Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator Read online

“A lot of damn good that does me now. Fucking cocksucker. Blowing his damn head off and leaving it for us.”

  It took some time to finish working the scene, scraping up brain matter and bagging it. I had found the dead man’s suicide note on his coffee table, so we were satisfied it could be logged as a suicide. But as we all walked back toward our cars and the attendants were loading the body into the coroner’s van, a woman screamed.

  It had come from the house on the other side of the fence, and the scream was soon followed by high-pitched yelps, as if someone was squeezing the life out of a lap dog. I looked back toward the noise. A woman appeared, looking like Divine’s twin sister. She had to be six feet tall, and she balanced masses of hair on top of that. Plus, she was wearing a loud floral print muumuu and gold lamé slippers.

  In one hand she held what appeared to be an extra-long Virginia Slims cigarette between manicured fingers and, in the other, shoved high above her head, she held an object that was obviously the reason for her rush toward me. Fast on her heels was a white Pekinese dog with a red bow tied on the top of its head. He was screaming too, in his own way.

  The woman was unintelligible above the rabid noises her dog was making and the clatter of her slippers on the driveway. When she drew closer, I finally heard, “My baby had this in his mouth! My God, my baby had this in his mouth!”

  Her “baby” was now leaping two to three feet off the ground in rapid succession, dead set on retrieving his snack.

  Very gently she extended what she held toward me: a two-by-three-inch piece of skull. This fragment had obviously been blasted over into the dog’s domain, on their side of the fence. The dog had retrieved it from their backyard and had re-entered their home through his doggy door. The woman had found him lying on her carpeted living room floor happily gnawing away.

  I calmly relieved the woman of her neighbor’s skull fragment and walked to my car. She remained on the driveway as I drove away, clutching her little dog to her bosom while the animal continued to complain about his loss.

  Almost ten years later and nearly eight hundred miles away, I faced a very different sort of canine, and the incident led my thoughts back to my grandfather.

  Dogs have been known to stay at the side of their owners long after that owner has died, watching over them and protecting them from any further perceived harm. Investigators sometimes have to call animal control officers to subdue a dog that is only trying to protect its now-vulnerable pack leader. This behavior I find very compelling, primarily because in my work I much more often encounter a version of the opposite—humans abandoning other humans while still claiming to love them. By their nature, dogs are a thousand times more faithful and honest than we are.

  The summer of 2000 was a brutal one. I tried my damnedest to remain in the new air-conditioned medical examiner’s building every minute of my shifts, with visions of a cool shower and a cold beer waiting for me later at home, but such relief was not always to be.

  One afternoon, as the sun baked the filthy streets of South Atlanta, I was called to an address next to the Atlanta International Airport. The homes in this neighborhood were older and worn out and they shook with the vibrations of jets passing overhead. Crowded onto this one street were at least six police cars, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime-scene van, and numerous other unmarked government vehicles. When I climbed out of my car, I noticed that a number of men at the scene were wearing surgical masks and several others were clad in white crime-scene coveralls with full headgear—never a good sign. I walked toward the front of the house. One of the uniformed officers met me and stopped me with a hand on my arm.

  I caught a whiff of the foul odor that engulfed his body as he explained that he’d been the first on the scene. He spoke so fast that I wasn’t able to understand everything he was saying, but a single word stuck: worst.

  People predictably and repeatedly ask investigators like me the same question: “What’s the worst thing you have ever seen?” Invariably the public fails, or refuses, to realize how insensitive this question is. What if someone asked you in a public forum, on a regular basis, to rehash the most terrible moments of your life? Perhaps an average person would reply, “That’s none of your damn business.” But for those of us who have been to the edge of hell, the public somehow feels perfectly justified in prodding us for every gruesome detail, perhaps to stir up some sensation in their lives or to simply relieve their boredom. Couple this insensitivity with the hurt some investigators end up feeling when they figure out they’ve mistaken this querying person’s interest for honest concern. A death investigator’s life is often nothing more than a salacious dime novel for the masses.

