might be able to match the blade to damage on the bone,” I said. “Or, better than that, recover tissue or blood from its teeth.”