Deadman, Welcome to the Crime Scene.

Be warned, this can get a little descriptive and a little sick. I wouldn’t recommend reading it after eating or before lunch.

There’re places scattered across the United States that if you were to find them on satellite imagery, you’d find an area connected by paths. There are trees, bushes, cacti, and so on.

But standing out in the imagery would be something that would haunt your dreams.

You’d see bodies.

Human bodies.

If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you’d swear you’d come across a dumping ground for a serial killer.

But that’s not the case.

These are laboratories designed for a single purpose. The collect data and assist criminal investigators in determining when a person might have died based on decomposition.

Decomposition of the human body begins at the moment of death. And depending on the climate, it will decompose at different rates. For instance, a body will decompose faster in the rainforest than one in the desert.

I’ve had to make a few body recoveries, and you don’t forget things like that.

The first was that of a traveler who had died at a local hotel. He’d rented the room for a week, put up a do not disturb sign because he was tired, and went to bed. A few days later, the owner realized he had seen the guy and went and knocked on the door. No answer. Looking through the window, he could see him in bed.

Realizing something was wrong, he called us.

We went in using his key.

And went right out.

This happened in the middle of winter, and the guy had turned the room heater up full blast. The stench was something I don’t recommend.

The other was venturing into the mountains to recover the remains of a Mexican national who had been working as a sheepherder for a local rancher. When he disappeared, the man he was working for never bothered looking for him and assumed the man had abandoned the sheep and gone back to Mexico (without his pay? Not likely). Almost three years later, he was found by some hunters. He’d died near a stream, and except for bones, very little remained of him.

We tried to get his remains back to his family in Mexico and learned something interesting. It’s not a big hassle to deport a living person. But a dead one! That involves permits, money, and so on.

With help from the Mexican Embassy, we were able to return his personal effects but had to bury him at the county’s expense.

A man from the embassy came out to attend the service.

So, when I started writing about the body recovery of Howard Brightman in my next novel, Deadman, I drew heavily from the experience.

Here’s just a little piece from it.

They’d located the skull the day before and it wasn’t far from the bone pile. It had been partially buried by the years. The disturbing piece of it was that it was face up, so it looked up at the sky.

    If they’d never come along to disturb it, Howard Brightman would have stared into the heavens for eternity.

     The red flag that marked it had a number on it. It wiggled a little in the breeze.

    Pam wrote the number on the flag that marked the skull onto her pad; her pencil made a scratching noise as she wrote.

    Then, lowering her clipboard, she walked over to look at it.

    They’d scoured the area, but most of the body had stayed fairly close to where she assumed Howard had died, and they figured they’d collected at least two-thirds of his remains.

     When she suggested they collect the skull last, the rest of the team simply agreed. If they wondered why she suggested it, they never asked.

    But she knew the only reason she’d done that was that she didn’t have to look into what remained of the face of a friend.

    There wasn’t much of a face to look at.

    Howard Brightman was gone, leaving a skull that was half-buried in the dirt. The lower jaw was still attached and, obscenely, a flower was growing out of the space between the upper teeth and the lower jaw.

    She touched the small flower, feeling the blossoms through her gloved hand.

    No movie director in the world would have put a flower in the mouth. It was too disturbing.

    But this wasn’t a movie.

    This was life.

    Everything else was as she expected. Small scraps of skin, hair, and flesh still clung to it. One eye was gone, having been eaten away by the birds. But the other was still there. It was shriveled and black.

    Pam squatted down next to it and studied the ravaged face and skull. It looked nothing like the man she’d known in her youth.

    The watch they’d found the day before was an exact match to the one he used to wear. That made it a lock for her that this Howard Brightman.

    She looked at the destroyed face and said softly, “Hello, Mr. Brightman.”

    “What was that, baby?” RJ asked.

    “Just saying hello to an old friend,” she answered.

Still aiming for a Christmas release.

Let’s see if I make it.