Swamp Bones (6 page)

“Who are you talking about?” Yellen asked.

For the first time, Deuce looked uncomfortable. “All of ’em.”

“The people you sell to.”

Deuce nodded.

“You’re saying the fashion houses buy illegal?”

“Not all.”

“Which?”

“Shoulda asked Kiley. She was the one all cozied up to their hoity-toity asses.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m done here.”

Yellen was about to push for more when his mobile sounded. Pointing a “Stay put” finger at Deuce, he stepped away.

Deuce and I eyed each other.

What the hell?

“Why were you shooting?” I asked.

Deuce just glared. Ernie smiled. I noticed that Ernie had a soiled gauze bandage taped around one finger. Defense wound? Knife? Chain saw?

“Hurt yourself?” I gestured at the bound digit.

“I got my tat.” Ernie sounded like a kid excited by a new bike. “Show her, Deuce. Show her yours. Blow her mind.” To me, “Mine will be just the same when it heals.”

Deuce held out his hand and shot the middle finger. Underneath the nail, in ink, was a
circle sliced top to bottom by three lines. On each side, within the larger circle, were three concentric curved lines. I recognized the symbol from the Miccosukee village.

“Jesus. Is that a tattoo under your nail?”

“Yep.” Said with macho pride.

“Miccosukee tradition?”

Ernie started giggling.

“Just our clan. Takes a pair, know what I’m saying?”

“I’m eighteen.” Ernie sounded pumped.

I looked to Deuce for explanation. “We get ’em when we turn eighteen and can gator-wrestle for the village. You hammer the fingertip, wait for the nail to fall off, then ink the bed. Nail grows back. Tat for life.”

“Hammer the nail.” Ernie giggled again.

Dear God. I couldn’t imagine the pain. And the long-term wound way out here in the swamp.

“Keep it disinfected and bandaged,” I couldn’t resist warning him.

Hearing footfalls, I turned. Yellen was jamming his phone back into his pocket and hurrying toward us. His face could have served as an image to accompany the definition of grim.

To Deuce he said, “You tell Buck to drop by the station or I’m coming to haul his bony ass in myself.” To me, “Let’s roll. I’m taking you home.”

“I’ll go home when I’m ready.” I was plenty ready, but I don’t like being told what to do.

“Your call.” Yellen turned and walked toward the cruiser. “But you’re doing another autopsy first thing tomorrow.”

Necropsy. Not autopsy. I’d explained the difference to Yellen, but he wasn’t “interested in semantics.”

I’ve examined victims lacking both arms and legs before, but none that had been born that way. My current subject was a sixteen-foot Burmese python, weighing 130 pounds and measuring eight inches in diameter. Except for the midsection, which showed a large bulge.

Lisa and I had risen at dawn. Over a breakfast of cold pizza on her terrace with its “angle your head just right” slash of canal view, we’d discussed possible motives for the James murder. The list had been longer than the snake.

There was tension among the python hunt contestants. Tension between the once-a-year amateurs and the full-time professional wranglers. Tension between the legal hunters and the poachers.

Then there was Kiley James herself. She’d been acting secretive and suspicious. She’d dropped Dusty Jordan as her python hunting partner. She’d had a violent encounter with Buck Cypress. Perhaps she’d tipped a poacher that she was on his or her trail.

After our healthy morning meal, Lisa had gotten a lift to her lab, generously leaving me her car. By eight I was back at Miami-Dade. Elvis waved as I passed the bustle of activity in autopsy one. I picked up that a car had been dredged from a canal, and there’d been decomps inside. No problem. Instead of Elvis, I needed Aaron Lundberg by my side. Today I was playing a supporting role to his leading man.

Yellen had issued a requisition to Fish and Wildlife. All reptiles captured in the vicinity of Hardwood Hammock were to be taken to the morgue and presented to Lundberg and yours truly. Since human remains were involved in the homicide we were trying to solve, the head pathologist didn’t object, as long as the snakes were no longer breathing. A qualifier I enthusiastically applauded.

“Yellen was smart to order the roundup.” Lundberg hadn’t stopped talking since I’d arrived. “FWC is working assembly-line style—one person making incisions, another examining stomach contents, a third studying sex organs.”

