chapter 20
Decca, Lammas/The Transfiguration
“There’s something over here,” I called back to Chris, my longtime friend and colleague.
This morning, we’d both been called out to this DMORT op in Memphis.
Why was it always fucking Memphis?
“Can you pass me a few more flags? I’m in a bad spot and don’t want to move my feet.”
“Here’s four. That’s the last of this box. That enough, or do you think you’ll need more?” Chris stood slowly from his crouched position, and wiped the sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his PPE gown. I stared at a swath of blood he’d painted on his forehead.
“What?” he asked.
“You’ve got a little…” I gestured to the smear, and he wiped again, looking at the blood on his gloved fingers when he pulled his hand away.
“Shit. Well, I’ll be back once I get this disinfected. You almost done here, or do we need another box of markers?”
I swiveled my head as much as possible without moving my feet. The less I moved, the less I’d kick over. Blood and bits of tissue were camouflaged against the leaves and brush of the surrounding woods. Everywhere I focused, a body part emerged like an image in a Magic Eye painting. An ear here, a piece of bone there, a full leg still wearing its pants. Where was the other leg?
Stupid question. It could be anywhere. If anything was true about the nature of explosions, it was that there was no rhyme or reason why the parts fell where they fell.
“I think we’re gonna need a bigger box,” I told Chris.
Despite the heat and the decedent’s blood on his face, my favorite partner-in-crime-solving still looked as cool and composed as ever.
I was sweltering in this plastic-lined gown under the hot West Tennessee sun. Smoke and the smell of accelerant lingered in the air, even hours after we’d been airlifted into the middle of nowhere.
Explosion. Seven presumed bodies.
Meth lab, probably, but that part didn’t concern me.
My only job, as a member of this team, was to assist local law enforcement and pathologists any way possible. Right now, that meant I was just another set of hands without a brain, labeling the pieces for photography. Later (hopefully on the sooner end of later) I’d be picking up the pieces I labeled, before they started to rot too badly. Then we could begin classifying them into the proper bags on board the refrigerated truck, and finally, we’d set up radiography and other equipment to start assembling biographic profiles on the decedents.
Chris carefully made his way back to me, carrying a cardboard box with colorful evidence flags on wires, avoiding the blood and grease slicks on the leafy forest floor.
“I’m going to take a look over this way. Let me know if you get stuck in another nasty patch and I’ll come help.”
“Find any teeth yet?” I asked.
“Partial mandible with no intact molars or incisors. But in our case, the lack of teeth might be just as helpful. A couple others. I’ve already contacted the West Tennessee State Pen and Whiteville to give them a heads up I might be pulling records, but the agents seem pretty sure they know who was in the trailer. I might get to go home early if they don’t need me.”
Chris’s primary job on these operations was to identify victims. As a forensic odontologist with the University of Tennessee, he did the same thing I did, only he got paid a lot more, and trafficked exclusively in teeth. He also taught general dentistry and some specialty classes at the FAC, and as a side gig, he maintained a thriving dental practice. The man was as busy as me. I suspected it was why we got along so well.
“Lucky for you.” I groaned in complaint, but I did it more because it seemed like something I was supposed to do, rather than because I hated being here.
I didn’t hate being here.
Sure, I hated the loss of life. Senseless death always brought a sense of emptiness along with it. But over the years, I’d grown accustomed to seeing bits of rotten flesh strewn about. This portrait was no more gruesome than anything I’d studied at the Body Farm, or anything I did all day in my career.
This was my normal.
Often, when remains were found with decomposing tissues intact, the rotting flesh was useless. It was impossible to distinguish between perimortem injuries that may have contributed to or caused death and normal postmortem decomp. In those cases, we’d have to clean the bones.
It was the bones that got me excited.
In my lab, I used various methodologies to cut, scrape, or macerate the soft tissue away from bone. I had human sized tanks and steel vats where I could boil remains in water, soak them in ammonia, or sometimes bleach. Occasionally, I worked with an entomologist who let his pack of dermestid beetles feast on the remains. That was always fun. And surprisingly fast.
Normies didn’t realize this, but once the flesh was removed, a new world opened up. Bones revealed all sorts of marks that could identify a victim or help us discover cause of death.
