Without Mercy (19 page)

The vehicle stopped only a few feet from the front porch. “Jimmy Ray Shiflett, we have a warrant for your arrest,” the officer's voice rang out, the drawl amplified by a factor of ten. “Come out unarmed, with your hands up and in plain sight.”

We waited, but no one emerged, so we waited some more. Still no one. “Tell him again,” Decker radioed Ron. Ron did as he was told, but Shiflett did not. After another long wait, Decker ordered, “See if the third time's the charm.” Ron tried once more, but the third time was not the charm.

“Too bad,” Decker said, “but not surprising.” He got on the radio again. “Ron? Come on back to the tree line for now. Jake? Let's get some eyes in the sky.” He looked at me with a grin. “Want to see our newest toy?”

“Sure, if it doesn't get me shot.”

“Not to worry.” He put the truck in gear and followed the BFT to the edge of the clearing, then tucked in behind it, so we were shielded. The big vehicle's rear door was already open, and one of Decker's men was leaning inside, removing tubes and motors and other parts from a large plastic case. Decker motioned me to follow him, so I got out and wandered up to the back of the truck.

“Doc, this is Jake, one of our pilots. We just got this baby last month. It's a DJI Inspire drone. This is only our third mission with it.”

As I watched, Jake fitted together the drone's tubular framework—carbon-fiber tubes that snapped together to form an H, each leg about two feet long—and then began attaching rotors at each of the four corners, followed by a chunky central module that appeared to contain an electric battery and a swiveling camera. “It's powered by a twenty-four-volt lithium ion battery,” Decker explained. “Like a cordless drill or circular saw. Gives us about thirty minutes of flight time. We've got a rack with spare batteries always on charge, so if we run low, we land and swap out. The camera's got high-def video and night-vision capability, so we can get HD imagery day or night. It's also got infrared—thermal—so we can look for hot spots, like people.”

Decker helped Jake lift the drone out of the truck and set it on the ground. Then Jake removed a control unit from the big case and powered it up, and with a soft whir, the drone rose into the warm sky and floated toward the house, a surreal
Star Wars
-looking craft flying toward a backwoods Tennessee cabin.

A FLICKER OF MOVEMENT CAUGHT MY EYE, A SPECK
drifting across the sky, so subtle that at first I took it for a floater inside my eyeball. But the speck was soon joined by another, and then several more, and they drifted closer, silent and graceful, silhouetted against the brilliant blue November sky.

I nudged Decker to get his attention, then pointed at the aerial congregation that was gathering, now beginning to
circle over one edge of the clearing. “Reckon your drone could slip into formation with those buzzards? Follow their noses to whatever they're smelling?”

Decker grunted, then radioed the pilot. “You see the buzzards? Just above the southeast edge of the woods?” After a pause, he added, “Sure, go on down and take a look. Let us know if you see anything.”

“Too bad that drone's not carrying a smell-o-vision camera,” I said, and Decker smiled.

A moment later, his head snapped up and he raised a pair of binoculars, sighting toward the distant tree line. “They've got a visual of a body on the ground,” he said. “Cold. It's not showing up on infrared. I'm gonna take two teams over there. One to check it out, the other to cover them, in case there's any threat from the house. We'll move the BFT and the Humvee around there, too. Soon as we—”

Decker was interrupted by the warble of a pager. He snatched it off his hip and glanced at the display, then muttered, “Shit.” He looked around for his deputy commander. “Ron,” he called.

Ron jogged over. “What's up, Captain?”

“We've got a hostage situation in Knoxville,” he said. “Domestic disturbance. I've got to scoot. I'll take my truck, the Humvee, and an entry team. You and the other guys follow once you've cleared the house here.”

AN HOUR LATER, I FOUND MYSELF STARING DOWN AT
the bloated body and blasted face of Jimmy Ray Shiflett, if Waylon's memory and the driver's license photo could be trusted. The body lay a few feet from a massive stump. Judging by the bloating and the insect activity—swarming green
blowflies, white dabs I recognized as masses of fly eggs, and swarms of small, freshly hatched maggots in the eyes, nose, and gaping crater of a mouth, he'd been dead for somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours.