We’d rolled a gurney end to end with the autopsy table to accommodate the full length of
our subject. Even knowing the snake was dead, I’d had to gird myself to touch it. Irrational, I know. But creatures without eyelids creep me out.

Still, I felt sorry for the snake. It hadn’t chosen to be born in trigger-happy Florida rather than Southeast Asia.

“It looks alive,” I said.

“There are two ways to ethically euthanize a python.” Lundberg handed me one end of a retractable tape measure. I held the little metal tab at the tip of the snake’s tail while he stretched the working portion to the end of its snout.

“By chemical injection or brain destruction.” Lundberg jotted a number, then looped the tape around the snake’s midsection and jotted again. When done, he glanced up.

I must have looked appalled.

“Like all reptiles’, the python’s central nervous system is tolerant to low oxygen and low blood pressure, so the brain can remain active for up to an hour after decapitation, allowing the snake to experience pain. To minimize suffering, you want immediate loss of consciousness and brain destruction.”

Lundberg took a Nikon from the counter and began snapping pics, all the while maintaining the flow of his lecture.

“For challenge participants, we recommend using a captive bolt or a firearm. A captive bolt works like a gun, where compressed air drives a steel bolt into the animal’s brain. FWC officials euthanized this catch by lethal injection.”

“He was captured in the same location as the python containing the turkey vulture and the foot?” I asked.

“She. Yes. Just yards away. Pythons aren’t territorial, so you can find more than one animal in close proximity. Especially during mating season.”

Lundberg circled to my side of the table and snapped a series of close-ups. At his direction, I repositioned the case marker for each.

“This female would have attracted multiple males to the vicinity. What we call a breeding aggregation.”

“How does one determine gender?”

“With most snakes you can’t tell just by looking. You have to probe, or open them up to observe the genitalia. But pythons have vestigial organs in the pelvic girdle, left over from a time
their ancestors had hind limbs. Look here, on either side of this vent.” He set down the camera and pointed a gloved finger to tiny spurs toward the tail end of the beast. “The small size indicates that this is a female. They’d be larger in a male.”

A female who would have cared for her young. Again, I felt a wave of sadness for an animal that had died through no fault of her own.

“Based on the size of the bulge, I’d guess she was bagged shortly after the swallowing process was complete.”

“How long does that take?” I dragged my eyes from the telltale little spurs.

“A python can swallow a good-size mammal or bird in about twenty minutes.”

“Does the catch ever get away?”

“Not likely once they have it in their mouth. The prey is dead by the time it’s swallowed. A python strikes fast, then immobilizes the kill with its teeth while wrapping it with body coils. Death is by asphyxiation.”

I could think of nothing to say.

“It’s a remarkable creature,” he said.

But a dead one. I swallowed. “I’m surprised the bones we’ve observed haven’t been more damaged.”

“Constriction doesn’t actually crush bodies or break bones. That’s Hollywood. Constrictors squeeze just tight enough to prevent the prey from breathing, but not tighter. Death is fast—three to four minutes.”

“Then they do that jaw unhinging thing?”

“More media hype. The jaws aren’t attached in a mechanical way. Long tendons and muscles connect the upper and lower jaws.”

Lundberg leaned close and observed the snake’s right eye, then its left. Made a note on the form on his clipboard.

“The lower jaw is composed of two separate bones to enhance the snake’s ability to manipulate large intake.” He looked up, slashing light from the overheads across his lenses. “Snakes swallow prey headfirst so the limbs will fold in. Then they work it down the throat into the stomach with rhythmic muscular contractions.”

“How does the snake breathe during all that?” Despite myself I was becoming interested.

“It has a special tube in the bottom of its mouth that stays open to one side to allow air
inhalation. Shall we get to it?”

“We shall.”

For my benefit, Lundberg spoke aloud as he made notes on marking patterns, pigmentation, nasal form, tail shape, old and recent wounds, abnormalities, and overall physical condition. Then, using a hand lens, he searched for external parasites such as ticks and mites. I had to agree with Yellen. There was little difference between an external in a necropsy and one in an autopsy.

Finally, Lundberg was ready for the internal exam. It’ll be the longest, skinniest Y incision ever, I thought.

