Stranger in the Room by Amanda Kyle Williams

Author:Amanda Kyle Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2012-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

21

It registers in some deep place. One never forgets. Investigators use different methods for pushing through the stench of decomposing flesh. It is one of the services the living must perform if they want justice for the dead. I had always reminded myself of this at the Bureau when we arrived at an especially horrid crime scene. Me, I try not to fight it. Accepting the organic realities of death makes you a better investigator. I never wanted to have to turn away from a scene, or from a victim.

I followed my nose, and thirty yards deep into the woods I nearly fell over something encased in leaves and pine straw. I used a stick to gently rake away debris. I found myself staring into the cavernous eye sockets of an eaten-away face—mostly skinless, jawbone intact, a perfectly formed skull. All the parasites and bacteria and animals that live off decay had done their job. Some of them were inside, doing it still.

I took a picture, stood there for a few seconds. I was beginning to realize I was inside a crime scene. Was this a disposal site for uncremated bodies?

Tall pine trees without lower branches made it easy to move through the dense forest. I began to pay closer attention to bumps and mounds in the pine straw. I found an arm, a hand, bones of a skinless leg. I saw tracks, impressions on the straw. Small tires, like those of a wheelbarrow. I followed them and heard the thick buzz of flies before I found a mass grave that the seasons hadn’t had time to blanket with leaves and pine needles. The smell here was stronger, like mill pulp and rotting animal and overripe fruit. It hung on the humid mosquito-infested air. Body parts, piled up and swarming with flies, thousands of them. Human debris was strewn recklessly, arrogantly, as if they were exempt here to the law, to moral borders—bodies without eyes, heads without bodies, arms and legs. When I spotted a leg with long patches of skin removed from the knee up, I was certain for the first time what this gruesome graveyard was all about and why. The Kirkpatricks had performed dark deeds in their barn while their neighbors and friends slept, the community that had entrusted them with the bodies of sisters and children and friends and fathers. The entire horrible scene finally made sense—the two-mil plastic that must have been strung up to prevent spatter, the bloodstained tools, the tissue in the saw chain. They were hacking, dismembering bodies for profit, selling the organs. Follow the money, Rauser always said, and that’s exactly what was happening here. The scene was so massive, the smell so overpowering, the flies and other parasites so thick, I could barely comprehend it.

I’d seen tissue-trading cases when I was with the Bureau. It’s a brutal practice in a field where safeguards like tracking and oversight have not caught up to the trafficking. Illegal tissue brokers don’t have an ethics issue when it comes to selling improperly harvested body parts.

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