A hole freshly dug beneath one side of the stump was filled with a slurry that Waylon sniffed and then carefully tasted before pronouncing it a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane—“rocket fuel, basically,” he said. “The stuff them long, skinny drag-racing cars burn.” He frowned. “That right there's the same stuff Tim McVeigh used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City, kill all them workers and little kids.”

“But what happened here?” I asked. “This stuff in the ground didn't go off, but
something
must've gone off, to do this to him.” The “this” I was referring to was massive damage to the dead man's face. Much of his mandible appeared to have been blown off, along with some of his upper teeth and part of the upper jaw. His right thumb and first two fingers were destroyed as well.

Waylon gave a dismissive grunt. “What a dumb-ass,” he said, peering down at the dead man. “Always thinking the fed'ral gov'mint or the U-nit-ed Nations was gonna come haul him off to some prison camp. But he ends up killing his own self with plain stupidity.”

“Waylon, I'm not quite following you,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Hell, the stupid sumbitch, he bit down on a blasting cap. To crimp the end.” He pointed at two bits of thin, insulated wire, one red and one yellow, lying on the ground nearby. “Them there's the wires. He set the fuckin' thing off in his own damn mouth.”

“Ouch, man,” I said. “Seems like pliers might have been a better choice.”

“Pliers is for sissies, guy like him'd say,” Waylon scoffed. “What's them awards for folks that do stupid stuff that kills 'em?”

“The Darwin Awards?” I asked, and he nodded. “Survival of the fittest,” I agreed. “Or at least of the nonidiotic.”

O'Conner, Steve Morgan of the FBI, and Decker's colleague Ron were off to one side conferring, and I saw the sheriff make a phone call. When he finished, the three of them joined Waylon and me beside the body. “This guy is determined to make our job harder, even after he's dead,” O'Conner said to me.

“What do you mean?”

“Explosives are involved. That means we've got to call in the ATF.”

“Makes sense,” I said. I had worked several cases with the ATF—officially renamed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but still informally called the ATF—and I respected their expertise. “Given that the gate was booby-trapped, and the guy has explosives, probably a good idea to let them check the place out, get rid of anything dangerous.” I nodded at the body. “Can somebody give me and my friend a ride back to Knoxville? Not that there seems much doubt about cause of death, but the sooner we get him to the medical examiner, the less smelly he'll be.”

O'Conner frowned. “Like I said, this guy's making it hard for us.
All
of us. Including you, Doc.” I must have looked confused, because he added, “The ATF doesn't want us to disturb anything—not even the body—until they've made sure everything's safe.”

I was about to protest—inspecting the body for explosives at this point seemed like installing a barn-door surveillance camera after the horse had been stolen—but I saw Ron and
Morgan both nod, and I decided there was no point arguing about a delay designed to keep me from getting blown up.
Be a shame to win a Darwin Award of my own
, I realized. “Any idea when they'll release the body?”

“I asked the same thing. He said probably within a day.”

“That's reasonable, I guess,” I conceded. “The good news is, it's not hot. Tonight's low is supposed to be near forty.”

“In Knoxville?” asked Waylon, and I nodded. “So it'll get down to about freezing up here,” he said. “Be just like keepin' him in the meat locker. He'll stay fresh as a daisy.”

“Sure,” I said, eyeing the growing number of buzzards wheeling overhead. With each spiral they edged closer, and by the time O'Conner assigned Waylon to drive me back to Knoxville, I felt as if I'd just escaped from a bad scene in the Hitchcock film
The Birds
.

“SHALL WE BEGIN?”