Together, Lundberg and I flipped the subject ventral side up. Then, using a scalpel identical to the one I’d used the day before, he sliced the length of the belly. Before examining the organs, he observed and then removed and weighed the glossy yellow layer underlying the skin.

“Fat’s a good indicator of health. It can also signal that a female has had a clutch. A Burmese doesn’t leave her eggs to hunt. While brooding, she survives off stored fat. Recent mothers have little of it left.”

Again, the ping of grief. Crap. This was almost as bad as working a homicide vic.

At last, the organs. Lundberg went through his routine, excising, observing, then recording size, weight, color, and consistency, instructing as he went.

I let his words roll over me. I was waiting for the big event.

And then the stomach.

“When it comes to the gut, you see a rapid drop in pH after feeding.” Lundberg was still rolling. “A steady maintenance of a very acidic pH during digestion, and a rise in pH upon completion of gastric breakdown. At which time acid production ceases.”

“Making for quick digestion.”

“In this case, hopefully not quick enough.”

With one slash, Lundberg detached the stomach, lifted and placed it to the side of the snake. Using the scalpel tip, he sliced the outer layer and splayed the sack open.

A stench filled the room. Liquid oozed onto the stainless steel.

As Lundberg teased free the stomach contents, I scanned each chunk. Several appeared to be bone. I poked and prodded. Scraped off gastric sludge with my scalpel.

In less than a minute I knew. More than a vulture and a gator had found human chow to their recent liking. This python had also dined on Kiley James.

Most of the flesh was gone, eaten away by stomach acid, but I could see portions of at least twenty to thirty bones. Small ones. Likely more hands and feet. Not the upper torso I’d been hoping for, but definitely parts of a human skeleton.

“Snakes don’t normally eat carrion.” Lundberg’s brow was furrowed above his silver frames.

“James was dismembered with a chain saw. There’s no way she was alive when this snake consumed her.”

Lundberg sighed. “The more we learn about snakes, the more we realize how little we know. The Burmese in particular are very adaptable. I suppose there’s nothing to say they wouldn’t eat a fresh carcass. They definitely take advantage of wounded prey.”

We spent another twenty minutes tweezing bones onto a tray, which Lundberg then handed to me. I shifted to the sink and carefully cleaned away tissue and flesh. Details emerged. A joint surface. An articular facet. A portion of shaft retaining a nutrient foramen.

A tiny fizz of electricity sparked in my chest. What?

I sorted the bones into piles, starting with the smallest, moving to the largest. Finger. Toe. Wrist. Ankle. Ulna. Radius. Early projections pointed to a pair of hands, a lower right arm, and one foot.

At one point, Lundberg approached with another tray. “Hair and fingernails.”

I heard the rattle of metal on metal but remained focused on the task of arranging bones. Before long I had assembled two complete hands. Then the distal portion of a right forearm.

As I took and recorded measurements, the fizz grew stronger. The bones were surprisingly large for a petite woman.

I turned to the foot. Arranged. Measured.

Knew something was wrong.

“Where’s the James file?” Keeping my voice even.

“On the desk in the anteroom.”

I retrieved the folder and flipped pages until I found the entry I needed.

The fizz blossomed into full-blown dread.

“The foot does not belong to Kiley James,” I repeated.

“You’re sure?” Yellen asked for the third time, as if hoping my answer might change.

“Unless she had one size five, one size twelve, and they were both left feet, yes.”

“What the blazes?” The sheriff’s mutter was to himself.

“That’s all I can tell you for now.”

Yellen pinched the bridge of his nose. “And why can’t you go back at it?”

“We got bumped.” More repetition. “A fisherman found what the cops think is a child missing since last week. In a lagoon. The media’s going berserk. That postmortem takes priority.”

We’d been hustled out of autopsy room two by the chief medical examiner himself. Jane Barconi had caught the case. Her taut expression had made yesterday’s seem downright relaxed.

I was delivering the news to Yellen in a corner of the staff kitchen. The lobby and parking lot were swarming with press.

“They needed the decomp room. Our snake exam got pushed to the bottom of the totem pole,” I said. Again.

“What
can
you tell me now?”

Very little. I’d realized what I was seeing only minutes before the mêlée broke out.