  As I pushed past the officer and continued toward the house with that word worst still drumming in my ears, the broadside of the foul odor struck me. Plainclothes police officers and a GBI agent waited for me. A stack of mail at least a foot and a half high had collected on the front stoop where they stood.

  One of the detectives said, “There’s no power so we’ll be in the dark.”

  The fire department had yet to arrive with their heavy-duty lighting units but, as was my habit, I didn’t want to wait. I should have.

  I removed a large rechargeable light from my scene kit but left all my other equipment outside with the police. Unlike in the movies, no creepy music escalated and no scary creaks and rattles accompanied me—it was only me with my thoughts.

  Cutting through the darkness with my artificial light, I illuminated patches here and there as I moved deeper into the dwelling. Clothing and toiletries were strewn everywhere. Women’s clothing had been ripped and torn to pieces, and bits of garments covered almost every surface. Plus, there was the smell.

  The odor of human decomposition is not particularly different in nature from that of any other animal, but to a seasoned death investigator the smell is unmistakable. Over the years I had developed discriminating olfactory sensitivity to any decaying matter. While other men my age sought worldly refinements and filled their nasal cavities with the finest merlots and pinots, I could discern between a freshly dead and an aged human carcass. Go figure.

  The owner of the house was lying where the police had said she would be, on the floor of her bedroom. The appearance of her torn bedsheets and pillows made it seem as if she had been the victim of either violence or passion. To say that she was lying there is not a complete picture. The remains I saw were female—the curve of hips and the telltale genitalia told me that—but the corpse was not whole. From her waistline up, there was nothing. Strings of muscle and tendon were the only evidence left behind that a torso had once been present. A wide, rank, greasy spot had accumulated beneath her. It seemed unreal, as if a fairytale giant had come along and snapped her in half, taking only the portion he had a use for.

  I ventured alone further into the dark house. My keen nose picked up another odor, not human—a dog’s kennel that had remained unkempt for some time. The texture of the carpet beneath my feet betrayed that I was walking atop something more than standard Berber. I stepped into a den at the rear of the house and my light shone on a floor coated in feces in various stages of deterioration—dry, tacky, and runny. Mixed within this pungent stew was what remained of the woman’s torso along with large clumps of canine fur. I continued to search the room until my eyes locked upon a large remnant of her skull and a single long bone that rested on a red cloth loveseat.

  I stood for a long time staring at the skull, hoping those waiting outside would think I was doing something very important and forensically astute, but honestly I couldn’t tear myself away. I had trouble fully processing what I was seeing. It was very late in my career, at this point, yet I don’t believe I’d ever felt anything affect me in quite the same way before. My rational mind understood that this woman had been food for her own dogs, but the rest of my mind staggered a bit to catch up.

  Examining the skull and the nearby leg bone, it was obvious they had been amusements for her animals. The lower ridges
of the eye sockets and the upper hard palate had been chewed away, teeth and all. The jaw no longer existed. Surrounded by a sea of liquefied dog shit, I held the skull in my hand for a long while. Staring at the empty sockets, I felt more like Hamlet than the Sherlock Holmes everyone expected me to be.

  According to the police, the woman’s five dogs had been removed from the scene, gnashing their teeth and starving. The animal control personnel had said that these dogs had developed the equivalent of dysentery. Our final estimate was that they had been locked in the house for about a month and a half, which is remarkable since, despite the presence of the five hungry pets, approximately half of her body still remained.

  There were no signs of a struggle or a break-in. Her purse and wallet along with her car and house keys were still there. As I searched through the semi-viscous pools of feces for what remained of her (primarily teeth), I couldn’t keep from wondering how it had all happened.