Eddie Garcia's three simple words, spoken with quiet formality and a slight Spanish accent, made me smile. It had been a while since I had stood elbow to elbow with Eddie during an autopsy, and I realized I had missed the corpse-side camaraderie. In some ways Eddie—Dr. Edelberto Garcia, M.D., Knox County's medical examiner—was my polar opposite: slight and dapper, well groomed and well dressed, from an aristocratic family in Mexico City. But bring us together over a body, and those superficial differences dropped away, and we were simply colleagues and kindred spirits, equally eager to commune with the dead and hear their stories. To be sure, my anthropologist ears were attuned to older stories, while Eddie's pathologist ears tended to listen for fresher tales of tragedy. A body like Shiflett's—several days past its peak of freshness—was nearing the outer limits of Eddie's expertise and verging into my own, but the corpse's condition gave us enough overlapping interest to provide an excuse to hang out together in the autopsy suite.

Eddie folded back the sheet, exposing Shiflett's mangled face and bloating body. “I'm sorry Miranda could not join us,” he said. “Her insights are always worthwhile, and sometimes quite unexpected.”

“She sends regrets,” I said. “
Painful
regrets. Her dissertation defense is next week, and she's frantically preparing.”

He nodded. “I have read this dissertation. Twice, in fact. A remarkable piece of work, I think. Do you agree?”

“I've never read anything like it,” I said truthfully; then—before he had a chance to drag me into Fourier analysis or other mathematical waters that were over my head—I changed the subject. “If you don't mind my asking, how are your hands?”

My question contained equal measures of curiosity, concern, and amazement. A few years before, Eddie's hands had been terribly burned by radiation. A physicist in Oak Ridge—“the Atomic City”—had been murdered by a radioactive pellet: a powerful imaging source hidden inside a vitamin capsule. Eddie, not realizing what he was handling, had removed the pellet from the dead man's intestine, and as he held it in his hands—for no more than sixty seconds—the radiation had inflicted irreversible damage. He had tried bionic prosthetics—a pair of i-limb hands, which looked straight out of
Star Wars
—but the lack of tactile feedback had made them only marginally useful for a physician whose work required deftness with scalpels, forceps, and microscope slides. So when he was offered the chance for a dual hand transplant at Emory University, Eddie had accepted without hesitating, despite the risk that sepsis might set in, or his body's immune system might reject the new hands completely, or the nerves might not regenerate fully. So my deceptive question carried a lot of weight, and a lot of worry.

By way of an answer, Eddie stretched out both hands, his gloved fingers extended and spread wide. Next he clenched and unclenched both hands slowly, then touched each of his fingertips to his thumbs, one by one. Finally he extended his right hand toward me—toward my own hand—offering to shake. I took his hand in mine, and when he gripped, my eyes widened, first in admiration, then in something approaching pain. “Uncle,” I said, only half joking, and when he released my hand, his smile matched my own. “Eddie, that's amazing. I'm thrilled the transplants have worked so well.”

“I thought my career was over,” he said. “I don't often use the word ‘miracle,' but I can't think of a more accurate term for this. It has given me back my work. My life. My wholeness.” And with that, we hitched up our paper masks. And we began.

We started by simply looking once Eddie had cut away the clothing. Jimmy Ray Shiflett was a tall, sinewy guy, measuring six feet, two inches, weighing one hundred eighty-three pounds, clothed. He wasn't beefy, in the way of weight lifters and bodybuilders, but he was muscled in a lean, ropy way—a cowboy way—and I suspected that his military service and militia training had instilled in him a regimen of regular workouts. Hard to fight the battle of Armageddon, I supposed—or the New Civil War, or whatever war might present itself—if you're fat and out of shape.

The most striking thing about him, of course, was his blasted face. It drew my eye irresistibly—horrifyingly—even when I tried to focus elsewhere. And there was abundant evidence of other trauma, earlier trauma, elsewhere on his body. In addition to the tattoos, Shiflett's skin bore a profusion of scars attesting to fistfights (layer upon layer of scar tissue on his knuckles), bludgeon fights (star-shaped scars on his cheek
and scalp), even knife fights (long, healed gashes in an upper arm and the lower belly).

Eddie interrupted his dictated inventory of the scars long enough for a side comment to me. “Nobody would accuse him of having a soft life.”

