Chapter 1
I was thinking about frogs. Specifically, about the one living in the fountain outside my town house.
Every summer, the creature took up residence there. Based on the depth and resonance of its dawn and dusk croaking, I guessed the amphibian was of fairly good size.
Why there? I wondered. What was the appeal of that tiny basin?
Where did the frog go in winter? Palm Beach? Key Largo? Did it leave at all or just hunker down in leaves somewhere and sleep?
Did the little fellow fear birds? Lawn mowers? Off-leash dogs?
Was it actually the same frog year after year?
I know what you’re thinking. But my office at the MCME was warm and stuffy, encouraging wandering thoughts, and I’d been awakened at sunrise by yet another polliwog serenade.
My sleep-deprived mind was meandering.
Also, the task at hand was beyond tedious.
At the request of my boss, Dr. Samantha Nguyen, Mecklenburg County’s chief medical examiner, I was compiling an inventory of the reports I’d written during the first six months of the year. Every MCME professional was doing this. The pathologists, the odontologist, the radiologist. Moi.
An annotated inventory.
Had the case involved a human or an animal? Had the remains been fresh, putrefied, mummified, burned, mutilated, skeletal, or other? Yeah, other. I’ll skip detailing the possibilities.
Had the examination focused on establishing identity? On analyzing trauma? On determining cause or manner of death? On reconstructing the method of body disposal? On estimating postmortem interval—the time that had passed since the victim’s death?
Some entity above Nguyen’s pay grade had requested the data. Maybe the governor’s office. Maybe the chief ME in Chapel Hill. Maybe God.
The questions I was answering could have served as descriptors for my job. I’m a forensic anthropologist, a specialist in the human skeleton. My expertise is requested for cases in which a normal autopsy is impossible, and all observations and conclusions must be derived from the bones.
Primarily, I’m employed by coroners and medical examiners in my home state of North Carolina, and by the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, the main medico-legal lab in the province of Quebec.
Charlotte and Montreal.
Long story.
Long commute.
One I’ve been making for decades.
Trust me. I have a mother lode of frequent flier miles.
More on that later.
I love my job and can’t imagine doing anything else. I love giving names to the anonymous dead and providing next of kin with closure. What I don’t love is informing families that the person they’re searching for has died.
I despise doing paperwork. Keyboard work?
That day I was on the Carolina end of my geographically complicated professional arrangement. Finally addressing the chore I’d avoided for weeks.
I’d been staring at a computer screen for hours. My eyes burned and a headache was bullying my frontal lobe.
Resting my elbows on the desktop, I circled the tips of my fingers on my temples. Sighed. A pointlessly theatrical performance given that I was alone in my office.
It was late morning on a Wednesday deep into August. The weather had been low-country hot and muggy for weeks, so I was hoping for a brief getaway soon, a jaunt to the mountains with Ryan, my significant other.
Nothing big. A leisurely drive to Asheville, some hiking, a couple of nights at an inn with way too much chintz in the room.
I was clicking open yet another file when I sensed a change in the light filtering in from the hall. I looked up.
A small woman stood framed in the open doorway. Dark, almond-shaped eyes. Olive skin. Black hair gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck.
“Tempe.” Nguyen’s voice carried hints of Boston and some other far more exotic locale. “You are well?”
“I am. Thanks for asking.” Knowing the boss hadn’t come to query my health.
“I have just had a call from the Stanly County sheriff’s office. An elderly woman named Bella Abato was involved in a single-car accident late yesterday near the town of Frog Pond.”
“Is this a joke? Were you reading my mind?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” Knee-jerk reaction on my part. Nguyen was not a kidder.
“A trucker called to report the crash. Abato was concussed and hysterical when officers arrived. They couldn’t make much sense of her rambling. But they persuaded her to go by ambulance to an ER.”
I was clueless why Nguyen was telling me this.
“Abato calmed overnight but is still insisting she was driven off the road by a sign from Satan.”
“The devil.”
“Yes.”
“Is she on pharmaceuticals?”
“She is. But when a tow truck arrived at the scene this morning, the driver, too, encountered a sight that unnerved him.”
Nguyen hesitated, unusual for a woman perpetually cool and unruffled. I waited for her to continue.
“The driver claims he saw a painted human head nailed to the tree.”
An image popped in my forebrain.
“Was the head wearing a hat, wrapped in fabric, and decorated with glitter and feathers?”
“Yes.”
“It’s probably another of these sick animal displays showing up around the county.”
“Perhaps it is another snatched pet.” Nguyen didn’t sound convinced.
It was clear she expected me to swing into action. I summoned my best bright-eyed-and-curious expression. “I assume the driver called the sheriff and that the sheriff called you?”
“Yes,” replied Nguyen. “The sheriff’s name is Hattie Spitz.
Finding the man’s story quite bizarre, but wanting to take no chances, she drove out to see for herself.
She says the item in question is about ten feet off the ground and that it’s something she doesn’t want to touch.
She’s ordered a deputy to stand guard until personnel from this office arrive. ”
I vaguely remembered Spitz, a thin woman with a jowly hound dog face. An overly earnest type who’d approached me after one of my “call in the experts and don’t contaminate the evidence” lectures at some regional law enforcement conference.
Advice I was now mildly regretting.
Nguyen studied my expression, which by this point was considerably less than bright-eyed.
A scene visit wasn’t in my pre-weekend plans.
In the event our mountain holiday panned out, I had to organize my cat, Birdie, for delivery to the neighbor, have the air pressure checked in my tires, make a pharmacy run, buy the drinks and munchies Ryan and I would want for roady snacks, and pack.
A trip to the boonies to collect a putrefying raccoon or opossum held absolutely no appeal.
