Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella Read Online Free PDF

kettle just now and laid them on the counter—so I felt fairly sure she’d been strangled rather than slashed. Trouble was, to confirm my hypothesis, I needed a hyoid—specifically, a hyoid crushed by a killer’s lethal grip. And the hyoid was not to be found, no matter how carefully I sifted and squeezed the gooey residue remaining in the bottom of the kettle.
    “Damned dogs,” I muttered. The ends of the woman’s legs were covered with gnaw marks, which indicated that her feet had been chewed off by canids—wild dogs or, more likely, coyotes roaming the hills of Morgan County. Had they also gnawed at the woman’s neck? I studied the vertebrae again, this time looking for tooth marks rather than cut marks. There were none. Was it possible that some especially dexterous dog or coyote—seeking a particular delicacy—had managed to pluck the hyoid from the throat without doing damage to any of the adjacent bones? No way , I thought, then said again, “So where the hell is the hyoid?” Had I been so sloppy and careless, in my haste to get the corpse into the body bag, that I’d failed to notice a stray bone lying on the ground, right beside the exposed cervical vertebrae?
    Frowning, I laid down the last of the vertebrae, shucked off my gloves, and opened the large envelope resting on the counter. I’d picked up the envelope at Thompson Photo on my way to campus. Inside, tucked snugly into slots in a sheet of clear plastic, were the thirty-six color slides I’d shot two days before, at the death scene in the mountains. As I’d spiraled in toward the corpse, I took half a dozen close-ups of the neck, including two from each side. Now, as I laid the slides on a light box and picked up a magnifying glass, I both hoped and feared what those close-ups might reveal: the woman’s hyoid, and my carelessness.
    In fact, the close-ups revealed nothing except what I remembered seeing: exposed cervical vertebrae, resting on a layer of dead, dry leaves. “Where the hell is the hyoid ?” I was sounding like a broken record. I snapped off the light box, then, an instant later, I snapped it back on, realizing that something in one of the other slides seemed odd. It was the first photo I’d taken—the one with my zoom lens at its widest setting—and it was the last photo I’d have expected to reveal an important forensic detail. I stared at it, and as I realized what I was seeing, my understanding of the crime scene—and even the crime—was transformed.
    In the upper corner of the photo, barely within the frame, was something I’d completely overlooked two days before: a dark, greasy-looking circle, a foot or so in diameter, located eight or ten feet up the slope from where the woman’s body lay splayed against the tree. I heard myself say once more, “Damned dogs!” This time I said it with a laugh.
    The body, I now realized, had not been posed by the killer in a shocking sexual display; the body hadn’t been posed at all, in fact. The dark, circular stain marked the spot where the body had originally lain, the spot where it first began to decompose. The stain was a slick layer of volatile fatty acids, released as the body had begun to decay. The body’s final resting place, against the tree—although perhaps “resting” was the wrong word—marked the spot where the dogs or coyotes had dragged it, en route to their den or some other sheltered spot, before the legs parted around the tree and the trunk stopped her downward slide. Picturing the scene in my mind, I imagined the confusion and frustration of the two coyotes on either side of the sapling as the corpse yanked to a halt; I imagined their disappointment as they were forced to settle for only the feet, their meager consolation prizes. “Poor doggies,” I said, snatching up a small paper evidence bag and tucking it into my shirt pocket. Snapping off the light box again, I headed for the door of the Annex.
    I stepped out into the cold, gray light of the