“Just a guess,” I said, “but I'd hate to see the other guys. I suspect they look even worse.” I caught myself looking at the face again. “Except, of course, for . . . you know.”

“Indeed. By the way, do you need me to take DNA samples for identification? Dental records are perhaps not ideal in this case.”

“Perhaps not,” I echoed, amused by his wry understatement. “But no, we don't need DNA. The TBI took fingerprints from the hand that didn't get blasted. The prints in his service records are a match. It's Shiflett, for sure.”

Eddie nodded, then, with deft strokes of a scalpel, he made a Y-shaped incision, cutting from each shoulder to the breastbone, then down the chest and abdomen to the pubic bone. He laid the scalpel aside, then tugged open the flaps he'd made, exposing the rib cage and viscera. As he did, I was struck again by his hands: if I didn't know they'd been cut from a cadaver and stitched onto Eddie's wrists, I wouldn't have guessed there'd ever been a thing wrong with them.

Using a stout pair of shears, he cut the ribs and opened the chest cavity, moving swiftly, removing and weighing the heart and lungs, then slicing open each and examining the interior, dictating, as he worked, into a microphone suspended over the autopsy table. For a dead guy, Shiflett appeared remarkably healthy—except, of course, for . . . you know.

Finally I decided to stop resisting and just give in—just
look
at the damn face. “Eddie,” I said, stretching both hands toward the head, “do you mind?”

“Please, be my guest.” And with a courtly gesture, including a slight, humorous bow, he stepped back to give me free access.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for, never having examined a face that had been decimated by a blasting cap, but aside from the gruesome disfigurement, I found it fascinating. A few sluggish maggots—the eggs laid and hatched during the day or three when Shiflett's body had been accessible to blowflies—were running for cover, fleeing down the throat or up into the skull. Their numbers were far fewer than I was accustomed to—corpses at the Body Farm teemed with maggots by the thousands—so I ignored them, figuring that they'd either get out of the way or get squashed by my probing hands.

The head was already tilted back, supported by a neck block that either Eddie or a morgue assistant had positioned beforehand, and the mangled mandible hung down, almost as if Shiflett were wearing a grisly war trophy around his neck—the jawbone of an enemy he had killed in battle.
We have met the enemy, and he is us
, I thought, a memorable quote from my favorite childhood comic strip, “Pogo.” Thanks to the neck block and the dangling mandible, I had an unobstructed view into the mouth cavity, or, rather, into what used to be the mouth cavity, once upon a time.

The blast damage was both massive and intricate: massive because the bones of the face and the floor of the skull tended to be far thinner and more delicate than, say, the cranium or the cheekbones, which were rugged enough to withstand substantial impacts; intricate because the bones were not just thin but also irregular in shape. I remembered Miranda's description of the sphenoid, the floor of the skull, as the “bat-bone” because of its winged appearance.

As I explored the abyss of carnage—my spelunking lit by
the surgical light I pulled down from above, angling and swiveling it this way and that—I found myself surprised by the depth of the damage. “Look at this, Eddie,” I said, stepping back so he could lean in for a better view. “If he was biting the blasting cap with his incisors, I'd expect most of the energy from the explosion to vent out of his mouth, wouldn't you?”

“That seems reasonable,” he said mildly. “And yet there appears to be extensive trauma to the throat—the top of the trachea and the esophagus are macerated.” He reached a finger in and moved a flap of tissue aside. “Also, two of the cervical vertebrae are partially exposed. C-3 and C-4, it appears.”

“You're kidding.” Eddie stepped back deferentially, and I peered in again. “I'll be damned,” I murmured. “You're right.” I straightened up, partly to fend off what felt like a neck cramp, partly to take a wider look, and partly to think. When I leaned down again, I focused on the teeth, and what I saw puzzled me. The incisors—which by rights ought to have been blown to kingdom come, roots and all—were simply snapped instead, folded forward in a hinge fracture.

