It started when a farmer had discovered the bodies of this woman and child in the tall grass at the edge of a fallow pasture somewhere near the close-knit town of Somerset, in Pulaski County. By the time I got to the scene, the sheriff's deputies had already identified the victims as a twenty-one-year-old woman and her four-year-old half-brother, last seen sitting on the steps of a neighborhood church on the afternoon of Sunday, just four days before. Obviously, they hadn't been murdered on the church steps-but where had they died? And when, and how? Obviously, the murderer had fractured their skulls-but had he shot them first? Beaten them to death? Or perhaps they had died by stabbing or even strangulation, the final beating merely an angry aftermath? If I could help investigators answer these questions, we might be able to answer the biggest question of all: Who killed them?

Coroner Alan Stringer had called me right after noon, asking me to come down to help with the crime scene investigation. Three days into the job, and I couldn't have found Somerset on a map-luckily, I was able to catch a ride with a couple of state police lab techs also assigned to the case. I didn't know any of the investigators yet, either, who were now standing behind me in a loose semicircle, safely away from the overwhelming smell. Sheriff Sam Catron stepped up and introduced himself, gallantly volunteering to assist with what he knew was going to be a difficult job. The good-natured mix of uniformed deputies and detectives in street clothes backed off just far enough to where they could watch my every move and see how I was going to work beside their fearless leader. I brushed ineffectually at the swarm of flies now buzzing around my head and wondered if the overwhelming smell would make me faint. It was time to collect samples of my old nemesis: maggots.

I started with the woman, whose skull bones peeped out from under a mass of dark, wet, maggot-filled hair. Normally, I'd gather maggots with a small spoon-like scoop, but I was so new to the job that I hadn't yet gotten my crime scene kit in order. Stifling a grimace, I reached into the maggot mass with my latex-gloved hand and pulled up a handful. As they writhed in my palm, I used my other hand to pick out a dozen long, plump ones and drop them into a little plastic cup, the kind doctors use to collect urine samples. My goal was to “freeze them in time”-to kill them while leaving their bodies intact-so that an entomologist could tell us just how old they were.

At school I'd killed maggots by filling my specimen jar with 70 percent isopropyl alcohol, but that was yet another item that was missing from my crime scene kit. Maybe if I covered them with scalding water?

“Okay, but where in the world am I going to find boiling hot water, way out here…?” I had been literally thinking out loud during this whole process, talking through each one of my actions for the benefit of my colleagues. This was a technique I'd developed during my Tennessee casework, when I'd realized that, otherwise, my actions seemed meaningless at best, downright weird at worst. Besides, sharing my process gave others a chance to offer a helping hand.

Sure enough, one of the detectives called out, “What about the radiator in your van? Y'all just drove a hundred miles. It should still be plenty hot.”

“What a brilliant idea!” I cocked my head at my fellow investigators, held out my cup of maggots, and smiled sweetly. “Can one of you please take care of this for me?”

I sat back on my heels and waited as the investigators shuffled their feet and looked sideways at each other. Finally, Deputy Coroner Tim Phelps sidled over and tentatively took the cup. He headed back to the van and I went back to picking maggots off the woman's body. From somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of a hood popping open and then Tim's agonized groan of disgust as he siphoned scalding water from the radiator over the writhing insects. I tried to hide my smirk.

Much to Tim's dismay, I wasn't finished. He watched me extract samples from the maggot mass churning in the woman's pubic area, then bravely made a second trip back to the van. I moved on to collect still more samples from the little boy, labeling each cup with the place on the body from which they'd been taken, along with the date, time, case number, and my initials.

To Tim's-and my-enormous relief, the maggot-collection part of my work was soon finished. Now it was time to take the temperature of the maggot mass itself, a task requiring the coroner's extra-long thermometer, the one he used to stick in the liver or rectum of recently dead bodies to find out how much they'd cooled off. If you slid the thermometer into the various maggot masses in the woman's and boy's bodies, you could document more information that might help determine time of death.

Next it was time to document the temperature and humidity of the air that enveloped the bodies-the same hot, sticky air that was making it so hard for me to breathe. The entomologist would eventually need this climatological data, so today and every day for a week the coroner or a deputy would have to return to this spot and document the temperature and humidity. The entomologist would then be able to look at the data and the maggots and work backward to figure out when the flies had first laid their eggs, when the maggots started feasting on the dead bodies-and when the bodies might have shown up in the field.

I went on to document the bodies' location, taking photos and making a quick sketch to remind me of their relationship to the surrounding scene. The sheriff's deputies were experts in this sort of procedure, so I left them to their more detailed sketches while I studied the two victims once more. Their postcranial area-everything from the neck on down-was still intact, which meant that any clues in these areas were the province of the forensic pathologist. Although there are some areas of overlap, pathologists usually deal with the soft tissues, while I deal with the hard ones-bones and teeth. If enough of the body is intact to permit a traditional autopsy, the pathologist conducts it, documenting the general appearance of the person and the internal organs, and collecting blood and tissue samples for analysis. If not enough soft tissue remains to yield any clues, then we rely on the bones, which I usually work on by myself. This division of labor-soft versus hard tissue-can be confusing to crime-show fans, since TV pathologists tend to appear as experts in all things; but in the forensic world, a person has usually either studied soft tissue and gotten an M.D. or has studied hard tissue and gotten an M.A. or a Ph.D. in anthropology. After all, no one can specialize in everything.

“Go ahead and bag them,” I told the coroner now, knowing that his men would take the bodies to the morgue. Tomorrow the forensic pathologist and I would do an autopsy together-him focusing on the soft tissue, me concentrating on the bone.

The coroner and his deputy wrapped each body in a clean white sheet and placed it in an individual body bag. Until we got a positive ID, the bags were labeled John and Jane Doe.

As the coroner was zipping up the first bag, I moved to the soil where the little boy's head had lain. Luckily, I'd brought a hand trowel, which I now dragged across the soil and matted grass. Piece by piece, a little treasure trove emerged: brownish-gray fragments from his shattered skull, tiny teeth that had separated from the rest of his head during decomp, and small black tufts of hair that had fallen away as his scalp sloughed off. Sealing my collection in a small plastic bag, I quickly labeled it “from head area of child victim” and tucked it inside the boy's body bag. As the guys carried the bag to the coroner's van, I made a similar collection in the spot where the woman had decomposed.