Flesh rots. Bones remain.
And some bones have a story to tell.
I was uniquely capable of jobs like this.
Working with the dead was as difficult as you might expect. It took a certain kind of person to do it. For some, it was a family thing. Something they were born to do, like with Gus’s family and their funeral home. George had always known he’d be a funeral director, and although he occasionally regretted it for the long hours and difficult clients, I didn’t think he’d ever sincerely wished to do anything different with his life. Other people, like my best friend Bethany, fell into it, and just knew that was her calling.
I went into deathcare because of Granny. Granny had been a midwife when she was young. And she came from a long line of midwives, too. This was back in Culver’s Hollow, when my mama was still a girl. And before that, even.
Granny said she’d been attending births since before she was old enough to know how those babies got put up inside those women, but no one questioned her young presence in the birthing rooms, so long as she unbraided her hair and loosened any ties on her dresses or laces on her shoes before she entered, as was the custom in the area.
But I grew up a long way from Culver’s Hollow, and a long time from it, too. Appalachia in the 1960s wasn’t much different from Appalachia in the 1860s, but Nashville in the 1990s didn’t have the same cultural paradigms, even if they still ran strong in my family. I couldn’t simply train as a midwife at my granny’s knee, just like loosened apron strings couldn’t “unknot” a laboring woman’s body.
And, at some point, I noticed that people around me had a tendency to die.
My parents had already done it. Daddy died in a drunk driving accident when Mama was pregnant with me, and Mama died of an overdose when I was seven.
When I was in kindergarten, my teacher died of cancer. I didn’t know it until third grade, though, when some kid in my class was going on about someone’s cousin being married to Mrs. Green, who had taught my class, and “didn’t know she had colon cancer until it was too late.” A long-term substitute had come to finish out the rest of the year and, after that first week, none of us even remembered we’d started with Mrs. Green.
Then my pediatrician got into a car wreck. My school bus driver had a heart attack while she was driving the bus. Luckily, one of the older kids knew how to steer the bus safely enough to the side of the road so we didn’t all die.
There was Granny’s bank teller at the credit union she went to every Friday. The checkout lady at the Food Lion we saw every Saturday, the woman who cut my hair and permed Granny’s, and that wasn’t even counting a whole host of Granny’s elderly friends.
Granny got wise to the fact that, between the two of us, we seemed to attract death–or really, dying people. Instead of walking with women through the births of their babies, she started walking with people as they moved onto the next life. And she took me with her whenever she could. Nobody called her a death doula back then, but I always thought she must have inspired the title.
It was only natural that I’d continue her work after she died. And it was only natural, since death followed me seemingly everywhere I went, that I’d start cleaning up after death.
That’s what had led me to the Body Farm, and what had eventually led me here, to this forest, where Chris and I had been helicoptered in this morning.
But since being married to Gus, picking up the pieces after death was finally starting to take a toll. I didn’t want to be out here in the heat, hundreds of miles away from my husband, categorizing bone fragments. I wanted to be with him, discovering our bones. Watching him scrunch up his nose at the musky scent of the valerian tea I offered him before bed or spending the evening weeding our garden. I wanted to twine our legs together, watching Netflix on the couch, hoping this might be the night it led to chilling.
A few days into the job, I was squatting in a clean spot on the grass outside the unit. The door slammed. I was staring into the grass but saw nothing until two blue-bootied shoes stepped into my field.
“I think our part’s done,” Chris said, peeling off his gloves. His glasses were askew. He was in desperate need of a shower, and there were black circles under his eyes. I had no doubt I looked very much the same. After spending days in a mortuary truck, we’d tagged and sorted and X-rayed every bit of tissue we could identify. I didn’t think I’d looked in a mirror in three days. I certainly hadn’t slept in the lumpy roadside motel bed.
“Thank God. I just want to be home.”
“I’ll drive if you want to share a rental. I’ve been dreading a visit with my parents. Seems like now’s as good a time as any.”
“Sounds perfect. As long as you don’t mind if I fall asleep against the window. I’m exhausted.”
He smiled. “Dec, I’ve known you for how many years? Twelve? I’ll be surprised the day you don’t fall asleep as soon as you get in a car.”