I had seen hundreds of hinge fractures in my time. Land teeth-first on a concrete curb, or whack somebody across the mouth with a baseball bat, and the incisors will fold inward, breaking through the thin, bony walls of their sockets as they fold. Shiflett's teeth, of course, were folded outward, not inward, but it was the fact that they were folded—not shattered or pulverized—that I found puzzling. No: electrifying—a slow, building buzz of mental current.

“Eddie,” I finally said, “if I didn't know better, I'd think he was swallowing that blasting cap, not biting down on the end, when it went off.”

Eddie studied my own face for several seconds before
turning again to Shiflett's. He leaned in again, swiveling the light, and then reached in with one hand, feeling the interior surfaces. “Jesus, Eddie, be careful. Some of that bone is really splintered. You don't want to stick yourself.”

“That's true,” he said. “I still have to take immunosuppressants to avoid rejection, so I need to be careful about bloodborne pathogens. But some things require touch, as you know.” I held my breath until he withdrew his hand. Seeing my nervousness, he smiled and held out his fingers so we could both inspect them. “You see,” he said calmly, “no damage.” He looked back at the corpse's face again. “I think you are correct,” he mused. “The epicenter—if I may use that word for a small explosion rather than a large earthquake?—seems to be at the back of the buccal cavity, between the base of the tongue and the posterial wall of the oropharynx. The damage seems to radiate outward in all directions from there, rather than from the front of the mouth. In fact, if you wish to feel it, you'll find a deep crater at the back of the tongue, consistent with immediate proximity to the blast.”

I believed him, and I didn't particularly want to stick my hand down the guy's throat. “It might be interesting to take x-rays and a CT scan,” I said, “to get a better look at the geometry of the damage—to confirm all this.”

Eddie gave another of his formal, inclining nods. “An excellent suggestion.”

“But unless those images contradict what we're seeing and feeling and thinking, I'd say that our man Shiflett here wasn't biting down on that blasting cap when it went off.”

“No, apparently not,” agreed Eddie. “It would almost appear that he was trying to swallow it.”

“Or trying
not
to.” I turned for one more look, and when I did, I accidentally stepped on Eddie's foot. For a moment I was
off balance, and in that moment, I instinctively reached out to steady myself. My hand nudged the block that was wedged beneath the shoulders, and it shifted beneath my weight. When it did, the corpse's head turned toward me.
Flopped
toward me. I shot a startled look at Eddie, then looked back at the corpse. The head was rotated a full 90 degrees. Reaching out with both hands, I gently rotated it back to center, then continued rotating until I had turned it 180 degrees. “My God,” I said, “did you know this?”

“I had no idea,” Eddie said. “This case is getting very interesting.”

AN HOUR LATER, AFTER I HAD CHANGED OUT OF MY
surgical scrubs and returned to my office at the north end of Neyland Stadium, the Cooke County sheriff's dispatcher patched me through to Jim O'Conner, who was winding up his second day at the Shiflett place with the ATF team.

“Broken? You're sure?”

“I'm sure, Jim. His neck was snapped, and his spinal cord was severed.”

“It didn't seem broken when they took the body away.”

“He was still in rigor mortis then. The muscles would have stabilized the head. Now he's out of rigor, and his neck's as floppy as a limp noodle.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“It gets even more interesting, Jim. The severed spinal cord was the cause of death. His heart and his lungs stopped working instantly. The blasting cap was just a smokescreen, shoved down his throat and detonated after he was dead.”

“What makes you think that? Couldn't the shock wave from the explosion have done the damage to his spine?”

“Could've, maybe, but didn't,” I told him. “The CT scan shows torsional damage to the vertebral column and the spinal cord. His neck was broken by a hard twist, not a shock wave. Besides, there's no way he could have been biting that blasting cap when it went off. The x-ray and the CT scan both show that it was halfway down his throat when it went off.”

“Damn,” he said. “Are you willing to repeat all that to the ATF's point man? This definitely sounds like it could affect his investigation.”

“Sure. What's his name?”