  She had obviously collapsed next to her bed and died there. Perhaps one of her dogs had been attuned enough to her to go investigate or sit beside her as life escaped her. Maybe he sniffed around her and prodded her, then hovered or possibly whimpered. Maybe then the other dogs joined him in his inspection. She lay face down on the floor. Probably they had circled her, nuzzled her, and licked her ears and hands, hands that had shown such care throughout their lives. I believe creatures understand when their lives are about to change.

  Perhaps the first day, as the sun had set and the hunger had begun to rumble in their bellies, they had rummaged. But as the days spun into weeks, food grew scarce and their once loving owner had become too pungent, overwhelming their acute canine sense of smell. So they had quit halfway.

  I was told later that she had lived alone, had no children, no husband, no parents—just her pack. She had provided a final kindness to the ones who had been her dearest companions.

  My papaw had determined that it would be mercy he would show his two old friends, since they might never have been able to chase another deer through the pines or lie in the heat beneath a hot Louisiana sun, basking in his love for them. This woman gave more than she probably ever intended or even imagined, but in the end she gave all that she had left.

  HELL YEAH,

  IT HURT!

  IF A MESSENGER OF DEATH has ever visited your doorstep in the form of a cop, medical examiner, preacher, or drunk neighbor and has just informed you that your kid has been crushed against the side of an eighteen-wheeler on its way back from a liquor store, maybe you can understand. It might be a bit like having your bowels ripped from your abdominal cavity. The first utterance of the first syllable brands your sulcus forever. There is no going back. You will never be the person you were before the moment you heard this visitor relate these words. And suddenly, with a fresh awareness, your own eventual death breathes hotly, closely into your ear.

  At the moment such news comes to them, most people lack speech. Often the only response they can elicit is the simplest of all questions: “Did they suffer? Was it quick?” Of course they suffered. If you are the one dying, it is never quick enough. Does anyone ever walk into a maternity ward or a delivery room and ask, “Does it hurt, honey? Would you like the labor to last a little longer, sugar?”

  There is a segment of the population who pose these same thoughtless queries after they’ve relinquished their own responsibility for a better outcome. They work full-time jobs and can’t give the time and care needed or they have too much on their plate already, so they drop a failing parent or grandparent at a retirement home and begin to forget.

  The final days of that person’s life—a life who birthed the lives of those who just gave them over—are cared for by an overworked mother-of-eight nursing assistant who has always hated her job, or a perverted male orderly who fingers the grandmothers after lights-out and their meds have kicked in. Yeah, they suffer, both in life and in death. No one can claim definitively otherwise.

  Those grandparents may lie peacefully at last, spindly hands posed appropriately across their chest, still and finally gone. But this pose reminds us all of what we don’t know about what happens in the end, about what it will be like for us too. Dig your fingers into the arm of the first white lab-coated individual you can find and ask, “Did Mama suffer?”

  The answer will most certainly be, “Naw, man. She wuzin’ feelin’ no pain.”

  Why do you ask? What makes you need to know?

  Maybe the one you loved wallowed around for hours in his or her own blood after having not aimed the bullet at the exact right spot for a perfect, instantaneous death. The soles of my shoes are still sticky with your loved one’s blood and you need to ask me that question. It hangs in the air, begging for ease, comfort, soothing reassurance. I refuse to be the one to give that to you. You want comfort? Buy an inflate-a-mate or a puppy. I’ve clocked out on compassion.

  When I knocked on my first door, preparing to deliver such news to the surviving family, I attempted to comfort the grief-stricken in the only way a twenty-something novice could manage. Feeble hand-holding paired with my own honestly sorrowful tears quickly became cold, pointless gestures to those whose lives I had just wrecked. Instead of welcoming my sympathies, they speared me with looks of contempt and shouted at me that I owed them something—excuses, explanations, more. Stupidly, I tried to give it all to them. But of course nothing anyone can say or do will fill such voids. Not even my own ever-present void, which kept expanding with each additional year, month, every day I spent as a death investigator.

