Carved in Bone

they nicknamed “the Soap Lady” because of adipocere’s chemical kinship to soap. But those were misshapen and repulsive compared to the eerily preserved corpse before me. It was not an image of repose, mind you—the eyes stared blindly and the mouth gaped in an eternal scream—and yet despite the grotesque expression, there was something oddly beautiful about it.
    I started forward, then caught myself and called out, “Have you all been in here?”
    “Just far enough to see the body. Didn’t want to disturb the scene before you got a chance to look at it.”
    “Good man. I wish more of your colleagues would be so careful.”
    I took out the 35-millimeter camera I’d brought with me from Knoxville. Early in my career, one of the smartest cops I ever worked with gave me a piece of advice that sounded equally apt for crime scene photographers and ruthless bank robbers: “Shoot your way in and shoot your way out,” he said, and I’d been doing it ever since. Standing in the opening to the crystalline grotto, I started with wide shots from eye level, to establish the scene as a whole. Then I squatted down and shot across the floor of the cave at a low angle—another photography trick he’d taught me—to cast shadows that would throw footprints into sharper relief.
    The flash was too quick and bright for me to see what it was getting, so I played the flashlight beam across the floor. The unevenness made it hard to tell for sure, but I thought I saw prints leading toward the body. I zoomed in on what seemed to be the best ones and fired off shots from several angles. Then I turned my attention and my lens toward the body.
    I approached, slowly and circuitously, taking photographs every time I moved more than a few feet. I’d started with a fresh roll of 36 exposures—slides, as always, because a carousel tray was easy to carry into a classroom or a courtroom, and the film’s resolution was still far better than any digital image. You could project a good slide on a movie theater screen and it’d still look crisp; try that with a digital image and it would turn into some murky Impressionist rendering of a crime scene shrouded in fog. Besides, the one occasion when I’d tried using a digital camera, every picture I snapped erased the one before, so I left that crime scene with just one photo, a close-up of a stab wound. But I had read that the last Kodak carousel slide projector had rolled off the assembly line a year or so back, so I knew my nondigital days were numbered. “Progress, hell,” I muttered.
    “What’s that, Doc?”
    “Sorry, just talking to myself in here. Y’all come on back.”
    They squeezed through the crevice into the grotto. Williams, who was skinny as a stray dog, slipped through easily. Kitchings required considerable time and effort. He turned sideways, his arms raised, for the first part. Then, when he reached the narrowest part of the passage—“Fat Man’s Squeeze,” the gap would be called if this were a commercial cave tour—he reached down, cupped his hands under his belly, and squished it upward like some gargantuan breast in a cyclopean Miracle Bra. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist: I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.
    He yelped when the flash seared his eyes. “God damn! What the hell?”
    I grinned. “Just making sure I document everything at the scene.”
    “Document my ass. Looka here, Doc, forensic legend or not, you show that picture to a soul, and I figure any jury in Cooke County would call your death justifiable homicide.”
    Williams piped up, “Could be, Tom, but to beat the rap, you’d have to show the picture to all twelve of ’em.” He chuckled at the notion.
    “Well, shit. That complicates my damn plan, don’t it? I reckon maybe I better just confiscate the doc’s film.”
    “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, Sheriff,” I said. “I think I had the lens cap on anyhow.”
    When they were both standing beside me, I asked, “Mind if I take a picture of your feet?”
    They looked puzzled for a moment, then the light dawned. Kitchings held Williams’s shoulder to steady himself, then raised one boot sole toward me for a photo, followed by the other. Next, Williams braced on Kitchings and I photographed his feet, too. Finally, I handed the camera to Kitchings and had him snap mine. It was unlikely to come up in court, but I didn’t want some defense lawyer claiming that what the prosecution presented as a ruthless