32
The Sea Glass Murders
bag?” Dr. Goldberg turned to DeFranco. “Curtis is my eyes and ears—often even my hands,” said Goldberg, smiling. Curtis Jones beamed. He and another attendant pulled back the sheet inside the bag to reveal the headless corpse, now grayish black in the light of a sodium vapor lamp over the table. “We couriered some of the killed maggot larvae to the state entomologist in Hartford. She established a gestation time of approximately four to six days to grow those maggots to their present size. Your hardware store employee discovered the body on October fifteenth, so that means this person died between the ninth and the eleventh. After she died, she lay on the ground somewhere—that’s how she picked up the insect population— then she was moved. But if we assume she was placed in the dumpster sometime during the night of the fourteenth, you will want to query any neighbors as to anything they might have seen between twilight that night and dawn the next morning. DeFranco was taking notes. Curtis and his helper got the body out of the bag and unwrapped it from the sheet, careful to note any skin, hair, or foreign objects that might have been left behind. She emerged, arms akimbo, and just as horrid. Curtis and his associate placed her on a body block to raise the chest and lower the shoulders, but her advanced state of rigor and decomposition offered the expected resistance. “Curtis, you did your usual superb job preparing and transporting the victim,” said Dr. Goldberg. Jones smiled in appreciation. “Now, we have an approximation of time of death, and we know she died in a place other than where she was found. Let’s try to establish an identity, and a manner and mechanism of death,” said Goldberg over the lab’s ventilation system, which was roaring away, removing a good portion of the reek that DeFranco had expected. “Curtis, please begin the postmortem with the classic Y-shaped incision from left and right clavicles to the bottom of the sternum, then down to the pubis. After that you can present the internal organs.” Curtis Jones’s talents extended