  So I drank. I masturbated. I tracked down their families. I stared at the corpses for hours. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Hatred and condescension bubbled up in me. I was a clerk caught in an unending rotation of thankless tasks. I never possessed what either they, or I myself, needed in order to satiate our collective craving for comfort and peace.

  Preachers especially, but plenty of other people too, like to say there is something better waiting for all of us in the great good beyond. Isn’t that enough of a balm to calm your fears? Why must you demand reassurance from me too? Vast swaths of humankind believe that life after death is better than life on this earth. Entire religions are based on the premise that “I ain’t home till I get to Heaven,” just as my granny Pearl always said to me. Some even threaten to deprive the rest of us of their company or to take hundreds of thousands of us along with them in a final act, confident that something better awaits them elsewhere. Who of us are what I refer to as the Lewis and Clarks of the Afterworld? Who really knows?

  Since it all remains unknown, why fear it? What is it about the unknown that is so difficult for us to navigate or to even accept? And is it the unknown, a possible nothingness that we fear the most? Or is it the possibility of the pain or the suffering we might feel in our final moments? Or is it that you’re going to miss something left behind here?

  Or is it, in fact, that you imagine some greater being will finally hold your feet to the fire and enact judgment? What scares you the most, the pitchforks or the maggots?

  Always boring into my conscience, inhabiting both my dreams and my waking life, was the notion that I had missed some important clue to my own eventual peace. Maybe I had ignored some scrap of paper, droplet of blood, or statement in the course of my own intellectual vanity, something that impeded my ability to comfort and reassure. Was there anything that I had failed to glean that would have given this dance with death significant meaning instead of what seemed to result in a waste of my own precious life? In the end, I was left hollowed out by my own bitterness. And Death continues its march, regardless of my absence as its witness.

  TERMINUS

  DEFECATION. A normal human bodily function that presses us to rush, hide, strain, and hopefully wash our hands as well as our collective asses. We want to be seen eating at the most prestigiously popular venues. We go on first dates, we discuss business deals, we celebrate birthdays—all over succulent, heaping plates of food. But steaming piles of fetid human leavings are no
t commonly the centerpieces at the tables where we do our backslapping or share our conviviality. Most of us flee at the sight and smell of such leavings, unless you’re a leather-clad scat master.

  To enlist as a medicolegal death investigator is to be relegated to the biggest outhouse in the world. All of humanity waited for me to come on duty and examine what they’d left behind. I stepped in it. I smeared it. I wore it forever. There was no need for me to shake my fist or curse those who had dropped their leavings; they were either already dead or had never cared in the first place.

  Taking a crap is certainly emblematic of the end. Our bodies deposit what is of no further use. Be it feces or a fellow human, we are all eventually left in a pile. The question becomes, how will we be dispensed of? Some are placed in lead-lined coffins and buried beneath tons of cement in order to preserve what remains. “They did such a good job with her. I’ve never seen her look better.” “Hey, Billy Ray, come see! Have you ever seen a better arrangement of corn and peanuts?” Some are incinerated in cremation ovens by families looking to save some money. Others are left to rot in abandoned crack houses, on battlefields, or on toilets without a witness or a word of farewell.

  In death investigation, humanity is lost. Investigators and forensic pathologists refer to corpses as shit bags, skinned or unskinned sausages, or for those who have been autopsied, human canoes. I wonder what a death investigator or a pathologist will say of me when I am lying on that cold, stainless steel table? My colleagues and I may have joked and thrown around perverse terms, but I doubt any of us thought in those moments that it could be one of us lying there instead. Except for me, perhaps. Death has always whispered in my ear.

  It was August of 2003 and blistering hot outside when I was summoned to the waste treatment plant in southeast Atlanta. This was it. I had reached the bottom floor of my career. From the lofty, intellectual heights I had once thought this job would elevate me to, I was ending up in the shithouse of Atlanta. But I have always been inquisitive, so I was eager to finally see what happened to everything that goes bye-bye down the potty.