“You want me to go out to Stanly County?” I asked with zero enthusiasm.
“I think that would be best. Sheriff Spitz has offered to send a vehicle and driver to transport you.”
“Can’t this—”
“The deputy has been on site for several hours now.” Then, almost as an afterthought. “He was instructed to bring a ladder.”
“Do you have precise directions?” I asked, resigned.
“I do.”
“I prefer to drive myself.”
“As you wish.”
Before setting out, I hopped onto the net.
Learned that Frog Pond was an unincorporated community of roughly five thousand souls located in the eastern part of Stanly County.
That the town’s variety store sold everything from iPads to diapers.
That area Airbnbs rented for as little as twenty bucks a night.
After entering the coordinates Nguyen had provided, I followed the nice WAZE lady’s navigational directions.
Once out of Charlotte, she sent me east on Highway 24, also unhelpfully labeled Highway 27.
Beyond the city and its suburban sprawl, the landscape yielded to rolling farmland dotted with convenience store–gas station combos, rural churches, and the homes of citizens wanting distance from their neighbors.
I passed through several small communities. As was my habit, I played mental games with the colorful town names so common in Dixie. Midland. Locust. Red Cross.
Frog Pond was one of those speck-on-the-map burgs one could blow through without taking notice. The Abato crash scene was just beyond the town limits, on a two-lane shooting off Molly Springs Road.
An hour after departing the MCME, I spotted the tree in question, a massive oak whose best days were far in the past. Pics forwarded to me courtesy of Spitz and Nguyen made the ID easy.
As did a pickup idling on the shoulder opposite the tree. A logo on the side of the cab declared Sheriff in bold black above, Stanly County in smaller font below. A five-point gold star topped the lettering.
A tired-looking deputy sat behind the wheel, ubiquitous cop Aviators shading his eyes. Sun winked bronze off the lenses as they followed my car’s progress from the pavement onto the shoulder in front of him.
In my rearview mirror I saw the deputy’s head tilt and his lips move, assumed he was reporting my arrival by radio. Then the truck’s door opened, and the man emerged.
The guy was small, maybe five six, and weighed less than he probably would have preferred. His hair was blond and buzzed close to a scalp the same bright pink as the Hello Kitty purse my daughter, Katy, had owned as a kid.
Buzz Cut wore black pants and a blindingly white shirt sporting one of the largest shoulder patches I’d ever seen. Pinned to his chest’s left side were a small brass plaque and a gold star identical to the one on his vehicle.
Heat enveloped me as I climbed from my car, the lack of any breeze cueing my sweat glands for serious action. I said a silent prayer that this outing would be brief.
While striding toward me, the deputy positioned a hat on his head and adjusted it twice. The hat’s brim was black and large enough to shade a schoolyard. Hand shielding my eyes, I read the inscription on the man’s plaque: “F. Torgeson.”
F. Torgeson stopped five feet out and nodded, offering one quick birdlike dip of his chin. His face was flushed, his nose and cheeks badly in need of sunscreen. I guessed his age at maybe twelve.
“Ma’am.” Neither smiling nor frowning.
“Deputy.” I dug out and proffered my MCME ID.
F. Torgeson studied the small plastic rectangle, then my face.
“Anthropologist,” he said, voice flat.
“I am.” Feeling no desire to elaborate. “Dr. Nguyen sent me to evaluate remains in a tree.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do I need PPE?” I was asking about personal protective equipment.
F. Torgeson’s brow creased, but he said nothing.
“Can I expect snakes, wasps, black widows, poison ivy?”
“I wouldn’t know that, ma’am.”
“Have you walked to the tree?” I asked, an edge to my voice.
“Just to set down a ladder, ma’am.” Jabbing a thumb over his shoulder, he added, “It’s there, yonder by that oak.”
Wordlessly, I unlocked the trunk of my car, removed my recovery kit, and turned back to F. Torgeson.
“Lead on.”
Our feet crunched on the gravel bordering the pavement, went silent as we entered the knee-high scrub beyond. Flying insects rose up and swarmed my face and whined in my ears. Now and then, a loner kamikazed into one of my eyes. I batted the nasty things away as best I could.
The air was thick with the smell of petroleum, heated asphalt, and sunbaked vegetation. Rivulets of sweat began running down my back.
Up close, the oak looked almost primeval, its branches semi-nude and terminating in clawlike twigs. Its scabby bark was black in patches, green with moss in others.
Nailed to the tree’s trunk, roughly ten feet above the ground, was the reason for my visit. Before climbing up, I set down my case and took pics with my iPhone, then expanded and studied the enlarged images.
Faded blue fabric partially wrapped the object, obscuring some detail. But just beneath a weathered old ball cap, within the shadowy folds, I spotted the curve of a cheekbone, the dark recess of an orbit, the yellowed enamel of dentition.
An eight-foot stepladder lay on the ground below the tree. Together, F. Torgeson and I lifted, spread, and maneuvered it into position. He stood at the base as I climbed, a spotter at the ready should his teammate tumble.
One rung. Two. Three.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Otherwise, the only sound was that of my boots hitting the aluminum rungs.
Halfway up, I paused. Surprised.
The smell of decomposing flesh is like no other, sweet and fetid and rank. The odor hung there on the hot, midday air, faint but unmistakable.
Yanking a latex glove from the back pocket of my jeans, I inflated, then snugged it onto my right hand. Probably overkill for an animal DOA, but what the hell. Best to follow protocol.
Two more rungs, then I encountered the flies. They swarmed and darted, whining in protest at the intrusion, the sun iridescent on their blue-green bodies.
Their presence at that height also surprised me.
Shooing the flies with my gloved hand, I mounted the final rung.
And got my first good look.
Holy bloody hell.