Free Carcass Trade by Noreen Ayres Page B

look of the scuffs and shiny digs in the hardpack. As he added notes to his field report sheet, I saw him write in block letters: KACKY PANTS, GRAY MUSCLE SHIRT, KACKY SOX, BLACK SHOSE, and I wondered what his sergeant had to say about his spelling. The deputy’s nose twitched frequently.
    I kept looking at the victim’s neck, the way the flesh piled out and the color waned at a fold, while the rest of the flesh had progressed to the colors of decomp, beginning with the measleslike Tardieu spots from ruptured capillaries, and progressing to the deeper lividity at the downward position where the draining blood had collected.
    â€œI think under that fat, we’ve got a ligature,” I said. I pressed the flesh at the neck. It blanched. My finger touched something hard embedded in the folds, but I reflexively drew back when what looked like a living mole moved at the crease, a whitish wart that wiggled. I flicked the maggot aside and spread the folds again. One of the flies that feed on corpses is aptly named Calliphora vomitoria .
    â€œWire,” I said.
    The deputy coroner, who stood off Joe’s right and who looked more like a girl’s soccer coach than a body snatcher, nodded. His name, Oskar, showed over the right pocket of his jumpsuit. He was checking air temperature and recording the barometric reading.
    Through the victim’s sparse hair, I saw a crusty stain, and I figured he’d been hit on the head as well. A rove beetle ran across his cheek. Beetles favor the outside, flies the orifices.
    I said, “Cripes.”
    â€œYeah, I know what you mean. We should carry Raid,” Oskar said, and barely were the words out when a larva emerged from the victim’s downside earlobe. At the lab there’s a man who insists on calling the ear canal the external auditory meatus, but instead of pronouncing meatus in three syllables, he says “meet us,” and every time I hear the innocent phrase of people joining one another, I see instead a landscape of convoluted gristle.
    With fat-ended tweezers, I gathered the insect specimens, put them in a small paper envelope, folded the top, and stapled it.
    â€œKiller,” Joe whispered in my ear. “No air.”
    â€œShut up,” I said.
    Other insect casings would be collected at the morgue from the water used to wash the corpse. They’d be air-dried and placed on cotton. The length of the insects’ life cycles can determine time of death.
    Our guess now was that the victim had been dead about thirty hours. Rigor mortis, a phenomenon caused by the release of lactic acid, had come and gone. Rigidity begins in the shortest muscles of the face and progresses throughout the rest of the muscles within eight to twelve hours; then the muscles begin to relax in the same order they contracted, and the body becomes limp again.
    I stood and walked over to a pipe bench near a wooden sign that said BLUEJAY CAMPGROUND . There, I tamped out my cigar and put the stub in the Velcro loop of my camera case.
    Joe was walking around carefully, keeping eyes out. He spotted three small-caliber shell casings, but they seemed old. Nonetheless, we put them in one of my empty film roll canisters and labeled them. At every crime scene, something is taken, something is left—it’s called the theory of transfer.
    Turning away, I walked to where I could see out over a plateau on which yellow flowers big as biscuits were growing in the shadow of an oak. Joe came up to stand beside me, his jacket still on in the eighty-plus heat. “It’s pretty here, huh?” I said.
    â€œIn some directions.”
    I asked, “Where you headed now?”
    â€œProbably to hell.”
    â€œCan I come too?”
    â€œProbably you will,” he said. We walked past the trash barrel. Joe looked in. “It’s empty,” he said. We crossed to the edge of the campground and looked beyond into a valley. “Hear any more from