“Good,” I said. “Maybe there’s DNA in the gum, too—and maybe the gum chewer’s not one of the smokers. So there could be three DNA profiles, right?” Heads nodded. “Okay, let’s talk taphonomy—the arrangement of the items you excavated. What did you learn as you unearthed the bodies?”
“All three were killed with a single shot to the back of the head,” said a guy whose nerdy, Coke-bottle glasses were offset by immense, chiseled jaw muscles, gleaming with sweat and smears of clay. “Execution style.” I nodded, slightly self-conscious about this part. The shots to the head were the least realistic part of the exercise, because the shots—unlike the corpses themselves—were fakes. It had struck me as unnecessary and disrespectful to fire bullets into donated bodies, so I’d settled instead for daubing a small circle of red dye onto the back of each head, and a larger circle on each forehead, to simulate entry and exit wounds.
“What else?” A long silence ensued. “Did you find blood in the grave?” Heads shook slowly. “Did you find blood anywhere besides on the wounds themselves?” More head shaking; several of the agents now cast nervous sidelong glances at one another. “So what does that suggest to you?”
The blond woman raised a hand. “It suggests they were killed somewhere else,” she said. “And then brought here.”
I gave her a thumbs-up. “Which explains why there was only one vehicle. Tell me—how often do drug traffickers and drug buyers carpool to the place where the deal’s going down?” A few of the agents laughed, but Kimball, the tread caster, winced, as he should have: Kimball, of all people, should have given more thought to the absence of a second vehicle. “Also,” I went on, “how likely is it that only three bullets would be fired during a drug-deal shoot-out? All of them to the back of the victims’ heads?” I could see them rethinking the scenario. “Anything else?” The agents looked from the grave to the bodies and back to the grave, then at me once more. My questions made it clear that they were still missing something—still failing to connect important dots—but apparently they needed a hint. “Look closely at the three faces,” I said. “See any differences?”
“Ah,” said the nimbus-haired blonde. “The two ‘buyers’ look a lot better than our guy. A lot . . . fresher.”
“Bingo,” I said. “They show no signs of decomposition, and no insect activity. Look at your ‘undercover agent.’ He’s a mess—he’s starting to bloat, and he’s got maggots in his mouth and nostrils. Anybody look in there?” Several of the agents grimaced; most shook their heads sheepishly. “So if you compare the condition of the bodies, what does the difference in decay tell you?”
“He was killed before the other two,” said Boatman, the agent who’d noticed the absence of mud spatter beside the tire tracks.
“Exactly,” I said, pulling on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. “Also, your undercover guy was probably outdoors, or maybe stashed outdoors for a while—someplace where the blowflies could get to him.” I pointed a purple finger at the puffed-up face again. “Blowflies like to lay their eggs in the moist orifices of the body,” I went on. “The mouth, the nose, the eyes, the ears, even the genitals, if those are accessible. But especially, especially, any bloody wound.” I stooped beside the dead “agent” and lifted his head. I had gone to the trouble of mixing a bit of actual blood—pig blood—with the red food coloring on his head, and I’d brought him out to the Body Farm two days before I’d brought the other bodies. During that time, his “gunshot wound” had attracted legions of flies, and by the time I’d placed the bodies in the ground, maggots had begun colonizing his hair, forehead, and orifices. “Next time, check for maggots. And collect the biggest ones.” I bent down and plucked a quarter-inch specimen from an eye socket, holding it in my palm for them to inspect. “A forensic entomologist could tell you that this maggot hatched three or four days ago,” I said. “Which—if I remember right—is just about the time your undercover agent dropped off the radar screen. Is that correct, Agent McCready?”
“That’s correct, Dr. Brockton.”
I flicked the maggot into the woods. It was time to reveal the final plot twist in the scenario. When I’d first phoned to suggest the idea, McCready had sounded dubious. As we talked, though, he warmed to the idea, and by the end of the call, he’d embraced the scenario enthusiastically: “A good lesson in investigative skepticism,” he’d called it.