Thirty-sixmiles from Nichols Depot, a body is found.
The location is rural and has a large backcountry—thousands of acres of woodland in a state preservation. Over the years, the backcountry has been a place to find solitude for campers and people living off the grid. There are no public utilities. Spotty cell phone coverage. One trail weaves to a modest peak with a lookout, but it’s hardly worth the effort for an experienced hiker.
In the 1970s a small group of hippies settled there. Aerial photos revealed several shelters scattered throughout the woods. Some were barely visible beneath the canopy of leaves. They were occasionally raided and cleared, but the occupants always returned a few at a time.
Complicating matters, the entire preserve is available to licensed hunters for two weeks during the fall to reduce the deer population, which would otherwise starve, die, or become a nuisance in the winter months. It is a problem that runs up and down the entire Eastern Seaboard—deer have no natural predators and an unnatural food supply in the lush gardens of its residents.
Local law enforcement from the surrounding towns asked the state to tear down what used to be the hippie shelters, but the hunters now use them to store their gear and seek refuge during heavy rainfalls. Some even camp there overnight if they’ve traveled far. The hunters who like to hunt and the wealthy residents who like their gardens outranked those enlisted to serve and protect.
And now there’s a body.
Two hunters discover the remains. They’d stopped by the largest shelter to reload, take a piss. They knew not to leave their scent in the field. Some of the shelters have outhouses. Others just have areas where the hunters do their business, then cover it with garden lime. The serious hunters don’t mess around. They know the rules; they have a code. They operate on an honor system, keeping their hands off other hunters’ gear and guns, closing the doors, taking their shits correctly. They don’t allow smoking of any kind. Smoke scares the game.
Three years back a man was murdered in this same shelter. Beaten and shot in the back of the head in the smaller of the two rooms inside—the one across from the stairs to the basement, the one where the hunters take their kill to clean and dress and do whatever it is they do to the dead animals.
The press dubbed it the Kill Room, and the name stuck. It was a big story then, the first one to draw attention to the backcountry and how it was being used by more than hunters and squatters and people wanting to disappear from the world.
Traces of drugs were found all over the place. The police dogs went crazy, even though it had been wiped clean. The dead guy was a lowlife dealer, wanted in New York City, just fifty miles away, for failure to appear on a possession charge. Two priors for assault and petty theft. Working his way up the ladder. Taking shortcuts that cost him his life.
The state agreed to put up game cameras, hiding them in trees and small boxes under thick brush. But they had no way to send a signal, no internet, so they recorded onto memory cards, which were collected and replaced, then analyzed. Not only did this attenuate the evidence from the criminal activity that was recorded, but once the cameras were found and the cards destroyed, so was the footage. And finding them was the first thing the squatters and dealers learned to do.
This particular shelter had awood-burningstove in the main room to generate heat, and a well and hand pump providing access to water in the Kill Room. No plumbing for a toilet, but more amenities than the others that had just four walls of wood with flat rubber roofs.
It also had a large animal cremation oven in the basement, which had been the most lurid piece of information that circulated through the media when the body was found three years ago. No one could trace the oven to a buyer, but the hunters who were questioned back then all believed it had been installed by “some rich guy” who didn’t like the idea of leaving a carcass to rot. The hunters could take whatever they wanted from the animals—meat, hides, etc.—and burn the rest. It operated on power from a generator outside the back door. Engineers opined that it had been installed during a renovation because there was “no way” it was carried down the narrow stairs.
The hunters who found the body heard the oven when they arrived at the shelter to gear up. It rumbles when it’s burning, so they went down to the basement, turned it off, then left to kill things. As they settled into the spot they’d chosen for the task and waited and waited and waited for an animal to appear, it occurred to them that the oven being on was strange. Technically, the hunting season had ended two weeks ago, and even if a hunter had turned it on to burn a carcass, where had he gone? So when they returned, they raked it out. That’s when they found the bones. The remains of a femur and pelvis. Some teeth that looked human. More were later found by the state forensics team.
Most people are unaware that bones survive cremation, even in a professional crematory. The bones are removed and put through a machine that grinds them down into dust so the family can have the entire body. Otherwise, they would have a pile of ash but also gruesome, charred chunks of their beloved.
It only takes a few hours to burn a body in this type of oven. First, soft tissue—skin, muscle, fat, tendons, internal organs, hair—is turned to ash. Everything but teeth and bone is destroyed. Second, it changes the chemical composition of the bone, causing it to shrink, contort, discolor. Bones become disfigured under extreme heat for extended periods. Third, it damages the DNA found inside the teeth and bone—sometimes completely, sometimes just enough to make it impossible to match in the CODIS database.
The science is constantly progressing. But without the DNA, the most common method of identifying a burned body is with dental records or otherX-raystaken when the person was still alive. And that requires having a possible victim. It begins with a missing person and works backward.
The time of death, cause of death, and even gender of the victim cannot be ascertained with any reasonable degree of certainty from the bone fragments and teeth.
The state takes over the investigation from the local police, who were called to the scene by the hunters. The land is under their jurisdiction, and no one argues because anything having to do with the shelters will stir the pot of disquiet over tearing them down or leaving them up and the local chief is an elected official.Good riddance.
The state investigators begin with the most likely scenario—another drug deal gone wrong. They plan to work the case from two angles—missing persons and forensics around the shelter. Maybe the victim was killed inside or nearby. There will be blood, tire marks, footprints, fingerprints. Surely an abundance of evidence. They brace themselves for the work, which can be tedious and time consuming. They also have to contend with the falling leaves, which continue to alter the crime scene outside the shelter minute by minute.
They assume that the oven had been turned on to cremate this body and not a subsequent animal carcass because no animal remains are found among the ashes. They put the time of death insideforty-eighthours. The generator runs on gasoline. It is small andhand-filledand was near empty when the investigators arrived. Taking into account the burn rate of that particular generator and the energy required to run the oven, two days is the longest it could have been left running.
The forensics team begins their work both inside and outside the shelter. The investigators interview the hunters who found the body and prepare to follow up on any leads that develop.
A piece of clothing is discovered later that first day, hanging on a hook attached to the back of the door. The forensics team only notices it once they are assembled inside and the door is closed. The investigators ask the hunters, but it doesn’t belong to either of them.
One of the men remarks that it wouldn’t belong to any experienced hunter. They know to wearbrown-and-greencamouflage. Most use orange safety vests.
The jacket hanging on the back of the door is bright red, and he insists that no hunter would wear that in the field.
This is all the evidence they have on the first day: teeth, twisted bones, and a red jacket.
Chapter Three
I wake slowly on the sofa in the small study downstairs, confused and disoriented.How did I get here? When did I leave our bed?
After Mitch’s affair four years ago, I didn’t sleep in our bed for two months. Even then, when we were through the worst of it, I would fall asleep beside Mitch but wind up here by morning. That lasted for another year.
Mitch is a contractor. He builds and renovates large houses for our wealthier neighbors. He works with the wives because they’re more likely to be home all day. The affair had been brief but devastating. Fran was barely a year old. Amy just starting preschool. I’d been immersed in motherhood. Endless demands on my body and emotions in every possible way. Mitch’s father had just passed, and he’d fallen into the arms of a woman who could give him what he needed. Time. Attention. Physical comfort. Her name is Briana. Mitch was renovating their kitchen.
